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0.996501 | Today most historians, including the Georgia Historical Society, agree that the first gold discovered in the Chattahoochee River and Etowah River basins was found on Duke's Creek north of Loudsville, Georgia, at the extreme southwestern end of the Nacoochee Valley in 1828. It was this discovery that touched off the first gold rush in American history. From northeast of Helen to Dahlonega, and further southwest into Cherokee County the Dahlonega gold belt remains the purest ever found in the world.
Within months thousands of "twenty-niners" poured into the state, however, the land in the Nacoochee Valley was settled a decade earlier, so purchasing or leasing the land was the only option for miners who wanted to work the area near the earliest discoveries. In a very short time land prices double, then double again. What is commonly called Georgia Gold Rush occurred west of the Nacoochee Valley, where land was held by Cherokee Indians.
Along the Chattahoochee River surface gold was panned from larger rivers. Miners then purchased small tracts looking for veins. Water-powered stamping machines would grind rock and then the gold would be removed, frequently by panning.
Finally, starting in 1857, hydraulic mining was used to search the soil for alluvial gold (gold found at or near the surface of the land). Gold was a very profitable venture for both miners and local farmers. For example, according to F. M. Green in Georgia's Forgotten Industry, Thomas Lumsden drew thirty thousand dollars in gold from a mine on his property north of the confluence of Dukes Creek and the Chattahoochee River during a single summer. |
0.999999 | Which printer is right for me / my business?
Initial cost - inkjet printers are cheaper to buy than laser printer, but they are far more expensive to run in the longer term.
Running costs - Laser printers are cheaper to run and the cost to print a page is approximately 25% that of inkjet.
Photo quality - Photo quality printers offer near photo quality, but are very expensive to use.
Text and graphics print quality - laser printers offer the most professional text and graphics quality.
Speed - Ink jets are extremely slow and are for home users only. Laser printers are recommended for all businesses.
You are aware that initial costs are higher, but the running costs are extremely low and the printer will pay for itself during the printer's lifetime. |
0.994885 | Select a "teaser" to start your text, one which causes curiosity and thus activating the receptiveness of your readership. Avoid lurid formulations like exaggerated, emotionals and values.
Preface your text with a quote, one that leads the reader to the topic: All art has a social dimension by linking it to each one exploring ways to strike back into society and other social reality to them. With this quotation starts a scientific essay about the practice and theory of art therapy.
Start with a current result by lecture facts, numbers and circumstances: Eating disorders are considered difficult to treat. With rate of mortality of 5-16% is the most severe psychosomatic disorder anorexia nervosa among girls and young women.
In public perception, especially the hedge funds are the most dazzling of all institutes of the international finance markets. On the one hand with great chances of winning them are connected, on the other hand, they are always made responsible for turbulence in financial markets. Thus, they are as it were the epitome of all real and avoidable mistakes in the financial markets.
Before starting the therapy you have to decide if the therapy should be ambulatory, partial inpatient and inpatient and whether it should be conducted as rehabilitation measures or hospital treatment. You have to choose between behaviour therapy and psychoanalytic based therapy procedures as well as between group sessions and individual therapy.
Furthermore you can give historical reasons for the relevance of this topic: in the medieval time, women rarely claimed the right to rule and reign supreme under their own name.
This sentence introduces you to the biography of Empress Mathilde (1102 - 1167).
In 1500, the human flaying - more precisely, the flaying of men - a central theme of the religious image as the profane art.
In the second half of the 17th Century achieved the art of ballet as both elliptical and abstract, and figurative and sculptural expression - as, or silent poetry, painting in motion 'at the court of France, Louis XIV Sun King `peaked.
Hardly a pathogen has been explored in recent years as intense as the human immunodeficiency virus HIV. Yet it is still undefeated.
A provocative statement backs up your claim from beginning to the attention of your readers. So you can start with a message or information, which arouses opposition. |
0.989647 | Suggest great vacation rental products and services that may be useful to travelers, home owners or anyone else involved in vacation rentals. Get even more exposure with your own vacation rental blog.
Easy - Easy to get start, easy to maintain.
Post Photos of Your Vacation Home/Travel - It's FREE!
Owners/agency: Publish photos of your vacation home and receive great vacation rental exposure. Travelers: Post photos of your vacation trip and share your vacation rental stories.
Get your own vacation rental blog and start receiving great targeted traffic through our ownernet works. Your customizable vacation rental blog is automatically created for you once you Join ownernet works. |
0.999968 | Riverdale is a thriving neighbourhood located just east of downtown Toronto. This neighbourhood was established in the 1910s, and features beautiful Victorian and Edwardian style architecture throughout the area, giving Riverdale a unique and classic feel.
Riverdale is renowned for its culture. It is home to a vibrant arts community with a a variety of independent art galleries along Queen Street, the world famous Danforth with an endless variety of top end international cuisine and East Chinatown with its eclectic and unique Asian shops and amazing restaurants.
Outdoor lovers will be impressed with Riverdale Park, Withrow Park and Jimmie Simpson Park. These three large parks provide residents with a well-deserved retreat from the high paced Toronto lifestyle, and also host numerous recreational activities that the whole family can enjoy.
It's no surprise that Riverdale is one of the most sought after communities in all of Toronto.
If you're looking for a premiere dining and shopping experience in Toronto, you'll find it at the Danforth. The Danforth is famous for its Greek restaurants, but has a diverse range of international dining options that will please even the most discerning palates.
The Danforth is home to the "Taste of the Danforth", the largest food festival in Canada with over one million people attending annually. At the festival, visitors can sample foods from an endless variety of international style restaurants including Greek, Thai, Chinese, Brazilian, Indian and Japanese.
Riverdale Park is a large 104 acre park with fantastic views of the city. The park features a running track, three baseball diamonds, soccer fields, a skating rink, a public swimming pool and tennis courts.
In the summer, Riverdale Park is host to a series of free family-friendly outdoor movie showings. Create a memorable experience with the whole family as you watch a movie under the stars.
There's always something to do in Riverdale.
It all starts with the cuisine. Riverdale not only has some of the best dining options in the city on the Danforth, but the area also features a rich and diverse variety of restaurants. In August, the culinary community comes alive with the Taste of the Danforth where hundreds of local restaurants sample their dishes for the public at the largest food festival in Canada.
Shopping in Riverdale is a fantastic experience. You can stroll through the neighbourhood to experience the vast variety of shops along the Danforth and East Chinatown as well as the charming shops in nearby Leslieville, or you can take a short transit ride to the vast array of shopping centres in Toronto.
If you're looking for something a little more active, Riverdale is home to three large parks, giving residents the opportunity to enjoy various activities, from swimming, skating and tobogganing to soccer, baseball, hockey and more. |
0.923865 | Can a wicked boy be rehabilitated?
What would cause a young boy to murder his mother and can there be any redemption for him after committing such an act? Those questions are central to The Wicked Boy, a novel which covers a true crime that happened in Victorian London in 1895.
Thirteen year old Robert Coombes and his eleven year old brother Nattie were living in London with their parents as the 19th century was drawing to a close. Their father, also named Robert, worked on merchant ships that made transatlantic crossings. He was frequently away from home for long periods, leaving the boys in the care of their mother Emily. During one of their father's job-related absences, friends and family members began to notice that they hadn't seen Emily for a while. The boys said they had gotten word that a rich relative had died, and that their mother had gone to Liverpool to check on their inheritance. In the meantime, John Fox, a somewhat simple man who worked at the same shipping company as their father, was staying with them.
The boys were seen spending lots of money (attending cricket matches, among other things), having Mr. Fox pawn belongings, and even sending letters to the shipping company attempting to get an advance on their father's wages while their mother remained absent. Eventually, relatives insisted on entering the house and the body of Emily Coombes was discovered upstairs in bed. She had been stabbed repeatedly.
The boys and John Fox were quickly arrested as the police attempted to sort out who was responsible for the crime. As the investigation continued, it emerged that Robert was the one who wielded the knife against his mother. What could have caused him to behave in such a way? The press was quick to blame his love of "penny dreadfuls," cheap books that featured adventurous heroes and exotic locations. Because of his young age and somewhat more enlightened times (compared to how justice had been meted out in earlier times in England), the boy wasn't hanged. The rest of the book deals with his punishment for the crime and the events that happened later in his life.
The most startling aspect of the book to me was a quote from an article in the newspaper the Pall Mall Gazette, advocating the practice of killing morally defective children at birth (were we only able to detect such a thing!). The quote reads, "It would be well if we could choke such moral abortions at birth, as we now choke physical ones."
That would seem to imply that it was entirely legal in Victorian England to euthanize babies with physical defects at birth. That's the first I've ever heard of this practice, and the author didn't elaborate on it at all. A footnote explaining the historical context would have been appreciated.
I enjoyed reading about how the young boy was treated in the press and legal system of the day. It was really interesting also to read about how the author was able to tease out the details of Robert's later life and the methods she employed to do so. |
0.999785 | What’s the latest on eggs? My mother said that they are not good for your heart, but I had heard that they are healthy. Are they good for you or not?
Here’s the story: When it comes to good, cheap nutrition, it’s hard to beat an egg (oops, sorry about the pun). An egg is an excellent source of protein and provides vitamin A and vitamin K, iron, several B vitamins including folic acid, and the antioxidants lutein and zeaxanthin. The fat in eggs is predominately the good, unsaturated variety and is relatively low in unhealthy saturated fat. That’s a lot packed under one thin shell. At a little over a dollar a dozen, they’re a relatively inexpensive protein source that can work at any meal: scrambled at sunrise, whipped up as an egg salad at lunch, or folded over into a Western omelet when the sun goes down.
The only blemish on the egg’s record (this is where your mom isn’t entirely wrong) is that it contains over 200 milligrams (mg) dietary cholesterol. Dietary cholesterol can raise the “bad” LDL cholesterol, but luckily, not as dramatically as saturated fat and trans-fatty acids. The current recommendation is to keep your intake of dietary cholesterol under 300 mg daily, on average.
However, all sources of dietary cholesterol may not be created equal, according to a study in the issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association titled A Prospective Study of Egg Consumption and Risk of Cardiovascular Disease in Men and Women. In this study, Harvard researchers looked at the egg intake of more than 100,000 individuals; and, it appeared that eating up to one egg daily was not associated with an increased risk of heart disease or stroke in healthy individuals. The authors of the study speculated that various nutrients in the egg may actually be heart healthy, offsetting the high dietary cholesterol content.
However, those in the study with diabetes were found to be at somewhat of a higher risk. The Dietary Guidelines from the American Heart Association, advise that those with high levels of LDL cholesterol, diabetes, or heart disease should keep their dietary cholesterol to less than 200 mg daily.
Egg lovers take note: Mother Nature was on the ball, as she put all the egg’s dietary cholesterol in the yolk. If you separate the yolk from the white and toss it out, you’ve just tossed out all of the cholesterol and all the fat and saturated fat. So feel free to have a field day with those fluffy egg whites, which are cholesterol- and saturated fat-free.
If you want a two-egg scrambler or omelet, balance the cholesterol elsewhere in your diet over the course of several days. Or, use one whole egg and two whites, egg substitutes, or just the egg whites. For a lunchtime egg salad sandwich, make it an egg white salad filler by chopping up only the whites and adding some mustard and light mayo. You can also substitute two egg whites for one whole egg when baking muffins, cookies and sweet breads. No one will ever notice the difference … trust me.
How Heart Healthy Is Lobster? |
0.757262 | Connor Rabinowitz fell in love at first sight with the sister of the man whose heart was now beating inside his chest.
Lucky to get the donor heart of Kellen Roberts after his health collapsed because of a genetic heart condition, Rabinowitz was bowled over when he met Erin - just over a year after his transplant.
Although he was only 17-years-old at the time and she was 26 when they first met in 2004, the electric chemistry between the pair persisted until they got together in 2010 - with both feeling that deceased Kellen helped them to become lovers.
'We had an instant connection – we both feel that Kellen bought us together,' Connor said to the UK's Daily Mirror.
Connor was a fit teenager when he began to suffer flu-like symptoms in November of 2004.
One morning he woke in cold sweats to actually see his enlarged heart beating up through his chest and was rushed to hospital.
Doctors told the Minnesota teen that he would need a heart transplant or he would die and so he began the terrifying wait to see if a donor organ would become available.
Sadly for the Roberts family, but luckily for Connor, Kellen passed away after he suffered head injuries during a drunken fight in his home state of South Dakota.
The heart was moved to be transplanted to Connor, who had mixed feelings about his predicament.
'It was the best day of my life but I knew someone had died for me,' he said to the Daily Mirror.
During his recovery, Connor decided that he wanted to write a letter to the family of the donor - who were protected by anonymity.
'Kellen’s mother Nancy got in touch immediately and a few months later my mum flew to meet her. Six months after that I was well enough to visit too.
'It was an emotional meeting and as Nancy put her hand on my chest to feel Kellen’s heart beating inside me, I saw Erin for the first time.
'We locked eyes – and I was smitten. Erin felt the connection too but she tried to dismiss it, thinking I was too young.
While school assistant Erin thought that Connor was too young and had a teenage crush on her, the two lost contact for five-years - but got back in touch using Facebook in 2010.
'We were both single for the first time and everything just fell into place,' said Connor.
Now 34, Erin said that the shared connection that the two felt was undeniable.
'He was still very young and I thought he might have a teenage crush,' she said to the Daily Mirror. 'I tried to dismiss my confused feelings. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Connor – he made me feel happy.
'After we reconnected via Facebook in 2010 everything changed. He came to visit and for the first time I felt really nervous around him.
While Connor was training to be a cardiovascular ultrasound technician in Minneapolis, Erin was living in Seattle - so the two began a long-distance relationship.
For Erin's family, the beginning of her relationship was difficult - especially for her mother and her 14-year-old son, Christian.
However, once they all witnessed Erin and Connor together, they all came to realize that maybe it was Kellen who had played some part in their relationship.
'I know he brought us together and I know he is watching over us,' said Connor, who moved to be with Erin and is now a medical technician at a Seattle hospital.
'I was now forever connected with this young man who sacrificed his life and chose to save mine,' Connor told the West Seattle Herald.
Kellen died after becoming involved in an argument at a party with 20-year-old Cody Faber.
While Cody was charged with second degree manslaughter after Kellen fell and hit his head on the concrete driveway - the judge in his case decided that Faber was not directly responsible for his death.
He was sentenced to 10-days in prison after pleading guilty to assault - a verdict which Kellen's mother, Nancy and his family, including Erin agreed with.
'That’s the verdict we wanted. It became clear to us that Cody was telling the truth – as clear as you could be with alcohol and all the chaos,' said Nancy.
According to the Star Tribune, whenever Erin really misses her brother, she rests her head on Connor’s chest. 'It’s a strong beat,' Erin said.
The couple added that they believe Kellen bonded them together, both through sadness at his departure but also through huge celebration of his life. |
0.998994 | postcards from the edge did meryl streep sing is a 1990 American comedy-drama film directed by Mike Nichols. The screenplay by Carrie Fisher is based on her 1987 semi-autobiographical novel of the same title. The film stars Meryl Streep, Shirley MacLaine, and Dennis Quaid. |
0.965672 | A delegate from Virginia to the United States Constitutional Convention, George Mason (along with James Madison) is commonly referred to as the "Father of the Bill of Rights". Unlike Madison, however, George Mason never wavered on his political stances. Mason was a staunch proponent for the inclusion of individual liberties into the United States Constitution. The patriot from Virginia believed that the Federal Government should be limited in power, and states in congruency with the country's well-being should have the ability to govern themselves. Mason's influence can be traced back to 1776, when he first served at the Virginia Convention in Williamsburg.
Mason, a die-hard advocate for individual freedoms, authored the Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776. George Mason firmly believed that the success of a nation depended on the happiness and individuality of its people. A substantial member of the Anti-Federalist movement, Mason felt as though the components that make up the government are more important than the government itself. This individualist sentiment was captured in Mason's creation of his State's Constitution.
The Virginia Declaration of Rights was the first document in American History to concretely outline a series of individual rights as they pertained to the greater good of government. The Virginia Declaration of Rights was the most influential State doctrine and the precursor for the first 10 Amendments to the United States Constitution.
In 1786, Mason was appointed to represent Virginia as a delegate to the Federal Convention in Philadelphia. The purpose for the meeting was to revise the Articles of Confederation and find an appropriate balancing of powers between the individual, the states, and the Federal Government. While at the meetings, Mason grew frustrated and uncommonly reserved. He refused to sign the ratification of The amended Constitution due to the absence of individual rights.
Many historians have claimed that Mason's refusal to compromise with the ratification process cost him close friendships with George Washington and other proponents of an empowered centralized government. As a result of his unwavering stance, Mason's popularity and historical recognition severely waned. Following the meetings, Mason and his fellow supporters moved back to Virginia where the Anti-Federalist Party continued to preach the necessity of a Bill of Rights.
The stance taken by the Anti-Federalist Party was a fervent one; they believed that the newly founded country was ironically and shamefully steering a course of government reminiscent of the authoritative British Parliament. Mason felt that a strong central government would abuse its power and eventually lose sight of the country's needs and vision. In response to the Anti-Federalist Party's inertia, the Constitution was again up for revision in 1791.
Primarily influenced by George Mason's Virginia Declaration of Rights, the United States Bill of Rights was ratified on December 15th, 1791. James Madison, the author of the first 10 Amendments, was originally a member of the Federalist Party and proponent of a strong federal government. Whether Madison authored the Bill of Rights due to a change in personal belief or because he needed Mason's support and the subsequent Virginia vote is still questioned to this day. What is known, however, is that without Mason's unyielding efforts, the inclusion of individual rights in the U.S. Constitution would have been in serious limbo and perhaps never solidified. |
0.961465 | Simon & Garfunkel were a highly acclaimed folk rock duo from New York City consisting of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel that became one of the top acts of the late 1960s. With a long history dating back to elementary school, the two friends made their first recordings in the late 1950s as teenagers under the name, Tom & Jerry. Their unique sound came from their close-knit harmonies that often showcased Garfunkel's ethereal soaring tenor, combined with a melodic and well-crafted collection of mostly Simon-penned songs that captured the spirit of the times. Their many era-defining hits included "The Sounds Of Silence," "Homeward Bound," "I Am A Rock," "Mrs. Robinson," "The Boxer," and "Bridge Over Troubled Water." "The Sounds Of Silence," "Mrs. Robinson," and several of their other songs are a part of the soundtrack to the landmark 1967 coming-of-age film, "The Graduate."
Simon & Garfunkel had their first hit in 1957 on the Pop/Rock charts with the Everly Brothers sound-alike song, "Hey, Schoolgirl," credited to Tom & Jerry. The duo reunited in 1963 as Simon & Garfunkel and re-emerged on the charts in late 1965 with the chart-topping "The Sounds Of Silence." First released as an acoustic song on the duo's 1964 debut album, "Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.," the hit version of this folk rock classic was overdubbed with electric guitars, bass, and drums. This smash was followed by a long string of hits that also included "Homeward Bound" (1966), "I Am A Rock" (1966), "A Hazy Shade Of Winter" (1966), "Scarborough Fair (Canticle)" (1968), "Mrs. Robinson" (1968), "The Boxer" (1969), "Bridge Over Troubled Water" (1970), "Cecilia" (1970), "El Condor Pasa" (1970), "America" (1972), "My Little Town" (1975), and "(What A) Wonderful World" (1978, with James Taylor). In addition to their debut album, the duo released four other studio albums that include "Sounds Of Silence" (1966), the platinum-certified "Parsley, Sage, Rosemary And Thyme" (1966), and "Bookends" (1968), which topped the Billboard 200 and UK album charts and also went platinum. The duo's fifth and final studio album, "Bridge Over Troubled Water" (1970), which includes the chart-topping title song, was their most successful, reaching #1 on the charts in over ten countries and earning multiple Grammys. Simon & Garfunkel had one final chart entry in 1982 with their cover of The Every Brothers' "Wake Up Little Susie," which was recorded live at a 1981 reunion concert in Central Park and included on the gold-certified "The Concert in Central Park" (1982).
After disbanding in 1970, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel each went on to pursue solo careers, occasionally reuniting over the years to record and/or perform. Their many honors and accolades include ten Grammys and being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990.
For more info about Simon & Garfunkel, visit simonandgarfunkel.com.
Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel discuss their latest reunion tour, their early beginnings, the making of some of their best known songs, and other topics in an interview with NPR (June 12, 2004). |
0.999997 | List a few ways you can help sales reps track the competition in Salesforce.
Prepare your org so you can create custom fields and reports.
Every company needs insight on competitors to stay competitive in the marketplace. But do you know who has some of the best insight? Sales reps.
In this module, you’ll learn how to help sales reps document those insights right in Salesforce. Here’s a brief summary of what you’ll do.
Create new custom fields on the Opportunity object where users can identify competitors and the reasons deals are lost.
Add validation rules to ensure users populate the new fields at the right time.
Build reports and dashboards based on the new custom fields.
Create a Competitor Chatter group for sharing insights and stories.
If you’ve earned other Trailhead badges, you’re used to getting hands-on in your personal Trailhead Playground. For this module, we’re taking a slightly different approach.
We recommend you use your sandbox. Follow along with these steps in your sandbox, test them, and then consider deploying your setup to production.
Don’t have a sandbox? That’s OK. You can use your free Trailhead Playground to follow along.
While your Salesforce org and sales processes are unique, when you follow along in any of these environments, you learn the configuration, analytics, and change management steps for tracking competition in Salesforce.
In the next three units, you build out new fields, rules, and reports. To prepare, do these things first.
Admin access: We start by customizing the Opportunity object. Salesforce System Administrators typically do this, so make sure you have access.
Familiarity with custom fields, validation rules, and reports: We show you how to create custom fields, validation rules, and reports. Before you start the work on your own, take some time to get acquainted with these concepts. |
0.938129 | François Nicolas Léonard Buzot (1 March 1760 – 18 June 1794) was a French politician and leader of the French Revolution.
Born at Évreux, Eure, he studied Law, and, at the outbreak of the Revolution was a lawyer in his home town. In 1789 he was elected deputy to the Estates-General and there became known for his radical opinions. He demanded the nationalization of the possessions of the Roman Catholic Church, and the right of all citizens to bear arms.
After the dissolution of the National Constituent Assembly, Buzot returned to Évreux, where he was named president of the criminal tribunal.
In 1792 he was elected deputy to the National Convention, and joined the Girondists under the influence of his friend Madame Roland. Buzot entered a polemic with the main rival of the Girondists, Jean-Paul Marat, and demanded the formation of a National Guard from the départements to defend the Convention against the Paris crowds of sans-culottes. His proposal was carried, but never put into force - the Parisians subsequently singled him out as a target of their hatred.
In the trial of King Louis XVI, Buzot voted in favour of the capital punishment death, but with appeal to the people and postponement of sentence (sursis). He had a sentence of death passed against the Royalist émigrés who did not return to France, and against anyone who should demand the re-establishment of the monarchy. At the same time, he opposed Georges Danton and The Mountain, and rejected the creation of a Committee of Public Safety and Revolutionary Tribunal (but abstained when the question of Marat's trial before the Tribunal was brought up by the Girondists).
Proscribed with the Girondists on 2 June 1793, he escaped, and took refuge to Calvados in Normandy, where he contributed to organize a Girondist insurrection against the Convention, which was suppressed soon after.
The Convention prosecuted him, and decreed "that the house occupied by Buzot be demolished, and never to be rebuilt on this plot. [Instead,] a column shall be raised, on which there shall be written: «Here was the sanctuary of the villain Buzot who, while a representative of the people, conspired for the overthrow of the French Republic»". He fled together with Jérôme Pétion de Villeneuve to Saint-Émilion, near Bordeaux, and remained in hiding. Both of them committed suicide in the forest surrounding the area; their bodies were recovered a month later, half-eaten by wolves.
He left behind his Memoirs, first published in 1823.
Mémoires de Pétion, Barbaroux, Buzot, published by C. A. Daubon (Paris, 1866).
This page was last edited on 9 January 2019, at 07:36 (UTC). |
0.999796 | How to Use a Kanji Dictionary Someday you might use one!
There's nothing like a good kanji dictionary at your side. While online resources have become more and more popular, having a good dictionary is still pretty important if you're going to take Japanese classes or plan to work in Japan. There are a lot of different kinds of kanji dictionaries out there and it can be really hard to know which one to buy, let alone trying to figure out how to use the thing. I can't tell you how many people I saw buying the required kanji dictionary for a class and never once picking it up, let alone using it on a daily basis.
I realized that many people don't know how to use the things, and unfortunately, not every kanji dictionary is the same. So for all of you out there who have a kanji dictionary sitting on your desk, in a pile of other books, or propping open their door, hopefully this guide can help you get some miles out of it.
We're going to be looking at three popular kanji dictionaries in depth, the New Nelson, Kodansha's Kanji Learners Dictionary, and The Kanji Dictionary by Spahn & Hadamitzky.
Is it suitable for your language level?
Does it provide the information you're looking for?
Is it structured in an easy to understand format?
If you're new to Japanese, if kanji are still a bit frightening or seem like a chore, you might want to go for a beginner's dictionary. They'll usually include a good chunk of the most common Jōyō kanji (taught from elementary to secondary school, usually about 2000 or so), plus a few additional kanji here and there. Usually, this type of dictionary will be sufficient all the way up and through intermediate Japanese. However, once you reach the higher intermediate and more advanced levels, you may notice more and more of the characters you're trying to look up are not included. Once you hit that point it's time to move on to a larger dictionary.
It's rather important to know what it is you're going to be looking up in your dictionary. Generally, if you find a word or character you don't recognize in a book, on a sign, or even online, you would look it up in your dictionary to find the reading and/or the meaning. Some dictionaries only give you the basic meaning for the kanji and list a few compounds (the kanji in the entry plus other kanji to make one word) and their readings and meaning.
Your own preference is also something to consider. If you pick up a dictionary and it makes your head spin, if you can never seem to find what you're looking for, and you just get frustrated, don't blame yourself. Sometimes you won't mesh well with a dictionary. I went through three or four before I found one that I felt comfortable with. If you can, go to a bookstore or a library and flip through a few before you buy one. If you don't live in an area where that's possible, look online and read reviews from other people. See how they feel and try to use your best judgement. Also, don't feel bad about having more than one dictionary. The good thing about their differences is that if you can't find something in your go-to one, you may be able to find it in the one collecting dust on your bookshelf.
To find the word you're looking for, first you need to find the radical, and there are a few different ways to tell what the radical is.
You may be thinking, but aren't kanji made up of radicals? How do you find the radical? Well lucky for you there is a twelve step guide to figuring out which radical the kanji you're looking for will be listed under. This same guide (in more detail) is included in the appendices of the New Nelson as well.
If you don't know how to find the radical yet, check out my other guide How to Find the Kanji Radical.
That number under the radical, in this case 195, tells us what section to flip to in our dictionary. Here we find the section for this radical.
Now we need to count how many strokes there are in the character OTHER THAN the radical we found. In this kanji there are nine more strokes, so we go to the section labeled nine.
Flip the page and there's our entry.
Here is another example, let's use the kanji kani 蟹（かに） this time.
First we find the radical, which in this case is 虫 in our chart.
The radical number is 142, so we go to section 142.
So how many strokes are there minus the radical itself? Thirteen. We go to the section showing the radical plus thirteen strokes.
And here we find the kanji entry for 蟹.
It's important to know the kind of information you're getting with your kanji dictionary. Before you buy or commit to one over the other have a look at what it can offer. Here is an example of an entry and what it tells us.
Let's go back to wani 鰐（かに）.
M46337, Morohashi's Dai Kanwa Jiten.
There is also another character next to the entry we're looking at, 鱷.
This is a variant form of the character we're looking at. Sometimes characters that are no longer used because they have been simplified to another version can be found here. This is useful because if you are reading something written during or before WWII, they may use these older kanji.
If there was the letter A next to the character, it would mean it is one of the 1006 characters selected by the Ministry of Education that elementary school students should know. On the other hand, a capital B means that while not learned in elementary school, it is still one of the characters on the Jōyō Kanji List. If you plan on studying kanji on your own and need a list to go off of, you can use these markers to decide which ones you should be studying.
Then we have the on'yomi (capital letters) and kun'yomi (italics) readings, as well as the meaning(s) of the character. Beyond that, there are more kanji with their stroke orders to the left and their readings and definitions to the right when they are used with the entry character before them in a compound word.
Unlike the New Nelson, Kodansha's Kanji dictionary is organized using a pattern system. They look like they use four of the seven general radical locations, but their categorization uses them in an altered fashion from what you may know them as.
This is more of a beginners character dictionary, and it does not have as many entries as the New Nelson, however, it may be more useful to students who are trying to learn the most used kanji. They layout and more durable pages may also be a better fit for someone who doesn't want to sit and pour over their dictionary.
In order to find the character you're looking for, you still need to be able to find the radical. Once you've done that though, you need to also determine it's location. Let's use kuma 熊（くま） as an example.
If we use what we already know, that the radical is 灬 is a variant of 火, then how do we know what pattern it fits in? Well if we look at all four options it is fairly easy to see that this sits on the bottom of the character, making it No. 2 the Up-Down pattern.
At the top of every page there is a pattern, we want to go to the second section labeled with the Up-Down picture.
The easiest way to find the radical you're looking for in this dictionary is by using the "skip numbers" that are meant to allow you to skip the tedious work to get to the character quicker. To find the skip number we need to count the number of strokes in the character, but this time we need to know the number of strokes in the shaded area and then in the non-shaded area.
Under the character the "skip number" is also listed. It's 2-10-4.
Let's look at what this dictionary entry can tell us about 熊.
The character is in red (showing that it is a frequently used kanji), as well as the english "core" meaning: Bear. The on'yomi (capital letters) and the kun'yomi (lowercase letters) is just below the meaning.
The "Names" means that it is a character in the Jinmei Kanji list.
S14-4-10 is the total number of strokes, the radical strokes, and the remaining strokes.
K2307 indicates how to located the character within the Japan's Industrial Standard code.
B0986 is the frequency level.
N2848 is the entry number for this character in the larger version of this dictionary.
U718A is the international unicode character encoding standard.
In addition to that we also get come compounds that contain the character, their readings, and English meanings. Stroke order is also provided for all the Jōyō Kanji, but because this is not on that list, it has no stroke order listed.
Instead of flipping through pages looking for the pattern numbers, you can always look for the page number using the pattern index at the back of this dictionary.
You may be wondering why we didn't go with our previous examples 鰐 and 蟹 this time. Well, the downside of getting a smaller, easier to use dictionary is that they usually don't have that many complex kanji. While this is a beginners dictionary, it should still do a very good job of telling you everything you need to know as you start to delve into the wonderful world of kanji. That being said, it's by no means cextensive. And while you're getting a lot of information like in the bullets above, you probably wont need any of that information until you're much farther into your studies. At that point you'll probably need more kanji in your dictionary.
This is the case with every dictionary, eventually you'll have to move on to a bigger, better one, to fill in the gaps, so to speak.
This dictionary is more of an intermediate dictionary, boasting "over 47,000 Japanese character compounds" right on the cover. If you can't get into the New Nelson or Kodansha's Kanji Learner's, then this may be the happy middle ground you're looking for.
Once again, you need to be able to determine the character's radical and the number of strokes in a character to use this dictionary properly. Unlike the other two, however, instead of using the 214 Kangxi radicals or organizing radicals by their location patterns, Spahn and Hadamitzky's uses a smaller set of 79 radicals.
The authors argue that the kanji commonly used in Japanese do not require the 214 Kangxi radicals created for use in China because there are so few comparatively. They're still using a good chunk of them, just cutting it down. They also offer a cross reference in the indexes if you're used to the traditional system and have trouble transitioning.
Let's go back to the kanji 鰐. We know the radical is 魚 which is listed under 11 because it has 11 strokes. It is also the first of the two radicals in this category so it's 11a. Now we need to flip to the section for 11a.
Here we'll see a very convenient chart of all of the characters located in this 11a section, and scanning through we find our kanji in the middle labeled 9.5. Add that to the first part and you get 11a9.5 – that's how the character is classified in this dictionary, it's descriptor. So looking at the top of the pages, we flip to that section to find our entry.
By now this should feel a lot easier. Let's take a look at what this dictionary has to offer in it's entries.
The first thing we see directly to the right of the character, in capital letters, is the on'yomi GAKU. Then next to that in lowecase is the kun'yomi, wani, and the definition.
Next we have two different categories, 1 and 2. The 1 means it's the first position in a compound word while the 2 means it is the second character. In other entries they can go higher to the third or fourth position but in this case it only occurs in two kanji compounds.
The small numbers next to kanji compounds represents the number of strokes in the other kanji in that compound. This does not include the character in the entry.
Last, you have the romaji reading and then the definitions of those words that include the kanji 鰐.
You may have noticed that this is a lot less information than the other two dictionaries offered. If you're the kind of person who thinks they will never need to know frequency levels, or what grade a kanji is learned, this dictionary contains a lot of words for being so simple. It's probably best for intermediate learners, but you may learn with time that you need something with more, like the New Nelson. But as far as basic information goes, this one is great.
In the end, picking out and buying a kanji dictionary is up to you. Find one that fits your style and has what you need in it. If you absolutely hate radicals, most dictionaries include on'yomi and kun'yomi indexes, just remember that being able to look up a kanji by it's radical is a really useful skill, and once you get used to it (with your favorite dictionary) you can find things faster than wading through readings.
If you bought or borrowed a kanji dictionary for class and it's collecting dust, pick it up, clean it off, and give it a try. Use it to wade through that manga you keep telling yourself you'll read but has no furigana. When you see something online, in a picture, on a sign in an anime, grab your kanji dictionary, find the radical, and look it up. The extra effort will help your Japanese improve, and your doorstop just found new purpose.
Next Article in Series Question: How Should You Learn Kanji? |
0.997909 | Who was this Greek "god" Asclepius or Asklepios [es KLEE pi uhs] which was changed in Latin to Asculapius or Aesculapius [es" kyoo LAY pee uhs]?
His name may not be as well-known as that of Hermes, but we know that the Romans showed high regard for him by setting aside Januarius 1 as a special day to remember him in worship.
Perhaps this date is set aside because it is believed to be when his temple was established Januarius 1, A.U.C. 463 (January 1, 291 B.C.) on Tiber Island (Insula Tiberina) to teach medicine in Rome.
The cult apparently was established to eradicate a plague that was in the city. Even today, St. Bartolomeo, a hospital, is located on the island thus continuing the healing arts established there so many centuries before.
When Homer, the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, wrote about Aesculapius, he was portrayed as a mortal, and it appears that his primary distinction was that he was the father of two doctors in the Greek army.
Four centuries later, Aesculapius had become one of Greece's most important gods. Socrates' last recorded utterance as the hemlock started to take hold was to remind Crito that they owed Aesculapius a rooster sacrifice.
Apollo (also a god of healing) was said to be his father and his mother was Coronis. Although Apollo loved Coronis, she preferred a mortal and foolishly thought that Apollo wouldn't find out about her adultery.
Just before she was to be burned on her funeral pyre, after being killed for her infidelity, Apollo is supposed to have "snatched away the baby which was very near birth" and took him to Chiron, the wise and kindly old Centaur, to bring up in his cave on Mt. Pelion.
The child was named Asklepios (Asclepios), and Chiron passed on his considerable knowledge in the use of herbs and gentle incantations as well as cooling potions to this boy who showed an unusual enthusiasm for learning.
Aesculapius not only learned what Chiron taught him, but he was credited with treating whoever came to him whether from wounds or bodies wasting away with disease, "even those who were sick unto death, he delivered from their torment."
Legend proclaims that Aesculapius, as a mortal, had cured so many people, Pluto complained that hades was becoming under populated and complained to Zeus.
Disturbed by the physician's daring to tamper with the laws of life and death, Zeus used a thunderbolt to "dispatch Aesculapius into hades."
One source says that later he was brought into the family of gods. Others say that despite the displeasure of the King of Gods and Men, he was honored on earth as no other mortal. This was shown for hundreds of years after his death as the sick and the maimed and the blind went to his temples for healing.
They would pray and sacrifice, and then go to sleep. In their dreams, the good physician would reveal how they could be cured or gave them immediate treatment.
Apparently, according to temple records, thousands upon thousands of sick people through out the centuries believed that he had freed them from their pain and restored them to health.
Aesculapius is said to have had two sons, Podaleinius and Machaon, both surgeons; and three daughters, Hygeia (Health), Iaso (Healing), and Panacea (Cure-All).
The only "child" of importance in story, or cult worship, was Hygeia whose cults were both associated with and which also existed independently of Aesculapius.
Aesculapius may have established the first "hospitals" and "health spas"
The most celebrated of his healing temples were located at Cos, Epidaurus, Cnidus, and Pergamos. These temples flourished during the time of Hippocrates (late 5th century B.C.) but they existed independently of his school.
In the Asclepia (Asklepia) [es KLEE pee uh] temples, the priests of the cult applied their secret knowledge as well as religious rites to bring about their cures.
Treatment was free, although patients who could afford it were expected to contribute to the cost of running the temples.
At its peak of popularity, the cult appeared by some to represent the most successful attempt, historically, to fuse religion, magic, hypnotherapy (suggestion), and nature cure (diet, rest, massage, and hydrotherapy) into the services of healing.
The most famous temple was located in the ancient seaport of Epidaurus. "Access to the shrine was forbidden to the unclean and the impure, pregnant women, and the mortally afflicted were kept away; no dead body could find a resting place within the holy precincts, the shelter and the care of the sick being undertaken by the keepers of inns and boarding-houses in the neighborhood.
The suppliants for aid had to submit to careful purification; to bathe in sea, river, or spring; to fast for a prescribed time; to abjure wine and certain articles of diet; and they were only permitted to enter the temple when they were adequately prepared by cleansing inunction [an act of applying oil or ointment] and fumigation [the application of smoke, or other vapor, for cleansing purposes].
This lengthy and exhausting preparation, partly dietetic, partly suggestive, was accompanied by a solemn service of prayer and sacrifice [especially of a rooster], whose symbolism tended highly to excite the imagination."
—Max Neuberger, History of Medicine. English Translation. Oxford, 1910.
[Information in brackets were supplied by the author of this page].
Aesculapius, Part 2 of 2. |
0.932935 | Read up on getting your 5 A Day. I was having to buy bigger sizes far too often.
Why did you want to lose weight? From calorie-counting to snacking, Stephanie reveals how she did it and how the plan helped her develop healthier habits in 12 weeks. Instagram Unhappy with her weight and feeling unfit at the age of 27, Ampika decided to do something about it.
Probably the most important thing is to pick yourself up and carry on — a slip-up now and then doesn't really matter too much in the long run.
Do you still need to lose weight?
Snacks were already built in for the day — usually dried fruit, like raisins, apricots and apple, as well as fresh fruit.
Yes, provided they are from a trusted and reliable source, like LloydsPharmacy. After being on the plan for about a week, I didn't really have any cravings — I'd just eat healthily and often. What exercise did you do? Don't ban foods Don't ban any foods from your weight loss plan, especially the ones you like.
I used a couple of calorie-counting websites, such as Weight Loss Resources. If I can do it anyone can. Get more active Being active is key to losing weight and keeping it off. Fibre is only found in food from plants, such as fruit and vegoats, wholegrain bread, brown rice and pastaand beans, peas and lentils.
I wrote down every weight loss uk I had during the day in a notepad. But then I was pregnant and over time I put the weight on. Wow" exclaimed one follower.
how to lose weight on my thighs and belly Ampika's ten year challenge stunned fans who had no idea of her weight loss journey Image: It feels great to be able to share my experience of losing weight with others on the forum who are just starting out. I'd had how to lose 30 pounds in a month diet plan baby and I was stuck in a routine. It takes about 20 minutes for the stomach to tell the brain it's full, so eat slowly and stop eating before you feel full.
As well as providing numerous health benefitsexercise can help burn off the excess calories you can't cut through diet alone. If that wasn't possible, I'd make sure I didn't go over my allowance any weight loss change in face day of the week, and maybe step up the exercise. I knew I wasn't a healthy weight.
I'd been going to the gym for about 5 months, but I hadn't lost any weight. I was actually putting on weight. How did you keep yourself motivated? That was my weight about 5 years ago and the weight I feel comfortable with.
How has following the plan changed you?
BMI is calculated by dividing your weight in kilograms by your height in metresand then divided again by your height in metres. Medically speaking, your doctor may weight loss uk concern about your weight if you are overweight - i. In the evening, I'd tot up my calories and update the food and exercise chart. One day, I just realised how big I'd got and decided I wanted to get back to my ideal weight.
Medically speaking, having a Weight loss ingredients of 30 or more is considered obese.
That is, simply, to eat fewer calories than you require for you current body weight.
How has following the plan changed you? It was heavy, so I'd remind myself of that bag of sugar every so often. I've been a size 10 to 12 all my life, but the weight's been creeping up over the last 5 years. You can use a calorie counter to find out your daily intake needs to be sharapova diet plan a calorie deficit. Over time, drinking too much can easily diet pills as speed to weight gain.
Ideally, I'd like to get to 60kg. To qualify for prescription treatment, your BMI must be above 30 or 28 if you have a medical condition such as diabetes. For lunch and dinner, I used kitchen scales to weigh things like rice and pasta. Eat plenty of fruit and veg Fruit and veg are low in calories and fat, and high in fibre — 3 essential ingredients for successful weight loss.
During the 12 weeks, I lost 9. It doesn't take long, and I found it really helpful for keeping track of calories.
Losing weight quickly doesn't always promote a healthy relationship with food, say dietitians. Start losing weight My week weight loss journey Stephanie Higgins tells how she lost 9. This is your BMI, and, happily, it is in the middle of the healthy bracket. What qualifies me for treatment?
I ate less than usual and made healthier choices. I asked my boyfriend and his answer was: Use the calorie information to work out how a particular food fits into your daily calorie allowance on the weight loss plan. There was a handful of meals that we had every week, like chicken curry and spaghetti bolognese, which kept the calorie-counting work down. Banning foods will only make you crave them more.
Although this is a personal matter, and many people do not need to be concerned about their weight, the number of people classified as being overweight or obese is increasing at an alarming rate. Divide again by 1. In one memorable scene on the ITVBe series, Ampika revealed almost everything as she sashayed into co-star Leanne Brown's 40th birthday celebrations in a near-naked outfit.
If you can do it, I can!!!
After doing it for 12 weeks, it kind of feels normal to me. Plan your meals Try to plan your breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks for the week, making sure you stick to your calorie allowance. To fans of the reality show, Ambika is renowned for flaunting her enviably can weight loss cause light period size 8 figure. When taken alongside a balanced diet and exercise, it will help reduce your overall fat consumption, thereby helping you lose weight. |
0.999721 | Plan your first vacation as a married couple on the awesome island nation of Jamaica in the Caribbean. Totally unique and completely drenched in a rich culture fantastically different from your daily life, escape it all with your loved one and allow the island vibes of Jamaica to wash over you after the stress of your wedding is over. Reserve a car hire in Jamaica so you can get around the island at your own pace during your honeymoon.
During your stay in Jamaica you can visit the Nine Mile, where Bob Marley was born and is now buried. The journey up into the mountains is a lovely and scenic trip, which lets you experience the heart of the country. While you are there you can visit Negril 7 mile beach, and take lunch at Rick's Cafe, where you can enjoy a spectacular sunset.
Jamaica is an excellent choice for more adventurous honeymooners as well. Some of the many activities available here include hiking, camping, snorkeling, horseback riding, backpacking, swimming, jet skiing, and swimming with the dolphins. You can even get married and honeymoon in the same spot! Just bring along the required paperwork and you can get married in one of the most beautiful locations on earth, in a ceremony performed by a certified marriage officer of the island. |
0.968862 | The 2009 World Series was the championship series of Major League Baseball's (MLB) 2009 season. The Phillies earned their berth into the playoffs by winning the National League East.
The 2009 World Series began on October 28, and ended on November 4, with the New York Yankees defeating the Philadelphia Phillies in six games.
As the 105th edition of the World Series, it was a best-of-seven playoff contested between the Philadelphia Phillies, champions of the National League (NL) and defending World Series champions, and the New York Yankees, champions of the American League (AL).
After collecting a third straight Eastern Division championship, the Phillies won their second consecutive National League pennant for the first time in franchise history; however they were defeated by the New York Yankees in the 2009 World Series.
They won their 40th American League pennant on October 25, defeating the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim in 6 games to advance to the World Series, where they defeated the Philadelphia Phillies in six games to win their 27th World Series title on November 4.
The Phillies reached the World Series by defeating the Colorado Rockies in the best-of-five National League Division Series, and the Los Angeles Dodgers in the best-of-seven NL Championship Series (NLCS).
The 2009 National League Championship Series (NLCS) was a best-of-seven baseball game series pitting the Los Angeles Dodgers against the Philadelphia Phillies for the National League Championship and the right to represent the National League in the 2009 World Series.
The Phillies defeated the Dodgers in the NLCS by a series score of 4–1, and lost the 2009 World Series to the New York Yankees, 4–2.
The Yankees defeated the Minnesota Twins in the American League Division Series and the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim in the AL Championship Series (ALCS) to advance to their first World Series since 2003.
The AL East Division champions, the New York Yankees, defeated the AL West Division champions, the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, four games to two, to advance to the 2009 World Series, their first since 2003.
This series was a rematch of the 1950 World Series.
The two teams would not again meet in the Series for 59 years.
The Yankees went on to defeat the Angels 4–2 in the ALCS, and defeated the Philadelphia Phillies 4–2 to win the 2009 World Series.
In Game 2, solo home runs by Mark Teixeira and Hideki Matsui helped the Yankees win by a score of 3–1. Notable free agent acquisitions included starting pitchers CC Sabathia and A. J. Burnett, and first baseman Mark Teixeira.
One of the most prolific switch hitters in MLB history, Teixeira was an integral part of the Yankees' 27th World Series championship in 2009, leading the American League (AL) in home runs and runs batted in (RBI) while finishing second in the Most Valuable Player Award (MVP) balloting.
Cliff Lee pitched a complete game in the Phillies' Game 1 victory, allowing only one unearned run, while Chase Utley hit two home runs.
Lee won his first straight seven postseason starts; as a Phillie going 4-0 in the 2009 postseason including pitching a complete game in 2009 World Series against New York Yankees, and next season with the Rangers where he shutout the Yankees 8-0 in the 2010 ALCS en route to reaching the 2010 World Series.
Notable free agent acquisitions included starting pitchers CC Sabathia and A. J. Burnett, and first baseman Mark Teixeira.
With the Yankees, Sabathia led all of Major League Baseball in wins in both 2009 and 2010 and helped lead the Yankees to the 2009 World Series championship in the franchise's first year at the new Yankee Stadium.
Another major addition was outfielder Nick Swisher, acquired in a trade with the Chicago White Sox.
He won the 2009 World Series with the Yankees against the Philadelphia Phillies and was an All-Star in 2010.
Sabathia won 19 games and position players Alex Rodriguez and Teixeira both had strong seasons offensively, Rodriguez with 30 home runs and 100 RBI and Teixeira with 39 and 122 respectively.
He was part of the Yankees' 2009 World Series championship over the Philadelphia Phillies, which was the first year of the new Yankee Stadium and Rodriguez's only world title.
The Yankees played the 2009 season in Yankee Stadium, their first year in that park after playing for 84 years in "Old" Yankee Stadium.
The worker has since claimed to have buried a 2004 American League Championship Series program/scorecard, but has not said where he placed it. These attempts didn't have much effect upon the home team, though: the Yankees went on to win the 2009 World Series at the end of their first MLB season in the new stadium.
He was a member of the 2009 World Series champion Yankees.
The Yankees accomplished this feat yet again in the New Yankee Stadium in the 2009 World Series.
In Game 2, solo home runs by Mark Teixeira and Hideki Matsui helped the Yankees win by a score of 3–1.
In the 2009 World Series, Matsui helped the Yankees defeat the defending champion Philadelphia Phillies, 4 games to 2, by hitting .615 (8 for 13) with 3 home runs and 8 RBI, including tying Bobby Richardson's single-game World Series record (Game Three of the 1960 World Series) with six RBIs in Game 6.
Yankees manager Joe Girardi had been using a three-man starting rotation during the playoffs, in contrast to the four-pitcher rotation used by the Phillies.
Girardi managed the Yankees from 2008 to 2017, winning the 2009 World Series.
Closing pitcher Mariano Rivera earned his 500th save against the Yankees' cross-town rival New York Mets, becoming the second pitcher in history to do so. On September 11, 2009, shortstop Derek Jeter recorded his 2,722nd career hit, passing Lou Gehrig to become the all-time leader in career hits recorded as a Yankee.
The 2000 championship was the Yankees' last title until their 2009 World Series win.
Closing pitcher Mariano Rivera earned his 500th save against the Yankees' cross-town rival New York Mets, becoming the second pitcher in history to do so. On September 11, 2009, shortstop Derek Jeter recorded his 2,722nd career hit, passing Lou Gehrig to become the all-time leader in career hits recorded as a Yankee. Several records were tied, extended, or broken during this World Series, including team championships (Yankees with 27), career postseason wins (Andy Pettitte with 18), career World Series saves (Mariano Rivera with 11), home runs in a World Series (Utley with five), strikeouts by a hitter in a World Series (Ryan Howard with 13), and runs batted in in a single World Series game (Matsui with six).
In the postseason, he pitched 16 innings, allowing one earned run and saving five games, and he clinched the Yankees' victory in the 2009 World Series against the Philadelphia Phillies—his fifth championship.
The Yankees won the American League East to earn their berth, posting the best record in the Major Leagues.
The Phillies earned their berth into the playoffs by winning the National League East.
On October 28, Utley drew a two-out walk in the first inning of Game 1 of the 2009 World Series, setting a record for reaching base in consecutive postseason games (26).
The starting pitchers Lee and CC Sabathia continued to pitch until the top of the eighth when Sabathia was replaced by Phil Hughes.
Despite his struggles in the postseason, Hughes won a championship with the Yankees in the 2009 World Series over the Philadelphia Phillies.
Prior to the game, Jay-Z and Alicia Keys performed the song "Empire State of Mind" for the Yankee Stadium crowd.
Profanity is present throughout the song and, although it is usually included during live performances, it was omitted during the performance at Game 2 of the 2009 World Series. |
0.988357 | OBJECTIVES: We evaluated the pattern of ossicular chain (OC) lesion in chronic suppurative otitis media (CSOM) without cholesteatoma and its impact on outcomes in primary and revision surgeries.
MATERIALS AND METHODS: This was a retrospective chart review. Patients who underwent tympanoplasty due to CSOM with OC defect between 2010 and 2015 were included in the study.
RESULTS: OC lesions were found during 40 of 147 tympanoplasties performed due to CSOM. The preoperative air–bone gap (ABG) was greater in both discontinuity and fixation cases than in cases with CSOM with an intact OC (p<0.001). Twenty-nine patients were followed up postoperatively, after excluding four patients with stapes footplate fixation, in whom stapedotomy was not performed simultaneously. Among the 29 patients, the audiological results were similar in cases of discontinuity and fixation regarding gap change, residual ABG, and the rate of successful ossiculoplasty. Primary tympanoplasties provided better results according to postoperative ABG and the rate of successful ossiculoplasty than revision surgeries (p<0.05); however, similar patterns of OC lesions were found during primary and revision surgeries.
CONCLUSION: Both OC discontinuity and fixation occur in CSOM in a similar distribution in primary tympanoplasties and revision surgeries. The type of OC lesion does not affect outcomes. Primary surgeries provide better results, but that is not due to a difference in the character of the OC lesion.
Cite this article as: Horváth T, Lukács D, Horváth B, Ferenci T, Liktor B. Does The Type of Ossicular Chain Lesion Affect Outcomes in Chronic Suppurative Otitis Media Without Cholesteatoma? J Int Adv Otol 2019; DOI: 10.5152/iao.2019.5554. |
0.928418 | Have you made Carrot Pie?
1. FILLING AND ASSEMBLY: Heat oven to 450 degrees.
2. Mix all ingredients together at medium speed of electric mixer, blending thoroughly.
3. Pour into pie shell and bake at 450 degrees for 5 minutes.
4. Reduce heat to 325 degrees and continue cooking for 45 minutes, or until pie is set.
5. Let cool about 10 minutes before serving. PIECRUST: Mix flour and salt together in a bowl.
6. Cut vegetable shortening into flour until mixture resembles course meal.
7. Sprinkle with ice water, 1 tablespoon at a time, mixing quickly with a fork after each spoonful.
8. Add only enough water so dough holds together and can be formed into a ball.
9. Divide dough into 2 equal portions and form each into a smooth ball, handling as little as possible.
10. Roll one portion out onto lightly floured surface.
11. Place rolled dough in a 9-inch pie plate; trim and flute edges.
This recipe contains potential food allergens and will effect people with Wheat, Egg, Milk, Gluten, Natural Sweeteners allergies. |
0.939012 | How did the British monarchy respond to the multiple challenges of early twentieth-century mass democracy? Historians have separated the growth of constitutional sovereignty from the practice of a welfare monarchy, or from royalty as decorative and media friendly. This article argues that the political transformation of the modern monarchy was inseparable from innovations to its style and presentation. Opening with the dramatic constitutional crisis that confronted George V and his advisors in 1910, I show how the monarchy's entanglement in high politics forced the crown to assume an increasingly neutral, arbitrarial stance on industrial disputes and on the Irish question, despite the king's own conservatism. Simultaneously, George V invested in styles of royal accessibility and informality that contrasted sharply with other major European dynasties, in a series of royal tours across the industrial heartlands of England and Wales in 1912 and 1913. Extensively covered by the national and imperial press and by the newsreels, these visits to the strongholds of laborism promoted a vision of patrician democracy that drew heavily on traditions of organic, one-nation conservatism. But they also positioned royalty and the people in a new imaginary relationship that was more personal and intimate. Both versions had long-term consequences for the British monarchy across the twentieth century.
1 “‘Compassionate’ Prince Harry Visits Flood-Hit Homes,” Lancashire Evening Post, 5 February 2016, https://www.lep.co.uk/news/compassionate-prince-harry-visits-flood-hit-homes-1-7718807.
2 “Crowds Line Lancaster's Streets for Queen's Visit,” BBC News, 29 May 2015.
3 “Prince Charles Makes Permanent Base in Burnley,” Lancashire Telegraph, 18 May 2012, http://www.lancashiretelegraph.co.uk/news/9713220.Prince_Charles_makes_permanent_base_in_Burnley.
4 Greg Lambert, “The Queen Visits Lancaster,” Visitor (Morecambe, Lancashire), 1 June 2015, https://www.thevisitor.co.uk/news/video-the-queen-visits-lancaster-1-7284541.
5 “Prince William and Kate Middleton Visit Lancashire,” BBC News, 11 April 2011, http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lancashire-13033244.
6 See “The King Planting Copper Beech at Houghton Tower,” Manchester Guardian, supplement, 11 July 1913, 5A.
7 Bagehot, Walter, The English Constitution (London, 1867).
8 Cannadine, David, “The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the ‘Invention of Tradition,’ c.1820–1977,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terence (Cambridge, 1983), 101–64, at 108, 120. See also Cannadine, David and Price, Simon, eds. Rituals of Royalty: Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies (Cambridge, 1987).
9 Bogdanor, Vernon, The Monarchy and the Constitution (Oxford, 1995), 34. See also Brazier, Rodney and Bogdanor, Vernon, The British Constitution in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2003); Nicholson, Harold, King George V: His Life and Reign (London, 1967).
10 Prochaska, Frank, The Republic of Britain, 1760–2000 (London, 2000); Prochaska, Frank, Royal Bounty: The Making of a Welfare Monarchy (New Haven, 1995). See also Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Ina, “Prince Philip: Sportsman and Youth Leader,” in The Man behind the Throne: Male Consorts in History, ed. Been, Charles and Taylor, Miles (Basingstoke, 2014), 223–40.
11 See McKernan, Luke, Topical Budget: The Great British News Film (London, 1992), 117–22; McKernan, Luke, “‘The Finest Cinema Performers That We Possess’: British Royalty and the Newsreels, 1910–37,” Court Historian 8, no. 1 (July 2003): 59–71; Mayhall, Laura E. Nym, “The Prince of Wales Versus Clark Gable: Anglophone Celebrity and Citizenship between the Wars,” Cultural and Social History 4, no. 4 (December 2007): 529–43; Schwarzenbach, Alexis, “Love, Marriage and Divorce: American and European Reactions to the Abdication of Edward VIII,” in New Dangerous Liaisons: Discourses on Europe and Love in the Twentieth Century, ed. Passerini, Luisa, Ellena, Lilliana, and Geppert, Alexander (New York, 2010), 137–57.
12 Prochaska, Royal Bounty, 172.
13 Kuhn, William, Democratic Royalism: The Transformation of the British Monarchy, 1861–1914 (Basingstoke, 1996), 8.
14 For imperial Russia, see Lieven, Dominic, Towards the Flame: Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia (London, 2015); King, Greg, The Court of the Last Tsar: Pomp, Power and Pageantry in the Reign of Nicholas II (Hoboken, 2006); Wortman, Richard, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in the Russian Monarchy, vol. 2, From Alexander II to the Abdication of Nicholas II (Princeton, 2000). For Germany, see Röhl, John, The Kaiser and His Court: Wilhelm II and the Government of Germany, trans. Cole, Terence (Cambridge, 1987); Röhl, John, Wilhelm II: Into the Abyss of War and Exile, 1900–1941, trans. de Bellaigue, Sheila and Bridge, Roy (Cambridge, 2014); Clark, Christopher, Kaiser Wilhelm II (Harlow, 2000). For Austro-Hungary, see Bled, Jean-Paul, Franz Joseph, trans. Bridgeman, Teresa (Oxford, 1992).
15 Nicholas, Alison, Elisabeth, Queen of the Belgians: Her Life and Times (Bognor Regis, 1982), 53–54; Potter, Frank, Belgium's Soldier King: Albert, King of the Belgians, 1909–1934 (Ilfracombe, 1994).
16 Thompson, Dorothy, Queen Victoria: Gender and Power (London, 1990), 14.
17 Homans, Margaret, Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture, 1837–1876 (Chicago, 1998), chap. 1.
18 Morris, Marilyn, The British Monarchy and the French Revolution (New Haven, 1998), 160–61. For differing interpretations of George III's public image, see Colley, Linda, “The Apotheosis of George III: Loyalty, Royalty and the British Nation,” Past and Present 102, no. 1 (February 1984): 94–129; Sack, James, From Jacobite to Conservative: Reaction and Orthodoxy in Britain, c. 1760–1832 (Cambridge, 1993), chap. 5.
19 Dangerfield, George, The Strange Death of Liberal England (1935; repr., Geneva, 1971).
20 See McLean, Roderick, Royalty and Diplomacy in Europe, 1880–1914 (Cambridge, 2000), 193–206; Nicholson, George V, 291–92; Pope-Hennessy, James, Queen Mary, 1867–1953 (London, 1959), 479–82.
21 Joyce, Patrick, Work, Society and Politics: The Culture of the Factory in Later Victorian England (Brighton, 1980), xxii, 279–80.
22 Plunkett, John, Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch (Oxford, 2003).
23 George V Diary, 18 May 1910, RA GV/PRIV/GVD/1910, Royal Archives, Windsor Castle (hereafter RA).
24 George V Diary, 11 November 1911 and 12 November 1911.
25 Queen Mary to Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, 22 July 1914, RA QM/PRIV/CC26/94.
26 For accounts of the crisis that have been used here, see Dangerfield, Strange Death of Liberal England, 19–68; Nicholson, George V, chaps. 7, 9–10; Rose, Kenneth, King George V (London, 1983), chap. 5; Bogdanor, Monarchy and the Constitution, 113–35; Heffer, Simon, Power and Place: The Political Consequences of King Edward VII (London, 1998), 230–35, 275–97.
27 Lee, Sir Sidney, King Edward VII: A Biography, vol. 2, The Reign, 22nd January 1901 to 6th May 1910 (London, 1927), 455. See also Heffer, Power and Place, 304–5.
28 Lord Crewe to Lord Knollys, 19 April 1910 [marked confidential], RA PS/PSO/GV/C/K/2522/1/21.
29 Anson, William, The Law and Custom of the Constitution, part 2, The Crown, 2nd ed. (London, 1896), 55.
30 Windsor, Duke of, A King's Story: The Memoirs of H. R. H. the Duke of Windsor (London, 1998), 186–88.
31 Cannadine, David, George V: The Unexpected King (London, 2014). See also H. H. Asquith to Margot Asquith, September 1912 (no day given), in H. H. Asquith: Letters to Venetia Stanley, ed. Michael and Eleanor Brock (Oxford, 1982), 43.
32 Rose, George V, 52, 69; Riddell, Lord, More Pages from My Diary, 1908–1914 (London, 1934), 218.
33 “The King and Queen: Royal Visit to Brighouse,” Brighouse Echo, 12 July 1912, RA NEWS/PRESS/GV/MAIN/1912/LII/722. See also Lockhart, J. G., Cosmo Gordon Lang (London, 1949), 217.
34 William M. Kuhn, “Bigge, Arthur John, Baron Stamfordham,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 3 January 2008, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/31883. See also Ponsonby, Frederick, Recollections of Three Reigns (London, 1951), x.
35 Keith Grieves, “Stanley, Edward George Villiers, Seventeenth Earl of Derby,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 6 January 2011, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/36243; Seth-Smith, Michael, A Classic Connection: The Friendship of the Earl of Derby and the Hon. George Lambton, 1893–1945 (London, 1993). For Liverpool politics, see Waller, Philip, Democracy and Sectarianism: A Political and Social History of Liverpool, 1869–1939 (Liverpool, 1981), 225–26.
36 Lord Derby to Lord Stamfordham, 28 April 1913 and 16 May 1913, RA PS/PSO/GV/PS/MAIN/5721/34, 38.
37 See Esher, Viscount, Journals and Letters of Reginald Viscount Esher, vol. 3, 1910–1915, ed. Oliver, , Esher, Viscount (London, 1938), 15–17.
38 Pope-Hennessy, Queen Mary, 286.
39 Pope-Hennessy, 279, 424; Mabell, Countess of Airlie, Thatched with Gold: The Memories of Mabell, Countess of Airlie, ed. Ellis, Jennifer (London, 1962), 108–9.
40 Jennings, Ivor, Cabinet Government (Cambridge, 1959), 329; Bogdanor, Monarchy and the Constitution, 68.
41 George, Lloyd to George, Margaret Lloyd, 16 September 1911, in Lloyd George Family Letters, 1885–1936, ed. Morgan, Kenneth (Cardiff, 1973), 158–59. See also Grigg, John, Lloyd George: The People's Champion, 1902–1911 (London, 1978), 305.
42 Green, E. H. H., Ideologies of Conservatism: Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2002), 69–70; Green, E. H. H., The Crisis of Conservatism: The Politics, Economics and Ideology of the British Conservative Party, 1880–1914 (London, 1995); Manton, Kevin, “Edwardian Conservatism and the Constitution: The Thought of Lord Hugh David Cecil,” Parliamentary History 34, no. 3 (October 2015): 365–82; Thackeray, David, “Rethinking the Crisis of Edwardian Conservatism,” Historical Journal 54, no. 1 (March 2011): 191–213; Thackeray, David, Conservatism for the Democratic Age: Conservative Cultures and the Challenge of Mass Politics in Early Twentieth-Century England (Manchester, 2013). See also Ridley, Jane, “The Unionist Social Reform Committee, 1911–1914: Wets before the Deluge,” Historical Journal 30, no. 2 (June 1987): 391–413.
43 See Lawrence, Jon, “Paternalism, Class, and the British Path to Modernity,” in The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain, ed. Gunn, Simon and Vernon, James (Berkeley, 2011), 147–64, at 147; David Thackeray, Conservatism for the Democratic Age, 55.
44 Lockhart, Lang, 141–42, 216–17; Beaken, Robert, Cosmo Lang: Archbishop in War and Crisis (London, 2012), 68–71, 74–77.
45 Cosmo Lang to Mrs. H. Lang, 14 July 1912, Lang Papers, Family Papers, 1882–1920, vol. 188, 84, 101, Lambeth Palace Library, London; Beaken, Cosmo Lang, 71.
46 Beaken, Cosmo Lang, 71.
47 Prochaska, Royal Bounty, 172.
48 Prochaska, Royal Bounty, 172.
49 Lloyd George to Margaret Lloyd George, 9 May 1910, in Lloyd George Family Letters, 152. See also Grigg, Lloyd George, 216.
50 See Béliard, Yann, “Introduction: Revisiting the Great Labour Unrest, 1911–1914,” Labour History Review 79, no. 1 (April 2014): 1–17.
51 Thompson, James, “The Great Labour Unrest and Political Thought in Britain, 1911–1914,” Labour History Review 79, no.1 (April 2014): 37–53, at 38.
52 Fritz Ponsonby to Winston Churchill, 16 August 1911, RA PS/PSO/GV/C/B/246/1. See also Davies, Sam and Noon, Ron, “The Rank-and-File in the 1911 Liverpool General Transport Strike,” Labour History Review 79, no. 1 (April 2014): 55–80.
53 Winston Churchill to George V, telegram, 17 August 1911, RA PS/PSO/GV/C/B/246/3; Dudley Ward to George V, telegram, 17 August 1911, RA PS/PSO/GV/C/B/246/2.
54 See Nicholson, George V, 157.
55 Winston Churchill to George V, telegram, 20 August 1911, RA PS/PSO/GV/C/B/246/18; George V to Churchill, telegram, 20 August 1911, RA PS/PSO/GV/C/B/246/19.
56 G. R. Askwith to Stamfordham, 25 January 1912, RA PS/PSO/GV/C/B/350/4.
57 Heath, Alison, The Life of George Ranken Askwith, 1861–1942 (London, 2013), 131–38.
58 Heath, The Life of George Ranken Askwith, 125.
59 Nicholson, George V, 223–24; Rose, George V, 148.
60 Nicholson, George V, 223–24. See also aan de Wiel, Jérôme, “1914: What Will the British Do? The Irish Home Rule Crisis in the July Crisis,” International History Review 37, no. 4 (August 2015): 657–81.
61 Speech of King to Buckingham Palace Conference, Ireland, 21 July 1914, Lloyd George Papers, LG/C/5/6/7, Parliamentary Archives, London. See also George V Diary, 21 July 1914, RA GV/PRIV/GVD/1914.
62 Nicholson, George V, 157, 416–21; Rose, George V, 119, 139, 340–43.
63 Cannadine, George V, 52–53.
64 Sir George Armstrong to Stamfordham, 11 August 1911, RA PS/PSO/GV/C/K/2552/2/74.
65 Major Clive Wigram, memo, 15 November 1910, RA PS/PSO/GV/C/K/2552/1/57.
66 Sir Arthur Bigge, memorandum, 18 November 1910, RA PS/PSO/GV/C/K/2552/2/94. See also Extract of a Letter from Lord Esher to Lord Knollys, 1 March 1910, RA PS/PSO/GV/C/K/2552/1/16.
67 Bostridge, Mark, The Fateful Year: England 1914 (London, 2014), 158.
68 Judith Dray, “A Story from the Archive: A Royal Visit and a Suffragette,” http://blogs.cardiff.ac.uk/cuarm/royal-visit-and-suffragette; “Suffragette Protests at Llandaff,” South Wales Echo, 26 June 1912.
69 Queen Mary to Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, 21 February 1913, RA QM/PRIV/CC26/44; George V Diary, 4 June 1914, RA GV/PRIV/GVD/1914.
70 Tickner, Lisa, The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign, 1907–14 (London, 1987).
71 See Chomet, Seweryn, Helena: Princess Reclaimed: The Life and Times of Queen Victoria's Third Daughter (New York, 1999); Wake, Jehanne, Princess Louise: Queen Victoria's Unconventional Daughter (London, 1988); Hawksley, Lucinda, The Mystery of Princess Louise: Queen Victoria's Rebellious Daughter (London, 2014).
72 Hamilton, Mary Agnes, Mary Macarthur: A Biographical Sketch (London, 1925), 137–38; Hamilton, Mary Agnes, Margaret Bondfield (London, 1924), 108–9. See also Braybon, Gail, Women Workers in the First World War: The British Experience (London, 1981), 44–45.
73 See Murphy, Philip, Monarchy and the End of Empire: The House of Windsor, the British Government and the Postwar Commonwealth (Oxford, 2013), 12–13.
74 “Third Chapter Contrast. King in Glamorgan Valleys,” South Wales Daily News, 24 May 1912, 5.
75 H. H. Asquith to George V, 6 March 1912, Cabinet Letters: Copies of Asquith's Cabinet Letters to the King, 1908–1916, Papers of Herbert Henry Asquith, 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith, mainly 1892–1928, A2 MS Asquith 5, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.
76 See the letters and memoranda in RA PS/PSO/GV/C/K/2522/1, and RA PS/PSO/GV/C/K/2522/2.
77 Programme for the Visit of the King and Queen to Wentworth, RA PS/PSO/GV/PS/MAIN/7175. See also the exchanges between Derby and Stamfordham, RA PS/PSO/GV/PS/MAIN/5721/13, 34, 38.
78 See Bailey, Catherine, Black Diamonds: The Rise and Fall of a Great English Dynasty (London, 2008), 114.
79 Bailey, Black Diamonds, 113–14; Asquith to the king, Cabinet, 6 March 1912, Asquith Papers, A2 MS Asquith 6.
80 “The King's Visit,” Western Mail (Cardiff), 6 June 1912, 4.
81 Joyce, Patrick, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, c. 1848–1914 (Cambridge, 1991), 11.
82 See King George V, Books Read from 1890, RA GV/PRIV/AA7/46.
83 Quoted in “The King and the Workers ‘One Common Weel for the Common Good,’” Daily Express (London), 25 June 1912, 1.
85 “The King's Birthday,” Register (Adelaide), 3 June 1912, and “King's Birthday,” Mirror (Trinidad), 3 June 1912, RA NEWS/PRESS/GV/MAIN/1912/XLVII/1397, 1399.
86 Potter, Simon, News and the British World: The Emergence of an Imperial Press System, 1876–1922 (Oxford, 2003).
87 Simonis, H., The Street of Ink: An Intimate History of Journalism (London, 1917), 181–82.
88 “King and Cardiff. Forthcoming Royal Visit,” South Wales Daily News, 20 May 1912, 5.
89 Derby to Stamfordham, 28 January 1913, RA PS/PSO/GV/PS/MAIN/5721/13-16.
90 Derby to Stamfordham, 16 May 1913, RA PS/PSO/GV/PS/MAIN/5721/38.
91 Mansel, Philip, Dressed to Rule: Royal Court and Costume from Louis XIV to Elizabeth II (New Haven, 2005), 142; Hibbert, Christopher, The Court of St James's: The Monarch at Work from Victoria to Elizabeth II (London, 1979), 77–78.
92 Royal Visit to Bolton, July 1913, producer, Electric Cinema Bolton, film no. 33, North West Film Archive, Manchester Central Library. On the genesis of the royal wave, see Owens, Edward, “All the World Loves a Lover: Monarchy, Mass Media, and the 1934 Royal Wedding of Prince George and Princess Marina,” English Historical Review 133, no. 562 (June 2018): 597–633.
93 See Morgan, Kenneth, Keir Hardie: Radical and Socialist (Oxford, 1967), 24; Holman, Bob, Keir Hardie: Labour's Greatest Hero? (Oxford, 2010), 162; Ward, Paul, Red Flag and Union Jack: Englishness, Patriotism and the British Left, 1881–1924 (Woodbridge, 1998), 99.
94 Keir Hardie, “An Open Letter. To His Most Gracious Majesty King George the Fifth, on his Proposed Visit to Dowlais Ironworks,” republished in Rhondda Socialist, 22 June 1912, 2. See also Keir Hardie's Speeches and Writings, ed. Hughes, Emrys (Glasgow, 1923), 155–58.
95 “Royal Visit to Dowlais,” South Wales Daily News, 19 June 1912, RA NEWS/PRESS/GV/MAIN/1912/XLV/909-10.
96 “Dowlais Schemes,” South Wales Daily News, 22 June 1912, 8.
97 Queen Mary to Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, 29 June 1912, RA QM/PRIV/CC26/20.
98 Queen Mary to Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, 14 July 1912, RA QM/PRIV/CC26/22.
99 “Yesterday's Tour of the King and Queen,” Manchester Guardian, supplement, 11 July 1913, 2A.
100 “The Royal Tour,” Liverpool Daily Post and Liverpool Mercury, 10 July 1913, 7.
101 Barker, T. C., The Glassmakers: Pilkington: The Rise of an International Company, 1826–1976 (London, 1977), 181–241.
102 “The Royal Visit to Pilkington's Works,” St. Helen's Newspaper and Advertiser, 11 July 1913, 8; Barker, Glassmakers, 203.
103 At Messers. Pilkington's Glass Works, July 1913, producer, Weisker Brothers, film no. 138, North West Film Archive; Geoff Senior, “A Right Royal Tour of Lancashire,” unpublished paper, North West Film Archive (2013).
104 “King Visits the Miners,” South Wales Daily News, 28 June 1912, 7.
105 “Visit to Horrockses: Triumphal Arch of Cotton Bales,” Lancashire Daily Post, 8 July 1913, 4.
106 “Kind Is My Mary,” Daily Express (London), 11 July 1912, 5.
107 For early modern royal tours and progresses, see Vale, Malcolm, The Princely Court: Medieval Courts and Culture in North-West Europe, 1270–1380 (Oxford, 2003).
108 See Reynolds, K. D. and Matthew, H. C. G., Queen Victoria (Oxford, 2007), 9; Longford, Elizabeth, Victoria R. I. (London, 1983), 41–43, 47–48; Gardiner, Juliet, Queen Victoria (London, 1997), 24–25.
109 See Manchester Evening News, Royal Manchester: From Victoria to Diana (Manchester, 1998), 6, 9–13; “The Queen's Visits to Manchester, 1851, 1857, 1894,” Manchester Guardian, obituary supplement, 23 January 1901, 12.
110 Gunn, Simon, The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class: Ritual and Authority and the English Industrial City, 1840–1914 (Manchester, 2000), 166–67.
111 Manchester Evening News, Royal Manchester, 15–16; Salford City Council, Official Programme—Visit to Manchester of His Majesty King Edward VII and Her Majesty Queen Alexandra, on Thursday 13th July 1905 (Salford City Council, 1905).
112 Derby to Stamfordham, 28 April 1913, RA PS/PSO/GV/PS/MAIN/5721/34.
113 “The Personality of Royalty,” Birmingham Gazette, 27 June 1912, 4.
114 Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (London, 1992), 233.
115 See Wiener, Joel, “‘Get the News! Get the News!’—Speed in Transatlantic Journalism, 1830–1914,” in Anglo-American Media Interactions, 1850–2000, ed. Wiener, Joel and Hampton, Mark (Basingstoke, 2007), 48–61; Symon, J. D., The Press and Its Story (London, 1914), 106; Fyfe, Hamilton, Sixty Years of Fleet Street (London, 1949), 36; LeMahieu, D. L., A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain between the Wars (Oxford, 1988), 11, 25–26.
116 See “Edward the Peacemaker at Peace: The Late King Photographed on His Death-Bed at Buckingham Palace,” Daily Mirror, 14 May 1910, 1; Simonis, Street of Ink, 80–81.
117 Chalaby, Jean, The Invention of Journalism (Basingstoke, 1998), 76–78; Wiener, Joel, “How New Was the New Journalism?” in Papers for the Millions: The New Journalism in Britain, 1850s to 1914, ed. Wiener, Joel (New York, 1988), 47–71. See also Matheson, Donald, “The Birth of News Discourse: Changes in News Language in British Newspapers, 1860–1930,” Media, Culture and Society 22, no. 5 (2000): 557–73.
118 Rosemary T. Van Arschel, “Women's Periodicals and the New Journalism: The Personal Interview,” in Wiener, Papers for the Millions, 243–56, at 245.
119 See “King George V” frontispiece portrait, Illustrated London News, Coronation Record Number, ed. Bruce Ingram (London , 1911); George V, One Penny Stamp, 1911–12, Downey Head Issues, Stamp Collecting World, British Stamps Definitives of 1911–1922, https://www.stamp-collecting-world.com/britishstamps_1911d.html.
120 “The Royal Visit to Yorkshire,” Leeds Mercury, 11 June 1912, 4; “The King-Comforter,” Pall Mall Gazette, 10 July 1912, 6.
121 Yorkshire Observer and Advertiser, 17 May 1912, 8.
122 Esher, quoted in Rose, George V, 90.
123 “The Queen in a Miner's Home,” Daily Express (London), 28 June 1912, 1; “The Queen Leaving a Cottage Near Bury,” Daily Mirror (London), 14 July 1913, 9.
124 “Collier-Host of the King and Queen” and “In Lowly Homes,” South Wales Daily News, 28 June 1912, 7.
125 “In Lowly Homes,” South Wales Daily News, 28 June 1912, 7.
126 Stamfordham to Derby, 31 January 1913, RA PS/PSO/GV/PS/MAIN/5721/17.
127 Dowlais Central Infants School Log Book, 400, EMT9/1, Merthyr Tydfil Division Elementary/Primary School Records, Glamorgan Archives.
128 North Hulme Secondary School for Boys, Boy's Department, 27, Manchester School Records, School Log Books, M66/18/1/1/1, Manchester Central Library.
129 “The Royal Visit,” Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury, 2 July 1913, 5; “To Welcome the King to Lancashire,” Manchester Daily Dispatch, 2 July 1913, 5.
130 Prochaska, Royal Bounty, 18. See also Colley, Britons, 240–41.
131 Poliakoff, Stephen, The Lost Prince (London, 2003); Dennis Judd, George VI (London, 2012), 15–17.
132 “Pageant in the Streets,” South Wales Daily News, 26 June 1912, 7.
134 “In the Colliery District,” Dewsbury Reporter, 12 July 1912, 2.
135 Programme, Tuesday, 9 July 1912, RA PS/PSO/GV/PS/MAIN/7175.
136 “King and Queen in Yorkshire,” Daily Telegraph (London), 10 July 1912, 13; “The King in a Coal Mine,” Daily Mail (Hull), 10 July 1912, 3.
137 Quoted in “In the Colliery District,” 2, and “The King in a Coal Mine,” 3.
138 Bailey, Black Diamonds, 73.
139 Bailey, Black Diamonds, 79.
140 “Queen in Tears,” Daily Express (London), 10 July 1912, 1.
141 “Cadeby Heroes Interred,” Leeds Mercury, 13 July 1912, 5; “The Royal Week,” Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 8 July 1912, 6.
142 “The German Emperor Follows the Example of King George,” Daily Mirror (London), 13 August 1912, 1.
143 See, for example, Francis Addy Diary, 19 March 1916, MLMSS 1607/1, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales; Ivo Lucius Beresford, sound recording, cat. no. 18564, reel 2, Imperial War Museum, London.
144 For discussion of early cinema audiences, see Biltereyst, Daniel, Maltby, Richard, and Meers, Philippe, eds., Cinema, Audiences and Modernity: New Perspectives on European Cinema History (London, 2012).
145 See McKernan, Topical Budget; Low, Rachael, The History of the British Film, 1906–1914 (London, 1997), 14.
146 McKernan, Topical Budget, 117–18.
147 “Films of the Royal Visit to Wales,” Bioscope, 11 July 1912, 101.
148 “Hibbert's Again to the Fore,” Bioscope, 24 July 1913, 246.
149 Vicki Caren, “Weisker Brothers, Merseyside at War, 1914–1918”, http://www.merseyside-at-war.org/story/weisker-brothers.
150 Royal Visit to Lancashire, July 1913, producer, Pathe, film no. 157, North West Film Archive.
151 Old Grimwade's Winton King George V & Queen Mary Visit to Padiham Mug, July 1913, accessed 6 August 2018, https://picclick.co.uk/Old-Grimwades-Winton-King-George-V-Queen-382336442033.html.
152 See Gunning, Tom, “Pictures of Crowd Splendour: The Mitchell and Kenyon Factory Gate Films,” in The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon: Edwardian Britain on Film, ed. Toulmin, Vanessa, Popple, Simon, and Russell, Patrick (London, 2004), 49–58; Dave Russell, “The Football Films,” in Toulmin, Popple, and Russell, The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon, 169–80.
153 Royal Visit to Bacup, 9 July 1913, producer, Lama Films, film no. 5985, North West Film Archive.
154 Royal Visit to Atherton, July 1913, producer, Will Onda, film no. 547, North West Film Archive.
155 Turvey, Gerry, “Ideological Contradictions: The Film Topicals of the British and Colonial Kinematograph Company,” Early Popular Visual Culture 5, no. 1 (April 2007): 41–56.
156 Stephen Bottomore, “From the Factory Gate to the ‘Home Talent’ Drama: An International Overview of Local Films in the Silent Era,” in Toulmin, Lost World, 33–48.
157 Low, History of the British Film, 25.
158 “Happenings at Accrington,” Bioscope, 31 July 1913, 323; “Olympia Picture,” Mildura Cultivator (Australia), 10 September 1913, 5.
159 Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England.
160 Woolf, Virginia, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (London, 1924); Todd, Selina, The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class (London, 2014), introduction, Kindle.
161 “Vile Attack on the King,” Daily Telegraph (London), 24 July 1914, 12. |
0.977255 | Are heat pumps a good idea for homeowners?
Most people are looking for a way to reduce their energy costs on a month by month basis. In colder climates, it can be quite expensive to continue to heat the home throughout the winter time and to keep it at a comfortable temperature. Many of us even sacrifice our comfort to some degree or another in order to cut the costs that we are spending on our energy bill. That may not be as necessary, however, when heat pumps are used. As a matter of fact, there are many benefits that are provided through the use of heat pumps that should be considered and we will review some of those benefits in this article.
One of the primary benefits that you are going to get when installing a heat pump at your home or place of business is energy savings, which equates to financial savings. A heat pump is the most efficient way for you to heat your home in the wintertime and when you consider the fact that about half of your energy costs are going to go towards heating the home, it can really make a difference. The efficiency of the heat pump is seen in the following equation. When you spend a dollar for electricity in order to power the heat pump, you get an average of three dollars of heat in return.
You will also be happy to know, a heat pump not only provides you with the heat that you need in the winter time; it also provides a central air-conditioning unit that helps to keep your home court in the summer. In that way, you are not only providing yourself and your family with comfort during the cold winter months, you are helping them to be more comfortable in the home during the summer months as well.
Of course, the amount of money that you are going to save when using heat pumps is going to vary from one household to another. In some cases, however, the savings can be quite substantial, particularly if you are currently using an electric furnace or if you're using a different type of fuel to heat your home. Of course, there may be some options that are available which would be slightly less expensive in some areas but you would be losing out on the benefits of AC in the summer. |
0.997156 | This article is about the astrophysicist. For other people with this name, see Brian Schmidt (disambiguation).
Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University, Nobel prize winning professional astronomer (born 1967).
Brian Paul Schmidt AC, FRS, FAA (born 24 February 1967) is the Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University (ANU). He was previously a Distinguished Professor, Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and astrophysicist at the University's Mount Stromlo Observatory and Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics. He is known for his research in using supernovae as cosmological probes. He currently holds an Australia Research Council Federation Fellowship and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2012. Schmidt shared both the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, making him the only Montana-born Nobel laureate.
Schmidt, an only child, was born on 24 February 1967, in Missoula, Montana, where his father Dana C. Schmidt was a fisheries biologist. When he was 13, his family relocated to Anchorage, Alaska.
Schmidt attended Bartlett High School in Anchorage, Alaska, and graduated in 1985. He has said that he wanted to be a meteorologist "since I was about five-years-old [but] ... I did some work at the USA National Weather Service up in Anchorage and didn't enjoy it very much. It was less scientific, not as exciting as I thought it would be—there was a lot of routine. But I guess I was just a little naive about what being a meteorologist meant." His decision to study astronomy, which he had seen as "a minor pastime", was made just before he enrolled at university. Even then, he was not fully committed: he said "I'll do astronomy and change into something else later", and just never made that change.
He graduated with a BS (Physics) and BS (Astronomy) from the University of Arizona in 1989. He received his AM (Astronomy) in 1992 and then PhD (Astronomy) in 1993 from Harvard University. Schmidt's PhD thesis was supervised by Robert Kirshner and used Type II Supernovae to measure the Hubble Constant.
While at Harvard, he met his future wife, the Australian (Jenny) Jennifer M. Gordon who was a PhD student in economics. In 1994, they moved to Australia.
Schmidt was a postdoctoral research Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (1993–1994) before moving on to the ANU's Mount Stromlo Observatory in 1995.
In 1994, Schmidt and Nicholas B. Suntzeff formed the High-Z Supernova Search Team to measure the expected deceleration of the universe and the deceleration parameter (q0) using distances to Type Ia supernovae. In 1995, the HZT at a meeting at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics elected Schmidt as the overall leader of the HZT. Schmidt led the team from Australia and in 1998 in the HZT paper with first author Adam Riess the first evidence was presented that the universe's expansion rate is not decelerating; it is accelerating. The team's observations were contrary to the then-current models, which predicted that the expansion of the universe should be slowing down, and when the preliminary results emerged Schmidt assumed it was an error and he spent the next six weeks trying to find the mistake. But there was no mistake: contrary to expectations, by monitoring the brightness and measuring the redshift of the supernovae, they discovered that these billion-year old exploding stars and their galaxies were accelerating away from our reference frame. This result was also found nearly simultaneously by the Supernova Cosmology Project, led by Saul Perlmutter. The corroborating evidence between the two competing studies led to the acceptance of the accelerating universe theory and initiated new research to understand the nature of the universe, such as the existence of dark energy. The discovery of the accelerating universe was named 'Breakthrough of the Year' by Science in 1998, and Schmidt was jointly awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Riess and Perlmutter for their groundbreaking work.
Schmidt is currently leading the SkyMapper telescope Project and the associated Southern Sky Survey, which will encompass billions of individual objects, enabling the team to pick out the most unusual objects. In 2014 they announced the discovery of the first star which did not contain any iron, indicating that it is a very primitive star, probably formed during the first rush of star formation following the Big Bang.
He is the chairman of the board of directors of Astronomy Australia Limited, and he serves on the management committee of the ARC Centre of Excellence for All-Sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO). In July 2012 Schmidt was given a three-year appointment to sit on the Questacon Advisory Council. As of March 2017, Schmidt serves as a member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Board of Sponsors.
On 24 June 2015 it was announced Schmidt would replace Ian Young as the 12th Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University, to commence his tenure on 1 January 2016. The Chancellor of the ANU, Professor Gareth Evans, said, "Brian Schmidt is superbly placed to deliver on the ambition of ANU founders – to permanently secure our position among the great universities of the world, and as a crucial contributor to the nation ... We had a stellar field of international and Australian candidates, and have chosen an inspirational leader. ... Brian's vision, vitality, global stature and communication skills are going to take our national university to places it has never been before."
The publicity that came with winning the Nobel Prize has given Schmidt the opportunity to help the public understand why science is important to society, and to champion associated causes.
One of his first acts after winning the Nobel Prize was to donate $100,000 out of his prize money to the PrimaryConnections program, an initiative of the Australian Academy of Science that assists primary school teachers. He has continued to press for improvements to the public school system, particularly in the sciences and mathematical literacy (numeracy). He sees the major problem is that so few of the teachers are trained in "STEM" (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines. He used the opportunity of delivering a speech at the National Press Club to call for more focus on the public education system, including holding principals more accountable and the proper use of standardised testing, concluding with the warning that otherwise "the fundamental tenet of Australian democracy, that we all deserve a fair go, is at risk of being eroded away along with our public school system." At the other end of the spectrum, he also raises the profile of the matter by visiting primary schools personally to answer children's questions.
Schmidt is a strong supporter of funding scientific and medical research on a long-term, non-partisan basis driven by a national research strategy. He has often voiced his concern that the current year-to-year uncertainty and lack of co-ordination make it difficult to establish and staff large facilities, or to participate in multi-national ventures, and that scientists spend too much time applying for funding instead of doing research. Interviewed by the Australian Financial Review, Schmidt was characteristically forthright: "It's unclear to me whether or not we will continue to be a great astronomy nation... If we're damaged it will take 20 years to fix ourselves. It only takes one year to cause 20 years of damage."
He urges people to pay attention to the consensus of expert opinions, instead of basing their conclusions on the incomplete information which they personally know. Launching the Australian Academy of Science's report "The science of climate change: questions and answers", Schmidt commented that "Whenever this subject comes up, it never ceases to amaze me how each person I meet suddenly becomes an expert... More surprising is the supreme confidence that non-experts (scientists and non-scientists alike) have in their own understanding of the subject." He even put up $10,000 of his own money in a bet with Maurice Newman, who is the chairman of the Prime Minister's Business Council, that global temperatures will rise. In 2015, he presented the Mainau Declaration 2015 on Climate Change on the final day of the 65th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, which was signed by 76 Nobel Laureates and handed to then President of the French Republic, François Hollande, as part of the successful COP21 climate summit in Paris.
Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess, and Brian Schmidt being awarded the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy. The trio would later be awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Schmidt has received the Australian Government's inaugural Malcolm McIntosh Prize for achievement in the Physical Sciences in 2000, Harvard University's Bok Prize in 2000, the Australian Academy of Science's Pawsey Medal Medal in 2001, and the Astronomical Society of India's Vainu Bappu Medal in 2002. He was the Marc Aaronson Memorial Lecturer in 2005, the same year he received an ARC Federation Fellowship, and in 2006 he shared the Shaw Prize in Astronomy with Adam Riess and Saul Perlmutter.
Schmidt was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia in the 2013 Australia Day Honours. He was called "Australian of the Year" for 2011 by The Australian newspaper. He is a Fellow and council member of the Australian Academy of Science, The United States National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society, and Foreign Member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences.
Schmidt, Adam Riess, and the High-Z Supernova Search Team shared in the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.
Brian Schmidt is an internationally renowned researcher in cosmology and also in the physics of supernovae and gamma ray bursts. In particular, Schmidt's formation and leadership of the High-z Supernova Search Team led to the discovery that the expansion of our universe is accelerating, for which he shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. This discovery completely changed our understanding of the universe. It showed that about 70% of the mass of our Universe is in a previously unknown form which is now usually referred to as 'Dark Energy'.
Schmidt is married to Jennifer Gordon. They met while they were both studying for their PhDs at Harvard – he in Astrophysics and she in Economics. They decided to settle in Australia, which he had already visited on several occasions to visit family. He now holds dual citizenship of Australia and the United States.
He is not religious, being described as a "militant agnostic" with his tagline, "I don't know, and neither do you!"
Schmidt and his wife own and operate Maipenrai Vineyard and Winery, a small winery established in 2000 in Sutton, near Canberra. The vineyard covers 1.1 hectares (2.7 acres), producing exclusively pinot noir grapes, and the wines have received favourable reviews. Schmidt has quipped that "it's easier to sell your wine when you have a Nobel prize". At the 2011 Nobel Prize Ceremonies in Stockholm, he presented the King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden with a bottle of wine from his winery.
In 2013, Schmidt was appointed to join the board of the federal government's Australian Wine Research Institute. The Institute's chairman Peter Dawson commented that Schmidt brings to the board "a unique combination of scientific excellence, wine industry knowledge and relevant board experience".
^ "The 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics – Press Release". Nobel Foundation.
^ a b c d "Professor Brian Schmidt FRS". London: The Royal Society. Archived from the original on 22 February 2015.
^ a b "Profile: Brian Schmidt". astrogeo.oxfordjournals.org. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 25 November 2015.
^ a b Restless experimenter Archived 7 October 2011 at the Wayback Machine The Canberra Times, 6 April 2011, p 8.
^ a b Attard, Monica (5 August 2007). "Mr Universe: astronomer, Dr Brian Schmidt". Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Retrieved 20 March 2015.
^ a b "SCHMIDT, Brian" in Who's Who Live (Australia), Crown Content Pty Ltd. Retrieved 4 October 2011.
^ The Universe from Beginning to End, Pollock Memorial Lecture, April 2009, The University of Sydney. Retrieved 5 October 2011.
^ "Two GSAS Alums Win 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics". gsas.harvard.edu. The President and Fellows of Harvard College. Retrieved 25 November 2015.
^ "Professor Brian Schmidt, astronomer". science.org.au. Australian Academy of Science. Retrieved 25 November 2015.
^ a b Moskowitz, Clara (22 December 2011). "Our Strange Universe: Q&A With Nobel Prize Winner Brian Schmidt". SPACE.com. Retrieved 26 March 2015.
^ a b c d Palmer, Jason (4 October 2011). "Nobel physics prize honours accelerating Universe find". BBC. Retrieved 5 October 2011.
^ a b c Levine, Alaina G. (2 September 2014). "Quantum Correlations: Interview With Nobel Laureate Brian Schmidt at ESOF on Success, Europe, Women in STEM, War and ET". National Geographic Society. Retrieved 2 April 2015.
^ "Astronomy Australia Limited – People". astronomyaustralia.org.au. Archived from the original on 14 April 2015.
^ "Management Team". caastro.org. CAASTRO. Retrieved 22 August 2017.
^ "STAFF, MANAGEMENT AND COUNCIL". Questacon. Archived from the original on 13 March 2015. Retrieved 13 March 2015.
^ "Board of Sponsors". Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. 30 March 2017.
^ "Nobel Laureate Brian Schmidt to lead ANU" (Press release). Australian National University. 24 June 2015.
^ a b "Brian Schmidt: an Aussie expanding the universe". The Australian. 21 January 2012. Retrieved 26 March 2015.
^ Smith, Deborah (18 February 2012). "Primary colours of Nobel scientist". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 27 February 2015.
^ Schmidt, Brian (8 February 2012). "Speech: Brian Schmidt's mathematical argument". The Australian. Retrieved 19 March 2015. He delivered this speech at the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute forum in Canberra on Tuesday 7 February.
^ Westcott, Ben (23 May 2014). "Nobel Prize winner Brian Schmidt calls for public school renaissance". The Canberra Times. Retrieved 26 February 2015.
^ Warden, Ian (5 August 2014). "Gang-gang. The Life of Brian Schmidt". The Canberra Times. Retrieved 27 February 2015.
^ Robertson, James (18 June 2013). "Scientists desperately seeking certainty". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 28 March 2015. many of the country's science and medical research sectors... could not plan their future direction because of stop-start funding and a poorly co-ordinated approach to research.
^ Phillips, Nicky (24 July 2014). "Nobel laureate Brian Schmidt fires broadside at Australia's research strategy". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 19 March 2015.
^ Schmidt, Brian (10 March 2014). "Let's bust out of the endless loop, says Brian Schmidt". Australian Financial Review. Retrieved 19 March 2015.
^ Hyland, Anne (24 January 2015). "How ignoring science damns our economy". Australian Financial Review. (Subscription required (help)). Cite uses deprecated parameter |subscription= (help), cited in "'This is just insanity': four Nobel laureates let fly over Australian science funding". The Sydney Morning Herald. 30 January 2015. Retrieved 19 March 2015.
^ a b Schmidt, Brian (16 February 2015). "Jury in on climate change, so stop using arguments of convenience and listen to experts". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 19 March 2015.
^ Hare, Julie (16 January 2014). "Nobel scientist willing to bet on global warming". The Australian. Retrieved 19 March 2015.
^ "Mainau Declaration". www.mainaudeclaration.org. Retrieved 19 December 2017.
^ a b "Brian Schmidt". cosmosmagazine.com. Retrieved 28 March 2015.
^ a b "Nobel physics prize honours accelerating Universe find". BBC News. 4 October 2011.
^ "Australian Astrophysicist Wins Nobel Prize". ABC News. 5 October 2011.
^ O'Keefe, Brendan (18 July 2007). "Breakthrough keeps reaping rewards". The Australian. p. 23.
^ "Extract for SCHMIDT, Brian Paul". It's an Honour: Australia celebrating Australians. Commonwealth of Australia. Retrieved 6 January 2015. For eminent service as a global science leader in the field of physics through research in the study of astronomy and astrophysics, contributions to scientific bodies and the promotion of science education.
^ "ANU Nobel Prize laureate Brian Schmidt receives new science honour". Australian Broadcasting Corporation. 11 November 2014. Retrieved 20 March 2015.
^ Schmidt, Brian (23 December 2009). "Very different paths to God: Seeking truth in the heavens". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 2 April 2015.
^ "Maipenrai Vineyard and Winery". winecompanion.com.au.
^ Shanahan, Chris (30 January 2013). "Wine review – Dandelion, Maipenrai, Moss Wood, Punt Road, Penny's Hill and Hartz Barn". The Canberra Times. Retrieved 7 March 2015.
^ Robinson, Jancis (5 May 2012). "Brian Schmidt, star vigneron". Retrieved 25 February 2015. article also published in the Financial Times.
^ Lawson, Kirsten (18 December 2013). "Brian Schmidt joins Australian Wine Research Institute". Good Food. Retrieved 26 February 2015.
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0.957346 | What is the feed/day limit for various pack animals?
Each animal has a weight it can carry normally described as a percent of its body weight, and food requirement that can also be described as a percent of its body weight. An animal who is carrying only its own food reaches a limit, where it can only trekk so many days.
Several years ago I found a list that showed these values, and described it better then I have here. But my google skills are failing me on this.
For horses I've seen various numbers but 125 to 250 seems to be the range. This depends on the breed, the difficulty of the terrain, and the length of the trip. Horses need a lot of time to graze. You can carry hay (required in many parks) or you can carry grain to supplement grazing. Advocates for the lower number point out that the load is always on the same parts all day, unlike a person who shifts about.
For dogs carrying, about 1/3 of their body weight. Dogfood is calorically denser, but dogs don't graze. You won't find that number in the trail guides, but I did see it in the accounts of a man who used sled dogs in winter, and used them as pack dogs when there wasn't enough snow to slide.
For dog sledding, much again depends on the terrain and the snow conditions. During the klondike where most of the travel was on the Yukon River (flat) pulling 600 pounds with a team of 6 large dogs was common. Under really good traveling conditions, a team could haul two sleds. You'd unhook at a portage and make two trips over the portage. Must have been interesting bringing a team back without a sled.
At one point in my life I trained dogs for freight races. We could put 7 milk crates of frozen wet sand (about 900 lbs) and still go at a pace that the musher couldn't run fast enough to keep up -- at least for a few miles on broken trail.
Dogs don't like unbroken trail. (Exception: if they are very familiar with the route, they will do an unbroken trail. And there are exceptional lead dogs...) Usual routine is to either have at least 2 of the party break trail on snowshoes, or to break trail the day before, move up to the end of the trail and repeat. Sleds don't slide well at very cold temps, even the modern HDPE sleds. New snow is stickier than old snow. Temperatures just below freezing can put you in situations where the compression of the runners melts a film which is incredibly slippery -- and flash freezes back to ice, glueing you the the trail if you stop. Water bodies often have water on top of the ice, forming a layer of slush under the snow. This works about as well as hitting a tar patch on a hot summer day. And the dogs don't like getting their feet wet. One musher told me a story of hitting 8 inches of overflow, and as soon as the sled stopped the entire team came back and perched on the sled to get there feet out of the water.
Llamas are ~80 pounds carrying capacity.
While goats I guess could be used for packing, they are little. I think it would be very aggravating to pack them up in the morning.
Humans: The usual number given is 1/3 of body weight. In practice having run expeditions I would put it at 1/2 of lean body mass. This gives you about the same number for skinny fit people, but prevents overloading those with a BMI of 30. This is also why 14 year old boys can carry proportionally more weight than their scoutmaster.
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0.998302 | name to be searched. I have tried to use the most common spelling where possible. Or type in a year or date.
If you see an (x) next to the name, this indicates illiteracy as signed by a cross on the paper.
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. Father: William Hoar . . . Father: John Hopkins . . . .
. Witnesses: Sophia Cullen and James Hopkins . . . . . . . . .
. Father: Edward Champion . . . Father: [not declared] . . . .
. Witnesses: Charles Prebble and Maria Prebble . . . . . . . . .
. Witnesses: Harrison Dale and Emma Dale . . . . . . . . .
. Father: George Marshall Sutton . . . Father: Henry Pibus . . . .
. Witnesses: Henry Fisher and Frances Warren . . . . . . . . .
. Father: Thomas Beer . . . Father: Edward Philpott . . . .
. Witnesses: Marsh Gilbert and Sophia Quested . . . . . . . . .
. Father: Thomas Daniels . . . Father: Richard Boughton . . . .
. Witnesses: George Boughton and Isabella Daniels . . . . . . . . .
. Father: Robert Johnson . . . Father: Robert Newing . . . .
. Witnesses: Emma Newing And .... Halliday . . . . . . . . .
. Father: Stephen File . . . Father: George Gammon . . . .
. Father: George Wanstall . . . Father: Thomas Daniels . . . .
. Witnesses: Sarah Wanstall and Thomas Daniels . . . . . . . . .
. Father: Stephen File . . . Father: James Warren . . . .
. Witnesses: Cubison Stickles and Lydia Sutton . . . . . . . . .
. Father: Robert Benefield . . . Father: John Mungram . . . .
. Witnesses: G.H. Gilham and S A Mungram . . . . . . . . .
. Father: William Castle Baker . . . Father: Bromley Belsey . . . .
. Witnesses: Laurie Jane Belsey and Thomas Belsey . . . . . . . . .
. Father: John Sharp . . . Father: John Hopkins . . . .
. Witnesses: Eliza Oxley and Stenyear Ellen? . . . . . . . . .
. Father: Leonard Tupp . . . Father: Hezekiah Hopkins . . . .
. Witnesses: Elizabeth Champion and William S Denham . . . . . . . . .
. Father: F Mantle Read . . . Father: William Pellett . . . .
. Witnesses: Burroughs Dawson Mantle and Frances Mantle . . . . . . . . .
. Father: David Pay . . . Father: Alfred Richardson . . . .
. Witnesses: L W Richardson and E C Richardson . . . . . . . . .
. Father: Alfred Tuff . . . Father: George Gammon . . . .
. Witnesses: Charles Groombridg and Alicina Gammon . . . . . . . . .
. Father: George Manuel . . . Father: James Stupples . . . .
. Witnesses: John Middleton and Eleanor Harriet Stupples . . . . . . . . .
. Father: William Foad . . . Father: Mark Goldup . . . .
. Witnesses: John Foad and Mary Ann Goldup . . . . . . . . .
. Father: James Croucher . . . Father: William Clayson . . . .
. Witnesses: William clayson and Ann? Clayson . . . . . . . . .
. Witnesses: Edwin Beer and Elizabeth Philpott . . . . . . . . .
. Father: Alfred Richardson . . . Father: H T Lilly . . . .
. Witnesses: Henry Lilley and Harriette Susannah Lilley . . . . . . . . .
. Father: Edward Tumber . . . Father: Thomas Hopkins . . . .
. Witnesses: John Hopkins and Jane Hopkins . . . . . . . . .
. Father: William Clayson . . . Father: H.T. Lilley . . . .
. Witnesses: H Lilley and Candida Jane Lilley . . . . . . . . .
. Father: Christopher Wood . . . Father: Robert Davis . . . .
. Witnesses: David Swaffer and Harriet Middleton . . . . . . . . .
. Father: W Hopkins . . . Father: James Prior? . . . .
. Witnesses: Alfred George Richardson and Mary Ann Richardson . . . . . . . . .
. Father: John Hopkins . . . Father: Stephen Revell . . . .
. Witnesses: Luther Sharp and Adelaide Sharp . . . . . . . . .
. Father: William Fagg . . . Father: James Champion . . . .
. Witnesses: James Champion and Emma Campion . . . . . . . . .
. Father: Thomas Beer . . . Father: Thomas Sharp . . . .
. Witnesses: Thomas Halliday and sophia Quested . . . . . . . . .
. Father: John Davidson . . . Father: James Taylor . . . .
. Witnesses: William Beer and Caroline Davison . . . . . . . . .
. Father: John Daniels . . . Father: W.B. Friend . . . .
. Witnesses: John dilnot Daniels and Charlotte Daniels . . . . . . . . .
. Father: George Finn . . . Father: Henry W Eliiott . . . .
. Witnesses: William Finch and Mirian Dale . . . . . . . . .
. Father: Thomas Sutton . . . Father: George Finn . . . .
. Witnesses: Job Finn and Emily Louisa Finn . . . . . . . . .
. Father: ....... Griffin . . . Father: William Cook . . . .
. Witnesses: Henry Gelham and Martha Cook . . . . . . . . .
. Father: Charles Middleton . . . Father: George Fuggle . . . .
. Witnesses: David Swaffer and Nellie Middleton . . . . . . . . .
. Witnesses: Stephen Revell and Adelaide Sharp . . . . . . . . .
. Father: George Gammon . . . Father: William Webb . . . .
. Witnesses: Ellen Victoria Webb, William Webb . . . . . . . . .
. Father: George Finn . . . Father: William Martin . . . .
. Witnesses: Cassell Finn and Emily Louisa Finn . . . . . . . . .
. Father: Thomas Ford . . . Father: James Baker . . . .
. Witnesses: John Goldup and Davina Clayson . . . . . . . . .
. Father: James Champion . . . Father: William Woollett . . . .
. Witnesses: Elizabeth Woollett and Edward Dale . . . . . . . . .
. Father: James? Bligh . . . Father: Hezekiah Champion . . . .
. Witnesses: Hezekiah Champion and Emma Champion . . . . . . . . .
. Father: George Court . . . Father: Henry Davison . . . .
. Witnesses: Henry Davison and Florence M Davison, Florence F Richards . . . . . . . . .
. Father: William Cook . . . Father: William Swan . . . .
. Witnesses: Henry Gilham and Martha Cook . . . . . . . . .
. Father: Edward Dale [deceased] . . . Father: William Woollett . . . .
. Witnesses: George Fagg and Caroline Fagg . . . . . . . . .
. Father: James Gilham [deceased] . . . Father: William Cook . . . .
. Witnesses: Walter Cook and Minnie Cook and June Cook . . . . . . . . .
. Father: George Gammon . . . Father: Stephen Keeler . . . .
. Witnesses: Thomas Edward File and Amelia Keeler . . . . . . . . .
. Father: Edward Smith . . . Father: Edward Mills . . . .
. Witnesses: Emma Champion and John Mills . . . . . . . . .
. Father: Edward Mills . . . Father: Hezekiah Champion . . . .
. Witnesses: Hezekiah Champion and Jane Champion . . . . . . . . .
. Father: Thomas Heady . . . Father: Joseph Gilham [crossed out] . . . .
. Witnesses: Charles Kemp and Jane Webb . . . . . . . . .
. Father: John D.. Pigott . . . Father: James Ovenden . . . .
. Witnesses: Alfred Pigott and France Ovenden . . . . . . . . .
. Father: Samuel Broad . . . Father: James Champion . . . .
. Witnesses: Elgar Fagg and Eleathea? Fagg . . . . . . . . .
. Father: Thomas James Quaife . . . Father: Edward John Webb . . . .
. Witnesses: Edward John Webb and John Mills . . . . . . . . .
. Father: John Goldsmith . . . Father: James Ovenden . . . .
. Witnesses: John Russell and Anne Beake . . . . . . . . .
. Father: Edward Dale . . . Father: Valentine Wood . . . .
. Witnesses: Stephen Wood, Emma Hezekiah Wood and Albert Dale . . . . . . . . .
. Father: William Brazier . . . Father: William Philpott . . . .
. Witnesses: Charlie Lane and Martha Lane . . . . . . . . .
. Father: William Clayson . . . Father: William Carvil . . . .
. Witnesses: William Carvill and Mabel Florence Carvill . . . . . . . . . |
0.967555 | A Girl is giving directions to her new boyfriend to get to her apartment.
She says: "You come to the front door of the apartment complex where I live and look for apartment 14A, and with your elbow push button 14A. Come inside and you'll find the elevator on the right. With your elbow hit 14. When you get out of the elevator you'll find my apartment on the left. With your elbow, hit my doorbell and I'll open the door for you"
The boyfriend says: "Dear, that sounds very easy to find, but why am I hitting all these buttons with my elbow ?"
"Oh my God!! You're not coming empty-handed, are you?" |
0.999998 | Explain how employee performance is measured and managed.
To find out how hard employees are working ,businesses have to measure their performance and so, compare employees. The way this is carried out, depends on the business but usually involves both quantitative and qualitative measurements which have to be seen to be fair and accurate.
Performance Management is something that is important to all businesses as it allows senior members of staff to see if staff are working at the right levels. There are different methods of Performance Management ranging from Appraisals to Target Setting.
Appraisals are used to highlight the effectiveness of an employee to the business they work for. a good job and also point out where things can improve. At McDonald`s ,particularly in the first few weeks progress is monitored carefully and there will be a formal assessment at the end of the probationary period. Once completed performance is monitored on a regular basis. Objectives can be set for the employee as well to ensure they are always striving to improve their performance in all areas. McDonald`s employees may be set targets after appraisals such as making service quicker and making sure that the high standards of food quality is maintained. |
0.9995 | Explore the foundational astronomic theory of the heliocentric theory and test your understanding about the history of astronomy including the lives of major contributors to the science.
Think about the Sun. It comes up in the morning and sets at night. Why? For a long time, people believed it was because the earth was the center of the universe, and the Sun revolved around us. Now we know the opposite is true; the Sun is the center of our solar system and we revolve around it.
The theory that the earth revolves around the Sun is called the heliocentric theory, helio meaning 'sun' and centric meaning 'in the center.' This theory was developed in parts by different astronomers over many years, namely Aristarchus, Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo.
The first true astronomers in Western history looked to the stars and began formulating theories about our place in the universe. In the second century BCE, Pythagoras developed a mathematical model that measured the distance from Earth to other planets with a high degree of accuracy and proposed the geocentric model of the universe with the earth in the center. This was one of the foundational moments for astronomy as a science.
The first development of a heliocentric theory came from Aristarchus of Samos around 270 BCE. Aristarchus calculated the size of the earth and the distance to the Sun and determined that the Sun was much larger than the earth. Therefore, he concluded, the earth must revolve around the Sun rather than the other way around. Aristarchus' theory was not widely accepted by most Greek astronomers. This is a model developed by Aristarchus to measure the size of the Sun (see video).
During the Renaissance, a period from roughly 1300-1600, European culture was given a large boost after the Middle Ages with new wealth from trade. This led to a huge increase in art, engineering, math, and science as people pushed the boundaries of these disciplines. The Renaissance was also characterized by a belief that European civilization held its roots in the culture of ancient Greece and Rome, so everybody from artists to astronomers began reading the works of the ancients.
The earth and all the planets revolve around the Sun.
The earth rotates but also spins on a tilted axis.
The distance from the earth to the Sun is less than the distance from the earth to the stars, which are very far away.
Inconsistent motions recorded in the motion of the stars and planets is a result of the earth moving at the same time as those other celestial bodies.
Unlike Aristarchus', Copernicus' model was widely accepted and read across Europe, resulting in a new wave of astronomy called the Copernican Revolution. Even the Catholic Church, which maintained that that the earth was the center of the universe, treated the book with intellectual curiosity.
The Copernican Revolution led to the development of the telescope, which Galileo Galilei used to confirm Copernican theories with improved observations and measurements. Although the Church was becoming more conservative by this point, Galileo publicly defended the heliocentric model and claimed that it was not contradictory to the teachings of the Church. In 1616, the Inquisition met to formally discuss heliocentricism and Copernicus' writings. Both were condemned as heretical, being anti-Christian, and were completely banned. Galileo was told to immediately stop his work on the heliocentric model.
However, Pope Urban VIII and the Jesuit order still supported him and encouraged Galileo to publish the pros and cons of the heliocentric theory. In the book, Dialogue concerning the two chief world systems, characters who held the Pope's viewpoints were cast as idiots, and Galileo lost the support of the Pope and Jesuits. Galileo was put on trial in 1633 for advancing heliocentricism and spent the last years of his life under house arrest.
Around this same time, another astronomer was also working on heliocentricism, Johannes Kepler, wrote in 1609 that the planets in the solar system had elliptical, rather than circular, orbits around the Sun. Kepler's theories were not accepted until many years later but became important contributions to modern astronomy. Since Kepler was a Protestant, the Catholic Church could not punish him for his ideas beyond banning his books.
In the history of astronomy, two theories fought to determine our place in the universe. The geocentric theory stated that the earth was the center of the universe and was the most accepted viewpoint for a long, long time. The heliocentric theory, on the other hand, states that the earth revolves around the Sun.
The first advocate of a heliocentric model was Aristarchus of Samos in ancient Greece. Centuries later, Nicholaus Copernicus developed a geometric model of the heliocentric theory during the Renaissance. His book became very popular and sparked a new wave of astronomy based on the heliocentric model called the Copernican Revolution. Johannes Kepler built on this in the early 1600s, to demonstrate that planets orbited in ellipses, not a circle. Galileo Galilei was the first to have to defend heliocentricism against heresy and wound up on trial by the Inquisition. |
0.97377 | Some ideas to try for the upcoming summer season.
After a bad winter and what was a non-existent spring, summer is almost here for everyone in school. After being stuck inside after the crazy weather that's been going on, many of you might want to get outside and enjoy the newfound sunny weather. Here's a list of some ideas to kick your summer off right.
Yes this is probably something everyone does, but that doesn't mean it's not an incredibly enjoyable time. You can surf, tan, play volleyball, swim, or just enjoy the weather and scenery of the ocean. Its a great way to relax and spend a day hanging out with friends.
Even if you don't have a BBQ, one of your friends probably do. The summer is a great time to fire up the grill, make some food and just sit and talk with everyone while enjoying the weather. You may feel weird about asking your friend to have a BBQ at their house but no one says no to a summer BBQ. Also, offer to bring something like the plates or some food for it so it's not as hard on your friend.
Summer is the perfect time to take a road trip. School's out, the weather is great, everything is open and it would be a great time.
This is something to definitely do in the summer. It's summer specific because the night's in the summer are warm enough to stay out but not really hot.
Personally, I've never been jet skiing, but it look really fun and it seems like it would be the perfect thing to do on a hot day. |
0.951779 | I have seen some subwoofer cabinets designed to face the woofer down though. It's an interesting design, and makes the woofer cone "invisible." But the disadvantage is that the cone weight will tend to shift it downwards, which will only get worse over time.
Speaking of subwoofer facing up or down, I've seen a few subwoofer setups in a vehicle where the subwoofer was facing up. As you mentioned that this type of setup will get worse over time, but are there subwoofers that are made to face upwards?
The only way a speaker can be made to tolerate facing upwards or downwards is to make it have a suspension that takes much more force to overcome than the force due to gravity on the cone.
The trouble is, that is exactly the opposite of what a subwoofer generally is. Subwoofers usually have heavy cones and soft suspensions. Those qualities give low resonant frequencies and generally lend themselves to low-frequency characteristics.
However, another thing that lends itself to low-frequency characteristics is having a large cabinet. Conveniently, a car trunk is a pretty large cabinet, especially for a relatively small woofer. So a woofer can be used that has a more rigid suspension and still hit the low notes.
Car speakers have other hazards that they must endure - not the least of which is sunlight. The sun will bleach the cones and disintegrate rubber surrounds. They are exposed to temperature extremes, often from well below freezing to over 150° Fahrenheit, sitting parked in the sun. Humidity ranges from 0 to 100%. So they're frozen, cooked, dried and soaked.
So they're frozen, cooked, dried and soaked.
That is a nasty way of damaging the subwoofer. Those car subwoofers must have very good resistance with temperature and humidity rapid changes. Even then, I would also think that it is still susceptible to damage no matter how good the subwoofer is. It's just a matter of time before it gets damaged. |
0.98534 | How Constant are 'Physical Constants'?
MSNBC is reporting on rising doubts among scientists - particularly Cambridge Univeristy astronomer Michael Murphy - as to whether key physical constants are actually constant. The new evidence goes beyond c-decay or the variable speed of light cosmology, and posits changes in the constants governing the four fundamental forces. (Side-note: does anyone know why Wikipedia describes c-decay as a crackpot, pseudo-science claim, and even Answers in Genesis is skeptical about it, but the 'variable speed of light cosmology' is considered to be a real scientific theory, and in description Wikipedia says "The idea is that light propogated as much as sixty times faster in the distant past?" Which Wikipedia article is in error, or is there some difference between the two accounts that I am not seeing?) In particular, it appears that the spectrum of light may have been different billions of years ago, based on analysis of light emitted from distant quasars, and this can be explained by minute decreases in c, the speed of light, and increases in α, the electro-magnetic force constant. If string theory is correct, these variations could be explained by slight changes in the geometry of the invisible string-theoretic dimensions. More info at SPACE.com.
First of all, questioning whether physics constants are constant is NOT new- in fact, as the universe expands, some of them (Hubble's constant) are even expected to change. Others, however, (like G) we're not sure, but it is not unlikely that they could change slowly as the universe changes, since a lot of physicists expect them to be determined by the make-up of the universe. For example, as the mass density decreases, they think it is at least possible for them to change.
Now as for light. The answer to which wikipedia article is right is both. c-decay is very specific "conjecture"- it's used by young earth creationists, and needs to light to decay by a certain amount and at a certain rate, which physicists are fairly certain is wrong (unless for some reason light has stopped decaying at this substantial rate). (To be fair, I should say physicists as a group tend to strongly dislike young earth creationists.) However, variable speed of light cosmology is more general ("the speed of light can change"), and is not so specific. In general, the changes tend to be much, much smaller.
As I'm sure you're aware, the postulate that the speed of light is constant for all observers is one of the fundamental postulates of relativity. Relativity has been pretty well verified experimentally, and there is no CONCLUSIVE experimental/theoretical reasons as yet to reject that the speed of light was constant in the past. There are questions as to the accuracy of the people measuring the quasars, and factors such as intersteller dust need to be accounted for before we start changing our fundamental understanding of the universe, although as you correctly noted string theory allows for the possibility and even explains it.
PS- I should say that even if the speed of light was varying over time, relativity would still hold, with a few alterations in the math. |
0.999999 | Chinese ex-online tsar Lu Wei charged with bribery Image copyright Visual China Group Image caption Lu Wei was once believed to be one of President Xi Jinping's inner circle but was detained in November China's former chief of internet regulation, Lu Wei, has been charged with taking bribes. He is accused of taking advantage of his position to reap monetary and property gain, the official Xinhua News Agency reports. Mr Lu was once one of China's most senior officials, overseeing the department of online media regulation. His role as China's "internet tsar" meant he was once listed as one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People. Mr Lu has been prosecuted for "taking advantage of his own positions and using other officials to seek profits for others as well as accepting a huge amount of money and property", Xinhua said. 'Arbitrary and tyrannical'Lu Wei was once touted as a key ally of President Xi Jinping, with media noting that he rose quickly ..
Why Jeremy Hunt's 'Japanese' wife gaffe is a bad mistake Media playback is unsupported on your device Media captionJeremy Hunt gaffe: 'My wife is Japanese' The UK's new Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt is on an official visit to China - but an embarrassing gaffe is stealing the headlines instead. Mr Hunt tried to get into his host's good books by mentioning that his wife is Chinese - but called her "Japanese" instead. He quickly corrected himself and those at the meeting laughed it off. But the gaffe is making headlines and, as Mr Hunt himself says, it's a "terrible mistake to make". Lucia Guo was born in Xian in central China. She and Mr Hunt met in 2008, when she was working at Warwick University. They have three children. What exactly did he say? Mr Hunt was at a meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, when he said, in English: "My wife is Japanese - my wife is Chinese. That's a terrible mistake to make." Mr Hunt added: "My wife is C..
Cricket Australia accused of sacking woman over abortion tweets Image copyright ANGELA WILLIAMSON Image caption Angela Williamson has criticised Tasmania over its lack of access to abortions A former Cricket Australia (CA) employee says she was sacked for publicly criticising lawmakers over the state of abortion services in Tasmania. Angela Williamson, 39, had been a government relations manager at affiliate Cricket Tasmania until June. Ms Williamson said she was sacked after writing tweets critical of the state government. CA said only that it would not tolerate "offensive comments". The recent closure of Tasmania's only abortion clinic has been controversial. Its closure, due to lack of demand, has forced Ms Williamson and other women to travel to mainland Australia to seek an abortion. Ms Williamson has launched legal action against CA over her dismissal. 'Right to political opinion'In June, Ms Williamson used her Twitter account to express frustration about healthc..
Karunanidhi health: Tamil Nadu former chief minister in hospital Image copyright Getty Images Image caption A previous photo of Mr Karunanidhi in his Chennai residence Massive crowds have gathered outside a hospital in southern India's Tamil Nadu state where a politician who has served as chief minister five times was admitted on Saturday. Muthuvel Karunanidhi, 94, is being closely "monitored and treated" in the intensive care unit. Doctors say he has made some improvement after an apparent urinary tract infection. But police are struggling to contain emotional crowds desperate for news. Image copyright AFP Image caption Massive crowds have gathered around Mr Karunanidhi's hospital in Chennai Image copyright AFP Image caption The 94-year-old is revered as a huge political figure in India After 50 years as the leader of India's DMK party, he has amassed a huge following in India, and enjoys a god-like status among his supporters. The 94-year-old politician was first a..
Assam: Millions risk losing India citizenship Image caption Hasitun Nissa's family is one of millions who expects to be stripped of their Indian citizenship The final draft of a bill which will determine who has the right to be called Indian in the north-eastern state of Assam will be published hours from now. The entire process has sparked fears of a witch hunt against the state's ethnic minorities, reports the BBC's Joe Miller. Hasitun Nissa has never known a home outside the floodplains of Assam. It's where the 47-year-old schoolteacher spent her childhood, where she studied, where she got married and where she had her four children. But on Monday, she expects to be stripped of her Indian citizenship, and fears her land rights, voting rights and freedom are in peril. She's not alone. Millions of Bengalis - a linguistic minority in Assam - may have fallen foul of a long, bureaucratic process known as the National Register of Citizens, or NRC. The government ..
Lombok earthquake: Hikers trapped on mountain after landslides Media playback is unsupported on your device Media captionIndonesia earthquake: 'Massive damage' in Lombok village More than 200 hikers are trapped on a mountain on the Indonesian tourist island of Lombok, after a deadly earthquake triggered landslides which cut off escape routes. Hundreds of rescue workers are now working to evacuate them from Mount Rinjani, a popular hiking destination. The 6.4 magnitude earthquake struck early on Sunday not far from the base of the mountain. At least 14 people have died, and more than 160 were injured in the quake. Thousands of homes have been damaged and hundreds have been left homeless and substantial aftershocks rocked Lombok and neighbouring Bali island. A Malaysian tourist who was on a hiking trip to Mount Rinjani was among those killed. Authorities say more than 500 people, mostly foreign tourists, have already come down from the mountain but 266 are still trapped up th..
'Panicked' kangaroo smashes way into Australian home Image copyright MANFRED ZABINSKAS Image caption The "highly stressed" kangaroo suffered cuts and lost blood, a rescuer said An Australian family has been startled awake after a kangaroo crashed its way through a window in their home. The residents managed to trap the marsupial in a bathroom after it "ran amok" in the house in Melbourne early on Sunday, a wildlife rescuer said. The family was unharmed, but the distressed kangaroo suffered blood loss and cuts to its paws and legs. Rescuer Manfred Zabinskas said the incident could partly be attributed to homes competing with kangaroo habitats. After being called to the home, Mr Zabinskas found the kangaroo "fairly exhausted" in the bathroom, and administered a sedative to remove it safely. "The family was quite concerned about him because of the amount of blood everywhere," he said. Image copyright MANFRED ZABINSKAS Image caption The family managed to lock the kangaroo in a ..
Cambodia election: Ruling party claims landslide in vote with no main opposition Image copyright Reuters Image caption Hun Sen - seen here casting his vote - says he wants to rule for at least a decade longer The party of Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, who has been in power since 1985, says it has won a landslide victory in a general election that lacked any serious challengers. The Cambodian People's Party (CPP) said it had won 80% of the vote, giving it at least 100 of 125 seats. Election staff say turnout was 82.71%. Critics have called the vote a sham as the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), which narrowly lost the last election, has been dissolved. The US and EU were also among those questioning the credibility of the vote, but the CPP said 19 other parties had stood. In a statement on his Facebook page, former CNRP leader Sam Rainsy, who is living in exile abroad, said "a victory without a contest is a hollow one". "The result of this false election conducted in a c..
Indonesia earthquake: 10 dead on tourist island Lombok Image copyright Reuters Image caption Officials say the earthquake has damaged many buildings A powerful earthquake has struck a popular tourist destination in Indonesia, killing at least 10 people. The 6.4 magnitude quake hit the central Indonesian island of Lombok just before 07:00 local time (00:00 GMT) on Sunday. The island attracts tourists from around the world and is located about 40km (25 miles) east of Bali. Many buildings have been damaged and some of the injured are being treated in hospital, officials say. The US Geological Survey said the epicentre of the earthquake was 50km (31 miles) northeast of the city of Mataram, in northern Lombok. History of deadly earthquakes Are earthquake warnings effective? "People are gathering on the streets and empty fields to avoid collapsing buildings," Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, a spokesman for the country's disaster agency, posted on Twitter [in Indonesian]. "The main focus now is e.. |
0.945417 | Why is it that the guy who watches 50 movies a week, buys a bunch of the pop culture merchandise, and immerses himself in film industry news can't break into the film industry itself?
He knows every actor's name just by the movie title.
He understands the philosophies and styles of different directors.
Surely someone as knowledgeable deserves a job in the industry right?
Unfortunately, the world doesn't reward people who consume and consume and consume.
He may be a great "student of film" and has a huge database in his head, but no one's going to pay him for that. He has to apply that knowledge.
Because right now, he's only taking.
He's not giving to the film industry.
Now before you say "Hey, he's paying for the movie tickets, he's definitely contributing to the industry, so HA YOUR LOGIC IS FLAWED," just remember that he is one of millions paying for a ticket.
I'm sure the film industry is grateful that he is a customer of their products, but as long as he stays just a customer, he will never find it within himself to direct a film, interact with A-list actors and actresses, or indulge himself in the pride of telling a story to an audience of millions.
In other words, he's never going to distinguish himself from the millions of people who simply consume content.
How does he fix this?
It means immersing yourself with the content you're consuming by interacting with people in the industry, getting your feet wet and participating in conversation and producing in order to add value to the industry.
1.) Consume the content that your industry produces.
Read blogs about economics if you're trying to go into politics. Watch movies and go to plays if you're looking to get into the acting world. If you like music, listen to as much Kanye as you can.
Usually, this step is one that doesn't need to be said.
You probably already do consume a lot of content of the things you like.
But that's not complete engagement.
2.) Start producing and contributing to this industry that you love.
Write a review of a movie so that other people can make a better judgment of whether to watch or not.
By simply writing your thoughts on trends and the products of your industry, you're adding value to that community. You add exposure, contribute a unique viewpoint on the future of the industry, and distinguish yourself from others.
You can start by creating your own videos, blogs, or podcasts.
The more you build a reputation for your work and get people to engage with your content, the more value you are creating for the industry.
3.) Join groups that share your same love for the industry and build relationships.
Your network is a powerful thing.
When you combine who you know with the value you've contributed to the industry, success will become natural and literally work like dominoes falling in succession.
You get one opportunity. You create value. You get another better opportunity. You contribute even more value. And it goes on and on.
Participate in online forums, email people in the industry you admire for advice, or go to events where you're bound to meet a lot of people. |
0.99067 | Most institutions do not teach what should be the centerpiece of a contemporary education: entrepreneurship, the capacity to not only start companies but also to think creatively and ambitiously that would inspire them to become inventive and innovative.
Entrepreneurship education benefits students from all socioeconomic backgrounds because it teaches kids to think outside the box and nurtures unconventional talents and skills. Furthermore, it creates opportunity, instills confidence.
Additionally, entrepreneurship embraces talents and skills that teachers in conventional classrooms might otherwise penalize.
People exposed to entrepreneurship frequently express that they have more opportunity to exercise creative freedoms, higher self esteem, and an overall greater sense of control over their own lives. |
0.998444 | How much is too much? Is a question we always hear when it comes to childhood activities. Parents are often concerned about enroling their young children in immersive childhood art programs due to fear of overloading the kids schedule with lessons and classes.
While that is a legitimate concern, and you should always make sure to provide your kid with a balanced schedule that allows for both education and free time, investing in an immersive childhood art programs is going to enable your child to learn more than just art or music. In a previous article we also explained some of the cognitive benefits of artistic learning for kids, and how music, language, drama and art classes can help your child’s neural development.
Your child’s free time should always be a priority. Make sure they’re getting as much of it as possible. However, during preschool years, your little bee’s brain is going through rapid and intense changes, which makes it the ideal time for them to be stimulated through immersive art programs. Those programs often offer a variety of classes that can include music, arts and language, just to name a few, taught in a playful and nurturing environment, where kids are able to grow in skill and confidence.
The study also showed that students who had high levels of arts engagement were more likely to aspire to college and a had a higher chance of being interested in current affairs, engaging in activities such as volunteering, voting and other civic activities. This reinforces the positive long lasting effects of artistic learning during early childhood found by many other similar researches.
Our Bee School is an immersive program that offers three options of sessions varyingfrom 3.5 hrs to 5 hrs and includes classes such as Spanish, Music, Art and Drama classes as well as a lunch break, so your little bee can get the best education in a super easy format that won’t compromise your schedule. Our Bee-School programs were created to cater to the needs of kids from 3 to 6 years old. They are developed specifically for your child’s age group and development and we use a play-based and movement-based approach to learning.
Our programs are open year round. Make sure to enrol your little bee in our Bee School or in one of our music and/or art programs. |
0.999878 | Dan co-founded the company with Tony and Vince in 2001. Since then he has built the corporate infrastructure necessary to maintain the company’s growth. He is directly responsible for managing the company’s operational framework and ensures that the product development, logistics, financial and sales efforts are synchronized around the globe. Additionally, Dan has played an instrumental role in designing the corporate strategy and business model.
Prior to founding the company, Dan spent 10 years with Henkel Consumer Adhesives where he was most recently Executive Vice President of North American Sales. His sales and marketing career is highlighted with many notable achievements. While at Henkel, Dan’s team grew the Walmart account to more than $100 million in annual sales. In addition, his team was the first and only supplier in history to ever receive 3 Vendor of the Year Awards from Walmart in the same year. Additionally, Dan and his team designed many of the modern category management techniques and practices that serve as industry standards today. Dan’s successes led him to become the youngest member of Henkel’s Executive Committee in the company’s history.
Dan earned a bachelor’s degree from John Carroll University.
What does Dan enjoy most about the company? "I enjoy the freedom to innovate, the absence of politics, and the ability to only be limited by our imagination and capacity to create." |
0.997783 | This is a wonderful book that really drew me in didn't let go. This is the first book of a trilogy so it was fun to read the first book and I'm definitely looking forward to the next two books!
I really love the characters of Annette and Peter and I was cheering them to get together throughout the book, however, there are so many roadblocks, twists and turns keeping them apart, it really holds one's attention. Just when you think things are going to work out for them something happens to keep them apart.
There is a really unlikable and dastardly fellow that keeps things interesting! Although I didn't like the character of Steven, he definitely brings a lot of action to the book! There is a lot for all the characters to recover from or to forgive and I loved how they grew in each of these areas.
There is a lot of intrigue to this book and it reminded me of a Jane Austen novel. It was wonderfully described historically and you really feel like you are a part of the whole story. I loved this book and give it 5 out of 5 stars! |
0.943448 | Can you save money on OCR?
I was surprised that VueScan, obviously outclassed by a program that costs 10 times as much, did so well, but FineReader 9.0 was the clear winner.
Optical character recognition is tricky. When it works right, it's great. But good OCR usually costs a lot of money. Is there a way to scan a document into editable text without applying for your share of that Wall Street bailout?
Optical character recognition is the city-slicker cousin of photo scanning. Unlike scans of photographs, which are turned into digital pictures, scans of documents are converted into text you can edit in your word processor and save on your computer's hard drive. This requires clever software that traditionally costs a lot of money.
But can cheap software be just as clever? To see how an inexpensive OCR program compares with the industry-leading software, I ran some tests of various documents -- including some that weren't very readable to my tired old human eyes -- using VueScan, a $39.95 all-purpose scanner program with built-in OCR capabilities, and ABBYY FineReader 9.0 Professional Edition, a $399 OCR program used by many offices.
My conclusion? I was surprised that VueScan, obviously outclassed by a program that costs 10 times as much, did so well, but FineReader 9.0 was the clear winner -- and I mean "clear" in a very real way. Text that VueScan's OCR software stumbled over, such as documents that had been sloppily photocopied, usually were massaged into clearly readable text with FineReader 9.0.
FineReader 9.0 also did a good job with "broken" text -- documents with tables and other text that snaked from one column to another. VueScan sometimes did well with such challenges, but never performed as well as FineReader 9.0.
But the price differential made me stop and think. Text that VueScan had trouble with could be fixed up manually by typing corrections into the editable document. This might seem like a burden, but is it a burden worth the price difference? If you're saving more than $350 on the software, you probably would be smart in thinking of the extra typing chore as a more of a money saver than a time waster.
Both programs can be tried out for free, and you can also buy them right from the Web sites. Check out VueScan at www.hamrick.com and FineReader 9.0 at www.abbyyusa.com. |
0.964399 | There is a long-standing division in memory research between hippocampus-dependent memory and non-hippocampus-dependent memory, as only the latter can be acquired and retrieved in the absence of normal hippocampal function1,2. Consolidation of hippocampus-dependent memory, in particular, is strongly supported by sleep3,4,5. Here we show that the formation of long-term representations in a rat model of non-hippocampus-dependent memory depends not only on sleep but also on activation of a hippocampus-dependent mechanism during sleep. Rats encoded non-hippocampus-dependent (novel-object recognition6,7,8) and hippocampus-dependent (object–place recognition) memories before a two-hour period of sleep or wakefulness. Memory was tested either immediately thereafter or remotely (after one or three weeks). Whereas object–place recognition memory was stronger for rats that had slept after encoding (rather than being awake) at both immediate and remote testing, novel-object recognition memory profited from sleep only three weeks after encoding, at which point it was preserved in rats that had slept after encoding but not in those that had been awake. Notably, inactivation of the hippocampus during post-encoding sleep by intrahippocampal injection of muscimol abolished the sleep-induced enhancement of remote novel-object recognition memory. By contrast, muscimol injection before remote retrieval or memory encoding had no effect on test performance, confirming that the encoding and retrieval of novel-object recognition memory are hippocampus-independent. Remote novel-object recognition memory was associated with spindle activity during post-encoding slow-wave sleep, consistent with the view that neuronal memory replay during slow-wave sleep contributes to long-term memory formation. Our results indicate that the hippocampus has an important role in long-term consolidation during sleep even for memories that have previously been considered hippocampus-independent.
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We thank I. Sauter for technical support and E. Coffey and E. Bolinger for proof reading. This study was supported by a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Tr-SFB 654). A.S. received a scholarship from the Development and Promotion of Science and Technology Talented Project (DPST), Thailand.
Nature thanks J. Csicsvari, S. Ramirez and R. Stickgold for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
A.S., J.B. and M.I. planned and designed the experiments and wrote the manuscript. A.S. and C.S. performed the experiments and the histology. A.S., C.N.O. and N.N. analysed the data. All authors approved the final version of the paper.
Correspondence to Jan Born or Marion Inostroza.
Extended Data Fig. 1 Control measures for NOR and OPR task performance.
Extended Data Fig. 2 Performance in recent and remote tests for NOR and OPR tasks.
Extended Data Fig. 3 Performance on NOR task for hippocampal inactivation studies.
Extended Data Fig. 4 Remote 3-week OPR testing.
Extended Data Fig. 5 Verification of cannula location and muscimol spreading.
a, Coronal brain section showing location of cannula in the dorsal hippocampus (black arrow) together with position of guide cannula in overlying cortex. b, Coronal brain section showing spread of muscimol (red) after infusion into the hippocampus. Experiments were repeated in n = 3 rats with similar results. The infusion protocol was the same as in the behavioural experiments. In brief, after implantation of the guide cannula in the dorsal hippocampus, animals were infused using the injection cannulae with 0.5 µl fluorophore-conjugated muscimol47,48. After infusion, animals were intracardially perfused and brains were post-fixed with PFA 4% for 24 h. Brains were cut on a vibratome to obtain 70-µm-thick sections and stained with DAPI (1:5,000 µl in PBS) for 15 min. Fluorescent images were acquired by epifluorescence microscopy (Axio imager Zeiss, Germany). Scale bars, 1 mm.
This file contains Supplementary Methods. |
0.999972 | The production marks the third collaboration for Kander, Ebb, McNally and Rivera. The artists previously worked together on The Rink (1984) and Kiss of the Spider Woman (1993), both of which led Rivera to Tony Award wins for her performances.
Tony Award-winning director John Doyle (Sweeney Todd, Company) has reshaped the musical's original two-act format into a new, 95-minute intermissionless version. The Visit features choreography by Tony Award nominee Graciela Daniele.
Rivera originated the role of Claire Zachanassian when The Visit had its debut in September 2001 at Chicago's Goodman Theatre and later repeated her work at the Signature Theatre in 2008 and at Williamstown.
She was reunited on Broadway with her Williamstown co-star Roger Rees, who played her long-ago lover Anton Schell. In recent weeks, Rees was forced to depart the production due to health issues. Tom Nelis took over the role of Anton.
The cast also features George Abud as Karl, Jason Danieley as Frederich Kuhn, Matthew Deming as Louis Perch, Diana Dimarzio as Annie Dummermut, Tony nominee David Garrison as Peter Dummermut, Rick Holmes as Father Josef, Tom Nelis as Rudi, Chris Newcomer as Jacob Chicken, Mary Beth Peil as Matilde Schell, Aaron Ramey as Otto Hahnke, Elena Shaddow as Ottilie, Timothy Shew as Hans Nusselin, with John Riddle and Michelle Veintimilla.
Standing by for Rivera is Tony Award-winning Chorus Line star Donna McKechnie.
"In The Visit, Chita Rivera shows the world what becomes a legend most," producer Kirdahy said in a statement. "Kander and Ebb's final musical is a masterwork. Fascinating, visceral and haunting, The Visit entertains and challenges in ways that can only be described as thrilling."
Here's how the plot is billed: "In her juiciest role yet, Chita Rivera is Claire Zachannassian, the world's wealthiest woman, who returns home to Anton Schell (Roger Rees) who captured her heart then shattered her dreams. What she does next shocks the town and makes for the most thrilling and intriguing musical in years... This tale of romance, seduction and betrayal proves that revenge is the best revenge."
The creative team includes Tony-winning scenic designer Scott Pask , Tony-winning costume designer Ann Hould-Ward, Tony-winning orchestrator Larry Hochman, Tony Honoree for Excellence Paul Huntley (hair and wig design), Tony nominee Japhy Weideman (lighting design), Tony nominee Dan Moses Schreier (sound design), J. Jared Janas (make up design) and veteran musical director/supervisor David Loud.
The Broadway run is produced by Tom Kirdahy, Edgar Bronfman, Jr., Tom Smedes, Hugh Hayes, Peter Stern, Judith Ann Abrams, Rich Affannato, Hunter Arnold, Carl Daikeler, Ken Davenport, Bharat Mitra & Bhavani Lev, Peter May, Ted Snowdon, Gabrielle Palitz/Weatherby & Fishman LLC, Marguerite Hoffman/Jeremy Youett, Carlos Arana/Terry Loftis, Veenerick & Katherine Vos Van Liempt, 42nd.Club/Silva Theatrical and The Shubert Organization, in association with Williamstown Theatre Festival.
For further information, go to thevisitmusical.com. |
0.901552 | One can only imagine the reasons why a mother would train her daughter to go after money, but it happens. There is a fierce pattern involved in why a mother would want her daughter to seek money over love. Seeking love and respect is what most mothers and fathers want their children to seek as they grow and mature into adults. However, when a mother is hoping her daughter hits the lottery, it is a very wicked web that both fall into. I have experienced gold-digging at its finest. You may not imagine that women behave like this, but think again.
The biggest gold-digger I ever knew was named Lynn, a pretty blonde with a nice body. She had two kids very young, so when she was in her early 30s, they were already in their early teens. Lynn met Paul, a very well-paid Silicon Valley CFO who had a thing for pretty girls. Here is the obvious sign: Lynn was only 33 or so, and Paul was already in his 50s. Paul promised Lynn the world, and Lynn was living a very good life on Paul's dime. When it came time to get married, Paul busted out an iron-tight prenup two days before the wedding. It wasn't some small-time event, either. It was going to be huge, with all of her family flying in on Paul's dime. Lynn signed the prenup but knew she was on a mission. Paul and Lynn had always played games with each other, but Lynn's new mission was Paul's money. She bought the best of everything, lived in a million-dollar home and drove her nice new BMW. A few years into the marriage, Paul quit his job. He had this vision of creating a billion-dollar company. But once the $40,000-a-month salary stopped, the marriage began to struggle. Paul had always allowed Lynn to spend what she wanted. Her children were in the best schools, and she made sure she had a nice little savings account Paul didn't know about. The very minute Paul's new company wasn't generating income, Paul had to take out a million-dollar loan on his house. Now, how long was the marriage going to last? She left him real fast, then admitted to me she never gave a hoot about him. He was security.
Why do mothers seek a son-in-law with money?
1. The family wants a breadwinner, simple as that. If a son-in-law is making over $500,000 a year, writing a check for $5,000 to help his mother-in-law fix her house isn't a big deal. The entire family knows that getting a check isn't going to be hard.
2. The mother knows the daughter doesn't have any ambition to do anything with herself and will have to marry money to have someone take care of her. My friend's mother groomed her for that, and it worked.
3. Social status in a small community. It’s crazy, but some mothers desire the status that comes with saying, “My daughter married a ‘Johnson’ or a ‘Smith.’ I have seen this happen quite a bit in smaller towns.
4. The mother is hoping the daughter will get the life she never had, with all the material possessions she ever dreamed about. Pushing a daughter to marry rich will ensure a mother that her little girl will get the white picket fence, the vacations to Italy and the savings account the mother never had. The mother lives through the daughter.
5. Completely poverty-stricken homes are more likely to have a pretty daughter the parents know will be able to land a rich guy. The entire family will push for the daughter to try harder. How many families of CEOs or billionaires care how much money their son-in-law has? A totally broke family is going to see a pretty daughter and know if she is groomed and trained just right, she will help the family.
6. Family competition is the worst. My family is already very competitive, so when I told my family I was dating a lawyer, it became the talk. When a family is very concerned about who is doing what, marrying a rich man is a huge bonus.
7. Retirement: the worst reason of all. I have heard several mothers say they hope their daughters can afford to take care of them when they are old. A struggling family can't take care of sick ol’ Mom, but a rich one can.
Men are going to have to wise up to the rhyme and reason of women’s behavior. Any man that has money needs to be prepared for all kinds of women to come his way. The best thing for a rich man is to try to make his wallet not appear so big. |
0.502614 | Examples of good thesis statement for essay and research papers on Health.
Dimensions of Health Essay The seven dimensions of health are the next: physical dimension, spiritual dimension, emotional (psychological) dimension, social, mental (intellectual), occupational and environmental dimensions.
Health and Fitness for children with disabilities and Disorders essay As children with disabilities generally have similar problems as for the behavior required to play kickball, here is a list of modifications to the game rules, which make the game appropriate for such children.
Personal Diet and Activity Plan essay The problem of healthy human nutrition is a vital question nowadays, because due to the contemporary lifestyle some people have a completely physically passive life and consume for more than they need to keep the correct balance in their organism.
Neonatal ventilators essay Neonatal ventilators support the respiratory system of the newborn facilitating the process of respiration and let the immune system concentrate on other vital processes increasing the possibility of the infant’s survival as they control airway pressure and flow.
Myositis Essay Myositis may include such illnesses as: polymyositis, dermatomyositis and inclusion body myositis.
Proteins Essay Proteins provide immune system defense for the body and also are contain anti-oxidant components. Protein creases muscle growth and is highly necessary in order to recover properly from some kind of injury.
Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) essay The contemporary medical world is very much concerned with the female alcohol abuse phenomenon and the appearance of a group of inclinations known as the Fetal Alcohol Syndrome is nowadays one of the major worries prenatal medicine is facing. |
0.940976 | Benedict was born in Norwich, Connecticut in 1741. He was an apprentice druggist until he quit to fight in the French Indian War. Benedict then served in the New York militia until he became a deserter a year later. A short time later he returned to Norwich to complete his druggist apprenticeship. When Benedict was just 21 years of age his parents died, leaving him a large sum of money. At the time he and his sister moved to New Haven, Connecticut, and they opened up a pharmacy and bookstore. The business soon profited, and before long Benedict owned several trading ships which sailed as far as the West Indies.
Benedict married Margaret Mansfield in 1775, and was eager to fight the British who he felt had an economically oppressive hold on the colonies. Once more he enlisted, only this time as the leader of the Connecticut militia. Before long, Benedict Arnold marched his troops into Canada, attacking Quebec, in what became a disastrous defeat. However, it didn't seem to matter because on his return home Benedict was promoted first to brigadier general, and then just a short time later he was promoted to major general.
Next, after the British had withdrawn, Benedict Arnold was placed in charge of the Philadelphia garrison. In Philadelphia, Benedict learned about the good life, and he began socializing with the most prosperous people in the city who were all Tories or British Loyalists. Before long, General Benedict Arnold and his new wife were deeply in debt, and visibly living beyond his means. Then, his whole world came tumbling down when in February of 1779, he was charged with using government funds to finance his personal life. However, Congress did not want to smear a war hero, and as a result he was not punished.
His wife would die after just 5 years of marriage, leaving Benedict 3 sons. He would soon marry 19 year old Peggy Shippen, who was from one of Philadelphia's most prominent Tory families. Now he was spending more money than ever before, and both the civilian and military authorities began asking questions. Finally, he became completely desperate and contacted an aid of the British General Clinton, named Major John Andre. In a message, General Benedict Arnold told them that he would help the British anyway that he could if they would give him 20,000 British pounds. He wanted 10,000 pounds up front. Benedict Arnold told General Clinton that he was next in line for the command of West Point and he could arrange for its surrender, He was very serious about getting the money first, and he proceeded to use his wife as a courier. She gave Major Andre tidbits of secret information about impending battle plans.
Major Andre and Benedict Arnold decided to meet in the woods near the Hudson River to finalize their plans. They decided to use Joshua Hett Smith as their messenger. Major Andre arrived on a boat called the “Vulture.” The three plotted the takeover until 4 o'clock in the morning. Then they went to spend the night at Smith's house. The next morning the Vulture came under attack and was rendered useless. Arnold didn't want to lose his money so he told Smith and Andre that they should put their plans in Andre's boots and walk back to the British lines. General Arnold wrote them passes, which he told them would get them through enemy lines, instead they aroused suspicion. Then before General Washington could be alerted, Benedict Arnold fled and was quickly recruited by the British. Major Andre was executed by George Washington himself. |
0.999912 | Would you recommend The Retreat In Vail to others?
The Retreat In Vail is conveniently located within walking distance to everything Vail Village has to offer including skiing via Gondola One. It is perfect for the traveler looking for a private, welcoming Vail condo rental in a convenient, Vail Village location. This remodeled residence sits atop La Bottega in Village Inn Plaza. Guests may enjoy the Hotel Sebastian's amenities including outdoor heated pool and hot tubs, Frost Bar, Bloom Spa, and restaurant Leonora. The Retreat also offers a private balcony to enjoy fresh, mountain air while overlooking Vail Village. The free Town of Vail bus stops right out front for easy access to Lionshead, Vail Village, and Golden Peak. |
0.999999 | Jalebi Bai has two decks of sweets. These decks are represented by two strings s and t consisting of lowercase letters from the English alphabet. Each letter from 'a' to 'z' denotes a single type of sweet, e.g., ‘b’ denotes Barfi, 'r' denotes Rasgulla, etc. She wants to use these decks in her friend Laddu’s marriage. Instead of graciously accepting the gift, Laddu asks Jalebi Bai to first make the two decks exactly the same, so that they look good while serving. Now Jalebi Bai can apply the following operation as many times as she wants on both the decks.
From a single deck, pick any two consecutive sweets of the same type and eat one of them. e.g., if a deck is "rrrjj", she can change it to "rrrj" by picking the last two sweets of type 'j' (Jalebi) and eating one of them, or she can change the deck to "rrjj" by picking up the first two sweets of type ‘r’ and eating one of them.
You need to tell whether Jalebi Bai can make the decks equal by applying the above operation as many times as she wants. Output "Yes" [without quotes] if she can, otherwise output "No" [without quotes].
The first line of each test case contains a string s.
The second line of each test case contains a string t.
For each test case, output "Yes" [without quotes] or "No" [without quotes] depending on the case.
Each character of s, t will be between 'a' and 'z'.
Jalebi Bai can change the first deck from "rrrjj" to "rrrj" in a single operation, then both the decks will be equal. Example taken from the statements.
Jalebi Bai can never make both decks of sweets equal. |
0.888799 | Can we use the word North to refer to all of Europe including southern Italy?
The way I see it is that the default position of the world is the equator, and thus Europe could be referred to as the "North", but I am wondering if I am stretching the meaning of the word too extremely. What are your thought on this? Because the meaning is pretty much relative to who the speaker is, I am a bit perplexed about this.
I laid to rest on Mount Etna, as the humans call it, a mountain of the North.
There are billions of people who live south of Mount Etna. To them, Mount Etna is in "the north."
If the population of humans this figure is referring to live in, say, Egypt, then they might reasonably call Mount Etna "the mountain of the north."
Likewise, a site that is far to the south of where most of us live could be called "the north" by anyone south of that location. For example, Uluru is a rock formation in central Australia. Central Australia is south of most of the rest of the world, but it's north of all of the biggest cities in Australia. Someone in Sydney could call Uluru "the mountain of the north."
In fact, almost every location on Earth can be called "the north." The only place that cannot ever be north of your location is the South Pole.
if you are refering to the northern hemisphere, then yes, indead, the entirety of Europe, is in the northern hemisphere. However, if you are referring to the north of europe, Northern Europe is the general term for the geographical region in Europe that is approximately north of the southern coast of the Baltic Sea. Nations usually included within this region are Denmark, Estonia, the Faroe Islands, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway and Sweden, and less often the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, northern Germany, northern Belarus and northwest Russia.
How I can use a word of “whereas”?
When can I use the word Temporal?
Does “etiology” refer to the the original source or can it refer to a middle cause? |
0.976455 | HowToRepairGuide.com: How to Remove 2UZ-FE Engine on Toyota 4Runner?
The procedure mentioned here is for Toyota 4Runner engine removal and installation details.Its for 2UZ-FE engine removal..
Remove the transmission assembly. For additional information, please refer the following topic(s): Automatic Transmission, Automatic Transmission Assembly.
Disconnect the vacuum and ventilation hoses from the air intake assembly.
Remove the engine under covers.
Disconnect the oil cooler hoses from the fan shroud, and remove the fan shroud with the fan.
Disconnect the fuel supply, return and vapor hoses.
Remove the power steering pump mounting bolts and nuts, and hang the pump securely.
Do not disconnect the power steering hoses.
Remove the A/C compressor mounting bolts, and hang the compressor securely.
Do not disconnect the A/C compressor lines.
Remove the fan with the fluid coupling and fan pulley.
Remove the exhaust manifold heat shields.
Disconnect the oxygen sensor connectors.
Remove the mounting nuts and remove the exhaust manifolds.
Remove the right side front door scuff plate.
Remove the right side cowl side trim board.
Disconnect each connector for the Electronic Control Module (ECM), four wheel drive control ECU (if equipped with 4WD) and instrument panel wire before pulling out the engine wire into the engine room.
Disconnect the three ground cables from the body.
Disconnect the engine wire No.2 from the battery terminals and engine room relay block.
Install two engine hangers to the block.
Attach the engine chain hoist and hang the engine with the chain block.
Remove the engine mounting bolts and nuts and separate the engine mounting brackets from the frame brackets.
Carefully lift the engine out of the vehicle.
Slowly lower the engine assembly into the engine compartment.
Attach the engine mounting brackets to the frame brackets.
Install the four nuts and four bolts holding the engine mounting brackets to the frame brackets. Tighten the nuts to 28 ft. lbs. (38 Nm).
Remove the engine chain hoist and engine hangers.
Install the engine wiring harness in the reverse order in which it was removed.
Install the right and left exhaust manifolds. Tighten the mounting nuts to 33 ft. lbs. (44 Nm) and tighten the heat shields to 69 inch lbs. (7.8 Nm).
Install the engine oil dipstick tube. Tighten the mounting bolts to 11 ft. lbs. (15 Nm).
Install the transmission oil dipstick tube and tighten the mounting bolts to 9 ft. lbs. (12 Nm).
Install the fan with fluid coupling and tighten the mounting nuts to 21 ft. lbs. (29 Nm).
Install the A/C compressor and tighten the mounting bolts to 34 ft. lbs. (47 Nm) and the mounting nut to 18 ft. lbs. (25 Nm).
Install the power steering pump and tighten the mounting bolts and nut to 32 ft. lbs. (43 Nm).
Connect the fuel supply, return and vapor feed hoses.
Install the fan shroud into the engine compartment. Tighten mounting bolts 44 inch lbs. (5 Nm). Connect the oil cooler hoses to the fan shroud.
Install the air intake assembly. Tighten the mounting bolts to 9 ft. lbs. (12 Nm).
Attach the vacuum and ventilation hoses to the air intake.
Install the throttle body cover, tighten the nuts to 66 inch lbs. (7.5 Nm).
Refill the engine cooling system to the correct level.
Refill the engine oil to the correct level. |
0.961301 | ‘Cromwell’ started off as a joke. We were touring Ireland a couple of years ago with another of my plays ‘On Raglan Road’, and had just played in Dingle, Co. Kerry, where I had purchased a new biography of Oliver Cromwell’s time in Ireland. When somebody asked what my next play was going to be I replied ‘Cromwell The Musical’. Everybody laughed, including myself, but over the next few months there were several (joking) questions about ‘how is the musical coming on’, and I thought ‘ maybe I will surprise them all’. I did surprise them – myself included – by actually writing – and finishing – it!
To Hell or to Connaught: that’s where Oliver Cromwell plans to send all Irish Catholics.
The year is 1649 and Oliver Cromwell is on the rampage in Ireland. His mission is to quell the Irish Catholic rebellion, with its growing support for English Royalists. Failure could mean a new Civil War in England. Not that he countenances failure; he has seen a vision – he truly believes he has God on his side.
Ireland’s only hope is Owen Ro O’Neill and his Ulster Army. O’Neill is a veteran of the Spanish Wars and is recognized as Ireland’s greatest soldier. Cromwell plans to ensure he doesn’t leave Ulster.
We see his journey through Ireland through his own eyes, those of his Puritan soldiers, and of two girls, Emir and Eithne, who, having been captured at the battle of Drogheda, are now being forced to work in the kitchens before being shipped off as slaves to the West Indies.
Emir is hiding a big secret; she is a spy for Owen Roe O’Neill’s Ulster army, She plans to poison Cromwell, little knowing that Cromwell’s own agents have a similar plan for O’Neill.
When Eithne is raped by one of the Puritan soldiers, both plan to escape and join the defenders at Limerick, where O’Neill’s Ulster army is making a last desperate stand.
WITH A SPRINKLING OF MUSIC!
You are a highly inventive writer Tom, as I know from your short stories. The Cromwell story would be pretty bleak, so I’m guessing there was a fair dose of very dark humour in this musical. |
0.990868 | Many Freemasons are curious as to what is the oldest Masonic Lodge in the world.
Lodge of Research, publisher, 1964.
Brother Denslow also founded the Royal Arch Mason magazine in 1942 and was instrumental in founding the Missouri Lodge of Research.
The oldest Masonic Lodge in the world (with verifiable lodge minutes) is the Lodge of Edinburgh No. 1, Edinburgh, Scotland...sometimes known as Mary's Chapel.
In July, 1949, it observed its 350th anniversary of its establishment. In 2008, (at the time of this writing), Lodge of Edinburgh No. 1 is 409 years old.
Oldest Masonic Lodge Minutes - July 31, 1599: Lodge of Edinburgh No. 1 has records to prove its long time existence as the Oldest Masonic Lodge.
Most impressively, its first 5 pages of minutes incorporate the Schaw Statutes which are dated December 28, 1598.
Six months later, on July 31, 1599, are to be found the minutes which confirm the lodge's claim as having the oldest existing Masonic minutes. It must be noted, however, that from these minutes there exists no conclusive evidence that the lodge was actually constituted on this date nor that it is, in actuality, the oldest lodge.
Schaw Statutes: The Schaw Statutes (part of the Old Charges) are named for William Schaw, who was Master of Work to His Majesty and General Warden of the Masonic craft. In these Statutes, he declared that theses ordinances issued by him for the regulation of lodges considered the lodge at Edinburgh to be for all time, the first and principal lodge in Scotland.
Lodge of Edinburgh No. 1 was first called "The Lodge of Edinburgh" and retained this name until 1688, when the Grand Lodge of Scotland confirmed its charter, designating it as "The Lodge of Edinburgh (Mary's Chapel) No. 1"
Both were affiliated with the lodge, taking the obligation on the "Breeches Bible", which was printed in 1587. The pen with which these 2 brothers signed the roll is still preserved in the Edinburgh Lodge No. 1 museum.
First Operative to Speculative in Scotland - 1600: As early as 1600, The Lodge of Edinburgh began to admit non-operative Freemasons. In June, 1600, the Laird of Auchinleck was made a speculative member, the first authentic record of the making of such a member.
The famous Dr. Desaguliers visited the The Lodge of Edinburgh on August 24, 1721. He had served as Grand Master of England and was referred to as "General Master Desaguliers". On the next day, while he was present, the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, the Treasurer, the Deacon Convener of the Trades and the Clerk to the Dean of the Guild Court were admitted as members.
This date is thought to mark the change over from operative to speculative Freemasonry in Scotland.
Inception of Grand Lodge of Scotland - 1736: When the Grand Lodge of Scotland was established on November 30, 1736, Lodge of Edinburgh took an active part. Thirty-three lodges were represented at the meeting which was held in the lodge room of Edinburgh Lodge. Because the oldest minute of a lodge was that of Edinburgh Lodge, it was placed first on the roll of the Grand Lodge.
Lodge Kilwinning - 1642: Lodge Kilwinning was the second oldest Masonic lodge because of its records dating to December 20, 1642. (It is believed there may be older lodges, but empirical proof has not been found.) Considerable friction developed in 1807 when the Grand Lodge of Scotland permitted Kilwinning to prefix the word "Mother" to its name. |
0.931064 | If you decide to keep the pond carp (Cyprinus carpio), get ready to build several ponds with ideal habitat condition. Farmers who want to grow the fish need several ponds to accommodate them, from breeding to “nursing” period, until they are ready to be harvested. Understand what you must build before deciding to breed your own common carps.
The main pond is the place for adult carps after they are big enough to leave nursery pond. This pond must be at around 1.2 to 1.5 meters of depth, with a muddy bottom. If you don't cover the sides of the pond with concrete, turn the bottom soil to make the water "fertile". The standard size for carp pond is 6 x 8 or 5 x 10 meters, but the most ideal way is to consider the numbers of your carps first.
Ideally, you should make two of this pond, one for male and female. Also called “broodfish ponds”, these main ponds are used to keep mature fish until they are ready to be spawned. You can scoop male and female fish and put them in the breeding pond to mate. Afterward, you can return them to the main ponds.
This pond is used to breed carps by putting male and female fish together. Depending on the pond type used in your area, this pond can have a wide net, floating palm leaves, or aquatic weeds. These objects are used by female carps to lay their eggs, and you can easily move them to the nursery pond.
This pond is used to keep the newly-hatched fish until they reach enough size to be moved to the regular pond. Nursery pond must be protected from predators that eat small fish (or you can switch to nursing tanks for extra protection). Make sure the pond has around 200 to 400 fry ratios for every square meter. You must also provide nutritious feeds such as Daphnia, Moina, meat meal, soybean meal, or rice bran.
There are several types of ponds that you can use, but it is best to follow the most common type that is used by local fish breeders/farmers in your area. You may have ponds with a concrete layer, regular ground pound, or ground pound with the net layer. Also, building the pond carp (Cyprinus carpio) with the proper condition is also important to breed healthy carps. |
0.998338 | Since its initial release in 1998, the 01V from has been used in a wide variety of applications - both personal and professional - ranging from recording and production environments to live sound and installation setups. Building on the proven configuration of its predecessors, the new 01V96i now offers USB 2.0 connectivity along with new multi-track recording features and improved sonic quality.
To meet the increasing demand for multi-track recording and playback in live sound applications, the 01V96i now features USB 2.0 connectivity-allowing you to effectively take your studio on the road with you. With 16 in/16 out live audio streaming at 96kHz and seamless DAW integration requiring just a single connection, it has never been easier to capture, edit and produce high-quality, professional level recordings. USB connectivity also provides extensive two-way communication of MIDI data allowing you to seamlessly combine the precise physical control of your console with all the capability of the latest Cubase AI software that comes bundled with the 01V96i.
Unlike some digital consoles that achieve operation in 96kHz mode with a reduced number of tracks, 01V96i imposes no such limitations at any of the provided sampling rates, with high resolution 96kHz and 32bit internal processing (58-bit accumulator) as the standard. What's more, all onboard A/D and D/A conversion makes use of top-performance 24bit/96kHz converters. This is particularly important with the 01V96i because it features improved, studio-quality head amps that offer extremely high-resolution and a remarkable sense of "air". With onboard converters operating at the full 24bits and 96kHz, you can be sure that nothing is lost in the digital representation of the warm, transparent output from these exceptional preamps.
What's the point of having 24bit/ 96kHz audio if you have to convert down to a lower sampling rate for effect processing? That's exactly what's happening if you're using hardware or software processors that don't offer 24bit/ 96kHz performance anywhere in your signal chain. That's why included a comprehensive range of 96kHz compatible stereo effects. The 01V96i also features flexible, independent channel compression and gating/ducking processors for dynamics control, 4-band parametric channel equalizers that offer extra versatility with switchable "type I" or "type II" EQ algorithms, as well as a channel delay. All channel processors, except for channel delay, come with an extensive selection of presets in a range of "libraries" that can simply be used unmodified or edited to suit specific requirements. All channel functions except gating are also provided on all output buses.
[Channel Strip] The Channel Strip consists of 5 models that employ VCM (Virtual Circuitry Modeling) technology to recreate the sound and characteristics of several classic compression and EQ units from the 70's. Not only do these models faithfully capture the unique saturation of analog circuitry - in part thanks to precise modeling of the original FET gain reduction, tube/transformer buffer amplifier, VCA and RMS detector circuits - but they have also been fine-tuned by leading engineers and feature carefully selected parameters in a simple interface that makes it easier than ever to create the ideal sound.
[Master Strip] The Master Strip employs VCM technology to recreate both the analog circuitry and tape characteristics that shaped the sound of open-reel tape recorders. Because of their ability to smooth out peak levels and tidy up the response, many high-end recording studios still maintain open-reel recorders such as the Studer A80 mk I, A80 mk IV and A820, and the Ampex ATR100 and others from the 70's and 80's to be used to provide tape compression at the mastering stage. Different types of tape - new BASF, old Ampex, etc. - are also selected and used according to the unique sounds they produce. Open Deck provides models of four machine types: Swiss '70, Swiss '78, Swiss '85, and American '70. You can even combine different record and playback decks for a wider range of variation. You also have a choice of "old" and "new" tape types, tape speed, bias, and EQ settings that can vary the "focus" of the sound, distortion, and saturation characteristics. Now you can easily take advantage of top-end analog sound-shaping techniques in real time using the 01V96i digital console.
[Vintage Stomp] Vintage Stomp gives you three distinctly different phasers modeled after the most sought-after stompbox effects units of the 70's. 's VCM technology gives these outstanding recreations all the warmth and atmosphere of the original vintage units, and combines it with the control and processing flexibility that a digital environment affords.
[Reverb] These high-resolution reverbs employ the latest "REV-X" algorithms first introduced in 's SPX2000 Digital Multi Effects Processor. The REV-X programs feature the richest reverberation and smoothest decay available, based on years of dedicated research and development. REV-X Hall, REV-X Room, and REV-X Plate programs are provided, with new parameters such as room size and decay envelopes that offer unprecedented definition and finer nuance control. The REV-X Hall and REV-X Room programs have a very open sound, while REV-X Plate delivers a brighter tonality that is ideal for vocals. All models deliver dense, warm reverb that does not interfere with the natural timbre of the source.
Don't let its compact construction fool you- the 01V96i has tremendous mixing capacity for a console its size, making it extremely versatile and suitable for a wide range of studio and sound reinforcement applications.
With up to 40 simultaneous inputs and 20 buses at 96kHz, the 01V96i delivers large console power in a rack-mount sized package. Offering a main stereo bus, eight individual mixing buses, two solo buses, and eight auxiliary buses -a total of 20 in all- the 01V96i gives you plenty of signal-routing options to adapt to just about any mixing requirements.
Right out of the box the 01V96i offers 16 analog channel inputs-12 with improved studio-quality head amps-and on the digital front, 8-channel optical ADAT, coaxial 2-track inputs and 16 inputs via USB. Analog outputs include the main stereo output, stereo monitor outputs, a stereo 2-track output, four OMNI outputs, 12 channel TRS insert points and a headphones output, matched with coaxial 2-track outputs and 8-channel optical ADAT for digital output. When you need more, offers a range of mini-YGDAI expansion cards that can be inserted into the 01V96i's expansion slot. From traditional analog audio formats to standard digital audio and dedicated third-party proprietary network protocols, Mini-YGDAI cards make it easy to add I/O in a wide variety of audio and network formats to 01V96i.
When your situation demands a high capacity setup-particularly for live sound reinforcement applications- the "01V96i Cascade Link" allows you to run two units cascaded giving you up to 80 channels of mixing capability. One simple connection for all the power you would ever need.
The benefits of digital technology are innumerable in terms of functionality, cost and space. However the physical, intuitive aspects of analog style mixers can never be discounted either.
Patching and assigning channels has always been one of the most trying aspects of mixing with an analog console. Using the 01V96i's versatile, easy-to-use patching system, all available inputs, outputs, effects, channel inserts -and now USB I/O- can be assigned to any of the console's channels or outputs. For example, any of the effect processors can be assigned to an auxiliary bus for send-type operation, or inserted directly into any input channel as required. Centralized control means you'll never have to run around to physically re-patch cables whenever you need to reconfigure the system. Patch setups can be stored in the 01V96i patch library for instant recall at any time.
All of 's professional digital mixing consoles feature motor faders for a reason. A mixing engineer needs to be able to see exactly where levels are at all times, and without motor faders, every time you recall a previously stored scene or remotely control your mixer from external devices, the mix you hear will be totally different from what is represented by the faders on the console. This can cause considerable confusion and affect your workflow dramatically. Why run the risk of blowing your mix by compromising on such a crucial feature? 's 100mm motor faders are the end result of the extensive research and analysis put into making top-line digital mixers. With the intuitive, physical control they afford, these precision faders will ensure that your previously stored settings not only sound exactly the same, but also look just as they did when you saved them. What's more, multiple monitor mixes can be recalled and modified instantly and intuitively via the sends on fader function.
"Selected Channel" controls are the "hands-on" channel controls for the currently selected input and output channel, with analog style buttons and knobs that allow you direct access and control of essential parameters. This -designed configuration has become a classic as well the de-facto industry standard, and is familiar territory to most experienced engineers.
In addition to being able to pair faders "horizontally," corresponding faders in adjacent layers can be "vertically" paired, allowing each physical channel fader to be used for stereo channel control. Multiple stereo channels can thus be controlled from a single layer with a whole list of linked parameters.
Eight user-defined keys allow you to customize how you interact with your console. These keys can be assigned to control any functions you choose. You could, for example, assign them to switch scenes, copy/paste channels or flip display pages and numerous other functions that can give you a tremendous advantage in live sound applications. The Instant Group Assignment function allows you to use these keys to set up mute group masters quickly- ideal for live applications where groups of instruments or sound sources need to be muted instantly.
The ability to store and recall all console parameters in an instant is a huge advantage for sound reinforcement applications. You can instantly switch "scenes" during a performance, as well as recall the basic settings for a show at different venues, then tweak to optimize the sound for that environment. This can dramatically reduce setup time and benefit your workflow tremendously. All scene data can also be managed offline on a personal computer using the 01V96i Editor. You can do basic setup on your laptop, and then transfer the data to the console at the venue. 01V96i digital mixing console also lets you recall a scene with fade time, or apply "recall safe" for only the specified parameters and channels, or globally for added creative control and flexibility. There's even a global paste function that lets you simultaneously paste selected parameters from one scene to multiple scenes - your EQ and AUX settings from final rehearsal, for example, can easily be copied to all other scenes that will be used during the performance.
In addition to its extensive stand-alone capabilities, the 01V96i can seamlessly integrate with your computer-based DAW. In addition to the bi-directional 16 x 16 USB2.0 audio integration, the 01V96i also functions as a powerful controller for your Digital Audio Workstation (DAW). This provides that familiar hands-on feel when recording, mixing and editing your tracks. Control templates are provided for Avid ProTools, Steinberg Cubase and Nuendo while the general DAW mode supports a range of other DAWs. MIDI control tables can also be created to provide compatibility with MIDI-compatible DAW systems.
Available for MAC and Windows platforms, 01V96i Editor is a total management software package that gives you the complete control of all the console's parameters via your computer. Editor provides comprehensive monitoring as well as real-time display of selected channel status once it is connected to the console and online. Offline you can edit and manage scene data, patch lists, and other functions for a significant boost in control and work efficiency. If you are using a rental or another installed console, you can easily save your settings to a computer, then load them into the other console at your convenience. 01V96i Editor also makes an effective tool for safely managing your backups.
With Cubase Al you get a stripped-down version of the Steinberg Cubase advanced music production system, using the same core technologies and interface that have won this series worldwide acclaim. Together with the 01V96i, both MAC and Windows PC users will have access to a full system solution with all the tools they need for composing, recording, editing and mixing studio-quality music whether you're in the studio or not.
The digital domain of mixing has reached optimum levels, order the 01V96i today.
Equivalent input noise: -128dBu Equivalent Input Noise.
Dimensions (WxHxD): 17-1/8" x 5-7/8" x 21-5/8"
work great.THe 01V96I also is load with plug ins that are easy to access and control. |
0.93335 | How might providing health insurance affect people along various dimensions, like how much health care they consume, their financial well-being, and their actual health? As health care economists have long recognized, this question is a lot tougher to answer than one might at first think. The basic analytical problem is that you can't just compare averages for those who have health insurance and those who don't, because these groups are different in fundamental ways. For example, those with private sector health insurance in the U.S. tend to get it through their employers, so they tend to be people of prime working ages who hold jobs, or those who get government health insurance for the elderly (Medicare) or the poor (Medicaid). It's easy to imagine cases of people who have a hard time holding a job because they have poor health, and thus don't have employer-provided health insurance. For these people, their poor health leads to a lack of health insurance, but wasn't primarily caused by their lack of health insurance. When the variables are interrelated like this, it's hard to sort out cause and effect.
From a social science research perspective, the ideal experiment would be to take a large group of people and to divide them randomly, giving health to one group but not the other. Then study the results. However, in the real world, such randomized experiments are quite rare. The one classic example is the Rand Health Insurance Experiment (HIE) conducted in the 1970s: for an overview written in 2010 with some applications to the health care debate, see here.
"The HIE was a large-scale, randomized experiment conducted between 1971 and 1982. For the study, RAND recruited 2,750 families encompassing more than 7,700 individuals, all of whom were under the age of 65. They were chosen from six sites across the United States to provide a regional and urban/rural balance. Participants were randomly assigned to one of five types of health insurance plans created specifically for the experiment. There were four basic types of fee-for-service plans: One type offered free care; the other three types involved varying levels of cost sharing — 25 percent, 50 percent, or 95 percent coinsurance (the percentage of medical charges that the consumer must pay). The fifth type of health insurance plan was a nonprofit, HMO-style group cooperative. Those assigned to the HMO received their care free of charge. For poorer families in plans that involved cost sharing, the amount of cost sharing was income-adjusted to one of three levels: 5, 10, or 15 percent of income. Out-of-pocket spending was capped at these percentages of income or at $1,000 annually (roughly $3,000 annually if adjusted from 1977 to 2005 levels), whichever was lower. ... Families participated in the experiment for 3–5 years."
The basic lessons of the Rand experiment, which has been the gold standard for research on this question over the last 30 years, is that cost-sharing substantially reduced the quantity of health care spending by 20-30%. Further this reduction in the quantity of health care spending had no effect on the quality of health care services received and no overall effect on health status.
August 2012 issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, which is not freely available on-line, although many in academia will have access through library subscriptions.
hospital admission, an 8.8 percentage point (15%) increase in the probability of taking any prescription drugs, and a 21 percentage point (35%) increase in the probability of having an outpatient visit. We are unable to reject the null of no change in emergency room utilization, although the confidence intervals do not allow us to rule out substantial effects in either direction.
In addition, insurance is associated with 0.3 standard deviation increase in reported compliance with recommended preventive care such as mammograms and cholesterol monitoring. Insurance also results in decreased exposure to medical liabilities and out-of-pocket medical expenses, including a 6.4 percentage point (25%) decline in the probability of having an unpaid medical bill sent to a collections agency and a 20 percentage point (35%) decline in having any out-of-pocket medical expenditures. ... Finally, we find that insurance is associated with improvements across the board in measures of self-reported physical and mental health, averaging 0.2 standard deviation improvement."
Under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act signed into law by President Obama in March 2010, the U.S. is moving toward a health care system in which millions of people who lacked health insurance coverage will now receive it. Drawing implications from the Oregon study for the national health care reform should be done with considerable caution. Still, some likely lessons are possible.
1) One sometimes hears optimistic claims about how, if people have health insurance, they will get preventive and other care sooner, and so they will avoid more costly episodes of care and we will end up saving money. This outcome is highly unlikely. If lots more people have health insurance, they will consume more health care spending overall.
2) The cost of the Oregon health insurance coverage was about $3,000 per person--adequate for basic health insurance, although less than half of what is spent on behalf of the average American spends for health care in a given year. The health care reform legislation of 2010 is projected to provide health insurance to an additional 28 million people (leaving about 23 million still without health insurance). At the fairly modest cost of $3,000 per person, the expansion of coverage itself would cost $84 billion per year.
3) Although health insurance will improve people's well-being and financial satisfaction, the extent to which it improves actual health is not yet clear. As the Finkelstein team reports: "Whether there are also improvements in objective, physical health is more difficult to determine with the data we now have available. More data on physical health, including biometric measures such as blood pressure and blood sugar, will be available from the in-person interviews and health exams that we conducted about six months after the time frame in this article."
Evidence from theOregon health insurance experiment will be accumulating over the next few years. Stay tuned!
Are Groups More Rational than Individuals?
"A decision maker in an economics textbook is usually modeled as an individual whose decisions are not influenced by any other people, but of course, human decision-making in the real world is typically embedded in a social environment. Households and firms, common decision-making agents in economic theory, are typically not individuals either, but groups of people—in the case of firms, often interacting and overlapping groups. Similarly, important political or military decisions as well as resolutions on monetary and economic policy are often made by configurations of groups and committees rather than by individuals."
Thus starts an article called "Groups Make Better Self-Interested Decisions," by Gary Charness and Matthias Sutter, which appears in the Summer 2012 issue of my own Journal of Economic Perspectives. (Like all articles appearing in JEP back to 1994, it is freely available on-line courtesy of the American Economic Association.) They explore ways in which individual decision-making is different from group decision making, with almost all of their evidence coming from behavior in economic lab experiments. To me, there were two especially intriguing results: 1) Groups are often more rational and self-interested than individuals; and 2) This behavior doesn't always benefit the participants in groups, because the group can be less good than individuals at setting aside self-interest when cooperation is more appropriate. Let me explore these themes a bit--and for some readers, offer a quick introduction to some economic games that they might not be familiar with.
There has been an ongoing critique of the assumption that individuals act in a rational and self-interested manner, based on the observations that people are often limited in the information that they have, muddled in their ability to process information, myopic in their time horizons, affected by how questions are framed, and many other "behavioral economics" issues. It turns out that in many contexts, groups are often better at avoiding these issues and acting according to pure rationality than are individuals.
As one example, consider the "beauty contest" game. As Charness and Sutter point out: "The name of the beauty-contest game comes from the Keynes (1936) analogy between beauty contests and financial investing in the General Theory: “It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practice the fourth, fifth and higher degrees.” Similarly, in a beauty-contest game, the choice requires anticipating what average opinion will be."
The game works like this. A group of players is told that they should choose a number between 0 and 100, and the winner of the game will be the person who chooses a number that is (say) 1/2 of the average of the other choices. In this game, the rational player will reason as follows: "OK, let's say that the other players choose randomly, so the average will be 50, and I should choose 25 to win. But if other players have this first level of insight, they will all choose 25 to win, and I should instead choose 12. But if other players have this second level of insight, then they will choose 12, and I should choose 6. Hmmm. If the other players are rational and self-interested, the equilibrium choice will end up being zero."
The players in a beauty contest game can be either individuals or groups. It turns out that groups choose lower numbers: that is, as a result of interacting in the group, they tend to be one step ahead.
(b) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement."
Notice that Linda is a bank teller in both choices, but only active in the feminist movement in the second choice: that is, the second choice is a subset of the first choice. For that reason, it is impossible for choice b to be more likely than choice a. However, early research on this question found that 85% of individuals answered b. But when the game is played with groups of 2, and with groups of 3, the error rate drops.
Charness and Sutter offer a number of other examples, but the underlying themes are clear. In many settings, a group of people is likely to be better than an individual at processing a question, processing information, and acting in a rational answer. However, there are a number of settings in which pure self-interest can be self-defeating, and a more cooperative approach is useful. It turns out that individuals are often better than groups at setting aside pure self-interest and perceiving such opportunities.
Here's an example called the "trust game." In this game, the first player starts with a certain sum of money. Player 1 divides the money and passes part of it to Player 2. The experimenter triples the amount passed to Player 2. Player 2 then divides what is received, and passes part of the money back to Player 1. In this kind of game, clearly what's best for both players is if Player 1 gives all of the money to Player 2, thus tripling the entire total, and trusts that Player 2 will return enough to make such this worthwhile. However, a strictly self-interested Player 2 may see no reason in this game to send anything at all back to Player 1, and Player 1, perceiving this, will then see no reason to send anything to Player 2. If both players act in a self-interested manner, both can end up worse off.
It turns out that when groups play this game, when they are acting they send less of the pot from Player 1 to Player 2 than do individuals, and they return less of the pot from Player 2 to Player 1 than do individuals. Thus, groups pursue self-interest in a way that reduces the potential returns from cooperation and trust, as compared with individuals.
Much remains to be done in comparing actions of groups and individuals in a wider variety of contexts. But these results intrigue, because they seem to point toward an economic theory of when group decision-making might be preferable to that of individuals, and vice versa. For example, when looking at a potentially complex problem, where the appropriate decision isn't clear, getting a group of people with diverse backgrounds and information can be quite helpful in leading to a more rational decision. But groups can also become large enough that they don't work well in gathering input from individuals, and become unable to move ahead with decisions.
The results also suggest that economists and social scientists should be cautious in making quick-and-dirty statements about how economic actors either do engage or don't engage in rational self-interested behavior. For example, it's possible to have a bunch of individuals who can't manage to lose weight or save money when acting on their own, but who find a way to do so when acting acting as a group and reinforcing each other. A person may act irrationally in some aspects of their personal life, but still be a useful member of a highly rational group in their work environment. On the other side, in situations calling for gains from cooperation, pitting one group against another may be dysfunctional. For example, many negotiations in business and politics follow the model of designating a lead negotiator, and descriptions of such negotiations often suggest that good negotiators form a bond with those on the other side that helps a compromise to emerge.
Low interest rates are good for borrowers, but lousy for savers. Here's a graph showing personal interest income, which dropped by about $400 billion per year--a fall of more than one-fourth--as interest rates have plummeted.
One of my local newspapers, the (Minneapolis) Star Tribune, offered a nice illustrative set of anecdotes in a story last Sunday about this consequences of this change for those who were depending on interest-bearing assets--often those who are near-retirement or in-retirement, and who want to hold safe assets, but who are receiving a much lower return than they might have expected.
Moreover, as the article points out, it's not just individual savers who are affected. Pension funds, life insurance companies, long-term care insurance companies, and others who keep a substantial proportion of their investments in safe interest-bearing assets are receiving much less in interest than they would have expected, too.
I'm someone who supported pretty much everything the Federal Reserve did through the depths of the recession and financial crisis that started in late 2007: cutting the federal funds rate down to near-zero percent; setting up a number of agencies to lend money to make short-term liquidity loans to number of firms in financial markets; and the "quantitative easing" policies that involved printing money to purchase federal debt and mortgage-backed securities. But the recession officially ended back in June 2009, more than three years ago. It's time to start recognizing that ultra-low interest rates pose some painful trade-offs, too. Higher-ups at the Fed were reportedly saying back in 2009 that when the financial crisis was over, they would unwind these steps--but with the sluggishness of the recovery, they haven't done so.
A year ago, for example, I posted on Can Bernanke Unwind the Fed's Policies? I posted last month on "BIS on Dangers of Continually Expansionary Monetary Policy," in which the Bank of International Settlements states: "Failing to appreciate the limits of monetary policy can lead to central banks being overburdened, with potentially serious adverse consequences. Prolonged and aggressive monetary accommodation has side effects that may delay the return to a self-sustaining recovery and may create risks for financial and price stability globally."
I lack the confidence to say just when or how the Fed should start backing away from its extremely accommodating monetary policies, but after jamming the monetary policy pedal quite hard for the last five years, it seems time to acknowledge that monetary policy in certain settings like the aftermath of a financial crisis and an overleveraged economy is a more limited tool than many of us would have believed back in 2006. Moreover, the U.S. economy has a very recent example from the early 2000s in which the Federal Reserve kept interest rates too low for too long in the early 2000s, and it helped to trigger the boom in lending and borrowing, much of it housing-related in one way or another, that led to the financial crisis and the Great Recession. The dangers of ultra-low interest rates and quantitative easing may not yet outweigh their benefits, but the potential tradeoffs and dangers shouldn't be minimized or ignored.
The performance of the economy clearly has an influence on presidential elections. What are such models saying about the like outcome of an Obama-Romney election? Here are three examples: from Ray Fair, from Douglas Hibbs, and from the team of Michael Berry and Kenneth Bickers.
VP is the Democratic share of the two-party presidential vote in 2012. G is the growth rate of real per capita GDP in the first 3 quarters of 2012. P is the growth rate of the GDP deflator in the first 15 quarters of the Obama administration. And Z is the number of quarters in the first 15 quarters of the Obama administration in which the growth rate of real per capita GDP is greater than 3.2 percent at an annual rate.
Obviously, the third quarter GDP of 2012 GDP numbers will not be officially announced until after the election--although one can argue that they will be perceived by people in the economy as they happen. Just for the sake of argument, if one plugs in a 1.5% growth rate for real per capita GDP in the first three quarters of 2012, a 1.5% growth rate for the GDP deflator (a measure of inflation) and 2 quarter of real per capita GDP growth above 3.2% (that is, fourth quarter 2009 and fourth quarter 2011), then Fair's equation says that Obama will get 50.4% of the two-party vote--and thus (assuming not too much weirdness in the Electoral College) would narrowly win re-election.
An obvious question about Fair's equation is that it doesn't t include a separate variable for the unemployment rate. Why not? The answer is that researchers like Fair have experimenting with a wide variety of different kinds of economics data. For Fair, the equation given above is the one that predicts best over the elections from 1916 up through 2008. It's worth remembering that presidents have often been re-elected with a fairly high unemployment rate, like Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression, or Ronald Reagan when the unemployment rate was 7.4% in October 2004.
However, my guess is that in the context of 2012, Fair's equation will tend to overstate Obama's changes. I think the sustained high rates of unemployment will be more salient in the 2012 election than they may have been in some past elections. Also, Fair's equation is that it gives Obama credit for the low rate of inflation during his term of office--but it's not clear that in 2012, the low rate of overall inflation is getting Obama a lot of political credit. Fair's equation gives Obama extra credit for the two good quarters of economic growth during his presidency--and I'm not sure that in the broader context of a slow recovery, Obama will get much political credit for those two quarters.
Douglas Hibbs takes a related but different approach to economic variables and presidential election outcomes in his "Bread and Peace" model. He starts off by using the average of per capita real economic growth over the incumbent president's term, and uses that to predict the incumbent's share of the two-party vote. The result, as shown in the best-fit line in the figure below, is that some of the years where the incumbent did much worse than expected were years with a large number of military fatalities, like 1952 and 1968.
Thus, Hibbs added a second explanatory variable, military fatalities, and with the addition of that extra factor most of the points showing actual voting shares fall closer to best-fit line. As the figure shows, based on economic data through the end of 2012, Obama would receive 45.5% of the two-party vote. The Hibbs equation doesn't give Obama credit for a low inflation rate.
Like Fair, Hibbs doesn't include an unemployment variable. But of course, these sorts of disputes over what should be included in drawing connections from economic data to election results just illustrates a broader point: every election has unique characteristics, starting with the actual candidates. In the 1996 election, Bill Clinton did better than would have been expected based on Hibbs formula. In the 2000, Al Gore (who was from the "incumbent" party), did considerably worse than would have been expected. Public perceptions of the candidates, non-economic policies, and the actual events during the campaign clearly matter as well.
Michael Berry and Kenneth Bickers take a different approach in "Forecasting the 2012 Presidential Election With State-Level Economic Indicators." Instead of trying to predict the overall national popular vote, they instead estimate an equation for each of 50 states and the District of Columbia. They also use a more complex set of variables. They emphasize economic variables like the change in each state in real per capita income, the national unemployment rate, the state-level unemployment rate. But they also include variables for the vote received by that party in the previous election, a variable for whether the incumbent is a Democrat or a Republican, and for how many terms in a row the presidency would be held by a particular party. These terms then interact with the economic variables. A variable for the home state of each presidential candidate is also included.
The strength of the Berry/Bickers approach is that with this extra detail, their equation correctly predicts all of presidential elections from 1980 to 2008. The weakness is that if you add enough variables and complexity, you can always create an equation that will match the past data, but your results can be quite sensitive to small tweaks in the variables that you use. Thus, it's hard to have confidence that a complex equation is will be an accurate predictor. For what it's worth, their equation predicts that Romney will win the 2012 election rather comfortably, with more than 52% of the popular vote. As they point out: "What is striking about our state-level economic indicator forecast is the expectation that Obama will lose almost all of the states currently considered as swing states, including North Carolina, Virginia, New Hampshire, Colorado, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida."
In terms of narrowly economic influences on the presidential race, there are just two more monthly unemployment reports that will come out before the election in November. There won't be too much new economic data, either. Thus, my suspicion is that the ways in which economic outcomes affect presidential preferences are in large part already being taken into account in the presidential polls, which currently show a tight race.
Twice each year, the Congressional Budget Office publishes a "Budget and Economic Outlook" for the next 10 years. The just-released August version offers a timeline for the eventual recovery of the U.S. economy to its pre-recession path of economic growth, and some worries about the budget fights that are scheduled to erupt later this year.
On the subject of eventual full recovery, the CBO regularly estimates the "potential GDP" of the U.S. economy: that is, what the U.S. economy would produce if unemployment was down to a steady-state level of about 5.5% and steady growth was occurring. During recessions, of course, the economy produces below its potential GDP. During booms (like the end of the dot-com period in the early 2000s and the top of the housing price bubble in about 2005-2006), it's possible for an economy to produce more than its potential GDP, but only for a short-term and unsustainable period. Here's the CBO graph comparing actual and potential GDP since 2000. The shallowness of how much the recession in 2001 caused actual GDP to fall below potential, compared to the depth and length of how much actual GDP has fallen below potential in the aftermath of the Great Recession, is especially striking.
This scenario in which the U.S. economy returns to potential GDP in 2018 requires a period in which the U.S. economy shows some rapid growth. Here's a graph showing the growth rate of the U.S. economy vs. that of the average of major U.S. trading partners (weighted by how much trade the U.S. economy does with each of them). "[T]he trading partners are Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Mexico, Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and countries in the euro zone." Notice that the prediction is for a substantial burst of growth around 2014, and lasting for a couple of years.
spending, totaling almost $500 billion, that are projected to occur in fiscal year 2013 represent an amount of deficit reduction over the course of a single year that has not occurred (as a share of GDP) since 1969." These changes mean that the baseline CBO projection is for a recession in 2013.
2011 (Public Law 112-25) do not occur (although the original caps on discretionary appropriations remain in place) ..."
Other scenarios are possible, of course. But several points seem worth making.
The CBO alternative scenario does not predict a recession in the short-term, and it predicts higher growth in the next few years. But the alternative scenario also means that the budget deficits are reduced by less, which means that growth slows down. The CBO prediction is that by 2022, the U.S. economy would be larger under the baseline scenario--with a recession in 2013--than it would be with the alternative scenario. This is a standard tradeoff in thinking about budget deficits: in the short run, spending cuts and tax increases are always unattractive, but unless a government figures out a way to reduce outsized deficits, long-run economic growth will be hindered.
The obvious policy conclusion here, it seems to me, is that having all the scheduled changes to taxes and spending hit in 2013 is too much of a burden for an already-struggling U.S. economy, and should be avoided. But it remains tremendously important to get the U.S. budget deficits headed in a downward direction in the medium-term, certainly before the 10-year horizon of these predictions.
Moreover, it would be useful for the U.S. economy, in the sense of reducing uncertainty, if the political system would stop gaming the budget process. That is, stop the ongoing cycle of having taxes that are scheduled to rise in a few years, or spending that it scheduled to be cut in a few years. Sure, writing down projections that show higher taxes or lower spending in a few years makes the 10-year deficit projections look better, but it also leads to waves of uncertainty cascading through the economy as these policies perpetually are hitting their expiration dates.
It seems as if every few weeks, I see an article about a publication that is going digital. Last month, the owner of Newsweek magazine--a mainstay of newsstands and kiosks for all of my life--announced that it would transition to digital-only publication, with a timeline to be announced this fall. Among glossy think-tank publications, the Wilson Quarterly recently announced that the Summer issue will be its last one to be printed on paper. Among more specialized journals, the most recent issue of the Review of Economic Research on Copyright Issues announced that it was turning to pure digital publication, too.
My own Journal of Economic Perspectives has a different digital landmark. As of a few days ago, all issues of JEP from the current one back to the first issue of Summer 1987 are freely available on-line, courtesy of the journal's publisher, the American Economic Association. (Before this, archives back to 1994 had been available.) For the Spring 2012 issue of the journal, which was the 100th issue since the journal started publication, I wrote an article called "From the Desk of the Managing Editor" which offered some thoughts and reminisces about running the journal. From that article, here are a few reflections on the shift from paper to electronic media.
"Some days, working on an academic journal feels like being among the last of the telephone switchboard operators or the gas lamplighters. Printing on paper is a 500 year-old technology. When the first issue of JEP was printed in 1987, the print run was nearly 25,000 copies. Now, as readers shift to reading online or on CD-ROM, the print run has fallen to 13,000. The American Economic Association has shifted its membership rules toward a model where all dues-paying members have online access to the AEA journals at zero marginal cost, but need to pay extra for paper copies. Thus, in the next few years, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the JEP print run fall by half again. The smaller print run means substantial up-front cost savings for the AEA: paper and postage used to amount to half the journal’s budget. But for anyone sitting in a managing editor’s chair, the shorter print runs also raise existential questions about your work: in particular, questions about permanence and serendipity.
"Back in 1986, when we were choosing paper stocks for the journal, “permanence” meant acid-free paper that would last 100 years or more on a library shelf. I’m still acculturating myself to the concept that in the web-world, permanence has little to do with paper quality, but instead means a permanent IP address and a server with multiple back-ups. As a twentieth-century guy, pixels seem impermanent to me. I still get a little shock seeing a CD-ROM with back issues of JEP : almost two decades of my work product condensed down to a space about the size of a lettuce leaf.
"But in a world of evanescent interactive social media, there remains a place for publications that are meant to lay down a record—to last. It pleases me enormously that the American Economic Association in 2010 made all issues of JEP freely available online at <http://e-jep.org>. Archives are available back to 1994; the complete journal back to 1987 will eventually become available. The JEP now has a combination of permanency and omnipresence.
"The other concern about the gradual disappearance of paper journals is the issue of serendipity—the possibility of accidentally finding something of interest. In the old days, serendipity often happened when you were standing in the library stacks, looking up a book or paging through a back issue of a journal, and you ran across another intriguing article. The Journal of Economic Perspectives was founded on the brave and nonobvious assumption that busy-bee academic economists are actually interested in cross-pollination—in reaching out beyond their specialties.
"As the JEP makes a gradual transition from paper to pixels, I hope it doesn’t become a disconnected collection of permanent URLs. When you hold a paper copy of an issue in your hands, the barriers to flipping through a few articles are low. When you receive an e-mail with the table of contents for an issue, the barriers to sampling are a little higher. But perhaps my worries here betray a lack of imagination for where technology is headed. Soon enough, I expect many of us will have full issues of our periodicals delivered directly to our e-readers. When these are tied together with the connectivity of weblinks and blogs, the possibilities for serendipity could easily improve. Starting with the Winter 2012 issue, entire issues of JEP can be downloaded in pdf or e-reader formats."
But the big question I don't mention in this article is financial support. There's no big secret about the American Economic Association finances, which are published on its website. The audited financial statement for 2010, for example, shows that the AEA gets revenue from "license fees" paid by libraries and other institutions that use its EconLit index of economics articles, from subscriptions for the seven AEA journals, from member dues, and from fees paid for listing "Job Openings for Economists" in the AEA publication of that name. These sources of revenue don't change much or at all just because the AEA makes one of its journals, the Journal of Economic Perspectives, freely available. But whether and how Newsweek, the Wilson Quarterly, and Review of Economic Research on Copyright Issues can gather funding and attract readers for their digital publications of the future remains to be seen.
A large proportion of academic research isn't about trying to resolve a big question once and for all. Instead, it's about putting together one brick of evidence, and when enough bricks accumulate, then it becomes possible to offer evidence-backed judgements on bigger questions.
In that spirit, Alberto Chong, Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, and Andrei Shleifer offer a study of "Letter Grading Government Efficiency" in an August 2012 working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research. (NBER working papers are not freely available on-line, but many readers will have access through their academic institutions. Also, earlier copies of the paper are available on the web, like here.) Full disclosure: One of the authors of the paper, Andrei Shleifer, was the editor of my own Journal of Economic Perspectives, and thus my boss, from 2003 to 2008.
The notion is to measure one simple dimension of government efficiency: whether a letter sent to a real city with an actual zip code, but a nonexistent address, is returned to the sender. Thus, the authors sent 10 letters to nonexistent addresses in each of 159 countries: two letters to each of a country's five largest cities. The letters were all sent with a return address to the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth University with a request to "return to the sender if undeliverable." A one-page letter requesting a response from the recipient was inside.
"We got 100% of the letters back from 21 out of 159 countries, including from the usual suspects of efficient government such as Canada, Norway, Germany and Japan, but also from Uruguay, Barbados, and Algeria. At the same time, we got 0% of the letters back from 16 countries, most of which are in Africa but also including Tajikistan, Cambodia, and Russia. Overall, we had received 59% of the letters back within a year after they were sent out. Another measure we look at is the percentage of the letters we got back in 90 days. Only 4 countries sent all the letters back in 90 days (United States, El Salvador, Czech Republic, and Luxembourg), while 42 did not manage to deliver any back within 3 months. Overall, only 35% of the letters came back within 3 months. ... In statistical terms, the variation in our measures of postal efficiency is comparable to the variation of per capita incomes across countries."
Not unexpectedly, the data shows that countries with higher per capita GDP or with higher average levels of education typically did better at returning misaddressed mail. The U.S. Postal Service is at the top of the list--but because the letters were mailed in the U.S. and being returned to a U.S. address, it would be quite troublesome if this were not true!
The authors can account for about half of the variation across countries by looking at factors like the types of machines used for reading postal codes, and whether the country uses a Latin alphabet (although the international postal conventions actually require that addresses be written in Latin letters). But more intriguingly, much of the variation across countries in whether they return misaddressed letters seems to be correlated with other measures of the quality of government and management in that country. In that sense, the ability to return misaddressed letters may well be a sort of simple diagnostic tool that suggests something about broader patterns of efficiency in government and the economy.
Most discussions of hyperinflation focus on a particular episode: for example, here's my post from last March 5 on "Hyperinflation and the Zimbabwe Example." But Steve H. Hanke and Nicholas Krus have taken the useful step of compiling a list of "World Hyperinflations" in an August 2012 Cato Working Paper.
Hanke and Krus define an episode of hyperinflation as starting when the rate of inflation exceeds 50% in a month, and ending after a year in which inflation rates do not exceed this level. But the task of compiling a systematic and well-documented list of hyperinflations is tricky. Data on prices can be scarce. While data on consumer prices is preferable, looking at data on wholesale prices or even exchange rates is sometimes necessary. As one example, the Republika Srpska is currently one of the two main parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which in turn was formed from the break-up of Yugoslavia. But for a time in the early 1990s, the Republic Srpska had its own currency circulating. Finding monthly price data for this currency is not a simple task! As another example, the city of Danzig in 1923 carried out its own currency reform: Danzig was at the time technically a free city, but heavily influenced by the German hyperinflation around it, in the midst of the overall German hyperinflation at that time.
Their paper offers a much fuller discussion of details and approaches, but here is a taste of their findings: a much-abbreviated version of their main table showing the top 25 hyperinflations, measured by whether the single highest monthly inflation rate exceeded 200%.
1) The infamous German hyperinflation of 1922-23 is near the top of the list, but ranks only fifth for highest monthly rate of inflation. The dubious honor of record-holder for highest monthly hyperinflation rate is apparently Hungary, which in July 1946 had a hyperinflation rate that was causing priced to double every 15 hours. The Zimbabwe hyperinflation mentioned above is a close second, with a hyperinflation rate in November 2008 causing prices to double every 25 hours.
2) The earliest hyperinflation on the list is France in 1795-1796, and there are no examples of hyperinflation in the 1800s.
3) Many of the hyperinflations on the list occur either in the aftermath of World War II, or in the aftermath of the break-up of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.
4) Finally, Hanke and Krus state in a footnote that they would now make one addition to the table, which would be the most recent episode of all: the experience of North Korea from December 2009 to January 2011.
"We are aware of one other case of hyperinflation: North Korea. We reached this conclusion after calculating inflation rates using data from the foreign exchange black market, as well as the price of rice. We estimate that this episode of hyperinflation occurred from December 2009 to mid-January 2011. Using black market exchange rate data, and calculations based on purchasing power parity, we determined that the North Korean hyperinflation peaked in early March 2010, with a monthly rate of 496% (implying a 6.13% daily inflation rate and a price-doubling time of 11.8 days). When we used rice price data, we calculated the peak month to be mid-January 2010, with a monthly rate of 348% (implying a 5.12% daily inflation rate and a price-doubling time of 14.1 days)."
What is a Beveridge Curve and What is it Telling Us?
BLS explains: "This graph plots the job openings rate against the unemployment rate. This graphical representation is known as the Beveridge Curve, named after the British economist William Henry Beveridge (1879-1963). The economy’s position on the downward sloping Beveridge Curve reflects the state of the business cycle. During an expansion, the unemployment rate is low and the job openings rate is high. Conversely, during a contraction, the unemployment rate is high and the job openings rate is low. The position of the curve is determined by the efficiency of the labor market. For example, a greater mismatch between available jobs and the unemployed in terms of skills or location would cause the curve to shift outward, up and toward the right."
Thus, on the graph the U.S. economy slides down the Beveridge curve during the recession from March 2001 to November 2001, shown by the dark blue line on the graph. During the Great Recession from December 2007 to June 2009, the economy slides down the Beveridge curve again. On a given Beveridge curve, recessions move toward the bottom right, and periods of growth move toward the upper left.
However, the right hand-side of the Beveridge curve seems to convey a dispiriting message. Instead of the economy working its way directly back up the Beveridge curve since the end of the recession, it seems instead to be looping out to the right: that is, even though the number of job openings has been rising, the unemployment rate has not been falling as fast as might be expected. Why not?
One possible reason is that this kind of looping counterclockwise pattern in the Beveridge curve is not unusual in the aftermath of recessions. Daly, Hobijn, Sahin, and Valletta provide a graph graphing Beveridge curve data back to 1951. Notice that the Beveridge curve can shift from decade to decade. Also, if you look at the labels for 1990s and 1980s, it's clear that the Beveridge curve can have an outward counterclockwise shift for a time. A partial explanation here is that at the tail end of recession, employers are still reluctant to hire, so that even as they start to post more job openings, their actual hiring doesn't go full speed ahead until they are confident that the recovery will be sustained. Conversely, if employers aren't fully confident that the recovery will be sustained, they won't be quick to hire.
My own thoughts about the pattern of U.S. unemployment situation developed along these lines: The unemployment rate hovered at 4.4-4.5% from September 2006 through May 2007. In October 2009 it peaked at 10%. By December 2011 it had fallen to 8.5%, but since then, it has remained stuck above 8%--for example, 8.3% in July. How can these patterns be explained?
As a starting point, we should recognize that the 4.4% rate of unemployment back in late 2006 and early 2007 was part of a bubble economy at that time--an unsustainably low unemployment rate being juiced by the bubble in housing prices and the associated financial industry bubble. Estimating the sustainable rate of unemployment for an economy--the so-called "natural rate of unemployment"--is as much art as science. But in retrospect, a reasonable guess might be that the dynamics of the bubble were pushing the unemployment rate down from a natural rate of maybe 5.5%.
When the U.S. unemployment rate hit 10% in October 2009, it was countered with an enormous blast of expansionary fiscal and monetary policy. That is, the economy was stimulated both through huge budget deficits and through near-zero interest rates from the Federal Reserve. The ability of these policies to bring down unemployment quickly was overpromised, but they made a real contribution to stopping the unemployment rate from climbing above 10% and to getting it down to 8.3%.
To put it another way, I strongly suspect that whoever is elected president in November 2012 will look like an economic policy genius by early in 2014. It won't be so much because of any policies enacted during that time, but just a matter of the slow economic adjustment of Beveridge curve.
As an afterthought, I'll add that Beveridge curve is apparently one more manifestation of an old pattern in academic work: Curves and laws and rules are often named after people who did not actually discover them. This is sometimes called Stigler's law: "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer." Of course, Steve Stigler was quick to point out in his 1980 article that he didn't discover his own law, either!
The U.S. economy since the Great Recession is clearly failing Beveridge's test for full employment, and failing it badly.
I've posted in the past about "The Big Decline in Housing Segregation" by race, but it seems likely that another kind of residential segregation is on the rise. In a report for the Pew Research Center, Paul Taylor (no relation) and Richard Fry discuss "The Rise of Residential Segregation by Income Social & Demographic Trends."
To measure the extent to which households are segregated by income, the authors take three steps. First, they look at the 30 U.S. cities with the largest number of households. Second, they categorized households by income as lower, middle, or upper income. "For the purpose of this analysis, low-income households are defined as having less than two-thirds of the national median annual income and upper-income households as having more than double the national median annual income. Using these thresholds, it took an annual household income of less than $34,000 in 2010 to be labeled low income and $104,000 or above to be labeled upper income. The Center conducted multiple analyses using different thresholds to define lower- and upper-income households. The basic finding reported here of increased residential segregation by income was consistent regardless of which thresholds were used." Third, they look at where households are living by Census tract: "The nation’s 73,000 census tracts are the best statistical proxy available from the Census Bureau to define neighborhoods. The typical census tract has about 4,200 residents. In a sparsely populated rural area, a tract might cover many square miles; in a densely populated urban area, it might cover just a city block or two. But these are outliers. As a general rule, a census tract conforms to what people typically think of as a neighborhood."
Overall, the national index rose from 32 in 1980 to 46 in 2010. The report does not seek to analyze the differences across cities, which are presumably influenced by a range of local factors. At the regional level, "one finds that the metro areas in the Southwest have the highest average RISI score (57), followed by those in the Northeast (48), Midwest (44), West (38) and Southeast (35). The analysis also shows that the level of residential segregation by income in the big Southwestern metro areas have, on average, increased much more rapidly from 1980 to 2010 than have those in other parts of the country. But all regions have had some increase."
"[T]here has been shrinkage over time in the share of households in the U.S. that have an annual income that falls within 67% to 200% of the national median, which are the boundaries used in this report to define middle-income households. In 1980, 54% of the nation’s households fell within this statistically defined middle; by 2010, just 48% did. The decline in the share of middle-income households is largely accounted for by an increase in the share of upper-income households. ... With fewer households now in the middle income group, it’s not surprising that there are now also more census tracts in which at least half of the households are either upper income or lower income. In 2010, 24% of all census tracts fell into one category or the other—with 18% in the majority lower-income category and 6% in the majority upper-income category. Back in 1980, 15% of all census tracts fell into one category or the other—with 12% majority lower and 3% majority upper. To be sure, even with these increases over time in the shares of tracts that have a high concentration of households at one end of the income scale or the other, the vast majority of tracts in the country—76%—do not fit this profile. Most of America’s neighborhoods are still mostly middle income or mixed income—just not as many as before."
I have no strong prior belief about how much residential segregation by income is desirable, and I have no reason to believe that the extent of residential segregation by income in 1980 was some golden historical ideal to which we should aspire. But in a U.S. economy with rising inequality of incomes, and in which our economic and political future will depend on shared interactions, a rising degree of residential segregation by income does give me a queasy feeling.
To hear the candidates and the media tell it, every presidential election year has greater historical importance and is more frenzied and intense than any previous election. But the share of U.S. adults who actually vote has been voter turnout has mostly been trending down over time. Here's are some basic facts from a chartbook put together by the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.
The youngest group of voters from age 18-24 have seen a rise in turnout recently, especially from 2000 to 2004, and there is a more modest rise in turnout for some other age groups. But all elections since 1988 have had lower turnout than that year; in turn, 1988 had lower turnout that the presidential elections from 1964-1972.
I see the chart as a reminder of a basic truth: Elections aren't decided by what people say to pollsters. They are determined by who actually casts a vote.
"The historical meaning of a commons is a piece of pasture land that is open to anyone who wishes to graze their cattle upon it. More recently, the term has come to apply to any area that is open to all, like a city park. In a famous 1968 article, a professor of ecology named Garrett Hardin (1915-2003) described a scenario called the tragedy of the commons, in which the utility-maximizing behavior of individuals ruins the commons for all."
"Hardin imagined a pasture that is open to many herdsmen, each with their own herd of cattle. A herdsman benefits from adding cows, but too many cows will lead to overgrazing and even to ruining the commons. The problem that when a herdsman adds a cow, the herdsman personally receives all of the gain, but when that cow contributes to overgrazing and injures the commons, the loss is suffered by all of the herdsmen as a group—so any individual herdsman suffers only a small fraction of the loss. Hardin wrote: `Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit—in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.'"
"This tragedy of the commons can arise in any situations where benefits are primarily received by one party, while the costs are spread out over many parties. For example, clean air can be regarded as a commons, where firms that pollute air can gain higher profits, but firms that pay for anti-pollution equipment provide a benefit to others. A commons can be regarded as a public good, where it is difficult to exclude anyone from use (nonexcludability) and where many parties can use the resource simultaneously (nonrivalrous)."
"The historical commons was often protected, at least for a time, by social rules that limited how many cattle a herdsman could graze. Avoiding a tragedy of the commons with the environment will require its own set of rules which limit how the common resource can be used."
Hardin's original 1968 article is widely available on the web--for example, here.
I enjoyed Angus's counterattack, but in the end, it seemed to me overwrought. The logic behind the tragedy of the commons is solid enough that it is often a useful starting point for thinking about shared resource issues. I'm fairly confident that Hardin didn't see himself as blaming the poor for their own poverty and for ecological destruction! However, it's important to emphasize that because a tragedy of the commons is possible doesn't make it inevitable. And further, as the penultimate sentence from my short textbook description mentions,social rules and community self-regulation have often been able to manage the commons for a considerable period of time.
High Government Debt: A Bang or a Whimper? |
0.962287 | Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have achieved great success at generating realistic images. However, the text generation still remains a challenging task for modern GAN architectures. In this work, we propose RelGAN, a new GAN architecture for text generation, consisting of three main components: a relational memory based generator for the long-distance dependency modeling, the Gumbel-Softmax relaxation for training GANs on discrete data, and multiple embedded representations in the discriminator to provide a more informative signal for the generator updates. Our experiments show that RelGAN outperforms current state-of-the-art models in terms of sample quality and diversity, and we also reveal via ablation studies that each component of RelGAN contributes critically to its performance improvements. Moreover, a key advantage of our method, that distinguishes it from other GANs, is the ability to control the trade-off between sample quality and diversity via the use of a single adjustable parameter. Finally, RelGAN is the first architecture that makes GANs with Gumbel-Softmax relaxation succeed in generating realistic text. |
0.99926 | London, England (CNN) -- It's an extraordinary meeting to discuss an extraordinary incident.
FIFA, football's governing body, has called an emergency meeting Wednesday in Cape Town, during which many commentators expect it to approve a plan to have five referees at every match at next summer's World Cup finals.
Football's governing body had to act after the global gasp that followed Thierry Henry's blatant handball during France's play-off victory over Ireland. The win put France through to the finals and left Ireland feeling cheated.
FIFA has already allowed such an experiment in this season's Europa League, where an extra official stands to the left of each goal mouth. In the Henry match, they would have been right in front of the handball.
Referees' groups are disappointed the match official has been criticized as much as Henry.
"It's all very well to blame the ref for not spotting it but fundamentally it starts with the players and the players have really got to think about the game, think about the reputation of the game and their own reputations and say, look, there is a line we won't cross," said Alan Leighton from Prospect, the UK referees' union.
Leighton said that recently in China and Thailand, "referees have been attacked by players during games, with one referee breaking a finger and needing 50 stitches in Thailand. In China, one referee was chased by a player, pushed to the ground and narrowly avoided a beating."
Football referees seem to be under more scrutiny than ever before.
"It's become quicker," said Leighton. "There's more money in it. The stakes are much higher and, therefore, that all adds to the pressure."
Many referees say they would welcome more help to make decisions but unlike American football, cricket or rugby, soccer bosses are refusing to use TV technology.
"There has been a lot of calls for video evidence to be used, technology to be used," said Gary Mabbutt, the former England and Tottenham Hotspur defender. "I am not a great believer in that because if you are playing at White Hart Lane [Tottenham Hotspur's home ground] on a Wednesday afternoon in mid-December, it is snowing, it is minus two degrees, and you've got to wait around for someone sitting in a nice warm box to make a decision. I think it could slow down the game and I think it could effect it overall."
Fans say they've seen plenty over the years that referees have missed.
"I've been in plenty of football grounds when I am 100 yards away from the action and I can see something clearly that has happened that the referee has missed and you sometimes wonder," said Kevin Miles, from the Football Supporters Federation. "But by the same token, I don't think there is anything that you can do about it after the game."
Miles said he thought the "referee's decision has got to stand otherwise if they start re-opening that France/Ireland game, I want that game in Argentina in '86 looked at again."
He is of course referring to Maradona's so-called "Hand of God" goal at the Mexico World Cup, probably the most infamous handball in football history.
23 years ago, most of the consternation focused on the player. Now, the spotlight is just as likely to fall on the referee. |
0.999986 | A potential human community is a group of people sharing some interest but do not yet know each other’s person. Assuming that personal homepages usually carry personal information, we have developed a new method that allows us to automatically find such communities from them. Potential human communities, once found, can be used for enhancing human activities; a potential human community can refer you a person having the same interest as yours, for example. A Web community, on the other hand, is a set of Web pages sharing some topic. While a lot of researches about information retrieval have focused on web communities themselves, we instead focused on pages that link to them. In other words, we assumed that a potential human community is group of personal homepages each of which has at least one hyperlink to one of the pages in a Web community. Our method constructs Web communities from hyperlinks and finds corresponding potential human communities. In our experiment, we found potential human communities and relations between them. Also, we found a potential key person in the intersection among multiple potential human communities who can realize interactions across them. |
0.958929 | A two-story house of frame construction was built at the plantation by William Hilton. It may have also served as a tavern known as High Hills Tavern (7, pp. 2, 15, 20) (8).
? William Moore transfered ownership to Adam F. Brisbane (7, p. 9).
1780-1781 The house served as headquarters for both Lord Cornwallis and General Nathaniel Green during the Revolutionary War (1) (7, p. 2).
1792 Thomas Hooper purchased the plantation from Adam F. Brisbane and his wife Mary (7, p. 9, 21).
1802 Mary Heron Hooper became owner of the plantation after the death of her husband, Thomas Hooper (7, p. 9).
1820 The niece and adopted daughter of Mary Hooper, Mary Jane McKenzie Anderson and her husband, Dr. William Wallace Anderson, became owners of Borough House Plantation after the death of Mary Hooper (7, p. 9).
1821 Dr. William W. Anderson added the wings to the house and several outbuildings using pisé de terre (rammed earth) construction (1, pp. 2-3) (7, p. 2).
1864 Dr. William Wallace Anderson passed away and was proceeded in death by first wife Mary Jane in 1832. Dr. Anderson had remarried in 1833 to Elizabeth Waites in and willed Borough House Plantation to Elizabeth until her natural death then it was to go to his eldest son, General Richard H. Anderson (4) (7, p. 9).
1865 The house was spared from being destroyed during the Civil War by Union commander Colonel Potter. Potter was a Mason and upon learning that Elizabeth Anderson was a member of the Eastern Star, the women's Masonic organization, he ordered his troops not to burn the house but allowed them to plunder the plantation (7, pp. 23-14).
1877 Virginia Childs Anderson, wife of Dr. William Wallace Anderson II, became the plantation's owner. It is not clear if she purchased Borough House from the estate of Dr. William Wallace Anderson after Elizabeth's 1876 death or from the son, her husband's brother, General Richard H. Anderson. It is also unclear if Virginia owned the plantation solely or jointly with her husband (7, p. 9).
1912 Virginia Childs Anderson passed away (her husband Dr. William Wallace Anderson II had died in 1911) and willed the plantation to son William Wallace Anderson III who gave title to his sister Ann Catherine Anderson Saunders. Ann Saunders and her husband purchased adjoining property to greatly increase the size of the plantation (7, p. 10) (8).
1923 Ann Catherine Anderson Saunders gave the plantation to daughter Mary Virginia Saunders White (7, p. 10).
1946 Mary Virginia Saunders White converted the plantation from growing cotton to a timber managed tree farm. The Borough House Plantation was the first farm of this type in South Carolina and holds Certificate No. 1 from the South Carolina Tree Farms System (7, p. 10).
1959 Mary Virginia Saunders White died and left Borough House Plantation to her daughter Mary Greenleaf White Anderson. Mary Anderson was married to Richard K. Anderson the great-grandson of Dr. William Wallace Anderson I (7, p. 10).
1972 Mary White Anderson was still owner of record. She passed away in June 2016 (1, p. 1) (10).
2016 Borough House Plantation is still owned by Anderson family descendants (9).
Slave List and Workers List - this list is a compilation of slave records kept by Dr. Anderson for Borough House Plantation. They span several decades and were updated to include surnames as listed in the 1870 and 1880 censuses of those that remained at Borough House as contract workers after the Civil War. This file also includes birth years, mothers' and fathers' first names when available, and is grouped by families.
The house and accompanying outbuildings are the largest remaining complex of pisé de terre buildings in the United States (1, p. 13).
Information contributed by photographer Gazie Nagle.
Obituary of Mary Greenleaf White Anderson. |
0.998896 | The greatest weakness of a fat cat is Three Chords and the Truth.
One of three vague main categories of music, alongside Classical Music and pop. The easiest way to understand the differences between the three would be; in Folk Music, the author is often ambiguous, and music is often distributed by rote; Classical Music refers to the tradition of music being performed from the score; and Popular Music refers to the tradition of music being played from recordings to reach a wide audience.
Despite it being the oldest category of music out there, no one seems quite sure what folk music really is, or if it even constitutes a proper genre. To many modern commentators, it is any music played by a lone singer-songwriter with a guitar, three chords and the Truth. Except, of course, when it's played by a band, with complex arrangements, and there are no acoustic instruments in sight.
To understand what folk music is and the kind of genres it covers, it is best to look at the history of the term. It is derived from folklore; i.e., the culture, traditions and customs of agrarian and working-class society. According to its original definition, it was distinguished from classical (or "art") music and popular music. The main characteristics of folk music were that it enjoyed mainly local popularity and was played by non-professional musicians. Later, it became largely synonymous with traditional music; i.e., songs that had been handed down orally for many generations and were still known to some segments of the population—and weren't part of one of the newfangled musical genres (like Tin Pan Alley, music hall, ragtime, or Jazz).
In this context, it was soon used to describe music that was peculiar to a particular part of the world and that did not fit the mold of academic or popular music. World Music is now the more commonly used term for this category.
In the British Isles and North America, a renewal of interest in folk music took place between the 1890s and the 1960s. As singers such as Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly led the scene during The Great Depression, it culminated in the American folk music revival, which began in 1948 with the rise of Pete Seeger and the Weavers. There was something of an interruption during the Red Scare of The '50s, since even playing a guitar was grounds for suspicion for communist sympathies, and some of the major figures like Pete Seeger and Ewan MacColl openly identified as socialists. However, the revival continued into The '60s with the likes of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Peter Sarstedt and Phil Ochs.
Although all these musicians, from Guthrie through Dylan, drew heavily from tradition and were well versed in ancient ballads, it was at this point that many of them began to write their own material, addressing highly relevant political issues of the day; some of these songs had enough universal resonance to become standards themselves. Folk music became strongly associated with progressive politics and the Civil Rights Movement.
A similar movement took place in Britain and Ireland, with perhaps a little more focus on the traditional aspect (although especially in Ireland, singing traditional songs itself is a political act).
It was from this Folk Revival that a new conception of folk emerged. Bob Dylan, the major breakout figure of the movement, soon abandoned politics in favour of more poetic, introspective songs. In 1965, he released two albums- Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited that blended folk music with blues rock. In the same year, The Byrds released their hit single "Mr. Tambourine Man", a Dylan cover, which brought a pop-influenced upbeat and rhythmic element to the song. Bob Dylan and The Byrds were now the Trope Makers of a new genre: Folk Rock. From folk rock emerged Psychedelic Folk, Indie Folk and countless other genres. While it ultimately derived from the Folk Revival, folk music was not a classification anymore, but a particular style of music influenced by the one that emerged in The '60s. It is a popular genre, if a somewhat alternative and underground one, to this day.
This is only one narrative drawn from the history of folk. Along the way, its many subgenres and regional variants spawned Blues, Country Music, Bluegrass, Folk Punk, Folk Metal and some of its elements incorporated into Slowcore. Depending on which definition you use, all music was at some point derived from folk. Before there were Bach and Beethoven, before The Beatles and The Buzzcocks, there were a few lone singers and instrumentalists who made songs purely for the love of it.
Around the 80's a genre called antifolk emerged, the shtick being subversion of the earnestness of 60's style folk, mocking pretension and seriousness and often being raw and experimental. Its definition is as loose and broad as folk itself. An example of a band influenced by this is the Mountain Goats.
European musicians, particularly in Eastern Europe, have followed in exploring their own folk traditions through the use of electric or electronic instruments. This music tends to be more traditional and folklore-orientated. However, the "sung poetry" genre in the Baltic States and Poland also focuses on setting the works of national poets to music. Other movements include "turbofolk", which had Unfortunate Implications in Serbia, where it was largely sponsored by the Milosevic clan, particularly Mira Markovic.
Perhaps all this confusion is best summarised by a quote from Louis Armstrong: "All music is folk. I ain't never heard no horse sing a song".
Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder: Occasionally subverted by the woman who does wait and then double subverted by her lover in disguise who tests her by trying to woo her away from her promise.
Always Murder: Too many murder ballads to count!
Bawdy Song: Probably as many of these as murder ballads, if not more.
Determined Homesteader and related tropes, sometimes used ironically.
Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters: Applies especially to IRA songs, but most outlaw ballads and a few protest songs also fit.
Björk: Recorded one album almost entirely in a cappella, with lots of throat singing. Her other albums sometimes include folk elements, too.
Leonard Cohen - Very good writer, less good singer, gets covered frequently as a result.
Jim Croce - With elements of blues, country, and pop.
Ergyron - Chukchi (Russian Eskimo) song and dance ensemble.
The Grateful Dead: From the 1970s on.
Namgar - the best and only Buryat-Mongolian folk-rock fusion band.
Sinéad O'Connor - Known for her folk-rock, along with various other genres.
Natalia O Shea - Russo-Celtic folk-rock.
Anette Olzon - She's better known for her work in Symphonic Metal bands, but her two solo albums are a mix of folk rock, Alternative Rock, and Indie Pop. |
0.951822 | I surprised when blaziken was putted in smogon ubers is it because of its speed boost?
They put Blazekin in Uber because of his Ability to Baton-pass Swords-dance/Hone-claws and Speed boosts. If you are thinking: "Well can't Ninjask do that too?" yes but Blazekin can also hit hard and make use of the boosts to his Attack. Personally I believe that he is better suited for OU as Priority kills him, Focus-sash kills him, and several more things kill him. Usually Blazekin has this Moveset: Hi-jump-kick/Swords-dance, Blaze-kick/Swords-dance, Protect, and Baton-pass.
Dragonite: Resists both STABs, has Extreme speed/Aqua-jet for priority, and is bulky enough to take multiple hits.
Tentacruel: Resists both STABs, has Haze to remove his Stat ups, has super effective STAB. Gyarados: Resists both STABs, can OHKO Blazekin in one hit from Waterfall.
Giratina: Immune to Fighting, resists fire, has priority Shadow-sneak, Origin form would be the best for KOing him.
Raquaza: Resists both STABs, Extreme-speed priority, hits super Hard.
Honestly most Ubers can take him though, the real problem is beating the Pokemon he Baton-passes too. So it is a good idea to have a Pokemon with Haze or Clear-smog. |
0.977634 | -- from scrambled to fried to soft boiled. To make the perfect soft-boiled eggs, follow these simple steps.
1. Boil a pan of water and drop in the egg. Do not place the egg in the pan while bringing the water to a boil, or it will be overcooked.
2. Cook the egg for about three minutes. A larger egg may need a little more time.
3. Hold the egg and tap around the center with a knife, and then gently pull the shell apart. You can use a small spoon or serve the egg with strips of toasted bread for dipping. |
0.936093 | Increasing evidence suggests that neural population responses have their own internal drive, or dynamics, that describe how the neural population evolves through time. An important prediction of neural dynamical models is that previously observed neural activity is informative of noisy yet-to-be-observed activity on single-trials, and may thus have a denoising effect. To investigate this prediction, we built and characterized dynamical models of single-trial motor cortical activity. We find these models capture salient dynamical features of the neural population and are informative of future neural activity on single trials. To assess how neural dynamics may beneficially denoise single-trial neural activity, we incorporate neural dynamics into a brain–machine interface (BMI). In online experiments, we find that a neural dynamical BMI achieves substantially higher performance than its non-dynamical counterpart. These results provide evidence that neural dynamics beneficially inform the temporal evolution of neural activity on single trials and may directly impact the performance of BMIs. |
0.999768 | TL;DR: The next version of TrendWeight will not support Internet Explorer 11 or earlier. See below for why and what you can do if this affects you.
Internet Explorer is a very old browser and does not support modern web standards. That makes it harder (though not impossible) for developers like me to create the features we want without a bunch of extra work. Since this is a project I work on for fun in my free time, I'm choosing not to do that extra work.
So... You will not be able to use Internet Explorer 11 or earlier with TrendWeight once I finish the new version.
As I said above, I still have a lot of work to do to finish the new version, and I only find a few hours each week to work on it, but I'm getting closer to the end and wanted to give you all as much of a warning as possible about this coming change.
But what do I do if I only have Internet Explorer today? You'll need to get a modern browser.
If you are on Windows 10, you can still use Microsoft's Edge browser.
If you are on Windows 7 (or earlier?!?), then you can install Chrome or Firefox.
Internet Explorer is used by less than 0.7% of the TrendWeight users who visited the site in February 2019, so this won't affect most people. For those that it does inconvenience, I'm sorry, but it's time to upgrade to a better browser.
If you have questions, feel free to email me at erv@ewal.net or support@trendweight.com. |
0.912688 | For those of a similar name, see George Borg (disambiguation).
Giorgio Borg Olivier, GCPO KSS (Maltese: Ġorġ Borg Olivier) (5 July 1911 – 29 October 1980) was a Maltese statesman and leading politician. He twice served as Prime Minister of Malta (from 1950–55, and from 1962–71) as the Leader of the Nationalist Party. He was also Leader of the Opposition between 1955–58, and again between 1971–77.
Borg Olivier was elected as one of the three Nationalist members of the Council of Government in 1939. In May 1940, when the leader of the Nationalist party, Enrico Mizzi, was first interned by the British and deported, Borg Olivier became interim leader. After his return, Mizzi made Borg Olivier his deputy. Rising to office as a protégé of Mizzi and Sir Ugo P. Mifsud, Borg Olivier believed in the economic and social development of Malta as a viable independent state and in the necessity of a mixed economy. During his premiership, he pursued corporatist policies to develop the tourism industry and construction as the engine of growth. Under his leadership, average living standards rose steadily as Malta began to decouple from a fortress economy purely dependent on the British military establishment.
Near the end of his rule as prime minister, his government was rocked by various political and personal scandals, which seemed to symbolise the moral decay of the Maltese political establishment. Resigning from Leader of the Nationalist Party in 1977, Borg Olivier retained his parliamentary seat until his death in 1980. He was succeeded as leader of the party by Eddie Fenech Adami.
George Borg Olivier was born in Valletta, the son of Olivier Borg Olivier de Puget Paleologo and Rosa (née Amato), and had had a sheltered childhood lived in the Valletta of the 1920s and 1930s.
Borg Olivier grew up in a family steeped in Nationalist politics. His uncle Salvatore was speaker of the house and then a senator, and led the opposition to Lord Strickland's Constitutional Party in the 1920s before becoming a cabinet minister during the premiership of Ugo P. Mifsud in the early 1930s. Borg Olivier followed in this uncle's footsteps by becoming a notary.
He was educated at the Lyceum, Malta, and the Royal University of Malta, where he graduated Doctor of Laws in 1937. As a university student, Borg Olivier was elected President of the Comitato Permanente Universitario until it was suppressed by the British colonial government in March 1935.
Borg Olivier married Alexandra Mattei in 1943. They had one daughter, Angela, and two sons, Alexander and Peter. Alexandra Borg Olivier died on 25 February 2009, aged 87.
The internees were returned to Malta in May 1945, and the three Nationalist members of the Council resigned in July, with the Nationalists refusing to participate in the 1945 elections. This was a protest against the imposition of non-administrative government. In 1947, Borġ Olivier was elected to the Legislative Assembly and was later Deputy Leader of the Opposition. The Boffa Government of 1947 was soon in crisis following Paul Boffa's disagreements with Dom Mintoff.
Following the general elections of 1950, Borg Olivier held the post of Minister for Public Works and Reconstruction and Minister of Education in a Nationalist Minority Government led by Enrico Mizzi. Borg Olivier became Prime Minister and Minister of Justice in a Minority Government upon Mizzi's death in December 1950. He was also confirmed leader of the Nationalist Party by the Party's Executive Committee. The obstructionist strategies of the parties in opposition made Borġ Olivier bid the Governor, Sir Gerald Creasy, to call for fresh elections. These were held in May 1951, and as a result of them, Borg Olivier formed a coalition Government with the Malta Workers' Party, which was led by erstwhile PM Paul Boffa. Borg Olivier was head of the new government, retaining the Ministry for Public Works and Reconstruction. Re-elected in 1953, the coalition remained in office till 1955.
On the political front, these years were marked with the attempt for a proper definition of Malta's constitutional status and relationship with the United Kingdom. One such attempt related to an incident with respect to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. Borġ Olivier was invited for the ceremony, but refused to attend unless Malta's precedence rights were respected. The difficulties were overcome when the British government agreed to treat the Prime Minister of Malta on an equal basis to the Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia and Northern Ireland. This was a diplomatic victory for Borġ Olivier, winning him unanimous approval in Parliament.
During his stay in London, Borġ Olivier presented a memorandum to the Minister of State for Colonial Affairs, Henry Hopkinson, explaining the Maltese government's position that Malta ought be transferred from the Colonial Office to the Commonwealth Office, as an independent dominion within the Commonwealth. This was a counter-proposal to the British Government's offer to move Malta under Home Office responsibility. Discussions by a Maltese delegation in May 1953 focused on the legal, constitutional and economic aspects of this question. This was a prelude to the political struggle with Mintoff's Malta Labour Party, which favoured full integration with Britain.
The general elections of 1955, which were lost by the Nationalist party, were linked with the two competing proposals of integration with Britain and dominion status. The imperial authorities on the islands were accused of exerting undue pressure on the electorate by the Nationalist party, with the Governor, Major General Sir Robert Laycock, taking the unheard of step of addressing the electorate over the rediffusion at the start of the electoral campaign. The Nationalist Congress, held on 24 April 1955, passed a resolution deploring the "scandalous and unconstitutional interference of the Governor."
From 1955–58, Borg Olivier served as Leader of Opposition. He led the Nationalist Party delegations in June and September 1955 for the Malta Round Table Conference. In these meetings, the Nationalist members reiterated that "Malta ought be given full autonomy within the Commonwealth, autonomous in its relationship with the United Kingdom, but not with the rest of the Commonwealth and other independent nations. The matters dealing with defense, the Commonwealth and international relationships should be the equal responsibility of the governments of the United Kingdom and Malta."
These constitutional demands were not met by the British government, which moved to agree in principle with Mintoff's demands for integration with Britain. A referendum was called, with Borg Olivier calling a boycott of the vote. Although the votes cast showed a substantial majority for integration, the outcome clearly showed that the nation did not approve of the proposals. Coupled with Borġ Olivier's attempts to expose British intrusions, and that "the Secretary of State for the Colonies is determined to bulldoze integration on the Island," support for the Malta Labour Party's proposal for full integration began to wane.
With the decrease in British defence spending, and the British government's unwillingness to set dates for full equality between the Maltese and British people, the integration proposal was effectively dead. At this point, Mintoff resigned and declared a national day of protest. Riots broke out on 28 April 1958. The governor declared a state of emergency with troops placed on standby to help the civil police. After Borg Olivier's refusal to form a government, the governor was forced to declare a state of public emergency in Malta, suspending the 1947 Constitution.
Following the February 1962 election, Borg Olivier agreed to form a Government after obtaining important amendments to the Constitution. In addition to being Prime Minister, he assumed the portfolio of Minister of Economic Planning and Finance. In the 1962 elections, 76% of the electorate voted for the principal parties which were demanding Independence. The Nationalist Party had suffered an internal split, with Herbert Ganado founding the more populist Democratic Nationalist Party.
The Nationalists gained a majority and therefore Borg Olivier became Prime Minister. Shortly afterwards, amendments to the Constitution were made. Borg Olivier proceeded to London to ask for a financial agreement and demand Independence with full membership within the Commonwealth. At the time unemployment had risen to 6% and there were fears of discharges from the Naval Arsenal. On 20 August 1962, Dr Borg Olivier presented a formal request for Independence. It was soon made known that the Attorney General Prof John J. Cremona, was working on a draft constitution while it was announced that a Malta Independence Conference was to be held at Marlborough House, London. The Conference started on 16 July 1963. Delegates from all the political parties led by Borg Olivier, Dom Mintoff, Toni Pellegrini, Herbert Ganado and Mabel Strickland attended. The Conference was chaired by Duncan Sandys. Discussions went on right through July. The Maltese Government was asking for a monarchical state with a Governor General representing the Queen. The Secretary of State proposed a referendum about the constitution.
Borg Olivier's shrewdness as a politician enabled him to use the ongoing religious conflict between the Labour Party and the Maltese church, headed by Archbishop Mikiel Gonzi, to his advantage. This was a particular achievement given Borg Olivier's relationship with the Bishop were very strained. However, Borg Olivier was still able to gain a reduction in the clerical and episcopal influence on Maltese politics.
This was the tail end of the Maltese Politico-religious dispute, comparable in some ways to the questions arising thirty years earlier, in Strickland's time. Although there was a personality clash between Archbishop Gonzi and Mintoff, other issues of power and jurisdiction were clearly becoming evident in the growing tension between the ecclesiastical sphere and the state. Mass hysteria and campaigns of almost sectarian proportions ensued, with Mintoff and several of his Labour Party colleagues being denied the sacraments and demonised. Borg Olivier was no religious fanatic, and took the politically correct side against his main adversary, riding on the wave of religious sentiment. Privately he argued that the Church's efforts to rally third parties to enter the political fray was damaging his chances. This referred in particular to a second, Church-supported right-wing party led by Herbert Ganado, which had returned four MPs in the 1962 elections. Ganado, along with three other ‘pro-church’ small parties, two of which with returned MPs, were opposed to independence.
Gonzi wanted to check both Mintoff and Borġ Olivier, to prevent the loss of the Church's guarded status under a new political system. Both the main political parties, the PN and the MLP, had independence from Britain prominently included in their electoral campaigns. On taking office in 1962, the demand for independence was put on the table quickly enough and preliminary discussions began almost immediately. Borġ Olivier tried rather unsuccessfully to get Britain to increase its aid to Malta, to protect against the consequences of the planned ‘run down’ of British service establishments in Malta. After unsuccessful talks, Borg Olivier retorted that he had not gone to London "to make a silver collection".
From his London hotel on 20 August 1962, Borg Olivier addressed to the secretary of state for the colonies a formal and urgent request for Malta's independence. The main British concern was of course defence, but also security. The violence of 1958 and subsequent events, including manifestations of support for ‘neutrality and non-alignment’, had rather dented regard for Mintoff and his party generally, not only among the British Conservative Party. The Malta Labour Party tended to be perceived now as departing from or sidelining the Western camp. It was the Nationalists under Borg Olivier who were now seen by the British as the better able to reassure the West, and to offer the best chances for democracy, security, and stability in an independent state.
After a controversial referendum in May 1964, in which a majority of the votes cast approved the proposed independence constitution, in July a full round of talks with all the five political parties concerned, led by Borg Olivier as prime minister, was held at Marlborough House in London. The minority view against immediate independence was dismissed. The majority view was hindered by disagreements as to constitutional form, mainly concerning civil and secular entitlements against traditional Roman Catholic presumptions and fears, but one of Mintoff's six points also endorsed the potential justification of violence. The MLP also seemed unenthusiastic about Malta's staying in the Commonwealth, or retaining the George Cross in the national colours.
On 13 July 1963, Borg Olivier headed a Government delegation for the Malta Independence Conference at the end of which it was announced that Malta would become independent. On 25 January 1964, Borg Olivier was made a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St. Sylvester, Pope, by Pope Paul VI. After having had a series of talks with the British Government and after preparing a Constitution for an independent Malta, which was endorsed by Parliament and approved by the people in a referendum held in February 1964, Borg Olivier set 21 September as Malta's Independence Day. Independence was part of a package which included retaining British defence facilities for ten years and financial aid to the tune of £51 million. NATO's Mediterranean branch headquarters, just outside Valletta, was also retained, ensuring that Malta would remain in the Western sphere of influence, while British and NATO forces would continue to benefit from the islands' strategic location.
On Independence Day, 21 September 1964, the degree of Doctor of Literature (Honoris Causa) was conferred on Borg Olivier by the Royal University of Malta. In November 1964, he was received by Pope Paul VI and made Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Pius IX.
In March 1965, he became Minister of Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs in addition to his duties as Prime Minister and Minister of Economic Planning and Finance. In the General Elections held in March 1966, the Nationalist Party was again returned to power with Borg Olivier as Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs. On 14 June 1968, Borg Olivier was decorated with the Grand Cross of Merit of the Order of Malta by the Grand Master of the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St. John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta.
Borg Olivier's family affairs, which were somewhat disturbed, soon fell under public scrutiny. The marital relationship of the Borg Olivier couple began to be used by all his political opponents as a source of criticism. These scandals were part of the political rhetoric of the 1960s. The Maltese church's teachings still played a cardinal role in local politics. Borg Olivier had jumped on the Church's bandwagon, grasping a substantial political advantage from the Church's excommunication of the Maltese Labour Party.
Borg Olivier did not agree with the Church's position, yet he still capitalised on the situation and gave sterling support to the Church's authorities. The introduction of Labour newspapers in public hospitals was banned, a decision later revoked by the courts, while excommunicated citizens were forbidden from being buried in their family graves in public cemeteries. The abuse of Maltese children who had been sent to Australia on the initiative of the Maltese church was another scandal which rocked the country.
As the 1960s came to a close, an economy reeling from over-reliance on construction and labour troubles at the Dockyards endangered Borg Olivier's administration. Above all, the common belief was that Borg Olivier and his cabinet had no initiative, preferring to react rather than to act.
In the 1971 election campaign, the Labour Party claimed that the government was lazy and out of touch, especially compared with the aggressive and determined Mintoff. However, the Borg Olivier Cabinet was incredibly active meeting, in all, 766 times from August 27, 1962 to June 1, 1971, just before the elections which were to unseat it; the cabinet met even on Boxing Day, sometimes morning and evening, and even on the feast day of St Paul's Shipwreck. This effort did Borg Olivier no good; Mintoff and Labour regained power.
Having led the Nationalists to defeat in the 1971 election and also the next election five years later, Borg Olivier incurred increasing censure within as well as outside his own party. His approach seemed lightweight and passive compared with Mintoff's vehement rule. Borġ Olivier opposed, but without success, the growing tendency of Mintoff's most extreme supporters to resort to violence as a political weapon.
Among Borg Olivier's fellow party members, a younger generation had emerged by this time which considered him physically and politically incapable of winning back popular support from Mintoff. His growing tendency to procrastinate rather than to take tough decisions attracted particular criticism.
During January 1974, eighteen Nationalist parliamentarians signed a declaration of no confidence in Borġ Olivier's leadership. Three others who could not attend signed later. Out of 27 MPs, only five supported the party leader. These five MPs were Paulo Borg Olivier (George's brother), Albert Borg Olivier de Puget (George's nephew), Alfred Bonnici (who had been appointed speaker in the previous parliament by George), J. Cassar Galea (an old friend of Borġ Olivier) and Alexander Cachia Zammit (a former minister in Borg Olivier's cabinet). Borg Olivier could still count on the support of his relatives in the party, as well as on those politicians who, like Cachia Zammit, had been members of his 1962-1971 cabinets and were still in the legislature. For a while, that backing was enough to enable Borg Olivier to retain the party leadership. Yet when Borg Olivier loyalists proved incapable of opposing Mintoff's proposal to change Malta from a constitutional monarchy to a republic (with a parliamentary majority of two-thirds, but without the referendum which Borg Olivier wanted), his position was fatally weakened.
After Mintoff's re-election in 1976, the general feeling among most Nationalists was that the party could succeed only if it acquired a young, genuinely devout, dynamic Catholic as a new leader. In other words, the Nationalist Party wanted to adopt a populist approach. Ironically enough, it was a position which had been advocated by Ganado, but which Borg Olivier had strongly resisted in the sixties. Undercurrents began to form within the higher ranks of the party with the aim of removing Borg Olivier. Eddie Fenech Adami, a comparative newcomer among Nationalist parliamentarians, became the party's leader in 1977. At 44 years of age he was much younger and more determined than Borg Olivier. His tenure as Opposition Leader reinvigorated an ailing party, which achieved an actual majority of the popular vote in 1981.
Once forced out of the leadership, Borg Olivier resigned from parliament, feeling worthless. Leisure did not suit him. He became a recluse, alone, friendless and detached from the local political scene. A sense of betrayal marked his attitude, given that Fenech Adami had been encouraged by Borg Olivier to remain in politics after suffering two personal electoral defeats.
Despite his increasingly worsening health, Borġ Olivier still tried to remain active in public life. By 1980, Borg Olivier had been battling lung cancer for a number of years. Less than four years after he had resigned from the leadership of the Nationalist Party, he died at his Sliema home, at age 69, on Wednesday 29 October 1980.
Prime Minister Mintoff expressed his intention to organise a state funeral for Borg Olivier. His funeral was the largest state funeral in Maltese history up to that point in time, and it was followed by thousands who went to Valletta to pay their last respects. He was buried at Addolorata cemetery, Paola, Malta.
A monument in honour of Borġ Olivier was erected in Castille Square, Valletta in 1989, as part of the events commemorating the 25th anniversary of independence.
^ a b "Giorgio Borg Olivier's Biography: The Political life of a Maltese patriot". The Malta Independent. Retrieved 24 December 2013.
^ "Giorgio Borg Olivier's Biography: The Political life of a Maltese patriot". The Malta Independent. Retrieved 24 December 2013.
^ a b c "Dr Giorgio Borġ Olivier". A PROJECT RUN BY THE VASSALLOMALTA.COM WEBSITE. Retrieved 24 December 2013.
^ a b Grima, Noel (4 February 2014). "The 'lazy' Borg Olivier Cabinet met 766 times, the 'hyper-active' Mintoff one 45". The Malta Independent. Retrieved 4 February 2014.
^ "Wikileaks: Borg Olivier faced no confidence declaration by party MPs," The Malta Independent, Wednesday, 10 April 2013.
^ "Timestalk: Cachia Zammit regrets way how Borg Olivier was replaced". Times of Malta. 25 February 2014. Retrieved 25 February 2014.
^ a b D. Darmanin (2009). "My father, the Prime Minister". Malta Today.
Frendo, Henry (2000). The Origins of Maltese Statehood: A Case Study of Decolonization in the Mediterranean. Malta: BDL. p. 86. ISBN 9789993200369.
Galea, Michael (1989). Ġorġ Borg Olivier mill-qrib. Malta: Uffiċċju Informazzjoni, Partit Nazzjonalista.
Rudolf, Uwe Jens; Berg, W. G. (2010). Historical Dictionary of Malta. USA: Scarecrow Press. p. 43. ISBN 9780810853171.
This page was last edited on 4 April 2019, at 20:28 (UTC). |
0.879948 | I love Indian food, and there are a few dishes I like to cook. They're not necessarily authentic; or they're fairly authentic, just done to my preferences. This is my first time making vindaloo. It's traditionally spicy, but I wasn't in the mood for searing heat, so I just chopped up hot chiles to add at the end if I felt like it. You could also add them to the onion-based sauce mixture if you want heat to permeate the dish. I just stuck with some Indian chile powder (similar to cayenne) in the sauce blend.
The sauce itself is made mostly of onions sauteed with spices. It also gets a nice hit of vinegar for a little sourness. Potatoes also figure in and help make this version so hearty and comforting--yet still nice and healthy. Serve it over basmati rice. I finally figured out how to cook it perfectly, which is easier said than done (at least for me). Of course naan is never a bad idea either.
What's your favorite Indian dish, and do you make it at home?
This dish tastes authentic, but lacks the rich, heavy quality so often found in restaurant cooking. It's flavorful and hearty, and is worth the effort to put together (You'll need at least 1 hour to marinate). I finally stumbled upon the perfect method for cooking basmati rice (it was years of trial and error), so I've included that in the recipe. The side dish is just frozen green beans steamed in the microwave then seared in a skillet with about half a can of diced tomatoes and a bunch of the spices used in the vindaloo.
1. Heat 2 tbsp of the ghee in a Dutch oven or large pot on medium high heat. Add onions and cook, stirring occasionally, until tender and golden brown, 7 to 9 minutes. Add ginger and garlic and cook, stirring constantly, until softened, 1 to 2 minutes. Transfer to a blender. Add vinegar, coriander, cumin, garam masala, black pepper, turmeric, chile powder and 1/4 tsp of the salt, or salt to taste. Puree; if too thick to blend, slowly add water 1 tbsp at a time until you have a thick sauce.
2. Put chicken pieces in a large bowl. Add sauce and stir well. Refrigerate for 3 hours or as long as overnight; or rest at room temperature for 1 hour.
3. Bring a medium pot of water to a boil and cook until tender but not falling apart, 8 to 10 minutes. Drain and rinse and wipe out the saucepan.
4. Heat 1 tbsp of the ghee in the same medium saucepan on medium heat. Add rice and cook, stirring frequently until opaque and fragrant, 1 to 2 minutes. Add 1 3/4 cups water and a scant 1/4 tsp of the salt and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low and simmer, covered, until rice is tender and water is absorbed, 15 to 17 minutes. Keep the pan covered and set aside to rest for 10 minutes or more.
5. Heat 1 tbsp of the ghee in a large skillet on medium-high heat and add mustard seeds. When seeds start to pop, add the potatoes. Season lightly with salt and cook just until browned on most sides. Transfer to a bowl.
6. Heat remaining 1 tbsp of ghee in the Dutch oven (no need to clean it) on medium heat. Add the chicken with its sauce plus 1/2 cup of water and bring to a simmer. Reduce heat to maintain a slow simmer and cook, stirring frequently, until chicken is cooked through, about 10 minutes. Stir in potatoes and simmer just until heated through. Season with salt to taste. Add additional water if you want a thinner sauce. Sprinkle with cilantro and serve with rice and lime wedges. Pass the chiles (or additional chile powder) at the table for people who want to add more heat. |
0.964358 | Go into nature and set your intention to find a piece of nature to communicate with. When you are drawn to a piece of nature, pick it up and find a lovely place to sit down. Hold this piece of nature in your hand(s.) Close your eyes and speak to this piece of nature. Allow it to share with you whatever it wants to. You may feel tingling or a warm sensation in your hands. You may see images, hear words, or things just pop into your mind. You can journal about your experience. Nature so wants to speak to us and have us experience it on this deeper level. Even something as small as an acorn is powerful.
With each new day, I begin an expedition into the world by using my senses. I become alive as I taste the air and smell the earth. To see the forest I shut my eyes and let my sixth sense move me through the sounds of rustling leaves and the fluttering wings. I envision the mystique of the forest in my mind, and as I become a traveler through its space and time…I feel unity within its essence. |
0.982871 | Since World War II, America’s President has been the leader of the free world. Until now. In a shameful performance at the Helsinki summit Trump meekly surrendered that mantle in deference to Putin, without regard for the consequences. His impulse is to side with Putin and advance his agenda instead of speaking up to protect American’s interests. Trump's reluctance to criticize, and his eagerness to appease Putin is disturbing.
Former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili knows him well: “Putin is pure evil. He’s a murderer. He absolutely hates the United States. He thinks America is his #1 enemy. Everything he does worldwide is motivated by this hatred.” Everyone comprehends this but Trump who ignores his own intelligence community in favor of Putin.
Considering his dishonesty and poor judgment, his lack of preparation and understanding of the stakes, his undermining of the entire Western alliance and the subversion of his own intelligence community, I can only conclude: Donald Trump is unfit to be President. |
0.999986 | Must you provide the body sufficient diet and diet? Is nice diet vital that you our overall health? Eating well means achieving or maintaining sufficient diet that’s necessary for everyone to enhance and keep optimal health and wellness. Eating healthily includes special diets to lose weight, cholesterol-reducing level, bloodstream pressure and controlling diabetes. Additionally, it includes dietary guiding concepts and cake recipes. Fundamental diet and diet therapy are two of the most key elements we ought to envisage to keep our overall health towards the maximum.
An individual’s diet consists of the meals they eat while diet may be the way of adding nourishment to the body appropriately. Sufficient diet and diet implies that bodies are getting all of the vitamins, minerals and nutrients it should function at its best level. Therefore, eating a healthy diet plan and diet is the primary method of getting a healthy body.
Many people think that an account balance of diet and diet, including exercise might help them achieve and a proper weight. However, the advantages of good diet, outweighs the load. A healthy body will usually increase heart along with other body organs function, including mental health improve school performance, better wound healing and fast recovery from injuries or any illnesses. Getting enough diet and diet within our body may also boost our defense mechanisms, growing your body’s capability to protect against illnesses and infections.
Every person has unique dietary needs, and each person’s diet and diet should meet individuals specific needs. For example, a baby requires different diet and diet than a teenager. Also, the dietary requirements of an expectant lady tend to be not the same as individuals of the toddler. However, an individual’s height, current weight and level of activity may also influence the quality and quantity of nutrients themselves needs.
2. Include vegetables and fruit in what you eat and diet. It’s suggested to consume fresh frozen fruits instead of ready to use juice for much of your drinks. Eat sufficient quantity of dark eco-friendly leafy vegetables, beans and peas more often than not because they contain plenty of fiber.
Generally, a healthy diet plan and diet is the one which provides the body balance diet. It’s important to create smart selections of all the food group, balance between food and exercise and acquire most diet from your calories. |
0.998787 | stitches together a series of nows..
new nows blink in their turn..
what he considers the most important aspect of this Edition, the aspect of Erwin Schrodinger.
physics, and Hemingway for literature. A quantum friendship..?
How he must have agonized..
Cathrine remained both dead and alive..
choices shaded with life and death..
the past night he had recorded..
novel than are apparent at first glance.
explain some of the less obvious aspects.
Schrödinger's cat is a famous illustration of the principle in quantum theory of superposition, proposed by Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. Here's Schrödinger's (theoretical) experiment: We place a living cat into a steel chamber, along with a device containing a vial of hydrocyanic acid. There is, in the chamber, a very small amount of hydrocyanic acid, a radioactive substance. If even a single atom of the substance decays during the test period, a relay mechanism will trip a hammer, which will, in turn, break the vial and kill the cat. The observer cannot know whether or not an atom of the substance has decayed, and consequently, cannot know whether the vial has been broken, the hydrocyanic acid released, and the cat killed. Since we cannot know, according to quantum law, the cat is both dead and alive, in what is called a superposition of states. It is only when we break open the box and learn the condition of the cat that the superposition is lost, and the cat becomes one or the other (dead or alive).
to war and lust and superpatriotism..
Experienced love as seed was planted..
the happiness of his writing Spring..
each tragedy made his story whole..
bends which shaped his happiness now..
as appendage of a writing life-force..
by electric remembering of death..
is shaped as a torus..
thing and then explore it."
the work of our day..
Welcome to the What the Bleep Do We Know!?
At the core of this film are provocative questions about the way we participate in an unfolding, dynamic reality. What the Bleep Do We Know!? proposes that there is no solid, static universe, and that reality is mutable—affected by our very perception of it. At the same time, the film acknowledges that reality is not entirely relative or simply created out of thin air. Mothers do give birth to real babies. Some things are more solid and reliable than others.
A paradigm is a philosophical or theoretical framework that holds our experience together and creates a coherent picture of reality—a worldview. What are the roots of our current prevailing paradigm? What worldview is articulated in What the Bleep!? What difference does our paradigm really make? Our worldview implies a way of knowing. This chapter also explores how to question claims of knowledge. What makes science, intuition, or channeled messages reliable or easy to dismiss?
What are the discoveries of quantum physics? What challenges do they pose to our current worldview? What do the discoveries of quantum physics tell us about the nature of reality? Many of the pioneers in quantum physics disagreed on the implications of their discoveries. Explore different explanations and perspectives on this mind-boggling science or add your own.
How can we create our days consciously and with clear intention? What is the scientific evidence for the power of intention? How can we know if our intention is having an effect? Here we explore both the extent and limits of our creative capacities and offer guidance on establishing our own practices for creating our days.
How can we let go of old stories and shift the way we interact with the world? Here we explore ways in which emotional patterns can become biomechanical processes, and we introduce pathways to begin liberating ourselves from past conditioning. |
0.992491 | Voluté is not really a sauce, more a thickened stock. It is made in a very similar way to Béchamel sauce and is most often used as a base for other sauces. It can also be used to thicken soups and stews.
Add the flour and stir them together until it forms a paste.
Add about 50ml of the stock and stir well to combine it (it may appear as if the stock will never combine with the butter and flour, however, if you keep stirring, it will eventually come together).
Add another 50ml of the stock and, again, stir it well until it has combined.
Continue adding the stock, 50ml at a time, until it has all been combined.
Boil the sauce for 2 minutes to cook the flour (otherwise the sauce has a floury taste) and thicken the sauce.
Season with salt & pepper and use as required.
Can it be prepared in advance? Yes, it can be finished up to 3 days in advance (place a piece of cling-film/plastic-wrap on the surface of the sauce to prevent it developing a skin).
- If the stock is hot, it will combine much faster with the flour and butter and the sauce thickens quicker when boiling it.
- Either chicken, fish or vegetable stock can be used, depending on what you want to use the sauce for.
- This sauce is usually used as a base to which other ingrediants can be added, such as stews, and can also be used to thicken soups. |
0.985042 | what is the answer to the original question?
Do you dare answer (honestly of course)?
Secondarily, do you hate freedom of association? You missed answering that one too. |
0.999998 | Ara que l'auto-tune ha omplert les llistes d'èxits amb veus manipulades, potser és hora de repassar el vocoder, aquesta manera primerenca i una mica robòtica de transformar la veu humana.
01 Daft Punk - "One more time"
02 Kraftwerk - "The robots"
03 Boney M. - "Nightfly to Venus"
04 Phil Collins - "In the air tonight"
05 Laurie Anderson - "O Superman"
06 Zapp - "More bounce to the ounce"
07 Boards of Canada - "In a beautiful place out in the country"
08 Bon Iver - "33 GOD"
09 Panic! At the disco - "The end of all things"
10 Beastie Boys - "Intergalactic" |
0.999215 | Exercise and fitness may be difficult for some people to keep a tab on in their daily life, however the two are very measurable. When constantly on the go it can be even more difficult for people to keep track of their physical activities.
With that said, through the creation of fitness apps such as MyFitnessPal and Fitness Buddy, mobile device users are able to accurately log their daily exercise, as well as the calories they intake and expend throughout each day. The fitness industry is comprised of billions of dollars in revenue, and these apps cut to the core of what so many fitness enthusiasts are in search of: a simple way to get healthier. If you are looking to capitalize off of the trend by creating a fitness related mobile app, here are three things you should include.
All good fitness apps have a library of exercises for users to try out. With that said, simply explaining an exercise in words may not accurately instruct someone on how to do it. For such reason, it is crucial that you include photo and/or video demonstrations of each exercise. Ideally, you will provide video instructions on how to perform each exercise listed in your app’s fitness library. This is optimal as it is extremely difficult for someone to get the gist of a moving exercise from a still photo. So, while photo demonstrations of exercises on your app are certainly better than no visual instruction at all, the ideal method of doing so is by using a moving video to display the motion involved with each exercise.
Calories are an integral part of fitness and someone’s overall health. For such reason, if you are going to offer a fitness app to the mobile market, it is pretty much a given that you will need to intertwine some sort of calorie tracker. More specifically, this means allowing mobile device users the ability to easily keep tabs on the calories they burn and consume each day. For instance, the MyFitnessPal app effectively offers a database of food and associated measurements for users to add to their daily food diaries. Additionally, the app also lets users measure the amount of calories they burn through exercise each day.
The third key to offering a successful fitness app to the mobile market is providing encouragement and suggestions on how users can improve their health and fitness. In other words, if a user is simply using the service that your app provides, but has no idea on how to improve their fitness as they see it suffering, then the purpose of your app is sort of a bust. This is why you should aim to provide guidance on how users can become healthier with their exercise and diet.
As you have seen from the previously mentioned three elements to developing a fitness app, creating such a mobile offering can be more complex than it initially seems. By providing photo and video demonstrations, along with helpful suggestions and the ability to accurately measure caloric intake, you will be providing users with a complete method of improving their fitness and diet. Taking after apps like MyFitnessPal, if you can provide the aforementioned elements to your fitness app , you will undoubtedly be able to compete in the market.
The author works with an enterprise application development companies. The mobile app development companies in Delhi NCR provides quality mobility solutions for multiple verticals. It is a renowned android application development companies in Dallas, TX.
Next Will Your App’s Users Allow Push Notifications? |
0.99991 | A growing number of Americans believe that climate change is happening, and 59% of voters think that humans are the primary cause. As we start to see the impacts of a changing climate, the topic of climate change may be coming up more often in conversation than it has in the past. If you’re talking with someone who seems to be rethinking their skepticism about global warming, be an informed spokesperson for the environment by mentioning these quick facts about climate change and its impacts.
It’s true that the earth’s climate has changed many times over the centuries, but until a few hundred years ago, these changes were due to small variations in the earth’s orbit. These orbital shifts affected the amount of solar energy that our earth received and caused climate fluctuations. Today’s warming is far more dramatic. Researchers say that it’s more than 95% probable that this unprecedented rate of change is due to human activity, and much of this warming is caused by an increase in greenhouse gas emissions.
Greenhouse gases are gases that absorb infrared radiation (IR) from the sun and radiate that heat in all directions. Common greenhouse gases are water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, ozone, and any fluorocarbons. Some of these gases are naturally produced, like water vapor, and a certain amount of greenhouse gases are necessary for our ecosystem to function. But, some of these gases are increasing rapidly because of human activity. Carbon dioxide in our atmosphere has increased by 40% since the dawn of the industrial age in the 1750s. Fossil fuel use is the primary source of carbon dioxide emissions. Other greenhouse gases emitted through human activity are methane from farming, waste management, and energy use; nitrous oxide, mostly from agriculture; and fluorinated gases, from industry, refrigerants, and consumer products.
These gases warm the earth through a natural process called the greenhouse effect. Check out a diagram here. Basically, when the sun’s heat hits the earth some is absorbed and some is reflected back to space. Greenhouse gases absorb heat and keep it all from leaving our atmosphere, which helps keep the earth at a temperature suitable for sustaining life. However, the more greenhouse gases that exist in our atmosphere, the more heat that is prevented from escaping into space and, consequently, the more the earth heats.
Over the past hundred years, greenhouse gas emissions have been growing at an accelerated pace. Since 1970, carbon dioxide emissions have increased by about 90%, with emissions from fossil fuel use and industrial processes contributing about 78% of the total greenhouse gas emissions increase from 1970 to 2011. Agriculture, deforestation, and other land-use changes have been the second-largest contributors.
The increase in earth’s temperature triggers additional changes in our climate. Heat waves, drought and extreme weather patterns are all signs of a warming planet. In turn, these events have consequences for our economy, infrastructure, and the health of our communities. Below are a few examples of impacts we are already seeing.
The earth’s warming is behind the increase in extreme weather events such as heat waves, heavy downpours, drought and flooding. Since the mid-1970s, the number of hurricanes that reach Categories 4 and 5 (the highest levels) in strength has roughly doubled.
New York has felt the impact of such hurricanes–and not just in coastal areas. In 2011, Hurricane Irene tore through upstate New York, hitting counties including Albany, Orange, Sullivan, and Ulster. The storm caused $1.3 billion worth of damage and caused 1 million power outages. In New York City, the city’s subway system shut down.
A year later, in October 2012, SuperStorm Sandy brought unprecedented storm surges and flooding that devastated many communities throughout the five boroughs of NYC. Large parts of the city and surrounding areas were without power for days, fires consumed 100 homes in Queens, and water flooded subway and road tunnels and highways. Thousands of homes were destroyed.
New York City suffered an estimated $19 billion in economic losses from Hurricane Sandy and restoration costs for the state were an estimated $32.8 billion.
Extreme weather events hit all of us in the pocketbook. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, grocery prices spike after extreme weather events.
Damage caused by storms and flooding is also hitting the insurance industry hard and that hurts consumers. Because of a spate of devastating losses due to severe storms, insurers have been drastically curtailing their underwriting of homeowner policies. Almost 3 million U.S. households lost coverage between 2003 and 2007, and only half were able to find new coverage. Other insurance companies have raised their premiums dramatically, effectively denying coverage to millions of homeowners.
Another – less major but still upsetting – way climate change is impacting our daily lives is by threatening the major ingredients in beer. Drought and heavy rains have hurt hops and barley production and some breweries are reporting shortages of clean drinking water. These changes can also affect the coffee industry. Most beans come from Arabica beans that thrive on cool mountain slopes. Due to climate change, coffee growers have to move higher up the mountain. Globally, we could lose 50% of the land suitable for growing coffee by 2050.
Overwhelmed? Don’t be. Use these tips to change one mind at a time, and take a look at some of our other sustainability tips to learn what else you can do to join the fight against climate change. |
0.992157 | What secrets of the old pirate can you uncover as you make your way through the treacherous terrain of golden mahjong layouts? Find out when you play Mahjong Gold, a hardy bounty of tile-matching mischief. Long John Silver's treasure is buried deep, but the search is on. As you match the tiles and clear the board, new challenges are laid before you. Persevere to travel around a distant island. Special gold tokens have you pondering new perspectives in the classic favorite of mahjong. Each level brings a new, exciting task. Free Game features: - 120 unique levels; - Voyage across the sea mahjong-style; - Discover new rules played only by pirates like you; - Take the Long John Silver's treasure for your own. |
0.999996 | I should preface this piece by disclosing something about myself: I love the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
I saw “Avengers: Infinity War” three times in theaters (which is quite the commitment, given that the run time is two hours and 40 minutes). The more movies that come out, the more heroes that we meet and grow to love, the more intricate–and dare I say genius–the Universe becomes. I am obsessed with how every movie ties together, how everything happens for a reason. Details that appeared in the original “Iron Man” will no doubt have repercussions in the upcoming “Avengers: Endgame.” I mock the people that leave Marvel movies before the mid-credits scene for being so naive, so innocent, so unaware. Those scenes, those 45 seconds, contain precious material.
In spite of all the action-packed ingenuity, Marvel movies have lacked what so many people needed to see on the silver screen–diversity and representation. Up until last year’s blockbuster, “Black Panther,” every major hero in the Universe had been white and male. What few badass women and heroes of color they had were always in supporting roles, aiding the white man’s quest for justice, never on the quest for themselves.
Starring an African superhero, “Black Panther,” is not only Marvel’s highest grossing movie to date, but one of its most critically acclaimed as well–the film took home two out of the six Oscars it was nominated for. Not only did “Black Panther” follow the story of a black protagonist, it also featured some of the strongest women characters the Universe had ever introduced.
On March 8, 2019, a little over a year after the release of “Black Panther,” Marvel gave us the empowering “Captain Marvel,” which follows the galactic adventures of Brie Larson’s Carol Danvers. The daring pilot turned confused Kree Starforce member turned protector of our planet is not just Marvel’s first female protagonist, but the most powerful superhero in the MCU.
I experienced all sorts of emotional cliches while watching Danvers thoroughly one-up not only unexpected villains, but societal norms; I left the theater with a profound sense of self, believing that I could accomplish anything I set my mind to. Our protagonist spends the majority of the movie attempting to piece together the parts of her past that she no longer remembers, mostly her life on Earth before she acquired unimaginable powers. It takes her the majority of the movie to to realize that her greatest weapon has been a part of her all along: her humanity. When she gets knocked down, she gets back up again; she is as powerful as she is because she has the will to be powerful.
I am envious of every 12-year-old girl that gets to see “Captain Marvel” in theaters. Throughout the entirety of the film, I wished that I could be that age and watch such unadulterated, raw womanly power on screen. Danvers is fearless in her assertions, confident in her abilities, and undaunted by failure. Our hero is not painted as “bossy” or “unfeminine,” like many self-assured women are, but rather “stoic” and “empowered.” Her disposition is not unlike many women I have been privileged enough to know and look up to in my life. She represents the type of woman that has been historically underrepresented in Hollywood.
It goes without saying that “Captain Marvel” is important; it uplifts, rather than tears down, powerful women. The movie shows us that we can be as dynamic and impressive as men, and often, even more so. Although I wish I could have been at more of an impressionable age when I watched the film, it shows women at all stages of life that we have the potential to change the world.
Captain Marvel’s unparalleled powers serve as a statement–the world needs women. In “Endgame,” which will be released next month, our beloved heroes need Marvel to save the day because the men of the “Avengers” cannot do it autonomously. In many ways, this situation imitates our reality; women have helped solve so many of our world’s problems.
I like to think of Captain Marvel as a combination of many of the world’s most powerful women–resilient athletes, whip smart politicians, passionate creatives. But she is also every single woman who has something to say, who believes in something. She is all of us, all the women of the world, and that is our greatest power. |
0.999996 | Tech article: What’s after the Internet of Things? The Tactile Internet!
The Internet is a paradigm changer and went on to define the economies of the late 20th century. However, after that Internet of connected computers became the Mobile Internet, connecting billions of smart phones and laptops, and yet again redefining entire segments of the economy in the first decade of the 21st century. Today, we witness the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), shortly to connect trillions of objects and starting to redefine yet again various economies of this decade.
These different embodiments of the current Internets will be dwarfed by the emergence of the Tactile Internet which we believe is a true paradigm shift, in which sufficiently responsive, reliable network connectivity will enable it to deliver physical, tactile experiences remotely. For example, imagine delivering (possibly self-assembling) hospital equipment to the current areas of West Africa suffering from the Ebola epidemic. The best doctors and surgeons could then perform diagnosis and even surgery remotely using connected, tactile technologies.
We imagine the Tactile Internet will, in the business-to-business ecosystem, drive markets for autonomous cars, remote medical care markets, energy resource extraction and power generation, and other challenging industries. For consumers, it will revolutionize the way we teach, learn, and interact with our surroundings. A preliminary market analysis has revealed that the potential market could extend to US$20 trillion worldwide – around 20% of today’s worldwide GDP.
At the edges, the Tactile Internet will be enabled by the Internet of Things and actuating robots. Content and skillset data will be transmitted over a significantly more powerful 5G core network as well as the next generation Internet. The finite speed of light, however, will require a lot of the cloud intelligence to be enabled close at the edge, close to the tactile experience.
In contrast to the prior Internets which enabled content delivery, the Tactile Internet however will be an enabler for skillset delivery – thus a very timely technology for service and skillset driven economies like the ones predominantly found in Europe. In my capacity as Chair Professor in Wireless communications at King’s London, I am driving this pioneering initiative, along with numerous colleagues in the field. |
0.999963 | Do you have an idea of how much clay roof tile, similar to a terracotta mission style tile would cost? also How much is concrete per cubic yard?
Hi there! If you're interested in finding the best roof-tile on the market, I'd recommend checking that link: www.archiexpo.com/architecture-design-manufacturer/roof-tile-1277.html. It really help me chose the ideal solution for my place.
I think you should try going to the nearest hardware in your town. They surely have some tiles that you can use to make your roof. They will also help you in making decisions on how you can make your roof look better.
Roof tiles are 'hung' from the framework of a roof by fixing them with nails. The tiles are usually hung in parallel rows, with each row overlapping the row below it to exclude rainwater and to cover the nails that hold the row below. There are also roof tiles for special positions, particularly where the planes of the several pitches meet. They include ridge, hip and valley tiles. These can either be bedded and pointed in cement mortar or mechanically fixed. |
0.93656 | A Norn is a kind of female spirit found in Norse theology, who can cause great toil and trouble, or bring blessings and happiness. There are a great many of them, but according to Snorri Sturluson, author of the Prose Edda, the three most important Norns are giantess sisters who draw water from the Well of Fate and with it water the roots of Yggdrasil, the World Tree. The names of these three Norns were Urðr (wyrd, “fate” or simply “future”), Verðandi (derived from the Old Norse verb verða, “to become”) and Skuld (related to shall); thus they were all concerned with the future, in one way or another.
The origin of the name Norn is unknown. One possibility is that it is related to the Swedish word norna, “to warn, to speak secretly”, which may be imitative (like mutter, growl, and howl, the sound of the word imitates the sound itself). It may also be related to a word meaning “to twist, to twine”, and may refer to the twisting of fate, although the idea that the Norns wove the fate of the world appears to have been borrowed from Greek theology.
Norn is a word that thrums with earthy, solid energy, directed powerfully toward one goal — the future. Compare it to other earthy, directed words with a similar sound pattern, such as thorn, born, morn(ing), horn, and warn.
In Proto Indo European, the word for “oak tree” was derwo or dreu, but in the daughter language Proto Germanic derwo/dreu was replaced by aiks. Where aiks came from is a mystery, but it was very possibly borrowed into Proto Germanic from some unknown neighboring non-Proto Indo European language. Proto Germanic has a large number of words not derived from Proto Indo European, leading some researchers to speculate that the early Germanic tribes had extensive contact with an ancient non-Indo European culture in northern Europe, now lost to history.
Why aiks replaced derwo/dreu is a unknown; but given the holiness of the oak tree for the peoples of Europe in ancient times, perhaps aiks was brought in as a euphemism for derwo/dreu. Later, derwo/dreu descended into English as tree, while aiks became ac in Old English and oak in Modern English.
The sound of the word oak suggests a well-rounded, whole, earthy energy, with no known source or beginning, which is wrapped up and contained (perhaps even concealed).
The notions of “objective” (real, true, unbiased) and “subjective” (personal, unreliable, biased) seem fundamental to the world today. Indeed, modern science would be impossible without these notions. But these words, and their opposition, are a relatively recent development.
Objective is from the Latin compound objectus, “something presented (to the mind or sight)”, from ob (”against”) + jacere (”to throw”); the metaphor was that something seen, or presented to the mind, was thrown up against you. Thus objective originally referred to an essentially subjective experience. In English, objective appeared around 1620, and meant “considered in relation to its object”. The object of a sentence is that which is “thrown up against” the action of the subject and verb. The meaning of “unbiased” did not appear until the middle of the 19th century.
Subject is also from Latin, subjectus, “something placed under another”, from sub (”under”) + jacere (”to throw”). Frequently used in reference to subject peoples of the Empire. The subject of a sentence is something “under the control of” the verb, a meaning first found in English in the early 1600’s. Subjective appeared in English in the 1300’s, meaning “something acted upon”; the meaning “existing in the mind” only appeared around 1700, possibly related to the meaning “subject matter” (a meaning borrowed from Aristotle, who spoke of a topic of inquiry as being “under” the inquiry). It was only in the 19th century, a time when the idea of objective vs. subjective ideas were first really developed in Western culture, that the two words objective and subjective encountered each other and were placed in opposition.
Phonosemantically, both of these words seem to encode the progress of an idea from “inside” (”su”) or “outside” (”o”) the mind up to where it bursts in on the consciousness (”b”); this is a doorway (”j”), at which time it moves into the mind (container) itself (”ec”). Interestingly, the subjective source (”su”) is phonosemantically much more active and directed than the objective source (”o”), which may reflect the idea in Western culture that the subconscious is something apart, active, and perhaps dangerous.
My latest posts at Pagan+Politics concern poverty and war, and how they both arise because of a failure to honor the pagan notion of hospitality (trust, mutual vulnerability). But there is hope; against all odds, matters have been improving in the last 50 years. I talk about the purpose of tribes and their relevance to the modern world, and why just a little bit of hospitality goes a long way. Check it out!
I finally broke down and signed up for Twitter. I update once or twice a day with quotes, links of interest, and similar things relating to meditation, nature, spirit, and the ancient world. Find me @druidjournal.
A fascinating article about a woman who lives without money. Interesting particularly from the point of view of philanthropic economics.
A beautiful story, Michelle! Thanks for sharing! |
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0.995433 | Systematic reviews address a specific clinical question by unbiasedly assessing and analyzing the pertinent literature. Citation screening is a time-consuming and critical step in systematic reviews. Typically, reviewers must evaluate thousands of citations to identify articles eligible for a given review. We explore the application of machine learning techniques to semi-automate citation screening, thereby reducing the reviewers' workload.
We present a novel online classification strategy for citation screening to automatically discriminate "relevant" from "irrelevant" citations. We use an ensemble of Support Vector Machines (SVMs) built over different feature-spaces (e.g., abstract and title text), and trained interactively by the reviewer(s).
Semi-automating the citation screening process is difficult because any such strategy must identify all citations eligible for the systematic review. This requirement is made harder still due to class imbalance; there are far fewer "relevant" than "irrelevant" citations for any given systematic review. To address these challenges we employ a custom active-learning strategy developed specifically for imbalanced datasets. Further, we introduce a novel undersampling technique. We provide experimental results over three real-world systematic review datasets, and demonstrate that our algorithm is able to reduce the number of citations that must be screened manually by nearly half in two of these, and by around 40% in the third, without excluding any of the citations eligible for the systematic review.
We have developed a semi-automated citation screening algorithm for systematic reviews that has the potential to substantially reduce the number of citations reviewers have to manually screen, without compromising the quality and comprehensiveness of the review.
In this section we first motivate our work by presenting a brief overview of the systematic review process in general, and the abstract screening component in particular. We then review previous research in biomedical text classification, which provides the foundation for our contribution.
Systematic reviews (with or without meta-analysis) are increasingly used to inform all levels of healthcare, from bedside individualized decisions to policy-making. Like all scientific approaches, a systematic review tries to address a well-formulated research question by following a protocol of well-defined steps [1, 2]. To minimize selection bias, systematic reviews appraise and analyze all research reports that fulfill a set of pre-defined eligibility criteria. To identify all eligible reports, reviewers conduct broad searches of the literature, and then manually screen the titles and abstracts of all returned citations. All relevant (potentially eligible) citations are retrieved and reviewed in full text to select those that are ultimately included in the systematic review.
Screening of citations for systematic reviews is a tedious and time-consuming, yet critical, step. Failure to identify eligible research reports threatens the validity of the review. Typically, reviewers screen between 2,000 and 5,000 citations, approximately 200 to 500 of which are deemed relevant and are reviewed in full text. From these, at most a few dozen are ultimately included in the systematic review. Much larger projects are not uncommon. For example, in a project that involved three evidence reports conducted for the United States Social Security Administration on the association of low birth weight, failure to thrive, and short stature in children with disability, the Tufts Evidence-based Practice Center screened over 33,000 abstracts [3–5].
An experienced reviewer can screen an average of two abstracts per minute. At this rate, a project with 5,000 abstracts requires 5 person days (40 hours) of uninterrupted work time. Abstracts for difficult topics may take several minutes each to evaluate, thus multiplying the total time needed to process them by several fold.
Herein, we modify the typical (manual) approach to screening citations for systematic reviews in order to semi-automate the process. We use a classification model to automatically exclude irrelevant citations. The reviewers will trust the model's exclusions, and will only screen those citations that are suggested by the classifier. The aim of our approach is to reduce the reviewers' workload, allowing them to focus on the more intellectually demanding steps of the systematic review (e.g., interpretation and analysis), while reducing costs.
In this section we review related work. We first discuss previous applications of machine learning techniques to biomedical text classification. Next, we review some of the machine learning tools we use (Support Vector Machines and the active learning framework, in particular).
Due to the exponential growth of available biomedical literature , much work has been done in automatically mining and learning from published manuscripts. Here we briefly review the emerging body of promising research on applications of machine learning methods to biomedical text classification [7–11], particularly those works focused on automatic classification of biomedical abstracts into clinically relevant categories.
Aphinyanaphongs et al. applied machine learning techniques to automatically discriminate "high-quality" from "low-quality" articles in the domain of internal medicine . They explored classification using several different feature-spaces (this is sometimes referred to as multi-view learning ). A feature-space is the mathematical space where the points for each citation for a particular feature set live. For example, title text is a feature-space, and each citation is represented by exactly one point in this space, corresponding to the vector representation (e.g., bag-of-words encoding) of its title. They found that using publication type, abstract text, title text, and Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms as features with a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier resulted in the best performance.
Building on this work, Kilicoglu et al. demonstrated the feasibility of automatically identifying "scientifically rigorous" articles using classification algorithms . They too found that using multiple features from publications, including "high-level" features such as Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) terms, boosted classification accuracy. Additional research [13–15] has further corroborated the observation that biomedical text classification can be improved by using multiple feature-spaces, and by enriching raw text with additional information (e.g., with automatically extracted UMLS terms, or via other Natural Language Processing techniques).
The above works have demonstrated the potential of machine learning methods to mitigate the burden imposed by the overwhelming volume of published biomedical literature. The task of semi-automating citation screening is unique due in part to the obstacles outlined by Cohen et al. . In particular, the requirement of identifying all of the eligible citations changes the goal of the classification task; rather than attaining high accuracy, as is usually the objective in classification, we aim to eliminate the need to review clearly irrelevant citations without wrongly excluding eligible ones. Our task differs from that delineated by Cohen et al. in that we aim to semi-automate the citation screening step while conducting systematic reviews, rather than semi-automating the process of updating previously conducted systematic reviews.
As discussed above, reviewers conducting systematic reviews first search a database (e.g., PubMed) with a carefully constructed query tailored to the medical question being investigated. Next, they peruse and then categorize each of the returned abstracts as either "relevant" or "irrelevant" to the review. This latter step of determining which articles are suitable for inclusion is a laborious, time-intensive process. Moreover, the reviewers are typically physicians, and their time is therefore expensive. Thus, we have access to a large "pool" of unlabeled data (the citations retrieved via the database query) and an "oracle" (the reviewer) that can provide labels ("relevant", "irrelevant"'), at a cost. This scenario is exactly the sort that motivated the development of pool-based active learning , wherein the expert trains the classifier interactively by providing labels for instances the classifier "thinks" will be most informative.
The basic idea in active learning is that if the classifier is allowed to select the data with which it is trained, as opposed to passively accepting a training dataset, the training process can be expedited. Furthermore, it has been argued that active learning over a small subset of informative data can actually produce a better generalized model than one trained over more, randomly selected data. For a recent survey of active learning, see Settle's literature review . In this work we focus on pool-based active learning with Support Vector Machines (SVMs).
In this section, we first present our active learning strategy for biomedical citation classification. We then report results from experiments conducted over three previously conducted systematic reviews. We demonstrate that our technique can significantly reduce the burden on reviewers without excluding any relevant citations.
Our novel semi-automated citation screening strategy comprises two major components: our approach to document representation and our novel active text classification learning strategy. The latter includes the model training process, classification algorithm, ensemble method and sampling technique used. We also address the question of how many citations should be manually labeled before allowing the model to classify the remaining documents. We present these components in the following subsections, but first outline how we envision the semi-automated step fitting into the citation screening process.
Figure 1 juxtaposes the typical screening process with our semi-automated approach. In the typical citation screening process, humans evaluate the whole set of citations in the dataset and select (or "screen-in") citations pertinent to the reviewed topic, following protocol-defined criteria. In other words, they categorize, or label, citations as either "relevant" or "irrelevant" to the systematic review. Papers selected at this stage ("Level 1" screening) will be retrieved and appraised in full text ("Level 2" screening). In the modified approach we break "Level 1" screening into two phases. First, reviewers will train and use a classifier that categorizes citations as "relevant" or "irrelevant". They will trust the classifier in excluding completely "irrelevant" citations, and thus they will manually review only the citations that are screened in by the classification model. "Level 2" screening remains the same as in the typical approach.
Shown are the typical approach and our modified approach that includes semi-automated abstract screening on the left and right-hand, respectively (see text for details). In the modified approach the reviewers train and use a classification model to exclude completely "irrelevant" citations ("Level 1a"). They will trust the model's exclusions, and will review only the citations suggested by the classification model.
An article is broken down into its component parts (title, abstract text, and keywords), and these are in turn represented as either bag-of-words or bag-of-UMLS-biomedical concepts vectors.
We have developed a novel active learning strategy for scenarios where classes are imbalanced and the costs of mistakes over these classes are asymmetric (e.g., false negatives in our case are more costly than false positives). The strategy first attempts to characterize the space of relevant citations before refining the decision boundary, or hyperplane, which separates "relevant" from "irrelevant" citations.
As discussed in the Background Section, uncertainty sampling active learning is an online training strategy that is more efficient than training on a random subset of data. In uncertainty sampling, the classifier requests labels for examples about whose class membership it is most uncertain, and in this way incrementally refines the current approximation to the separating boundary. With SVMs, this is equivalent to asking the reviewer to label citations nearest the (current) separating hyperplane . In previous work we demonstrated that uncertainty sampling can result in classifiers with poor performance, in terms of sensitivity to the minority class, when classifying text documents . Theoretically, this can happen if there are different clusters, or regions, of the minority class (here, "relevant" citations); in such a scenario, uncertainty sampling is prone to myopically focusing in on the first boundary or boundaries discovered, missing any other clusters. This problem of hasty generalization becomes particularly important when there are asymmetric misclassification costs, such as in citation screening, wherein the mistaken exclusion of an eligible paper is much more costly than wrongly including an ineligible paper.
Our algorithm, Patient Active Learning (PAL), attempts to overcome the pitfall of hasty generalization in active learning. Briefly, our strategy works by first exploring the space of citations by requesting labels for randomly drawn instances until it is likely that a reasonable representation of the minority class has been encountered. Only then does the algorithm begin refining the current boundary via uncertainty sampling. The heuristic used to decide whether or not the space of minority examples has been adequately explored is a function of the diversity over the encountered minority examples thus far, as measured by the average angle between each pair in kernel-space . In particular, when this value changes by less than or equal to ϵ for a pre-specified number of iterations, we assume the diversities have converged and switch to uncertainty sampling.
Typically, active learning frameworks have assumed only one underlying feature-space. However, we represent citations as points in multiple feature-spaces (see Figure 2) and build separate classifiers over each of these. Thus we need to adapt active learning to an ensemble (i.e., multiple-model) scenario. Moreover, we must address how to aggregate the predictions of the classifiers comprising this ensemble. Note that each feature-space will have its own corresponding separating hyperplane; thus we may be confident about the class membership of an example in one space while uncertain about the same example in another. It is therefore desirable to refine the boundaries in all k feature-spaces, rather than focusing on just one. Here we adopt the naive approach of picking a feature-space at random by flipping a fair, k-sided coin at each step in the active learning process, and requesting the label for the example closest to the hyperplane in this feature-space. Our approach to aggregating classifier predictions is similarly naive. Rather than outputting the majority vote of the k classifiers as the prediction for a particular unlabeled document, we predict "relevant" if any of the k classifiers predicts "relevant", due to our emphasis on sensitivity.
Our datasets are (at times, extremely) imbalanced, i.e., the prevalance of "relevant" citations is always smaller than 50% (and often much smaller). Class imbalance presents a problem for classification algorithms, because they have typically been optimized for accuracy, rather than sensitivity to a particular class. Many techniques have been proposed to mitigate the effects of class imbalance and are reviewed at length elsewhere [29, 30].
Here, we undersample (i.e., throw away instances from) the majority class (irrelevant citations) so that there are an equal number of labeled examples from each class prior to training our classifiers. This approach has been shown to work well with respect to increasing classifier sensitivity to the minority class . We modify this strategy as follows: rather than undersampling the majority class at random, as is traditionally done, we throw out the majority examples nearest the current separating hyperplane. We call this aggressive undersampling. The idea is to explicitly push the decision boundary away from the minority class, as it has been observed that when there is class imbalance, SVMs are prone to discovering hyperplanes that are closer to the minority class than the ideal separating boundary, resulting in false negatives .
In review, our strategy is outlined in Algorithm 1, and is briefly summarized as follows. First, map each (initially unclassified) abstract into points in k different feature-spaces (here k = 4). Next, randomly pick abstracts for the reviewer to label until it is likely that the space of relevant citations has been explored (i.e., the diversity scores converge); at this point, switch to active learning via SIMPLE over a feature-space selected at random at each iteration. When some stopping criterion is satisfied (e.g., a pre-specified number of labels has been provided), aggressively under-sample the majority class (irrelevant abstracts) in each feature-space, then retrain and return an ensemble of SVMs, one per feature-space. Now, given an unlabeled abstract, d*, map d* into k feature vectors, and compute k predictions with the respective SVMs. If any of these predictions is "relevant", predict "relevant", else predict "irrelevant".
In this section we first outline our experimental setup, including the datasets used, metrics considered and methodology employed. Next, we present our empirical results from experiments over three previously conducted systematic reviews.
We experimented with datasets from three systematic reviews previously conducted by our team: the Proton Beam dataset , the chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) dataset (manuscript currently under review) and the Micronutrients dataset . These are summarized in Table 1.
In simulating the modified approach we considered as "relevant" the citations that were retrieved in full text ("Level 1" screening in Figure 1).
The Proton Beam dataset is from a systematic review of comparative studies on charged particle radiotherapy versus alternate interventions for cancers . The COPD dataset is from a systematic review and meta-analysis of all genetic association studies in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The Micronutrients dataset is from a systematic empirical appraisal of reporting of systematic reviews on associations of micronutrients and disease . Note the class imbalance in all three datasets.
Generally, classifiers are evaluated by considering their predictive performance as evaluated over a hold-out dataset. However, in this work we are not interested in predictive performance. We focus on whether a citation screening approach as a whole can identify all citations that are eventually eligible for the systematic review; we do not care if said citations are identified during training, or when the classifiers are applied to the unlabeled citations. To this end, we start our learners out with the same small initial set of labeled data, and then allow them to request labels for examples in the unlabeled pool, U. The center confusion matrix in Figure 3 shows the classifier predictions over the remaining unlabeled examples in U. To this we add the "relevant" and "irrelevant" citations labeled during training (the leftmost matrix) to produce the rightmost confusion matrix, used in the metrics defined below. Thus if an active learning strategy is somehow good at finding hard-to-classify examples in a pool during learning, and hence does not have to predict labels for these difficult instances, it is rewarded. We are concerned only with performance over the total pool of citations initially returned by the searches; anything else is immaterial for our purposes.
Construction of confusion matrices for the semi-automated abstract screening strategy. The leftmost matrix represents citations that are labeled by the reviewer while training the classification model. The middle matrix displays the predictions of the trained model over the remaining unlabeled set of citations U. The rightmost matrix shows the corresponding crosstabulation at the end of "Level 1a" (see Figure 1). The quantities mentioned in this figure are used in the definition of Yield and Burden, the chosen evaluation metrics (see Equations 1 and 2). Superscripts T and U refer to model training and applying the model to yet unlabeled citations, respectively. tp[T|U]: "true positives", tn[T|U]: "true negatives", fp[T|U]: "false positives", fn [T|U]: "false negatives". We assume that reviewers will never erroneously exclude a citation that is eligible for systematic review, i.e. fn T = 0.
To make this point explicit, consider the following extreme scenario. Active learning strategies often ask for labels for a subset of citations that is enriched with "relevant" examples, compared to a random sampling. In our explorations the SIMPLE active learning strategy behaved this way. Assume an active learning strategy that happens to identify all abstracts that are finally eligible in the systematic review during training. We would definitely use this strategy, irrespective of its actual predictive performance; we do not care how it performs in a hold-out independent dataset, as long as it works well in the dataset at hand.
We introduce two metrics to evaluate citation screening approaches. The first metric, Yield, expresses the fraction of the citations that are finally eligible for the systematic review that are identified by employing a given citation screening approach. The second metric, Burden expresses the fraction of the total number of citations, N, that a human has to review manually with a given screening approach. In the typical approach reviewers screen manually the whole set of N citations. In the semi-automated approach they screen manually the citations that are presented to them during training, and only those suggested by the trained model as "relevant" (Figure 1). Figure 3 helps fix notation.
In the typical approach of manual screening, both Yield and Burden are 100%. In the semi-automated approach the aim is to retain a Yield of 100% while minimizing the Burden.
We simulated the application of our semi-automated citation screening approach on datasets from three systematic reviews recently conducted by our team. We used two datasets, the Proton Beam and COPD datasets, during the development of our algorithm. From these we generalized a simple, operational stopping criterion for citation screening, i.e., a way of determining when enough labels have been provided to use the built classifier to classify the remaining citations. We kept the Micronutrients dataset as a holdout set to assess the generalizability of our approach and also to test our derived stopping criterion.
Experiments over the three datasets were conducted as follows. For each dataset, we initially hid all labels except for two; one citation from each class ("relevant" and "irrelevant") was selected at random and provided to the learning algorithm. (In practice systematic reviewers always know at least one relevant citation from the outset; indeed they often know of more than one, and including more relevant citations from the start would likely expedite training.) We then simulated active learning by allowing the learning algorithm to pick a number of citations to label at each step (we used 5 in our experiments, arbitrarily). The labels of the selected examples were revealed to the learner and subsequently used in training, and the examples were then removed from the unlabeled pool, U. Every 25 labels, we evaluated the current classifier over the remaining examples in U, calculating Yield and Burden as outlined in the above section. We continued active learning until U was exhausted, i.e., until all citations had been labeled. This whole process was repeated 10 times, and we report the averages over the runs.
We first motivate the use of our variant of active learning, PAL, and aggressive under-sampling (see Algorithm 1) by presenting results over the Proton Beam dataset for four different active learning strategies: naive random sampling (equivalent to passive learning), classical SIMPLE, PAL and PAL with aggressive undersampling. All of the approaches shown use the same four feature-spaces (see Figure 2) and a linear kernel SVM. (We used linear kernels because our data is high-dimensional . We kept C set to its default value of 1 and did not perform parameter tuning, as we found its affect on performance to be negligible, possibly due to the sparseness of the feature space.) In all but PAL with aggressive undersampling we use standard undersampling, i.e., we throw away labeled irrelevant abstracts at random to achieve an equal class distribution prior to training the final classifier. In Figure 4, one can see that PAL with aggressive under-sampling (Algorithm 1) performs the best over this dataset. If the reviewer labels 2,000 abstracts, this method reduces their Burden by a bit less than half, on average. Moreover, not once were any of the 23 truly relevant citations misclassified with this method.
Yield (blue) and burden (red) curves for four learning strategies over the proton beam dataset as a function of the size of thetraining set. The thick lines are averages over 10 runs. Thin lines denote individual runs. Clockwise from the upper left, the strategies shown are: random sampling, SIMPLE, PAL, and PAL with aggressive undersampling. It is desirable to achieve maximum Yield while minimizing Burden. The upper right-corner (100% yield and 100% burden) corresponds to the manual approach of citation screening. Every point where Yield (the blue line) is at 1.0 and Burden (the red line) is less than 1.0 is thus progress. Note that Burden curves are U-shaped because classifiers trained on very small training sets tend to classify the majority of the unlabeled citations as "relevant" (due to our undersampling and cautious aggregation technique), and all citations classified as "relevant" must be subsequently screened by a human. When the training set is very large, the reviewers manually screen the majority of the citations during training.
Results over the COPD dataset.
We extrapolated a simple operational stopping criterion from the results over the Proton Beam and COPD datasets: we hypothesized that training on half of the dataset would be sufficient to achieve 100% Yield. The results over the Micronutrients dataset are shown in Figure 6. Using our simple stopping criterion of stopping after half of the citations (2,000, in this case) are labeled would have reduced the Burden on reviewers by nearly half, on average, while maintaing 100% Yield.
Results over the micro-nutrients dataset.
We managed to accomplish our goal of reducing the number of abstracts that would have needed to be manually screened by nearly 50% without missing any relevant abstracts on the Proton Beam dataset. Likewise, over the COPD systematic review data, our method would have reduced the Burden on the reviewers by ~ 40%, on average, again without missing any relevant citations. However, our strategy was in a sense 'optimized' for these two systematic reviews, because they were used to evaluate and tune our approach (choice of document representation, classification and re-sampling algorithms, etc.) during testing and development. Regardless, the fact that our technique performed so well over ten independent runs on these real-world datasets is encouraging.
From the COPD and Proton Beam datasets we extrapolated a simple stopping criterion, i.e., a minimum number of citations that need to be labeled for training before applying the classifier to the remaining unlabeled citations. This is an important practical issue in deploying a system for semi-automating the citation screening process. If no such stopping criterion is provided, reviewers will have no way of knowing how many citations they must manually screen. We observed that in both the Proton Beam and COPD datasets Yield was consistently 100% after half of the citations were labeled (see Figures 4 and 5). We thus adopted this - labeling half of the citations - as our hypothetical stopping criterion for the Micronutrients dataset. Our results over this hold-out dataset, which we did not experiment with during the development of our algorithm, satisfied our stated aim of achieving 100% Yield while significantly reducing the Burden using our simple stopping criterion.
These initial results are promising, but there is room for improvement. In particular, while we achieved our aim of achieving perfect sensitivity to relevant abstracts, the Burden remains rather high at 50 to 60%. Ideally, we could reduce this burden while maintaining perfect Yield. We are optimistic about the prospects of further improving our method. Many sources of information remain to be exploited. For example, we plan on incorporating more feature sets, including full document text, citation networks, and so forth. Moreover, we plan on further enriching the features that we are using, e.g. by extracting UMLS concepts from the abstract text. Other encoded ontologies might also provide a source of enrichment .
Aside from new feature sets, a few algorithmic improvements may improve performance. One obvious technique that we plan on implementing is bagging , in which multiple subsets of each feature-space would be constructed at random from the labeled data, and used to build ensemble classifiers over each feature-space. Another possible improvement would be to follow the suggestion of Kilicoglu et al. and employ different classification algorithms over the different feature-spaces (here we used only SVMs). We are also interested in the emerging work on active learning over features rather than instances , which may be helpful in identifying phrases or UMLS concepts particularly characteristic of relevant citations. Indeed, active learning over features may provide a novel framework for extracting and modeling the reviewer's expertise. Finally, exploiting latent hierarchical structure in the UMLS ontologies might also be helpful, particularly because active learning techniques for hierarchical data have recently been developed .
Our results here are promising, but more extensive testing remains to be done. We plan on assembling 20-30 systematic review datasets for use in a large-scale validation of our method.
We have presented a strategy for semi-automating the laborious, tedious task of citation screening for systematic reviews, and provided evidence that our method can significantly reduce reviewers' workloads. The burden on researchers undertaking systematic reviews is only going to increase with the exponentially growing body of biomedical literature. This work is a step towards alleviating a large part of this burden without sacrificing the scientific thoroughness of conducted reviews.
Our code is written in Python and makes use of a modified version of LibSVM . Abstract and title texts were pre-processed by removing stop words from the pubmed stop-word list , and also removing all words that appeared fewer than 3 times (this was an arbitrary number picked to reduce feature-space size).
To extract UMLS concepts, we used the MetaMap transfer application (available at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/mmtx.html.) Using this program, a list of all discovered UMLS terms was generated for each abstract title in the whole set of abstracts. We then mapped title texts to a bag-of-biomedical concepts representation, treating the UMLS terms as words.
We fully plan on open-sourcing our abstract screening code once it is further validated (and documented). Indeed, we have included the source code used in experimentation as additional file 1 (curious snake.zip). We also plan to eventually make our systematic review datasets publically available, to allow other researchers to work with them. In the meantime, if a researcher is interested in obtaining the current version of the code (or datasets), he or she may contact the authors.
This work was supported by R01 HS018494 from AHRQ and Tufts Medical Center Research Fund for methodology development, and based on previous work funded by NCRR R33 RR17109. The funders had no role in the design, conduct, analysis, and interpretation of the study, the drafting of the manuscript or the decision to submit it for publication.
BCW wrote the first draft of the paper that was critically commented on by all authors. BCW, CB and TAT developed algorithms. BCW and TAT assembled the databases. BCW implemented software code and performed. Findings were interpreted by all authors. All authors have read and approved the final manuscript. |
0.99925 | What's the point in training?
The next time you walk into the office and tell your employees that they’re due to go on a training course, I’m sure you’ll hear at least one subdued groan. Training isn’t going to be everyone’s favorite part of business for obvious reasons. It’s tedious for your employees, and eats into more important tasks you want to be tackling. However, if you want to reach your long-term business goals, ongoing employee training is essential. Here are a few pointers for making sure you get the most out of it.
First of all, leverage your best employees, as they make the best trainers. One of the many perks of being a small business owner is that you start off with a small number of employees, which makes them much easier to manage. When you’re hand-raising people in entry-level jobs, you’ll know who’s best suited to pass on their skills and knowledge. There’s no need to spend a load of capital on outsourcing your training when you’ve already got a wealth of knowledge and experience right there. For example, if you have employees who have been with you for a while and demonstrated great communication skills, appoint them as trainers for that skill, and make them the host for a monthly talk on the subject. As I mentioned before, training isn’t generally that popular, so you may want to offer bonuses or other incentives to make sure you’re getting the most out of these in-house tutors.
Next, make sure you’re researching changes in your industry, and stacking this against the skills and expertise within your business. If you let the skills at your business become outdated, then your profit margins are sure to suffer. Whatever industry your business is a part of, you can be sure that it’s not static, and there will always be some new technology, practice or convention which you should be looking into. As your business changes with the times, your training should as well. For example, if you’re in the energy sector and you’re looking to branch out into greener, more progressive energy sources, then organize some global renewable energy training. If you want your sales team to start using a more modern CRM system, then set a date for an in-house seminar on it.
Finally, make sure you’re taking generational differences into account. Unless you’re a genius like Mark Zuckerberg, odds are you were fairly old when your business started to take wing. It’s also pretty likely that your workforce is made up of a lot of millennials, who may not have the same outlook on business as you do. Your upper management are probably closer to your age, or somewhere in between. The point I’m getting at here is that a multi-generational workforce can sometimes lead to gaps in training. It’s very important to realize that different age groups are more receptive to different kinds of training. Your older workers may be more comfortable sitting through a good-old seminar, whereas your younger employees will stand to gain more from hands-on, tech-based training. |
0.920736 | In 1998, I began sewing. In 2011, my sewing productivity began to drop. I had a good run. I made hundreds of garments and a few curtains, pillows, and bags along the way. Some projects turned out, some didn’t (if I was lucky, I could tell the difference). I loved sewing so much I have a needle and thread tattoo. I’m also a former owner of a sewing blog and spender of thousands of dollars in fabric and other sewing supplies.
First off, my body changed. It’s much easier to fit a flat piece of fabric onto a flat body. Why do you think models are that skinny? It’s not to taunt the rest of us; it’s to make the designers’ jobs easier. When I started sewing, I was maybe 100 pounds. Then I had my daughter in 2004 and decided to keep the weight because I’ve always wanted to be curvy. Clothes got much harder to fit.
Second, I got busier. This led to less sewing time and less energy. Spending 5 hours sewing a garment that may or may not fit and/or flatter became a costlier investment. I decided to spend my more limited leisure time on other hobbies.
And then I got more ready-to-wear shopping options. I live 10 minutes from an outlet mall. Then there’s Ebay and Thredup and 6pm.com and Amazon Prime. I find it easier to just go buy something instead of trying to sew it. And with sites like those I mentioned, I can usually buy a garment for the same cost as making it myself.
I’ve tried pattern alterations. I’ve even tried figuring out which alterations I’m supposed to make. Neither venture succeeded. My brain just doesn’t work that way. I’ve read Fit for Real People, Fast Fit, Pattern Fitting with Confidence, and I’ve bought Sure-Fit Systems. I’ve posted unflattering photos of myself on sewing forums wearing mock-up dresses hoping the advice I got would somehow make sense in my mind. It didn’t.
Aside from the occasional sweatpants, maxi skirt or loose-fitting tunic, I think I’m done making clothes for myself. I have a few pieces of fabric I plan to sew into a garment that may be presentable, and then that’s it. I’ll miss buying all those patterns on sale at the chain fabric stores, but then I’ll have money to buy clothes I can actually wear.
The above sentiment is often heard from patrons at craft shows and occasionally impolite folks commenting on a crafter or artist’s social media page. A local garden artist recently had this happen to her on her Facebook page. Mary of Garden Whimsies by Mary makes garden art, known as whimsies, using upcycled dishes, vases, knick knacks, and the like. While the majority of the comments on her creations are very complimentary, she also receives occasional requests to share the type of adhesive she uses, and some even are so bold as to tell her that they could easily make whimsies too. Some were actually pretty rude about it.
And these are only the factors I am aware of as a person who has never made such an item. I am sure there are many other factors involved in making a piece like this.
As a seller of handmade goods and an avid crafter myself, this topic is not new to me. I often see items for sale that I could easily make myself. However, the key is politeness. I know that it is extremely rude to say such a statement in front of the maker. And even if I can make the item myself, I may buy it anyway. Why?
For the same reason many of us eat at restaurants. While we can cook a meal, we just don’t want to at that time. We would prefer to pay for the convenience of having another person make the meal (or other item) for us. We might also appreciate the unique style that maker brings to the item that we might not have. We are not just buying a meal or a product; we are buying convenience.
Just like Mary, I am very transparent about how my products are made. My specialty is korker ribbon hair accessories. I learned to make them by finding tutorials via my friend Google. Obviously, anyone can use Google and learn to make the same item, and that’s OK with me. My customers are those who prefer not to make their own and prefer to purchase them from me. In fact, since I purchase ribbon in bulk, the cost of my bows isn’t much more than what it would cost the average person to purchase the materials at their local craft store.
So, stating dismissively that you could make an item that someone put a lot of effort and love into is really oversimplifying it. And it’s also very rude to say to that person.
I recently ended a 7-year journey as an adoption social worker in the child welfare field. I was involved in almost 200 adoptions, and I was ecstatic for every single one. So, when it came time to adopt my 2 stepdaughters, I was dumbfounded as to why I didn’t feel that same excitement and joy. Some may even pass judgment on me for it. These feelings even upset me until I figured them out.
In a child welfare adoption, that day in front of the judge has been highly anticipated by many of the parties involved for many months or years. A child who’s spent years in the system being repeatedly abandoned and rejected, a couple who experienced infertility now has children who call them Mom and Dad, a relative caregiver or foster parent who cared for a child throughout an unpredictable and slowly-progressing dependency case. All of these scenarios involved uncertainty, and most of them involved a conclusion that had been hoped for.
A stepparent adoption doesn’t necessarily work that way. I will only comment on my own experience which may or may not be typical. When I met these girls almost 3 years ago, I never envisioned becoming their mother. In fact, I only had one birth child because that’s all I wanted and thought I could handle. I did not mind being a stepmother (crazy behaviors aside), and I encouraged the girls’ relationship with their birth mother. I even tried to help her, but her lifestyle choices were not compatible with parenting. (I am not sharing the details here in the event that the girls someday find this blog; I don’t want them to learn about the circumstances this way.) About 2 1/2 years into my relationship with my now-husband, she decided to surrender her parental rights with the knowledge that I would adopt them.
Telling 2 young girls (ages 6 and 8) that they may never see their birth mother again, even with a therapist present, is about as horrible as you may have guessed it is. I did not expect the blow to be softened by the news that I would adopt them, and I doubt it was.
About 5 months later, we were all in a courtroom finalizing the adoption. Like the weeks leading up to the occasion, I did not have any of the feelings I did at the adoptions I’d been a party to professionally. In fact, everyone was quite blase about it. Nothing felt different. The younger girl had been calling me “Mommy” since I’d broken the news to her (I told them they could call me whatever they felt comfortable with, and they could change their mind anytime). The excitement surfaced when we pulled up to Yogurt Mountain for a post-adoption treat.
So, why the lack of excitement? I couldn’t muster up any excitement for what I feel is a monumental loss for them. The only reason we were in that courtroom is because of their birth mother’s inability to care for them. How could I feel joyful about that? Of course, adoption means a lifelong commitment, but I’d already made that commitment when I married their father. So, they didn’t gain anything; rather, they lost a parent. The adoption made it official.
I suspect that I will see future adoptions I attend a little differently now. It reminded me of the time my supervisor told me, “adoption is sad.” I had no idea what she was talking about. I understood that an adoption was preceded by a loss, but I never believed that the loss could overshadow the joy of adoption. Now I understand.
On my last post, I talked about all the ways my husband and I saved money on our wedding. I promised more details in future posts, and though life has been unsurprisingly busy since then, I want to keep my word and share!
For most brides, picking out a dress is a very big deal and involves trying on dozens of dresses, lots of opinions from family or friends, and budget-busting misery. There is just something, well, wrong with spending 3 or 4 figures on a dress that will be worn once when many of those same brides don’t even break the hundred-dollar mark on garments they wear all the time.
As the sole wage earner in my family until my husband finishes college, buying an expensive wedding dress was not an option. However, buying a sundress off the rack would’ve been disappointing to me. After all, it was my WEDDING, after all! I ended up with a dress I love so much I would’ve chosen it no matter how big my budget was.
The first thing I did was think about what was and was not important to me. I have always loved ball gown style dresses, so that went on the list. I also wanted a white gown. It did not matter to me if the dress was brand new or not. I didn’t find many local options for pre-owned dresses, so I looked online.
The site I ended up buying from was www.preownedweddingdresses.com. It’s a site similar to eBay in that individual sellers post and sell their dresses and accessories. Since I was buying online and therefore couldn’t try it on, I looked for a strapless style with lacing in the back. This eliminated having to worry about it not fitting in the arm and shoulder area, which is where I have the most problems. The corset-style lacing allows the dress to fit a range of sizes. The ball gown skirt is also very full and loose fitting and therefore easy to fit as well. The dress I bought was a sample from a bridal shop. It’s a beautiful Maggie Sotero with a beaded bodice and pick-up skirt. I paid $220 shipped! The only way one could tell it wasn’t brand new was if they looked on the inside. Since bridal shops don’t want you ordering direct from a manufacturer or shopping around, they remove labels from the dress and instead write a number inside the bodice for identification. The ribbon hangers were also cut out. No big deal. When my dress arrived, all I had to do was hem it with some Steam-a-Seam and I was ready for my wedding!
I felt so beautiful in that dress, and no one could believe I only paid $220 for it! I always thought I’d be one to give away or sell my wedding dress, but it’s so beautiful that it’s still hanging in my closet almost 4 months later! I see it every morning when I get dressed, and it still makes me smile.
Weddings, as you already know, are ridiculously expensive. An average wedding in the US costs $27,000. How does an average couple (or their parents) afford that?!? My husband and I got married last weekend, and being on a budget like most of us are these days, we needed to keep costs to a minimum. We managed to have a lovely wedding on a super small budget of $638.75. I’ll tell you how!
We held the wedding at our house. This eliminated venue fees completely. All we had to do was clean our house and rearrange our living room. My husband spruced up our backyard including pressure washing our fence. We rented chairs and decorated the yard ourselves. My husband bought wood posts, painted them white, and I draped lengths of tulle between each, securing with a thumbtack.
We kept the guest list short. We only invited very close family and friends who’ve been supportive of us and our family. We did not invite acquaintances, coworkers, or family we’re not close to. Also, most of my family lives out of state, so they were unable to attend. This resulted in about 20 guests, about half of whom were children.
The entire wedding, including reception, was 3 hours long. We saw no need for an all-day affair. Of course, this meant skipping lots of the traditional wedding festivities, but we preferred that anyway. In addition, this was much easier for our guests as it didn’t take up an entire Saturday for them.
We did not serve a meal. Getting married does not obligate you to buy dinner for dozens of people. It’s not that we didn’t want to; we could not afford to. We held our wedding from 2-5pm so it was not during mealtime, and instead we served some simple snacks, drinks (no alcohol), and a wedding cake baked by my mom.
We did not have a traditional reception with dancing, a DJ, and alcohol, i.e. no drunk white people dancing. While that is certainly entertaining, it is also expensive as it requires a paid venue, DJ, alcohol, and bartenders. We also had a family friendly wedding as we have 3 children between us, and our guests had children as well. A bunch of drunks grinding on the dance floor and falling all over the place is not great for kids to watch. Instead, we all hung out and chatted like a regular party, and I set up a craft table for the kids.
We skipped the flowers. I just could not see myself spending 4 figures on flowers. It is such a waste of money, in my opinion. I am also quite unusual in that I do not even like flowers. Even my bouquet was flower-less. I used feather butterflies instead (more on that in a future post). And I doubt our guests even noticed the lack of flowers.
We did not hire a photographer. This was a difficult one, as I really appreciate well done, professional photos. However, we could not afford it. Fortunately, we had 2 of our guests who brought great cameras and happily took pictures for us. And after seeing the results, I no longer regret not having a pro do them. Additionally, with the availability of free, easy to use photo editing programs, great photos are possible for even the novices among us.
I bought a pre-owned dress online. I know, how could I have skipped the joys of going to bridal shops and having my friends gasp as I walk out in wedding dress after wedding dress? And how could I get THE perfect dress for $200 online, and have it fit without professional alterations? Well, first, I am not as picky as some. I knew I wanted a strapless ballgown in white with a detailed skirt. Luckily, that is a very popular style. Also, in order to avoid expensive alterations, I chose a corseted style which laces in the back. All I had to do was hem it with Steam-a-Seam. I found a gorgeous Maggie Sotero gown on http://www.preownedweddingdresses.com/. It was a floor sample from a bridal shop, which didn’t bother me in the least. The only difference is that the tags are removed, and a style number was written on the bodice lining. Big deal! It is the most beautiful dress I could’ve gotten no matter what budget I had. I got so many compliments on it, and people were surprised to find out how little I paid for it.
I skipped the veil. I cannot believe how much brides are willing to pay for a $1 length of tulle sewn to a hair comb! Also, veils, in my opinion, are a little dated. I was going to make a fascinator with birdcage veil, but after trying it on, I decided it looked silly on me. So, I did not wear any kind of headpiece at all.
A family member did my hair and makeup. I’m sure most of us have at least one friend or relative with a talent for hair and makeup. I am not that person, but luckily, my husband’s aunt is. She happily came over early to make me pretty for my wedding day.
I did not purchase any special accessories or shoes. The length of my dress made my shoe choice completely inconsequential, so I wore a favorite pair of flats. I found a pair of butterfly earrings in my jewelry box which fit perfectly with my bouquet and the sugar butterflies on the cake. I wore a necklace from my sister that I wear every day, and my husband and I kept the rings we’ve been wearing since our engagement. And my husband’s aunt gave me a pretty jeweled butterfly for my hair.
My husband skipped the tuxedo. We decided that since it was a casual spring wedding in Florida, it would be just fine if he wore a shirt and tie instead of a formal tux. His only expenditure was a new tie.
Our flower girls’ ensembles were not from a bridal shop. It seems as though attaching the words “wedding” or “bridal” to something doubles the price. This is where Ebay came in handy. I’m a big fan of Gymboree clothing, and while it is spendy at their stores, you can buy their clothes pretty inexpensively used. I took several hours browsing dresses on Ebay until I decided on a cotton shift style. And since it is a popular brand, I had no trouble finding one in each girl’s size. I paid $14, $15, and $20 for the dresses, which originally retailed for $34.75. And since it is a casual style, they can wear them many more times. Each girl wore a pair of pink sandals and a hair bow I made to match the dresses (having my online accessory shop, Orange Blossom Accessories, made that simple). Their baskets were from Ross and were spray-painted white (they were orange) with a ribbon handle added (more on that in a future post).
I made the programs and favors. I’ll do a separate post on these, but in a nutshell, the programs were printed on cardstock at home for pennies. The favors for the adults were magnets with a fun Dr. Seuss poem with our names and wedding date (i.e. something our guests may actually use and appreciate). For the girls, they got hair bows similar to those worn by our daughters, and the boys got bottle cap zipper pulls that I also made.
We did not do printed invitations. I considered them, but decided against it because they’d just be thrown out anyway. Who keeps old wedding invitations? We invited people via Facebook event instead. And for those who couldn’t attend, we hooked up our webcam so they could watch it on You Tube (I’ll write a separate post on this later). |
0.616767 | The Federal Election Commission (FEC) is an independent agency that was established by the 1974 amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 (88 Stat. § 1280 [2U.S.C.A. § 431 et seq.]). The 1974 amendments—passed after President RICHARD M. NIXON resigned in the wake of the WATERGATE scandals, which included charges of abuse of power and OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE involving campaign contributions—set out financial rules governing campaigns for federal office. The FEC was designed to act both as a clearinghouse for information on federal campaign laws and as the enforcer of campaign laws.
The FEC is composed of six commissioners who are appointed by the president with the advice and consent of the Senate. The act also provides for three statutory officers—the staff director, the general counsel, and the inspector general—who are appointed by the commission.
The FEC's main responsibility is to enforce federal campaign financing laws. Thus, its scope is limited to overseeing the financing of congressional, senatorial, and presidential election campaigns. The Federal Election Campaign Act, as amended in 1974, was intended to limit severely the amount of financial contributions made by wealthy individuals, and to place limits on the amounts that candidates could spend on their campaigns. In addition, the law required public disclosure of all campaign contributions and established public financing for presidential campaigns.
Since the law was enacted in 1971, the FEC has been faced with lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of its campaign-financing provisions. The U.S. Supreme Court, in Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1, 96 S. Ct. 612, 46 L. Ed. 2d 659(1976), complicated the work of the FEC when it ruled that the 1974 act's limitation on campaign expenditures was unconstitutional. The Court did uphold the limit of $1,000 for individual contributions, but ruled that candidates could spend as much as they wished of their personal fortunes on their campaigns.
Because of loopholes in the law and the Buckley decision, there has been a tremendous growth in POLITICAL ACTION COMMITTEES (PACs) as vehicles for major campaign spending. PACs are special organizations formed by labor, industry, the professions, and other interest groups that are not identified with individual candidates. PACs are not bound by the individual-contribution restriction; therefore, their political influence has risen with their large contributions.
The FEC administers and enforces the law with respect to limits and prohibitions on contributions and expenditures made to influence federal elections. In addition, it enforces the requirement that candidates must disclose where campaign money comes from and how it is spent. This requirement has created a complex set of rules that the FEC must administer. The FEC places reports on the public record within 48 hours after they have been received, and computerizes the data contained in the reports.
If the FEC discovers irregularities or violations of the law, either through its own internal audits or through a complaint filed by the public, it has the authority to seek civil enforcement of the law. The FEC first seeks compliance through conciliation, but it may file a lawsuit when conciliation fails.
The FEC administers the public funding of presidential elections. It certifies federal payments to primary candidates, general election nominees, and national nominating conventions. It also audits recipients of federal funds and may require repayment to the U.S. Treasury if a candidate makes nonqualified campaign expenditures.
Because of the complexity of the disclosure requirements and the concern that these requirements discourage some individuals from running for federal office, the FEC provides information through a toll-free telephone line; a web site, (www.fec.gov) publications; seminars; regulations, which clarify the law; and ADVISORY OPINIONS, which interpret the law in specific, factual situations.
The legitimacy of the Federal Election Commission to enforce campaign finance law and the provisions of the FECA was recently upheld by the Supreme Court in Federal Elections Commission v. Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee. 533 U.S. 431, 121 S.Ct. 2351 (2001). In that case, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) sued the Colorado state REPUBLICAN PARTY for violating the spending limits of Federal Election Campaign Act. The Party counterclaimed, asserting constitutional challenge to FECA, arguing that the FEC's attempts to limit independent expenditures in connection with a senatorial campaign violated free speech rights.
By a 5-4 majority, the Court held that FECA limits on parties' coordinated expenditures are not unduly burdensome to parties. The Court also found the expenditure limits comported with First Amendment's free speech and associational guarantees. Finally, the Court found that coordinated expenditure limits should be treated the same as FECA's limits on individuals' and nonparty groups' cash contributions when determining their validity.
This was the most important case the Supreme Court has handed down since Buckley concerning the powers of the FEC to enforce campaign finance laws. Despite the concern of many observers that the high court might strike down the ability of the FEC to regulate campaign contributions, the Court in the Colorado case affirmed the FEC's power. The decision reaffirmed Buckley's contribution/expenditure distinction while simultaneously reinforcing the government's power to control furtive contributions.
This decision has important implications concerning the FEC's ability to enforce the new campaign-finance reform act passed in 2002. Popularly known as McCain-Feingold, after the sponsors of the legislation, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) of 2002 (Pub.L. 107-155, Mar. 27, 2002, 116 Stat. 81) imposes new restrictions on the financing of political parties and candidates in the United States. The primary goal of the BCRA is to ban soft money, which is money given by corporations and other large donors for party-building and electioneering communications, and the FEC would have the responsibility to put the BCRA into effect. Senator JOHN MCCAIN, the chief sponsor of BCRA, said of the Colorado case, "Clearly, this decision demonstrates that McCain-Feingold restrictions on campaign contributions are constitutional, and our opponents will have to find some other excuse not to enact laws to restore Americans' confidence in our political system."
While the Court's Colorado decision seems to bode well for the FEC's ability to enforce the BCRA, there are still questions whether the act will be effectively enforced. Since its inception, the FEC has been a lightening rod for criticism from both parties. Campaign finance reform opponents and proponents alike question whether the nature of the FEC will prevent it from successfully implementing the law. Senator McCain has already suggested that the FEC was trying to "emasculate" the law through the efforts of commissioners appointed by President GEORGE W. BUSH, who signed the BCRA legislation reluctantly.
Others have suggested that the problem with FEC goes beyond its ability to enforce existing election laws, and that since it is normally a panel that is split evenly between Republican and DEMOCRATIC PARTY members, it is inherently biased against third parties. But while suggestions have been made to change the nature of the FEC by making it more independent or eliminating it altogether, it remained the nation's primary enforcer of state and federal election laws at the end of the twentieth century. It has entered the twenty-first century by establishing a web site with extensive information, by making campaign data from past elections more easily accessible, and developing a new electronic filing system. |
0.934974 | At the time, two major factions within the Punjab were contending for power and influence: the Sikh Sindhanwalias and the Hindu Dogras. The Dogras succeeded in raising Sher Singh, the eldest illegitimate son of Ranjit Singh, to the throne in January 1841. The most prominent Sindhanwalias took refuge on British territory, but had many adherents among the Army of the Punjab.
The army was expanding rapidly in the aftermath of Ranjit Singh's death, from 29,000 (with 192 guns) in 1839 to over 80,000 in 1845 as landlords and their retainers took up arms. It proclaimed itself to be the embodiment of the Sikh nation. Its regimental panchayats (committees) formed an alternative power source within the kingdom, declaring that Guru Gobind Singh's ideal of the Sikh commonwealth had been revived, with the Sikhs as a whole assuming all executive, military and civil authority in the State, which British observers decried as a "dangerous military democracy". British representatives and visitors in the Punjab described the regiments as preserving "puritanical" order internally, but also as being in a perpetual state of mutiny or rebellion against the central Durbar (court).
Maharajah Sher Singh was unable to meet the pay demands of the army, although he reportedly lavished funds on a degenerate court. In September 1843 he was murdered by his cousin, an officer of the army, Ajit Singh Sindhanwalia. The Dogras took their revenge on those responsible, and Jind Kaur, Ranjit Singh's youngest widow, became regent for her infant son Duleep Singh. After the vizier Hira Singh was killed, while attempting to flee the capital with loot from the royal treasury (toshkana), by troops under Sham Singh Attariwala, Jind Kaur's brother Jawahar Singh became vizier in December 1844. In 1845 he arranged the assassination of Peshaura Singh, who presented a threat to Duleep Singh. For this, he was called to account by the army. Despite attempts to bribe the army he was butchered in September 1845 in the presence of Jind Kaur and Duleep Singh.
Jind Kaur publicly vowed revenge against her brother's murderers. She remained regent. Lal Singh became vizier, and Tej Singh became commander of the army. Sikh historians have stressed that both these men were prominent in the Dogra faction. Originally high caste Hindus from outside the Punjab, both had converted to Sikhism in 1818.
The actions and attitudes of the British, under Governor General Lord Ellenborough and his successor, Sir Henry Hardinge, are disputed. By most British accounts, their main concern was that the Sikh army, without strong leadership to restrain them, was a serious threat to British territories along the border. Sikh and Indian historians have countered that the military preparations made by these Governors-General were offensive in nature; for example, they prepared bridging trains and siege gun batteries, which would be unlikely to be required in a purely defensive operation.
Sikh historians have always maintained that, in order to retain their hold on power and maintain the figurehead rule of Duleep Singh, Lal Singh and Tej Singh embarked on the war with the deliberate intent of breaking their own army. In particular, Lal Singh was corresponding with a British political officer and betraying state and military secrets throughout the war.[page needed] Lal Singh's and Tej Singh's desertion of their armies and refusal to attack when opportunity offered seem inexplicable otherwise.
^ Allen 2001, p. 28.
^ Hernon 2003, p. 546.
^ Grewal 1998, p. 120.
^ Hernon 2003, p. 547.
^ Hernon 2003, p. 548.
^ Farwell 1973, p. 30.
^ Cunningham 1853, p. 257.
^ a b Sidhu 2013.
^ a b Jawandha 2010, p. 64.
Farwell, Byron (1973). Queen Victoria's little wars. Wordsworth Editions. ISBN 978-1-84022-216-6.
Hernon, Ian (2003). Britain's forgotten wars. Sutton Publishing Ltd. ISBN 978-0-7509-3162-5.
Grewal, J. S. (1998). The Sikhs of Punjab. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-26884-4.
Cunningham, Joseph (1853). Cunningham's history of the Sikhs. Retrieved 24 July 2015.
Sidhu, Amarpal (2010). The First Anglo-Sikh War. Stroud, Gloucs: Amberley Publishing Limited. ISBN 978-1-84868-983-1.
Jawandha, Nahar (2010). Glimpses of Sikhism. New Delhi: Sanbun Publishers. ISBN 978-93-80213-25-5.
Allen, Charles (2001). Soldier Sahibs. Abacus. ISBN 978-0-349-11456-9.
A fictionalised description of the origins and course of the First Anglo-Sikh War (as well as various Sikh fortifications including breastworks) can be found in the comedy/adventure novel Flashman and the Mountain of Light by George MacDonald Fraser (1990). However, the book's well-researched footnotes are a source for serious historical information and further reading, such as the memoirs of some of the principals involved. |
0.999991 | You have meat which make hatcheries to produce larva. Larva and meat are used to make drones which make more meat. Drones, larva, and meat are used to make queens which make drones. In short, lots of stuff makes lots of stuff. |
0.943403 | Ow does social media affects our happiness?
Write a 6-page research paper which is about how does social media affects our happiness. Please use 3 resources to illustrate that social media actually makes us happy. and analyze them further. The research paper should have introduction, body graph, and conclusion.
Introduction: You might explore the way that some writers have defined happiness as a?good feelingsa? and a?enjoyment,a? while you will argue that happiness can be found in a social connection with others.
Body of paper: you might write about three examples from resources, and analyze them that social media actually makes us happy. |
0.999872 | What are some tips on eating healthy when living in UCF apartments?
The Place at Alafaya has great kitchens to help you make healthy meals. Click the picture for more information!
For some residents, maintaining a healthy lifestyle after moving is an important priority. Additionally, moving to University of Central Florida apartments can be a great opportunity for making changes to your diet, creating more thoughtful grocery lists and discovering new places and restaurants with healthier food choices. A change of environment and routine may make it easier for some residents to achieve more of their health goals. Apartments near UCF have a high student population, leading to a wider range of health food shops and diet-specific restaurants.
What are some tips for eating at home and packing lunches in UCF apartments?
Even though there are several healthy and delicious restaurant options near UCF apartments, eating out on a regular basis can be expensive for most budgets. Many people on the path to eating healthier will recommend making your own food as much as possible. This allows for better control of ingredients, such as dressing, butter and oils, and allows for customization exactly to your taste. Enjoying your food is an important part of improving your lifestyle, so make sure to add this to your list of priorities.
One of the best tips for preparing your own food is to do additional research in your free time before you head to the grocery store. Try to make a clear list of all the ingredients and items you need, and stick to the list as much as possible when walking down the aisles. This can help reduce the temptation of grabbing unhealthy items on a whim. While not for everyone, meal prep for the entire week can be a fantastic solution for residents who want to cook it and forget it. If you're interested in meal prep, read through this helpful beginner's guide to meal planning. The article also has important information about nutritional value and ensuring you're eating enough to stay healthy and strong. Apartments with a kitchen pantry and kitchen island can be helpful for meal prep and organization.
Do you have any tips for healthy eating while dining out near UCF apartments?
Some people associate eating out with heavy meals and unhealthy options, but many restaurants have revamped their menus to include healthier options and diet-specific choices. The Orlando area is home to a diverse population with different lifestyles, health goals and dietary needs. This makes it much easier to be picky and find exactly what you're looking for.
For example, First Watch near UCF apartments has a "healthier side" menu section that helps cut some of the calories and cholesterol of typical brunch foods. Darden restaurants, like LongHorn Steakhouse and Bahama Breeze, have customizable menus with healthier swaps for sides, and most of the nutritional information can be found online. Additionally, Seasons 52 is a specialty restaurant that focuses on providing fresh, tasty food that is much lower in calories than the typical restaurant meal. They even provide the nutritional information directly on the menu. Your best tool when eating out is a strong knowledge base on ingredients and food preparation, so that you can make informed choices regardless of the availability of nutritional information. |
0.997703 | "Facebook have clearly entered into whitelisting agreements with certain companies, which meant that after the platform changes in 2014/15 they maintained full access to friends data", Collins wrote in an accompanying note.
A cache of internal Facebook documents released by a United Kingdom member of Parliament show how CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other executives wrestled with how to monetize their valuable user data while still encouraging third-party apps to post user activity on Facebook.
Another plan which Facebook never put into practice was outlined by Mark Zuckerberg in an email in October 2012, where he suggests charging developers "a lot of money - perhaps on the order of $0.10 per user per year" - for access.
Within the emails are several examples of external companies begging Facebook not to remove user data permissions for their products - perhaps the most prominent victim of which is Twitter and its now-defunct Vine social video app.
In one exchange from 2012, when Mr Zuckerberg discussed charging developers for access to user data and persuading them to share their data with the social network, he wrote: "It's not good for us unless people also share back to Facebook and that content increases the value of our network".
"We stand by the platform changes we made in 2015 to stop a person from sharing their friends' data with developers", said a spokeswoman. With regards to Onavo, Facebook argues "we've always been clear when people download Onavo about the information that is collected and how it is used, including by Facebook".
Facebook's statement goes into specifics, detailing each of the concerns raised thus far by the exposed communications, although arguably, numerous provided answers do not completely address the issues raised - in some cases going off on tangents and pointing towards other mechanisms involved.
The summary of findings' second takeaway is that Facebook consistently wanted to link "access to friends data to the financial value of the developers' relationship with [the company]". Zuckerberg mentioned companies like Path and Pinterest, rival social networks that could use the developer access to run it out of business. Rather than letting devs pay a one time fee to fetch data, we could effectively do this by mandating that devs must keep data fresh and update their data each month for anything they call.
In Britain, Zuckerberg and his leadership team are under fierce scrutiny since revelations that one developer, Cambridge Analytica, allegedly abused access to information about up to 87 million people on Facebook.
Netflix, Airbnb, Lyft and Badoo did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Facebook planned to make it as hard as possible for users to know that this was happening.
Trump used his online proclamations on Monday to slam Michael Cohen over his plea deal with Robert Mueller . Trump added: " He lied for this outcome and should, in my opinion, serve a full and complete sentence ".
Still, the Israeli army has warned farmers not to approach the border, while Hezbollah has put its forces on high alert. On Tuesday, bulldozers and military vehicles were seen operating near the pastoral Israeli border town of Metula.
Noted trade analyst and film critic Taran Adarsh took to Twitter to share the box-office numbers of Hindi version of "2.0". However, things did not seem to have worked out between them and then the role eventually fell into Akshay's lap.
Kop idol Ian Rush believes the next month will hold the key to Liverpool's hopes of winning a first title in 29 years. We do not need an extra portion of motivation because of Paris and what happened on the pitch. |
0.999999 | You are a member of a team of programmers whose task is to write a board game. Your job is to write the part that examines a board layout and enumerates all possible moves for a given player. The game you are writing is played on an 8 by 8 grid of squares (similar to a chess or checker board but the squares are all the same color). The rows are labeled with the letters A through H from top to bottom. The columns are labeled with the numbers 1 through 8 from left to right.
1. Pieces may be moved in a straight line, either left, right, up, down or diagonally.
2. The number of spaces a piece may be moved is determined by the total number of pieces in the row, column or diagonal in which the piece is being moved. Pieces may only be moved by this exact number, no more, no less.
3. A player may jump over his own pieces.
4. A player may not jump over his opponent's pieces.
5. A player may capture an opponent's piece by landing on it.
6. A player may not land on a space he already occupies.
The input file consists of one or more board layouts followed by which piece, either 'X' or 'O' (that's an ``oh'' not a zero), for which moves should be displayed for. Each board is specified as 8 lines of 8 characters each. Each board position will contain an 'X', an 'O' or a period. The 'X' and 'O' position represent the occupied positions, and the periods represent empty board positions. Immediately following each board is line containing a single 'X' or 'O' character, and it is for this piece that moves should be displayed. The end of the input is indicated by the end of the file.
The output file should contain one line for each possible move. The moves should be printed in lexicographic order. Each line should specify the origin and destination of each piece, in that order, separated by a single dash character. Each board location (origins and destinations) should be specified as a row letter followed by a column number. If no moves are possible then the output should simply specify "No moves are possible". The output for each board should be separated by a single blank line. |
0.970378 | Coming up with a proper storage system - This is one of the most important parts of decorating the kids' room. You need to have a good storage system so that the kids themselves would be able to learn how to organize their things properly and in the right manner. You might also want to pay attention to the actual materials used in creating the storage system. Make sure that it won't be a hazard inside the room specially if the kids accidentally bump against it. As much as possible, you should also choose storage systems that are not too bulky. |
0.999196 | The author is trying to convey that there is a shortage of stem cells for research. The president claimed that there will be enough funding available for stem cell research, but in fact, there is not. He misleads medical researchers and scientists as there are a limited number of stem cells available for funding and research. Medical researchers and scientists are in need of stem cells for research and treatments for diseases. It is apparent to the public that there is not enough funding available for their research, and even worse, the stem cells that are available lack sufficient genetic diversity. Therefore, they cannot figure out how effective their research would be on these stem cells. The stem cells available were not really effective because the ones on the approved list were mixed with other cells, so researches cannot find an effective treatment using mixed cells. The administration assures researchers, but the fact is evident that they are being led away from ever researching stem cells that would help find the cure for different diseases. The researchers and scientists have been betrayed by their government and administration.
The president and his administration tries to assure abortion opponents that they will not continue to use embryos in stem cell research as they are ultimately destroyed after the use of research. The president and his administration show pride in maintaining the proper use of embryos. They demonstrated strong ethics in their course of action. They deserved to be applauded for advocating on behalf of abortion opponents. This is the one thing that is true in the tight limit of stem cell research; they realized the bad affect of stem cell research on human embryos and rectified the problem. Restricted federal support was put into play as a means of limiting stem cell research.
The president and his administration talked like they wanted to support the researchers, but they in turn knew that it was not a reality for anyone. They tried their best to deny the fact until it became public. After it became public, they still found a way to cover up this treachery by implying that it was a growing process. I think that such deception should not have been portrayed by the president and his administration. They should do everything to support the researchers and scientists, who are trying to find different treatments for diseases. There is no humility in such behavior displayed by the president and his administration. The president and administration appeared inadequate to handle such a situation, which is embarrassing and uncalled for. It definitely was not the right time to inform researchers of a shortage of stem cells that were needed. They did not have to be informed in this way. They should have been notified of the shortage from the beginning, and then they would have been able to work towards a goal of providing the necessary stem cells for the research.
This was a childish performance by the president. It appears as if he does not take their matters into consideration, which is a poor work ethics to display in the public eye. He could have handled this situation a lot better; therefore, the researchers have the right to complain. He placed a limit on stem cell funding and is comfortable with his decision. But he does not realize that he is acting unethical. The researchers need to plan a course of action and, probably, start a fundraiser of their own to find solutions and obtain stem cells for their research. That is the step I would have taken as a researcher. Then again, there is a concern for human embryos being used for research. There is also information that supports the claim of unwanted embryos through in-vitro-fertilization. This is the one solid point that has been supported throughout the article. The president had no intentions of speeding up the process for research. He failed in his responsibility of taking care and showing interest in his people. As the president, he has the authority to make things happen, but he just proved to fellow citizens that his matters come first and everything else can come after, which is selfish on his part. |
0.899115 | Eden Hazard can win the Ballon d'Or according to former team-mate Yohan Cabaye, who labelled the Belgian the best player he has played with.
The pair are both graduates of Ligue 1 club Lille's youth system, and spent four years together in the first team there before Cabaye moved to Newcastle in 2011, with Hazard switching to Chelsea a season later.
Now in his seventh season at Stamford Bridge, Hazard has won two Premier League titles and the FA Cup with the club, as well as the 2013-14 PFA Players' Player of the Year.
And after a blistering start to the season, which has seen the 27-year-old net eight goals in 11 games, Cabaye has backed Hazard to take his seat at the top table.
Cabaye exclusively told Sportsmail: 'Eden, even back at Lille, he was a young player but he still had that quality that made him so special.
'I would say he is the best I have played with. He has so much quality and you see that every time he plays.
Cabaye also pointed to one former Premier League boss as particularly influential on his career.
Under Alan Pardew, Cabaye helped Newcastle to a remarkable fifth-placed Premier League finish in 2013, while the pair also reached the FA Cup final with Crystal Palace in 2016.
And Cabaye highlighted the 57-year-old's man management skills as key during their two spells together.
He said: 'Alan is an important person for me; he gave me the chance to play in England and that is something I will never forget.
'He always tried to know if you were OK both in and outside football, to be in the best mentality to play.
'For him, he knows that is something that is really important. He always took care of his players, and especially for me that is something he was amazing at.
'There are some games where his speeches made the difference. The way he could motivate his players was something special.
Yohan Cabaye believes Newcastle will secure Premier League survival despite picking up just one win in their opening 11 league games.
Cabaye, who starred for the Magpies between 2011 and 2014, was part of the Crystal Palace side that lost seven straight games at the start of last season but improved to finish 11th in the table.
And the Frenchman feels Newcastle can turn their season around following the victory over Watford.
Cabaye told Sportsmail: ‘In this situation it is really important to work really hard and not to change everything. It is easy to say that doesn’t work so we are going to change everything.
‘You need to keep the same mentality to work and give the player confidence.
‘You can be a good player with good quality but if you do not have confidence it can be difficult, really difficult.
Cabaye, 32, left the Eagles in the summer after three years to join Dubai-based Al-Nasr, opting to join them despite having offers to return to France.
Al-Nasr themselves endured a four-game losing run at the start of the season but are now unbeaten in three in the Arabian Gulf League.
The former PSG man insists he is enjoying life in the Middle East, despite the conditions being somewhat different to those he experienced in England.
He said: ‘The weather was hard to deal with at the beginning but I didn’t want to complain or use this as an excuse.
‘For me I have always played in the north of France or England, so it has been different.
‘I was happy to come here and play in warm weather but I didn’t expect it to be this warm.
While the Frenchman was settling into his new club, his country claimed World Cup victory in Russia.
Cabaye won 48 caps and scored four goals for his country since his debut 2010, with his last appearance coming during Euro 2016, but insists he has no regrets over missing out on the summer’s triumph.
And now having left the Premier League for seemingly the last time as a player, Cabaye reflected positively on his time in the UK.
He said: ‘It is not easy to adapt yourself to English football, it is totally different to French football I am proud of my time there and in France and also with my national team.
‘I worked really hard to have those memories and in my time here, I can only be proud of what I have done.
Pardew also features in one of Cabaye's best memories in football, Crystal Palace's 2-1 extra-time defeat by Manchester United in the 2016 FA Cup final.
The Eagles had taken the lead late on through Jason Puncheon, and Cabaye remembers vividly his boss' eccentric celebration on the touchline.
Cabaye said: 'His dance after the goal in the FA Cup final, it wasn't something arrogant, but it was all him.
'He lives for the moment and he is happy and that is the way he enjoys the moment.
The Frenchman also admitted that management holds an increasing appeal to him as he nears the end of his playing days.
Cabaye revealed that he has started to view games differently as he reaches the end of his career.
He said: 'It's something I'm really interested in when I watch football games.
'Before, I was just watching football for watching football, for goals and skills, but now I try to watch the game in a different way, more tactically, to see the whole picture.
'I like to see which manager is on the sideline, what they bring when they change a player, how they change it game by game. |
0.999997 | Jafarian, H., Demers, C. M. H., Blanchet, P., and Laundry, V. (2016). "Impact of indoor use of wood on the quality of interior ambiances under overcase and clear skies: Case study of the Eugene H. Kruger Building, Québec City," BioRes. 11(1), 1647-1663.
This paper explores the potential of wood for improving environmental quality in interior spaces. In northern climate cities where overcast skies predominate, interior spaces may appear gloomy or dull, since natural light is white and uniform. Nevertheless it is observed that wooden surfaces tend to create warmer and brighter spaces under overcast sky conditions. The objectives of this research were twofold. The first was evaluating the quality of wooden spaces under two sky conditions in terms of color, brightness and contrast. The second objective was to investigate daylight quantity of wooden spaces under diffuse and clear sky conditions. The method involved on site-surveys using Photolux, a calibrated photoluminance meter. Data consist of calibrated digital images that were processed to analyze the quality of spaces based on brightness, contrast, and color. The Kruger Building, with its internal wooden architectural structure and decorative indoor panels, was chosen as a site study for this research. Conclusions suggest that knowing the effect of different sky conditions on wooden spaces can help architects and other professionals in designing more comfortable and efficient ambiances. More particularly, this research addresses issues related to the quantitative effects of wood on daylighting distribution, visual comfort and luminance diversity.
A connection with nature, even in the modern world, is critical to people’s physical and psychological wellbeing. Unfortunately, modern society increases the disconnection from nature. One of the areas where this increasing separation from nature is reflected is through the modern built environment. This is especially problematic because people spend around 80% of their time within buildings (Harijaona et al. 2009; Wymelenberg 2012; Veitch and Dikel 2013), a reality that is even more critical during winter in cold climates. There are several ways of emphasizing a feeling of nature inside the built environment. Biophilia design addresses the deficiencies of contemporary building and landscape by establishing a new framework for satisfying experience of nature in the built environment (Kellert 2005; Kellert et al. 2008; Kellert and Finnegan 2011; Browning et al. 2012). Kellert and Calabrese (2015) categorize these challenges into three sections. First is through the direct experience of nature, which refers to actual contact with environmental features in the built environment including natural light, air, plants, animals, water, and landscapes. Second is via an indirect experience of nature, which refers to contact with the representation of nature including pictures, artwork, and natural materials such as wood furnishing and wooden fabrics. And finally, the experience of space and place refers to spatial features characteristic of natural environment such and complexity, mobility and way finding.
Emphasizing the feeling of nature inside buildings through the use of natural materials such as wood enhances physical and mental health, and therefore promotes wellbeing. These effects of wood have been studied in recent research. Wood was associated with decreased blood pressure in an Austrian study; high school students who were taught in classrooms with floors, ceilings, and walls finished in real wood had lower heart rates than students taught in classrooms with no wood elements (Kelz et al. 2011). Besides having lower heart rates, students in the wood classrooms also reported lower levels of stress than those in non-wood classrooms. Tsunetsugu et al. (2006) investigated study participants’ responses to being in a room with 0%, 45%, or 90% of surfaces covered with wood. Diastolic blood pressure was lowest in the rooms with 90% wood. However, the 45% coverage room was the one most preferred by participants. When 45% of surfaces were covered with wood people said they felt most comfortable. Fell (2010) studied the autonomic responses of 119 subjects in wood and non-wood offices before, during, and after a stressful mental task. In this study sympathetic nervous system activation was lower in the wood room indicating lower stress. Skin conductance level was lower in the wood office when subjects were alone in the room. Furthermore, the rate of non-specific skin conductance responses, measurable divergent stressful thoughts, in the wood office was less than half the measured values from the non-wood office. In healthcare environments, natural materials such as wood and views outside are associated with better patient outcomes with respect to recovery times, lower pain perception, and positive dispositions (Fell 2002).
Although the impacts of wood on enhancing physical and mental health of buildings’ occupants have become known, research on the effect of indoor wood material on visual comfort and energy efficiency of an interior ambiance is limited. This research therefore addresses the notion of visual comfort, which consists of a subjective impression related to the quantity, distribution, and quality of light. When addressed, it could lead to a decrease in external energy demand such as electrical lighting, and help in creating an energy-efficient ambiance.
Visual comfort is reached when objects can be seen clearly, without tiredness and in a pleasantly colored environment (Wymelenberg and Inanici 2009). A visually comfortable environment supports the wellbeing of buildings’ occupants and their productivity. On the contrary, space with lighting that is too weak or that is extremely lit favors tiredness. In the long term, or sometimes sooner, these spaces can cause tiredness and other eyes problems, accompanied by a feeling of discomfort and a reduced visual performance (Wymelenberg and Inanici 2009). Absence of glare is one of the key parameters to reach visual comfort within a lit environment. Due to the great variability between individuals as to when they start to perceive a bright surface as disturbing, this research evaluates visual comfort quantitatively by comparing glare indices and also qualitatively by comparing brightness and contrast, as well as color temperature of the space. Among the glare indices driven from the Photolux measurement system, Visual Comfort Probability (VCP) and Daylight Glare Index (DGI) evaluate glare caused from large sources such as the sun, while Unified Glare Ratio (UGR) is valid for small glare sources. The visual comfort probability (VCP) system evaluates lighting systems in terms of the percentage of the observer population that will accept the lighting system and its environment as being comfortable (Light Guide, 2012). Daylight Glare Index (DGI), however, is developed by Hopkinson, and Table 1 shows the scale for DGI proposed by Chauvel et al. (1982) to evaluate glare. According to this scale, DGI values greater than or equal to 26 represent an uncomfortable space.
Therefore, this research aims to study visual characteristics of a wooden built environment under two sky conditions. For this reason, the Pavilion Eugene H. Kruger, a structure made with black spruce (Picea mariana Mill.) and Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii Mirb.), mostly covered with indoor decorative yellow birch (Betula alleghaniensis Britt.) and medium density fiberboard (MDF) panels, was chosen. This all-wood structure is known for its environmental control strategies, which led to a 32% reduction in operating energy consumption compared with a reference building, as defined by the Canadian building codes (Potvin and Demers 2007).
To take advantage of the benefits of the visually comforting characteristics of wooden spaces, it is necessary to know the effect of sky conditions on the wood and on the visual perception of wood in interior spaces. Therefore, on-site surveys were performed under two sky conditions, overcast and clear. Overcast skies are a critical consideration for daylighting strategies implemented in spaces located in northern latitudes, such as Canada. In Quebec City, overcast to partly overcast skies are dominant, and occur 63% of the year (Demers 2001). The diffuse light of the overcast sky is uniform, with lower lighting levels than sunlighting, and is generally associated with low contrast values. Interior spaces may be perceived as being gloomy and dull under overcast sky conditions, and therefore affect people’s moods and atmosphere of spaces (Lam 1977). It is therefore important to study the effects of wooden spaces under the critical but characteristic conditions of the diffuse light, while still including the clear sky condition in order to cover different sky conditions throughout the year.
The main objectives of this research were to analyze visual characteristics of a wooden lit environment both quantitatively and qualitatively and its impact on reducing the demand for artificial lighting. Quantitative analysis used statistical information driven from Photolux photoluminance meter. The qualitative analysis was performed by comparing brightness, contrast, and color temperature values of an interior space. It was hypothesized that knowing the impact of daylight on wooden spaces would help architects and other professionals to produce visually comfortable and energy-efficient spaces by decreasing the demand for artificial lighting.
The Eugene H. Kruger Building, especially its first floor, includes large areas of yellow birch surfaces distributed in a series of public places such as the cafeteria, atrium, and corridors. Six strategic viewpoints that provide a complete 180° overlook of those places were chosen. Figure 1 shows a schematic plan of the first floor and the location of those views that were selected according to the diversity of the location, the number of wood surfaces, the typology of the window system, as well as for their role in the daylighting system. Windows are mainly oriented on the southeastern facade, except for the atrium space where bi-lateral daylighting provides two facing window-walls. In all cases, windows are double-glazed clear with low-e coating and aluminum frames. Electric light sources were not present in the spaces during the experiment.
Fig. 1. Schematic plan of the first floor showing the location of 6 viewpoints: a) Viewpoint A shows the corridor without direct access to daylight, b) viewpoint B shows the cafeteria, c) viewpoint C shows the corridor, d) viewpoint D shows corridor and cafeteria, e) viewpoint E shows the corridor f) viewpoint shows the atrium.
Figure 2 shows all viewpoints and the main variables related to space and windows. Viewpoint A shows the corridor surrounded with 3 wooden wall surfaces without any direct access to daylight. The window is linear, located in the upper southeastern (right) side of the space. Viewpoint B shows the cafeteria and has 2 wood surfaces with direct access to daylight with a window-wall surface. Viewpoint C shows a corridor with direct access to daylight and has two wood surfaces. Viewpoint D shows the corridor (facing A) and cafeteria with direct access to daylight and has two wood surfaces. Viewpoint E shows the corridor with direct access to daylight and has two wood surfaces, mainly located in the upper parts of the space. Viewpoint F shows the atrium with direct access to views and daylight on two opposite window-walls and the wood surface essentially consists of the ceiling. For each point, an image resulting of multiple exposures with different settings was captured and later assembled into HDR (high dynamic range) images for analysis. Figure 3 shows the exposure parameter for HDR images of each viewpoint.
The research involved collection of large field-of-view luminance maps and illuminance measurements in interior spaces. The research setting (Fig. 2) consists of corridors, cafeteria, and atrium with southeast facing window exposure in Quebec City (46° 49’ N and 71° 13’ W), described in the previous section (Figs. 1 and 2). The study was performed during the late Fall season under two different sky conditions. A clear sky refers to 0 to 25% of cloud covering during daytime (e.g. 45 to 60 minutes of sunshine per hour); an overcast sky reflects 75 to 100% of cloud covering (e.g. 0 to 15 minutes of sunshine per hour) (Borisuit et al. 2014). This research addresses issues related to types of skies in terms of its effects on the visual character of wood, space, and light. Although interesting, it was not necessary to ensure that surveys were actually performed on the equinox, since the location and orientation of the sunlighting pattern was not at stake and thermal issues were not discussed. Also, the most critical condition correspond to the diffuse light of the overcast sky, which varies in terms of cloud covers independently from the time of year. The first series of images was captured on November 25th 2013 from 11:30 to 12:30 with overcast sky (approximately 90% cloud covering) during data collection, while the second series of photos was captured on December 5th 2013 from 11:30 to 12:30 with a combination of clear sky and direct sunlighting (approximately 5% cloud covering).
The method includes a contrast analysis of the pictures. A HDR photography technique was used to collect luminance data in a large (180° by 180°) field of view (Inanici 2005). The Photolux photoluminance meter consists of a calibrated Canon EOS 50D equipped with an EF lens was used to produce High dynamic range (HDR) images consisting of different luminance ranges. This system was used to collect multiple exposure sequences and was fixed in place throughout the data collection for each viewpoint. Figure 3 illustrates an example of a series of 6 photos used to capture a different luminance range and the exposure sequences that were assembled into an HDR image using computational methods (Ward 2009). The resultant HDR photograph is an accurate luminance map of the scene, where pixel quantities closely correspond with physical quantities of luminance. The HDR photograph of each viewpoint was used for qualitative and quantitative analysis. This method enabled the quantitative investigation of wooden spaces with regard to sky condition. This procedure provided numerical data for each point of the wooden space and enabled the comparison of lighting distribution and the luminance of any point under different sky conditions.
HDR images were transferred into gray-scale mode images in order to study the luminance distribution on the surfaces of a space. This type of images do not produce any subjective response of the eye, as does the chromatic contrast found in color photographs (Demers 2007). False color images were used to analyze the viewpoints based on the daylight distribution within the space to evaluate the luminosity and visualize the spatial luminance and illuminance distributions (Inanici 2005).
Over the course of the two-day study, HDR photographs and illumination data were analyzed in order to see which viewpoints best explained the effect of physical environment (direct/indirect access to daylight, number of wooden surfaces) on visual characteristics of the wooden built environment. Comparing glare indices for view point A and E under both sky conditions emphasize their great differences in terms of statistical information related to daylighting and glare variables. Table 2 shows the visual comfort probability (VCP) and direct glare index (DGI) results for all viewpoints of the study, highlighting the most contrasting locations for A and E.
The physical analysis for these two points made it possible to observe significant differences, for which a more detailed analysis is performed in the following sections. For instance, viewpoint A has indirect access to daylight and the largest number of wooden surfaces (three). Meanwhile, viewpoint E has direct access to sunlight and views and only one wooden surface located on the ceiling of the space. These differences in terms of window typology, location, and number of wood surfaces create distinct ambiances which are discussed quantitatively and qualitatively in this paper.
To study the luminance diversity of wooden spaces under overcast and clear skies, Demers’ daylight classification system was used (Demers 2007). This system of classification allows the comparison of brightness and contrast patterns of indoor surfaces in the presence of direct sunlight and diffuse light. This daylight classification system categorizes images of interior architecture by plotting the mean brightness of each composition against the standard deviation of its luminance values. This method is useful in creating an early schematic design tool for comparing contrast-driven architectural types, as well as providing comparative data on the luminous composition of a single space under varied lighting conditions. The system provides a schematic scale of global contrast, which identifies related perceptual aspects that have been recognized in association with the general visual appearance of space by scientists and architects (Demers 2007).
To evaluate the Color Temperature (CT) of wooden spaces under different sky conditions, the CIE L*a*b* system was used. Color is a subjective experience of the stimuli received by the human eye in the form of electromagnetic waves. The color of a space is another parameter that affects the perception of space and can also indirectly impact the amount of energy usage. As the perception of color is a psychophysical phenomenon and cannot be measured with exactitude, the international commission on illumination (CIE) developed a method to measure illumination, color, and colorimetry. CIE L*a*b* is a commonly used standard system that uses the parameters L*, a*, and b*. L* stands for the lightness of color (0 perfect black, 100 pure white), a* refers to the position of the color between red (+100) and green (-100), and b* defines the position of the color between yellow (+100) and blue (-100) in Fig. 4.
In this research, the value b* was used to evaluate the color temperature of the images. Positive values refer to yellow, and negative values refer to blue. Therefore, higher b* values indicate a yellowish and warm color, while lower b* values point to a bluish and colder color (Troland 1922).
The CT for viewpoints A and E was analyzed using the Adobe Color CC software, which enables extracting b* value of each image. This software also enables the selection of 5 punctual area or points, on each photograph. A selection of 5 identical points were selected on photos taken on clear and over cast sky conditions. These points were selected considering the relation between sky condition and the location of wood on affecting the color temperature of the space. More precisely the study compared the b*values of each 5 points on overcast sky images with the b* value of the identical points from clear sky image to figure out the effect of sky conditions and luminous reflections in the wood on the overall CT of the space. HDR images were used for this purpose as they reach the higher level of accuracy in color rendering of daylight.
Knowing the effect of light from different sky conditions in spaces that include wooden surfaces is important for choosing the right material for a particular climate. The following section discusses the results for viewpoints A and E, which were found to be the most contrasting in terms of ambiances, and challenging in terms of visual perception and glare (refer to Table 2). The quantitative analysis addresses glare issues in relation to luminance maps, while the qualitative analysis include notions of global assessment of brightness and contrast, as well as color.
In Fig. 5, the selected viewpoints A and E are shown under overcast and clear skies. Calibrated high dynamic range (HDR) images, grey scale mode and false color image of these viewpoints are used in order to have a more detailed perspective of the viewpoints.
The false color images issued from the Photolux photoluminance meter analysis of viewpoint A showed a uniform ambiance in terms of daylighting under both sky conditions, which was a result of the use of more extensive wood surfaces as well as the indirect access to sunlight. It also showed the higher level of visual comfort probability, since the eye may perceive several low reflectance (about 39%) surfaces consisting of the decorative wood indoor panel (reflectivity of about 15%).
Viewpoint E, however, showed two different quantitative results under the discussed sky conditions and also exhibited distinct architectural ambiances with regard to the quantity of daylight distributed within the space. In other words, when viewpoint E was observed under clear skies, it was found to be a luminance space with harsh shadows, whereas when viewpoint E was observed under overcast skies, it was found to have a more uniform ambiance. A comparison of the false color images between viewpoint A under clear skies and viewpoint E under overcast skies showed the same range in color and, therefore, the same quantity of daylight in the space. This showed that increasing the quantity of yellow birch wood used within the space did not decrease the quantity of daylight.
Analyzing visual characteristics of wooden spaces in the presence of direct daylight and diffuse skylight based on statistical information extracted from the Photolux photoluminance meter system revealed differences in terms of interpretation of the glare indices. According to Table 2, discussed in the previous section to determine the most challenging spaces, viewpoint A on a cloudy day (overcast skies) represented an ambiance in which 98% of occupants could expect to be comfortable, and this was illustrated with its DGI of 18.9. As shown in Fig. 6, this confirmed that the level of glare was acceptable. However, this consistency between glare indices did not exist for viewpoint E for the same cloudy day. At viewpoint E, the DGI value of 30 indicated the existence of an intolerable glare within the space, even though the VCP predicted that 86% of occupants would be comfortable visually within the space. The presence of large window walls in the viewfield probably accounts for much of these differences. The higher location of wood surfaces, away from the center of the visual field, could not provide the needed visual rest to diminish glare. These difference in glare results existed between the VCP and the DGI of viewpoints A and E for the sunny condition as well. For instance, the VCP of viewpoint A referred to a space in which 90% of the occupants could be expected to be comfortable, while its DGI value of 28.7 referred to a space in which the glare had reached an intolerable rank. Glare indices obtained from the Photolux photoluminance meter system showed that analyzing visual comfort of a space based on statistical information obtained from computational software was not absolute, and remained largely dependent on the location of windows and wood surfaces in the visual field.
In Nordic and cold climate countries with predominantly overcast skies, the risk of creating gloomy, dull, or even cold ambiances is high. To address this problem, architects and interior designers should be aware of the impact of materials on creating ambiances that enhance the users’ mood and enrich their experience within the architectural environment. Color temperature of the space aims to show the impact of three types of wood as commonly used material in built environments, their position, sky conditions and daylighting ambiances on the color of the whole space.
HDR images enable studying color of other surfaces by the light reflected from wood surfaces coming from the structure and indoor decorative panels. For this reason HDR images of selected viewpoints were imported into Adobe Color CC. As it could be expected, Figs. 7 and 8 showed that the b* value for the 5 selected points of diffuse light was lower than that of the direct sunlight. Therefore, viewpoints A and E on a sunny day seemed warmer than a cloudy one. However, a comparison of these two viewpoints showed that viewpoint A, with its 3 wooden surfaces and indirect access to sunlight, was more greatly affected in terms of CT than was viewpoint E, with its two wooden surfaces and access to direct sunlight. The effect, therefore, of the higher wood ratio in increasing the CT of the space was even greater than the effect of direct sunlight. This showed the significant impact of wood in improving the CT of the entire space.
Classification of images based on their brightness and contrast assists architects and professionals to identify the main elements of such analysis and allows the comparison of design hypothesis or existing spaces in a systematic manner (Demers 1997). Such classification should unify the language of luminous ambiences in architecture. More particularly, the following classification method is helpful in order to compare the impact of each variable on the brightness and contrast of the space. It should be reminded that the brightness of an image is different from the brightness percevied by the users since the latter is a sensation. However, since the experimental research is not evaluating the perception of the users, it remains the best way to study and compare the overall quality of the space through its brightness and contrast values.
Figure 9 shows a classification system of images (Demers 2007) from dark to light and from low contrast to high contrast. The entire range of brightness and contrast values collected during the comparison of overcast (diffuse light) and clear (direct daylighting) sky conditions lies within the dashed square in Fig. 9. The enlarged dashed square and the classification of both series of images are shown in Fig. 10.
Brightness and contrast affect the way a person perceives architectural space and how the space will affect the users. Spaces with direct access to sunlight, like viewpoint E, are considered to have higher brightness and contrast values than spaces with indirect access to sunlight, like viewpoint A. A comparison of the brightness and contrast of viewpoints A and E showed that viewpoint A, under both conditions, was located in the low brightness, low contrast zone. Meanwhile, viewpoint E was found to be located in the high brightness, high contrast zone under both clear (direct sunlight) and overcast (diffuse light) conditions.
This classification illustrated that the viewpoints from the overcast sky have higher brightness contrast value than those obtained from a clear sky. This result showed the effect of sky conditions on the brightness and contrast of spaces containing wood surfaces. In other words, in the wood-characterized space with a direct view to the outside, higher brightness and contrast values were found on a cloudy day than on the sunny day. Therefore the higher values for brightness and contrast will result in a decrease on the demand for external energy from the users of the space. However, in wooden spaces with only indirect access to daylight, that is, viewpoint A, the light was reflected off the wood surfaces of the corridor and the result was the opposite: brightness and contrast were higher under the clear sky conditions than under the overcast condition. When the wood surfaces were more extensive within the space, the difference between the two sky conditions became greater.
This study used the Eugene H. Kruger Building, located in Quebec City, as a successful project in which wood is used as the main material. The research studied the visual characteristics of a wooden space in the presence of direct daylight from the clear sky and diffuse light of the overcast sky in terms of quantitative values related to glare indices as well as qualitative parameters such as brightness and contrast and color temperature of a space. It is important to take into consideration that visual comfort depends on physiological and psychological factors related to each individual and is also affected by physical factors such as his age, visual acuity or the possibility to have access to views to look outside.
This research showed that in the presence of indirect natural lighting, increasing the quantity of decorative Yellow birch panels used in a space decreased the contrast within the space and provided a more equal balance of lighting across the space, facilitating greater uniformity within the space. Therefore, increasing wooden surfaces in the space decreased both the contrast and the harsh shadows while increasing the brightness and luminance values. Other types of wood and finishes would need to be studied to validate these positive effects on visual perception.
This paper also shows the impact of luminance variability on visual comfort when indoor decorative wooden panels were applied using Demers’ system of classification. This classification, which enables to compare all 6 viewpoints, showed that wooden spaces were brighter under overcast than clear skies (shown in figure 10). Although individuals can react differently to the same environment, using yellow birch decorative panels appeared to be good choices in this project, as Quebec City has a predominant diffuse sky light in winter. Other types of wood would need to be studied to validate these effects. This figure shows that the type of wood used in the Eugene H. Kruger building was helpful in creating a brighter space under overcast sky condition. The demand for electrical energy on overcast sky days is higher than clear skies. The above-mentioned findings support the idea that using yellow birch or a similar wood type should promote the creation of a brighter space under both overcast and clear sky conditions and therefore decrease the demand for electrical energy.
The relationship between sky condition and the color of wooden spaces was studied. It was shown that although direct sunlight increased the b* value and helped in creating a warm ambiance, the impact of yellow birch used in this project optimized the quality of the space by increasing its color temperature, which attained even higher levels than the effect of direct sunlight.
Analyzing the quality of interior ambiances based on statistical information obtained from computation software is not a reliable way to qualify the interior ambiances. For instance, statistical information driven from Photolux photoluminance analysis software predicted the existence of an intolerable glare in most of the viewpoints (6 viewpoints, each photographed under 2 types of sky conditions). However the users’ tolerance toward glare from daylighting is higher than the glare from electrical lighting. Their tolerance also depends on the time of the year as well as the climatic zone of the project. The study suggests that studying visual characteristics of an interior ambiance needs a detailed analysis, which should take into consideration several aspects such as the time of the year, usage of the space and climate.
Although this research showed the effectiveness of yellow birch in improving the quality of the ambiance by increasing the brightness of the space on overcast sky conditions and increasing the color of the space, further studies would be necessary to investigate the impact of other commonly used wood types on the quality of the built environment. By encouraging a consideration of the use of the space and the climate situation, this information should help designers and architects to choose the right amount and type of wood necessary to give the interior the ambiance they have in mind.
Achieving that balance of energy efficiency and while having visually comfortable spaces should be primarily done through the wits of architects, engineers and designers. That manipulation of different types and ratio of wood generate the desired visual impact to an interior of an architectural ambiance.
The evaluation of visual comfort of interior ambiances would ultimately need to be confirmed by participants performing their own assessment on the visual preferences of the ambiance. Questionnaires would provide actual visual impressions of users to confirm observed lighting patterns discussed within the present research. At the moment, the results are limited to measured data and evacuate the complexity of the visual experience. Further studies would be necessary to evaluate visual preferences of users, conducting for instance a limited series of experiments selected from this study. Furthermore, knowing the impact of other types and colors of wood enables to confirm the significant effect of wood on enhancing visual comfort within an architectural ambiance.
The research addresses energy efficiency only in its relation to the contribution of indoor decorative panels to optimize daylighting. Further studies should also include the thermal potential of wood to integrate bioclimatic solutions adapted to low energy buildings.
The authors would like to thank the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada for its support under the Industrial Research Chair Program IRCPJ 461745 as well as the chair industrial partners.
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Article submitted: July 31, 2015; Peer review completed: September 23, 2015; Revised version received: November 17, 2015; Accepted: November 21, 2015; Published: January 4, 2016. |
0.999937 | Additive fabrication refers to a class of manufacturing processes, in which a part is built by adding layers of material upon one another. These processes are different from subtractive processes or consolidation processes. Subtractive processes, such as milling, turning, or drilling, use carefully planned tool movements to cut away material from a workpiece to form the desired part. Consolidation processes, such as casting or molding, use custom designed tooling to solidify material into the desired shape. Additive processes, on the other hand, do not require custom tooling or planned tool movements. Instead, the part is constructed directly from a digital 3D model created through Computer Aided Design (CAD) software. The 3D CAD model is converted into many thin layers and the manufacturing equipment uses this geometric data to build each layer sequentially until the part is completed. Due to this approach, additive fabrication is often referred to as layered manufacturing, direct digital manufacturing, or solid free form fabrication.
The most common term for additive fabrication is rapid prototyping. The term "rapid" is used because additive processes are performed much faster than conventional manufacturing processes. The fabrication of a single part may only take a couple hours, or can take a few days depending on the part size and the process. However, processes that require custom tooling, such as a mold, to be designed and built may require several weeks. Subtractive processes, such as machining, can offer more comparable production times, but those times can increase substantially for highly complex parts. The term "prototyping" is used because these additive processes were initially used only to fabricate prototypes. However, with the improvement of additive technologies, these processes are becoming increasingly capable of high-volume production manufacturing.
Several different additive fabrication processes are commercially available or are currently being developed. Each process may use different materials and different techniques for building the layers of a part. However, each process employs the same basic steps, listed below.
Convert CAD model into STL model: Each form of CAD software saves the geometric data representing the 3D model in different ways. However, the STL format (initially developed for Stereolithography) has become the standard file format for additive processes. Therefore, CAD files must be converted to this file format. The STL format represents the surfaces of the 3D model as a set of triangles, storing the coordinates for the vertices and normal directions for each triangle.
Slice STL model into layers: Using specialized software, the user prepares the STL file to be built, first designating the location and orientation of the part in the machine. Part orientation impacts several parameters, including build time, part strength, and accuracy. The software then slices the STL model into very thin layers along the (X,Y) plane. Each layer will be built upon the previous layer, moving upward in the Z direction.
Build part one layer at a time: The machine builds the part from the STL model by sequentially forming layers of material on top of previously formed layers. The technique used to build each layer differs greatly amongst the additive process, as does the material being used. Additive processes can use paper, polymers, powdered metals, or metal composites, depending upon the process.
Post-processing of part: After being built, the part and any supports are removed from the machine. If the part was fabricated from a photosensitive material, it must be cured to attain full strength. Minor cleaning and surface finishing, such as sanding, coating, or painting, can be performed to improve the part's appearance and durability.
The technologies that can be used to build a part one layer at a time are varied and in different stages of development. Some technologies are commercially available methods of fabricating prototypes, others are quickly becoming viable forms of production manufacturing, and newer technologies are continuously being developed. These different methods of additive fabrication can be classified by the type of material that is employed.
Liquid based processes: These additive technologies typically use photocurable polymer resins and cure selected portions of the resin to form each part layer. The most common liquid-based additive process is Stereolithography (SLA), which was the first commercially available additive process. Parts produced using this technology offer high accuracy and an appearance similar to molded parts. However, photocurable polymers offer somewhat poor mechanical properties which may worsen over time. Other liquid-based processes include Jetted Photopolymer, which may use a single jet or multiple jets.
Powder based processes: In powder based processes, such as Selective Laser Sintering (SLS), a selected portion of powdered material is melted or sintered to form each part layer. The use of powdered material enables parts to be fabricated using polymers, metals, or ceramics. Also, the mechanical properties of these parts are better and more stable than a photocured polymer part. Other powder-based processes include Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS) and Three Dimensional Printing (3DP).
Solid based processes: Solid based processes use a variety of solid, non powder, materials and each process differs in how it builds the layers of a part. Most solid-based processes use sheet stacking methods, in which very thin sheets of material are layered on top of one another and the shape of the layer is cut out. The most common sheet stacking process is Laminated Object Manufacturing (LOM), which uses thin sheets of paper, but other processes may use polymers or metal sheets. Other solid based processes use solid strands of polymer, not sheets, such as Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) which extrudes and deposits the polymer into layers.
Stereolithography (SLA) is the most widely used rapid prototyping technology. It can produce highly accurate and detailed polymer parts. It was the first rapid prototyping process, introduced in 1988 by 3D Systems based on work by inventor Charles Hull. It uses a low-power, highly focused UV laser to follow cross-sections of a three-dimensional object in a container of liquid photosensitive polymer. As the laser follows the layer, the polymer solidifies and the excess areas are left as liquid. When a layer is completed, a leveling blade is moved across the surface to smooth it before depositing the next layer. The platform is lowered by a distance equal to the layer thickness (typically 0.05-0.007 mm), and a subsequent layer is formed on top of the previously completed layers. This process of following and smoothing is repeated until the build is complete. Once complete, the part is elevated above the container and drained. Excess polymer is swabbed or rinsed away from the surfaces. In many cases, a final cure is given by placing the part in a UV oven. After the final cure, supports are cut off the part and surfaces are polished, sanded or otherwise finished.
Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) was developed by Stratasys in Minnesota. In this process, a plastic or wax material is extruded through a nozzle that follows the part's cross sectional geometry layer by layer. The build material is usually supplied in filament form, but some setups utilize plastic pellets instead. The nozzle contains resistive heaters that keep the plastic at a temperature just above its melting point so that it flows easily through the nozzle and forms the layer. The plastic hardens immediately after flowing from the nozzle and bonds to the layer below. Once a layer is built, the platform lowers, and the extrusion nozzle deposits another layer. The layer thickness and vertical dimensional accuracy is determined by the extruder die diameter, which ranges from (0.1 to 0.3 mm). In the (X,Y) plane, (0.025 mm) resolution is achievable. A range of materials are available including ABS, polylastic, polyamide, polycarbonate, polyethylene, polypropylene, and investment casting wax.
Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) was developed at the University of Texas in Austin, by Carl Deckard and colleagues. The technology was patented in 1989 and was originally sold by DTM Corporation. The basic concept of SLS is similar to that of SLA. It uses a moving laser beam to follow and selectively sinter powdered polymer and/or metal composite materials into cross sections of a three dimensional part. As in all rapid prototyping processes, the parts are built upon a platform that adjusts in height equal to the thickness of the layer being built. Additional powder is deposited on top of each solidified layer and sintered. This powder is rolled onto the platform from a bin before building the layer. The powder is maintained at an elevated temperature. Unlike SLA, special support structures are not required because the excess powder in each layer acts as a support to the part being built. With the metal composite material, the SLS process solidifies a polymer binder material around steel powder (100 micron diameter) one slice at a time, forming the part. The part is then placed in a furnace, at temperatures in excess of 900 °C, where the polymer binder is burned off and the part is infiltrated with bronze to improve its density. The burn-off and infiltration procedures typically take about one day, after secondary machining and finishing is performed. Recent improvements in accuracy and resolution, and reduction in stair-stepping, have minimized the need for secondary machining and finishing. SLS allows for a wide range of materials, including nylon, glass-filled nylon, SOMOS (rubber-like), Truform (investment casting), and the previously discussed metal composite.
Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS) was developed jointly by Rapid Product Innovations (RPI) and EOS GmbH, starting in 1994, as the first commercial rapid prototyping method to produce metal parts in a single process. With DMLS, metal powder (20 micron diameter), free of binder or fluxing agent, is completely melted by the scanning of a high power laser beam to build the part with properties of the original material. Eliminating the polymer binder avoids the burn-off and infiltration steps, and produces a 95% dense steel part compared to roughly 70% density with Selective Laser Sintering (SLS). An additional benefit of the DMLS process compared to SLS is higher detail resolution due to the use of thinner layers, enabled by a smaller powder diameter. This capability allows for more intricate part shapes. Material options that are currently offered include alloy steel, stainless steel, tool steel, aluminum, bronze, cobalt-chrome, and titanium. In addition to functional prototypes, DMLS is often used to produce rapid tooling, medical implants, and aerospace parts for high heat applications.
The first commercial Laminated Object Manufacturing (LOM) system was shipped in 1991. LOM was developed by Helisys of Torrance, CA. The main components of the system are a feed mechanism that advances a sheet over a build platform, a heated roller to apply pressure to bond the sheet to the layer below, and a laser to cut the outline of the part in each sheet layer. Parts are produced by stacking, bonding, and cutting layers of adhesive-coated sheet material on top of the previous one. A laser cuts the outline of the part into each layer. After each cut is completed, the platform lowers by a depth equal to the sheet thickness (typically 0.05-0.5 mm), and another sheet is advanced on top of the previously deposited layers. The platform then rises slightly and the heated roller applies pressure to bond the new layer. The laser cuts the outline and the process is repeated until the part is completed. After a layer is cut, the extra material remains in place to support the part during build.
Jetted photopolymer is an additive process that combines the techniques used in Inkjet Printing and Stereolithography. The method of building each layer is similar to Inkjet Printing, in that it uses an array of inkjet print heads to deposit tiny drops of build material and support material to form each layer of a part. However, as in Stereolithography, the build material is a liquid acrylate-based photopolymer that is cured by a UV lamp after each layer is deposited. For this reason, Jetted Photopolymer is sometimes referred to as Photopolymer Inkjet Printing. The advantages of this process are very good accuracy and surface finishes. However, the feature detail and material properties are not quite as good as Stereolithography. As with Inkjet Printing, the most common application of this technology is prototypes used for form and fit testing. Other applications include rapid tooling patterns, jewelry, and medical devices.
Three Dimensional Printing (3DP) technology was developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and licensed to several corporations. The process is similar to the Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) process, but instead of using a laser to sinter the material, an ink-jet printing head deposits a liquid adhesive that binds the material. Material options, which include metal or ceramic powders, are somewhat limited but are inexpensive relative to other additive processes. 3D Printing offers the advantage of fast build speeds, typically 2-4 layers per minute. However, the accuracy, surface finish, and part strength are not quite as good as some other additive processes. 3D Printing is typically used for the rapid prototyping of conceptual models (limited functional testing is possible).
The 3D printing process begins with the powder supply being raised by a piston and a leveling roller distributing a thin layer of powder to the top of the build chamber. A multi-channel ink-jet print head then deposits a liquid adhesive to targeted regions of the powder bed. These regions of powder are bonded together by the adhesive and form one layer of the part. The remaining free standing powder supports the part during the build. After a layer is built, the build platform is lowered and a new layer of powder added, leveled, and the printing repeated. After the part is completed, the loose supporting powder can be brushed away and the part removed.
Speed: As described above, these "rapid" processes have short build times. Also, because no custom tooling must be developed, the lead time in receiving parts is greatly reduced.
Part complexity: Because no tooling is required, complex surfaces and internal features can be created directly when building the part. Also, the complexity of a part has little effect on build times, as opposed to other manufacturing processes. In molding and casting processes, part complexity may not affect the cycle times, but can require several weeks to be spent on creating the mold. In machining, complex features directly affect the cycle time and may even require more expensive equipment or fixtures.
Material types: Additive fabrication processes are able to produce parts in plastics, metals, ceramics, composites, and even paper with properties similar to wood. Furthermore, some processes can build parts from multiple materials and distribute the material based on the location in the part.
Low-volume production: Other more conventional processes are not very cost effective for low-volume productions because of high initial costs due to custom tooling and lengthy setup times. Additive fabrication requires minimal setup and builds a part directly from the CAD model, allowing for low per-part costs for low-volume productions. |
0.947166 | Structure learning is the identification of the structure of graphical models based solely on observational data and is NP-hard. An important component of many structure learning algorithms are heuristics or bounds to reduce the size of the search space. We argue that variable relevance rankings that can be easily calculated for many standard regression models can be used to improve the efficiency of structure learning algorithms. In this contribution, we describe measures that can be used to evaluate the quality of variable relevance rankings, especially the well-known normalized discounted cumulative gain (NDCG). We evaluate and compare different regression methods using the proposed measures and a set of linear and non-linear benchmark problems. |
0.999998 | Description A coroner and a medical examiner are legal certifiers of death. A coroner is an elected official who often lacks formal medical training. A medical examiner is usually an appointed official who has formal medical training in forensic pathology. Each state within the U.S. can be comprised of a coroner system, a medical examiner system, or a blended statewide system. The coroner or the medical examiner documents the cause and manner of death of a person both on a report and on a death certificate. Deaths are classi-fied as natural, accidental, suicide, homicide, or undetermined.In 1978, Jefferson County, Alabama switched from an elected coroner system to an appointed medical examiner system. In this thesis, a systematic review and coding of all death reports within Jefferson County, Alabama excluding Bessemer, Alabama during the years of 1970, 1971, 1976, and 1977 was performed and combined with the Jefferson County Coroner/Medical Examiner's database for 1978 through 2008 to create a data set of mortality aggregated at Jefferson County, AL per month for 1970-1971 and 1976-2008. An initial bivariate analysis of the data set was performed using an independent-samples t-test followed by a discontinuity regression analysis of the data set. The output generated from both analyses was used to answer the following question: <italic>When a system changes from a coroner system to a medical examiner system, is there an effect on how the manner of death is reported?</italic>I hypothesize that <italic>there would be systematic variations in reporting death across elected coroner and appointed medical examiner systems. Specifically, I hypothesize that elected coroners would have higher official justifiable homicide rates than medical examiners. Conversely, appointed medical examiners would have higher official autopsy, overall homicide, natural death, suicide, undetermined death, and work related death rates than elected coroners.</italic> The reasons for and implications of the differences are discussed in detail in the following chapters.
Thesis Note M.P.A.University of Alabama at Birmingham2013.
Subject LC Death--Proof and certification--Alabama--Jefferson County .
Medical examiners (Law)--Alabama--Jefferson County . |
0.937372 | Q: What is the Braylwiyyah sect and what is their belief?
The Braylwiyyah are a Soofee sect which was born in India at the time of the British rule there.
It`s followers concern themselves in exceeding in their love and honour for the Prophets and the "saints" in general, and the Prophet (sal-Allaahu `alayhe wa sallam) specifically.
It`s founder was a man by the name of Ahmad Ridhaa Khaan ibn Taqee `Alee Khaan who was born in 1272 A.H. (1851 C.E.) and called himself Abdul-Mustafaa (slave/servant of Mustafaa, i.e. Muhammad (sal-Allaahu `alayhe wa sallam)).
He was born in the city of Braylee in the province of Uttar Pradesh and was a student of al-Mirza Ghulaam Qaadir Begg who was the older (blood) brother of Mirza Ghulaam Ahmad al-Qaadiyaanee (founder of the Qaadiyaaniyyah sect).
He was of a slim build and known to be shrewd and clever, whilst also being ill-tempered and foul-mouthed. He used to suffer from chronic illnesses, and used to consistently complain of headaches and back pains.
He visited Makkah and studied under some of the scholars there in 1295 A.H. (1874 C.E.).
Amongst his "notable" books are: (Anbaa. al-Mustafaa) and (Khaalis al-I`tiqaad).
From the beliefs of this sect is that the Messenger of Allaah (sal-Allaahu `alayhe wa sallam) has the ability/power to control the creation and all that occurs, and that the "saints" have the ability/power to influence the creation and all that occurs.
And they have exceeded in their belief with respect to the Prophet (sal-Allaahu `alayhe wa sallam) such that they have ascended him to a rank close to that of worshipping him. And they have exceeded in their belief with respect to the Messenger of Allaah (sal-Allaahu `alayhe wa sallam) such that they believe he has knowledge of the unseen, and they deny that he was a human being, rather that he was the light (noor) of Allaah. And they also permit calling for assistance from the "saints" and the Prophets and other than them from the false beliefs. |
0.918746 | How to choose an on grid solar inverter?
First, the conversion efficiency of the on grid solar inverter directly affects the amount of power generation. A good inverter not only has a wide input voltage and output voltage range, but also has efficient and reliable MPPT tracking accuracy and internal circuit design. Although there are many varieties of inverters on the market, it has been proved that PV arrays with the same installed capacity use different brands of inverters, and the power generation is still very different, and some even have a gap of 5-10%.
Second, the reliability of the on grid solar inverter is very important. If the inverter is inefficient, the efficiency is zero. The previous results were completely erased due to the loss of power generation caused by the faulty repair for several days.
Therefore, in addition to the good match between the on grid solar inverter and the photovoltaic array voltage, the designer of the selected brand inverter is one of the keys to ensure the photovoltaic power generation. |
0.998357 | Germination requirements of seeds can dictate when and where plant offspring establish. Microsites available for germination vary spatially and temporally in factors such as temperature and moisture; thus, the production of seeds with identical requirements may limit germination. When seed mass influences germination and offspring establishment, the production of seeds with a range of sizes encourages differential behavior in progeny. Seed heteromorphism, the production of two or more seed types with different forms and/or behaviors by the same plant, may be "cryptic" when seed types have different behaviors but similar morphologies. Although rarely documented, cryptic seed heteromorphism may be widespread among plant taxa. The production by a plant of seeds with variable mass or heteromorphism may increase the number of microsites favorable for germination. I investigated seed mass variation and seed heteromorphism in Packera tomentosa (Michx.) C. Jeffrey (woolly ragwort, Asteraceae), a clonal plant found in disturbed habitats in the coastal plain of the southeastern U.S. Like most members of the Asteraceae, P. tomentosa displays flowering heads that contain disc and ray florets, which produce central and peripheral seeds, respectively. Seeds were collected from 50 purported clones of P. tomentosa at East Carolina University's West Research Campus (WRC), Pitt County, North Carolina. Seed mass was compared among- and within-genetic individuals as well as between floret types of a flowering head. Amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) profiles confirmed that all 50 clones were unique genetic individuals or "genets", verifying that seedling recruitment does occur in this population of P. tomentosa. I compared total mass and allocation to the embryo and pericarp between central and peripheral seeds. An initial study investigated germinability and speed of germination for both seed types in controlled conditions. I then tested the germination response of central and peripheral seeds to frequent, intermediate, and infrequent watering intervals. A final study determined whether germination speed or success of central and peripheral seeds was influenced by aging and/or cold stratification. Overall, seed mass of Packera tomentosa was highly variable among- and within-plants. Larger seeds exhibited faster, higher germination. Central and peripheral seeds did not have different morphologies, but differed in mass characteristics and germination. Central seeds were 11% heavier with 80% larger embryos than were peripheral seeds, whereas peripheral seeds allocated 17% more of total mass to the fruit coat than did central seeds. Differences in total mass between seed types appear to be driven by embryo size. Central seeds germinated at a higher proportion than did peripheral seeds (74.5 vs. 36.0%, respectively) and germinated faster than peripheral seeds (32.8 vs. 36.2 d, respectively). Differences in germination may be due to pericarp thickness or embryo size. Central seeds exhibited greater germination success in frequent and infrequent watering intervals, but not in the intermediate watering interval. Both seeds types showed lowest germination in response to infrequent watering, suggesting germination success decreases in drought conditions. Germination speed increased in central seeds following aging; thus, central seeds after-ripen. In contrast, peripheral seeds germinated faster after cold stratification, suggesting they delay germination and are stimulated by cooler temperatures. Cryptic seed heteromorphism occurs in Packera tomentosa, supporting the suggestion that this trait may be more common than is documented, particularly in the Asteraceae. In P. tomentosa, variation in germination behavior resulting from seed mass variation and seed heteromorphism may spread the risks associated with germination among many offspring phenotypes, potentially functioning as bet-hedging strategies and providing success in the unpredictable environments this species inhabits.
Leverett, Lindsay D.. Cryptic Seed Heteromorphism in Packera tomentosa (Asteraceae) : Differences in Seed Mass Characteristics and Germination. Master's Thesis. East Carolina University, January 2012. The Scholarship. http://hdl.handle.net/10342/3832. April 26, 2019.
Leverett, Lindsay D., “Cryptic Seed Heteromorphism in Packera tomentosa (Asteraceae) : Differences in Seed Mass Characteristics and Germination” (Master's Thesis., East Carolina University, January 2012).
Leverett, Lindsay D.. Cryptic Seed Heteromorphism in Packera tomentosa (Asteraceae) : Differences in Seed Mass Characteristics and Germination [Master's Thesis]. Greenville, NC: East Carolina University; January 2012. |
0.999994 | Time management is a key part of successfully running a business. How to manage your company's time easily and efficiently? A good idea is to start using a software solution.
A good time management suite will allow you to control not only your own time, but also manage what your team is doing on the clock. Features such as task management, tracking and reporting are a must. A time management program should also be able to group tasks into projects - otherwise things would quickly get out of hand.
A useful feature to have is automated timesheet generation and an option to convert time sheets to invoices. This cuts down on administrative duties tremendously.
Finally, no time management software is complete without an activity tracking feature. A good solution should automatically collect data about how long each of your tasks takes, so that you can easily identify bottlenecks and time sinks. |
0.999844 | will a plastic water jug do when making hard cider?
Here's the skinny. Plastic can contribute an off taste to your brew. That's the biggest reason why not to use it. I do know people who start their cider in the carton, but it's just not the best idea. A far better alternative is to use a 1g glass jug of apple juice, Whole Foods sells them for like 8$. You'll need an airlock and a drilled stopper, but you can improvise with a baloon carefully strapped to the top of the container with a hole poked in the tip ;D basically you need to let co2 out, and keep fresh air and germs outside. Keep in mind that cider generally needs to age for a year, so it's better (and really, not much more expensive) to do it right.
I suggest using plastic bottles called BetterBottles that can be purchased fairly cheaply ($25-$35) in 6.5 gal, 5 gal and I believe smaller varieties from Homebrew Beer stores. I got my 5 gallon one from Northern Brewer. The advantage is that they are lighter than glass (which makes shipping cheap when you buy) and don't shatter easily like a 5 gallon carboy I had. The milk/water gallon jugs I have heard are more permeable to air which can cause bacterial infection which can A) make apple cider vinegar if you're lucky B) grow all kinds of different colored stuff on the top of your cider which you don't want to drink.
I've been told be (beer) brewers that plastic isn't as good as glass. But they never exactly said why.
Wikipedia has this to say about big jugs for fermentation.
A wine making site much preferes glass, as do I. The biggest concern is bacteria.
With an official brewing glass carboy (jug), it is VERY easy to see if there is any residue on the inside surface. Plastic is much easier to scratch, which means that germs now have a nice cozy little home that's difficult to clean.
As far as water jug is concerned, I would say don't use them. Most comercially available ones have a textured surface and are made from very thin plastic. This means more places for germs to live and there is a much worse sealing surface at the top.
Bacteria is a brewers enemy. You can put a lot of hard work into a batch, and if you aren't meticulous about bacteria you can waste weeks (months) on a spoiled batch.
Oh, and don't forget to make an I'ble on how to make hard cider. |
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