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Genetic susceptibility to substance dependence.
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, NY 10461, USA.
Molecular Psychiatry (Impact Factor: 15.15). 05/2005; 10(4):336-44. DOI: 10.1038/
Source: PubMed
ABSTRACT Despite what is often believed, the majority of those who experiment with substances with a dependence potential do not develop dependence. However, there is a subpopulation of users that easily becomes dependent on substances, and these individuals exhibit pre-existing comorbid traits, including novelty seeking and antisocial behavior. There appears to be a genetic basis for the susceptibility to dependence and these comorbid traits. Animal studies have identified specific genes that can alter susceptibility to dependence and response to novelty. The mechanisms underlying the genetic susceptibility to dependence and response to novelty are complex, but genetic susceptibility plays a significant role in the transition from substance use to dependence and from chronic use to addiction. We discuss two models to explain how genetic variations alter dependence susceptibility. Identification of the specific genes involved in these processes would help to identify individuals that are vulnerable to dependence/addiction and to devise novel treatment strategies.
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ABSTRACT: Alcohol dependence (AD) has a large heritable component. Genetic variation in genes involved in the absorption and elimination of ethanol have been associated with AD. However, some of these polymorphisms are not present in an African population. Previous studies have reported that a type of AD which is characterized by anxious behaviour may be a genetically specific subtype of AD. We investigated whether variation in genes encoding cytochrome P450 2E1 (CYP2E1) or acetaldehyde-metabolising enzymes (ALDH1A1, ALDH2) might alter the risk of AD, with and without symptoms of anxiety, in a Cape population with mixed ancestry. Eighty case control pairs (one with AD, one without AD) were recruited and individually matched for potential confounders. Genotype data were available for 29 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) across the three genes. Linkage disequilibrium D' values were evaluated for all pairwise comparisons. Allele and haplotype frequencies were compared between cases and controls using a χ (2) test. The ACAG haplotype in block 4 of the ALDH1A1 gene provided evidence of an association with AD (p = 0.03) and weak evidence of an association with AD without symptoms of anxiety (p = 0.06). When a genetic score was constructed using SNPs showing nominal evidence of association with AD, every extra risk allele increased the odds of AD by 35 % (OR 1.35, 95%CI 1.08, 1.68, p = 0.008) and the odds of having AD with anxiety symptoms increased by 53 % (OR 1.53, 95%CI 1.14, 2.05, p = 0.004). Although our results are supported by previous studies in other populations, they must be interpreted with caution due to the small sample size and the potential influence of population stratification.
Metabolic Brain Disease 02/2014; 29(2). · 2.40 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: Addictions are chronic, devastating psychiatric disorders that are characterized by a compulsive pattern of drug taking or behavior. The development of addictions relies on life style choices but also on genetic, heritable factors that put some individuals at an increased risk for these disorders. Genetic factors for addictive disorders were established by multiple epidemiological studies, showing heritability between 40 and 60%. In an effort to dissect addictive disorders, genetic research was focused on the direct interaction of a variety of drugs with the respective biological systems. Another focus was the identification of long-lasting changes in the brain reward mechanism, using animal models, and more recently brain imaging studies in humans. In the following, we are briefly summarizing the evidence obtained so far for an inheritable trait in addiction as well as what is currently known about the underlying biology.
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May 28, 2014 | <urn:uuid:01d12d91-bef5-44bc-8008-43849f230c7b> | 2 | 2.046875 | 0.097857 | en | 0.92537 | http://www.researchgate.net/publication/8143611_Genetic_susceptibility_to_substance_dependence |
Ireland // Limerick and Clare //
Lough Gur
Twenty kilometres south of Limerick city on the R512 towards Kilmallock, a cluster of grassy limestone hills spring unexpectedly from the plain, sheltering in their midst Lough Gur, the site of dozens of largely prehistoric monuments. Their importance lies in the fact that many of them are not ceremonial sites but stone dwelling places, dating from around 3000 BC onwards, which have furnished archeologists with most of their knowledge of the way of life in Neolithic Ireland. That’s not to say that this curious landscape did not have a ritual aspect, as it was also revered as the territory of the sun goddess, Áine, and accrued a powerful mythical reputation, for example as the location of some of Fionn Mac Cumhaill’s adventures in the Ulster Cycle.
Before it was partly drained in the nineteenth century, the lake (now C-shaped) formed an approximate square, with a nine-kilometre shoreline around a large triangular island, Knockadoon. The drainage, which left a marsh on the eastern side of the island and lowered the lake’s level by 3m, revealed hoards of prehistoric items. These included myriad bones of ritually slaughtered oxen, gold and bronze spearheads, a bronze shield, swords and dozens of stone and bronze axes, all of which appear to have been thrown in as offerings to the gods of the lake but which are now scattered around the museums of the world. The tranquillity of the lake, broken only by the sounds of geese and a wealth of other birdlife, allows you easily to set your imagination to work on how life would have been here five thousand years ago. | <urn:uuid:dd59bbe1-66f1-4d53-bd45-0bf04971ea43> | 3 | 2.953125 | 0.019116 | en | 0.961224 | http://www.roughguides.com/destinations/europe/ireland/limerick-clare/lough-gur/?wpfpaction=add&postid=25606 |
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The Science and Entertainment Exchange found itself in Berkeley last week for Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory's first-ever Science Cafe. The event featured Jaime Paglia, co-creator and showrunner for SyFy's hit TV series, Eureka, with a special Skype appearance by Colin Ferguson, who plays Sheriff Jack Carter on the show.
Prusiner's Prions
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The new film, The Men Who Stare at Goats, is based on the book by Jon Ronson detailing a weird military research project involving psychic warriors, LSD, astral projection and the like. But while the movie might be fiction -- and highly amusing fiction at that, thanks to stellar performances by the cast -- there really is a historical record of both the Army and the CIA experimenting with LSD and other hallucinogens as possible "incapacitating chemical agents."
Science of the Living Dead
Sizzle Me This
What might happen to an idealistic marine biologist after he decides to leave the Ivory Tower? If you're Randy Olson, you become an independent filmmaker. First, you make a splash with a short music video about the sex life of barnacles. Then you take on intelligent design and the failure of the scientific community to make their counter-arguments about evolution convincingly to the public with a quirky documentary called Flock of Dodos.
My Favorite Cyborgs
Some of the most popular characters in science fiction are its artificial creatures: the robots like R2D2, the androids like Commander Data. I like them too, especially Data, but there’s another type of artificial creature I find more interesting. Or I should say semi-artificial, because I’m talking about cyborgs – cybernetic organisms: half living organic beings, half cold, dead steel, plastic, and computer chips.
What is intriguing about cyborgs is the tension between the two halves. In the 1987 film RoboCop, the level of crime in Detroit requires a new kind of policing. Enter RoboCop, a metal body with super physical capabilities that’s given intelligence and personality by an implanted brain from a dead policeman. RoboCop is an outstanding law officer, but inside that casing is a mind that yearns for the warm human connections it once had but can never recover.
This Is Your Brain On Lies
What would the world be like if nobody could lie -- not even a harmless little white lie? It would probably be like the world envisioned by British comic actor Ricky Gervais in The Invention of Lying, where brutal honesty is the order of the day, until Gervais' hapless character suddenly develops the ability to lie, or in his words, "I said something... thatwasn't!" We are treated to an image of neurons in his brain firing in new ways at that pivotal evolutionary moment. | <urn:uuid:9da51ad5-bc4b-430a-83a4-c0eda6b25395> | 2 | 2.078125 | 0.021595 | en | 0.919401 | http://www.scienceandentertainmentexchange.org/blog-tags/science?page=2 |
Friedrich Sertürner (1783-1841)
The German Friedrich Sertürner discovered the painkiller morphine in opium while working as a pharmacist's apprentice in 1805.
Opium, a narcotic produced from the seed pods of the poppy plant, had been in use as a medical and recreational drug since prehistoric times. It was the main ingredient in laudanum, a popular medicine developed by the influential physician Paracelsus in 1527. With the new developments in chemistry introduced by Lavoisier and others in the late 1700s, many chemists began to try to isolate the active ingredients in plants.
When other chemists did not believe the initial report of Sertürner's discovery of morphinr, he resorted to public experimentation on himself and three friends to prove that the substance he had isolated was indeed the one which was responsible for the actions of opium. He named the new substance ‘morphine’ after Morpheus, the ancient Greeks’ god of sleep and dreams.
Morphine became more widely used from 1815, most importantly for pain relief but also, initially, as a substitute for alcohol and opium addicts - until doctors realised that morphine was actually even more addictive than the substances it was supposed to replace. Sertürner's success encouraged others - by 1820 chemists had isolated other medically important substances such as quinine, strychnine and caffeine. | <urn:uuid:da8a08f8-04c7-4a1d-afa2-0ca5264c8082> | 4 | 3.890625 | 0.663757 | en | 0.956228 | http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/onlinestuff/People/friedrichserturner.aspx |
Finding Fissile Fuel
A new wave of nuclear power plant construction has boosted the price of uranium reactor fuel
Courtesy of Cameco Corporation
More In This Article
[This is Part 1 of an In-Depth Report on The Future of Nuclear Power.]
Nearly 400 miles (645 kilometers) north of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, lies the McArthur River uranium mine.* Owned and operated by Cameco Corp., the world's largest producer of uranium, the mine disgorged about 18.7 million pounds (8.5 million kilograms) of the nuclear element in 2007. The year's output was enough to supply roughly one quarter of the annual fuel needs of the 104 U.S. nuclear reactors, according to World Nuclear Association (WNA) figures.
Such uranium deposits in Canada, Australia and Kazakhstan comprise the bulk of the world's known supply—although uranium is a ubiquitous atom that can even be derived from seawater. With 436 reactors worldwide consuming 65,000 metric tons (one metric ton equals 1.1 U.S. tons) of enriched uranium per year, demand for this nuclear reactor fuel outstrips available supply, which has caused uranium prices to jump from a low of $10 per pound a few years ago to more than $130 per pound in 2007 and still more than $50 per pound today.
Nuclear power is in the midst of a resurgence in the U.S.—the first application for a new reactor in more than 30 years was filed in September 2007—and a construction boom of new reactors is underway around the world. That resurgence will require full utilization of existing and yet undiscovered stores of the uranium ore that fuels such power plants. The first application in nearly 20 years for a new uranium mine in the U.S.—chemically leaching uranium from surrounding rock and pumping it to the surface at Moore Ranch in Wyoming—was submitted in October 2007 by Energy Metals Corp. and, subsequently, 19 more followed.
But finding enough fuel for existing and new reactors may prove a challenge, as will preventing the health and environmental impacts that have plagued uranium mining.
Big dig
The McArthur River mine contains uranium deposits that are both deep and concentrated. Seventeen-foot-tall, 11-ton raise-boring machines spear into the rock with as much as 750,000 pounds (340,194 kilograms) of force and then chew out the ore with a 10-foot- (three-meter-) wide reaming head that applies as much as 115,000 pounds (52,163 kilograms) of force for every foot (30.5 centimeters) it turns. They work more than 1,700 feet (520 meters) below the surface, knocking ore into remote-controlled loaders in a tunnel nearly 2,100 feet (640 meters) belowground.
In fact, most of the mining is done via remote control, because the McArthur River deposit is so rich: more than 20 percent triuranium octaoxide (U3O8), the most common form of uranium found in nature, according to Cameco. The machines handle the decaying element's radiation better than human miners and can tolerate the radon gas released by the ore; early Navajo miners of uranium in the U.S.—and their families exposed to residual radioactive dust and debris as well as contaminated water—developed lung cancer and other ailments by the 1970s and 1980s.
But that doesn't leave humans entirely out of the picture at McArthur River; human miners keep a close eye on the radio-controlled loaders, known as scoop trams, and directly operate much of the other mining machinery. And in emergencies, miners are vital: a cave-in and flood in 2003 required humans to do repairs and the urgency of the task—the entire mine could have been destroyed—caused them to forgo the usual safety equipment.
On a more typical day, however, the remote-controlled loaders dump ore loads into an underground mill, where the chunks of rock are ground down into fine silt that is mixed with water and pumped to the surface as a slurry. Diesel trucks carry containers of the slurry 50 miles (80 kilometers) to the larger mill at Key Lake, where it is mixed with lower grade ore. The resulting mixture is then chemically transformed into "yellowcake"—a brown or black powder concentrate of uranium oxide.
Whether the uranium is stripped out of an open pit like the Ranger mine in Australia, removed from deep underground like McArthur River or chemically leached from its rocky home as at the Smith Ranch-Highland mine in Wyoming (the largest mine in the U.S.), yellowcake is the end product, along with a heap of radioactive tailings and, often, contaminated water. For every metric ton of uranium ore pulled from McArthur River, roughly one metric ton of waste rock, often radioactive and rich in toxic heavy metals, is produced—and other mines produce even more waste rock per ton of ore.
Milling that metric ton from McArthur, which is reported to be roughly 20 percent uranium, would then result in 440 pounds (200 kilograms) of yellowcake and 1,765 pounds (800 kilograms) of toxic, radioactive tailings, at best. For ores that contain even less concentrated uranium—McArthur River is the most concentrated active mine—the proportion of waste in radium and other radioactive elements (as well as toxic heavy metals such as arsenic and mercury) is even higher—and McArthur River's uranium is much less concentrated than the mines of the past like nearby Rabbit Lake or Shinkolobwe in the Democratic Republic of the Congo's Katanga Province.
Yet, the uranium still is not ready to use in a nuclear reactor.
Although the yellowcake is more than 80 percent uranium after processing, most of that uranium is unusable. For every 1,000 atoms of natural uranium, only seven can easily split under neutron bombardment: They are the fissile isotope U235. The vast majority of the remainder is relatively stable U238 (with a tiny fraction of U234).
Reactors around the world require their fuel to hold anywhere from 3 to 5 percent U235, or 30 to 50 atoms of the fissile isotope per 1,000 atoms of uranium. The concentration of this isotope must therefore be boosted in natural uranium before it can function as nuclear power plant fuel. In the U.S., there is currently only one plant capable of so enriching natural uranium—the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky, built in 1952.
This plant covers 74 acres and sucks up at least 300 megawatts of electricity most of the time, peaking at as much as 2,000 megawatts (much of it from a coal-fired power plant nearby), to heat uranium hexafluoride until it gasifies and then force it through 1,760 porous membranes that gradually concentrate the level of the fissile isotope—a method invented during World War II. "The gaseous diffusion is an electricity-intensive process," says Jeremy Derryberry, a spokesman for USEC, Inc., the Bethesda, Md.–based company that leases Paducah from the Department of Energy (DoE) and operates it. But "we don’t discuss how much power we use to do the enrichment."
One metric ton of yellowcake becomes roughly 255 pounds (115 kilograms) of uranium hexafluoride enriched to contain as much as 5 percent U235, suitable for fuel; the remaining 2,500 pounds (1,135 kilograms) of depleted uranium is waste, according to David McIntyre, a spokesman for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the federal agency with oversight of the nuclear power industry. "These numbers could differ depending on the target assay for enrichment," he adds.
USEC prefers to measure this efficiency in terms of "separative work units," or the amount of energy required to enrich the uranium. "We're running at five million SWU," Derryberry says, enough to turn more than 18 million pounds (8.2 million kilograms) of natural uranium into more than 1.8 million pounds (816,465 kilograms) of uranium enriched to contain 4.5 percent U235.
That is also enough to meet almost half the fuel needs of the 104 U.S. reactors, once various plants located throughout the country shape this uranium into half-inch- (1.27-centimeter-) diameter black pellets and then form them into rods by coating the pellets with zirconium cladding. The remainder of the fuel comes from government stockpiles and dismantled Russian nuclear warheads.
Megatons to megawatts
Roughly half of the nearly 20 percent of U.S. electricity that nuclear power plants supply comes from old Russian warheads. The same company responsible for enriching natural uranium at Paducah also dilutes the highly enriched uranium, or HEU, (90 percent U235) contained in more than 14,000 Russian nuclear warheads. So far, 350 metric tons of Russian HEU has been converted into 10,160 metric tons of the more diluted stuff, suitable for nuclear reactors. (The U.S. government, for its part, has down-blended roughly 100 metric tons of HEU it no longer requires, according to the National Nuclear Security Administration, the branch of the DoE charged with oversight of the nation's nuclear weapons.)
Derryberry says the company plans to finish the job in 2013, which is about the same time current long-term uranium purchase agreements will expire, according to an analysis released in 2007 by The Keystone Center in Colorado, which assembled a panel of utility executives, environmentalists and other experts to examine the future role of nuclear power, particularly the role it might play in reversing climate change. "The fact that it's [the weapons down-blending] winding down and it's not an unlimited supply is part of the market boom in uranium," NRC's McIntyre speculates.
More troublesome, according to some experts, is the rapid decline of highly concentrated uranium deposits. "The high grades will be depleted within a decade," says Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen, an energy and technology analyst at Ceedata consultancy in the Netherlands, which advises European governments on nuclear issues, among others. At present consumption rates, he predicts (in a report he prepared for the U.K. Parliament in 2005) that the industry-wide average ore grade will fall below 0.1 percent—or one metric ton of uranium for every 1,000 metric tons of nonuranic material—within the next decade.
"The energy payback time of a nuclear power plant is at present about 11 years compared with natural gas at half a year," Storm van Leeuwen argues, when the full cost of decommissioning a nuclear power plant at the end of its useful life is included. "The cost in the U.K. for dismantling a reactor is now estimated at about 7 billion euros ($9.9 billion) per reactor of one gigawatt-electrical. That's before the first bolt has even been loosened."
And by 2070, Storm van Leeuwen found, the amount of energy it takes to mine, mill, enrich and fabricate one metric ton of uranium fuel may be larger than 160 terajoules—the amount of energy one can generate from it.
Other studies offer different estimates of the amount of energy it will take to make the uranium fuel and, as the WNA notes, one metric ton of natural uranium yields nearly 20,000 times as much energy as the equivalent amount of coal—the cheapest form of electric generation at present. In other words, one metric ton of uranium can produce the same amount of electricity generated by burning more than 19,000 metric tons of coal.
The International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) estimated in 2005 that 4.7 million metric tons of uranium are known to be available worldwide (at varying costs of recovery) and that an additional 10 million metric tons exist but are yet to be discovered—plenty of isotope to meet the 65,000 metric tons of fuel required annually by the world's fleet of 436 nuclear reactors.
Further, should the price of uranium go high enough, it might become economical, if not energy-efficient, to separate it from phosphates, estimated to yield an additional 22 million metric tons, or seawater, thought to have a stash of as much as four billion metric tons.
Renaissance requirements
The search for more uranium has already begun in earnest but nothing approaching the concentration of McArthur River has been discovered since 1988. "We're certainly looking at expanding existing operations in the Athabasca Basin in northern Saskatchewan," says Lyle Krahn, a Cameco spokesman. "Our core exploration activities are focused in Canada as well as Australia, but we're certainly involved in many places in the world," such as Kazakhstan and the U.S.
That search had ground to a halt in the 1980s and 1990s thanks to the moratorium on new nuclear plants in much of the world and an influx of fuel from nuclear weapons. "I expect some major new finds and discoveries by 2010," says George Bell, president and CEO of Toronto-based uranium exploration company, UNOR, Inc. "These would be shipping by 2017 and that's when you need it," because that's when the planned new wave of reactors will begin to fire up.
The NRC, which regulates leach mining of uranium, expects 11 applications for new leach mines in the U.S. in addition to the one filed for Moore Ranch, along with the expansion of eight operations. In addition, as many as seven new mills for the ore may be constructed, McIntyre says. Urenco, Ltd., a U.K. manufacturer of enriched uranium, is building a more efficient centrifuge enrichment plant near Eunice, N.M., set to begin producing fuel this year, and France-based Areva filed an application last December with the NRC for a license to build another one in Idaho.
USEC has also begun construction of a new centrifuge enrichment plant on the site of the old gaseous diffusion enrichment plant in Piketon, Ohio, in May. "We will probably have the first cascade of production machines in 2010," Derryberry says. The "American centrifuge [technology] uses 95 percent less electricity than the comparable gaseous diffusion plant."
In addition, nuclear engineers have uncovered ways to coax more heat out of fissile uranium fuel before it inevitably fizzles out. Pavel Hejzlar of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology invented a ring-shaped configuration for the fuel that boosts the power output of the plant by 50 percent by enabling it to operate more efficiently and at much lower temperatures.
The U.S. government is also interested in recycling the spent nuclear fuel, as France, Japan, Russia and the U.K. do, under the terms of the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, a consortium of 21 foreign countries as well as domestic nuclear technology firms formed to promote nuclear power. As proposed, spent fuel would be "reprocessed" at new plants to remove plutonium and render the fissile material useable as a reactor fuel, according to the DoE, though critics charge this is both expensive and dangerous.
Some scientists have argued that thorium, a more abundant element that can be bombarded with neutrons to produce the fissile fuel isotope uranium233, could become the nuclear fuel of the future.
In the meantime, the hunt for uranium—the fuel of nuclear reactors—continues, albeit slowly. "We have found the easier deposits to find, which are the ones that are closer to the surface," Cameco's Krahn says. "Is there potential for more? Until you find it, you don't know what's out there. It takes a long time to find and build a uranium mine, just as it takes a long time to build a reactor. This is a long-term business."
*Note (1/27/08): Due to an error, this sentence was modified after publication.
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rating: +154+x
Item #: SCP-335
Object Class: Safe
Special Containment Procedures: SCP-335 is to be kept in a secure location to prevent tampering.
Description: SCP-335 is a set of one hundred and fifty 3.5" floppy disks discovered in a cardboard box found in the attic of former Agent ███ shortly after her termination. Each disk is individually numbered in hand-written permanent marker. Disks are to be referred to by their number; SCP-335-001, SCP-335-002, etc. Each disk has also been labeled with a human name in the same writing as the numbering. 118 are male names and 30 are female. There is some speculation as to whether SCP-335-011 "Jackie" is meant to be male or female. The names have no identified pattern.
Initial examinations suggested that all 150 disks were blank, as their capacity all read as 0 megabytes. Dr. ██████████ determined that the disks were ordinary and had them archived with the rest of former Agent ███'s possessions. It was not until Agent ████ suggested the unlikelihood of Agent ███ keeping a box of floppy disks in her attic among the other contraband, that Dr. ██████████ agreed to have the disks examined again. It was determined that Dr. ██████████'s original floppy disk drive had been defective, and a different computer was brought in.
All 150 disks appear to have an infinite amount of storage space available. It is unknown whether the disk space is truly unlimited or simply too large to measure; regardless, the space is effectively infinite.
When SCP-335-001 was inserted into Dr. ██████████'s computer, the contents of a large pornographic website were the first data found on the disk. Further investigation by Agent ████ showed that all the contents of SCP-335-001 are of a pornographic nature.
Note from Dr. ██████████: I believe I know where all our bandwidth is going at night. Agent ████'s computer privileges should be limited until he either finds a girlfriend or learns some self control.
Further investigation revealed that SCP-335-001 through 012 contained pornographic material. However, upon discovering the entire contents of Wikipedia on SCP-335-013, the actual nature of SCP-335 was uncovered.
SCP-335 contains the entire contents of the Internet stored within its infinite storage space. It appears to have some sort of organizational system, with similar sites grouped together on the same disk. Experiment 335-007a showed that when content on the Internet is changed, the content on the corresponding disk changes to match. Precisely how this occurs is unknown. It is uncertain what would happen if content on the disk were changed, as all 150 disks seem to be locked in read-only format.
Addendum: Agent ████ has proposed on numerous occasions that an experiment be conducted where a disk is destroyed. Dr. ██████████ as well as ███-███ agree that this could potentially have disastrous effects on a large portion of the internet and could draw unwanted attention to the Foundation. Such an experiment is not to be attempted under any circumstances.
Addendum: The following is a listing of all 150 names written on the disks in their numerical order. No pattern has yet been identified in the names.
001: "Jonny"
002: "Carl"
003: "Robert"
004: "William"
005: "Benjamin"
006: "Patrick"
007: "Blake"
008: "Keith"
009: "Michael"
010: "Darrell"
011: "Jackie"
012: "Daniel"
013: "Jimbo"
014: "Cynthia"
015: "Valerie"
016: "Ozzie"
017: "Wayne"
018: "Paul"
019: "Frank"
020: "Sandra"
021: "James"
022: "Mark"
023: "Jordan"
024: "Isabella"
025: "Eugene"
026: "Matthew"
027: "Sean"
028: "Heath"
029: "Janice"
030: "Donald"
031: "Bradley"
032: "Ryan"
033: "Ryan"
034: "Emily"
035: "Francis"
036: "Theodore"
037: "Craig"
038: "Sharon"
039: "Jessica"
040: "Xavier"
041: "Parson"
042: "Heather"
043: "Jay"
044: "Kelly"
045: "Oscar"
046: "Brian"
047: "Calvin"
048: "Kenneth"
049: "Stanley"
050: "Walt"
051: "Helen"
052: "Martin"
053: "Hubert"
054: "Joe" [The letter E in this name is written backwards. Reasoning unknown.]
055: "Bartholomew"
056: "Jerry"
057: "Leroy"
058: "Steven"
059: "Roger"
060: "Bill"
061: "Susan"
062: "Lewis"
063: "Aaron"
064: "Leopold"
065: "Gordon"
066: "Kimberly"
067: "Dale"
068: "Julie"
069: "Randy"
070: "Vladmir"
071: "Fred"
072: "Leon"
073: "Marcus"
074: "Ernest"
075: "Mario"
076: "Able"
077: "Wesley"
078: "Howard"
079: "Mickey"
080: "Sarah"
081: "Angelicka" [This name appears to be misspelled. Unknown if this was intentional.]
082: "Tony"
083: "Andrew"
084: "Dorothy"
085: "Stephen"
086: "Clarence"
087: "Homer"
088: "Nathan"
089: "Maximilian"
090: "Joshua"
091: "Ralph"
092: "Rodney"
093: "Bruce"
094: "Eve"
095: "Phillip"
096: "Alexander"
097: "Chad"
098: "Ruth"
099: [Label is torn, no name remains except for the letter G]
100: "Gary"
101: "Ronald"
102: "Kyle"
103: "Antonio"
104: "Elizabeth"
105: "Isaac"
106: "Dennis"
107: "Chris"
108: "Anthony"
109: "Frodo"
110: "Lawrence"
111: "Victor"
112: "Brenda"
113: "Albert"
114: "Russel"
115: "Curtis"
116: "Pamela"
117: "Samuel"
118: "brandon" [Note the lower case first letter. Reasons unknown.]
119: "Michelle"
120: "Jesus"
121: "Walter"
122: "Борис" [Russian name, translates to Boris]
123: "Melissa"
124: "Justin"
125: "Jeffrey"
126: "Gerald"
127: "Anna"
128: "Vincent"
129: "Lloyd"
130: "Nicole"
131: "Allen"
132: "Frank"
133: "Jacob"
134: "Patricia"
135: "Joel"
136: "Harold"
137: "Derek"
138: "Amy"
139: "Douglas"
140: "Lenny"
141: "Rebecca"
142: "Scott"
143: "Glenn"
144: "Henry"
145: "Carlos"
146: "Mary"
147: "Normal"
148: "Eric"
149: "Dave"
150: "肇" [Japanese name, translates to Hajime]
Note from Dr. ██████████: Just some "points of interest" here.
• Disks one through twelve apparently contain all of the pornography on the internet. With all that there is, I can see why whoever made these got the porn out of the way first.
• Disks 85, 86 and 101 contain image-hosting sites such as Imageshack and Photobucket. Myspace is also on Disk 85.
• Disk 30 seems to contain the Google home page and nothing else. The rest of Google's website seems to be scattered all over the place. I've only found a few parts.
• Disk 119 has emoticons. Millions and millions of emoticons. Forums, instant messengers, and from other places.
• After looking long and hard, I have found that [REDACTED] can be found on Disk 76. I find it very disturbing that this disk has the same name as SCP-076.
Notes from Agent ████: SCP-335-085 and 058 are the same name, spelled differently. The name "Ryan" is used on both SCP-335-032 and 033. SCP-335-028 is named Heath, and that one actor that OD'd on pills, he died at age 28. Vladimir Lenin was born in 1870 and SCP-335-070 is named Vladimir. The name on SCP-335-150 is Japanese and roughly means "beginning." I'm assuming that SCP-335-120 is the Spanish name "Hay-suse" and not the biblical guy, but I guess you never know. And I agree with Dr. ██████████ that it's pretty disturbing that SCP-335-076 has the same name as SCP-076.
| <urn:uuid:406d859a-58d1-4683-a9c6-702f79fbc789> | 2 | 1.515625 | 0.048842 | en | 0.916067 | http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-335 |
Subject: File No. 4-606
From: Glenn S Newlin
July 30, 2010
I've only got brief remarks about this whole effort to protect the consumer.
The Compliance standard which exists today, the one of Suitability, with the additional state and NIAC regulations are sufficient enough to safeguard the public. States like Florida are imposing arduous regulations already for suitability and the company's must now supervise the activities of their representatives from their compliance departments. This is forward looking, as it catches the violations before they occur. If they don't use the suitability standards already in place-they are subjected to costly lawsuits, which neither they nor the representatives want.
By adding an ambiguous definition of Fiduciary responsibility, the Congress and the SEC are just seeking to be more backward looking in enforcement. I've only got one name to put out there as an example of how well this new standard would work-Bernie Madoff. That's all that needs to be said as to the efforts of the SEC or our government to protect the consumer.
The consumers are protected when representatives wish to be in business long term and do business ethically. This is something you can never legislate. If the government tries to do this it will just end up costing the consumer more and then the consumer will have less representation to assist them in making their financial goals a reality. As more legislation comes, less people will get into the financial field and more will retire because it will just not be worth all the hoops one has to jump through to provide a valuable service.
And this is , as Paul Harvey was fond of saying, "the rest of the story". | <urn:uuid:48c193c2-0305-4ee8-9508-fe0f793c5e29> | 2 | 1.617188 | 0.04369 | en | 0.965616 | http://www.sec.gov/comments/4-606/4606-216.htm |
"Groups Ask EPA to Ban Lead Tire Weights"
"The federal government should ban the use of lead weights, those fingertip-size chunks of metal that balance the tires of cars and trucks, says a petition filed with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last week.
While the federal government has banned lead in paint, gasoline and plumbing, among other products, the EPA has ignored an estimated 3.5 million pounds of lead weights that drop off tire rims and onto U.S. roads every year, according to a coalition of environmental groups that filed the petition.
Once the lead weights hit the road, they can be picked up by children or eaten by wildlife. They are run over by other vehicles and broken down into dust, which can be inhaled or end up in runoff that taints water and wetlands, the groups say.
Lead has been shown to cause serious neurological problems, affecting development, intelligence and behavior, particularly in children."
Jane Kay reports for the San Francisco Chronicle June 1, 2009.
Source: San Francisco Chronicle, 06/01/2009 | <urn:uuid:4ca4de91-5869-44eb-a486-ebf405bbc03f> | 2 | 2.265625 | 0.035744 | en | 0.961185 | http://www.sej.org/headlines/groups-ask-epa-ban-lead-tire-weights |
Carolina-style whole hog sandwich. [Photograph: Joshua Bousel]
Editor's note: American barbecue culture is mindbogglingly diverse. What differentiates your Carolina whole hog from your Texas brisket? Southern food sage Robert Moss is here to lay it all out, element by element. First up: the smoker.
The rich variety of American barbecue can be attributed to many factors—the kind of wood used, the types of meat selected, and the way that meat is seasoned, cooked, and served. But the differences between one regional style and another begins long before the brisket or pork shoulder ever encounters smoke and heat, and that's with the design and construction of the barbecue pit itself.
Pits tend to evolve in complexity as you move from east to west. Eastern North Carolina and the Pee Dee region of South Carolina is the home of whole hog barbecue, and the pits its leading practitioners use are not far removed from barbecue's original native American form: a trench dug directly in the ground (which is the origin of the term "pit" in the first place.)
By the time you reach Texas, the pits can more accurately be called smokers, which use indirect heat from an offset firebox to slow-smoke the meat. Many restaurants use commercially-manufactured models from companies like Bewley and Oyler, which offer automatic air control systems and motorized rotisseries, while other pitmasters have their own customized pits whose construction details they consider highly-sensitive trade secrets.
Here's the scoop from some of the most noted barbecue cooks in the country about the starting point of their craft: the pits. This time around, we're focused only on those who use wood-fired pits. We'll take a look at the newer gas- and electric-assisted pits in a later piece.
A butteflied hog on over an open pit, cooked by whole hog master Ed Mitchell. [Photograph: Joshua Bousel]
When it comes to the pits at the Skylight Inn in Ayden, North Carolina, Samuel Jones emphasizes their simplicity. "They're just standard masonry pits," he says. "We've been cooking the same way since we opened."
Each long rectangular pit has thick brick walls and is open at the top, with iron rods to hold the split whole hogs. There's not even an opening at the bottom for adding coals: they're simply scattered by the shovelful around the pigs so they fall to the floor of the pit. "There's metal lids that hinge on the pit itself," Jones adds, "Which we lower while the meat's cooking."
As the fame of Skylight Inn grew and volume increased, they had to add more capacity, and now they have two pit houses in operation. "One house was built in the '70s," Jones says, "and one house was built in the late '80s or early '90s. We finally tore down the original pit house four years ago because they had dirt floors and we hadn't used them in forever."
The Smoking Pits
The pits at Scott's Barbecue in Hemingway, South Carolina[Photograph: James Boo]
The pits at Scott's Bar-B-Que in Hemingway, South Carolina, are similar in design, though they've evolved a little over the years. "We started with a little brick pit," says Rodney Scott, who now runs the business his father started back in 1972. "And then my dad added a few more. The original pits I remember were little brick stacks with rebar to hold them up. He had the cinder block pits built a little bit later on." Each pit can hold two whole butterflied hogs, and they're covered by a big sheet of metal that is lifted away and leaned against the cookhouse wall when Scott needs to flip or baste the meat.
At both Scott's and Skylight Inn, they burn wood outside the pits to create the coals that provide the heat. "We burn [logs] down in chimneys," Samuel Jones explains, "Then as it it produces the coals they are fired into the pit." Those chimneys are essentially brick fireplaces similar to what you might find in a house, and they carry the smoke and heat from the burning logs out of the pithouse.
The system is even more basic at Scott's, where they use contraptions they call "burn barrels"—huge repurposed industrial pipes set upright on the ground with steel truck axles inserted through holes near the bottom to create a sort of grate to hold burning logs. The barrels are situated out behind the cook house, and the men tending the pit scoop glowing red coals from the bottom with long-handled shovels and carry them into the cook house to scatter beneath the pigs through an opening at the bottom of each pit.
These details of pit design helped determine the characteristics of the finished food. The broad, open pits like those used by Samuel Jones and Rodney Scott are naturally suited for accommodating 150 pounds worth of whole hog. When hot embers are scattered beneath the meat, they cook with a direct heat, giving the meat a crusty, thick outer layer (what North Carolinians call "outside brown") that's imbued with smoke while the inner meat stays moist and mildly flavored.
Rodney Scott points to an addition effect of direct heat, too. "I have this theory," he says, "That when the juices of the hog fall into the wood it creates a whole new thing. They steam up the flavor of smoke back into the meat."
Pulled pork by Big Bob Gibson. [Photograph: Joshua Bousel]
As one moves westward into the Piedmont of North Carolina and southward into Georgia and Alabama, the pits tend to be more elaborately constructed, and the wood that fires them is often burned right inside the pit.
"In the restaurant we have elevated brick coffin pits with large metal lids that are counterweighted and raise up and down," says Chris Lilly of Big Bob Gibson in Decatur, Alabama. "It's three layers of brick with insulation between the three layers . . . and heavy gauge metal along the sides."
The pits are heated by logs that are burned in a firebox on one side of the pit. "We have two chimneys," Lilly explains "One's beside the firebox, and on the other side we have another smaller chimney where we can bleed the heat and the smoke as we're cooking." That second chimney draws the heat and smoke through the pit and over the meat as it cooks.
And the size? "They're absolutely huge," Lilly says. "We can cook up to 75 chickens at a time on each of our brick pits."
The precise temperature gauge of an indirect smoker. [Photograph: Paul Yee]
As you move down into Texas, slow smoking and carefully-regulated heat is the name of the game, and many barbecue restaurants employ big metal cookers with a range of designs—huge barrel-like cylinders with hinged lids, locker-like metal cabinets with stacks of racks inside. Smoke and heat are funneled by pipe or chimney from the fire box, a process called indirect smoking.
Some cooks, like John Lewis at Austin's La Barbecue, can get downright secretive about how their pits are constructed. When Lewis took over the pitmaster duties at La Barbecue, he wasn't satisfied with the metal pit he inherited. "It wasn't cooking brisket the way I wanted it to," he says. "So I just built a new one that would do it the right way. The new one is aerodynamic on the inside, everything about it is made to make the heat work."
"The cook chamber is made out of a decommissioned 1,000 gallon propane tank, with a firebox on the right and a chimney on the left. Much more about that I can't really tell you."
Texas brisket. [Photograph: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]
What Lewis will reveal, though, is that the key is what's inside that big tank, a proprietary design that creates an incredible draft from the firebox, pulling heat and smoke across the cooking meat and out the chimney. "There's nothing mechanical or anything," Lewis says. "It has such an incredible draft that the smoke doesn't sit in there very long."
Modern offset/indirect smokers lose that effect of juices dripping directly onto coals. They do, however, offer more precise temperature control, which is needed for turning a persnickety cut like brisket into tender barbecue. When logs are burned in attached fireboxes, more smoke gets sent across the meat than in pits fired with glowing embers, so the meat tends to have a thicker red smoke ring and a more intense smoky flavor, too.
The pits, of course, are just the beginning. In future installments we'll take a look at each of the other elements that make America's regional styles of barbecue so deliciously unique.
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Bounce Back from Mistakes with 'The Flush'
RIS - Fall 2004
By Kathy Toon
How do great skaters deal with pressure during competition? How do they regroup after making a mistake? A key to maintaining your "game face" during competition is to develop and use an effective mistake ritual. Athletes who maintain emotional control on the ice handle mistakes differently than those who lose emotional control.
All athletes have a ritual they use after making a mistake. How effective is your ritual? Does it allow you to bounce right back? Or does it cause the mistake to linger and impact the rest your routine?
Think about yourself for a moment. What do you typically look like right after you've made a mistake? Do your shoulders slump? Does your head drop? Do you shake your head and throw your hands in the air? What does your face look like? Do you roll your eyes? Where do you look? What is that little voice in your head saying? Do you say anything out loud?
Now think about some of the best skaters you know. How do they consistently handle mistakes on the ice? What do they look like? Do they maintain a look of confidence and determination, no matter what just happened? How would you describe them? What do you think they are saying to themselves?
Positive Coaching Alliance believes that all skaters need a "go-to" ritual when mistakes are made that helps them bounce right back and stay engaged in their routine. Let's take a look at how you can develop an effective mistake ritual.
1. Develop a Disciplined Physical Response
This refers to the way you carry your head and shoulders, the look on your face and your body language during the first two to three seconds after you make a mistake. Physically, you want to portray a strong, powerful and confident image, no matter what just happened. Acting the way you want to feel in that moment - confident and determined, will move you closer to actually feeling that way. Use your body language to control your emotional state. This means standing tall, shoulders back, chin parallel to the ground, and keeping your facial expression strong. If you want to feel confident and determined in the face of a mistake, you need to look the part.
A favorite PCA mistake ritual is "The Flush." We learned it from PCA trainer Mike Legarza, formerly the men's basketball coach at Cañada College in Redwood City, Calif. When a player makes a mistake, he makes the motion of flushing a toilet, which involves making a fist with one hand, putting his fist in the air and bending his elbow to bring his fist down. With this flushing motion, the mistake is flushed away and he can now focus on moving forward.
While the flush works well for hockey players, it is not very realistic for skaters in competition, where every movement is choreographed. It would look pretty silly to do a "flush" while skating to Swan Lake! A good mistake ritual for skaters is to squeeze your shoulder blades together and let the mistake roll off your back. On the other side of the coin, one of our trainers, Shannon Peck, used to press her middle finger to her thumb when she did a good jump or spin. It was a way she would pat herself on the back and say, "Good job!" This really helped Shannon's confidence and energized her to finish strong.
2. Develop a Disciplined Mental Response
What you say to yourself (even in the privacy of your own head) has an impact on how you feel. If you obsess over a mistake and play it over and over again in your head, you are likely to skate tight and to repeat the mistake. Rather than focusing on the mistake, focus on the challenge of bouncing back. Talk to yourself in the language of challenge. Use your words and your thoughts to control how you feel. Mentally, you might say: "Come on," "Right back," "No worries," "Hang in there," "Next one" or "Make up for it."
3. Practice
If you want your new, effective mistake ritual to show up under pressure on game day, you better practice it during practice. If you don't, the odds are against you that it will be there during competition. New responses need time and practice to become automatic. Share your ritual with your coaches so they can help you reinforce your new behavior.
Kathy Toon is the product development manager and senior trainer for Positive Coaching Alliance. For more information on the PCA-ISI partnership or PCA programs, go to positivecoach.org or call (866) 725-0024. | <urn:uuid:d0bb7e9f-ca01-4160-9fa2-1647d1ec3c01> | 2 | 1.921875 | 0.535524 | en | 0.962034 | http://www.skateisi.com/site/Sub.Cfm?content=Archive_BounceBackfromMistakes |
Saint Louis University
Hate Crimes & Bias-Related Incident Protocol
Saint Louis University is committed to creating an inclusive environment that respects the fundamental dignity of all human beings. As part of this commitment, the University has developed the Hate Crime and Bias-Related Incident Protocol to provide a caring, effective, and uniform response to any member of the SLU community who reports a hate crime or bias-related incident, or who is the victim of a hate crime or bias-related incident.
What is a hate crime?
Pursuant to federal law, a hate crime is a criminal act, where an individual willfully causes bodily injury to any person, or attempts to do so through the use of fire, a firearm, a dangerous weapon, or an explosive or incendiary device, because of the actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability of any person. 18 U.S.C. § 249.
What is a bias-related incident?
Not all hateful behavior rises to the level of a crime. The protocol uses the term “bias-related incidents” to refer to any act or behavior that is a violation of the Code of Student Conduct and/or the Policy on Harassment and reasonably believed to be motivated by a consideration (real or perceived) of race, sex, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, disability, age, sexual orientation, marital status, military status, veteran status, pregnancy, or any other protected classification.
Hate Crime and Bias-Related Incident Protocol
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The Next 10 Years: What we can (and can't) expect from regulators and policymakers
By: SGN Staff
Editor's note: This is the fifth installment of our The Next 10 Years series where industry insiders offer insights on smart grid issues and trends they expect to see in the coming decade. (The previous segments are linked at the end of today's story.) As always, we welcome your comments; please use the Talk Back form at the bottom of the page.
By Doug Peeples
SGN News Editor
Lionel Chocron, general manager for Connected Energy Networks Business Unit at Cisco, sees in the years to come a recognition by regulators and policymakers (and utilities) that "intelligent, secure and connected energy networks are key to enabling the lower-carbon, energy independent economy we envision for ourselves."
And because of that optimism, he expects those stakeholders to find and implement the right regulatory changes needed to pave the way for cost-effective smart grid investment, encourage innovation in the electricity sector, bring consumers into the fold so they can make informed decisions about their energy use - and protect critical infrastructure.
While other insiders drew similar conclusions, the opposite view also was expressed: There will be a lot of talk but little action in terms of a significant change in regulatory focus.
Where will future regulatory changes come from? The states? The feds?
Echoing comments from others who addressed the issue, S&C Electric VP for Strategic Solutions Mike Edmonds sees regulatory change coming from both the state and federal levels - it's just that those changes will affect different areas. "Changes will occur at the state level and those changes will have the biggest impact on smart grid investments. Federal-level policy and regulations will impact all types of generation - renewable, nuclear, coal and natural gas fired plants - and changes in the generation mix will drive the need for corresponding smart grid technologies that will improve grid efficiency, shave peak loads and integrate intermittent energy sources."
Others noted that neither the states nor the federal government can accomplish the needed changes on their own, and that it will take an intensively collaborative effort between them and other major stakeholders.
The costs of regulatory compliance
We asked our execs if they see changes coming in the amount of time and money they invest in compliance, and what shape those changes would take. It wasn't intended as a trick question but in hindsight, it does sound like one. Most of the responses to questions about regulatory issues were from vendors and in many instances strikingly similar.
Don Rickey, SVP for Infrastructure Business at Schneider Electric, expressed the view of many: "As a vendor, we would expect to invest as appropriate to see that our products and services are compatible with the regulatory requirements of our customers. As the industry moves toward more open standards support and greater interactivity, this necessarily would increase investments made in this area." Others specified that further development of cybersecurity standards in particular would drive compliance investments.
And overall...
We certainly didn't expect unanimity in their responses to questions about the future of regulation, and we didn't get it. But we did get a range of informed insights on what to expect. Sensus CEO and President Peter Mainz provided an overview. While he said he expects the U.S. regulatory focus to remain much the same as it is now, he does not anticipate the federal government to have a lot of impact on smart grid.
"On the federal level in the United States there will be a continued focus on the need to deploy smart grid technology driven in part by events such as the Hurricane Sandy disaster and the associated impact of widespread and prolonged power interruptions. However, while there will be a continued focus we don't anticipate the federal government to have a meaningful impact on smart grid deployment as another round of stimulus funding is likely not in the cards given the current emphasis on deficit reduction.
"We believe regulatory bodies in countries outside North America will play a pivotal role in dictating the pace of smart grid deployment in their respective countries. Brazil is an example of a market where this is already evident."
More from SGN's The Next 10 Years series...
The Next 10 Years: Maybe customer engagement isn't so dang important
Empowered "digital natives" become a force to reckon with
Silver Spring exec insists we need to go faster
Where we've come from (and how it shapes where we'll go next) | <urn:uuid:0281b609-f79b-4f3d-8d30-1d4cc44dbde5> | 2 | 1.640625 | 0.024313 | en | 0.944997 | http://www.smartgridnews.com/story/next-10-years-what-we-can-and-cant-expect-regulators-and-policymakers/2012-12-10 |
All Hail Software Metrics!
Estimating project expenses and quantifying the total value of a piece of work are variables that have plagued software development since it's conception. When will the program be complete, how much will it cost, and what will be my return on investment are simple questions that remain unanswered in nearly all phases of development.
Imagine a situation in which a construction contractor refused to release information regarding project completion and total expenses. What would be your reaction? Would you take this contractor seriously? Now imagine a scenario in which the entire industry acted in this way. You would have something called software development. Assuming the industry is somehow different or special is a giant mistake; it should be held to the same standards as other forms of business.
This is Our Philosophy:
1. We believe that a great system of measurement is at the foundation of any successful project.
2. We believe planning and evaluating technical tasks correctly allows managers to make quick and effective decisions.
3. We believe development teams need to be held accountable for failing to deliver projects on time and within budget.
4. And most of all we believe Software Metrics is the answer.
How This Site Works
The site is broken down into two sections: services and information. If you're looking to hire a consultant to apply Software Metrics techniques to your business, then you probably want to visit the services section. If you're looking for more information on Function Points and Software Metrics in general, then the information section is for you. | <urn:uuid:5b28c19c-f978-4442-8593-b5f75a7bc213> | 2 | 1.570313 | 0.066734 | en | 0.945541 | http://www.softwaremetrics.com/ |
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Please, feel free to download:
Excel spreadsheet model
> Depending on your navigator, you may need to right-click on the link to download files.
This example illustrates the use of Monte Carlo simulation and spreadsheet modeling to estimate the risk of cost overrun on a project.
A project management team has listed with risk experts a set of potential risks likely to be realized during a project. Each potential risk can be qualified regarding to 2 aspects:
• the probability to occur
• the cost which would result from it
The project management team wants to estimate:
• the average cost overrun on this project
• the value at risk (VaR) 5%, that is: the cost overrun C5% for which there is a 5% probability to be greater than C5%.
To make simple, we will not try to justify the assumptions made about each potential risk. We just want to model these assumptions with Excel and Statscorer and measure the outcome for the project.
The purpose of this example is not to explain the project risk management matter but the way quantitative analysis can help project management face to risk issues and decision making.
Assumptions about the potential risks
Risk experts have identified a set of 26 potential risks.
A risk may be realized or not depending on a given probability. As it is difficult for them to figure out precisely, experts think that this probability follows roughly a uniform distribution, ranging from a minimum value pmin to a maximum value pmax.
Uniform distribution
They have defined 5 categories for the whole set of risks which provide values for pmin and pmax.
Prob. category pmin pmax
1 0% 50%
2 0% 20%
3 0% 10%
4 0% 5%
5 0% 1%
Thus, each potential risk is more or less probable depending on the category it belongs to. For instance, a risk belonging to category no. 3 may be realized according to a probability between 0 and 0,1. It can be 0,05 or 0,06 as well as any other value of the interval, in equiprobable way.
If a risk is realized, this one leads to a cost overrun. Risks can have a more or less important impact on cost overrun but the cost globally follows a Pert distribution (here, a Beta distribution with parameters α=2 and β=3) ranging from Cmin to Cmax.
Beta distribution
Experts have also defined 5 categories for the whole set of risks which provide values for Cmin and Cmax.
Cost category Cmin Cmax
1 0 € 500 €
2 0 € 2000 €
3 1000 € 5000 €
4 2000 € 10000 €
5 5000 € 100000 €
Thus, each potential risk is more or less severe depending on the category it belongs to.
Note: categories are independent regarding the occuring probability aspect and the cost aspect. That is: 2 potential risks that belong to the same probability category may belong to completely different cost categories.
Below is the list of the 26 potential risks with their related probability category and cost category:
Risk index Prob. cat. Cost cat.
#1 1 1
#2 3 4
#3 2 1
#4 3 2
#5 1 1
#6 2 1
#7 2 2
#8 3 1
#9 2 1
#10 3 2
#11 3 1
#12 3 4
#13 1 3
Risk index Prob. cat. Cost cat.
#14 3 3
#15 5 5
#16 1 1
#17 2 1
#18 3 2
#19 2 1
#20 2 2
#21 3 3
#22 2 1
#23 1 2
#24 1 2
#25 2 3
#26 2 2
Modeling inside the Excel sheet
First, we have to define somewhere on the sheet the 3 tables listed above:
List of potential risks, their related probability and cost
List of potential risks, their related probability and cost, defined inside the Excel sheet
Then, we have to notice that our model will be composed of:
• a main parameter variable : the risk index, ranging from 1 to 26
• a 1st input variable X1 : the probability for the risk to be realized
• a 2nd input variable X2 : according to X1, the fact that the risk has been realized (X2=1) or not (X2=0)
• a 3rd input variable X3 : the cost consecutive to the risk if this one is realized
• an output variable Y : the effective cost, that is Y = X2 . X3
Note: the parameter will take the values 1 to 26 and the output variable will be summed over this set of values, using the operator "Sum" available in Statscorer.
Excel model of the project risk analysis
The Excel model allows to retrieve data from the tables while Statscorer generates values (yellow and green cells) and records the output (red cell)
As shown in the picture above representing the Excel sheet, the yellow cell will take the value of the main model parameter.
According to the value of this cell, we can retrieve the probability and cost categories thanks to the very useful Excel function "VLOOKUP".
Then Statscorer will generate a probability for X1 according to a uniform distribution, a value (whether 0 or 1) for X2 indicating the risk has been realized or not and a cost for X3 following a Beta distribution. These values are generated by Statscorer then written in the green cells.
Finally, Statscorer records the values taken by the red cell that stands for the output Y.
Output values are summed over the set of risks.
Simulation results
Results show that potential risks may lead to a possible cost overrun. According to the hypotheses experts made, the average cost overrun is estimated at 2890 €.
As for the value at risk (VaR), the cumulative function gives a VaR5% of 7800 € which means that 95% of the smallest possible cost overruns are less than 7800 € or we have 5% chance to be greater than 7800 €.
Cost overrun above 13000 € represents less than 0,8% of the possible outcomes. We limited on purpose the plot range to 13000 € to have a better view on what is going on below this value.
Expected project cost overrun
Statscorer plots the frequencies of the possible cost overrun and the cumulative distribution function (in red)
Optionally, we could also measure with Statscorer the number of risks that may be realized simultaneously during the project. The file downloadable online does not include this 2nd output but here is what we would get:
Expected number of risks realized during the project
Number of simultaneous risks likely to be realized during the project.
We see that we have a probability of only 3,86% that no risk ever be realized.
On the opposite, the probability to have more than 6 simultaneous risks realized is less than the probability to have none of them. Cases where the number of realized risks is greater than 9 (from 10 to 26) are negligible (less than 0,02 % of all cases), though possible.
In conclusion, Monte Carlo simulations can be valuable for risk and decision analysis involved by project management activity. Results are all the more accurate as potential risks have been comprehensively identified and characterized regarding probability and gravity. With results like those described here, it is possible for a project management team to put aside a reasonable budget especially intended for risks ("risk provision").
Note: a similar study would have been possible with delay instead of cost. Monte Carlo method and stochastic modeling would have allowed us to set dependencies between risks, precisely like we would have done in MS Project with tasks, and estimate the total expected delay on a project.
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Mannerisms Maketh Man
From the earthy Christianity of GK Chesterton and CS Lewis to the crafty wit of Alistair Sim and PG Wodehouse, Stephen Fry has subsumed the defining characteristics of his ideological mentors. After all, where else will you find Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), GK Chesterton (1874-1936), Charles Dickens (1812-1870), C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), Alistair Sim (1900-1976) and PG Wodehouse (1881-1975) in the same list other than in the roll call of Stephen’s influences.
Religious overtones
From atheist beginnings, Stephen dropped the ‘a’ for a time in his teens, absorbed by the thoughts of Lewis’s “Screwtape Letters” and the colossal genius (according to George Bernard Shaw) of GK Chesterton.
Such theological leanings were not meant to be for young Master Fry and, while their shadow remains, his character was drawn to the less refined idols of popular literature.
Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse did, and still does resonate deeply with our man Fry. While he has played the inimitable Jeeves on television, the impact of Wodehouse’s gentle satire and larger-than-life characterisations have stretched far beyond this one series of performances. Providing an avenue of expression for the contemporary Stephen Fry to grow into his public persona.
Add to this a dash of the singular comic genius of Alistair Sim. The end result: an inquisitive, spiritual, humorous, eccentric character actor that is the incomparable Stephen Fry. | <urn:uuid:c9e8a6fb-578a-4e11-bddd-af8f35776070> | 2 | 2.09375 | 0.027348 | en | 0.899042 | http://www.stephenfry.com/moab/influences/ |
How to keep a positive attitude in challenging times
Published online: May 30, 2013
Viewed 126 time(s)
The point?
There are millions of things you can do to position yourself on the right side of a stressful situation, but here are four simple mindsets that you can adopt today regardless of the obstacle at hand:
1. Nothing in life is permanent, not even you. So, if you are impermanent, how can your problems be permanent? While this might sound negative, understanding that everything in life is transitory will give you an empowering viewpoint in regards to your current challenges. Reminding yourself that whatever turbulence you are experiencing at this moment is temporary will encourage you to keep elevating yourself in search of that perfect cruising altitude.
On the other hand, even when things are perfect, embracing a temporary mindset can be very helpful. You see, people's zest for life is frequently killed not by misfortunes but by their inability to appreciate what's already great around them. Therefore, if you begin to remind yourself that this moment, no matter how perfect, will too come to an end, you will start appreciating all of the positives in your life that you have been taking for granted.
2. Failure is a prerequisite. Your failures exist for one and only one reason: to make your future successes possible. Instead of complaining and asking life to stop throwing things at you, start recognizing your current dilemma as building material. Life tosses bricks to all of us; it's up to you to build an artistic masterpiece or to end up with a pile of rubbles.
Keep this thought in mind by Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude." Be thankful even for failures, for they are an indispensable piece of your success puzzle.
3. Find the silver lining. Constantly ask yourself one simple question: what great opportunity can come out of my current circumstances? Asking this question will direct your energy to look for the hidden positives that lie within your challenges and keep you from wasting it on complaining about the negatives.
Once you start seeing the silver lining in every incident, your challenges will cease to be the heavy blocks that previously burdened you; for they will now become stepping stones from where you can stand just a little taller. It's at this point that you will experience a new height regardless of the negatives thrown your way.
4. Trust the bigger plan. You no doubt have big plans. But understand that however big your plans are, the universe has much bigger plans for you. When you are discouraged and things are not working according to your plans, realize that there's something else out there guiding you; and that which you perceive as a detour might be the actual road you must travel on.
Don't get so caught up on the way things should've been, could've been, or would've been because looking from where you stand you will never be able to comprehend the magnitude of the grand plan that's in store for you. Trust that you are where you are because that's where you need to be; then you might get a glimpse at how insignificant your initial plan was and how grandiose your current one is.
Call to action
Everyone says in life you have to be positive if you want to get somewhere. The question is how can you become positive when negative things keep happening to you?
Just like anything, being positive is a habit that can be developed. All you have to do is for the next 30 days when you are faced with a challenge adopt one of the 4 mindsets by reminding yourself that (1) Whatever is troubling you is temporary, (2) Your current setback is an indispensable part of the success puzzle, (3) There is a silver lining or a great opportunity within every challenge and (4) No matter what happens, you must trust that you are part of a much bigger plan.
Andres Lara is an international-selling author and a motivational speaker who speaks to companies and groups from all walks of life on the psychology of how to move forward when you feel like quitting. For more information,,,, @motivation911 or call 239-424-9152. | <urn:uuid:ee6de546-bb68-47d4-8e67-801a3e829dab> | 2 | 1.945313 | 0.028877 | en | 0.950038 | http://www.sugarproducer.com/2013/05/how-to-keep-a-positive |
The Language Lab
The Language Lab at SCCC is equipped with 25 computer stations with software to support the study of Spanish, French and Italian. Students can listen to CDs and watch videos for class work as well as study and do homework. The lab instructor can monitor each student and communicate with them individually or as a group, and is there to assist as needed.
To better enrich a student's experience in learning the language, there are cultural videos available for viewing in the lab. In addition, there are videos to accompany Dicho y Hecho, Identidades, Chez Nous and Avanti! These are provided for the reinforcement of the textbook.
Students have the capacity to write papers using the Italian, French and Spanish alphabet that is installed on Microsoft Word. To do this, open Microsoft Word, then click on new, then blank document, then click on tools, language then set language and click on France, Spain-Traditional Sort or Italy. When you are done, please set the language back to the default of English.
On the bookshelves of the Language Lab there are reference books which all students may use. The bilingual dictionaries will give you the meanings of words, however they will not instruct you how to grammatically use these words. The Language Lab also has copies of the 501 verb book for each language which has the verbs listed alphabetically wherein you can locate the spelling of each verb in the verb tense i.e. present, preterit etc. If those resources are being used by other students, you can also use a variety of websites such as for verb information and conjugations.
Thanks to the Spanish Club, we also have a small library on our bookshelves that includes Spanish and Latin American authors as well as other books ranging from poetry to drama and history, etc.
The Spanish Club meets in the language lab on Wednesdays from 11:20 to 12:20 during College Hour; however, the Language Lab will remain open while the meeting is held. Meetings alternate between business and cultural presentations to other things decided on by club members at the start of each semester. The meetings are open to the entire college community. Food and informal conversation are sometimes the highlights of our meetings. Over the years, the Spanish Club has provided distinguished artifacts, artwork, posters and other cultural items that decorate the walls and provide an atmosphere where culture is celebrated.
Language is a major component of an entire culture. It is said that one cannot truly understand a culture without learning the language. The art, music, food and customs that comprise any culture help motivate our interest.
Please do not hesitate to ask for help or make suggestions so that we may improve the experience for students in our lab!
Sandra Riggin or
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7 brilliant tech ideas that completely flopped
Ideas that were great on paper but got dumped in the fail bin
Microsoft Zune
Brilliant ideas don't always lead to brilliant results - we saw that with Betamax. But such technofail isn't just confined to the annals of time - it's still with us, eating away at the ideas that should have worked but just fell away.
So after an office discussion about HD DVD, the Sinclair C5 and Nokia Ngage we decided it was time to celebrate a bunch of great but lesser known tech flops. A couple might supposedly still be alive, but they might as well be dead. Fine on paper, but already falling towards failure, just like the rest.
1. Wireless USB
Someday wireless peripherals may become a reality. It's a good way to get rid of some cable clutter around your desk and promote the use of even more USB gadgets. But Wireless USB has been simply too expensive to be a success. Oh, and USB cables require no drivers, no training and are ten-a-penny - they are so ubiquitous you can find them for sale at airports. Only a few companies – including the beleaguered Belkin, who fought a firestorm of criticism over the paid-for reviews scam – have released any products that actually work. Wireless USB's chance has already passed, and it'll take a second version with some extra perk - such as a speed boost - as well as universal out-of-the-box support for any derivative version to succeed.
2. Speaking to your PC
We should all be talking to our computers by now, dictating memos and getting into arguments over world politics with them. Microphone technology is advanced enough for clear voice detection, and technology such as the car-based Microsoft Sync prove that speech recognition can work. The problem is that the processing required for really accurate speech recognition - not just guessing at the word, but always getting it right - would require several data centres to interpret and then convert the spoken words. No one has signed up to take on that challenge, not even TellMe, the company that powers Sync.
3. Fold-away keyboards
Here's a brilliant idea that should work, except for the pesky problem of ergonomics. A roll-up or fold-away keyboard would allow you to bring only a mini-notebook on trips and skip the laptop. Unfortunately, to type fast on a keyboard, your fingers must be positioned for the most comfort, able to move freely across well spaced and raised keys. A roll-up or fabric keyboard might be highly portable and makes sense for those who want to type longer documents or emails on a smartphone or on an airplane in a cramped space, but the form factor is just not good enough.
4. Internet voting
Placing your finger on a pad at a voting kiosk makes sense - and processing the vote in a data centre would certainly be more accurate than counting them by hand. After the elections of 2000 in the US, you'd think internet voting would be a reality by now. Yet, voting requires a high-degree of reliability and trust. Biometrics, or the use of technology to confirm the identity of a human, is now a commonplace feature on laptops, but not on desktops and other hardware. Another issue with internet voting is securing the connection, not only from the terminal to the data centre but making sure the voting record is held in long-term storage with encryption and authentication.
5. Micropayments
A few years ago, micropayment services were all the rage. The idea is to fill up an account by paying, say, £10 or so and then using the service to buy small items such as postage stamps or one audio file. While the idea is sound, and the technology is more than possible (PayPal has proved this for years), it's the business model that doesn't quite work. Companies are essentially taking a small fee to process even smaller transactions. Consumers, for their part, are also unclear about the advantages when they know they can always buy a single MP3 file on iTunes with a credit card. Fail. | <urn:uuid:593d6ad5-3649-4e82-b867-5b2a6e06db71> | 2 | 1.546875 | 0.131852 | en | 0.970896 | http://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/7-brilliant-tech-ideas-that-completely-flopped-534931 |
About PCI and PCIe x16 slot
By palugulamadhu
May 3, 2013
Post New Reply
1. Hi friends,
I am not a computer savvy and all I wanted to know what is PCI, PCle x16, PCle x1 slot. As, my mother board had came up with these facilities and I don't know what the use of this slots and how can they helpful for me. So need a detailed explanation over these structures.
Has my mother board has 1 x PCle x16 slot
1 x PCle x1 slot
2 x PCI slots
2. JC713
JC713 TS Evangelist Posts: 7,155 +943
The PCIe x16 slot is for GPUs, it is the highest bandwidth of them all. I can explain more later, I am in a rush now.
3. slh28
slh28 TechSpot Paladin Posts: 1,926 +170
As JC explains the PCI-E x16 is usually for dedicated graphics cards, the others can be for sound cards, wireless cards, TV tuners, etc.
JC713 likes this.
4. JC713
JC713 TS Evangelist Posts: 7,155 +943
5. mailpup
mailpup TS Special Forces Posts: 8,544 +253
Although the PCI-E x 16 slot is usually used for graphics cards, you can also fit PCI-E x 1 or PCI-E x 4 cards too. Since some motherboards have more than one PCI-E x 16 sized slot (though they may run at x 8 or less), you can make use of them for other expansion cards if you aren't running multiple graphics cards.
6. SNGX1275
SNGX1275 TS Forces Special Posts: 12,765 +360
A simple "PCI" slot is pretty much worthless today. They are just included for 'legacy' purposes. Pretty much, if you don't know you need a regular PCI slot, then you don't need one. Almost everything has a PCIe alternative now, you'd know if you required a regular PCI.
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Netflix Explains Why Its Canadian Content Library is So Different from the US
by Knowlton Thomas
Ever wonder why Netflix's content library varies so dramatically from region to region? The company decided to answer that question for you one of its Quick Guide YouTube videos.
Netflix cites three core reasons as to why each country has its own library:
1. Location
2. Popularity
3. Purchasing rights
"Programming on Netflix is different from region to region because of how TV shows and movies are licensed," explains Joris Evers, Netflix's director of corporate communications.. "Organizations that own the rights to those shows license the rights by geography. So this means that we have to acquire rights on a territory by territory basis. And that's why what you watch on Netflix in Brazil is different from you see in Sweden or the US."
Popularity comes into play because, if a certain show or film is not being watched in a country, Netflix may drop it because it's not profitable. But that show could still appear in other countries, where members in those regions watch that specific content often.
The video streaming company says all of its content decisions are based on "detailed research" that gives insight into what each country's users are most interested in.
Los Gatos, California, United States
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Knowlton Thomas
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Tennessee Death Records >Sample Death Certificate
The image below is a sample death certificate from Tennessee. Each death certificate has twenty fields of information; however, some fields were left blank if the requested information was not readily available.
The fields are as follows:
1. Place of death: County, civil district OR village OR city
2. Full name
3. Sex
4. Color or race
5. Marital status
6. Date of birth
7. Age
8. Occupation
9. Birthplace (state or country)
10. Name of father
11. Birthplace of father (state or county)
12. Maiden name of mother
13. Birthplace of mother (state or county)
14. Name and address of individual who provided information for death certificate
15. Name of registrar
16. Date of death
17. Cause of death
18. Length of residence
19. Place of burial or removal and date of burial
20. Name and address of undertaker
Death certificates are stamped with an identification number in the upper right-hand corner (marked in yellow on the image).
sample Tennessee death certificate
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Call for more as Australia ratifies arms trade treaty at UN
Ratified by Australia, the Arms Trade Treaty still needs 10 countries to sign up for it to become law.
Ratified by Australia, the Arms Trade Treaty still needs 10 countries to sign up for it to become law. Photo: Yun Tae-hyun
Australia has ratified the global treaty it helped draft to stop the proliferation of weapons across the globe, but must encourage neighbouring countries to sign up, to guard against the Pacific being further racked by gun violence or descending into a weapons-running hub, human rights group say.
Australia ratified the Arms Trade Treaty in New York on Wednesday. The pact aims to regulate the trade of weapons and to set up a global register of arms deals between countries.
Under the terms of the treaty, weapons cannot be sent where they could be used to abuse human rights or violate international humanitarian law.
The treaty is the first global effort to regulate and monitor the $80 billion global trade in conventional weapons.
The treaty covers heavy weapons - such as battle tanks, combat aircraft, warships, attack helicopters and missiles - and also the trade in small arms and light weapons. There are an estimated 875 million light weapons across the world, which cause half a million deaths a year and 90 per cent of civilian casualties in war.
Forty countries have now ratified the treaty, with 50 needed for it to become international law. The extra 10 countries and more are expected to ratify in coming months.
Australia was instrumental in drawing up the treaty. Foreign Minister Julie Bishop made arms control the centrepiece of her presidency of the UN Security Council, saying the council had "taken too long" to stem the unrestricted flow of weapons across the world.
Australia was one of seven co-authors of the original General Assembly resolution calling for an arms agreement, and Australia's ambassador to the UN, Peter Woolcott, presided over the conference that drafted the treaty.
However, there are concerns the treaty will be ineffective unless the US, China and Russia, three of the world's largest weapons exporters, become party to it. The treaty has the support of the Obama administration, but there are doubts it would survive a ratification vote in the US Senate. China and Russia have expressed scepticism, and would almost certainly not become party to the treaty if the US did not.
The five largest buyers of weapons - India, Pakistan, China, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia - are outside the treaty.
From New York, the humanitarian advocacy co-ordinator with Oxfam Australia, Ben Murphy, said the arms treaty would establish new international standards for the trade in weapons, which would improve transparency and accountability, even for countries outside its scope.
But there are concerns for Australia's region.
"What we have seen, in places like the Solomon Islands and in Bougainville, is the influx of even a relatively small number of these weapons having a huge destabilising and devastating impact on these countries," Mr Murphy said.
"Because of the very porous borders between countries, the Pacific is a region that is vulnerable to smuggling. When we start seeing other forms of illegal trade through a region, it doesn't take long for arms to follow."
Lax legislation and enforcement has led to the Pacific being targeted by gun-runners before. In 2009, when a cargo plane full of North Korean weapons was seized at a Bangkok airport bound for Iran, the deal for the arms had been engineered in Vanuatu, through a shelf company based in New Zealand.
"Throughout the region, Pacific island countries are being confronted by serious criminal activity such as drugs and arms trafficking," Tuiloma Neroni Slade, secretary general of the Pacific Islands Forum, warned as long ago as 2010.
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Buyer's Remorse: Why Chinese Enthusiasm for the Olympics Is Sagging
Though China is one London's top performers, many back home are wondering if it's worth the price tag and the foreign criticism.
zchina olympic article2.jpg
China's Zhang Jike celebrates after winning the singles table tennis. (AP)
The Chinese currently stand second in the overall Olympic medals table--and first in gold medals--but you would never know it from what's going on in their media. Of course, there is celebration of the country's athletes. Yet the flawless performances of the Chinese divers and spectacular achievements of the Chinese male gymnasts are in danger of being drowned out by a torrent of commentary focused on what the games mean for China as a society and for its place in the world. Some of the commentary is lamenting, some angry, and still other searching.
Some Chinese are concerned that the cost of an Olympic gold is too great, both literally and figuratively. People have reportedly calculated the financial cost of swimmer Sun Yang's two years of gold medal-worthy training at approximately $1.57 million. Not a small sum in a country where per capita income still tops out at roughly $7,500. At the same time, the stories of Chinese athletes living away from their families for years--missing deaths, illnesses, and family celebrations--in state-run training centers also raise questions for some Chinese as to whether gold medal mania is a worthy substitute for the to and fro of daily life. Then, inevitably, there are those who are worried about the enormous pressure placed on state-supported Chinese athletes, such as the weight lifter Wu Jingbiao, the gold medal favorite in his event, who broke down in tears and apologized to his country after winning a silver medal.
Even more Chinese media attention, however, has been paid to what China's Olympic experience signals for the country's place in the world. As Caixin reports, many Chinese believe their athletes have been unfairly treated by the rest of the world simply because they are Chinese. There is anger over the silver-instead-of-gold finish by China's amazing gymnastics rings master Chen Yibing; fury over the disqualifications of Chinese cycling and badminton teams; and outrage over the accusations of doping by the gold medal-winning swimmer Ye Shiwen.
Some commentators argue that these cases are simply one more example of how the rest of the world is attempting to keep China from assuming its rightful place as a global power. In a Global Times article, for example, director of the China Institute of International Studies Qu Xing argues, "It's unavoidable that we will encounter jealousy and even unexpected obstructions during the process of rising, as is the case in other fields." Peking University professor Zhang Yiwu further suggests, "What we can do is try to be stronger to let others acknowledge and get used to our power.... It's very difficult to change the bias of others, while we can defend ourselves with facts."
Others take a more measured approach. Zhang Yun, in the People's Daily Overseas Edition, compares the Olympics to China's participation in the WTO and IMF, arguing, "As China develops, dissonance that grates on the ears will only increase. The key is still to hold one's ground, to withstand the test of bias, and to listen to accurate criticisms. This is an international initiation that must be experienced for China to move towards renewal. Going back to history, every developed country experienced a similar kind of initiation."
And a lengthy editorial in the China Youth Daily entitled, "It's very tiring to watch the Olympics with a victim mentality," argues that China's experience is really no different from that of any other country, pointing out that both the Koreans and Indonesians lost outstanding badminton teams for the same reason as the Chinese, and that even the very unfortunate doping accusations against Ye Shiwen have been heard many times by many athletes from many countries. That does not make it right, but it does make it unexceptional. Moreover, the gold medal-contending British cycling team was disqualified earlier in the London games for the exact same violation committed by the Chinese cyclists.
The China Youth Daily also offered a profound critique of those who see an anti-China hand behind every silver medal: "At the Beijing Olympics, what tested the Chinese people was how to be a host. After the Beijing Olympics, at the London Olympics, what tests the Chinese people is how to be an audience with a gentle attitude and healthy mind. Sports is not war, the Western world is not the enemy, patriotism does not cover up one's errors, and criticism is not treason."
The Olympics have encouraged wide-ranging discussion in China over the relationship between the Chinese state and society and over the country's relationship with the rest of the world. Neither issue will be resolved by the end of the games, but both are evidence of a Chinese citizenry deeply engaged in open discourse and debate within itself and with the rest of the world. This is an achievement everyone should celebrate.
This article originally appeared at, an Atlantic partner site.
Presented by
Elizabeth Economy is a senior fellow and Director for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and blogs for "Asia Unbound."
Why Principals Matter
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A History of Contraception
'A Music That Has No End'
What Fifty Shades Left Out
A straightforward guide to BDSM
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The Politics of Misperception
Ever wonder what our public discourse would be like if everyone agreed on the facts? You can keep wondering.
A lot of Americans don't know the precise details of how their country works. That's less a criticism than a fact -- people are busy, the way the government is run is complicated and not always transparent, and folks have plenty of other things to worry about, especially these days. And yet I'm always struck by how little the fact-based insider conversations about key budgetary matters seem to penetrate the national consciousness, allowing misperceptions to play a major role in shaping the national policy conversation. Three recent examples:
1. Almost no one knows this, but the budget deficit is going down, not up. Screen Shot 2013-02-27 at 5.54.35 PM.png
According to the Congressional Budget Office:
If current laws remain in place, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates, the federal budget deficit will total $845 billion in fiscal year 2013; this will be the first time since 2008 that the budget shortfall will be less than $1 trillion. At 5.3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), that deficit will be well below the peak of 10.1 percent in 2009 but still larger than in all but one year between 1947 and 2008 (see Figure 1-1). As a result, debt held by the public is estimated to increase to 76 percent of GDP by the end of 2013, the largest ratio since 1950.
And yet, reported Bloomberg's Julie Hirschfeld Davis in February:
The size and trajectory of the U.S. deficit is poorly understood by most Americans, with 62 percent saying it's getting bigger, 28 percent saying it's staying about the same this year, and just 6 percent saying it's shrinking. The Congressional Budget Office reported Feb. 6 that the federal budget deficit is getting smaller, falling to $845 billion this year -- the first time in five years that the gap between taxes and spending will be less than $1 trillion.
2. People think balancing the budget will lead to job growth. In fact, in the absence of strong economic growth or other sources of increased revenue, economists believe that dramatically cutting the federal budget enough to balance it would lead to job cuts and economic contraction in the short term. This is what we're seeing already with the much smaller cut of the sequester -- job cuts, pay cuts, furloughs, and so on. It's all expected to be a minor drag on the economy, clipping the rate of growth of a recovery that's just starting to heat up. But according to Politico, internal Republican polling shows that people believe cutting even more jobs by cutting the federal government by another order of magnitude will lead to more jobs, rather than more unemployment:
The poll showed that 45 percent of Democratic voters think "balancing ... the federal budget would significantly increase economic growth and create millions of American jobs." A sky-high 61 percent of independents and 76 percent of Republicans agree....
Seventy percent of voters in districts Republicans are targeting, and 67 percent of swing district voters support balancing the budget by reforming entitlements and cutting spending.
3. People think the country is much less economically unequal than it is. This extraordinary video tells the tale of how Americans think wealth is distributed in the United States, showing that "the ideal [wealth distribution] is as far removed from our perception of reality as the actual distribution is from what we think exists in this country."
It's been viewed nearly 5 million times, and if you haven't watched it already, you should.
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• Tuesday, March 03, 2015
The 'nowhere people' of the enclaves
Ahmad Ibrahim
Compiled by: Amiya Halder
Compiled by: Amiya Halder
THERE is a rather curious place inside Rangpur which goes by the name of Dahala Khagrabari #51. Upon close inspection the landscape provides no clues as to what exactly is it about the area that garners such curiosity and interest among locals and visitors alike. The land is a small 7000 m2 of farm land that belongs to a farmer who lives in the village called Upanchowki Bhajni, which encompasses the entire area of the land. The uniqueness of this land is that it is legally claimed by the district of Koch Bihar of West Bengal, in India. India claims this land as one of its many enclaves that exist inside Bangladesh. Dahala Khagrabari #51 also has the (mis)fortune of being the only third-order enclave in the world. That means that it is a piece of India within Bangladesh, within India within Bangladesh.
There might be a few raised eyebrows at the existence of such a claim on a small area of land, but it is nothing too surprising along the Indo-Bangladesh border. Near the border, there exist about 162 enclaves inside both India and Bangladesh (111 inside India and 52 in Bangladesh) that are claimed by the other country. The enclaves originated through a disputed and rather confusing deal between the Kingdom of Koch Bihar and the Mughal Empire in 1713. Famous legends say that these lands (or chitmahals, as they are called in Bangla) were used as bargaining chips to cover debts when the Raja of Koch Bihar played chess with the Maharaja of Rangpur. Tall tales aside, what seemed then as an irrelevant treaty over farm land, has now turned into prisons for almost 100,000 people living inside these enclaves.
The dispute over the enclaves stretched into colonial India, while the British ruled and the kings were denigrated to titular positions. However, they retained their claims and the locals continued in the same vein. The dispute became fiercer right after Partition, as India and Pakistan both laid claims on the enclaves on either sides of the border. A 'de-enclaving' agreement was reached in 1958, but the issue became a Supreme Court case in India and was never revived again. The War of Liberation in 1971 brought with it significant developments to this issue as the Indian forces aided Bangladeshi freedom fighters in their war against Pakistan. At this point, due to the poor demarcation lines, BSF forces took over a small strip of land near the village of Padua, close to the border. Bangladesh claimed it as its land while India refused to budge. The Indira-Mujib agreement on the border issue was signed in 1974, and while Bangladesh quickly ratified the bill and handed over Berubari to India, India was not able to hand over the Teen Bigha corridor to Bangladesh to connect Dahagram-Angarpota enclaves, due to lack of constitutional amendment and litigation by some aggrieved Indian nationals living along the border.
Talks were revived yet again in 2001 as conflict on the border reached tipping point as sixteen BSF troops and 3 BDR troops died in conflict. There was very little headway made until 2011, when India and Bangladesh signed an agreement to transfer enclaves to each other, giving the people of the enclaves the right to choose or repatriate to the country that claimed the enclave. The bill, though, is yet to be passed. It requires a constitutional amendment which was opposed by the Trinamool Congress and the BJP when Congress footed it. India's hue and cry stems from the fact that in this deal, India stands to lose a net worth of 40-square-kilometer of land.
The people of the enclaves live in an abysmal state of lawlessness. There is no electricity, no proper hospitals, no social institutions to provide them with anything. Residents of an enclave cannot cross the perimeter without infringing illegally into foreign. Since they do not have passports, they cannot ask for a visa from the host country. And to get a passport would mean crossing illegally, putting their lives at stake. The Teen Bigha corridor was leased to Bangladesh indefinitely to allow passage of the people of the enclave into the mainland but the situation is far from solved. In many areas, the small strips of enclaves have practically become prisons for its inhabitants, who grow up and die in that small perimeter.
The pertinent question is this: is it worth squabbling over a few odd acres of land while people's lives are at stake? The same people who have said, openly, that they care not a single jot about which side of the border they belong to; that they only wish to have a life where they are free to move without the fear of being shot by border security. The fact that this has carried on for as long as it has is a gross violation of human rights. At the same time, the residents of these enclaves are falling prey to fraudulent schemes by financial institutions that promise to store and pay interest on their money but end up stealing from them. The residents cannot complain to law enforcement authorities because crossing the border to complain will be seen as an even bigger crime.
The absurdity of the situation beggars belief and there seems to be no signs of this letting up. During her recent trip to Bangladesh, Sushma Swaraj said that the Modi-government is eager to come to a quick solution about this issue. How much of that is true remains to be seen. It was the BJP that opposed the passing of the bill by Congress, claiming that it was tantamount to sympathising with illegal Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh, in their bid to stoke the communal flames. In the end, the issue comes down to simple real estate for India, who have shown time and again their apathy towards the residents of the enclaves. Is the land worth wasting 100,000 people's lives? On current evidence, it would seem so.
The writer is Editorial Assistant, The Daily Star.
Published: 12:00 am Friday, July 04, 2014
TAGS: Bangladesh India Indo-Bangla Relations Sushma Swaraj
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March 02, 2015
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Time is Brain: Treating Stroke as an Emergency
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"Time is Brain": Treating Stroke as an Emergency
Dr. Campbell is Assistant Professor of Medicine, Department of Neurology, University of Texas Medical School at Houston.
If oxygen-rich blood is blocked from reaching the brain, brain nerve cells will die, producing damage and disability we call "stroke." Not too long ago, the treatment for most types of stroke was passive — wait for it to be over and then manage the consequences. With this approach, most stroke victims simply died. Those who survived faced the challenge of years of rehabilitation and, often, permanent brain damage or other disability. Today, however, there are several new treatments available that help to restore blood flow to the brain and, as a result, minimize damage.
What is a Stroke?
A stroke happens when blood flow to the brain is blocked by a blood clot in a brain artery or because a brain blood vessel has burst. Obstruction is the more common cause. Stroke symptoms include headache, mental confusion, inability to speak, loss of consciousness and paralysis.
When a stroke occurs, part or all of the brain is deprived of oxygen. Without oxygen, affected nerve cells in the brain stop functioning and begin to die within minutes. This is a disaster for the body because dead brain cells cannot be replaced. Because the brain controls the rest of the body, the death of certain brain cells often means a loss of functioning elsewhere.
Stroke affects 700,000 people annually in the US. It is the third leading cause of death and the number one cause of long-term adult disability.
A New Treatment and Timetable
In 1996, stroke treatment changed dramatically when the FDA approved the use of a new drug called tissue plasminogen activator, or tPA, to treat stroke. tPA immediately dissolves the blood clots that cause many strokes, drasically reducing the amount of damage strokes produce. Since then, several other drugs have been developed that are similar to tPA. These include r-tPA, streptokinase, urokinase and prourokinase. Together they are known as thrombolytic drugs from the Ancient Greek word, thrombolysis, meaning "clot-dissolving."
The faster stroke victims are treated, the less damage to the body and, especially, to the brain.
Thrombolytics, however, only work if delivered directly into the bloodstream, either through a vein or an artery (intra-arterial). Both are complicated processes, especially intra-arterial treatment, which involves assembling a medical team and performing an elaborate test called cerebral angiography. Most importantly, these drugs must be administered within a few hours of the stroke before the oxygen-deprived nerve cells suffer permanent damage. Emergency rooms and emergency medical services have to work quickly because "time is brain." In other words, the faster stroke victims are treated, the less damage to the body and, especially, to the brain.
If a loved one or friend suffers a stroke, you need to make sure that he or she gets to the hospital as soon as possible. The time window for getting the best results from thrombolytic drugs is three hours from the first signs of stroke.
Treating Stroke with tPA
The FDA's approval of tPA in June 1996 was a major advance in stroke management.(1) tPA works by traveling through the bloodstream to the clot or other blockage; it then dissolves the material causing the obstruction and allows blood flow to resume. The result is that far less brain tissue is deprived of oxygen and victims suffer less damage. But tPA and other thrombolytics can cause increased bleeding. This is the reason that they are never used to treat strokes that result from burst blood vessels.
Studies demonstrated that patients given intravenous tPA within three hours of suffering a stroke were far better off three months afterward. Later studies showed that while 10-20% of all stroke victims could benefit from tPA, only 1-2% are actually getting it, or getting it in time.(2)(4)
Today, the medical community has been gradually adjusting to view stroke as a true emergency. As in any other profession, it has proven to be a difficult and frustrating task to change long-standing beliefs and attitudes. Extensive efforts are needed to educate medical professionals, from physicians to EMS personnel, as well as the general public, about stroke awareness.(5)
Part of the difficulty is that in order to provide state-of-the-art stroke treatment, hospital emergency rooms and stroke treatment centers need to build a multidisciplinary support network including emergency medicine, primary care, neurology and radiology. This requires a great deal of time, money and effort.(3)(6)(7)(8)
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On Isis and Osiris
There are some who give the name Typhon to the earth's shadow, into which they believe the moon slips when it suffers eclipse. Hence it is not unreasonable to say that the statement of each person individually is not right, but that the statement of all collectively is right; for it is not drought nor wind nor sea nor darkness, but everything harmful and destructive that Nature contains, which is to be set down as a part of Typhon. The origins of the universe are not to be placed in inanimate bodies, according to the doctrine of Democritus and Epicurus, nor yet is the Artificer of undifferentiated matter, according to the Stoic doctrine, one Reason, and one Providence which gains the upper hand and prevails over all things. The fact is that it is impossible for anything bad whatsoever to be engendered where God is the Author of all, or anything good where God is the Author of nothing; for the concord of the universe, like that of a lyre or bow, according to Heraclitus, is resilient if disturbed; and acco rding to Euripides,
The good and bad cannot be kept apart,
But there is some commingling, which is well.
Wherefore this very ancient opinion comes down from writers on religion and from lawgivers to poets and philosophers; it can be traced to no source, but it carried a strong and almost indelible conviction, and is in circulation in many places among barbarians and Greeks alike, not only in story and tradition but also in rites and sacrifices, to the effect that the universe is not of itself suspended aloft without sense or reason or guidance, nor is there one Reason which rules and guides it by rudders, as it were, or by controlling reins, but, inasmuch as Nature brings, in this life of ours, many experiences in which both evil and good are commingled, or better, to put it very simply, Nature brings nothing which is not combined with something else, we may assert that it is not one keeper of two great vases who, after the manner of a barmaid, deals out to us our failures and successes in mixture, but it has come about, as the result of two which guides us along a straight course to the right, while the other turns us aside and backward, that our life is complex, and so also is the universe; and if this is not true of the whole of it, yet it is true that this terrestrial universe, including its moon as well, is irregular and variable and subject to all manner of changes. For it is the law of Nature that nothing comes into being without a cause, and if the good cannot provide a cause for evil, then it follows that evil, just as she contains the source and origin of good.
The great majority and the wisest of men hold this opinion: they believe that there are two gods, rivals as it were, the one the Artificer of good and the other of evil. There are also those who call the better one a god and the other a demon, as, for example, Zoroaster the Magus, who, they record, lived five thousand years before the time of the Trojan War. He called the one Ahura Mazda and the other Ahriman; and he further declared that among all the things perceptible to the senses, Ahura Mazda may best be compared to light, and Ahriman, conversely, to darkness and ignorance, and midway between the two is Mithras; for this reason the Persians give to Mithras the name of "Mediator". Zoroaster has also taught that men should make votive offerings and thank-offerings to Ahura Mazda, and averting and mourning offerings to Ahriman. They pound up in mortar a certain plant called Haoma, at the same time invoking Hades and Darkness; then they mix it with blood of a wolf that has been sacrificed, and carry it out and cast it into a place where the sun never shines. In fact, they believe that some of the plants belong to the good god and others to the evil demon; so also of the animals they think that dogs, fowls, and hedgehogs, for example, belong to the good god, but that water-rats belong to the evil one; therefore the man who has killed the most of these they hold to be fortunate.
However, they also tell many fabulous stories about their gods, such, for example, as the following: Ahura Mazda, born from the purest light, and Ahriman, born from the darkness, are constantly at war with each other; and Ahura Mazda created six gods, the first of Good Thought, the second of Truth, the third of Order, and, of the rest, one of Wisdom, one of Wealth, and one the Artificer of Pleasure in what is Honourable. But Ahriman created rivals, as it were, equal to these in number. Then Ahura Mazda enlarged himself to thrice his former size, and removed himself as far distant from the Sun as the Sun is distant from the Earth, and adorned the heavens with stars. One star he set there before all others as a guardian and watchman, the Dog-star. Twenty-four other gods he created and placed in an egg. But those created by Ahriman, who were equal in number to the others, pierced through the egg and made their way inside; hence evils are now combined with good. But a destined time shall come when it is d ecreed that Ahriman, engaged in bringing on pestilence and famine, shall by these be utterly annihilated and shall disappear; and then shall the earth become a level plain, and there shall be one manner of life and one form of government for a blessed people shall all speak one tongue. Theopompus says that, according to the Magi, one god is to overpower, and the other to be overpowered, each in turn for the space of three thousand years, and afterward for another three thousand years they shall fight and war, and the one shall undo the works of the other, and finally Hades shall pass away; then shall the people be happy, and neither shall they need to have food nor shall they cast any shadow. And the god, who has contrived to bring about all these things, shall then have quiet and shall repose for a time, no long time indeed, but for the god as much as would be a moderate time for a man to sleep.
Such then, is the character of the mythology of the Magi. The Chaldeans declare that of the planets, which they call tutelary gods, two are beneficent, two maleficent, and the other three are median and partake of both qualities. The beliefs of the Greeks are well known to all; they make the good part belong to Olympian Zeus and the abominated part to Hades, and they rehearse a legend that Concord is sprung from Aphrodite and Ares, the one of whom is harsh and contentious, and the other mild and tutelary. | <urn:uuid:e58a6c04-04c0-48e9-acd0-e280f4cfcea7> | 2 | 2.359375 | 0.081559 | en | 0.967904 | http://www.thedyinggod.com/chaldeanmagi/Plutarch |
Monday, 02 March 2015
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Facial analysis method heralds era of ultra-realistic animations
A new method of analysing faces on 3D video could help the film industry create more realistic animations without actors having to wear distracting markers.
Engineers at Bath University have developed a way of computer-modelling facial expressions — initially for psychology experiments — that could lead to identity-recognition systems or make it easier to animate people in films and computer games.
The ’dynamic facial capture’ technique uses computer algorithms to track individual pixels in each frame of video footage captured with a 3D depth camera by treating them as 2D images.
This allows the computer to build a model of the person’s moving face without the use of physical or painted markers, which are typically used in current facial-capture techniques in the film and computer game industries.
Dr Darren Cosker, who is leading the research funded by a Royal Academy of Engineering (RAE) Fellowship, said that with sufficiently advanced cameras, the model should be able to track individual skin pores on a person’s face.
‘The hardest challenge in computer graphics is creating characters that are indistinguishable from humans,’ said Cosker, speaking at the annual RAE Engineering Research Forum last week.
‘There are three aspects to this problem. You want to be able to create a character that looks like a photograph. As soon as that character’s face starts to move, you want the dynamics of the face to be right, which is a lot harder.
‘And the third problem is we want the perception of the face to be right, so when a character is smiling, we want to feel that is a genuine smile. [Currently] with human characters that illusion of realism starts to break down.’
Given that the program is able to track very subtle facial movements, the researchers have also used it to develop a way to identify individuals based on their expressions and tell if their expressions are genuine, which could be used by security systems.
The computer model treats the 3D image of the face as a 2D one by projecting it onto a cylinder and then ‘unwrapping’ it, in a similar way to how world maps are drawn.
Different pixels correspond to vertices on a triangular mesh placed across the face in each frame. Following the pixels allows the computer to model how the mesh moves and identify facial expressions based on a method used by psychologists called the Facial Action Coding System (FACS).
Engineers at Disney Research in Zurich have developed a similar system using high-resolution cameras that produce more detail with very large amounts of data. Cosker hopes that when his system is scaled up to use better cameras, the data will be more manageable.
Other commercial systems that don’t require markers or painted patterns do exist but currently don’t provide as much realism because an animator is still required to fill in much of the detail.
Oliver James, chief scientist at visual effects company Double Negative, said better facial-capture techniques would give animators a better set of tools to use but wouldn’t replace them.
‘Where we use motion capture it’s the first part of the animation,’ he said. ‘Shots that would have taken a week can now take half a day. It can get animators closer to the final result and then let them spend their effort on making it that bit more special.’
A major problem in facial capture still to be solved is the use of cameras outside of a controlled studio environment, where lighting can change from shot to shot. Cosker said he thought new cameras were needed to address this issue.
‘I think we rely too much sometimes on just trying to make an algorithm to do something but a lot of the time the hardware gets good enough. I have an idea that involves building a special camera which is lots of cameras put together.’
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Optic nerves regrowth raises hope for blind
Scientists have found a way to regrow damaged optic nerves, raising hopes for people who have been left blind or partially sighted by injuries to the cells.
The technique, developed by a team under Zhigang He at Children's hospital in Boston, prompts severed nerves to repair themselves within weeks. The procedure is being tested on spinal cord injuries.
The work, published in the journal Science, represents a step towards new therapies. Unlike nerves in limbs, nerves in the brain and spinal cord are blocked from regrowing by chemicals in the body, preventing them rewiring wrong.
Scientists showed it was possible to regenerate damaged optical nerves in mice by knocking out proteins that prevent nerve growth. Two weeks after their optic nerves were damaged half the nerves survived in mice given the treatment, against 20% in those which had not; and 10% of the treated mice showed significant regrowth.
The technique knocks out two genes, called PTEN and TSC1, which give rise to proteins that block nerve growth. In the future scientists believe it will be possible to develop drugs that mimic the effect.
In the same journal a second team from the US biotech company Genentech reports similar experiments that prompted the regrowth of nerve cells in petri dishes. Both studies looked at nerve fibres called axons, which carry electrical signals around the body.
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June 2, 2010
Even though our animal companions are not at risk from heart attacks like people, heart disease, heart weakness or enlargement, or congestive heart failure and other circulatory problems are common in aging cats and dogs and can gradually worsen over time.
The heart is actually a muscle, which is made up of four chambers and a series of valves. The role of the heart muscle is to relax and contract, and pump blood through the circulatory system to the lungs (via arteries) throughout the body and back through the heart again, via the veins. Certain breeds are more predisposed to heart disease than others, and the problem occurs when certain parts of the heart stop functioning correctly. The rest of the organ then tries to compensate for this improper function.
The general symptoms of heart disease vary from one individual dog to the next but can include fatigue or weakness, increased panting, reduced stamina or willingness to exercise, lethargy and increased time spent sleeping during the day. Reduced appetite and weight loss as well as a gray tinge to the gums and a distended abdomen are also warning signs that there is a problem with the heart.
A physical exam or diagnostics such as x-ray, ultrasound or more commonly and echocardiogram (ECG) may be used to make a diagnosis of heart disease and to determine exactly what is affecting the heart and circulatory system.
There are a number of things that animal guardians can do as part of a holistic approach, to help to support the long-term heart health of their pets. An appropriate exercise regime is one of the most important factors to address. Lean, active animals are at a generally reduced risk of heart disease than those who are inactive and obese.
The heart muscle can atrophy without adequate exercise every day. If your pet is already overweight or not sufficiently active, exercise should be built up very gradually over a period of several months, to avoid injury from over-exertion before an adequate level of fitness has been attained.
Begin with short (10 minutes or so) walks once or twice a day and slowly increase the distance you cover as well as the speed and terrain – steeper inclines can be introduced to increase the intensity of each session. Brisk walking or jogging of at least twenty minutes’ duration, twice every day is a good maintenance level of exercise to work towards. Many dogs need much more of a workout than this to maintain peak physiological health; this depends on your dog’s age, breed and other factors. Discuss an appropriate regime with your vet.
A healthy, well-balanced, varied diet is an important cornerstone to total health. Pets don’t suffer with problems of high (bad) cholesterol like people do, and a diet high in naturally high levels of (preservative-free) animal fat is actually ‘biologically appropriate and not as a general rule problematic for pets. Supplementing the diet with fish oils, which supply essential fatty acids, can help to prevent or reduce the severity of heart disease in pets as well as people.
The amino acid Taurine is vital for heart health. Without it, cats can develop heart disease. Taurine is an essential amino acid for cats (meaning it must be supplied via the diet) but dogs can make their own Taurine. However Taurine supplementation is often recommended by holistic vets for dogs predisposed to or suffering from, heart disease. Taurine is naturally present in meat and fish, especially organs.
Zinc, (found in naturally high levels in beef, turkey and lamb) and magnesium (found in raw bones as well as spinach, millet and pumpkin seeds) are also essential to heart health. Chromium (found in yeast) and selenium (found in oats, turkey and Brazil nuts) are also necessary for a healthy heart.
Sodium is generally restricted in the diets of pets who are suffering from heart disease, but it is a misconception that animals (or people) with this condition should goo 100% sodium-free, because sodium is a mineral that’s essential to life. However a low-sodium diet can help to reduce water retention which is problematic in congestive heart failure, where fluid buildup occurs around the lungs and the chambers of the heart become enlarged.
The antioxidant vitamins A, C and especially E are helpful for over all health and the prevention of heart disease and Co-Q10 is also widely used for the support of heart function and may help to prevent various types of heart disease including cardiomyopathy, enlarged heart and irregular or rapid heart-beat.
Homeopathy for the Heart
Heart disease should never be treated by homeopathy alone but it can be a useful adjunct to other approaches.Calcarea Fluorica, a cell salt, is indicated by homeopaths for weakness of the heart. Calc fluopr helps to restore elasticity to the veins and muscles
Hawthorn is the first herb of choice for most cases of heart disease. Hawthorn tincture is safe in large doses and can be used daily. It helps to strengthen the heart muscle and in some cases can actually repair damage to the heart.
Cayenne Pepper is also recommended for heart health, as is ginko, ginger, gotu kola which all help to improve circulation as well as Bilberry which may help to strengthen the capillaries and the Chinese herb fo-ti, which can increase blood flow to the heart and dilates blood vessels. | <urn:uuid:c6c91acf-1443-427d-a8ca-1f15a6d2d3ce> | 3 | 3 | 0.026903 | en | 0.95321 | http://www.thehonestkitchen.com/articles/promoting-heart-health/ |
Thursday, 19 August 2010
How Bad Will the Economy Get?
Written by Charles Scaliger
“Putting the nation on a sustainable fiscal course will require policymakers to restrain the growth of spending substantially, raise revenues significantly above their average percentage of GDP of the past 40 years, or a combination of both,” the CBO wrote. Translation: the federal government will either have to cut expenditures or raise taxes to cover ballooning deficits. Any guesses as to which option federal lawmakers are likely to prefer?
Since the onset of the Great Recession, governments have chosen two approaches to deal with unsustainable levels of public debt: so-called “austerity measures” and borrowing and spending more money in hopes of papering over fiscal woes. A number of European countries, including Greece, Ireland, and Spain, have chosen the former course, slashing social programs and other high-ticket items, and laying off government workers. The United States — so far — has chosen the latter, laying out trillions of new dollars in various attempts to stimulate anemic borrowing and spending.
Both Republican President George W. Bush and Democratic President Barack Obama have shown no inclination to rein in federal spending; both passed gargantuan spending bills in the name of fiscal stimulus and both doled out untold billons in bailout monies. The result, as should surprise no one who has ever owned a piggy bank, has been: more debt, no jobs creation, and minimal economic growth. There is, in other words, no sign that we are anywhere close to returning to the go-go '80s and '90s, and every likelihood that our country, and much of the rest of the developed world, is in the grip of a generational economic downturn.
Some observers have a bleaker outlook than the CBO. The “worst case scenario,” according to Egon von Greyerz of Matterhorn Asset Management in Zurich, writing on August 16, is that the ongoing correction is actually in its infancy, and the entire unwinding of generations of accumulated funny money and excess credit may take a century or more to accomplish. Greyerz’ comments are worth reproducing in some detail:
The hyperinflationary depression that many western countries, including the US and the UK, will experience is likely to mark the end of an era that has lasted over 200 years since the industrial revolution. A major part of the growth in the last 100 years and especially in the last 40 years has been built on an unsustainable build-up of debt levels. These debt levels will continue to swell for another few years until the coming hyperinflation in the West leads to a destruction of real asset values and a debt implosion….
Until the early 1970s the growth in credit to GDP had been going up gradually since the creation of the Fed in 1913. But from 1971 when Nixon abolished gold backing of the dollar, virtually all of the growth in the Western world has come from the massive increase in credit rather than from real growth of the economy. The US consumer price index was stable for 200 years until the early 1900s. From 1971 to 2010 CPI went up by almost 500%. The reason for this is uncontrolled credit creation and money printing. Total US debt went from $9 trillion in 1971 to $59 trillion today and this excludes unfunded liabilities of anywhere from $70 to $110 trillion. US nominal GDP went from $1.1 trillion to $14.5 trillion between 1971 and 2010. So it has taken an increase in borrowings of $50 trillion to produce an increase in annual GDP of $13 trillion over a 40 year period. Without this massive increase in debt, the US would probably have had negative growth for most of the last 39 years.
The coming hyperinflationary depression and the credit and asset implosion that is likely to follow will most probably lead to the end of a 200 year era of growth for the Western world. If only the excesses from the 1970s were corrected we might have a circa 20 year decline. But more likely we will correct the era all the way back from the industrial revolution in the 18th century and this could take 100 years or more.
Scary stuff indeed, but who’s right? Are we at the cusp of a new era betokening nothing less than an economic Götterdämmerung for the West, or will the Great Recession eventually, if slowly, give way to another cycle of boom and prosperity? It’s impossible to tell, but the long range forecast is likely to resemble Mr. Greyerz’ gloomy prognosis more than the CBO’s relatively benign assessment if our government continues to try to borrow and spend its way out of crisis.
There are historical precedents for the “generations to recover” scenario. France spent its way into bankruptcy in the 17th century and didn’t escape the cycle of national insolvency and civil unrest until late in the 19th. Turkey under the Ottomans was bankrupt and impotent by the mid-19th century (the “sick man of Europe,” Turkey was derisively styled), finally had her impotent empire dismembered after World War I, and did not recover into the relatively robust prosperity it enjoys today until a couple of decades ago. Argentina, one of the world’s largest economies a century ago, attracted — like the U.S. — a huge influx of immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, only to be ruined by Juan Peron and a succession of military juntas. To this day, Argentina remains an economic basket case. As for great economies that went into decline and never recovered, the Western Roman Empire and Venice are instructive examples.
There is thus no reason to expect that America is immune to the ravages of such trans-generational declines. But our real problem now is not economic but political; we still have the resources to cancel our debts and recover economically, but our current crop of political leaders obviously lacks the political will to do what must be done. Unless we elect leaders determined to stop repeating the mistakes of the past, we will likely experience what the French, Turks, and many other once-proud nations endured before us.
Photo: Two unemployed street vendors try to earn a living selling apples on the streets in New York City on Nov. 30, 1930 during the first Depression: AP Images | <urn:uuid:5d8adbbd-89e9-498f-b132-78e73759e5d7> | 2 | 1.9375 | 0.059747 | en | 0.951869 | http://www.thenewamerican.com/economy/economics/item/4492-how-bad-will-the-economy-get |
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Management 'scared' by open source
Suits petrified of covert open-source developers
EclipseCon Fear is stalking the corridors of corporate power, as executives sweat over the legal exposure caused by developers using open source software.
And the suits are resorting to play-it-safe legal advice and draconian management techniques in a vain attempt to stop open source crossing their frontier. Tactics include blocking popular sites like SourceForge and banning use of USB drives.
And, such is the hysteria, some business mergers have nearly come undone over the acquirees' use of open source.
In all, developers attending this week's EclipseCon must have had their darkest fears - that senior management is out of touch with the development shop floor - confirmed during a lively panel discussion on intellectual property issues and the risks of blending commercial and open source software.
Attending the panel were IBM, BEA Systems, OpenLogic, Black Duck, and Palamida. Yes, you could call this a case of predictable vendor scaremongering to drum up new business, but don't forget some well known open source cases are already on record - Tivo, Linksys/Cisco, and Progress Software versus MySQL, anyone?
What's behind such shenanigans?
According to Palamida co-founder Jeff Luszcz a disconnect exists between managers who set corporate open source policies and developers supposed to follow them, but who end up covering their tracks to make it seem like they are not using open source. Developers, though, end up using open source because of its ubiquity and not using it "puts them at a competitive disadvantage because their competitors are".
An example of the disconnect? OpenLogic director of community and partner programs Stormy Peters, who outlined the measures taken by one company, said: "We had a customer with a policy of no open source. They ended up blocking, but people started downloading at home on thumb drives. The company then started saying 'no thumb drives'. You can't keep this up!"
Another problem: the increasingly distributed nature of development makes bans impossible, as offshore teams and outsourcing partners employ open source.
Companies running open source also often make the mistake of thinking they are running a relatively benign, commercial-friendly license like BSD when they are actually using GPL, which has limitations on modification and distribution of code.
And that's a problem because 10 per cent of open source code leaks out of development and into final product, meaning companies really are potentially at risk from rightfully aggrieved software authors. In at least one case, an ISV paid a developer after its product shipped because it contained their GPL'd code.
With GPL 3.0 coming, things ain't going to get any easier - especially for Software as a Service (SaaS). Sit up and pay attention Silicon Valley.
SaaS providers should ensure any modified GPL'd software they use is not deliberately or inadvertently downloaded to the user as this could be considered distribution. "No one can make that call until there has been a court case. [Use] is at your own risk. I'd say be very sure you are not distributing that software," Peters said.
What's creating the confusion? Everyone's favorite: license proliferation. Yes, there might be 58 OSI-approved licenses, but there are also thousands of vanity licenses that vary by only tiny degrees - an interesting fact, given Eclipse created its own (OSI-approved) license that happens to be incompatible with the GPL.
Black Duck president and CEO Doug Levin blamed proliferation and general lack of knowledge among the very legal teams management relies on for creating extreme lock down policies. "That stems from attorneys not being fully educated about open source software. This has to change as more information becomes available." Peters agreed: "Open source has a lot of FUD associated with should be a case of weighing up the risks and the reward."
Among the panel's recommendations: educating managers about open source and licenses, regularly reviewing processes, and monitoring donations to the community. ®
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Related topics
JavaScript is everywhere. So are we all OK with that?
Beaten, slightly battered, but now shining on the web. What’s not to like?
Comment The JavaScript programming language has been in the wars over the years.
Oft derided for security concerns, its ‘amateur’ web designer following and for ‘borrowing’ its name from the beefier brew that is Java itself, it has been a rough 19 years or so.
Despite all this, JavaScript is still on every 'predictions for 2014 in tech' alert (yes, still they come!) currently doing the rounds. Are they trying to tell us that a coming of age is nigh?
We could suggest that things have changed due to the kinship this interpreted programming language shares with the pages of the web. This relationship is (arguably) a sort of self-perpetuating positive publicity vehicle.
JavaScript has also done well in the server room now that we have Node.js (basically server-side JavaScript) championing its ability to handle event-based server execution procedures, for all the goodness they bring.
Then there is the mobile HTML5 factor.
Where Objective-C has worked for Apple’s reasonably successful iOS devices, we also see Java for the Android army and Microsoft obviously setting a place for C# at its dinner table.
But all these mobile devices are going cloud-centric with applications that look and feel like web apps. All these devices are moving towards apps that either exist online-only, or act as muted versions of their connected cousins if you happen to live in a lead-lined bunker with no WiFi.
If a mobile developer can use HTML5 and JavaScript to build a potentially “ubiquitous” app capable of running everywhere, then why wouldn’t they?
Actually it’s not always that simple and there are reasons why HTML5 + JavaScript theory can fall at the last post (or in the last 10 per cent of a project i.e. same thing). This is mainly due to ground level engineering differences when porting from one platform to another, but that’s another API story for another day.
But for the most part, like we said, JavaScript is everywhere. So are we all OK with that?
The Register has already reported on the fact that Google positions Dart as its JavaScript competitor. The latest iteration of Dart claims to be able to output code that runs “as fast or faster” than the equivalent routines written in JavaScript. The native Dart virtual machine outstrips (in speed terms) even more so.
And now?
So it’s not all birthday cake and fizzy pop every time JavaScript crops up then? Not as far as Google is concerned anyway, especially given the fact that none of the top-five browsers (yes let’s include Opera) ships with Dart.
So what next for JavaScript?
JavaScript performance is thought to be improving and the mainstream analyst community has said that this will begin to push HTML5 and the browser as a mainstream enterprise application development environment - the two “mainstreams” there are not intentional.
“If I was just getting started in programming, and I didn't know what language to pick, I would pick JavaScript,"said Paco Hope, principal consultant at software security firm Cigital. "It can work on server side, client side, browser, mobile, Flash (ActionScript is just JavaScript repurposed).”
Mostly everyone loves (or at least likes) JavaScript and it has even been referred to as “the assembly language for the web” in some circles.
Program director for software development research at IDC Al Hilwa argues that it’s hard to disentangle a runtime from the platform it runs in - and JavaScript suffers under the wider reputation of the web platform itself, where broad accessibility and usage mean the longest list of security issues.
“The language itself is elegant, expressive and capable. In fact, too expressive in some ways, with features like closures that make it less readable and more difficult to debug. It also means that like many of the technologies on the web it is easy to learn but hard to master. This uneven learning curve is its curse and why many have continued to propose different languages,” said IDC’s Hilwa.
So OK it’s not all rosy everywhere, but it’s a light shade of positive pink for the most part. ®
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Amazon Simple Queue Service announced
News: Amazon Simple Queue Service announced
1. Amazon Simple Queue Service announced (12 messages)
Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) offers a reliable, highly scalable hosted queue for storing messages as they travel between computers. By using Amazon SQS, developers can move data between distributed application components performing different tasks, without losing messages or requiring each component to be always available. The following operations are provided:
• CreateQueue: Create queues for your own use, or to share with others.
• ListQueues: List your existing queues.
• DeleteQueue: Delete one of your queues.
• SendMessage: Add any data entries to a specified queue.
• ReceiveMessage: Return one or more messages from a specified queue, which are returned in roughly the same order it was added to the queue.
• DeleteMessage: Remove a message from a specified queue.
• PeekMessage: Return a specific entry from the queue without locking it.
• SetVisibilityTimeout: Control the amount of time after a message has been read that is locked from being read again.
• AddGrant: Allow other users to send messages to or receive messages from your queue.
The pricing is simple: $0.10 per 1,000 messages sent ($0.0001 per message sent), and $0.20 per GB of data transferred. The code looks quite straightforward. From the Enqueue sample, here's the actual sending code (after some setup that includes authentication data):// Authenticating the Request SignRequestHandlerHMAC.setWSSecurityInfo(AWSAccessKeyId, SecretAccessKey); // Create a QueueService object, a Queue QueueService service = getQueueService( url ); // Create the message queue object MessageQueue msgQueue = getMessageQueue( service, queueName ); String msgId = msgQueue.sendMessage( message );What do you think of the product and its implementation?
Threaded Messages (12)
2. Very cool[ Go to top ]
I applaud them. This is another long-term bet on their part to provide basic infrastructure for internet-based distributed applications. You'd have to send a LOT of messages to get anywhere near the cost of a WebSphere MQ license! :-)
3. Re: Very cool[ Go to top ]
This service is available since a year or more. Have there been any significant improvements since it was first announced?
4. Confused[ Go to top ]
What would prompt any money making real-world business to use this? This may be attractive to freelance developers trying to build the next bittorrent/search-engine, but it would be tough to make money from. Bad from a shareholder perspective.
5. Re: Confused[ Go to top ]
It's a very lightweight way to set up reliable messaging between two different businesses. I can see the OSS frameworks like Django/Rails using this as one possible lightweight messaging impl.
6. Re: Confused[ Go to top ]
Simple, it doesn't cost them much if anything to provide the service. Amazon is basically exposing the services it already uses in house out to the public. It already has a customer service arm set up to handle its file storage service, as well as to support developers who want to interact with Amazons store APIs. Adding this ability costs them essentially nothing. The benefit of it is that it makes ad hoc integration easy from disparate sources. Now you can use a queuing service that scales and is trivial to set up to integrate the two PHP apps you have running at GoDaddy (or whatever $5 host you're using). Now you can make micropayments for infrastructure rather than hosting and maintaining all of it your self.
7. Great[ Go to top ]
I alwady use their S3 storage service and it works great and the price is good.
8. I guess developers would have to build their own transaction controls on top of this API? thanks Johan
Very well asked. I guess thats why it is named "Simple Queue Service" and hey, how hard can implementing transactions be ? ;-)
10. I worry about privacy concerns. Now amazon can sniff the data and wonder how they might use to futher their own agenda.
Ever heard of encryption? Of course you should worry about confidentiality when using external services... but it should go without saying that it's not very different from worrying about your ISPs sniffing the traffic.
12. Can we use XML here?[ Go to top ]
Why oh why can't you write the screen of code necessary to do this with a database table? what's the point of this acronym mess? help me understand how you "architects" think, I don't think you people do.
13. Re: Can we use XML here?[ Go to top ]
What if you don't have a database in your system? Maybe I want to hook up several Swing rich clients on separate continents via a queue. This service has the potential to unlock new types of low-cost deployments. You might consider spending less time insulting others and more time thinking. | <urn:uuid:5569e9a3-f1ff-4bed-ba01-80a5d17a639a> | 2 | 1.632813 | 0.210358 | en | 0.92278 | http://www.theserverside.com/discussions/thread.tss?thread_id=41353 |
News / Obituaries
John Callahan, 59: Cartoonist rejected self-pity
“John Callahan,” wrote Comics Alliance writer Jason Michelitch, “was not politically incorrect. John Callahan was just plain wrong.”
In one entirely typical cartoon, Callahan depicted an “Alzheimer Hoedown” in which confused square dancers were unable to fulfill an instruction to “return to the girl that you just left.” In another, he depicted an aerobics class for quadriplegics. Said the leader: “O.K., let's get those eyeballs moving.”
Callahan drew frequent scathing criticism; his website included a “hate” page on which he proudly reproduced condemnatory letters. Yet he also managed to earn a loyal following — in part because many of his awful jokes were implicitly self-mocking. Callahan was a quadriplegic himself.
Born in 1951, he was adopted from an orphanage and raised near Portland. A heavy drinker since age 12, he was paralyzed from the diaphragm down at 21 when an acquaintance he had been doing shots of tequila with crashed his car.
He retained the ability to clutch a pen. This was enough to allow him to produce cartoons whose content was fuelled by his sadness and rage. To draw, he used his left hand to slowly move his right hand. The results of all the painstaking effort, Michelitch wrote, “looked like the doodles of the world's most disturbed 6-year-old.” If you had a mind of a certain type, they were also hilarious. Callahan was syndicated in more than 200 newspapers.
To publish him was a chore. “No contributor,” said Portland's Willamette Week, “ever caused as many problems as he did.” When a rejected cartoon that included a sick (nonsensical) joke about a teenage Martin Luther King Jr. was accidentally printed in the Miami Herald, the Herald decided to destroy 500,000 copies.
“In the ensuing media storm, the cartoon was described as racist, which was unfair to Callahan,” wrote the Washington Post's Gene Weingarten, a Herald alumnus. “It wasn’t about race at all; it was just phenomenally crude and rude and outrageous.” Callahan, he wrote, had such “a wonderful tone-deafness” he “simply had no idea that there was a line — let alone where that line might be.”
Callahan often declined to provide detailed defences of his work, preferring to simply say it was funny. But he explained in a 1992 New York Times Magazine cover story that he was attempting to shatter taboos.
“My only compass for whether I’ve gone too far is the reaction I get from people in wheelchairs, or with hooks for hands,” he said. “Like me, they are fed up with people who presume to speak for the disabled. All the pity and patronizing. That’s what is truly detestable.”
Callahan suffered for a year from complications from bedsores. He died Saturday at 59.
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What would you change about the british education system?
Announcements Posted on
1. Offline
What's wrong with it now?
Why would this benefit society?
Personally, I'd try and promote students to take an active interest in subjects and read around them (I know this is encouraged in college, but it should be a priority in lower years as well), and revamp the methods of assessment.
Knowing about things happening in the real world and being passionate about a subject rather than just memorising content and practising past papers will have a positive effect on everybody..
2. Offline
Make lessons more rounded, learning more about the whole subject as opposed to just what you need to pass the exam. I mean, obviously you can't digress too much, I'm just sick of people asking interesting questions in lessons, to then be told by teachers that it's not on the syllabus, we don't need it in exams, so we're not going to go into that.
(Sorry, no idea how to answer 'how'. Neither does the govt apparently...)
3. Offline
The problem now in secondary education is that exam grades are all squashed concertina-style at the top. i.e. there is a big crush at the top between the A*, A, B, C grades in very tiny margins (otherwise the A* wouldn't have to exist). Meanwhile, the grades below C have been completely de-valued. This is common to GCSE and A levels. If most universities are asking for A or B in most subjects - there's no point in having grades below C.
This is obviously due to the moronic grade inflation that started in the 1990s and was given fuel injection by New Labour.
The grades for GCSE and A-level need to be reset, and the stigma needs to be taken out of low grades, or indeed, failure.
It should be the case that GCSEs should be much, much tougher - and that if the average student is going to fail some of them outright - so be it. If you come out of GCSE French barely able to read the menu at Cafe Rouge - then frankly you deserve to fail, not to get a C.
Same with A-levels. At the moment, universities are giving stupid offers of A*A*A - which is meaningless. Only absolutely exceptional students should be getting straight As. The average A-level student should be scoring in the ABC or BBB range, and offers at mid-level universities should reflect that. There should be nothing wrong with studying and working hard and getting BBC and going to (for example) Exeter to read History.
I'll be honest, I think the A-levels should really convert to a GPA-type grading system.
In Tertiary education, I think there are too many subjects that should not be taught at university at all - not to say they're Mickey Mouse, but that University is the wrong place for them. I would revert to a Polytechnic-type system where large numbers of qualifications are devolved to colleges, whose awards are validated by universities. These awards could be in the form of Diplomas or such like, could be shorter, cheaper and more easily combined with practical work. Accountancy springs to mind, as do most practise-based technical courses. I would try to remove as many people from University as possible so as to allow for the lowest possible university fees.
I would also quantify the cost of secondary education on a continuous basis - eg £4000 per year or whatever, and allow parents that choose to send their children to public school to have 50% of that sum as a subsidy on fees, paid directly to the school.
***EDIT*** Almost forgot - make Classics compulsory on the National Curriculum. Everyone must take one of either Latin, Greek, Classics or Ancient History.
4. Offline
Get rid of R.S (religious studies) and replace it with 'Philosophical studies'.
I think calling it Religious studies at the moment is partly why this subject puts off so many students right from year 7 upwards, most kids aren't actually religious so I think the whole name of this subject is discouraging. Also, instead of learning about the technical workings of each religion (which quite frankly is boring as hell - no pun), there should be greater emphasis on the ethics/moral and reasoning side to each religion and their stances on various issues, from my experience, these are exact sort of things that get people interested and enthuisatic about learning and debating - because they're controversial!
So by doing this, the new title of 'Philosophical studies' is much more appropriate. Just like R.S currently is taught, this should be rolled out to kids from year 7 onwards up to the end of GCSE. There is also the additional benefit that political philosophy can be brought in as well. Improving people's understanding of politics is vital, and coincidently this is something thats a major issue right now with low voter turnouts and the general apathy towards politics.
5. Offline
I think people should come out of school knowing more about adult life as in like the organization of the government, how to write a CV and covering letters, what different types of loans are for and a basic understanding of the terminology. I wasn't taught any of that stuff at school and not everybody has parents that will take the time to explain it to them and show them how to do things.
I also think they should be made to read more books to expand their vocabularies because there are people my age (19) who don't know what quite basic words mean. I think they should have gotten the hang of working out what a word means through the context in which it is used in a book and learning it themselves rather than constantly asking people 'what does that word mean?'
Oh and also... I think maths and science GCSE's should be harder to lessen the jump between them and A-levels.
BTECs should have more praise and recognition than they do because they aren't as easy as people think and they inspire more independant thinking because you actually have to come up with your own scientific projects and things rather than just learning whats in the textbook and writing it in an exam.
6. Offline
Stop primary teachers saying to kids around about Yr 3-4 "right everyone, we're doing Algebra today so listen very carefully, it's really hard"
Of course it's hard, you've just told them it's hard you numpty!! If you'd told them it was fun, there's an outside chance they might have believed that instead.
Rewrite the entire maths curriculum so that there are two GCSEs, theoretical maths and maths for living, just like we have double award science and double English. Single English, Maths and Science for people who only need single and double for those planning to take the subjects further. Proper monetary budgeting etc should be on the maths for living so that people come out of school really understanding how APRs and PayDay loans work, how the banking system works, plus the maths that we really need for everyday life and some basic stats. Theoretical maths would then contain trig, algebraic fractions, vectors, a bit of mechanics, more stats, intro to calculus and matrices. That would cover a useful base for Maths A level instead of C1 having to do it instead. The current Additional Maths GCSE could then be incorporated partly into the theoretical maths GCSE and partly into C1/M1/S1.
Not that I've spent any time thinking about this at all you understand
BTW I tutor Maths to GCSE and A level with the odd help out for kids I know studying 1st year Uni and used to teach Mechanics (MST207/9) for the Open University, hence me truly having spent hours swearing at the current system whilst trying to get kids re-enthused about my favourite subject in the world.
7. Offline
scrap the tosh they teach like PSHE and Citizenship... useless and a waste of the students time/tax payers money. although i would settle for redoing the syllabus drastically for the latter i sense it could be quite an interesting subject if they stopped teaching worthless drivel in it...
8. Offline
Don't teach kids how to pass exams - teach them knowledge of the subject. And if you're going to teach a subject, teach all of it or none - for example, if I went soley on my Year 8 History teacher's lessons, Germany was the only bad guy in WWII and Britain and America were the only ones who fought. :rolleyes:
Also, I wish we taught Domestic Science nowadays - to BOTH sexes. I know people my age who don't know how to use a washing machine, or to cook basic stuff, like boiled poatoes.
9. Offline
The teachers are even more vacant than the portable toilets in Piccadilly.
10. Offline
cancel all islamic schools.
11. Offline
Stop making kids who don't want to sit exams/take a academic route do it. Set classes, why should I have to spend 3/4 of my education explaining stuff to the E grade student sat next to me? Should I not be stretched in my work at GCSE because the teachers time is taken up explaining stuff that should have been taught BEFORE secondary school. Or hold kids back a year or tell them to take a vocational route, I can not really see the harm.
Also having enough chairs for all the kids to sit on might be a start...
12. Offline
I think current system is close to being perfect. It leaves a lot of choice to every individual from young age (14), therefore if you fail at life you can't blame educational system.
13. Offline
People teaching the subjects should be the cream of the crop, instead of English teachers who are failed authors, physics teachers who didn't make it as pilots, etc. I had both of these and a couple of others in various subjects, who clearly didn't want to be there, or just weren't even that good at the subject they were english teacher in school couldn't even spell :/
The poster above just reminded me, I should add that compared to many other countries we do have a very good educational system and it is possible and completely doable to be successful and intelligent if you try, unlike some countries where the odds are truly against you.
14. Offline
Academic selection throughout the UK and not just Northern Ireland.
Northern Ireland consistently get the best GCSE and A Level results out of the UK so why doesn't everywhere else take notice?
15. Offline
I'd make it mandatory for everyone to do a gcse in a language. I wish I'd been forced to do one - they're invaluable and not enough people in the UK can speak a second language.
I'd have more vocational routes available so we aren't inundated with graduates who could have took a more practical route which is relevant to their career choice.
16. Offline
Put a greater emphasis on learning languages... a variety this time. Not just French :lol:
17. Offline
I will say it... TEACHERS! Far too many teachers in my experience are lacking knowledge, motivation, and enthusiasm for their subject.
Also I would give subjects didn't qualification levels depending on how hard they are. Maths A-Level for example should be worth more UCAS points than a Sociology A-Level. (That's just my subjective opinion and yes, I take both subjects.)
18. Offline
How about another Maths-based subject? I know that sounds like most people's idea of hell, but I'd have liked to have been taught more statistical-based skills that most people - outside of the jobs that need them - use in everyday life. They made my set in Maths do Functional Skills, but I have no idea what universities or employers make of that.
Also, we should be taught Politics at school. I was shocked when, during the General Election in 2010, my friend had no idea that there was a General Election going on, or what any of the main parties are. (We had to do a Mock General Election and she chose UKIP because it had the longest name ) Surely a knowledge, however basic, of our government would be more useful than, say, discovering what Muslims think of IVF?
19. Offline
(Original post by littleone271)
The problem with this is that careers etc. would inevitably be taught by teachers, who are by and large the worst possible people to teach children about "the real world". Many teachers will have zero experience of life outside the public sector gravy train, and their idea of being in the real world is going on a union strike march.
Where do you think all the idiot trends in CVs came from? Like personal mission statements or colours and highlighting all over the place? From school careers departments, of course.
The only way to improve things like that would be to involve industry across the board - for example to have CV writing taught by HR departments from local and national business. The problem with that is that the socialists and especially the unions will have the mother of all hissy fits, and call it privatisation.
20. Offline
Put in place some kind of voucher system, so that parents have full choice over where to send their children. Any school that wanted to charge more than the voucher rate would have to sign up to some kind of scholarship programme. The government would just enforce some minimum standards in terms of subjects that must be covered.
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Updated: April 13, 2012
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You need ID for everything else, why not voting?
Published: Thursday, August 15, 2013 at 02:11 PM.
I am writing in support of the voting bill that passed in the state Legislature. Everybody is making a big fuss over a law that requires voters to show an ID before voting. Many people are saying that this bill will set back voters. I would like to know how? The people that complain have not given a reason except “this will set voters back.”
When you go to the bank to get money, when you go to the airport or take a train they always ask for an ID What’s the big deal? The ID check is there to make sure those that are not eligible to vote cannot cast ballots.
I don’t see what the problem is you have to show your ID everywhere else. People need to get over this. It’s not the end.
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Good Soil, Roger Cook
Photo: Kindra Clineff
When TOH landscape contractor Roger Cook needs to improve a soil so it will grow grass, he rototills in equal parts sand and compost.
Q: The contractors who cleaned up the oil spill on our property tried three times to plant grass on the fill they brought in, but only weeds came up. I'm enclosing a packet of the fill for your inspection. What will we have to do to get a nice lawn?
—Margaret Kachur, Rahway, N.J.
A: Roger Cook replies: There's no way grass is going to grow in that rocky soil. It should have been screened before it was delivered to remove all the stones, twigs, and other debris.
Here's what to do. First, remove the top 4 inches of fill and discard it. Then dig up about 2 cups of soil and send it—without rocks and twigs—to be tested by your local cooperative extension service. They'll send you back a report letting you know what nutrients it needs.
While you're waiting for the report to come back, start by loosening up the fill with a rototiller. Then add 2 inches of sand and rototill again, followed by 2 inches of compost. Till that in, too. Now, grade the area with a rake and remove as much large debris from the surface as you can.
When you get the soil report, add the nutrients it calls for, plus a starter fertilizer for lawns, then rake in the seed. Keep the area moist, and I'll bet you'll soon be rewarded with a thick crop of grass seedlings.
Ask TOH users about Lawn Care
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There is a growing movement fomenting among disgruntled residents of Colorado's eastern plains. The movement is gaining momentum and spreading to other rural areas of Colorado. Disillusionment and utter frustration are generated by the rising tide of liberalism under the moon of big-city liberalism. Their solution is to secede, to disconnect from Colorado by forming a 51st state. The goal is fraught with many hurdles; the mission is probably impossible.
I take this opportunity to share some thoughts. I am absolutely, inalterably opposed to the formation of a 51st state. There are other ways to skin the statehood cat.
The United States is a giant dog, a hodgepodge of 50 breeds. Colorado is but one of the 50 breeds.
By becoming a sovereign and independent nation rather than forming a 51st state, the disgruntled residents would be freed from the yoke of the federal imperium. Gun control, health care, abortion, immigration, religious expression and marriage are but some of the issues that irk the secessionists. They fail to consider that the fleas of discontent that infest the larger dog would continue to infest a 51st state. The nettlesome fleas hop about in the thicket of federal laws and countless strata of wasteful and ineffective federal bureaucracies and regulations. A 51st state would still be part of the larger dog, held on a tight leash of federal control. There is an effective solution.
A new nation would establish and preserve the tradition of rugged individualism and noble self-determination exemplified by the secessionists. There are many additional benefits that national autonomy would achieve. A few examples:
Foreign aid: The United States annually spends more than $49 billion on foreign economic and military assistance. Such assistance is not substantially linked to economic downturns confronting the citizens of the United States. The government may shut down, welfare and education may be compromised, while foreign aid continues to grease the wheels of corrupt leaders and despotic governments. Surely a few paltry billions in foreign aid would enrich the coffers of the new nation, relieving the citizens of the new nation from the burdens of taxation, health care, welfare and national defense.
Immigration: The new nation would effectively secure its borders from millions of undocumented aliens seeking refuge to make a better life. These desperate souls will come from all points of the compass, north and south, east and west, from sea to shining sea.
Constitution: The new nation would by convention forge a new constitution written by contemporary patriots. It would be headed by the words "We the people." This constitution would enshrine freedom of rather than from religion, the sanctity of human life, marriage, and better provide the citizens protection from unreasonable criminal victimization and governmental intrusion.
National defense: The constitution will ensure the establishment of a well-regulated militia, that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
Name of new nation: What should the new nation be called? A unique opportunity and additional benefit should not be overlooked. Huge sums of money were generated by the sale of the naming rights to Mile High Stadium. Invesco Field and then Sport's Authority Field are examples of profitable naming opportunities. Magpul, the manufacturer of high-capacity bullet clips, might be interested in paying a bloody fortune to have a country named after it. Magpul would ensure a presence in the United Nations and in the foreign embassies around the world. "Magpul Nation" (worked for Auto Nation) yields a lot of bang for the buck.
Flag: The new nation should consider the Don't Tread On Me flag featuring a coiled rattlesnake from the high eastern plains.
Hope this modest manifesto is taken in the spirit gleaned from the Declaration of Independence. It begins with the timeless words:
Ralph Josephsohn is a Longmont resident. | <urn:uuid:9c370acd-1569-44bf-928a-605a622d2b6e> | 2 | 1.703125 | 0.272226 | en | 0.951916 | http://www.timescall.com/columnists/opinion-local/ci_24015939/want-51st-state-how-about-new-nation-instead |
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Easy tips to minimize the development of wrinkles
by timetospa September 28, 2011
Easy tips to minimize the development of wrinkles
Wrinkles are generally thought of as an inevitable part of the aging process, but did you know that simple lifestyle changes could reduce the number of fine lines you develop? Consider implementing some of the following steps recommended by Web MD:
1. Drink more cocoa. When you need an energy boost or want some warmth on a cold day, go for a cup of hot cocoa, which contains flavanols that protect skin from the sun and keep it hydrated.
2. Sleep on your back. If you sleep on your side or stomach night after night, your face is likely to develop more wrinkles than it would if it wasn't pressed against a pillow.
3. Avoid repeated facial motions, like squinting. Be sure to wear sunglasses on bright days and buy a pair of reading glasses if you need them, so you don't have to squint regularly.
In addition to adopting these habits, ladies can integrate the Anti-Wrinkle Control Collection from the Elemis skincare line, which has an array of products to keep skin smooth and firm.
Skincare Solutions
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updated 6/23/2009 2:45:56 PM ET 2009-06-23T18:45:56
Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ recent trip to Tennessee to pick himself up a new liver has raised some sticky questions about what money can buy.
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Jobs, 54, was diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer five years ago and had a piece of his pancreas removed. The prognosis with tumors of the pancreas is not good, the cancer can spread to the liver.
First, let me say I wish Jobs the best. This column is being typed on an Apple computer, while an iPod is playing and an iPhone is displaying missed messages on its screen. You would be hard-pressed to find a stronger Apple devotee and Steve Jobs admirer than I am.
But the news that this incredibly wealthy resident of Silicon Valley, Calif., had transplant surgery thousands of miles from his home at the University of Tennessee in Memphis, according to the Wall Street Journal, raises some important questions about access to health care at a time when America is in the midst of a major battle over health reform.
According to data from the United Network for Organ Sharing based in Richmond, Va., the quasi-public agency that distributes donated organs to those on waiting lists around the nation, there were roughly 16,000 people on the national liver waiting list when Jobs got a liver. He was one of 1,581 people who got livers in the United States in the first quarter of this year. Almost none of those people had any form of cancer.
Not enough is known about Jobs’ condition to say with certainty whether he still has cancer or whether the cancer has spread.
What is known is that Jobs beat very long odds to get a transplant.
Three hurdles to getting an organ
In the United States, three hurdles must be overcome to get an organ. First, you need to have a primary care doctor diagnose that you have a failing organ. Second, you need to gain entry to a transplant center. Third, you have to be selected by both your transplant surgeon and UNOS as the person best suited on the national waiting list of those admitted to various transplant centers as the best recipient.
Jobs did not have problem with the first hurdle. He has plenty of doctors watching him. They found his initial pancreas problem and his subsequent liver problem. Millions of Americans are not so fortunate. They can’t afford a primary care doctor. Some Americans show up at emergency rooms so sick due to failing hearts, livers, lungs and kidneys that they could not possibly survive a transplant. Others simply die without any doctor diagnosing what is going on with their organs. These unlucky patients are rationed out of their chance to get a transplant without even knowing it.
Video: CNBC: Jobs had liver transplant For those who do have a primary care doctor, like Steve Jobs, the next step is to get into a transplant center. This involves getting seen by a specialist, who will perform all sorts of tests both physiological and psychological. Most important, the potential patient must do well on a very precise wallet biopsy performed to ensure they can pay for a surgical procedure that might cost as much as $200,000.
The parents of 17-year-old Nataline Sarkisyan sued insurance giant Cigna Healthcare last year for declining to guarantee payment for a liver transplant at UCLA Medical Center. The family could not pay and she was not admitted to the transplant program. So she died.
Besides a lack of money, other factors that might lead a transplant center to reject a potential liver transplant patient include advanced age, mental illness, addiction, lack of a stable family to help after surgery, being a prisoner, or having other complicating diseases.
Jobs did not face these obstacles to gaining entry to a transplant program. But, he does have a complicating illness so he had to find a transplant center willing to ignore that fact. It was probably easier for a wealthy CEO to do that than it would be for you.
The waiting list is long for livers. But different centers have longer and shorter lists. Patients who are smart or who have savvy primary care doctors know that different transplant centers follow different rules in deciding who to admit and not to admit. Some will bargain a lower fee for a liver transplant for a poor family. Some would view a liver transplant for a person with cancer as a “waste” of an organ. Some might take a chance on a patient with cancer. This likely explains why Jobs went to Tennessee.
According to UNOS, there were 295 newly listed liver patients in Tennessee last year and 1,615 in California.
Shorter wait time in Tennessee
And UNOS data shows the median number of days from getting on the liver waiting list to getting a transplant was 306 nationally, in Tennessee only 48.
By traveling to Memphis, Jobs could drastically increase the odds he would secure a liver and cut the wait time. He also might have tried to gain entry to more transplant centers to increase the odds that he would get a transplant. Jobs or anyone with enough money can ”multiply list” at many centers and, by putting chips on more than one number, boost the odds of winning the transplant lottery. About 3 percent of all those on the national waiting list for livers, hearts and kidneys are listed at more than one program.
Jobs appears to have known exactly how to use his resources to maximize his chances of getting a life-saving transplant. Most Americans do not.
But, regardless of how much money or clout you have, actually getting an organ when one becomes available is the hardest hurdle. Organs are given on the basis of physiological measures of who is most in need, matching of blood type and other biological factors. Getting to the shortest waiting list and finding a transplant center to take him despite his cancer did not guarantee Jobs a liver. There was some amount of luck involved too.
Still, Jobs’ liver transplant shows precisely what is wrong about our nation’s debate over health care. Some say we do not need to reform what American Medical Association officials often refer to as the “finest health care system in the world.” Really?
The current system is hardly fair. People die every day from a lack of good care or the ability to pay for it. The truth is, those with resources can make the system work in their favor. And celebrity, money and the promise of future gifts can help procure access to scarce, life-saving resources.
The health care system is a broken mess, but not because a Steve Jobs can get a liver. Rather, it is because all too often only the wealthy and privileged can take full advantage of the best our health care system has to offer.
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Clue Score Sheet
I have a problem. Nobody will play Clue with me. Yes, I'm talking about the Hasbro board game that you probably haven't played in 15 years. It's one of my childhood favorites, but none of my friends will touch it with a ten foot pole.
It's not their fault, though. You see, while I was growing up we would play Clue as a family. It was usually just me, my sister and my mom. When we would talk Dad into playing, he would always beat us by solving the puzzle in the first few rounds, long before the rest of us could get close. It was that experience, knowing that I was playing the game wrong, that led me to a better way (read: more annoying) way of playing.
Before I knew it, I was solving the puzzle on the first turn, often before some people had even taken a turn. My friends took the obvious recourse and now we play games like Settlers of Catan, or Republic of Rome, or Dixit. Alas, all my strategy was for naught.
So why talk about it now? Why bring it up? It's indicative of a greater idea, as all good life metaphors are.
The idea that you can change how you play a game, or do some task, and it can break all sense of competition. Suddenly you are no longer on an even playing field. You win, not just occasionally, but always!
The metaphor is all around us. Take the NSA as a great example in the media right now. They changed the game by doing what few suspected was possible or plausible. Their reach provided them a level of power that cannot be matched across the globe. But what happened when people discovered their secret? Nobody wants to play their game anymore.
Maybe it's a stretch, but I see the pattern a lot. Sometimes it's in a field where advantage is positive, like a business offering something others can't touch. Other times it's creepy government dudes watching you on your webcam.
So what about me and my love of Clue? Could I go back to playing it the old fashioned way? I suppose it's possible, but then the temptation to use more advanced strategies would be powerful, and there would be nothing there to stop me. Would my friends even trust that I'd play that way? Probably not. They know me too well.
Instead, I have to accept that I'll probably rarely have the opportunity to play Clue again. If I want enjoyment from it then I'll have to find another approach. To that end, I'm going to share a few of my Clue techniques so anyone who reads this can enjoy ruining a childhood game on their own.
Warning: If you try the following techniques you will probably be ridiculed and shunned by all Clue-lovers around you.
Lesson 1: The score sheet is useless.
The little sheet that comes with the game of Clue (seen above) is severely lacking. In the Master Edition game, at least, they give you some blank space to the side for "notes". That's what you really need: some blank paper. Any old blank paper will do. You can keep your score sheet as well and use it to tick off some discoveries, just not in the way the game makers expected.
Lesson 2: Note everything
The hardest thing to grasp is that everything you hear around the table is helpful, not just the questions you ask. If the player to your left makes an accusation and that accusation is answered by another player before you, you've gained incredible insights into both players hands. Lets look at an illustration:
Clue Board
In this game, to my left is Chris, across from me is Josh, and to my right is Dan. In my notes I refer to us as T, C, J, and D to save space. In fact, I'm such a fan of saving space (I hate writing by hand) that I use letters to represent the people and objects in Clue as well: M - Col. Mustard, P - Prof. Plum, K - Mrs. Peacock, and so on. I use two-letter abbreviations for the weapons: Kn - Knife, Ca - Candlestick, etc. And finally, I just number the rooms cause there's so many of them: 1 - Hall, 2 - Lounge.
This codifying is completely unnecessary to the strategy, but it makes for concise notes, and it's hard to read when someone sneaks a peek at your sheet. If you're a fast writer, by all means feel free to write out the full names of things. I won't stop you.
Using my codes, I make notes of everyones accusations in a vertical column in my notes, like this:
> `C ( S, Kn, 1 )` >
In this example, Chris made an accusation that Ms. Scarlet used the Knife in the Hall.
When someone responds to the accusation, I note who they are and any possible answers they gave:
> `C ( S, Kn, 1 ) -> D ( S, -, 1)` >
In this example, Dan is the one who responded to the accusation. He possibly showed Chris either Ms. Scarlet, or the Hall. I know he didn't show Chris the Knife, because I have it!
So what did this teach me? Well, now I know that Dan has one of two items, but I also know that Josh, who came between them, definitely does NOT have either Ms. Scarlet or the Hall. I note this as well to finish my line:
> `C ( S, Kn, 1 ) -> D ( S, -, 1 ) = J ( !S, -, !1 )` >
My notation is sort of programming based, but really I'm just trying to show negatives with "!" symbols. Again, everything is concise.
Lesson 3: Logic
Now that I have a broad array of data, it's important that I review it after each accusation, not just on my own turn. Knowing that Dan has either or both of Ms. Scarlet and the Hall, I can try to see if either of those cards pops up as being held by a different player. If so, I can cross them off as being Dan's. Through a process of elimination I you can find an amazing amount of information without it being your turn at all. This is also where I bring the score sheet into play. I like to use all the columns, one for each player, and the final column for the solution. In each player's column I mark down a "*" if I know they have that card, and I mark down a "-" if I know they don't have it. In the final column, I mark off a "-" if I know someone has the card. The final column will quickly sort itself down to just a couple remaining options.
Lesson 4: Trickery
When making an accusation yourself, it's almost always better to guess one or two items that you already have, especially when trying to narrow down a category to a specific person, place or thing. You can also use what you know about people to tailor your accusation. If I know Dan has the Hall, but not Ms. Scarlet, I can guess both to see if Chris is secretly holding the Scarlet card. If not, I just solved a third of the puzzle, but nobody else knows this because Dan will show me the Hall when the question gets to him. In short, use what you know in creative ways to stay unpredictable.
Lesson 5: Always show the same card
This final bit is a small thing, but it can have big implications. If you've been forced to reveal a card, say, the Knife, then go out of your way to show that same card again and again, especially to the same person. If you are holding two cards from someones guess, but always show the same one, that's a bit of misinformation that is easy for others to overlook. It makes things a bit harder on the other players
Well, that's it. Try out that the techniques and you'll beat the pants off your friends and ruin a decent kids game. Of course, you can use the strategies and let the game linger a bit if you want, too. Maybe people won't notice and you can become the world's first Clue shark. How lame would that be?
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The Desk
I just looked to the side and noticed the pile of stuff building up on the corner of my desk. What an interesting collection it was. Through no particular effort on my part, I'd put together a little collage of myself. I thought it was pretty neat, anyway.
I wonder if other people have similar things creeping up around them. Maybe not on the desk, but on a nightstand or counter corner. Maybe some people have a drawer. I'm just curious about the accidental types, though. I know we design enough stuff around our interests on purpose. I think these haphazard ones are pretty special, though. They're more intimate and natural.
That's enough of a rant. For the curious I'll put a little list below of the items in the picture, starting on the left and spiraling in clockwise.
• A stapler (I started with the boring thing)
• A picture of me and my best friend, Kristin, in high school
• A moleskine notebook: holds story ideas, numbers, scratch math, a picture of a horse head, other notes
• Idae Notebook: nearly indestructible, waterproof outdoor notebook
• Portable scanner to digitize everything
• (Top) Box and pipe tobacco
• Book of Christian Prayer: Kinda a condensed Liturgy of the Hours
• Saint Paul's Daily Missal: For when I can't get to church
• (Obscured) Box holding my sextant
• Some additional papers for my preparation for Italian Citizenship
• A glass fountain pen
• Private Reserve fountain ink from Indiana
• (Obscured) 750GB secure external hard drive
• Assorted USB cables
• My Galdalf pipe
• A microphone
• Not pictured because this wasn't staged: role playing game rulebook and/or dice
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Moving to Iceland
Icelandic Flag
I haven't written in a little while, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to give some background on things that have happened, and where I would like to see life going for a while ahead. First of all, I met a wonderful woman shortly after leaving the Jesuits, and we've had a really amazing adventure in the short time we've been together. We got engaged in Florence in the Bobali Gardens. We bought a house in Bucks County, PA, right on the historic Delaware Canal. We also had a baby! His name is Wit, and he's just as fantastic as I could have ever hoped.
That's a lot for a year and change, and we're looking forward to a little bit of quiet in the time ahead. At least, we don't want to try to squeeze any more giant life changes in this year, if we can avoid it. I think out next big journey won't happen for another 4-5 years, in fact.
You see, we really want to move to Iceland.
It's not as simple as it sounds. Well, I'm not sure you were thinking it was simple at all, actually... but I was at first. People talk about leaving the country all the time, but it's really a complicated thing to do. Perhaps going to Canada isn't as bad, but I'm not sure. I didn't really want to go to Canada, so I haven't looked into it. Iceland is going to be a chore, but hopefully worth all the time and effort.
I'm going to try to share our experiences in the expatriate path here on my blog. Maybe someone else will find it helpful in the future. If not, it'll make a good story to look back on, I'm sure. So, without further ado...
The first part of my plan involves becoming an Italian citizen. You see, Italy has this really amazing thing called Jure Sanguinis that allows you to get dual citizenship if you can trace your ancestry back in a certain way. There's some fairly complex rules to it, but in brief it says that if your immigrant ancestor had kids before he or she became an American citizen, then the kids were technically born as Italian citizens (according to Italy), and you are eligible to claim Italian citizenship as their descendant. Did that make sense? If not, pop over to the link and read all about it.
It works out for me very well since my great-grandpa came over to this country and had my grandmother before he became naturalized. She passed the Italian-ness on to my dad, and thus to me. Now, all I have to do is get 10 billion documents, get them signed, translated, apostille's attached (kind of an international notorization), and take everything to the Italian consulate. Then, in another year or so when I can finally get an appointment, I can theoretically file for Italian citizenship. Once that goes through, I can get an Italian passport, a briefcase full of foreign currency and pretend I'm a secret agent. Or at least, I can get through European Customs a lot faster.
What it means for Iceland is that I'll be a member of the European Economic Area and a Schengen state, which means I can move there without having to have a job first and apply for a special visa. In fact, once I get a job there, I don't need to do any really special paperwork at all. I just prove residency and BLAM! I'm done! (Not really, but compared to moving as a US citizen, it feels like it)
So, that's the current plan. I'd love to have my Italian citizenship for more than just moving to Iceland, but what a great benefit it will bring. We're hoping we can figure out a method of moving before Wit enters school. We'll see how things develop, though. I've got a long history of big plans that go completely awry.
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Review: A Spell for Chameleon
A Spell for Chameleon
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
Xanth was the first series of books that caught my attention as a child, and I have Piers Anthony to thank for my love of reading today. I read nearly twenty of the books before moving on to more advanced fantasy series. What is most remarkable about all of that to me, however, is that I don't remember once thinking how horrifically sexist the books are!
It's hard to talk about the magic of Xanth and the great and interesting talents of its people because the book is overwhelmed with things like a mock rape trial, observations about the uselessness, deception, and irrelevancy of women, and downright shameful reduction of women's role in society and men's lives as objects. I am not a vocal advocate for women's issues, and I'm very often turned off by liberation or empowerment propaganda, but in the face of outright misogynistic vitriol I cannot help but take a stand. It is one thing to discuss the differences of the sexes, their relative strengths and weaknesses, and even allow for some socio-historical context to influence the characters in a fantasy setting; but Piers Anthony goes way beyond that at every turn. The book somehow makes a claim to be about the worth of a person being judged by doing the right and just thing even when faced with unjust situations. Yet it takes a pause in the very beginning of the main character's adventure to have a completely pointless aside where in the guise of a legal proceeding he dismisses the entire concept of date rape as being ridiculous. He outright claims that a beautiful and smart woman must be inherently evil, and that it is only natural for a man to want a woman of both intelligence and beauty, but not at the same time. These things overshadow every aspect of the fantasy story being told. I can't even begin to talk about the story's tales of companionship, illusion, history, or growth. They all take a back seat to one man's disgusting vision.
As my own son grows, I had planned on offering up this series to him at an early age in hopes of capturing his interest in reading. You can be sure that won't be happening. No boy should grow up thinking these kinds of thoughts about women. No good and just actions can come of it.
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Review: Practical Vim: Edit Text at the Speed of Thought
Practical Vim: Edit Text at the Speed of Thought
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This was hands down one of the very best technical books I've ever had the pleasure to read. Drew Neil has found a way to organize the book into a tip format without making it lose focus or seem endlessly unimaginative. Rather, by organizing the tips into themes, he gives the editor itself structure where before there was only the grey void of endless features.
I was an intermediate vim user before this book. It was my primary editor, and I used navigation keys and some basic yank and put operations regularly. I knew how to jump to lines, zip between words, and some mediocre regular expressions. After having read this book, I don't bother opening up gvim or macvim anymore. I'm so comfortable working without the mouse, I prefer to keep myself in the console all the time. My speed has increased dramatically, as has my confidence. I participated in vimgolf for the first time just last week.
If you are a vim user with a strong basic understanding, this book is for you. Don't pick it up if you are brand new to the editor, though. Complete the vimtutor first and give it some time to sink in.
Wouldn't you know it... Just this short review was incredibly painful to write since I'm not using my favorite text editor. What a snob I've become!
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Review: Hymnal for Dirty Girls
Hymnal for Dirty Girls
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I had to take a few days to think about how I should review this book. I received it in a Goodreads Giveaway, which I entered based almost entirely on the cover design and title. I knew nothing of the subject matter or format and that would have greatly affected my desire to pick it up in the first place.
Next, I should be clear that my rating is, and must be, true to my own experience in reading the book. It does not necessarily depict the independent value or quality of the writing, the impact of the themes or subjects, or any other fancy writing concepts. On Goodreads, two stars means, "It was ok," and that is exactly how I felt after reading it. I suspect that those who pick this book up based on its content with an honest desire and interest in it will find the book much more enjoyable.
The format is also very hard to critique. This is a collection of extremely short stories. Some are no more than a single scene. It felt, at times, like the author was sharing a bunch of writing experiments with us. I can't very well critique them on lack of character development or anything like that because that's not the form of writing we're dealing with. For what they are, they are very well written. In a few stories the use of the second person perspective is a bit annoying and feels like the type of gimmick I'd expect from a college-level writing class.
There are a few moments of clear inspired writing in here, which is commendable. My overall impression was that of a small art exhibit in a big city, which spends more effort on being different and niche than on the craft itself.
The jacket notes mention that Ms. Matthews is currently writing a novel. I'd be interested in reading that to see how she handles the larger work and the many aspects of writing that come with it.
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Zombie Survival Kit
All Gear
It's become somewhat of the popular joke to have a post about Zombie Survival these days, so I guess I'll toss my two-cents into the fray. Personally, I've never been much concerned with the Zombie menace, but there many other possible scenarios out there that call for readiness in the face of limited resources, disrupted public services, and downright chaos. With that (and an impending hurricane) in mind, I'd like to share my personal emergency kit with you all.
Let me first preface this by saying that this is far from everything I have prepared in case of emergency. Rather, this represents my "grab bags" of absolute essentials that we would take with us in case of a zero-warning evacuation or similar event. Were we limited to traveling only on foot, I might drop an item or two (dutch oven). Were we given a few minutes and the ability to take the car, I might add a few heavier things.
I have also omitted almost all of my clothing from this kit, mainly because I didn't want to go digging around in my closet. If you decide to mimic this, or use it for inspiration, just use some basic common sense in your clothing choices: layers, avoid cotton, pack light, bring extra socks.
This list follows the pictures from the top left, downward in columns, to the bottom right. The item headings are all links where you can find these items for purchase.
Gear Left
MTM Survivor Dry Box with O-Ring Seal
This box is the core to my medical kit. It is waterproof, tough-as-hell, and bright orange to find it quick in a hurry. It even has a handy little compass on the top. How quaint!
Adventure Medical Kits Trauma Packwith QuikClot
For serious trauma like gunshot wounds or tree branches through your chest, you need more than a bandaid. While the need may be uncommon, having this cheap little pack might just save your life, or the life of someone you love. It takes up very little space, too.
Quake Kare Emergency Thermal Blankets (4 Pack)
I hope to never have to need this level of extra thermals, but for an ounce and the tiniest bit of space, these provide us a "blanket" of security. Terrible joke, I know.
OtterBox 1000 Series Waterproof Case
These are my waterproof cases within the waterproof case. If there's one thing you never, ever want to get wet, it's your emergency bandages and medicines. This extra level of protection is absolutely imperetive in my opinion. Also, if you have anything really sensitive that needs to stay dry, toss it in one of these. I find that three of them are enough to fit the Medique kit below.
Medique 40061 First Aid Kit, 61-Piece
This handy medical kit has it all, short of a hospital, anyway. If you think you'll have a need for extras of a particular thing, don't hesitate. If there's one area you shouldn't skimp, it's first aid. If you're using this as your household first aid kit, remember to replenish items as you use them. You don't want to get trapped without any bandages because you "just haven't made it back to CVS yet."
Etón FR160R Microlink Self-Powered AM/FM/NOAA Weather Radio with Flashlight, Solar Power and Cell Phone Charger (Red)
This thing is a beast. I charged it with the hand crank for just over ten seconds and then sat listening to the radio all day long. If you plan on staying in touch with the outside world (or at least informed), having a backup radio with NOAA stations is important. Besides, this little guy will charge your cellphone too!
Rothco 550lb. Type III Nylon Paracord
I'm an Eagle Scout, and thus I never feel lost if I have a good length of rope. Paracord is extremely strong for its size, but it packs down light and tight. Use it for everything and everything from a clothesline to animal traps in the worst of situations.
3M Scotch Heavy Duty All-Weather Duct Tape, 1.88-Inch by 45-Yard, 1-Pack (2245)
Don't settle for the cheap duct tape. Get the good outdoor all-weather stuff. One roll should be more than enough to patch things up, bandage you up, make a stretcher, or any number of other tasks.
Hand Axe
If your kit needs to help you out past a day or two, being able to work with the natural resources around you is imperitive. Chop up some downed branches for a fire. Clear a space for your family. Make some posts for hanging a trash bag (instant trash bin). Be creative and live in outdoor luxury with this.
If you find yourself working with tough wood that needs clearing, having the right tools makes all the difference. Your hatchet can do a lot, but sometimes its nice to have a saw too. This thing is tiny and super light. Add it to the bag and then hope you don't need it.
ADC Medicut Shears, 7-1/4"
Most scissors are weak and useless when it comes to anything other than wrapping paper. These things have some real power, and they'll get the job done again and again. You can even sharpen them!
Snow Peak Titanium Spork
Ok, there's really no reason for this at all. I just love having a titanium spork on the list. Sue me.
Entrenching Tool
My advice for survival scenarios: Learn how to make a latrine. Seriously. It'll take you five minutes to watch a video on youtube and it will make your outdoor living much, much easier.
While I wouldn't rely on one of these guys solo, having all the little tools is a help. Suppliment your main knife with any old Leatherman model to add versitility.
Beretta Airlight II Tactical Knife, 30% Serrated 2.25" Skeleton Blade
I'm a bit of a knife junkie. Beretta makes a killer folding knife. If you have a solid blade like the Mora Classic below, this isn't exactly necessary, but you can think of it as a backup if that makes you feel better. You certainly don't want to end up bladeless. These are your primary tools of survival.
Smith's PP1 Pocket Pal Multifunction Sharpener
A dull knife is almost as bad as no knife. If you're going to be using them... really using them, keep them sharp. This will also help you in cases of accidental cuts. A clean cut heals much faster and with less chance of infection.
Potable Aqua Water Treatment Tablets
Clean water is absolutely essential to survival. There are a ton of options available thanks to fancy technologies these days. Get a filter pump or some sort of reverse osmosis device and live like kings. Just make sure to grab some iodine tablets as a backup. Filters break sometimes. These might make your water taste tinny, but you'll live. (Side note: you can also use bleach to purify water!)
Petzl E97 Tikka Plus 2 Headlamp
In the redundency department, along with your knives, add light to the list. A headlamp will keep your hands free to do work. They last a really long time with LEDs.
Gerber Infinity Ultra Task Light
Bring a flashlight, but not one with huge, honkin' D batteries. They're harder to find replacements than AA, and much heavier.
Bic Lighters
Don't buy them from this link. Get them at your local store for next to nothing. Have a few handy, along with some matches in your dry-box, just in case. And while you're watching survival videos on how to make latrines, you might as well learn to make a fire too. Don't rely on watching as knowing, though. Give it some practice before you need the skill.
Mora Sweden Classic #1 Red Wood Handle Carbon Steel Knife
Very few knives are better than this one. At 15$, you can afford to get extras too. Treat them well: sharpened, oiled, not chipped. They'll last a lifetime.
Folding Camp Saw
Another backup for your chainsaw. Or maybe the chainsaw is the backup. If you're going to stay outdoors for any length of time, bring a saw.
Datrex 3600 Emergency Food Bar
You'll notice I haven't put much in the way of food on this list. That's because you should spend some time learning your local edibles before you need them. Learn what berries you can eat, and also what animals are in your area. Learn to make a snare. Don't bother wasting time hunting deer unless you already have all the gear and experience. Set snares around your camp instead. It's more reliable. If all else fails, these emergency food bars are good for up to 5 years and pack enough calories to keep you going for a long, long time.
Camelbak or Platypus
You're going to need water containers. Have a variety, but don't keep them all filled up. Learn to treat your water so you don't have to carry it all with you. Carry the empty containers with a minimum amout of water for drinking as you travel, then fill them up when you stop, treat them, and save yourself the weight. 1 liter of water weights about 1kg. That adds up quick.
Youngstown Glove 05-3080-70-L General Utility Lined with KEVLAR Glove Large, Gray
The most common place to injure yourself working in survival situations is on your hands. Protect them with more than a pair of designer cotton gloves. These guys have Kevlar on the insides and outsides of your hands. Fantastic, and worth the price. Test them out with some yard work and you'll see what I mean.
Backpacker Poncho
Get a poncho that will keep you and your stuff dry.
Gear Right
Gossamer Gear Mariposa Ultralight Backpack
Pack choices are a highly personal decision. I'm an ultra-light backpacker, so this relatively cheap bag from Gossamer Gear is a fantastic fit for me. The one pictured is a slightly older model than the link. Remember, you may need to carry your emergency gear at some point. You can't just rely on the car to get you everwhere. Plan ahead for the un-fun possibilities.
Minus33 100% Merino Wool Base Layer 703 LightWeight Short Sleeve Crew Neck Top
I don't want to go over clothing too much, but let me make a brief mention about the basics here. Pack in layers: base layer, mid layer, outer layer, insulation. Avoid cotton or other fabrics that won't hold your heat when wet. You might spend some time being dirty. That's ok. Pick things that you can wear again and again and that will hold together. Quality over quantity here.
Lodge Logic Dutch Oven with Loop Handles
This luxury will probably the first thing to be left behind if we have to set out on foot. It's damn heavy, but what a versitile cooking tool. It works in your oven, in your fireplace, or on a campfire. It cleans up with a quick rinse and is ready to go again. Pure camping-cooking heaven.
Outdoor Research Wind Pro Balaclava
Leave the baseball cap. Dress for function, not form. This will keep you warm, and that's what's really important.
Spectra® Braided Cord 1050lb test - Heavy Duty Speargun Line - (1/8"DIA x 100ft LEN)
This cord is great for any number of uses, but it is in the kit especially for hanging a bear-bag. I use the PCT method myself, so I have the tools to fit it. In a pinch, though, you can get away with just a bag and line. Wildlife have incredible senses of smells. Remember, if you are outside, you don't have walls keeping your food and gear safe. Be wary and hang your food.
Stuff Sacks (Bear Bag, etc)
To go along with the line above, these stuff sacks from zpacks are wonderful. They weigh almost nothing and are very sturdy.
Tempest Tent
There's a lot of ways to make a shelter outdoors. This is a pretty hardcore 4-season lightweight tent. It's not the cheapest solution, nor the best in all situations. I use it for a variety of camping conditions outside of my emergency kit. If you aren't much of an outdoorsman, there's probably a better shelter for you. Ask around at Gander Mtn or REI, or bug your local scouts when they try to sell you popcorn.
Littlbug Junior Stove
There's a lot of stove options for the backcountry. White gas, kerosene, etc, are all valid. This "stove" is little more than a wind-shield and chimney for a tiny wood fire. It fits in my ultra-light model. If you know how to make a fire, this might work for you. If you get something more fancy, have a backup, and make sure you have plenty of fuel.
Snow Peak Ti-Mini Solo Combo Cook Set
Have something to heat up water. In survival situations, many times "cooking" literally means, "add hot water". Heat to purify. Heat to rehydrate. Heat!
Snow Peak Ti-Double H600 Stacking Mug
This mug stacks nicely with the cookset above, so I have a pot for heating the water, and a cup for eating. It keeps my cooking pot clean.
Z Lite Mattress
Sleeping on the ground can be rough. Go easy on your back with a little layer. More importantly, get some insulation between your body and the ground. The earth will suck the heat right out of you.
Jacks-R-Better Sierra Sniveler
I have horrible restless leg syndrome, and most sleeping bags feel like a coffin to me. A nice power-down quilt gives me the warmth I need at night without the restrictive footbox. Pick whatever works for you. The single most dangerous thing when you are forced to sleep outside is exposure. You will die from exposure in a single night. Make sure you have good shelter before you even worry about water or food.
waterBOB Emergency Drinking Water Storage
This is not pictured, but very handy. If you are going to be staying in your house without power for a while, toss this into your bathtub and fill it up right away. 100 gallons of water will last you a while. Purify it to drink, grab a bucket and pour it in the back of your toilet to flush it manually, clean yourself up. Just remember to be more conservative if you are unlikely to have help or power restored in the near future. It may have to last a while.
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A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This book started out very strong for me. I loved the author's voice and his subject matter. I read the first half of the book in one sitting, but then upon taking it up again, I faltered. I didn't feel a strong appeal in going back, and I really didn't feel like it was important to finish. There is a bit of a parallel there between my reading and Bryson's hiking, I suppose. It was a good trip down memory lane, recalling my own adventures on the trail. It was interesting to read about some of the history as well. In the end, though, the story just didn't have that spark that kept me asking, "what happens next?"
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Mars Science Laboratory 'Curiosity' Landing Image
Last night at exactly 5:14:39 UTC, the latest NASA project touched down on the surface of Mars. The Curiosity rover is a mobile science lab that will travel the planet looking for signs of previous life. It's a big mission and has already begun to capture the imagination of the world.
If we (notice how I include myself in this effort) manage to find evidence of extraterrestrial life, it will represent the single greatest scientific discovery in the history of mankind. There's no exaggeration there. It will be the biggest news ever. We're not talking about intelligent life, here, obviously. They're not even looking for living things themselves yet. This search is all about finding the building-blocks that support life. That, if found, will be enough to warrant this a huge success.
But lets take a moment to allow ourselves to wonder, to dream, and to be inspired. It's not a popular thing these days when we celebrate cynicism and doubt, but I guarantee it won't hurt. What would tomorrow feel like if we knew, not just suspected, that we weren't the only life in the solar system, let alone the universe. For some, I imagine, it will bring a moment of profound perspective, much like the Total Perspective Vortex of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. For others it will probably be a platform for pride, obviously (to them) verifying whatever belief they espouse. For all, it will bring a change; and, I'd hope, it will bring us together.
In the meantime, I want to congratulate NASA and thank them. It gives me incredible consolation to remember that despite our problems in this country and in this world, we can bring together the amazing talents and minds of that team and give them the necessary resources to work wonders. We need people like that. We need faith that such things can happen. And we need their contributions if we are ever to hope to spread our wings beyond this tiny blue dot.
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Review: Stardust
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Short review: I loved it.
Long review: Gaiman's skill at storytelling, the piece that makes his comics and books such a success, is his voice. I mentioned before that his book, "American Gods" was one I didn't like, but I respected him a lot as a writer. Stardust shows why. His tone and voice as a writer walk a very specific and wonderful line between humorous fantasy and serious realism. I liken it to the move "The Princess Bride". Everyone knows the movie is a comedy, but the tone treats its subject seriously... and that's the magic.
Stardust is a romantic fantasy filled with unicorns, fallen stars, witches and princes. At the same time, it is a quirksome coming of age story. The writing is strong. The characters are interesting. The adventure isn't cliche or the same old expected fare. With all that going for it the real gem, as I said, is the voice.
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Happinet Hyper Ping Pong Doesn't Require a Ball, Table or Opponent
By: Corinne Guirgis - Published: • References: randommization & odditycentral
Happinet Hyper Ping Pong is no ordinary game of table tennis! The virtual game is all computer generated and doesn't require a ball, table or opponent. Following in the footsteps of the Nintendo Wii console, the Japanese game developers decided to take things one step further by eliminating the video component altogether. According to Oddity Central, Hyper Ping Pong is "a table tennis game that only features a motion sensor racket that emits the sound of a ball being hit by the invisible opponent. Players must find their rhythm and time their hits to the sound to continue their rally."
Implications - The invention of the Nintendo Wii game console revolutionized the video gaming industry and took gaming from a passive to active activity. Parents are eager to invest in these interactive games that promote athleticism and activity as a way of keeping children active while engaging in activities they enjoy.
Stats for Invisible Table Tennis Trending: Older & Chilly
Traction: 839 clicks in 191 w
Interest: > 3 minutes
Concept: Happinet Hyper Ping Pong
Related: 57 examples / 44 photos
Segment: Neutral, 12-55
Comparison Set: 21 similar articles, including: 12 ping pong innovations, table tennis interiors, and chalkboard table tennis. | <urn:uuid:66e22de4-2259-4a08-bca0-e1a52a40b359> | 2 | 2.46875 | 0.078194 | en | 0.886093 | http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/happinet-hyper-ping-pong |
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In this tutorial you will learn how you can create your own simple To-Do list using CSS and JQuery. | <urn:uuid:9efe4212-cb99-49c4-8eef-cff4a55a1ed3> | 3 | 2.875 | 0.090601 | en | 0.894764 | http://www.tutcity.com/css/jquery-css-style-switcher.20997.html |
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CTIA Proposes Using 2 GHz BAS Spectrum for Broadband
Doug Lung
I suppose it was bound to happen. For small urban cell sites 2 GHz is more useful than 600 MHz and broadcasters have 85 MHz of prime real estate (down from 120 MHz before reallocation to AWS and MSS) between 2025 and 2110 MHz. Worse, use of this spectrum is intermittent, peaking during large news events and when local TV stations are in news programming, which might give some the impression it isn't being used.
In a letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and the commissioners, CTIA, “The Wireless Association,” presented its solution for identification of 15 MHz of contiguous spectrum for mobile broadband as part of the implementation of the Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012, part of which is referred to as the “Spectrum Act” as it authorized the incentive auction of UHF TV spectrum and relocation/sharing of federal government spectrum.
The attachment to the letter dated March 13, states:
“CTIA believes that the commission should closely consider spectrum from the Broadcast Auxiliary Service as a most effective candidate band. This spectrum band is below 3 GHz, contiguous and adjacent to current allocations, and would allow pairing in a readily achievable fashion. CTIA is not aware of any other spectrum bands as well-positioned as this band to meet all the key principles for mobile broadband spectrum that could be paired with the specific 15 MHz identified by NTIA, and that could be put to timely use and generate significant revenues through a competitive bidding process.”
CTIA sees the 2 GHz BAS spectrum between 2095 and 2110 MHz becoming available for auction in August 2014 with licenses granted by Feb. 22, 2015, in time to meet the deadlines in the Spectrum Act. CTIA notes that Ericsson proposed pairing the 1675-1710 MHz and 2075-2110 MHz bands in 2011.
CTIA acknowledges BAS use of the band, along with the federal space operations service, earth exploration service, and space research service that share the 2 GHz BAS band. However, CTIA said NTIA can move out of this band or, if not, the existing federal locations where the band is used can be protected.
Nowhere in the letter or the 14-page attachment did I see any mention of what would happen to broadcasters who currently use the 15 MHz of spectrum that would be eliminated from the band. As the 2 GHz BAS band is divided into seven 12 MHz-wide channels, with 500 kHz at each end for digital links, a new 2 GHz band plan would be required with narrower channels. I've heard complaints that seven 2 GHz channels aren’t sufficient for major markets, so reducing the number of channels isn't an option. How difficult would it be to modify all the radios in news vans and all the receive sites to handle the new channel plan and reduced bandwidth? Who would pay for this?
Auction revenues, I suppose.
In March 2012 NTIA Makes Spectrum Exchange Offer Involving 2 GHz BAS Band, I said:
“It seems like a spectrum shell game to me, with broadcasters and existing 2 GHz users coming out the losers,” and I asked, “Could it be that NTIA DOD 1.8 GHz spectrum is more valuable than directly auctioning the 2 GHz BAS spectrum which, as broadcasters are learning, sits right in the middle of existing wireless broadband allocations (AWS, MSS, etc.)? I doubt it, which is why the plan, in spite of the hoopla about found spectrum for wireless broadband, makes no sense to me unless the real agenda is to clear broadcasters from the 2 GHz ENG band. Perhaps they assume TV newsgathering won't exist in 10 years.”
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Charley Brandt is making it look easy.
He rings the Salvation Army bell in the subzero chill, as customers stream into the Byerly's in Roseville. They don't see him shiver in his new Santa costume, and few hear his not-quite-jolly comments.
"I haven't quite figured out this ho-ho-ho stuff yet," Brandt mutters through an acrylic white beard.
But even in the cold, people keep plugging bills into the red kettle. "They see a person; I think that is the secret," Brandt said.
It's a secret that the bell ringers used last winter to raise $3.5 million in the Minnesota-North Dakota region.
In the digital age, competing against thousands of online charity come-ons, the ancient art of street begging is going strong.
Salvation Army bell ringer Charley Brandt in a new Santa suit. (Pioneer Press: John Autey)
Over the past decade, through the recent recession, proceeds of the Red Kettle campaigns in Minnesota increased each year.
Instead of screen clicks, the 16,000 bell ringers in the Twin Cities area rely on smiles and thank-yous. They also employ a constantly changing blend of pride, peer pressure, empathy and generosity -- with a bit of Christmas spirit sprinkled on top.
"It's a complicated thing, this bell ringing," said Annette Bauer, spokeswoman for the Minnesota/North Dakota Salvation Army. "There is a lot of emotional stuff going on."
In the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2012, the national Salvation Army's $4.1 billion in revenue was exceeded only by United Way's $4.3 billion, according to Forbes magazine. In the Twin Cities area, the Salvation Army raised about $30 million last year, including $3.5 million from the kettles.
Founded in 1865, the Salvation Army uses many methods straight from the Victorian era.
Salvation Army officials have quasi-military ranks such as "corporal" or "captain," terms conceived to denote officers engaged in evangelical warfare. The soldiers of the "army" stand on street corners, tinkling bells, like something out of a Charles Dickens novel.
The bells, kettles and uniforms may be corny, but they have made a strong impression in the minds of donors, said University of St. Thomas marketing professor Dave Brennan.
In a marketplace crowded with charities, said Brennan, the Salvation Army has a "first mover" advantage, as the first to occupy a market niche.
Even well-run charities have to waste time and money explaining what they do -- and establishing a reputation. Not the Salvation Army and its Red Kettles.
The Salvation Army has hung on to another Victorian tradition: officers not motivated by money.
The director of the Salvation Army is paid about $13,000, compared with, for example, the $1.2 million annual salary of the director of UNICEF.
In true Victorian form, the bell ringers don't talk about the plight of the needy.
They know that magazines, TV and the Internet are choked with ads of charities. Those slick ads emphasize how the money is spent -- with horrible images of children with cleft palates, starving tots with flies on their faces, or typhoon-flattened towns.
Bell ringer Brandt has seen thousands of them. And they wash over him.
"It's like I say to them, 'I feel sorry for you, but you are so far away,' " he said. "It's like they are a thing, not a person."
The Salvation Army takes the opposite approach. The Red Kettle donors are not necessarily inspired by a good cause but by face-to-face contact with the bell ringers.
Brandt hands 2-year-old Eden Prawdiuk a candy cane just before she donates to the bucket Dec. 10 at Byerly’s in Roseville. (Pioneer Press: John
Brandt hands 2-year-old Eden Prawdiuk a candy cane just before she donates to the bucket Dec. 10 at Byerly's in Roseville. (Pioneer Press: John Autey)
"It's a snapshot of humanity," said Andrew Benjamin, 79, of St. Paul, who has been ringing for more than 15 years. "I can look at them and see if they will give or not."
The bell ringer engages in a quick psychological dance with each passerby. The nongivers slink past, eyes down. But if their eyes meet, the passersby are much more likely to give -- or explain why they can't.
"They make an entire case about why they can't give anything: 'I am wearing pants without pockets today!' " said Paul Rudeen, an officer of the Securian Financial Group, who this year organized 50 Securian employees in a bell-ringing drive.
Many donors don't even know where the money's going.
"They trust us. It's all on a personal level, when they look that bell ringer in the eye," Rudeen said.
The bell ringers also rely on the bedrock of every religious fundraiser -- guilt.
Some passersby actually cringe if they walk past without giving. But the guilt is entirely self-inflicted, said bell ringer Brandt.
"We don't care. There is no one judging, counting or keeping track," he said.
At other times, donors give to impress others.
"I call it the Kid Factor," said bell ringer Benjamin. "People generally will give more if there is a kid involved. They are trying to appear generous in front of their kids."
People walking alone, with no connection to those around them, are less likely to give.
Some tactics boost the respect for the bell-ringer -- and donations.
Anyone wearing the uniform of a firefighter or a soldier will get as much as twice the contributions. And giving increases in cold weather -- because donors feel sympathy for the bell ringers.
"When it's cold, the thank-yous increase five or 10 times," said bell ringer Brandt. "They say, 'If you are willing to freeze, the least I can do is give some money.' "
Another surprise? The Securian Group's Rudeen has noticed that people who are apparently poor give generously.
"You can't judge a book by its cover," Rudeen said. Last week, a homeless man insisted that a bell ringer take a pillow. "I am not sure the Salvation Army could utilize it," said Rudeen, "but in his heart, it had great value."
At Byerly's, Brandt showed the technique that has made him a champion.
Brandt is divorced, lives by himself and is often lonely -- so he loves the social contact of bell ringing. "I want to mingle with people," he said.
In a new Santa outfit, he looked radiantly yule-ish, with a padded belly and buttons themed for the eight reindeer. He even hot-glued a set of toys to the top of a red velvet bag, as a prop to stand beside him.
In the cold, his Santa glasses were fogged up, and ice from his breath gathered on his beard.
Cold customers darted into the store, clutching themselves, not interested in chatting with anyone.
But Brandt greeted each with a tailor-made comment:
-- To a man in a Minnesota Vikings cap: "Did you see that game? That last five minutes was rough."
-- To a young couple: "You'd be warmer if you held hands."
-- To a man carrying flowers: "Oh, she's gonna love those!"
-- "Have you been naughty or nice? I would say naughty, but in a nice way."
Parents with children lingered by the kettle, as Brandt passed out candy canes that he bought himself.
Brandt is too old to believe in magic. But for two hours, a desolate corner of a parking lot was transformed by something -- very much like holiday spirit -- into a delightful zone of good cheer.
As Brandt rang the bell, children laughed, strangers smiled, and shoppers called out to Santa like an old friend. He perfected his ho-ho-hos, and the money flowed into his kettle.
The Salvation Army was having another good night.
Pioneer Press: john autey | <urn:uuid:8938f5d9-30fd-45e6-8f9b-fe3244b43744> | 2 | 1.507813 | 0.033489 | en | 0.963291 | http://www.twincities.com/localnews/ci_24770428/salvation-army-bell-ringers-stand-tall-face-online |
Fig1Purkinjecell Fig2myelinatedaxons SJBfmri1
Patricia C. Salinas
Departments of Cell and Developmental Biology and Neuroscience, Physiology and Pharmacology
Synaptic plasticity & degeneration: from cell signalling to circuit function
We study the function of Wnt signalling proteins in the formation, growth and stability of synapses in the central nervous system. We use a multidisciplinary approach combining state of the art cellular imaging techniques, biochemistry, electrophysiology and behavioural studies in mice to understand how changes in structural plasticity, induced by Wnts and neuronal activity, affect synaptic transmission and whole circuit function.
Recent studies from our lab have demonstrated that Wnt proteins promote the assembly of excitatory synapses in the hippocampus by triggering distinct signalling cascades on the pre- and postsynaptic sides. For example, Wnts promote the formation and growth of dendritic spines by activating CaMKII within dendritic spines. These structural changes are associated with increased synaptic strength. We are currently investigating the molecular mechanisms that control spine development focusing on short and long term effects of Wnts and on the receptors that modulate this process.
Another important project in the lab is the contribution of Wnt signalling to synaptic stability in the adult brain. We found that blockade of Wnts using a secreted Wnt antagonist, Dkk1, leads to the rapid disassembly of synapses in mature neurons without affecting cell death. We are currently investigating how dysfunction in Wnt signalling in vivo affects the integrity of synapses.
Dysfunction in Wnt signalling contributes to Amyloid-ß (Aß) synaptic toxicity. The Wnt antagonist, Dkk1, is elevated in brain biopsies of AD patients and in the brain of some animal models for AD. Interestingly, we found that Aß rapidly induces the expression of Dkk1 in the hippocampus. Importantly blockade of Dkk1 protect synapses against Aß. Our studies strongly suggest that Dkk1 contributes to the synaptic toxicity of Aß, a finding that has important implications for developing new therapeutic targets for the treatment of AD at early stages of the disease. We are currently examining the contribution of Dkk1 in synaptic degeneration and cognitive decline in AD mouse models.
1) To determine the mechanisms that regulate the trafficking and function of Wnt receptors during activity-mediated synapse formation.
2) To investigate the mechanism that control spine growth during activity mediated synapse formation and plasticity.
3) To examine the cellular and molecular mechanisms that lead to the disassembly of synapses in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
Selected Publications
1. Stamatakou E., Marzo A., Gibb A., and Salinas PC. (2013) Activity-dependent spine morphogenesis: a role for the actin capping protein Eps8. J. Neuroscience 33: 2661-2670.
2. Purro S. A., Dickins E., Salinas P.C. (2012) The Wnt antagonist Dkk1 mediates the synaptic disassembly activity of Aß: a potential role for Wnt synaptic dysfunction in Alzheimer’s disease. J. Neuroscience. 32: 3492-3498.
3. Ciani L., Boyle K., Dickins E., Sahores M., Anane D., Lopes D. M., Gibb A. and Salinas P. C. (2011) Wnt-7a signalling promotes dendritic spine growth and synaptic strength through CaMKII. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sciences USA 108: 10732-7.
4. Budnik V, and Salinas P.C. (2011) Wnt signaling during synaptic development and plasticity. Current Op. Neurobiology. 21: 1-9
5. Sahores M, Gibb A and Salinas P.C. (2010) Frizzled-5, a receptor for the synaptic organizer Wnt7a, regulates activity-mediated synaptogenesis. Development 137: 2215-2225.
6. Juan P. Henriquez J.P. Webb A., Bence M., Bildsoe H., Sahores M., Hughes S.M., and Salinas P.C. (2008) Wnt signalling promotes AChR aggregation at the neuromuscular synapse in collaboration with Agrin. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sciences USA 105: 18812-18817.
7. Ciani L. and Salinas P.C. (2008) From Neuronal Activity to the Actin Cytoskeleton: A Role for CaMKKs and betaPIX in Spine Morphogenesis. Neuron 57: 3-4
8. Rosso S.B., Sussman D., Wynshaw-Boris A. and Salinas P.C. (2005) Wnt signalling through Dishevelled, Rac and JNK regulates dendritic development. Nature Neurosci. 8: 34-42.
9. Salinas, P.C. (2003) Backchat at the synapse. Nature 425: 464-467.
10. Hall A. C., Lucas F. R. and Salinas P. C. (2000) Axonal remodelling and synaptic differentiation in the cerebellum is regulated by WNT-7a signalling. Cell 100: 525-535.
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UPI en Espanol
The Almanac
By United Press International | Feb. 2, 2005 at 3:30 AM
Today is Wednesday, Feb. 2, the 33rd day of 2005 with 332 to follow.
The moon is waning. The morning stars are Mercury, Jupiter, Pluto, Venus and Mars. The evening stars are Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
Those born on this date are under the sign of Aquarius. They include French statesman Charles de Talleyrand in 1754; psychologist Havelock Ellis in 1859; Irish novelist James Joyce in 1882; Charles Correll, Andy of radio's "Amos and Andy" program, in 1890; National Football League co-founder George Halas in 1895; violinist Jascha Heifetz in 1901; novelist Ayn Rand in 1905; actor Gale Gordon in 1906; columnist Liz Smith in 1923 (age 82); comedian Tom Smothers in 1937 (age 68); singer Graham Nash in 1942 (age 63); actress Farrah Fawcett in 1947 (age 58); model Christie Brinkley in 1953 (age 52); and actor Michael T. Weiss ("The Pretender") in 1962 (age 43).
On this date in history:
In 1848, the war between the United States and Mexico formally ended with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. It provided for Mexico's cession to the U.S. of the territory that became the states of New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming in exchange for $15 million.
In 1936, Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson and Walter Johnson were voted into the brand-new Baseball Hall of Fame.
In 1991, allied forces in the Persian Gulf War declared they were in control in the air and at sea.
In 1992, one day after agreeing to withdraw its troops from Lithuania, Russia reached a similar agreement with Latvia and opened talks with Estonia.
In 1993, more than 7,500 UMW miners went on strike against the Peabody Coal Co., the nation's largest coal producer.
In 1998, President Clinton submitted the first balanced federal budget in 29 years.
In 2002, a report requested by the board of directors of the troubled Enron Corporation accused top executives of forcing the company into bankruptcy by, among other things, inflating profits by almost $1 billion.
In 2003, Vaclav Havel, the playwright who became a president, stepped down after his second five-year term as head of the Czech Republic.
In 2004, the Bush administration says a bipartisan commission will investigate why prewar intelligence reports that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction apparently had been wrong.
Also in 2004, President Bush asked Congress for $2.4 trillion to fund government programs for fiscal year 2005.
A thought for the day: Robert Frost said, "Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence."
| <urn:uuid:eb264441-66b5-4714-b2f4-0c03c8948a52> | 2 | 2.046875 | 0.047038 | en | 0.931545 | http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2005/02/02/The-Almanac/UPI-48181107333000/ |
Kamma on the Social Level
Bhikkhu P.A. Payutto
1. Kamma moves outwards
In practical terms it can be said that the human world is the world of intentional action. Human beings have a very sophisticated level of intention, which, in conjunction with their thought processes, allows them to achieve things which would be impossible for other animals. Although the lower animals, too, possess intention, it is limited to a nominal degree, being largely on the instinctual level.
Human thinking is guided by intention. Intention is what fashions the thinking process and, through that, external conditions. Our way of life, whether on the individual level or on the level of societies, both small and large, is directed by intention and the thinking process. It would not be wrong to say that intention, being the essence of kamma, is what decides our fate as human beings.
Now let us look at an example of how intention affects society. Intention on the negative side is that which is influenced by defilements. There are many kinds of defilements. When these defilements enter into our minds they colour the way we think. Here I will mention three kinds of defilements which play an important role in directing human behaviour. They are:
a. Tanha: craving for personal gain.
b. Mana: desire to dominate.
c. Ditthi: clinging to views.
Normally when talking of defilements we tend to summarize them as greed, hatred and delusion, the roots of akusala. Greed, hatred and delusion are more or less defilements on the roots level. Tanha,mana and ditthi are the active forms of defilements, or the roles they play in human undertakings. They are the form defilements most often take on the social level.
The way these three defilements direct human activities can be seen even more clearly on the social scale than on the individual level. When people's minds are ruled by the selfish desire for personal gain, aspiring to pleasures of the senses, their actions in society result in contention, deceit and exploitation. The laws and conventions formulated by society to control human behaviour are almost entirely necessitated by these things. And in spite of all efforts these problems seem to be almost impossible to solve.
A simple example is the drug problem. People have a tendency to be drawn towards addictive things, and there are a great number of people who are trapped in this problem. And why is it so hard to deal with? Primarily, because of the drug peddlers.[1] Their desire for the profit to be gained from the drug trade gives rise to the whole industry, and thus to the corruption, the gangs and so on. The industry has become so extensive and complex that any efforts to rectify the situation, including efforts to broadcast the dangers of drug abuse, are rendered ineffective. This problem of drug abuse, which is a problem on the social and national scale, arises from tanha.
Pollution is another case in point. When the indiscriminate dumping of chemicals and waste products presents a danger to the environment and public health, the government must create laws for the control of factories and waste disposal. But those running the industries are not inclined to give up their profits so easily. They find ways to evade or blatantly break the laws - in which case we find examples of government officials operating through selfishness. With minds dominated by greed and guided by selfishness, instead of carrying out the task expected of them, they take bribes. The law breakers go on unchecked, as does the pollution, causing strife for the whole of society. Both the presence of pollution, and the difficulty encountered in preventing and controlling it, arise from craving.
Corruption is another social problem which seems impossible to eradicate. This condition fans outwards to cause countless other problems in society, which are all in the end caused by craving. It is impossible to list all the problems caused by tanha.
Tanha also works in conjunction with mana, the craving for power and influence. From ancient times countries have fought and killed each other through this desire for power; sometimes at the instigation of one individual, sometimes through a faction, and sometimes collectively as whole countries. Coupled with the craving for personal gain, the craving for power gives rise to the exploitation, nationalism and expansionism in the world with all its subsequent chaos. You could say that the world turns almost entirely at the instigation of tanha, craving, and mana, pride. Human history is largely the story of these defilements.
2. The importance of ditthi in the creation of kamma
However, if we look more deeply into the processes taking place, we will see that the defilement which exerts the most influence is the third one ditthi. Ditthi is view or belief, the attachment to a certain way of thinking. The type of personal gain or power and influence aspired to are decided by ways of thinking. When there is the view that a certain condition is desirable and will provide true happiness, craving for personal gain is biased toward that end. Craving and pride generally play a supporting role to one ditthi. Ditthi is therefore the most important and powerful of these three defilements.
The direction of society is decided by ditthi. A sense of value of any given thing, either on an individual or social basis, is ditthi. With this ditthi as a basis, there follow the attempts to realise the object of desire. People's behaviour will be influenced accordingly. For example, with the belief that happiness is to be found in the abundance of material goods, our actions and undertakings will tend to this end. This is a wrong view, thus the undertakings resulting from it will also be wrong. All attempts at so-called progress will be misguided and problem-ridden. Material progress thus brings problems in its wake. It is founded on two basically wrong and harmful views: 1. That humanity must conquer nature in order to achieve well-being and find true happiness; 2. That happiness is dependent on material wealth. These two views are the directors of the modern surge for progress.
Looking deeply into the kind of civilization which is exerting its influence over the entire world today, we can see that it is founded on the basic premise that mankind is separate from nature. Mankind was created to have dominion over nature, free to exercise his will to manipulate nature as he desired. In the present time it is becoming obvious that many of the problems arising from material progress, particularly the environmental ones, are rooted in this basic misconception.
Guided by wrong view, everything else goes wrong. With right view, actions are guided in the right direction. Thus, a desire for personal gain can be beneficial. But with wrong view or wrong belief all actions become harmful. On the individual level, this expresses itself in the belief in the desirability of certain conditions and the efforts to obtain them. Such action has ditthi as its foundation. On the social level, we find the attitudes adhered to by whole societies. When there is a conviction in the desirability of any given thing, society praises and exalts it. This collective praise becomes a social value, a quality adhered to by society as a whole, which in turn pressures the members of the society to perpetuate such beliefs or preferences. It is easy to see the influence social values have on people. Sociologists and psychologists are very familiar with the role played by social values and the effect they have. From social values, beliefs extend outwards to become belief systems, ideologies, political and economic systems, such as capitalism, communism and so on, and religions. When theories, beliefs and political ideologies are blindly adhered to they are products of the defilement of ditthi.
From one person these ideas fan out to become properties of whole groups and societies. One individual with wrong view can effect a whole society. A case in point is the country of Cambodia. One leader, guided by wrong view, desiring to change the social system of Cambodia, proceeded to try to realize his aim by authorizing the killing of millions of people and turning the whole country upside down.[2] Another example is the Nazis, who believed that the Jewish race was evil and had to be destroyed, and that the Aryan race were to be the masters of the world. From this belief arose all the atrocities which occurred during the Holocaust in World War II.
Then there are economic systems and ideologies, such as Communism and Consumerism: many of the changes that have taken place in the world over the last century have been based on belief in these ideologies. And now it seems that it was all somehow some kind of mistake! Eventually we have to turn around and undo the changes, which is another momentous upheaval for the population, as can be seen in Russia at the present time.
One of the ways in which ditthi causes problems on a social level is in the field of religion. When there is clinging to any view, human beings resort to exploitation and violence in the name of religion. Wars fought in the name of religion are particularly violent. This kind of clinging has thus been a great danger to mankind throughout history. The Buddha recognized the importance of ditthi and greatly emphasised it in his teaching. Even belief in religion is a form of ditthi which must be treated with caution in order to prevent it from becoming a blind attachment. Otherwise it can become a cause of persecution and violence. This is why the Buddha stressed the importance of ditthi, and urged circumspection in relation to it, as opposed to blind attachment.[3]
On the negative side, intention works through the various defilements, such as those mentioned just now. On the positive side we have the opposite kind of influences. When people's minds are guided by good qualities, the resulting events within society will take on a different direction. And so we have the attempts to rectify the problems in society and create good influences. Human society for this reason does not become completely destroyed. Sometimes human beings act through metta, kindness, and karuna, compassion, giving rise to relief movements and human aid organizations. As soon as kindness enters into human awareness, human beings will undertake all sorts of works for the purpose of helping others.
International incidents, as well as relief movements, are motivated by intention, fashioned by either skilful or unskilful qualities, proceeding from mental kamma into verbal and bodily kamma. These institutions or organizations then proceed to either create or solve problems on the individual level, the group level, the social level, the national level, the international level and ultimately the global level.
The importance of ditthi, whether as a personal view, a social value or an ideology, cannot be over-emphasised. The reader is invited to consider, for example, the results on society and the quality of life if even one social value, that of materialism, were to change into an appreciation of skilful action and inner well-being as the foundations for true happiness.
3. External influences and internal reflection
When people live together in any kind of group it is natural that they will influence each other. People are largely influenced by their environment. In Buddhism we call this paratoghosa - literally, the sound from outside, meaning the influence of external factors. Paratoghosa refers to external influences, or the social environment. These can be either harmful or beneficial. On the beneficial side, we have the kalya.namitta,[4] the good friend. The good friend is one kind of external influence. The Buddha greatly stressed the importance of a kalyaa.namitta, even going so far as to say that association with a kala.namitta was the whole of the holy life (brahmacariya).
Most people are primarily influenced by paratoghosa of one kind or another. On the individual level this refers to contact with others, the influence of which is obvious. Young children, for example, are readily influenced and guided by adults. On the larger scale, beliefs, social Values, and the consensus of the majority serve the same function. People born into society are automatically exposed to and guided by these influences.
In general we can see that most people simply follow the influences from the social environment around them. An example is India in the time of the Buddha. At that time the Brahmanist religion completely controlled the social system, dividing the whole of society into four castes - the ruling caste, the intellectual or religious caste (the Brahmins), the merchant caste and the menial caste. This was the status quo for society at that time. Most people born into that society would naturally absorb and unquestioningly accept this state of affairs from the society around them.
But occasionally there arise those who dare to think for themselves. These are the ones who will initiate action to correct the problems in society by understanding how they come about. This is called the arising of yoniso-manasikara, skilful reflection, which sees the mistaken practices adopted by society and looks for ways to improve them,[5] as did the Buddha in ancient India, seeing the fault of the caste system. The Buddha pointed out that a person's real worth cannot be decided by his birth station, but by his actions, good or evil as the case may be. From the Buddha's skilful reflection, yoniso-manasikara, a new teaching arose, which became the religion of Buddhism.
Without skilful reflection humanity would be utterly swamped by the influence of external factors (paratoghosa) such as religious beliefs, traditions and social values. We can see how traditions and customs mould human attitudes. Most people are completely swayed by these things, and this is the kamma that they accumulate. We could even say that traditions and customs are social kamma that has been accumulated through the ages, and these things in turn mould the beliefs and thoughts of the people within that society. These things are all social kamma.
Every once in a while there will be one who, gauging the social conventions and institutions of the time with yonisornanasikjira, will instigate efforts to correct mistaken or detrimental beliefs and traditions. These means for dealing with problems will become new systems of thought, new social values and ways of life, which in turn become social currents with their own impetus. In fact these social currents are originated by individuals, and from there the masses follow. Thus we can say that society leads the individual, but at the same time, the individual is the originator of social values and conventions. Thus, in the final analysis, the individual is the important factor.
4. Personal responsibility in relation to social kamma
How does a socially accepted view become personal kamma? Personal kamma here arises at the point where the individual agrees to the values presented by society. Take, for example, the case of an autocrat who conceives a craving for power under the influence of maana. This is a condition arising within one person, but it spreads out to affect a whole society. In this case, what kamma does the society incur? Here, when the king or despot's advisers agree to and support his wishes, and when the people allow themselves to be caught up in the lust for greatness, this becomes kamma for those people also, and thus becomes kamma on a social scale. It may seem that this chain of events has arisen solely on account of one person, but this is not so. All are involved and all are kammically responsible, to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the extent of their personal involvement and their support. The views and desires conceived by the despot become adopted by the people around him. There is a conscious endorsement of that desire by the people. The craving for Power and greatness thus spreads throughout the population and increases in intensity.
This agreement, or endorsement, of social values, is an intentional act on the level of each individual, which for most is done without skilful reflection. For instance, the concept of "progress" so often spoken about in the present time is one based on certain assumptions. But most people do not enquire into the basic assumptions on which this concept is based. Thus the concept of "progress" goes unchallenged. This lack of reflection is also a kind of kamma, as it leads to the submission to the social value concerned. Here in Thailand, we are accepting the social values introduced to us by the West. This has a marked influence on Thai society. Being exposed to this form of belief, the Thai people think that the material progress from the West is a good thing. Adopting this way of thinking, their whole way of life is affected, leading to a rejection of religion and a decline in morals.
It is not difficult to see the lack of reflection present in most people in society. Even to understand the workings of things on an elementary level, such as in seeing the cause and effect involved in personal actions, is beyond normal understanding. Most people follow the crowd. This is the way society usually operates, and this is social kamma.
All in all, contrary to the widespread image of Buddhism as a passive religion encouraging inaction, responsible social action is rather encouraged in the Buddha's teaching. There are numerous teachings given on factors encouraging social concord, such as the four sa"ngaha vatthu, the Foundations for Social Unity: dana, generosity: piyavaca, kindly speech; atthacariya, helpful action; and samanattata, impartiality or equal participation.
However, in Buddhism, all action should ideally arise from skilful mental qualities. A seemingly well-intentioned action can be ruined by the influence of unskilful mental states, such as anger or fear, or it can be tainted through ulterior motives. On the other hand, simply to cultivate skilful mental states without resultant social action is not very productive. So we can look at virtue on two levels: on the mental level we have, for example, the Four Sublime States (Brahmavihara). These are the bases of altruistic action, or, at the least, of harmonious relations on a social level. On the second level we have the external manifestations of these skilful qualities, such as in the four sangaha vatthu, the Foundations of Unity. These two levels of virtue are interrelated.
The Four Sublime States are metta, goodwill, friendliness; karuna, compassion, the desire to help other beings; mudita, sympathetic joy, gladness at the good fortune of others; and upekkha, impartiality or equanimity.
Metta, goodwill, is a mental stance assumed towards those who are in the normal condition, or on an equal plane with ourselves; karuna, compassion, is a proper mental attitude toward those who are in distress; mudita, sympathetic joy, is the attitude toward those who are experiencing success; upekkha, equanimity or impartiality, is even-mindedness toward the various situations in which we find ourselves.
Now these four qualities, when looked at in practical terms, can be seen to manifest as the Four Foundations of Social Unity. Dana, giving or generosity, is more or less a basic stance towards others in society, an attitude of generosity, which can be based on metta, giving through goodwill; karuna, giving through compassion; or mudita, giving as an act of encouragement . Although this giving usually refers to material things, it can also be the giving of knowledge, labour and so on.
The second foundation of unity is piyavaca, kindly speech, which is usually based on the first three Sublime States. Friendly speech, based on metta, as a basic attitude in everyday situations; kindly speech, based on karuna, in times of difficulty, as with words of advice or condolence; and congratulatory speech, based on mudita, as in words of encouragement in times of happiness and success. However, when confronted with problems in social situations, piyavaca can be expressed as impartial and just speech, based on upekkha.
The third factor is atthacariya, useful conduct, which refers to the volunteering of physical effort to help others. In the first factor, generosity, we had the giving of material goods. In the second factor, kindly speech, we have the offering of gentle speech. With this third item we have the offering of physical effort in the form of helpful conduct. This help can be on ordinary occasions, such as offering help in a situation where the recipient is not in any particular difficulty. Help in this instance is more or less a 'friendly gesture,' thus is based on metta, goodwill. Help can be offered in times of difficulty, in which case it is help based on karuna, compassion. Help can be offered as an encouragement in times of success, in which case it is based on mudita, sympathetic joy or gladness at the good fortune of others. Thus, atthacariya, helpful conduct, may be based on any of these three Sublime States.
Finally we have samanattata, literally, 'making oneself accessible or equal.' This is a difficult word to translate. It means to share with other people's pleasures and pains, to harmonize with them, to be one with them. It refers to sharing, co-operation and impartiality. We could say that it means to be humble, such as when helping others in their undertakings even if it is not one's duty, or to be fair, such as when arbitrating in a dispute.
In regards to Buddhism, therefore, while social action is encouraged, it should always stem from skilful mental states rather than idealist impulses. Any social action, no matter how seemingly worthwhile, will be ruined if it becomes tainted with unskilful intentions. For this reason, all action, whether individual or socially oriented, should be done carefully, with an awareness of the real intention behind it.
Here are some of the Buddha's words on kamma on the social level:
At that time, the leaders among those beings came together. Having met, they conferred among themselves thus: 'Sirs! Bad doings have arisen among us, theft has come to be, slander has come to be, lies have come to be, the taking up of the staff has come to be. Enough! Let us choose one among us to admonish rightly those who should be admonished, to rebuke rightly those who should be rebuked, to banish rightly those who should be banished, and we will apportion some of our wheat to him.' With that, those beings proceeded to approach one being of fine attributes, more admirable, more inspiring and more awesome than any of the others, and said to him, 'Come, Sir, may you rightly admonish those who should be admonished, rightly rebuke those who should be rebuked, and rightly banish those who should be banished. We in turn, will apportion some of our wheat to you.' Acknowledging the words of those other beings, he became their leader ... and there came to be the word 'king'[7]
In this way, bhikkhus, when the ruler of a country fails to apportion wealth to those in need, poverty becomes prevalent. Poverty being prevalent, theft becomes prevalent. Theft being prevalent, weapons become prevalent. When weapons become prevalent, killing and maiming become prevalent, lying becomes prevalent ... slander ... sexual infidelity ... abuse and frivolity ... covetousness and jealousy ... wrong view becomes prevalent." [D. I. 70].
[1] Those who are involved in the industry often try to justify themselves with the rationalisation that they are merely satisfying a demand, but Buddhism teaches awareness of Wrong livelihood, the trade in things which will cause harm to other beings. This includes animals (for slaughter), slaves (which could include prostitutes), weapons and drugs and alcohol. From the Buddhist perspective, the trader is not immune from blame for the damage caused by these things.
[2] Of course, that Pol Pot possessed such views was also largely due to external influences. Thus, external influences and individual action are intricately enmeshed. The kamma created in this instance would have been his conscious endorsement and wholehearted support of these views.
[3] In this context it is notable that religious wars have never been fought in the name of Buddhism, probably for the reasons given above.
[4] The'good friend'here is one who will guide one to betterment, who can teach the Dhamma, rather than a friend as the term is normally understood.
[5] Yoniso-manasikara must be naturally founded on internal reflection. Thus it is not simply an intellectual consideration of social problems, but must be incorporated into the entire stream of Dhamma practice.
[6] The so-called 'silent majority' is thus not free of ethical responsibility. Such a silence, if accompanied by the resignation and acquiescence it usually generates, is in itself a condonement of social values and events, conditioned by the extent of apathy or lack of reflection involved.
[7] Mahasammata, lit., the Great Elect. | <urn:uuid:0a033c13-9f32-4c8f-9ffd-0c12b28338d7> | 3 | 2.828125 | 0.026528 | en | 0.958147 | http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma2/socialkamma.html |
Top Definition
Conformity is the act of 'blending in with the crowd' or emulating the actions of another individual, group, or belief system. Conformity can be linked to a fear of rejection or the presence of apathy in a person.
For instance, in a school-system, different social sects will conform to a certain style of clothing or behavior in order to fit in with a certain group. Conformity is also a part of conversation. In our daily lives, we will consistently conform to the opinions and ideas of other people. Conforming to the idea of another doesn't necessarily mean agreeing with something they say that you don't believe in, but it can be, and this is where the negative side of conformity comes from.
In conversational conformity, one can sit back and watch while someone they like/befriended is being attacked or even join in. This example of negative conformity is often found in schools and in the workplace. The desire for acceptance drives people to offer negative information about another person in order to fuel their conversational counterpart's drive for drama.
"Isn't that Jenny just a skank?" -Breann
"I know! I've heard so much crap about her. Let me tell you." -Leah
"I'm going to the game tomorrow, but my folks are going to Church. You going to the game?" -Joseph
"Of course, if you're going. I'd just have to skip Church." -Ben
"Isn't that Jenny just a skank?" -Breann
"I like Jenny, and Jenny is my friend." -Leah
"Nah, man. My parents are making me go to Church, but even if they weren't, I'd still go anyway. I like Church." -Ben
by TheNonconformist June 02, 2012
7 more definitions
The act of conforming; to conform.
Human nature.
/Everyone/ conforms.
Everyone /will /always/ conform.
You, your family, your friends, me, everyone.
by Tk like whoa January 22, 2007
The tendency for all human beings to atttempt to belong to a group of people, by any means necessary, in order to feel secure and wanted. Conformity is displayed particularly well by weak-minded individuals who fear loneliness, and when alone feel too afraid to stand up for themselves. Conformity is allowing anything other than your own true desires to influence your decision making. Conformity is what separates the true individuals, who are oppressed and hated, from everybody else.
Followers of fashion
by Dr. Reedman October 16, 2003
non-conformity = conformity
nuff said, non-conforming is conforming
by The_Dark_Side July 04, 2005
Something that hipocritical and annoying people run around and bitch about, usually because they are still bitter and pissed off about not fitting in with the majority of their society. Of course, all of their actions are based on the actions of another, since it is impossible to base an action on something you have never seen before. And if you really weren't a conformist, you would create all your own clothes, speak your own personal language, play and listen to only your own music, and invent unique foods to eat. Oh wait, you would still be a conformist, because you would be basing your anti-conformity on the widespread bitching about conformity.
"I hate all you stupid conformists! That's why I shop at Hot Topic!"
Fucking die you self-proclaimed anti-conformist morons.
by The mysterious J January 24, 2004
To do what everyone else does.
Also a word thrown around by whiny ass teens who r too obsessed with what everyone else is doing and trying to do the opposite to be real. Wich in a funny twist all there whinny ass friends are doing the same thing so they’re being different by being the same as there little equally sheepish friends. SO DEAR GOD STOP CARING ABOUR IT AND PLEASE SHUT THE FUCK UP AND STOP CRYING YOUR MASCARA IS RUNING YOU WHINNY LAME ASS.
there realy isn't any relivant examples besides the people of north Korea other then that the words just being missused by whinny ass teens. The north Korea example doesn't even actualy work because i assume because of the propaganda machine (all news programs) there is guns 2 everyones head.
whinny teen: look at all the conformity everywhere it makes me sick and want to kill my self.
Me: please do you anouying little shit.
by luke neville November 15, 2006
The idiocy of people who label people based on what they wear how they act and their life goals. They tend to consider themselves better then the opposite of what they label themselves even if everyone is equal.
goths and emo peopel tend to label preps as bitches who think less of goths and emo people and basically everyone else(and call them conformists) when actually preps dont even notice them.
conformity is stupid and by saying you are non confromists u are being conformists .the opposite of conformity is not non comformity its indiffrence to the fact that someone is diffrent then you and hanging out with who you like not just people "like you"
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Top Definition
A shy person when talking to the opposite sex, but when talking to same sex can hold a conversation well. Has always had a love for computer games and badminton and is very good at one of those. A good friend, a reliable friend, would never leave he's mates for a girl.
"Dude, my pal's just left me for some girl he just met at this party,"
"It's a shame you don't have a friend like mine, a friend like Gouldy."
by LOL@Gouldy October 14, 2011
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Hollywood on His, um, I mean, Her Holiness
Bryan Cones| comments | Print this pagePrint | Email this pageShare
Brace yourselves: A new and sensational attack on Catholicism is about to be unleashed in a theater near you. No, it's not the latest Dan Brown potboiler. It's even worse: It suggests that in the ninth century there may have been a female pope!
The UK Guardian headline suggests that the film will "spark a Vatican row" (Oh, the British--I love how they use "row" for fight). Belietnet blogger John Kennedy says the film is "stir[ring] Catholic controversy." Oh for God's sake.
Really? Anyone who gets their papal undergarments in a twist over this film should have their heads checked. In the first place, it's based on a legend so old that no one could ever establish its veracity. Second, the book by Donna Woolfolk Cross is as much a romance as a work of historical fiction. If you like either genre, you should read it because it's perfect light summer reading. And third, it's just silly to get all worked up over a movie.
But, if you want to get in a lather over Pope Joan, there's a Pope John (Paul II) story you might want to read, about a musical written by two priests about the late pope. Since it's a musical (which many people hate) and it's at least three hours long, there should be plenty to complain about. | <urn:uuid:6312b324-fa84-4f7d-a974-89ac30d19825> | 2 | 1.53125 | 0.159727 | en | 0.969197 | http://www.uscatholic.org/blog/2010/06/hollywood-his-um-i-mean-her-holiness |
UK issues Syrian rebels chemical attack protection
— Britain says it is rushing to issue Syria's rebel fighters with chemical warfare protection, including escape hoods, drugs and chemical detector paper.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague told Parliament Tuesday that roughly 655,000 pounds (nearly $1 million) worth of equipment would be sent to the rebels as "a matter of special urgency" because evidence suggests that Syrian President Bashar Assad has deployed chemical weapons against the opposition.
Syria is believed to have large stocks of the nerve gas sarin which Western powers, including the United States, say has been used to poison rebel fighters in urban areas.
Syrian officials deny the charge, alleging instead that rebels have used the arms against government forces.
Hoods and drugs can be used as short-term fixes to evade or treat sarin poisoning.
The Associated Press
| <urn:uuid:56b6ce68-d1cc-4aba-9b12-b98bc8cf8657> | 2 | 2.09375 | 0.567971 | en | 0.948904 | http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/jul/16/uk-issues-syrian-rebels-chemical-attack-protection/ |
Professor has taught 10,000 students at UC San Diego
He saw chemistry as wondrous, and he had a gift for it. It got him into Harvard University, where he was allowed to skip freshmen chemistry because he simply didn’t need to take it. The year was 1955, and chemistry was still largely a descriptive subject.
“You were told that these were the chemical reactions that occur. There was a lot of memorization,” Perrin said. “It is a lot different today. Now, we understand the principles of reactivity.”
He learned the basics of scientific research — and a lot about what it means to be a good teacher. Part of that insight came from a chemistry professor who Perrin said “was not very inspiring. I went to him and, as tactfully as I could, said that his course was not as clear as the physics course I was taking. He said the reason was that the electricity and magnetism I was studying in physics were well understood, but what he was saying in chemistry was not. It involved observation, interpretation. That was a revelation — that there were still things to be understood, and you needed to be honest about it with students. Honesty is important.”
The physics course he referred to was taught by E.M. Purcell, winner of the 1952 Nobel Prize in physics. Perrin said that class “was elegant and clear. To teach well, you need to be clear.”
Perrin ended up earning his doctorate at Harvard in 1963, doing work that caught the attention of recruiters at UC San Diego, which was beginning to take shape under giants. Nobel laureate Harold Urey had joined the faculty. So had renowned chemist Joe Mayer and his wife, Maria Goeppert-Mayer, who would win the Nobel in physics that same year.
“They all had secure positions elsewhere and were willing to come here and create a new university, and I could become part of that,” Perrin remembered.
He accepted the job offer and went on to help with the task of writing the university’s chemistry curriculum. He’s been in the classroom and the lab at UC San Diego ever since.
“Charlie is a living legend,” said Ted Molinksi, a fellow chemistry professor at the university. “I’ve been at UC in one capacity or another for over 25 years, but it seems like a moment in time next to professor Perrin’s tenure. If personalities were like physical constants, Charlie’s would be gravity: ageless, unwavering and dependable.”
Perrin also gets good marks from students, partly because he does something that’s relatively uncommon: He allows them to bring detailed notes to class during major exams.
“They’re not cheat sheets, they’re reminder sheets,” said Perrin, whose short and wispy gray hair, full mustache and arching nose make him resemble Albert Einstein. “I have an ulterior motive: I want to encourage students to organize information, to learn what’s important. The sheets aren’t actually that much help during the exam. But it helps that they wrote things down. It helps them to learn.”
Pre-med student Cindy Yang said, “I am extremely glad that I took him for (introductory organic chemistry). He has given me such a strong foundation for approaching problems. I don’t think I would have the same fondness for organic chemistry if it weren’t for him.”
Privately and publicly, that’s what Perrin hopes for: “Chemistry gives you new ideas, it lets you solve problems, it gives you the power of understanding. It is beautiful.”
U-T intern Ayan Kusari contributed to this report.
| <urn:uuid:28f33c37-ff5a-4d93-9539-e5f1c9718f7d> | 2 | 2.4375 | 0.083319 | en | 0.985084 | http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/mar/25/tp-half-century-of-chemistry/2/ |
Carolyn McDade, the author of the song "Spirit of Life", does not identify herself as a songwriter or musician—though she has written hundreds of songs and released fifteen CDs. "Activist, yes, but not a musician," she says.
McDade has given her life to what she calls the movement. By that she certainly means the feminist movement that dramatically changed what was possible for women since she was a girl. But she also means a chain of linked, politically progressive causes: She has actively opposed wars, South African apartheid, U.S. foreign policy, and nuclear power. She has worked for economic justice, environmental protection, and the rights of women migrant workers, prisoners, refugees, and lesbians.
"I'm boringly consistent," she says, with a streak of self-deprecation, sitting on the sun-dappled deck of her modest Cape Cod home, lined with three birdfeeders and a birdbath. "I'm still basically at the same work."
Consistent, yes, but not boring. McDade's life has reached pinnacles of political victory and spiritual insight as well as troughs of personal disappointment and despair with the world. Running through it all has been a strong thread of women's spirituality, which she has woven with Unitarian Universalist and United Church of Canada women, as well as radical Catholic nuns.
McDade still dresses in her signature layers, a dark turtleneck or T-shirt under a white collared shirt, jeans, and squiggly silver earrings. But she now wears her soft gray hair in a short cap of curls. The powerful, deep singing voice on her recordings hardly seems like it could come from this slight, soft-spoken, warm grandmother of eight.
It was the 1960s, when she was working as a Secretary at Boston's Arlington Street Church, that McDade started to write music. The student minister, Marni Harmony, had invited Carolyn to put together music for one of the first women's services. But when she went looking for songs written by women, she was appalled to find so little available.
So late one night she sat at her piano and sang what she wanted to say to her three daughters asleep upstairs, which became the song "Come, Daughter." It was a turning point, the first time she had sung from her own experience, and a searing recognition of what she was meant to do.
"Writing my own song really was the beginning of finding of my own way," she says. "I was a young woman activist, my children were young, and I had totally lost myself. I wouldn't have known what to call it. Social movement was my healing, seeing my life as part of other lives."
She quickly immersed herself in the groups of women activists rising up in Boston and across the country in the mid-1970s. Early on she joined with the Women and Religion groups within the UUA, demanding a place for women's spirituality. McDade and one of that movement's leaders, Lucile Schuck Longview, in 1980 conceived the water ceremony as a way for women who lived far apart to connect the work each was doing locally to the whole. Each woman brought a jar of water from the place she lived, and during the ceremony poured it into a bowl, naming what made it precious to her. Then, dipping her hands into the water they'd combined, each blessed the woman next to her, imparting strength to continue her work.
In the 1980s, McDade became a leader in the movement to oppose U.S. policies in Central America, particularly Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. The UU Community Church of Boston invited her to chair its Sanctuary Committee, challenging U.S. government policy by offering illegal shelter to political refugees. She traveled to Nicaragua and helped clear stones from land the revolutionary Sandinista government had given peasants, under constant threat of attack by the U.S.-backed contras. She traveled around the United States, sometimes on speaking tours, sometimes moving with refugees among safe houses or churches. Her life was intense with demonstrations, arrests, threats of legal action and violence, infiltration, and endless meetings.
Like much of McDade's music, the genesis of the song "Spirit of Life" was a very personal one. Late one night in the early 1980s, she was driving her close friend Pat Simon home from an activists' meeting for Central American solidarity.
Thus the song was born—a prayer for infusing work for justice with spirituality; a prayer for change in the heart leading to change in the world.
Spirit of Life, come unto me.
Sing in my heart all the stirrings of compassion.
Blow in the wind, rise in the sea;
Move in the hand, giving life the shape of justice.
Roots hold me close; wings set me free;
Spirit of Life, come to me, come to me.
For more information contact
Find everything tagged: | <urn:uuid:18387a17-ee72-44da-b00d-e448196a6e3e> | 2 | 1.59375 | 0.053533 | en | 0.985638 | http://www.uua.org/re/tapestry/adults/life/workshop6/159306.shtml |
Techniques for WCAG 2.0
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FLASH29: Setting the label property for form components
This technique relates to:
User Agent and Assistive Technology Support Notes
The objective of this technique is to explicitly associate a form component with its label text by setting the component's label property. Setting this property will visually place a label next to the component, and exposes the label text to assistive technology.
Components that support the label property are:
For other components, the label text has to placed adjacent to the form component manually. For these components, the label text can be associated with the form component using one of these approaches:
In order for these form controls to be accessible to assistive technology, the following lines of code will have to be added once to the movie's script:
When the Button component is used:
import fl.accessibility.ButtonAccImpl; ButtonAccImpl.enableAccessibility();
When the RadioButton component is used:
import fl.accessibility.RadioButtonAccImpl; RadioButtonAccImpl.enableAccessibility();
When the CheckBox component is used:
import fl.accessibility.CheckBoxAccImpl; CheckBoxAccImpl.enableAccessibility();
Example 1: Setting the label using the Component Inspector panel
1. Add the Button, CheckBox or RadioButton component to the movie by dragging it on the the stage from the 'Components' panel.
2. With the component selected, open the 'Component Inspector' panel by selecting it in the 'Window' menu or using the Shift + F7 shortcut.
3. In the Component Inspector, under the 'Parameters' tab, enter the label text for the 'label' parameter.
The screenshot below illustrates this technique.
Setting a component's label in the Component Inspector Panel
Example 2: Setting the label on a Button, CheckBox and RadioButton component using ActionScript 3.0
Example Code:
import fl.accessibility.ButtonAccImpl
import fl.accessibility.CheckBoxAccImpl
import fl.accessibility.RadioButtonAccImpl
import fl.controls.Button;
import fl.controls.CheckBox;
import fl.controls.RadioButton;
var myButton: Button = new Button();
myButton.label = "Submit Details";
myButton.x = 10;
myButton.y = 10
var myCheckBox: CheckBox = new CheckBox();
myCheckBox.label = "notify me";
myCheckBox.x = 10;
myCheckBox.y = 40
var myRadioButton: RadioButton = new RadioButton();
myRadioButton.label = "Male";
myRadioButton.x = 10;
myRadioButton.y = 60;
This technique is demonstrated in the working example of Setting the label on a Button, CheckBox and RadioButton component using ActionScript 3.0. The source of Setting the label on a Button, CheckBox and RadioButton component using ActionScript 3.0 is available.
When the Button, CheckBox or RadioButton components are used:
1. confirm that labels describing the purpose of the button have been provided through the component's label property.
Expected Results
1. #1 is true
| <urn:uuid:2e99a573-84fa-4608-a757-1999a562adaf> | 3 | 2.765625 | 0.268132 | en | 0.699079 | http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/NOTE-WCAG20-TECHS-20120103/FLASH29.html |
Within the Bachelor of Science in Forensic Science degree offering, you can choose from two concentration options and courses in a wide range of subjects:
Concentrations within the degree
Biology courses prepare you to identify human biological evidence using serological and DNA analysis techniques.
• BIOL 240 - Introdution to Genetics. Introduction to principles of Genetics, including Mendelian and molecular genetics. Topics include: Mendelism, linkage, recombination, DNA structure and function, geomics, evolution of development, molecular evolution. 4 credit hours.
• FS 330 - Population Genetics for Forensic Science. An overview of human genetic variation and molecular population genetics as applied to forensic DNA analysis in a crime laboratory as well as the courtroom. 3 credit hours.
• BIOL 333 - Cell and Molecular Biology. Viral, prokaryotic, and eukaryotic cell structure; DNA structure and replication; RNA and protein synthesis; control and gene expression. Structure and function of specific cell types. 4 credit hours (includes required laboratory).
• BIOL 422 - Forensic Biology. Principles of nuclear and mitochondrial DNA analysis, decomposition, autopsy, forensic databases, and bioterrorism. 4 credit hours (includes required laboratory).
• CHEM 462 - Molecular Bioinformatics. Provides experience in thecomputer analysis of DNA and protein sequences, interrogating gene bank databases, and predicting protein structures and functions. 4 credit hours (includes required laboratory).
• CHEM 463 - Molecular Biotechnology. Overview of modern biotechnology from a molecular perspective. 3 credit hours.
• CHEM 464 - Genomics. Molecular aspects of cellular genomes. 3 credit hours.
Chemistry courses prepare you how apply analytical chemistry to facts of legal significance, including analysis of hair, fibers, drugs, and explosives.
• CHEM 232 - Quantitative Analysis. Theory and practice of methods to quantitatively determine chemical compounds including equilibria, redox reactions, and spectrophotometry. 4 credit hours (includes required laboratory).
• CHEM 241/242 - Organic Chemistry I and II. Aliphatic and aromatic compounds of carbon; relationships between structure and reactivity. 4 credit hours.
• CHEM 361 - Principles of Biochemistry. Structure and properties of biomolecules; central principles of metabolism. 3 credit hours.
• CHEM 370 - Instrumental Analysis I. Introduction to instrumental methods, including gas and iquid chromotography, infrared, and fluorescence spectroscopy, and photometric methods. 4 credit hours (includes required laboratory).
Criminal Justice courses introduce you to the federal, state and local law enforcement.
• CJ 150 - The Criminal Justice System. Evaluation of formal institutions dealing with crime in Western culture; overview of major components of the criminal justice system. 3 credit hours.
• CJ 323 - Crime Scene Investigations. A survey of methods and techniques used in the scientific investigation of criminal offenses. 3 credit hours.
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Web2py supports the concept of components. Here we try explain what they are.
Consider the following complete web2py app, comprised of a controller (controllers/
def index():
return dict()
def auxiliary():
if form.accepts(request.vars): return "Hello %s" %
return form
and the following view for the "index" action (views/default/index.html):
{{extend 'layout.html'}}
<h1>Hello World</h1>
When visiting the URL "http://hostname/app/default/index", the "index" action is called and it is rendered by the "index.html" view. The view includes the component called "auxiliary" via the LOAD function. A component is just another web2py action.
There is a lot of "magic" that goes on in the LOAD function. First of all, the LOAD function generates a <div></div> and jQuery code to load the content of the "auxiliary" action into the DIV via AJAX. But this is not all. If the action auxiliary contains a form (as in this example) the form submission is intercepted by web2py so that the form is also submitted via AJAX. When the form is submitted, the response replaces the original component. In practice the component talks to the server without ever reloading the calling page and without any spacial programming effort other than using the LOAD function.
This is all transparent to the programmer. There can be multiple components per page and any web2py action can be used as a component, even if it has an associated view. The calling page can also pass parameters to the component and the server, LOAD(...,vars=dict()), and can give instructions to the calling page by passing JS instructions along with the response (not documented here).
The LOAD function allows a modular design for interactive web2py applications. Components can be distributed with their own models/views/controllers/static files packaged together using the web2py plugin mechanism.
a, b, args, and vars are used to build the URL URL(request.application,c=a,f=b,args=args,vars=vars)
if ajax=False the URL is called BEFORE the page is served
if ajax=True the URL LOAD just generates JS code to request the page via AJAX
if ajax_trap=True all forms in the content are captured and submitted via AJAX
ajax=True implies ajax_trap=True
ajax=False implies args and vars are ignored and request.args and request.vars are used.
| <urn:uuid:c696cb30-6125-434f-8201-3d7ae937a3c8> | 2 | 1.929688 | 0.057175 | en | 0.825476 | http://www.web2py.com/AlterEgo/default/show/252 |
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Impetigo: Symptoms and treatment
What is impetigo?
Impetigo is a highly contagious bacterial skin infection causing blisters and sores.
Impetigo mainly affects children, often on the face, especially around the nose and mouth, and sometimes on the arms or legs.
Picture of Impetigo
Bullous impetigo causes large fluid-filled blisters that are painless.
Non-bullous impetigo is the more contagious form of the condition causing sores that burst leaving a yellow-brown crust.
If the impetigo affects an otherwise healthy area of skin, it is called primary impetigo. Impetigo resulting from another skin condition is called secondary impetigo.
Causes of impetigo
The most common cause of impetigo is Staphylococcus aureus. However, another bacterial cause is the group A streptococcus. These bacteria lurk everywhere. It is easier for a child with an open wound or fresh scratch to contract impetigo. Other skin-related problems, such as eczema, body lice, insect bites, fungal or bacterial infections, and various forms of dermatitis can make a person susceptible to impetigo.
Most people get this highly infectious disease through physical contact with someone who has it, or from sharing the same clothes, bedding, towels, or other objects. The very nature of childhood, which includes much physical contact and large-group activities, makes children the primary victims and carriers of impetigo.
In extreme cases, the infection invades a deeper layer of skin and develops into ecthyma, a deeper form of the disease. Ecthyma forms small, pus-filled ulcers with a crust much darker and thicker than that of ordinary impetigo. Ecthyma can be very itchy, and scratching the irritated area spreads the infection quickly. Left untreated, the ulcers may cause permanent scars and pigment changes. The gravest potential complication of impetigo is post-streptococcal glomerulonephritis, a severe kidney disease that occurs following a streptococcal infection in about 2% to 5% of cases, mainly in children.
What are the symptoms of impetigo?
• A small patch of blisters that after a few hours break into red, moist areas that ooze or weep fluid; appears mainly on the face, but also on exposed areas of the arms and legs.
• In a few days, the formation of a golden or dark-yellow crust resembling grains of brown sugar occurs. The infection may continue to spread at the edges of the affected area or affect other skin areas.
Seek medical advice if:
You have sores or a rash that worsens or becomes more uncomfortable. Impetigo needs prompt medical attention, especially if accompanied by any of the following:
• Small, very itchy, pus-filled ulcers form, with a dark brown crust. This indicates ecthyma, an ulcerated form of impetigo that penetrates deep into the skin. If left untreated, it may cause scarring and permanent changes in pigmentation.
• Urine changes, body swelling, nausea, or headache develop. These could be signs of glomerulonephritis, a kidney disease caused by bacterial toxins.
Sores associated with impetigo may be mistaken for herpes, a viral infection. Impetigo spreads faster, never develops inside the mouth, and is rarely confined to one area of the body. If in doubt, seek medical advice for an accurate diagnosis.
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Health Care Reform:
Health Insurance & Affordable Care Act
Why the Jump in Health Insurance Premiums?
Hint: It's Not the Affordable Care Act
Cutting Your Health Insurance Costs
When the Affordable Care Act takes full effect in 2014, the health insurance game will change. But what can families paying more and more for job-based health insurance do next year?
It's possible that premiums may not go up as much next year as they did this year. But don't count on it.
"The fact of the matter is that over the longer term, premiums have gone up much faster than people's ability to afford them," Levitt says. "Premiums have gone up faster than workers' wages, faster than inflation, faster than the cost of other goods people buy. Nothing suggests this trend will change in future."
For now, Collins says, two specific populations can take meaningful action:
• States already have to offer health insurance plans that cover people with pre-exisiting conditions. "If you have a condition that excludes you from coverage or you need a reasonable premium, that is a place to apply," she says.
• If you're under age 26, find out if your parents have a policy that offers dependent coverage. "This is a group with high unemployment right now, and this is a really broad benefit," Collins says.
Levitt recommends that people access the web site, which offers a clear guide to buying health insurance.
"Plans can vary a lot in cost and coverage. Comparison shopping is the key," he says. "But it still isn't as easy as it should be, because you can still be excluded or charged more for underlying conditions. That won't change until 2014."
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WebRef Update: Featured Article: Health Lessons for Computer Professionals | WebReference
WebRef Update: Featured Article: Health Lessons for Computer Professionals
Health Lessons for Computer Professionals
Call it "geek-macho" - with the explosion of the information economy over the last few years, the longtime hacker ethic of no sleep, junk food and staring at a monitor for days on end has been adopted as a lifestyle by tens of thousands. Apocryphal stories abound of startup employees sleeping under their desks, and of promotional coffee mugs that state "You can sleep when you're dead." The goal is to work as hard as possible, and to demonstrate to your boss, your clients, and the guy in the next cubicle that you're going to do whatever it takes to get the job done. If that means that you've got to stay up for a week straight and strap yourself into wrist braces, well, then so be it.
But for all this "work harder longer" bluster, it's entirely likely that these work habits are actually counterproductive, in the short and long term. As a recent Industry Standard story pointed out, "the new economy may be in the hands of people incapable of operating heavy machinery." <www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/06/12/sleep.deprived.idg/index.html>
What does all this overwork result in? In the short term, sleep deprivation can drive your quality of work down, and can impact negatively on your decision making. Long term, you can be ruining your health, cutting your potential lifespan (or for the more capital-motivated readers, cutting your potential total number of wage-earning years). Numerous studies have documented the relationship between sleep deprivation and car accidents. If you're too tired to drive to the 7-11 safely, how good of a job can you be doing in writing a business plan, tracking down errors in your database or setting up a Web server?
Think the risks attributed to lack of sleep are overstated? Ok, how about RSI (repetitive stress injuries) or Carpal Tunnel syndrome? It's hard to get much typing done when your arms are numb, cramped or in pain. OSHA (the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration) studies suggest that "work-related musculoskeletal disorders account for more than 1/3rd of all occupational injuries and illnesses that are serious enough to result in days away from work." Although OSHA's recommendations for workplace ergonomic standards are not yet implemented, it's possible that employers could be held liable (at least to a degree) for their workers' RSI, and that employees can demand either compensation or a change in working conditions. So it's in both your and your boss' best interests to make sure you're not working yourself to the point of damage. <www.osha-slc.gov/ergonomics-standard/faq-overview.html>
So what can we do to take better care of ourselves? I say "we", because I'm including myself in the target audience of this article. I know as much as the next guy that I need more sleep, more exercise and a better diet. But sometimes I also lose sight of the big picture, and need to remind myself just how important it is to pay attention to all of these issues.
More Sleep
One of the first things to do is get more sleep. I know, I know, you're under deadline, you'll rest when you get vacation, there's not enough hours in the day and another pot of coffee would suit you just fine. I understand all of those excuses - I've used them all myself. Regardless of how convincing or snappy your excuses sound though, they don't change the facts - lack of sleep makes you less alert, less productive, more moody, and more accident prone. Doesn't sound like a model employee, does it?
The National Sleep Foundation, an non-profit research group, recently released the results of their "2000 Omnibus Sleep in America Poll." The findings, though unsurprising, were somewhat discouraging. Though health experts recommend 8 or more hours of sleep a night for adults to function properly, the omnibus poll found that "on average, adults sleep just under 7 hours during the work week," and that a full third of adults sleep only 6.5 or fewer hours a night. Why are people sleeping less than they should? Almost half of the adults surveyed stated that they "sleep less in order to accomplish more." <www.sleepfoundation.org/pressarchives/new_stats.html>
The NSF's also probed Americans' self-analysis of the effects of lack of sleep on their work performance. Again, the numbers are discouraging - 51% reported that sleepiness on the job "interferes with the amount of work they get done," 40% said the quality of their work suffers, 68% said that sleepiness interferes with their concentration and 66% said it "makes handling stress on the job more difficult." Almost 20% admitted that they make "occasional or frequent work errors due to sleepiness."
All of this adds up to more than enough reasons to get more sleep, both for your own sake, as well as for the sake of your job and quality of living. The occasional deadline crunch is inevitable - but nobody is especially effective after 72 straight hours on the job.
Next: RSI
This article originally appeared in the June 15, 2000 edition of the WebReference Update Newsletter.
Comments are welcome
Written by Eric Cook and
Revised: June 16, 2000
URL: http://webreference.com/new/health.html | <urn:uuid:7c563c45-ca67-4290-9e00-7b2e0e7f08f9> | 2 | 1.960938 | 0.19594 | en | 0.957569 | http://www.webreference.com/new/health.html |
Timor Leste - Dili Emergency Food Security Assessment, September 2007
The Emergency Food Security Assessment’s (EFSA) purpose is to assess the current food security situation in Dili, in different livelihood groups and geographical locations, specifically in IDP camps and in the Aldeias , in terms of food availability, access and usage.The assesment covers 18 months after the shock events and determines how the different livelihood groups are coping with the situation, while estimating the number of food insecure people. | <urn:uuid:238e9333-b23c-4da9-8b39-4b2ec85c5eb7> | 2 | 2.25 | 0.151779 | en | 0.908923 | http://www.wfp.org/content/timor-leste-dili-emergency-food-security-assessment-september-2007 |
A "loser pays" update to the proposed Shield Act in America would make patent trolls financially liable for all legal costs in unsuccessful lawsuits.
The revised version of the backronym-tastic Saving High-Tech Innovators from Egregious Legal Disputes bill was introduced by its original sponsors, representatives Jason Chaffetz and Peter DeFazio. It aims to discourage "frivolous" lawsuits from those holding patents but not actually creating anything with them.
"Patent trolls add no economic benefit to our nation," said Chaffetz speaking at a press conference. "They have captured part of the system, and they're exploiting it for their own financial gain. They're hampering the innovation that our country deserves. Literally every segment of our society's business is being attacked by these patent trolls."
According to the updated version of the bill, defendants would be allowed to file a motion to have the plaintiff ruled a patent troll. If successful the legal action could still go ahead but with the caveat that if the patent holder was unsuccessful they would be liable for all legal costs -- in some cases, millions of dollars.
Obviously creating a legal definition of a patent troll is problematic and the bill appears to acknowledge that difficulty, opting to define exemptions (i.e. things that are not patent trolls) instead:
1) ORIGINAL INVENTOR -- Such party is the inventor, a joint inventor, or in the case of a patent filed by and awarded to an assignee of the original inventor or joint inventor, the original assignee of the patent.
2) EXPLOITATION OF THE PATENT -- Such party can provide documentation to the court of substantial investment made by such party in the exploitation of the patent through production or sale of an item covered by the patent.
3) UNIVERSITY OR TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER ORGANIZATION -- Such party is (A) an institution of higher education (as that term is defined in section 101 of the Higher Education Act of 1965 (20 USC 1001); or (B) a technology transfer organization whose primary purpose is to facilitate the commercialization of technology developed by one or more institutions of higher education.
In an interview with Ars Technica Peter DeFazio noted: "If [the plaintiff] comes up as a non-practicing entity, or a troll, under these definitions, then they know if they go forward, they're on the hook."
Presumably anyone not covered under the above would be considered fair game, although the wording would still leave plenty of room for argument (and billable hours) in the "Is this a case of patent trolling?" stage before the case itself was even underway.
But despite the fact that patent trolling has been repeatedly called out for criticism, recently by Barack Obama, -- a site set up to enable interested parties to track legislation through the US system -- gives the Shield Act just a one percent chance of being enacted.
Don't miss: Giant Nasa spider robots could 3D print lunar base using microwaves
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Ask a Doctor: Narrowed aorta one of more common heart conditions in babies
1:57 PM, Apr. 19, 2013 | Comments
Dr. Uzoma Okorie
Dr. Uzoma Okorie
• Filed Under
Question: My baby's doctor told me my child has coarctation of the aorta. What does that mean?
Answer: Aortic coarctation is a narrowing of part of the aorta, the major artery leading out of the heart. This condition is a type of birth defect and is actually one of the more common heart conditions present at birth.
A narrowed aorta can be difficult to diagnose sometimes because it does not always cause symptoms, and babies can't tell you what they are feeling. When there are symptoms, they vary widely, depending on how much blood can flow through the artery.
Many newborns with this problem will have symptoms in the first few days of life. Common symptoms in newborns include poor feeding, rapid breathing, shortness of breath, decreased responsiveness, and cold legs and feet.
In mild cases, symptoms may not develop until the child has reached adolescence. In such cases the most common sign is a murmur or hypertension often noted during a medical visit. Less common signs include chest pain, dizziness or fainting, cramping pain in the legs during exercise, poor growth, headaches or shortness of breath.
Most newborns with symptoms must have heart surgery as soon as possible after birth. Children who are diagnosed when they are older may also need surgery, but because the symptoms are usually not as severe, more time can be taken to plan for surgery.
When the diagnosis is made in an older child, we can often perform a non-surgical approach. This is similar to other interventional heart procedures performed on adults in a cardiac catheterization laboratory. In this case, an interventional pediatric cardiologist routes a tiny balloon to the site of the blockage, pumps up the balloon and places a stent to hold the artery open.
While surgery during infancy remains the gold standard for treating this condition, stents are gaining in popularity as we gain experience in using them. Regardless of which procedure is used, symptoms usually improve quickly and the outcomes with timely care are generally excellent.
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Skip to definition.
Noun: handbag 'hand,bag
1. A container used for carrying money and small personal items or accessories (especially by women)
"she reached into her handbag and found a comb";
- bag, pocketbook, purse
Verb: handbag (handbagged,handbagging) 'hand,bag
Usage: UK
1. (informal, of a woman) make a fierce verbal attack on someone
"Thatcher's domineering style was to polarize issues and trash all opponents, as she handbagged her way through the 1980s"
Derived forms: handbagged, handbagging, handbags
Type of: container
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West Virginians on D-Day
Charleston Sunday Gazette Mail
June 6, 1999
Medal of Honor escapes Marion man's D-Day feat
By Greg Stone
He lies in a Marion County cemetery, hundreds of miles from Arlington.
Many of the men who worked with him in the Marion coal mines didn't even know he had fought in World War II. He was once even left out of a veterans' appreciation day at the mine.
"He never marched in parades or wore his medals or anything," recalls Marion County Commissioner Jim Sago, who as a kid knew him.
But pick up virtually any history book on the D-Day invasion of Normandy, France - 55 years ago today - and you'll find that Harrison Summers of Rivesville indeed fought. To say he simply fought, in fact, in what may be the 20th century's most pivotal military operation, rates as the height of understatement.
Summers performed one of the all- time remarkable war feats that day, single-handedly killing 31 Germans. With only a little help from two other squad members, the paratrooper either killed or forced to flee another 70 or so other German soldiers, who were holed up in a series of buildings near the Normandy coast.
In his book "The Victors - Eisenhower and his Boys: The Men of World War II," historian Stephen Ambrose succinctly sums up Summers' place - or unfortunate lack thereof - in history.
Summers was nominated, but not very vigorously, for the Medal of Honor by battalion commander Lt. Col. Patrick Cassidy, who later became a three-star general. The paperwork got lost.
After his death from lung cancer in 1983, Summers' fellow members of the 101st Airborne Division attempted unsuccessfully to posthumously award him the country's highest military honor.
Military officials seemed uninterested in dealing with such a long-ago case.
"Summers is a legend with American paratroopers nonetheless, the Sergeant York of World War II," Ambrose writes. "His story has too much John Wayne/Hollywood in it to be believed, except that more than 10 men saw and reported his exploits."
There are any number of reasons for Summers not receiving the medal. The two men willing to help Summers in that mad dash, Pvt. William Burt and Pvt. John Camien, were unavailable by 1983 to corroborate the events.
Burt was killed in Normandy. Camien survived the war but died before Summers.
Michigan author and former paratrooper George Koskimaki, who has written three books on World War II, points out that two other soldiers from Summers' 502nd regiment received the medal.
Perhaps the military brass were reluctant to bestow the same honor on a third member, he says.
Summers' 51-year-old son Richard, who works for the federal Department of Health and Human Services in Lorton, Va., wonders if his father's West Virginia heritage had anything to do with it.
"Yeah, it makes you think," he .said. "When you're from a poor state... "
The sheer weight of government bureaucracy never helps, Richard Summers said.
One thing's for sure: Harrison Summers possessed no interest in lobbying for the honor.
"He was just quiet," recalls his son. "He didn't really want to talk about it. That was in the past."
'It was all kind of crazy'
Staff Sgt. Roy Nickrent, the operations sergeant in Summers' battalion, provides some indication of the group's minds that day.
Nickrent and Summers had earlier walked through the town of Ste.-Mere-Eglise, where American paratroopers were hanging in trees, shot dead before they hit the ground.
"One of my best friends was hanging in a tree," said Nickrent, 79, a retired police officer in Saybrook, Ill. "He had been burned up by a flame thrower. Didn't even have a chance to get his chute off."
Sgt. Summers didn't hesitate, then, to storm the series of German artillery barracks at nearby St.-Martin-de-Varreville. These were massively thick stone houses which served as French residences before the Nazi occupation.
He stormed the first barracks, hoping his 15 men would follow suit.
None did.
Still, he kicked in the door and sprayed the place with his tommy gun, killing four soldiers and forcing others out the back door.
Inspired, Burt joined him in supplying cover fire, as a zigzagging Summers - avoiding fire - reached another house and killed six more Germans.
A captain offered to help Summers take the next house. Just then a bullet tore through him.
Another house, another six enemies killed. Summers turned the prisoners over to his men.
Why are you doing this? Camien asked Summers.
"I can't tell you," he replied.
"What about the others?" asked Camien.
"They don't seem to want to fight," Summers said, "and I can't make them So I've got to finish it."
"OK," said Camien. "I'm with you."
Summers and Camien moved from building to building, taking turns covering each other. Burt chipped in with his machine gun to kill more Germans.
With two buildings left, "Summers charged the first and kicked the door open," Ambrose writes, "to see the most improbable sight. Fifteen German artillerymen were seated at mess tables eating breakfast. Summers never paused; he shot them down at the tables."
Summers told Nickrent later that some of the Germans, inexplicably, kept right on eating when he kicked in the door.
Burt and Nickrent set the roof of the last building ablaze with tracer bullets and bazooka fire. Germans who sprinted out in the open field were easy targets.
"The field was just littered with the dead ones," Nickrent said.
"It's a pity to see it, but that's the way war was."
After five hours of combat, Summers needed a rest. How did he feel, someone asked.
"Not too good. It was all kind of crazy. I'm sure I'll never do anything like that again."
Nickrent liked and respected Summers.
"He was a coal miner and he didn't mind telling you that," he said. "He was a hard-working guy, an honest man. We were pretty close."
Nevertheless, Nickrent offers a simple assessment of Summers' heroism.
"He just lost his mind, lost his reasoning. He didn't care if he got killed or not, he was going to take some with him."
Proving the case
Accounts of these events also appear in L.S.A. Marshall's "Night Drop: The American Airborne Invasion of Normandy," and "Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of the 101st Airborne" by Leonard Rapport and Arthur Northwood.
Marshall worked as the Army's chief historian. After interviewing the paratroopers within weeks of the Normandy invasion, Marshall tore up Summers' Distinguished Service Cross and wrote the Medal of Honor nomination.
Still, the honor never came. Even Nickrent can't honestly say he saw Summers enter each house. His view was blocked by the corners of the houses themselves, he said.
An NBC crew flew Nickrent to Normandy years ago for a piece on Summers' inability to win the medal.
He disappointed them by not being able to verify Summers' bravery.
Allen Barham of Monroe, La., who served as a platoon leader in Summers' battalion, places much of the blame on Cassidy. He doesn't think Cassidy believed the men who gave statements that day.
"He wasn't one of my favorite people," Barham says of Cassidy. "As far as I'm concerned, I think Summers is as well-qualified as Alvin York."
'Good shoulders'
Summers did receive a battlefield commission to lieutenant and a Distinguished Service Cross. He also earned a Purple Heart for serious wounds suffered in Holland.
He came back to Marion County after the war and worked as a coal miner and later a mine inspector.
He earned a reputation as a steadying influence around mine disasters, according to a 1983 newspaper story.
Many people in Rivesville had no idea of Summers' military past.
"He was a gentle man," says Sago, who talked to him some in Rivesville.
"You'd never think speaking to him or observing his behavior that he was in such a violent situation."
Koskimaki got to know Summers at 101st Airborne reunions. Summers, in a rare moment of reflection, retraced the moves he made that day in 1944 for one of Koskimaki's books.
Summers wasn't a particularly large man, standing just under 6 feet tall. "But he had good shoulders on him," Koskimaki recalls.
Richard Summers knows a thing or two about war himself. He served a year as an infantryman in Vietnam and worked as a Washington, D.C., policeman.
He has seen enough carnage to avoid World War II movies such as "Saving Private Ryan," which follows a squad from Normandy inland.
"I don't like all the blood-and-guts stuff," he said. "I'm more into things happy."
Richard Summers remembers his dad fondly.
"He didn't take any stuff but, you know, he was very good to me. I wasn't always the best child... We had our disagreements."
It's still not too late to honor him, he says. President Clinton has awarded other soldiers the medal long after their service.
"It would be nice if they would award him the Medal of Honor, because he deserved it, plain and simple."
Military and Wartime | <urn:uuid:601c36f4-a6d0-4824-8af3-15ac12e724df> | 2 | 1.9375 | 0.03713 | en | 0.983607 | http://www.wvculture.org/HiStory/military/normandy04.html |
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If you're into downloading videos, you might find yourself in a wide array of videos that you can run on your personal computer. These video types can depend on different factors, and one of these factors could be the operating system that you are using. Some videos don't run on certain operating system due to its file type, unless you can be able to look for a program or a video player that can be able to play these types of videos. One of the earliest forms of video files is called as the xvideo.
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Science and Technology
Intel Wi-Fi Provides 6 Mbps Over 100 km
March 2008
Already, Intel has installed and tested the hardware in India, Panama, Vietnam, and South Africa. Later this year, the company will sell the device in India, with a target price below $500. The point-to-point technology will require two nodes, which could provide "full back-end infrastructure" for less than $1,000, Galinovsky says.
One node is usually installed at the edge of an urban area, wired to a local-area network cable, he explains. Using a directional antenna, the device shoots data to a receiving antenna as far as 60 miles away. Any farther away, and the system encounters problems due to the curvature of the earth. Practically, most links will be set up less than 30 miles away from one another. Once a node is installed in a village, the connection can be dispersed using standard cables and wireless routers, Galinovsky says.
There is nothing particularly innovative in the antenna technology and the router hardware, he says. The trick, he explains, comes in the software that the radios use to communicate with each other. "If you take standard Wi-Fi and focus it," Galinovsky says, "you can't get past a few kilometers." The reason is that one radio will send out data and wait for an acknowledgment from the other radio that the data was received. If the transmitting radio doesn't receive the acknowledgment in a certain amount of time, it will assume that the data was lost, and it will resend it.
Intel's RCP platform rewrites the communication rules of Wi-Fi radios. Galinvosky explains that the software creates specific time slots in which each of the two radios listens and talks, so there's no extra data being sent confirming transmissions. "We're not taking up all the bandwidth waiting for acknowledgments," he says. Since there is an inherent trade-off between the amount of available bandwidth and the distance that a signal can travel, the more bandwidth is available, the farther a signal can travel. (See a video with a technical explanation of the RCP here.)
Importantly, the devices require relatively little power. Running two or three radios in a link, Galinvosky says, requires about five to six watts. This makes it possible to power the radios using solar energy.
The Intel project and forthcoming product "sound like a huge step forward" in terms of usable bandwidth over long-range lengths, says Deborah Estrin, professor of computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Estrin develops technology for sensor networks in remote areas that monitor seismic activity, among other things. She says that these sensors are spread out over large areas and need to transmit large amounts of data. Previous low-power, inexpensive wireless communication technologies could only stretch a few kilometers, she says. "What's important is that Intel is getting much longer distances."
Galinvosky says that the RCP is alluring to markets beyond India. "We're seeing a lot of interest in the industry," he says. "Every time we talk about this, they say, 'We need this yesterday.'"
Science and Technology
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Re: Methodological Naturalism
Paul A. Nelson (
Wed, 25 Mar 1998 16:02:18 -0600 (CST)
Allan Harvey wrote, responding to Phil Johnson:
>"By MN we know that gravity keeps the planets in their orbits."
Really? Methodological naturalism (MN) is conspicuously absent
from Newton's _Principia_, and I couldn't find any mention of it in
the physics textbooks on my office shelves. MN is front and center,
however, in nearly every textbook I own on evolutionary theory.
Hypotheses of intelligent design (ID) are excluded categorically as
"unscientific." Not false. ID is "unscientific."
Allan also wrote:
>"By MN we know that the Sun condensed gravitationally billions of years
>ago from nebulous material and eventually began to burn by nuclear fusion."
This is more interesting as a counterexample to Phil's thesis.
But consider the following.
Suppose a scientist doubted the standard theory of stellar evolution.
Perhaps he decides that, for instance, the so-called "collapse problem"
(Larson 1978) is unlikely to be solved by any natural mechanism.
So he proposes that, on the grounds of the available evidence, stars
are intelligently-designed, or created, objects.
What do you suppose his chances are for publication at any of the
major astrophysics or astronomy journals?
I'd say his chances are nil. Not because of the evidence, however.
In a curious fashion all empirical considerations will prove to
be irrelevant. Rather, he will run afoul of MN. In the case
of theories of *origins*, MN is all-important, and all-governing.
As Stephen Brush (1990) observes:
Explanation is...a major function of theories. As Lyttleton
(1968, p. 5) points out, scientists "cannot really quite relax"
until they are assured that "the laws of science are sufficiently
comprehensive to allow the solar system to happen" -- we
demand that the origin of the solar system be explained
without invoking any supernatural events.
Brush's demand -- a clear statement of MN -- is philosophical. The
demand is made before consideration of any evidence, and thus
cannot be overturned by the evidence. In this sense MN is pernicious
to any science seeking the truth without fetters.
Paul Nelson
Brush, Stephen. 1990. Theories of the origin of the solar system
1956-1985. _Reviews of Modern Physics_ 62:43-112.
Larson, R.B. 1978. Collapse Dynamics and Collapse Models.
In _The Origin of the Solar System_, ed. S.F. Dermott
(New York: John Wiley & Sons), pp. 237-254. | <urn:uuid:a1eb517a-3d14-4438-9866-f6272d604cb9> | 2 | 2.078125 | 0.068727 | en | 0.886143 | http://www2.asa3.org/archive/asa/199803/0248.html |
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Pre 1933 Gold Coins
1927.20.p63.37LGThese gold coins have a special value because they survived President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1933 “Gold Confiscation Law ” that prohibited the private ownership of gold. Americans were ordered to surrender their gold coins under threat of imprisonment, and were given paper money for the same value.
Many of these pre 1933 gold coins remained in private collections, and usually trade at a higher price than the market price of their gold value.
Numismatic coins, minted by the US from 1795 through 1933, are considered a good investment opportunity, not only for its gold value, their historical meaning, and their relative scarcity for having survived the 1933 gold confiscation, and for the art of their design.
The US produced in a variety of denominations and weights. The “eagle” was the standard denomination with a $10 face value and an eagle on the reverse. The “half-eagle” was five dollars, a “quarter eagle”, $2.50, and a “double eagle” was introduced after the California gold rush, with a $20 face value.
What about International gold coins minted before 1933?
These rare coins provide the same economic value as Bullion bars and bullion coins, and were not included in the confiscation law. Usually these gold coins are priced a bit higher than bullion coins and are considered as collectible items. They were minted for use as currency in many countries and their historical value is a premium many buyers prefer over bullion or contemporary coins.
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Tuesday, November 01, 2005
Link Preface:
"The Failure of Global Guerrillaism: Democracies Withstand Economic Pain" by Dan of tdaxp
"Cascading System Failure" and " State Failure 101" by John Robb
"Network Theory with an Emphasis on al Qaeda" and " Emergence" by Dr. Von
"The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation" by William Lind, Keith Nightengale, John F. Schmitt , Joseph W. Sutton ,Gary I. Wilson
"Thomas P.M. Barnett: Deleted Scenes" and " The Virtuous Circle on Security: The Slippery Slope to Resiliency" by Dr. Barnett
"Reviewing the Deleted Scene on System Perturbation Part II." and "Rules, Rule-Sets And Social Systems" by Zenpundit
The Sling and The Stone: On War in The 21st Century by Thomas X. Hammes
State-Building:Governance and world order in the 21st Century by Francis Fukuyama
The hydra-like insurgency in Iraq has drawn attention to the political conundrum faced by state authorities when facing unconventional opponents. Whether they come in the form of traditional guerillas, transnational terrorist networks and even looser " leaderless resistance" movements that attract superempowered individuals, State actors often face the damned if you do, damned if you don't cycle of reaction and retaliation. Drifting into a seemingly permanent loss of initiative, the state allows the non-state actors to " write the script" in the political and moral dimensions of the conflict, creating strategic losses even out of tactical and operational victories.
This has led some military theorists of the 4GW school to make particularly gloomy forecasts in regard to not only Iraq, but toward all "state-building" interventions and even the long-term stability of the states of the Core. 4GW and "Open-Source " warfare of Global Guerillaism are inarguably very effective and these methods of warfare, when a State reacts conventionally and with political ineptitude, place the very legitimacy of the state itself is in jeopardy.
It would be a grave mistake however to conclude that these forms of warfare represent a magic anti-state bullet. They do not. 4GW forces can lose wars and have. Much of the current track record of 4GW success rests primarily upon the recurring failure of their state opponents to deliberately maximize their existing advantages and secondarily to develop and employ countervailing tactics. In other words, these represent failures of strategic vision on the part of statesmen and commanders who get caught up in the small-picture dynamics of the scenario rather than directing their attention to shaping the scenario itself. Some quotations to keep in mind here:
" Super-empowered individuals may rule vertical scenarios, but nation-states still rule horizontal scenarios. "
Thomas P.M. Barnett
" ...we must learn to function as a practical network"
" History has shown our fourth-generation opponents know how to fight us. Fortunately, it has also shown us how a democracy can defeat such an enemy. The British experience in Malaya, Kenya, Aden and Borneo all show that an integrated, coordinated, interagency approach can win the war of ideas rather than just winning in the field"
Thomas X. Hammes
Too often statesmen fail to mobilize the overarching panoply of resources at the state's disposal in diplomacy, intelligence, law, economics and politics to work in sync with military operations to close off all possible options for 4GW opponents. Or they crumble in the face of relatively minor damage, effectively abdicating their position. The reason for either scenario amounts to insufficient State Resiliency, a crucial element for surviving and prevailing during the stress imposed by wartime. Resilience may not guarantee victory in the war but it certainly improves the chances and imposes far higher costs on the opponent.
State Resilience, as the term implies is a state having the quality of adapting and continuing to function despite severe trauma or losses. When under attack, Non-resilient States lash out stupidly, retreat or collapse. Resilient States adjust and hit back from an unexpected direction. The term indicates a fusion of political will with executive competence and material means.
Nation-states are at root simply very large, very complex, networks with the capacity to determine the rule-sets that govern the behavior of all the smaller, internal, subnetworks they contain or the external networks with which they come in to contact. The greater the legitimacy of the state, the less frequently it need employ physical force to assure compliance. with legitimacy, the state's rule-sets exude enough moral authority and secure the nonzero sum outcomes that win voluntary obedience. Legitimacy in turn is secured when the governed implicitly recognize in their leadership a reflection of the deepest of their societal values.
A state whose leaders exemplify a nation's creed and demonstrate courage or intelligence can find men who will march for them to the Gates of Hell. A great empire, governed by hypocrites and thieves, will dissolve into mist as we discovered in 1991. No legitimacy, no resilience. No resilience, no state.
Legitimacy is often conferred by democratic elections, though not always. The Weimar Republic had one of Europe's most liberal and democratic constitutions in the interwar period but a majority of Germans decisively rejected liberal and democratic values. Thus, Weimar crumbled in the face of organized mob violence, implied threats and elite betrayal. Imperial Japan was oligarchic and authoritarian and grew moreso during the course of WWII but had Americans landed on Honshu as they did at Normandy then oppressed Japanese civilians would have marched off to their collective doom, shouting " Banzai!". Japan was as resilient in defeat as most nations only are in moments of victory because the Japanese imagined their Emperor as the living embodiment of Japan.
Against secure State Resiliency, a 4GW movement can make no headway, unless perhaps it would be to represent themselves as more truly " authentic" agents of society than the state itself. This is in fact the card that Osama bin Laden and radical Salafis and Deobandis seek to play in the Arab-Muslim world. It is a claim that has traction because so many regimes in that region of the world are unrepresentative, incompetent and deeply corrupt -in fact the degraded nature of these governments fostered the emergence of the terror networks dedicated to their destruction. Where the rulers are both self-confidently ruthless and are reflecting some degree of popular values of their own, usually nationalism, then the appeal of Islamism is muted.
Broadband connectivity style State-building is a positive endeavor, a useful prophylactic in weak States before trouble begins and a vital support where resilient states are effectively combatting 4GW attackers. Resiliency however is critical to state survival - it is the foundation that will support the range of State-building programs and will be reinforced by them. Nurturing resiliency should be the pivotal aspect of any System Administration intervention.
Without resiliency, State-building is nothing more than the creation of an empty suit.
Extremely good post. Very thought-provoking, and I will try to respond with a worth-while comment soon.
In the meantime, what are the major differences between deobandians and salafis? You've addressed this before (The Taliban were D, Wahabis are S, etc), but what are the doctrinal differences?
Dan tdaxp
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Well the deleted post was certainly a strange one....
Hi Dan,
Collounsbury would be beter placed to answer your question than me but here's my understanding.
Wahabbis adhere to a form of Sunni Salafism originating in Saudi Arabia in the 1700's. It was originally quite hostile to the form of Salafism emnating from Egypt's al-Azhar (the first 19th century Islamists Mohammed Abdub and al-Afghani were modernizers). Even as late as the 1920's and 1930's, Saudi Ikhwan loathed the Egyptians. This has changed as the Qutbist Salafis fled Nasser's repression in the 1960's and settled in KSA universities ( Bin Laden was taught by Qutb's brother) radicalizing the already xenophobic Wahabbi fringe.
Deobandis are a school of thought from Northern India similar to Arab Salafis in that they seek to find purer, older Islam without innovations. Like the Islamists they were anti-Western from the start and emphasized the obligation of jihad against infidels and Shiites. There are some differences of opinion though with Salafis over what Islamic practices and beliefs are " truer" than others but close enough that the relations between KSA and the Taliban were quite warm. If anything, Pakistan Deobandis are more reactionary and anti-modern than their Saudi counterparts.
I'd recommend checking out Gilles Keppel on this one for fine points.
One thing you may want to consider is that autocracies aren't a problem for us until they direct internal anger at their rule outward towards us.
Well, Mark, this is a very interesting post, and I wonder if this was the big project you were promising...
I have some problems with your method -- or maybe, they are questions -- but I'm a little too exhausted at the moment to force myself to explicate, and I'm not sure I have the words/terminology I need. I'll have to think about it.
In general, though, I'm a little troubled by the focus on "the State" which largely ingores the constituency of that state. If a state is a system (as it surely is), then any discussion of states fighting 4GW opponents would need to take a hard look at the constitution of that state, or the nodes and connections which make up that system. Resiliency (as I understand it) is not a top-down undertaking (or not only a top-down accomplishment).
Your post has me thinking that we are approaching the vs. 4GW question all wrong. Perhaps the 4GW opponent is so threatening, and often successful, because it doesn't quite need the "State." That is, if my fingertip-feeling is correct, then the network we call "The State" is one which is not a scale-free network (to borrow Vonny's conceptualization of it): for a "state" to be recognizable, it must be definable, or have definition, and when we consider or conceptualize a state, we tend to think of a very organized -- perhaps a rigid - entity. To borrow from Vonny again, consider the removal of one branch of government, or of the Constitution, and then ask if the system would hold. For another example, Vonny's description of a hierarchical, "tree branch" system of government strikes me as being a description of virtually every state (especially, every democratic state) in existence. In America, the Constitution of the U.S. is the trunk, and various branches rise from it to form the three branches of the federal government and also the states and their state government agencies, etc.
If resiliency is as Vonny described it, then a truly resilient state would need to be a scale-free network.
I don't think the ideas I've skimmed over here are antithetical to the ideas in your post. However, I do believe that the constant focus on "the State" as the primary actor which will defeat 4GW foes introduces too much rigidity, dooming dreams of a truly resilient and efficient entity. It ignores the people, the constituency of that entity, and thus ignores the variety and, well, cosmopolitan nature of the system: a necessary bit of chaos in a system which wants to be resilient (if only "the State" will let it.)
I think it's good to dream that a charismatic leader or set of leaders might pull all the threads together --
-- but I think it is a dream that can come true only in short (and thus, largely ineffective) bursts in a democratic nation or with great vitality but also long-term inefficiency via a dictatorial mania-driven program. See again my post on Flu(n)x: Your idea of "a nation's creed" implies a fantasy homogeneity at worst; at best, it implies strength where one or few common core values will only produce a weak national unity, in most cases. (The wish for survival of the self, however, is quite strong, and might work all by itself, under the right circumstances.) In fact, I think that such a formation around one person or a group is the very opposite of resiliency, since that one human node holds all together.
Of course, these musings have inspired many practical ideas about true democratic resiliency against a 4GW foe, but as I said, I'm a little too exhausted at the moment to go further!
Hi Curtis,
No, the big project is still on the way. Hopefully I can announce it tomorrow or Friday.
I too am really beat so these will be short points:
The state was the focus of my post but I am not implying an either/or situation.
You are right to look at the State's constitution.
Not all networks are scale free and I think formal state constitutional structures are not.
On the other hand, scale free networks of a professional, social and political nature constantly form within government institutions. The function and form of the State institutional structure would also tend to " shape" the growth of such networks to an extent even as these networks emerge to remediate the state's own functional shortcomings.
The State does not have to be the only actor engaged in defeating a 4GW opponent but if it isn't at least primus inter pares it risks vanishing altogether regardless if the 4GW opponent is defeated.
My gut is telling me that, properly speaking, there is no state. What we call "the state" is merely our description of the actors within it: the larger system/network formed by all the interactions of the actors. "State" is shorthand for that. To the degree that this "state" is not scale-free, or is rigid or functions through linear paths, the interactions of those within it are also rigid, linear, unable to adapt to new parameters -- at least, unable to adapt without also causing a change in the whole, or the "state."
Legitimacy is similarly at the heart of the Weberian bureaucratic state. We could define a state's response to 4GW in bureaucratic terms as primarily a problem of coordination -- devising and executing responses across a wide range of dimensions -- and organizational adaptivity. I'm not sure where thinking about the state as a network-of-networks gets you beyond what Weber would provide. Certainly network analysis is helpful in looking at specific spaces -- issue areas or action areas. But do we gain any distinctive insights about legitimacy when we view the state as some sort of amalgamation or aggregation of networks? Or when you're identifying legitimacy as a key characteristic of resiliency are you highlighting the interpenetration of the state with civil society through shared networks of elites?
NO!!! Just the opposite! A scale-free network is very vulnerable to an "intelligent attack" A scale free network collapses very quickly when < 5% of its best connected nodes are disabled/disrupted.
We know how to attack a scale-free network -- Saddam's Iraq, but we are not effective in fighting a distributed network -- post-Saddam insurgency. Which is more resilient?
Those of you that are "in love" with scale-free networks need to read more than one book on networks!
I just visited Valdis' site - I'll have to go back and review it in detail but it is certainly information-rich on network theory and its applications -
Dr. Von if you are reading this today, you in particular should take a look
I'll certainly look at Valdis's site, and he is absolutely correct about scale-free networks being greatly affected if small numbers of the larger hubs are taken out. But keep in mind that something like the Iraq network, where Saddam was THE main hub and was removed, does not entirely collapse because there are smaller nodes (i.e. with few connections to other members of the network) still out there on the periphery of the network, as we learned in the insurgency.
A more resilient network is a modified version of a purely scale-free network, and tht is one with modularity, where subgroups in the network do their own thing but have some connectivity with other subgroups (along the lines of a corporate structure, where various divisions specialize on different jobs...if one division goes down, the others have a higher degree of independence and may not be affected, even though they all exist as members of the larger network). Perhaps this is what Curtis had in mind.
I'll take a look at Valdis' site, even though I am not "in love" with scale-free networks.
Vonny is tracking my mind.
Actually, I've been thinking of attractors, and the ability of systems to adapt or change attractors without being utterly changed or destroyed -- with the idea that "strangely attracting" systems would be more resilient than systems which have fixed point or limit cycle attractors. (Here of course I am separating the concepts stability and resiliency to get a better look at it.) I'm not altogether certain (am even doubtful) that the term "networks" will be sufficent for describing democratic "states" -- perhaps we should be thinking in terms of complex systems rather than complex networks.
And of course the idea of a pure "scale free" network doesn't fit neatly with the idea of scaling and self-similarity for the network of nodes; but the idea of scale-free networks Valdis seems to hold assumes a small set of "best connected nodes" -- which in turn implies a scale. (Best connected node, better connected nodes, connected nodes, less connected nodes.) So modularity might be considered for scale-free networks, in which such a scalng becomes less significant: an attack on one or many of those nodes doesn't upset the operation of the others.
Valdis' scale seems to imply a state with a few fixed-point attractors or a cyclical attractors -- i.e., like an electrical grid, activity flows through a set of major hubs and, between the hubs, an enclosed and cyclical pathway. Even the "less connected" nodes in such a system nonetheless depend on those major nodes and pathways.
But, you know, I'm no expert.
I'm late to the party, but this post is making me want to go back and look at the 90s counterinsurgency work by the Egyptian government, or its ongoing low-level war in the Sinai.
Hey Curtis,
From an earlier comment you wrote:
No, the continuity of new actors over time being required to network in exactly ( or substantially) the same way is the state, not the actors themselves. The difference between patrimonial medievalism and constitutional nation-state forms.
Nadezhda wrote:
Always glad to have you commenting here Nad - very insightful. Yes my use of legitimacy - admittedly a slippery concept but one that defines a real characteristic - hews more to the latter.
Hi Prak !
How's the Arabic training going ? You could probably add something to Dan's Salafi/Deobandi question.
If i recall, the Egyptian response in terms of CI was ramped up after the major tourist attack ( Karnak?)
I read the other day that the U.S. Army has only recently rebuilt its CI programs *after* the invasion of Iraq. Great for future soldiers but right now Majors LTC and Colonels are trying to ad hoc train troops in the field in Iraq.
The big attack was the machine gunning of several dozen Swiss tourists at the Hatshepsut temple in Luxor, I believe.
As for doctrinal differences between salafism and Deobandism, I think that Deobandism is actually a subset of salafism. A regional variant, if you will, which reflects the culture of the Indian subculture as well as the extreme views of Mawdudi, the school's founder and ongoing inspiration. I would be hard-pressed, however, to go into details--suffice it to say that Deobandis are extremist though not necessarily violent.
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Chart of the day
Posted: 12 September 2012 in Uncategorized
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John Quiggin set out to determine whether or not the white working-class in the United States has abandoned the Democrats in favor of the Republican Party (by looking at the Republican voting base in 2008).
The pie chart above summarizes his findings:
the biggest group in the Republican voting base, and the group with which they do best is that of middle/high income whites without college degrees (the percentage after the group name gives the Republican share of the vote for that group). There’s nothing surprising in this, since all three variables are correlated with Republican voting. It’s the practice of calling this group “working class” that causes the confusion.
So, as it turns out, the white working-class is split pretty evenly between the two parties.*
To defend the “white working class problem” thesis, you might argue that the Dems, as the less rightwing party, ought to do better than a 50-50 split among this group if they were voting in line with their own economic interests, and obviously the politics of race and culture are playing a significant role here. But that would require a much more explicitly redistributionist position than the Dems have taken for a long time. The most obvious illustration is Obama’s determination to keep the Bush income tax cuts for the first $250 000 a year of income, a policy that greatly benefits the middle class and the rich, but does little or nothing for those with less than $40 000 a year, whose income is taxed mainly through the payroll tax. Add to that the fact that most politicians of both parties are millionaires and you can see why working class voters aren’t filled with enthusiasm for the Dems.
*Quiggin uses an income-based definition of the working-class, as having incomes less than $40,000.
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Last modified on 12 August 2013, at 00:42
From the French suffix -ade, as in promenade; adopted by other languages, as seen in English blockade.
1. (verbal suffix) -adi notable duration of an action
Example: danci (to dance), dancadi (to keep on dancing; to dance on)
2. (nominal suffix with verbal root) -ado noun of an action
Example: danci (to dance), danco (a dance), dancado (dancing)
3. (nominal suffix with nominal root) -ado simple action of the verb without connotation of duration
Example: krono (a crown), kroni (to crown), kronado (a coronation)
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March 2, 2015
The Security Mindset and "Harmless Failures"
Bruce Schneier has an interesting new essay about how security people see the world. Here’s a sample:
Security requires a particular mindset. Security professionals – at least the good ones – see the world differently. They can’t walk into a store without noticing how they might shoplift. They can’t use a computer without wondering about the security vulnerabilities. They can’t vote without trying to figure out how to vote twice. They just can’t help it.
I’ve often speculated about how much of this is innate, and how much is teachable. In general, I think it’s a particular way of looking at the world, and that it’s far easier to teach someone domain expertise – cryptography or software security or safecracking or document forgery – than it is to teach someone a security mindset.
The ant farm story illustrates another aspect of the security mindset. Your first reaction to the might have been, “So what? What’s so harmful about sending a package of ordinary ants to an unsuspecting person?” Even Bruce Schneier, who has the security mindset in spades, doesn’t point to any terrible consequence of misdirecting the tube of ants. (You might worry about the ants’ welfare, but in that case ant farms are already problematic.) If you have the security mindset, you’ll probably find the possibility of ant misdirection to be irritating; you’ll feel that something should have been done about it; and you’ll probably file it away in your mental attic, in case it becomes relevant later.
Which illustrates yet another part of the security mindset: Don’t rely too much on your own cleverness, because somebody out there is surely more clever and more motivated than you are.
1. Actually, I think the mindset of people who put “” in a “From” address is that people actually won’t reply to it, ergo, problem solved. It simply doesn’t occur to them that (a) people may reply even when you tell them not to, and (b) an automated system may use that address without consideration for the meta-level message contained within.
To me, that represents a third level of trust that sits above the security mindset *and* the engineer mindset. Of course, the source of that mindset probably comes as much from a lack of education of how things work as from a lack of education on what could happen.
2. I’m just surprised at how few people know about RFC 2606.
3. I think I have yet another mindset: the privacy mindset. The first thing that came to my mind when I read the ant story was, “Those dirty rascals at the ant farm company make me jump through hoops so that they can get my mailing address, which they undoubtedly will sell, and use to send me spam for decades to come.”
In the case of ants, perhaps their methods are sound, because the ant farm product might sit on a store shelf for years, and any ants in it would die, so it’s better to mail the ants once a customer has bought the ant farm.
Nevertheless, there are all sorts of schemes like this these days that try to get your personal information when they don’t really need it. Ever go to Radio Shack and have the clerk ask for your phone number? I just want to pay cash and have a nice anonymous transaction, thank you very much.
4. I think Bruce Schneier shows more of a programmers’ (or IT security experts’) mindset than the general “security mindset” in that special case: the possibility of ants going somewhere unexpected is an archetype of an “undefined state” – the “real world”s equivalent to a software bug. The difference is that the real world is probably not going to crash from it.
5. It struck me that the security mindset and the QA mindset have a great deal in common.
While I’m a developer, I have enough of that mindset that I often say “paranoia is a virtue.”
6. avatar Stephen S says:
Sending ants is no big deal, no. However, there’s a similar story that shows the real danger. A few years ago, some infamous spammer told reporters “if you don’t want it, just delete it”. In response, people went to hundreds of web sites and signed him up to receive catalogs from companies; he was absolutely inundated with snail mail, just like most of us are inundated by spam. Granted the guy deserved it, but the same tactic, now exposed, can be used against the innocent…
7. Actually the security mindset is just the same as a good maths/scientific/engineering/programming mindset. In particular anyone who deals with concurrent asynchronous systems knows that chance (given a few billion events) is more devious than any human adversary.
The problem is that the worlds of business and politics don’t think that way.
8. avatar Elad-vav says:
Richard, you’re wrong. Read the post again to understand.
9. Sorry – why exactly am I wrong?
I can’t see it in the post anywhere.
My point is that the difference between “security” and “engineering” is just that in security there is a human adversary trying to find the flaws in your system whereas in engineering it is just the random behaviour of those parts of the system that you don’t control – however the correct way to deal with those problems is the same in both cases.
The fact that a lot of engineers don’t do it very well is not relevant.
10. Richard, the point he’s making is that Programmers think about one way that things can go wrong, but security experts will look at the same failure modes in a very different way. Both groups of people will often identify the same potential failures. The difference is that the security group will very often be more creative in the specific ways they see the failures being exploited, both intentionally and unintentionally.
You are correct to the extent that *good* programmers, engineers, etc, will often identify the same *set* of potential failures as a good security person. However, the security person will most often come up with ways of exploiting the failure or ways that a single failure could mushroom that most good programmers (engineers, etc) would not think of. A good security person will also come up with more interesting consequences to the failures.
11. avatar supercat says:
Good programmers will indeed seek to identify and eliminate possible failure modes, but in many cases it’s considered adequate to reduce the probability of failure such that it just plain isn’t going to happen. As a simple example, some embedded document formats begin and end each attachment with a random sequence of bytes. The program that parses the containing document locates the initial sequence and then finds where that sequence occurs again. If the program randomly-generates a 32-byte sequence, the likelihood of that sequence appearing within a document is essentially nil. I wouldn’t be surprised if a number of such programs simply assume that the random sequence won’t appear in the file being embedded, without an actual check to ensure that’s the case.
To a programmer, such a vulnerability is not a real concern. If a program generates a 32-byte string using a decent random generator, it’s unlike that string will exist anywhere in the universe, much less within the document being encoded. On the other hand, suppose that the string is generated using some unique identifier for the machine processing it along with the time of day and a counter held by that machine. Someone with access to that information may be able to predict what ‘random’ strings will be generated, and thus able to create files that include the strings that will ‘enclose’ them. The probability of an unexpected match may be changed from 1:2^192 to 1:100 or even less.
Another factor that needs to be considered is that security experts can often snoop out ‘out of band’ methods of getting information they’re not supposed to access. For example, if an attempt to access a non-existent file reports failure more quickly than an attempt to access a file to which one doesn’t have access, one can use this information to discover what files exist even if their existence is supposed to be confidential. A typical programmer would hardly see as a problem the fact that program sometimes runs faster and sometimes runs slower, but a security expert might exploit such things.
12. As other commenters have mentioned, good engineers definitely think about how things can go wrong, and even about how “harmless failures” can add up to real problems. The big difference is that they think about failures by modeling them as *systems*, rather than as *engineers*.
Consider hackers, for instance. They’re basically engineers–often very good ones–who simply design hacks on systems, rather than systems themselves. And they generally have strikingly little insight into how to design secure systems. After, they think of their adversaries as systems–static, well-understood objects–and aren’t used to thinking of them as the products of ingenious engineering.
The hard part of security thinking, then, seems to be the ability to flip back and forth smoothly between engineering systems and engineering attacks on them. The faster and more skillfully you can do that, the faster and more thoroughly you can identify the underlying security threats to a given system, and how best to protect against them.
13. You haven’t convinced me. All of the things you mention as being particular to security experts seem to me to be just the same things that good technical people of all types will do – and bad ones of all types (in including security people) will fail to do.
Of course security problems are often interesting engineering problems – and so good engineers and scientists will be attracted to them – eg Feynmann’s safecracking exploits but it’s wrong to try to put them on a pedestal above other kinds of engineering.
When I am are trying to guarantee the integrity of a system I will in fact model the failure modes as if they were deliberate attacks even though there is no intelligent agency doing the attacking. That is simply the best way to do the job.
14. Maybe we should simply call this mindset something else other than the “security mindset”. Possibly the “what can go wrong mindset” or the “how can I misuse this mindset”. I’m sure someone of a more creative mindset can come up with a better name than I.
Good engineers don’t have much trouble figuring out how to make something work. They have trouble figuring out how to make sure it works the same way every time. Average engineers struggle to make things work at all. Good engineers already have this mindset (or have been taught it) and, I’m sure, could easily apply this mindset to security just as easily as they apply it to engineering.
Nonetheless, it does help explain the funny looks I get sometimes when I explain a security or an engineering problem to someone who just doesn’t understand the mindset, whatever you want to call it. | <urn:uuid:ae423592-a53f-4650-a5c2-85eb107a0792> | 2 | 2.015625 | 0.038385 | en | 0.957597 | https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/security-mindset-and-harmless-failures/ |
What One Photographer Did When f/1.0 Just Wasn't Fast Enough
What One Photographer Did When f/1.0 Just Wasn't Fast Enough
Many of you are familiar with Blair Bunting, one of the premier commercial portrait photographers in the United States, and a good friend of mine. A couple weeks ago we were chatting about lenses when he brought up this project he did several years back. I instantly wanted to share it, and we tweeted an image of his 50mm f/1.4 next to his 110mm f/.95, which many of you thought was fake. It wasn't.
Blair has always had an eye for the meticulous that borderlines at the somewhat outrageous. "Being self taught I found myself obsessing with the technical to a degree that the artistic side of photography was an afterthought. At first it was just grasping the concept of 18% grey, then it was learning the stop reach of my sensor, then it was getting rid of depth of field only to bring it back in later years. It serves a little ironic that I craved bokeh so much when young and now I cringe whenever someone uses that word in a conversation.
"Back in 2003, I found myself with a lens line up from 24 to 200, all faster than f/1.8, so to say I enjoyed depth of field isolation was an understatement. However, there was a part of me that thought the 85mm f/1.2 just wasn’t shallow enough. I had tubed the thing beyond its nodal point reach to where the min focus point was behind the front element. However, a part of me still felt there was less depth to be achieved."
For what purpose could one need something with less depth? It didn't matter. What mattered to Blair was that if it could be done, he wanted to do it. "There was not a practical use for the lenses, but there was learning to be had in their use."
"This quest impacted my grades as I would often sit in Italian classes trying to calculate the angle of light conversion for a lens instead of paying attention (2 years of Italian and all I know is how to say 'My name is cheese'). Being a true photo geek at heart, I listed lenses by absolute aperture size in millimeter rather than stop.
"Fortunately for me during this time, there was an industrial factory that did X-ray analysis that had gone under and surplussed its equipment. I called them up and offered to buy all their lenses for cheap as I intended to mount them to a Canon 1D.
"The lenses that came in the box ranged from 110mm to 50mm and had aperture values of 1.1 to 0.50. Unfortunately, they were made for industrial X-ray machines, so mounting them would not be easy. Some had nodal points that wouldn’t work with a mirror and others had rear elements that would support the lens. None of them had focus rings and would be strictly DTS pulled, not to mention no chips meant that the truest form of manual exposure would be required as most cameras aren’t set for f/.50.
"I eventually mounted some with cut body caps and others with plumbing tubing with a CD case. Min focus distance was very minimal, often only a couple inches, but depth of field is a function of distance as it is a derivative of iris, so this was a plus.
"Texture was important and the quality of the images that came from the lenses was often determined by the progression from focus to out of focus rather than the quality of the blur itself. At the end of the day, I never really showed the images all that much and sold off most of the lenses I had made. Like so many other aspects of photography, I was merely looking to show myself I could do it."
For more ridiculousness from the mind of Blair Bunting, head on over to his blog.
Published with Blair Bunting's permission.
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great shots, i love them
Alex Solla's picture
okay, this is insane!
Reading this i kind of felt found out, since I´m a shallow-DOF-enthusiast myself. I had never occurred to me to build the lenses myself though. Maybe some third party lens maker is granting my wishes and builds a 100mm f0.8 for the EF mount.
Ridiculousness, indeed. I'm glad he learned something, but I can't imagine spending this much time on something that I knew would have no practical value. But that's just me. :)
A guy on a photo forum here in Quebec took appart a huge Sigma lenses (north of 300mm... can't remember what exactly) that didn't have AF on his Canon..
Bought the AF from a teleconverter and retrofited it to the lenses and ... yeah by know you get the idea! hahaha
Zack Williamson's picture
I could be completely wrong about this, but if they were X-ray lenses wouldn't there be radiation concerns? Probably negligible amounts, and those images are really cool, but still...
Yes, actually Blair was concerned about this at first, but the amounts were so negligible that it was perfectly safe.
An experiment worth talking about. Do it all the time though not in photography field. These kinds of personal explorations should not be frowned upon. I'm sure that in the end, he came out with a lot more practical knowledge.
i love how he made these awesome lenses, all with a plastic, body cap as the mount....pretty lame in that aspect....
J's picture
Not really any different than some production EF-S lenses that have plastic mounts. It works, so why is it lame? There was no AF to be had, no focus ring on the lenses, so why go to the trouble to put a real metal or even plastic EF mount from a hacked lens on it?
Congrats dude... and Thanks for the post... Cheers!!
Kris Kendrick's picture
This is just lovely. I'm nutty for fast lenses.
Skywarn55419's picture
You can buy an adapter to mount a "C" mount TV camera lens on a Canon EOS body, but it can only be used for macro shooting.
Resulting images are poor and not worth the effort.
You sir, have missed the point. But thanks for playing.
Jesse Savage's picture
I disagree. I really dig the effect these lenses give the photos. They are very surreal and kinda dream like
Love the pencil shot!
Jesse Savage's picture
these lenses made some really nice effects. I would have loved to experiment with them, but I don't think I would want to take the effort to purchase and build them myself. Especially if there is no resale value. I just don't have it to spare.
Actually... resale value was quite nice. Kinda why he sold them.
RiverOaksArtsSociety's picture
If this is what you wanted to do, why not get a Lensbaby and learn how to use Photoshop?
What a great ideal, it is call creative thinking, the things he learned will be used for the rest of his life. He was willing to invest in his art. and not think about the cost only the result.
the shot of the #2 pencil alone makes it worth the trouble. Outstanding!
I glued an old 50mm 1.8 pentacon lens to my d5000, max focusing distance is about 2.5m, but boy is it sharp as a portrait lens with closer subjects... Too bad the "focus point" or whatever it's called is about 0.5cm long, so a bit of camera shaking can defocus your shot and render it total c**p :P
A fine obsession! | <urn:uuid:97f43028-d251-42ae-9193-0d7ae1873498> | 2 | 1.554688 | 0.038515 | en | 0.98104 | https://fstoppers.com/gear/what-one-photographer-did-when-f10-just-wasnt-fast-enough-5656 |
Indigenous Peoples Archive - Baka
The Baka Peoples, known in the Congo as Bayaka (Bebayaka, Bebayaga, Bibaya), are hunter-gatherers inhabiting the southeastern rain forests of Cameroon, northern Republic of Congo, northern Gabon, and southwestern Central African Republic.
The Baka are sometimes referred to as a subgroup of the Twa, but the two peoples are not closely related. Likewise, the name "Baka" is sometimes mistakenly applied to other area peoples who, like the Baka and Twa, have been historically called pygmies (a term that is considered to be quite disrespectful).
Unlike most other Central African Peoples, the Baka maintain a unique language, also called Baka. Although nearly all of their neighbors—including the Aka—speak Bantu languages, the Baka languages are of a different language family, Ubangian. In addition, many Baka speak Koozime, Bakoum, Bangandou, et al., the tongues of their respective Bantu neighbours, as second languages. A much smaller proportion speak French.
Baka religion is animist. They worship a forest spirit known as Jengi, also called Djengi or Ejengi, whom they perceive as both a parental figure and guardian. Each successful hunt is followed by a dance of thanksgiving known as the Luma, which is accompanied by drumming and polyphonic singing. One of the most important traditional ceremonies is the Jengi, a long and secret rite of initiation which celebrates the boy's passage into adulthood, studied in depth by the anthropologist Mauro Campagnoli, who also could take part in it. The Baka practice traditional medicine, and their skills are such that even non-Baka often seek out their healers for treatment.
Adapted from Wikipedia's article on the Baka Peoples
Relevant Links
Hosted by May First / People Link.
Background Photo: Norsk Folkehjelp Norwegian People's Aid (CC) | <urn:uuid:071f7872-76d3-469b-91d7-d2c6ea82c7dd> | 3 | 3.203125 | 0.200015 | en | 0.965545 | https://intercontinentalcry.org/peoples/baka/ |
Analysis of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”
I’m back…Weird, I know. It’s been a long time, but I got sidetracked for a while. I’m making some changes in my life, and I realized how much I do love writing. I always loved it, but I never realized the pure joy it brought me. So, one of my changes is to write more. I think this is the perfect place to do it, so I’m making a comeback. If you’ll have me.
I read Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” in my English 1102, and fell in love. Here’s my analysis.
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…” This is the opening sentence to Allen Ginsberg’s notorious poem, “Howl.” From there, Ginsberg begins his very own howl for these “best minds,” more specifically for Carl Solomon, the man who Ginsberg dedicates his words to. Ginsberg met Solomon in a psychiatric facility, where the author of the poem spent eight months of his life. Throughout the poem, the reader notices that these “best minds,” which he refers to, are not doctors, lawyers or scientists but those considered, by society, the bottom of the barrel. They are drunks, drug-users, poets, the homeless and the so-called mad ones. Ginsberg considered Solomon one of those best minds and found genius in his friend’s insanity. The poem’s title sets the tone for the entire work. It gives the reader an idea that this poem will not be a murmur or a romantic sonnet, but a howl, a cry for those who are mentally trapped by the society of the 1950’s that valued commercialism and conformity over free expression. This counter-cultural movement was known as the Beat generation led by Beatniks, and “Howl” was their manifesto. “Howl” is a celebration of personal liberty and breaking free from prisons.
In 1957, Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” was called to an obscenity trial on whether or not the poem held any literary merit, and while the strong language, and many drug and sexual references were called into question, nine literary experts testified on the poem’s behalf until the judge concluded that “Howl” was of “redeeming social importance”. The publisher of the poem, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, was found not guilty, so he and “Howl” were both set free. The question of whether or not the poem holds any literary merit is a rhetorical one, since it has clearly established a voice and made an impact on society. While the poem, written in free verse, seems outwardly chaotic, there is a distinct form to “Howl,” not to mention the fact that the apparent chaos of the poem is intentional. The poem superficially looks disordered with the lack of periods and the multitude of run-on sentences, but these deliberate grammar mistakes create an insane chatter that reflects the author’s mental state and thus, the reader’s. Each and every line must be read in one breath, which at times can be difficult because it leaves the reader breathless. This is another deliberate detail established by the author, in order to make the reader feel even the slightest ounce of struggle Ginsberg’s “best minds” went through. The form divides the poem into three parts: who, what and where. The relentless repetition of “who” refers to the “best minds” that Ginsberg introduces at the beginning of the poem. Throughout the work, the reader is able to recognize the author’s abhorrence of the society in America during the 1950s and blames the mainstream culture of leaving the best minds “starving hysterical naked” and while he mourned for their downfalls, Ginsberg rose them up to spiritual status, calling the best minds “angelheaded hipsters” (3). There are a multitude of religious references throughout the poem such as “heaven, purgatory, angels, saints, three fates, laurel crown, seven days and nights,” all referring to the best minds; however, Ginsberg establishes a paradox by stating that these men “bared their brains to Heaven under the El” (5) and were “fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists” (36). These two statements have clear oppositions within them. Heaven is under the El and “saintly” motorcyclists perform sodomy, known as a sin in the bible. Ginsberg states that while these minds are the best, they are also inconsistent contradictions.
“Howl” spends a lot of time on what exactly these “best minds” are doing, which relates to the second segment of the poem: the what. They protested the “narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism” by burning cigarette holes in their arms (31) and “distributed Supercommunist pamphlets” (32). There is some irony established here where Ginsberg praises drug-users that protest Capitalism, but then compares Capitalism to a narcotic. This fact reminds the readers that the poem is a personal one, not perfected for society but an individual’s thoughts and mental state. These best minds had sex with strangers and “hiccupped endlessly… in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword” (39), which shows they were sexually free, willing to have intercourse in public places with an anonymous angel or a mere mortal stranger. In line 39, Ginsberg presents phallic imagery with “pierce them with a sword,” establishing another literary element like phallic imagery, that shows the work’s complexity. The “what” is all about what these “best minds” did, and it wasn’t save lives or cure diseases. Instead, they injected themselves with narcotics, fell asleep under the “El,” and enjoyed sex with anyone and anything, but above all, they “howled on their knees in the subway” (35), howling for their manuscripts, their genitals, and their freedom.
The best minds “barreled down the highways” (59), “drove crosscountry” (60) and “journeyed to Denver” (61). The Beatniks travelled the country, never calling one place their homes, which leads to “the where” segment of “Howl. The “where” reflects all the different places such as Houston, New York, Denver, Baltimore etc., which Ginsberg refers to. The best minds “lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex” (28) and “reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI” (30). The poem travels around the world the same way the Beats moved around and established a lack of constancy. “Howl” is a literary representation of what a physical Beatnik is and does, and for Ginsberg to be able to paint such a vivid and accurate picture for his readers is certainly worth literary merit. “Howl” is not a stable poem, and with this fact, Ginsberg comments and continues to howl alongside these misunderstood geniuses, that life is unstable, especially for those “best minds.”
“Howl” is a diatribe, a stream of consciousness that found itself in the spotlight. It was never meant to gain popularity or acceptance because the readers are able to see that “Howl” is a glimpse into Ginsberg’s mind. It is not a poem filled with “stanzas of gibberish” but rather a piece of literature that takes its readers on a journey of drugs, sex and most of all, life. It is almost as if it’s a rage-fueled diary entry, because Ginsberg’s howl is heard through his words. His frustration and anger, left on the pages, is almost tangible. He genuinely views the people who are deemed mentally ill by mainstream society as unacknowledged geniuses. Close to the end of the poem, he equates an “angel beat” to a “madman bum” (76) establishing them as one and the same and at the end of the poem, one can’t help but think: There are academies filled with history books and biographies of apparently great men like politicians and military leaders, the “heroes” of the generation whose stories are being told over and over again, but what about those true “best minds” that are believed to be insane? Do they get their biographies or their names in history books? This is what Ginsberg tries to accomplish with “Howl”. It’s his ode to the mad, reminding society there are unrecognized great minds, and Ginsberg howls for them, stands by their sides and thrust his fist in the air in support. If one listens closely when reading the poem, a delicate but intense howl can be heard in between breaths.
Saving Mr.Disney
Where did it all go? You know, all the glamour and magic this world once had? It’s strange to think a world like that even existed. With all the fast food chains and unnecessary “in-your-face” advertisements, it’s easy to forget that there was something beautiful going on decades ago. Within simplicity, beauty was found. Now, the bigger, the better. Less is never more, and we all delude ourselves in believing that the time is now. Sometimes, that belief is true. None of us can deny that we have benefitted from everything that has been handed to us. In this age, your relatives, living across the ocean are merely a Skype call away. Or any opinion that you might have can simply just be put out into the world without a single thought. We hide behind these screens, the same hiding I am doing right now, and just rant or rave about a person, an event or a decision that was made by people of much higher positions than us. Granted, that embodies some mystery. A mystery that begs the question: “Who is this person, and why is she complaining about the obviously “simpler” world she is living in?” But this superficial mystery is nothing compared to the mystery that was embodied during the older eras. If you have not guessed already by the title, I did see Saving Mr.Banks today. The movie itself, was not strong, but that didn’t stop me from crying my eyes out. There were many explanations of my tears, some more literal than others like P.L Travers, portrayed by Emma Thompson, finally giving in and tapping along to “Let’s Go Fly a Kite,” but there was more…emotional explanation, which was, simply put, where did the magic go? When did that last sprinkle of fairy dust disappear? And why? Did we use it all up with our need for making money and changing things that didn’t need to be changed in the first place? I don’t know…And do not tell me you haven’t thought about living in another era, just to get a taste of those people and what they were capable of doing. People we have only truly ever experienced on the screen. The Marilyns, the Chaplins, the Disneys. The Bette Davis’ and the Humphrey Bogarts. The Hepburns. Both Katherine and Audrey. The list goes on and on and on…Now, I know it’s not wise to live in the past, but we can’t help but feel nostalgic at times. Without these bursts of sentimentality, I’m afraid that the magic that is deep within us, sinks farther and farther. For some, the magic is gone forever, and we can’t really blame them. It’s hard to hold onto something when you’re not trying. But for those of you, who feel the magic brewing inside yourselves, all I ask is to let it consume you. Let it take over. Let is just wash over you like buckets of lukewarm water cleansing your skin. This world needs more magic, and not technological “magic” or scientific magic, but actual, indescribable, unconventional magic. It all starts with a spoonful.
So. Much. Work.
Hey guys,
So, I know I haven’t posted in a while, but I have been insanely busy. IB stress and work, college applications AND assistant directing the High School musical have literally taken over my life. I just wanted to say that, and also say that I will try and be back soon!
Looking Good on Paper…
I told you I’d be back! I forgive you all for doubting me for a second, any more than that, I am truly hurt. :)
So, I just wanted to talk about a very stressful and significant period that I am going through in my life. The college process. Most of you have probably already went through it or are in the same boat as me, going through it while trying not to drown. It’s difficult, isn’t it? The whole thing. So many factors that play into this idea that you might not be good enough for a school. You are unwanted for being who you are. It’s a shame really because there are so many beautiful and bright kids out there who might not excel in school, and because of that they won’t be able to show how they can excel in a different environment like college. This is a question for you all: How many well-rounded people do you know? Do we even know what well-rounded really means? It means having a personality that is fully developed in all aspects. Jesus Christ! What 17/18 year old has a personality that is fully developed? You really only start to get close to figuring out who you are and what you believe in, what people are worth it or not, weeding out the good from the bad, in High School. At least, that is the way it was for me.
The thing is I am still not comfortable with who I am. I want to do better and be better. I have so much more to go and do before I am ready to be judged on paper. And this whole paper bullshit. I understand that colleges don’t have the time or energy to meet with every student that applies, but how can you truly know someone just by reading a 650 word essay and looking at their extra-curricular activities? Maybe more Skype calls would be beneficial or have a student send in a creative video about a favorite activity or something they feel is necessary for the admission officers to know. Just to give our applications a bit of life and pizzazz.
You send in a few papers and indirectly beg for acceptance and financial aid. I have learned that it’s not smart to have a dream college. The desire to get into Harvard, Yale, Princeton etc. will become so strong that it will overpower you. If you are accepted, it will be the best day of your life maybe, but if you are rejected…putting so much heart and soul into an application and just being denied from your dream…I don’t even want to imagine it. That’s why I decided that any school I get into, I will be perfectly content. I will still have fun and I will still learn and make friends hopefully wherever I go. That’s a big hopefully though…
It’s a crazy system, but I do know that it has to happen because out of hundreds and thousands of papers, after the blood, sweat and the inevitable tears, your application will be accepted and you will get that feeling of adoption. Someone chose you. Someone wants you. To someone the way you looked on paper was just right.
No Mayonnaise: A short story
As you all know, I have become a very prominent food and restaurant critic over the past 2 years. I have no one to thank for my success but my taste buds and my sharp tongue. Restaurants quiver at my name and I thrive from that fear. They get a one-week notice prior to my arrival to prepare and somehow get their shit together. In my opinion, a week is too undemanding. A restaurant as horrid as that Denny’s I reviewed last month can mask their true repugnant identity in that amount of time. I don’t have the energy to expose their countless flaws and blemishes. Restaurants should always be impeccably clean, with the most polite servers who present to me the most delectable dishes as swiftly as they possibly can. Is that too much to ask from a critic in this field? I expect excellence when it comes to the restaurant’s appearance and service. However, I require perfection when dealing with the food they are serving me. I automatically know whether or not there is too much parsley in my salad or if my soup is lacking a pinch of salt. I may be picky, but I know the difference between a good meal and a superb dish. That is why I am respected and considered the best in my profession. It is not a matter of opinion, but of facts. Now, before I start reviewing the restaurant of the month, I just need to state, I am willing to accept any and all consequences that I shall receive after this review is published. As I said, I am known for my harshness and I embrace it.
I arrived at Spill at precisely 7:40. My reservation was at eight. However, I prefer to be a tad early to give the staff a bit of a scare. The restaurant is situated in a very lively, hip area where I assume many college students “hang out.” I could tell I stuck out like a sore thumb, but there are only two categories I never managed to excel in. Likeability and adapting to my surroundings. As soon as I paid the taxi driver, (a young man, who only needed to hear the name Spill to know exactly where I wanted him to take me) I stepped out of the cab and saw in cursive letters: Spill. The last “L” funnily enough, seemed to be spilling, extending all the way down to the metal blue door of the restaurant. I climbed up the glass-looking stairs with caution and I marked down a point for being a safety hazard. The door wasn’t as heavy as it looked, so I swung it open with ease, making a loud sound, which caused the cacophony in the restaurant to cease. The place was packed, however still quite airy. I admit my skin prickled from embarrassment, because of my grand entrance, but I maintained my composure. I hope.
I went up to the hostess, who was dressed in ripped jeans and a Sex Pistols t-shirt. She had piercings all over her face and I’m sure in some other places, but I am not allowed to say where. She greeted me with a truly genuine smile and welcomed me to Spill. She didn’t seem to know who I was, which slightly confused me. Did she not get my one-week notice?
“Alright, table for…?”
She definitely did not get my one-week notice.
I kept looking at her, waiting for her to realize who I was, but the realization never came. She led me to my table in the corner. There were no chairs, just booths with lots of throw pillows that didn’t match each other and seemed to be previously owned. I sat down on a pink one with small black roses embroidered on it. I lifted myself back up and moved the pillow away. The hostess waited for me to get comfortable and then said:
“That one was mine.”
She gave me a warm smile and told me my waiter would be with me in just a moment. With that, she strolled away and I watched her go. Her shirt had risen up a bit so I was able to see her tattoo on her lower back. It was black rose.
The waiter came straight away. His name was Jeff, with a tattoo of an elephant on his face. I don’t think I was in Kansas anymore. He asked me what I wanted to drink, gave me a menu and a few minutes. I glanced at the menu and immediately chose the club sandwich. A sandwich is extremely difficult to make. Many people will disagree, but a mediocre sandwich is often mistaken for a completely decent one. So many factors that can go wrong in a sandwich. Too much tomato, not enough lettuce, meat is too dry, bread is too soggy and so on. I look around and examine the restaurant. It was a very trendy space. Artists and writers discussing music. Students arguing about the conspiracies of past history. No one seemed pretentious or pompous. There was no smell of competition in the air, whose life changing experience was the most…well, life changing. It was quaint. It was cool. Most of all, it was refreshing. And I had only marked down one point. Service was friendly, place was spotless. Lighting was comforting; the music was gentle, but audible enough to enjoy it. My sparkling water with lemon arrived in a matter of minutes and for the first time in a long time; I was content with the restaurant I was dining in.
In exactly 12 minutes, my sandwich had arrived. It looked like any other sandwich. No burnt edges, more of a golden brown. The insides were neatly packed in with a toothpick pierced through the center. I stared at the sandwich for quite a while, or until people around me got somewhat uncomfortable. I picked it up and took a huge bite right in the middle. The sandwich was delicious, an absolute pleasure. I chewed every piece slowly, so I could savor the delectable taste. But wait, something was missing. Something important. Something so significant that it could ruin a sandwich almost immediately. But I didn’t know what. I kept eating, now focusing more on what it needed, instead of what it had to offer. Then I got it. How could I not have noticed it before? It was so simple, yet so timeless. Mayonnaise. This club sandwich had no mayonnaise. Right then and there, I paid for my mayo-less sandwich, sparkling water and left immediately, slipping out of the restaurant as quietly as I wanted to enter it.
I give the restaurant two stars out of five and the reason for it, is not because there was no mayonnaise in my club sandwich, (even though that played a major part) but because the entire restaurant was a façade, a simulation, an illusion. Its so-called “trendiness” and “cool factor” clogged up my critical senses and for a second there, I actually thought it was a decent restaurant. Thank god for the lack of or should I say, the non-existence of mayonnaise, that cleared up the fog for me and truly made me see what a charade Spill is. No mayonnaise…how preposterous!
Quick Return…
Hello everyone,
It has been so long. Too long, and I apologize for that. Summer ended, school has been crazy and very work-filled and the stress of the IB is really kicking in. I just got back from New Orleans, and I’m going to try and be frequent in my posts, because I have missed this <3 | <urn:uuid:448832a3-dc6e-4182-95d7-bd1eb303668e> | 2 | 2.4375 | 0.060105 | en | 0.972722 | https://ketosworld.wordpress.com/ |
++ed by:
68 PAUSE user(s)
32 non-PAUSE user(s).
Gisle Aas
LWP::UserAgent - A WWW UserAgent class
require LWP::UserAgent;
$ua = new LWP::UserAgent;
In normal usage the application creates a UserAgent object, and configures it with values for timeouts proxies, name, etc. The next step is to create an instance of HTTP::Request for the request that needs to be performed. This request is then passed to the UserAgent request() method, which dispatches it using the relevant protocol, and returns a HTTP::Response object.
The basic approach of the library is to use HTTP style communication for all protocol schemes, i.e. you will receive an HTTP::Response object also for gopher or ftp requests. In order to achieve even more similarities with HTTP style communications, gopher menus and file directories will be converted to HTML documents.
The request method can process the content of the response in one of three ways: in core, into a file, or into repeated calls of a subroutine. The in core variant simply returns the content in a scalar attribute called content() of the response object, and is suitable for small HTML replies that might need further parsing. The filename variant requires a scalar containing a filename, and is suitable for large WWW objects which need to be written directly to disc, without requiring large amounts of memory. In this case the response object contains the name of the file, but not the content. The subroutine variant requires a callback routine and optional chuck size, and can be used to construct "pipe-lined" processing, where processing of received chuncks can begin before the complete data has arrived. The callback is called with 3 arguments: a the data, a reference to the response object and a reference to the protocol object.
The library also accepts that you put a subroutine as content in the request object. This subroutine should return the content (possibly in pieces) when called. It should return an empty string when there is no more content.
Two advanced facilities allow the user of this module to finetune timeouts and error handling:
By default the library uses alarm() to implement timeouts, dying if the timeout occurs. If this is not the prefered behaviour or it interferes with other parts of the application one can disable the use alarms. When alarms are disabled timeouts can still occur for example when reading data, but other cases like name lookups etc will not be timed out by the library itself.
The library catches errors (such as internal errors and timeouts) and present them as HTTP error responses. Alternatively one can switch off this behaviour, and let the application handle dies.
See LWP for a complete overview of libwww-perl5. See request and mirror for examples of usage.
Constructor for the UserAgent.
$ua = new LWP::UserAgent;
$ub = new LWP::UserAgent($ua); # clone existing UserAgent
simpleRequest($request, [$arg [, $size]])
If $arg is omitted, then the content is stored in the response object.
Process a request, including redirects and security. This method may actually send several different simple reqeusts.
The arguments are the same as for simpleRequest().
This method is called by request() before it tries to do any redirects. It should return a true value if the redirect is allowed to be performed. Subclasses might want to override this.
getBasicCredentials($realm, $uri)
This implementation simply checks a set of pre-stored member variables. Subclasses can override this method to e.g. ask the user for a username/password. An example of this can be found in request program distributed with this library.
mirror($url, $file)
Get and store a document identified by a URL, using If-Modified-Since, and checking of the content-length. Returns a reference to the response object.
Get/set member variables, respectively the timeout value in seconds, the name of the agent, wether to use alarm() or not, and wether to use handle internal errors internally by trapping with eval.
Set/retrieve proxy URL for a scheme:
$ua->proxy(['http', 'ftp'], 'http://www.oslonett.no:8001/');
$ua->proxy('gopher', 'http://web.oslonett.no:8001/');
Load proxy settings from *_proxy environment variables.
$ua->noProxy('localhost', 'no', ...);
Do not proxy requests to the given domains. Calling noProxy without domains clears the list of domains. | <urn:uuid:a96dfa7c-d01e-4b74-a159-bfdf9549dad2> | 2 | 1.96875 | 0.260228 | en | 0.813212 | https://metacpan.org/pod/release/GAAS/libwww-perl-5b6/lib/LWP/UserAgent.pm |
virtstrap virtstrap - Making repeatable environments easy! virtstrap ========= A simple script that allows you to setup a repeatable project using a variety of tools. The project came out of a need to use some things from buildout and some things from pip and virtualenv. However, eventually buildout support was abandoned as pip and virtualenv were powerful enough for the job - they just needed better tools. Main Goals ---------- - Create repeatable projects between other developers and environments - Provide a simple and easy to use interface - Create Gemfile/Gemfile.lock like system - Set custom environment variables in the virtualenv - Setup multi python virtualenvs - Create a plugin system similar that is both flexible and simple - Allow for local caching of compiled python modules so new virtstrap environments don't continually go online to find a module. - A configuration file that is portable to more than just virtstrap. This allows for programs that aren't virtstrap to take advantage of the the configuration file. Current Features ---------------- - Provides a standard location for virtualenv - Provide a quick and simple way to activate the current environment - Generate a requirements file much like a Gemfile.lock - Provide a simple plugin system - Allows for arbitrary environment variables to be set Is this yet another build tool? ------------------------------- Yes and no. Virtstrap is meant as a layer above virtualenv+pip to give the user buildout like capabilities without all the buildout overhead (I hope). Why not virtualenv-wrapper? --------------------------- I looked into using it but it did not fit my particular needs. It's a great tool but I originally wanted to create a tool that didn't have to be installed system wide to see use. Now, however, I see that as a horrible oversight and an unnecessary limitation. Although I still feel there is something elegant about keeping the package out of the global system, it now seems unreasonable to me. As a consequence, this question seems even more relevant. However, after having built the initial versions of virtstrap, I realized that virtstrap could make virtualenv-wrapper even simpler. It could also be shared between developers, build systems, and any number of scenarios. So, here's my crack at making something truly useful for python development. virtstrap Quick Start --------------------- The easiest way to get started with virtstrap is to install it on your local machine by simply doing the following:: pip install virtstrap Note: If you don't want to install it into your system. Look below for an alternative installation. To add virtstrap to your project. The most basic usage is:: cd path_to_your_project_path vstrap init This will add a directory named ``.vs.env`` and a file called ``quickactivate`` to your directory. Configuration Files ------------------- As of 0.3.x configuration files won't be required. Granted, virtstrap isn't very useful without it, but, if you really want to start a virtstrapped environment without doing anything, it's as simple as ``vstrap init``. To get more out of virtstrap you should define a ``VEfile``. This stands for virtual environment file. This is a general purpose file to be used for defining your virtual environment. The configuration file will be expected in the root directory of your project. Any other location can be specified, but that is extremely discouraged. At the moment the file is a YAML file. Eventually I hope to move away from yaml as its syntax can get in the way of defining requirements and the general environment. Links ----- * Website Coming Soon! * `Documentation <>`_ Reuven V. Gonzales 409cb9cf48a1ddf431811d1aac0ed7744b779ff3 0.3.10 | <urn:uuid:08e3a61c-c174-4c22-ac4f-b4eb90abbee0> | 2 | 1.578125 | 0.435895 | en | 0.897524 | https://pypi.python.org/pypi?:action=doap&name=virtstrap&version=0.3.10 |
Show simple item record Shaver, Robert H. 2006-08-09T15:27:42Z 2006-08-09T15:27:42Z 1979
dc.identifier.citation Shaver, Robert H., 1979, Geologic Story of the Lower Wabash Valley with Emphasis on the New Harmony Area. Indiana Geological Survey Occasional Paper 27, 14 p., 6 fig. en
dc.identifier.issn 0149-2470
dc.description Indiana Geological Survey Occasional Paper 27 en
dc.description.abstract The lower Wabash Valley-215 miles as the river flows from Terre Haute, Ind., to its meeting with the Ohio Valley; 3 to 12 miles across from bedrock wall to bedrock wall; as much as 150 feet from modem alluvial plain to ancient bedrock floor; conduit for 6 1/3 cubic miles of water each year by both gentle current and angry torrent; drainer of 33,000 square miles of basin; reservoir for 750 billion gallons of ground water within the alluvial fill at any given moment; storehouse of 18 cubic miles of sediment, some in active transit but much more waiting thousands of years between legs of its fitful journey to the sea Both host to and product of a restless wandering river that forever renews its flood plain, cutting into its alluvial bed on one side and backfilling on the other; host to a river that adds a new layer of silt annually to part of the 900 square miles of lower valley flood plain; a river that erosively impinges here and there against the bedrock-valley walls, thus moving them farther apart as though demanding even more room to accomplish its ultimate task; a river that leaves telltale marks of its patient sorting through the flood-plain sediments: cutoff meanders, silted-up channel scars and sloughs, crescentic ridge-and-swale topography, valley marginal terraces, whose rising edges denote the farthest advances of the latest looping-river bends to migrate gradually by those parts of the valley. A 500,000-acre breadbasket to a nation; direct provider of such basic resources as sand, gravel, and water; secreter and protector, it would seem, of the rich coal and oil fields that extend far below the bedrock floor. The lower Wabash Valley-complex physiographic wonder; capricious (or misunderstood?) phenomenon; tireless geologic agent; artery, resource, playground, and home for prehistoric and modem man alike-what are its origins, how does it gain its boundless energy, and of what legacy does its physiography speak? en
dc.description.sponsorship Indiana Department of Natural Resources en
dc.format.extent 39964699 bytes
dc.format.mimetype application/pdf
dc.language.iso en_US en
dc.publisher Indiana Geological Survey en
dc.relation.ispartofseries Occasional Paper en
dc.relation.ispartofseries 27 en
dc.subject Fluvial Geomorphology en
dc.subject Glacial Geology en
dc.subject Landforms en
dc.subject Floodplains en
dc.subject Landform Evolution en
dc.subject Wabash River Valley en
dc.subject Indiana en
dc.title Geologic Story of the Lower Wabash Valley with Emphasis on the New Harmony Area en
dc.type Technical Report en
dc.identifier.coden OPGSD8
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My Account | <urn:uuid:a0a3abef-98fb-4a66-9f47-3722942e6ae0> | 3 | 2.625 | 0.03357 | en | 0.817702 | https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/243?show=full |
Alli Puncha Mashikuna
This site is designed for students beginning to learn Kichwa and those entering the venture of the wonderful Andean Kichwa world. Kichwa, Quichua, Quechua or Runa shimi is the name of one of the indigenous languages spoken in the Andean Region. It was the language of the Inca from Tawantinsuyu (the four quarters) and is currently spoken in the Andean heartland of Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, parts of Argentina, Colombia and the western Amazon.
With some 11 million speakers, Runa Shimi means the language of the human being. Kichwa shimi, Quechua shimi, Quichua, or Runa Shimi is the largest indigenous language of the Americas. In Ecuador more than 2 million people speak Kichwa. Kichwa is spoken in all of the Andean provinces of Ecuador (except Carchi). In the Amazonian region the language is spoken in the following provinces: Napo, Pastaza, Sucumbios, and Orellana.
Although Kichwa and Spanish are not grammatically related, they have been sharing the Andean environment for more than 500 years. The majority of Andean Spanish speaking people have ancestors who once spoke Kichwa. Hence Kichwa has deeply influenced Andean Spanish as a substrate. The influence of Kichwa is pervasive in the pronunciation of Andean Spanish as well as in the distinctive grammar and semantics of Andean Spanish. | <urn:uuid:fd200d85-bcf2-4fab-bad9-778a4dab17ab> | 3 | 3.484375 | 0.131067 | en | 0.889162 | https://sites.google.com/site/kichwaayllu/home |
Blog Posts tagged with: java-next
Sep 24 2008
Comments Overview
As we reach the middle of our second decade of Java experience, the community has learned a lot about software development. Many of our best ideas on how to use a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) are now being baked into more advanced languages for the JVM. These languages tend to provide two significant advantages:
• They reduce the amount of ceremony in your code, allowing you to focus on the essence of the problem you are solving.
• They enable some degree of functional programming style. Think of it as a dash of verb-oriented programming to spice up your noun-oriented programming.
I have picked four "" languages to demonstrate these concepts: Clojure, Groovy, JRuby, and Scala. I have written a series of articles and conference talks describing how these languages can make teams more productive.
This page is the top-level table of contents for, and I will update the links below as new articles and talks become available.
Articles on
Conference talks on
Seeing a talk
If you are interested in hearing me speak on, check the event schedule, or contact Relevance ( to schedule an event near you.
Sep 10 2008
Comments #4: Immutability
This is Part Four of a series of articles on In Part Four, I will begin to explore how the languages (JRuby, Groovy, Clojure, and Scala) deal with concurrency. Concurrency is a big topic, so I will subdivide it, narrowing my focus in this part to how the languages support immutability.
Why concurrency?
Over the last decade, most programmers have written code with little concern for concurrency. Often this has caused problems later, when programs needed to be used in a more concurrent setting. This is only going to get worse: in the future, everything is concurrent.
Why don't programmers do a better job with concurrency? Because it is hard. Read the excellent Java Concurrency in Practice (JCIP), and you will come away impressed with all the clever work that has gone into making Java a good environment for writing concurrent applications. But may also come away thinking "Who is smart enough to get this kind of code right in production?"
Not many people can, and the experts agree that we need an entirely different paradigm for writing concurrent applications. It may even be the case that supporting concurrency is the number one priority for
Why immutability?
One of the most difficult things about writing concurrent programs is deciding how to protect mutable shared state. Java provides a locking primitive, synchronized, but locking primitives are difficult to use. You have to worry about
• data corruption (if you lock too little)
• deadlock (if you lock too much)
• performance degradation (even if you get it right)
To make matters worse, it is generally impractical to write automated tests that explore the various possible interleavings of events.
Immutability solves all these problems of locking, by removing the need for ever locking at all. Immutable state can always be shared safely. Nobody can ever see a corrupt value by definition, as values never change.
All of the languages support immutability to some degree, as I will show below.
Immutability in JRuby
JCIP uses a ThreeStooges class as an extremely simple example for creating immutable objects in Java. Continuing the theme of that example, here is JRuby's immutable stooges:
require 'set'
class ThreeStooges
def initialize(*names)
@stooges =
def stooge?(name)
In Ruby, you can set immutability on a per-instance basis, as opposed to a per-class basis. A particular object can become immutable by calling freeze. If the internal components of that object are not primitive, they will need to freeze as well. So, in the constructor above, I freeze the two things at risk of changing: stooges and self.
While immutability is possible in Ruby, be warned. Heavy use of freeze to enable safe concurrency is far from idiomatic.
Immutability in Groovy
In Groovy, the ThreeStooges class looks and works like Java, but prettier:
class ThreeStooges {
private final Set<String> stooges;
ThreeStooges(String... args) {
stooges = args as HashSet<String>;
boolean isStooge(String name) {
return stooges.contains(name);
The important details here are that the internal stooges collection is
• final (cannot be changed after the object is created)
• private (cannot be accessed outside the object itself)
I could also wrap stooges with unmodifiableSet, but since the ThreeStooges class already wraps stooges without exposing a modifying method, the second wrap is redundant.
Immutability in Scala
In JRuby and Groovy, immutability is possible. In Scala, immutability is preferred. The default collection classes are immutable, so ThreeStooges is just
class ThreeStooges(names: String*) {
private val stooges = Set() ++ names
def isStooge(name: String) = stooges(name)
A few observations here:
• In Scala, fields must be declared val (immutable) or var (changeable). Scala style encourages you to use val where possible.
• Scala's Set is immutable.
I find that Scala's inline constructor syntax and braces-free method definition syntax make the Scala definition easier to read than the JRuby or Groovy versions.
Immutability in Clojure
In Clojure, immutability is the default. In fact, everything is immutable, with only two exceptions:
• calling down into Java APIs (the Clojure version of assembly language)
• a few data structures which are specifically designed to support Software Transactional Memory (more on this in a later post)
So, the three-stooges can just be a set:
(defn three-stooges [& names] (set names))
(defn is-stooge? [name stooges] (stooges name))
A few observations:
• [& names] is Clojure's varargs syntax.
• A set can be placed in function position (first item in a list). So (stooges name) can be read as "find name in the set stooges"
Putting immutables to work
To see how immutables can simplify an implementation, consider the Factorizer servlet example from JCIP. The objectives of this example are to
• calculate the prime factorization of a number
• cache the most recent factorization
• use the cached answer where possible, and track the frequency of cache hits
• track the total number of factorizations
Here is a Java version of the factorizer using synchronized blocks, and stripped down to bare essentials for clarity:
import java.math.BigInteger;
public class CachedFactorizer {
private BigInteger ;
private BigInteger[] lastFactors;
private long hits;
private long cacheHits;
public void factors(BigInteger i) {
BigInteger[] factors = null;
synchronized (this) {
if (i.equals(lastNumber)) {
factors = lastFactors.clone();
if (factors == null) {
factors = factor(i);
synchronized (this) {
lastNumber = i;
lastFactors = factors.clone();
return factors;
In order for the CachedFactorizer to be correct and efficient, you need to think carefully about where the synchronized blocks should go. In the example above, there are two synchronized blocks. The first block checks the cache, and updates the counters. It protects:
• read and write of hits
• read and write of cacheHits
• read of lastFactors
The second block updates the cache. It protects:
• write of lastNumber
• write of lastFactors
To make sure you understand the approach, ask yourself the following questions:
• Could the first synchronized block be split into multiple, more granular locks? Would this likely be faster or slower?
• What about the second block?
• What operations are unprotected by locks? Is this safe?
• Would a simple, single-lock approach be correct? Under what circumstances would it perform well?
That's a lot to think about. Now, let's consider the same example, but using immutable data structures.
A Clojure cached-factor
Here is one Clojure approach to cached-factor:
(def #^AtomicLong hits (AtomicLong. 0))
(def #^AtomicReference cache (AtomicReference. {:n nil :factors nil}))
(def #^AtomicLong cache-hits (AtomicLong. 0))
(defn cached-factor [n]
(.incrementAndGet hits)
(let [cached (.get cache)]
(if (= n (cached :n))
(do (.incrementAndGet cache-hits)
(cached :factors))
(let [factors (factor n)]
(.set cache {:n n :factors factors})
There are several things to notice here:
• The hits, cache, and cache-hits take advantage of Java 5's atomic wrapper classes. (The #^ClassName syntax adds type information.)
• There are no synchronized blocks anywhere.
• Even though there are no synchronized blocks, you still have to think about the semantics of concurrency. The incrementAndGet method is used to update the two hit counters, and the cache is pulled into a local variable to avoid inconsistent reads.
The real key to this approach, however, is storing a Clojure map in an AtomicReference. Because Clojure data structures are immutable, they can benefit from an AtomicReference in a way that mutable classes cannot.
The immutable approach looks only a little simpler in this small example. But the benefit of using immutable data increases when you compose objects together. If you wanted to compose the synchronized version with another object, you would have have to dig back into the internals of both objects, study their locks, and pick a new lock strategy to cover the two objects together. Composing operations with immutable objects is much easier.
A Scala CachedFactor
Since Scala's default collections are immutable, a Scala approach can closely parallel the Clojure code above:
class CachedFactorizer {
case class Cache(val n: Int, val factors: List[Int])
val hits = new AtomicLong()
val cache = new AtomicReference[Cache](Cache(2, calculateFactors(2)))
val cacheHits = new AtomicLong()
def factor(n: Int) = {
val cached = cache.get
if (cached.n == n) {
} else {
val factors = calculateFactors(n)
cache.set(Cache(n, factors))
While this is similar to the Clojure approach, the difference is instructive. While the Clojure version stores the cache as a simple Map, the Scala version introduces a strongly-typed Cache class for the cache of values and their factors. The differences here are intended to idiomatic. Either approach could work in either language.
What about the JRuby and Groovy examples?
Could you write the example above in Groovy, JRuby, or even Java? Yes, but it would be non-idiomatic, even ugly. I am not going to show the JRuby and Groovy versions here, because those languages do not offer any concurrency-specific advantages over Java. Scala and Clojure, on the other hand, don't just make immutable objects possible. They make them easy and idiomatic.
Languages are designed to support certain priorities, inevitably at the expense of others. By making immutability a preferred option (Scala) or the standard (Clojure), these languages are encouraging a different paradigm for concurrent applications.
Languages are not about what they make possible, but about what they make beautiful. Clojure and Scala aim to make concurrent programs beautiful, and their preference for immutability is but the tip of the iceberg. In the next installment of this series, I will explore how Clojure and Scala enable concurrent programs through actors, agents, and software transactional memory.
• This article is based on the talk #4: Concurrency . Check the schedule for a talk near you.
• Thanks to Greg Vaughn and Glenn Vanderburg for their feedback on a draft of this article.
• Thanks to Rich Hickey for suggesting several Clojure versions of the factorizer example.
• Feedback on how to improve these examples is most welcome!
Sep 09 2008
Comments Presentation #4: Concurrency
Programming concurrency is hard, but the languages can make things easier. In this talk (Part 4 of the series), I will demonstrate how to write concurrent applications in Clojure, Groovy, JRuby, and Scala.
Topics will include
• calling the java.util.concurrent APIs
• why locks are harmful
• using immutable objects
• Scala's actor model
• Clojure's Software Transactional Memory and Agents
For more information, see the following article on the Relevance blog:
Aug 26 2008
Comments #3: Dispatch
This is Part Three of a series of articles on In Part Three, I will explore how the languages (JRuby, Groovy, Clojure, and Scala) support dispatch.
For my purposes here, dispatch is a broad term covering various methods of dynamically choosing behavior: single dispatch, switch/case, pattern matching and multiple dispatch. These concepts are not generally grouped together, but they should be. They are used to solve similar problems, albeit in very different ways.
Single dispatch
Let me start with single dispatch. In Java, methods can be selected based on the type of the object they are invoked on. All the languages support single dispatch, too:
; clojure
(fly vehicle speed)
// Java, Groovy, or Scala
# ruby speed
In all of these languages, the actual implementation of fly can vary depending on the run-time type of vehicle. (Clojure also supports multiple dispatch, where the implementation can vary based on the type of speed -- more on that later.)
Better switching
Another way to dynamically choose behavior is with a switch statement. Java has a simple switch statement, based on its historical kinship with C and C++. Switch statements have gotten a bad name, so much so that programmers are encouraged to replace them with polymorphism where possible.
This anti-switching bias is based on the limited kind of switching allowed in languages such as Java. In, there is a different story. The languages all have powerful switching capabilities, allowing you to switch on any criteria you like. As an example, consider a method that calculates a letter grade, taking input that is either a number or letter grade.
Ruby's case statement
Here is letter_grade in Ruby:
def letter_grade(val)
case val
when 90..100: 'A'
when 80...90: 'B'
when 70...80: 'C'
when 60...70: 'D'
when 0...60: 'F'
when /[ABCDF]/i: val.upcase
else raise "Not a valid grade: #{val}"
In Ruby, the switch/case variant is called case. The Ruby when clause can take arbitrary expressions. Above you see ranges and regular expressions side-by-side in the same case expression. In general, the when clause expects objects that implement a well-known threequals method, ===. Many Ruby objects have sensible === implementations: ranges match numbers in the range, regular expressions match strings containing the regular expression, classes match instances of the class, etc. But any object can implement ===, so you can implement arbitrarily complex dispatch with Ruby case.
Groovy's switch statement
Here is letterGrade in Groovy:
def letterGrade(val) {
switch(val) {
case 90..100: return 'A'
case 80..<90: return 'B'
case 70..<80: return 'C'
case 60..<70: return 'D'
case 0..<60: return 'F'
case ~"[ABCDFabcdf]": return val.toUpperCase()
default: throw new
IllegalArgumentException("Invalid grade: $val")
In Groovy, the switch/case variant is called switch. If you compare this code with JRuby, you will see minor syntactic differences:
• Groovy switch keeps faith with Java, so you have to return or break out
• Groovy uses default where Ruby uses else.
• Groovy's top-exclusive range uses ..< whereas Ruby's uses ... .
• Groovy uses isCase instead of ===. (This is not visible in the code sample, but you would need it to test case matches individually.)
The general ideas are the same. Both JRuby and Groovy provide far more powerful and general approaches than Java's switch.
Clojure's cond function
In clojure, as in many Lisps, you can switch on arbitrary functions using cond. One possible approach to letter-grade would be:
(defn letter-grade [grade]
(in grade 90 100) "A"
(in grade 80 90) "B"
(in grade 70 80) "C"
(in grade 60 70) "D"
(in grade 0 60) "F"
(re-find #"[ABCDFabcdf]" grade) (.toUpperCase grade)))
In Clojure, regular expressions look like #"...". The in function above is not part of Clojure. I wrote the code the way I wanted it to read, and then wrote this function:
(defn in [grade low high]
(and (number? grade) (<= low grade high)))
In Clojure, I probably wouldn't use a regular expression for the letter-matching step, but I wrote the example that way for symmetry with the others.
Clojure's cond is just the tip of the iceberg. Clojure-contrib includes a set of macros for other variants of switch/case, and later in this article I will demonstrate Clojure's multiple dispatch.
Scala's pattern matching
Scala's pattern matching is a powerful generalization of the switch/case idiom in many programming languages. Scala provides out of the box support for pattern matching on
• constants
• variables (which can be used in the match result)
• constructors
• sequences
• tuples
• types
With pattern matching, implementing letterGrade is a snap:
val VALID_GRADES = Set("A", "B", "C", "D", "F")
def letterGrade(value: Any) : String = value match {
case x:Int if (90 to 100).contains(x) => "A"
case x:Int if (80 to 90).contains(x) => "B"
case x:Int if (70 to 80).contains(x) => "C"
case x:Int if (60 to 70).contains(x) => "D"
case x:Int if (0 to 60).contains(x) => "F"
case x:String if VALID_GRADES(x.toUpperCase) => x.toUpperCase()
In this implementation, numeric grades and letter grades are both matched first by type. Then, case expressions also allow a guard that limits possible matches to some condition. So, for example, the first case above matches only if value is an Int (type match) and between 90 and 100 (the guard).
Scala's guard expressions are cool, but the combination of type+guard does not exactly parallel the other implementations of letterGrade, which rely on arbitrary predicates in case expressions. Scala can do this too: Scala extractors allow you to create arbitrary patterns. Here is one approach to letterGrade using extractors:
case NumericA(value) => "A"
case NumericB(value) => "B"
case NumericC(value) => "C"
case NumericD(value) => "D"
case NumericF(value) => "F"
case LetterGrade(value) => value
Behind the scenes, NumericA and friends are objects that implement an unapply method to determine if and how a value should match the pattern.
A more complex example
Scala's pattern matching is much more general than the letter grade example shows. To see this, check out Daniel Spiewak's series introducing Scala for Java programmers. In Part 4, he gives an example of pattern-matching working in conjunction with case classes, which I will explore below.
Scala's case classes
Case classes offer several interesting properties when compared to regular classes:
• Case classes automatically get a factory method, e.g. Foo(1) instead of new Foo(1)
• Case classes automatically get reasonable implementations for toString, hashCode, and equals.
These properties are so useful that Scala programmers use case classes for all kinds of things. But their true purpose is revealed in conjunction with patterns: Case classes work directly with pattern matching, without having to write an extractor as in the previous example.
class Color(val red:Int, val green:Int, val blue:Int)
def printColor(c:Color) = c match {
case col:Color => {
print("R: " + + ", ")
print("G: " + + ", ")
println("B: " +
case null => println("Invalid color")
The printColor method pattern-matches Red, Green, and Blue to provide special behavior for basic colors. Because these are case classes we can capture the actual color value v. All other colors fall through to a general Color, which prints a more generic message.
Clojure's defmulti
Scala's pattern-matching is a signature feature of the language. How do the other languages compare? To implement printColor in Clojure, I begin by defining a structure to capture a color:
(defstruct color :red :green :blue)
Where the Scala example defined basic colors with case classes, in Clojure I can use functions:
(defn red [v] (struct color v 0 0))
(defn green [v] (struct color 0 v 0))
(defn blue [v] (struct color 0 0 v))
Now for the fun part. I will define a multimethod named color-string, which dispatches based on which basic colors are present in the color struct.
(defmulti color-string basic-colors-in)
basic-colors-in is a dispatch function that reports which colors have nonzero values:
(defn basic-colors-in [color]
(for [[k v] color :when (not= v 0)] k))
Now I can define multiple implementations of color-string. The basic syntax is
(defmethod method-name dispatch-value function-body)
So for the three pure colors, I can define color-string as
(defmethod color-string [:red] [color] (str "Red: " (:red color)))
(defmethod color-string [:green] [color] (str "Green: " (:green color)))
(defmethod color-string [:blue] [color] (str "Blue: " (:blue color)))
I can also provide a catch-all implementation by specifying a dispatch-value of :default:
(defmethod color-string :default [color]
(str "Red: " (:red color) ", Green: " (:green color) ", Blue: " (:blue color)))
Multimethods are more powerful than polymorphic single dispatch in two important ways:
1. With polymorphic single dispatch, the dispatch function is always the type of the the first argument. With multimethods, the dispatch function can be any arbitrary function, e.g. basic-colors-in above.
2. With polymorphic single dispatch, polymorphism is limited to the first parameter. The dispatch function for a multimethod can look at all parameters, and vary based on any of them. (This feature is not needed in the color-string example above, but see Runtime Polymorphism for an example.)
Like Scala's pattern matching, Clojure's defmulti provides an extremely powerful and extensible dispatch mechanism.
Accidently blue
Both the Scala and Clojure code above take special action for colors that are declared to be pure blue:
// Scala
scala> printColor(Blue(10))
Blue: 10
; Clojure
user=> (color-string (blue 10))
"Blue: 10"
What about colors that are not declared as blue, but are, nevertheless, purely blue. These colors are accidentally blue:
// different result for accidental blues
scala> printColor(new Color(0, 0, 10))
R: 0, G: 0, B: 10
; all blues equal
user=> (color-string (struct color 0 0 10))
"Blue: 10"
The Scala example was written to dispatch based on type, so it treats accidentally blue colors different from "real" Blues. The Clojure example, on the other hand, dispatches based on the actual color values, so all solid blues are treated the same, no matter how they are created.
Of course, nothing stops me from "fixing" the Scala example, e.g. by dispatching on something other than type:
case class Color(val red:Int, val green:Int, val blue:Int)
object ColorDemo {
def colorString(c:Color) = c match {
case Color(r,0,0) => "Red: " + r
case Color(0,g,0) => "Green: " + g
case Color(0,0,b) => "Blue: " + b
case col:Color => {
"R: " + + ", " +
"G: " + + ", " +
"B: " +
case null => "Invalid color"
case null => "Invalid color"
Or, I could "break" the Clojure example by adding a type tag, and dispatching on that instead. Rich Hickey posted this example on the Clojure mailing list:
(defstruct color :red :green :blue)
(defn color-class [name r g b]
(assoc (struct color r g b) :tag name))
(defn red [v] (color-class :red v 0 0))
(defn green [v] (color-class :green 0 v 0))
(defn blue [v] (color-class :blue 0 0 v))
(defmulti color-string :tag)
(defmethod color-string :red [c] (str "Red: " (:red c)))
(defmethod color-string :green [c] (str "Green: " (:green c)))
(defmethod color-string :blue [c] (str "Blue: " (:blue c)))
(defmethod color-string :default [{:keys [red green blue]}]
(str "Color, R: " red ", G: " green ", B: " blue))
This version now works like the original Scala version, treating "accidental" blue differently from things marked with a :tag of :blue.
Note that multimethods are open. I can add new colors later without having to modify the existing code:
(defn orange [r g] (color-class :orange r g 0))
(defmethod color-string :orange [{:keys [red green]}]
(str "Orange, R: " red ", G: " green))
Dynamic Scala?
If you are a dynamic language programmer fearing the tyranny of the Scala compiler, pattern matching is a cause for rejoicing. With pattern matching, you can bypass static typing and get the flexibility of much more dynamic dispatch. Consider: Scala's pattern matching can be used to dispatch on arbitrary predicates. These predicates are not limited to type relationships known at compile time, so a Scala program that uses pattern matching as the cornerstone of its dispatch strategy can be as dynamic as an extremely dynamic Ruby program. Put another way: Scala's catch-all match default (_) is the moral equivalent of Ruby's method_missing.
Dispatch takes many forms. Single dispatch, switch statements, pattern matching, and multiple dispatch all meet similar needs: Selecting runtime behavior in response to varying runtime conditions.
Flexible dispatch is a key element of All of the languages support dispatch strategies that are far more flexible than Java's single dispatch. These strategies are not perfectly interchangeable, but have a great degree of overlap. For example, Clojure's multimethods and Scala's pattern matching look quite different on the surface but can be used to solve similar problems.
Dispatch can be based on criteria more dynamic than the type system, even in Scala.
• This article is based on the JVM Language Shootout talk. Check the schedule for a talk near you.
• Thanks to Ola Bini, Justin Gehtland, Jason Rudolph, Daniel Spiewak, Venkat Subramaniam, and Greg Vaughn for their feedback on a draft of this article.
• Thanks to Chouser and Rich Hickey for feedback on the Clojure examples.
• Feedback on how to improve these examples is most welcome!
Revision History
• 2008/08/29. Fixed fencepost error in Groovy code (Thanks Scott!). How irritating -- I have working unit tests for all the code and get burned by copy and paste.
• 2008/08/30. Better Scala pattern match in second example, per Stefan's suggestion.
Aug 26 2008
Comments Presentation #3: Dispatch
In this talk (Part 3 of the series), I will explore how the languages (Clojure, Groovy, JRuby, and Scala) support dispatch. For more information, see the Dispatch article on the Relevance blog.
Aug 12 2008
Comments #2: Java Interop
This is Part Two of a series of articles on In Part Two, I will look at how languages interoperate with Java.
Java interop is trivial in all of the languages. We have Java itself to thank for this--the Java Virtual Machine Specification makes it easy for other languages to reflect against and call Java code.
A Swing example
As a first example, consider calling into the Java Swing API to create an application [1] that has
• a frame
• button
• a button handler that responds with a model dialog
For starters, here is the application in plain old Java:
import javax.swing.JFrame;
import javax.swing.JButton;
import javax.swing.JOptionPane;
import java.awt.event.ActionListener;
import java.awt.event.ActionEvent;
public class Swing {
public static void main(String[] args) {
JFrame frame = new JFrame("Hello Swing");
JButton button = new JButton("Click Me");
button.addActionListener(new ActionListener() {
public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent event) {
String.format("<html>Hello from <b>Java</b><br/>" +
"Button %s pressed", event.getActionCommand()));
Below, I will present the same Swing application, ported to the languages. Please take note of two things about these examples:
• For this post, I am presenting the languages in order of increasing syntactic distance from Java. This makes sense for porting a simple example from the well-known to the increasingly unfamiliar.
• The ports below are not best practice in the languages. They are deliberately simplistic, so that I can focus on Java interop. In later installments of this series I will show more idiomatic code.
Groovy Swing example
Groovy is the language that looks most like Java. Here is the same example in Groovy:
import javax.swing.JFrame
import javax.swing.JButton
import javax.swing.JOptionPane
import java.awt.event.ActionListener
frame = new JFrame("Hello Swing")
button = new JButton("Click Me")
JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, """<html>Hello from <b>Groovy</b>
Button ${it.actionCommand} pressed""")
} as ActionListener)
frame.contentPane.add button
frame.defaultCloseOperation = JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE
frame.visible = true
If you compare this to the Java example, it is almost the same code, minus a bunch of unnecessary ceremony. The Groovy version lets us omit:
• semicolons
• type declarations
• most parentheses
• get and set for property access
The most important benefit, however, comes in the action listener. The Groovy version sports
• a multiline string (delimited by """)
• string interpolation of it.actionCommand (inside ${})
• no need to write an anonymous inner class, simply pass an anonymous function
For a more idiomatic approach to Swing in Groovy, see the Groovy SwingBuilder project.
Since this post is about Java interop I will state the obvious: From Groovy, Java interop is entirely trivial.
Scala Swing example
Next, let's look at the Scala version:
// Scala (almost right, see below)
import javax.swing._
import java.awt.event.{ActionEvent, ActionListener}
object HelloWorld extends JFrame("Hello Swing") {
def showButtonMessage(msg: String) =
JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, String.format("""<html>Hello from <b>Scala</b>. Button %s pressed""", Array(msg)));
def main(args: Array[String]) {
val button = new JButton("Click Me")
button.addActionListener((e:ActionEvent) => showButtonMessage(e.getActionCommand.toString))
getContentPane add button
The Scala version offers many of the same advantages over Java that the Groovy version provided:
• fewer type declarations than Java
• fewer semicolons
• fewer parentheses
We also see a few items unique to Scala:
• In Scala, the import wildcard is _, not *. In Scala, * is a valid identifier. (Scala's punctuation-friendly identifiers will be a big advantage later when I am writing DSLs.)
• Scala has an inline syntax for importing multiple classes in a package.
• Since we only need one, we declare an object instead of a class.
• Our object extends JFrame, and Scala lets us call the JFrame constructor inline, instead of having to declare a separate constructor.
Again, the most important differences are in the action listener. Like Groovy, Scala lets us skip the anonymous inner class ritual, and simply pass a function:
button.addActionListener((e:ActionEvent) =>
That looks great, except I cheated a little. Scala's implementation of strong typing won't automatically coerce a function into an ActionListener, so the above code won't compile out of the box. Fortunately, Scala's implicit conversions let us have our cake and eat it too: strong typing plus much of the syntactic convenience of a looser type system. All we have to do is tell Scala the the conversion is legal:
// Yes, we can
implicit def actionPerformedWrapper(func: (ActionEvent) => Unit) =
new ActionListener { def actionPerformed(e:ActionEvent) = func(e) }
With this one-time setup in place, we can now pass a function where an ActionListener is expected.
There seem to be several projects to wrap Swing in more idiomatic Scala. Using one of these libraries you should be able to get a syntax cleaner than the sample code here. See ScalaGUI for one example.
From Scala, Java interop is trivial.
JRuby Swing example
Let's see how JRuby fares:
include Java
import javax.swing.JFrame
import javax.swing.JButton
import javax.swing.JOptionPane
import java.awt.event.ActionListener
button = "Click Me"
button.add_action_listener do |evt|
JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(nil, <<-END)
<html>Hello from <b>JRuby</b>.
Button '#{evt.getActionCommand()}' clicked.
frame = "Hello Swing"
frame.content_pane.add button
frame.default_close_operation = JFrame::EXIT_ON_CLOSE
frame.visible = true
If you compare this to the earlier Groovy example, you will see almost exactly the same feature set:
• fewer type declarations
• fewer semicolons
• fewer parentheses
• simplified property access (no get or set)
• a multiline string (delimited by END)
• string interpolation of evt.getActionCommand (the stuff inside #{})
The action listener callback is simplified in a fashion similar to the Groovy example. Ruby automatically generates the ActionListener from a block:
button.add_action_listener { |evt|
# do stuff
In the JRuby example I used Ruby conventions for method names, even on Java objects:
# Ruby
Java programmers expect camel case. As a convenience, JRuby supports both naming conventions:
# Groovy, Scala, or JRuby
Ruby's flexibility has encouraged a lot of experimentation with alternate syntaxes for Java interop. See JRUBY-903 for some of the history. For a more idiomatic approach to Swing in JRuby, see the Profligacy project.
From JRuby, Java interop is trivial.
Clojure Swing example
Here is the Clojure version:
; Clojure
; Clojure
(import '(javax.swing JFrame JButton JOptionPane))
(import '(java.awt.event ActionListener))
(let [frame (JFrame. "Hello Swing")
button (JButton. "Click Me")]
(.addActionListener button
(proxy [ActionListener] []
(actionPerformed [evt]
(JOptionPane/showMessageDialog nil,
(.. frame getContentPane (add button))
(doto frame
(.setDefaultCloseOperation JFrame/EXIT_ON_CLOSE)
(.setVisible true)))
Because Clojure is a Lisp, the syntax is radically different from the others. This deserves hours of discussion, or none. Since my focus here is on Java interop, I am going to save The Great Parenthesis Debate for a later entry in this series. For now, let us suspend judgment on syntax, and focus exclusively on the Java interop.
Importing Java classes is easy. import takes a list. The first element of the list is a package, and the remaining elements are classes to add to the current namespace. Note that this allows the import of multiple classes in a single line.
(import '(javax.swing JFrame JButton JOptionPane))
Creating a Java instance is easy. Use the (class. &args) form.
(JFrame. "Hello Swing")
There are multiple ways to call methods on a Java class. If you want to call a single method, you can use the (.methodName obj &args) form. For static calls, you can also use the (class/method &args) form:
(JOptionPane/showMessageDialog nil "A message")
Sometimes you want to chain multiple calls together. Where in Java you would say x.y().z(), in Clojure you can use the (.. x (y) (z)) form.
(.. frame (getContentPane) (add button))
The last three method calls in our example are all on the same frame object. With Clojure's doto form, you can perform multiple operations on an object without having to repeat the object each time.
(doto frame
(setDefaultCloseOperation JFrame/EXIT_ON_CLOSE)
(setVisible true)))
As with the other examples, the action listener is the most interesting part. In Clojure, proxy will dynamically create a Java instance [2], allowing you to implement interfaces and methods as needed.
(proxy [ActionListener] []
(actionPerformed [evt] {do stuff here...}))
As with JRuby, this solution is more general, and requires more syntax, than the Groovy approach. Also as with JRuby, you can easily roll your own syntax.
From Clojure, Java interop is trivial.
Try this at home
The interop story in is almost boring: It Just Works. So to spice things up a little, here is an exercise in rolling your own constructs, inspired by the examples above. Consider Clojure's import, which can import multiple Java classes in a single line of code.
(import '(javax.swing JFrame JButton JOptionPane))
Why can't this be even more general? Try your hand at writing a custom import function in one of the languages. Some useful features might be
• import all the classes in a JAR
• import all the classes in the intersection of a package and a JAR
• import only interfaces
• import all classes matching some criteria
• import all classes except those matching some criteria
Let me know what you come up with, and I will link to it here.
In the examples above, I have demonstrated how all of the libraries can trivially interoperate with Java. Each of examples called the Swing library with fewer lines of code than the Java version. More importantly, the versions capture the essence of the program with less ceremony.
Seamless interoperation with Java should not be the primary yardstick when measuring languages, because they all get it right. There are complexities and corner cases beyond what I have shown here, in all of the languages. But I consider the Java interop problem to be basically solved.
In these first two articles, I have stayed fairly close to Java style while demonstrating language features. With that groundwork in place, it is time to start using idiomatic In the next installment of the series, we will look at how the languages support Domain-Specific Languages.
• This series is taken from the JVM Language Shootout talk. Check the schedule for a talk near you.
• Suggestions for improving the code samples above are most welcome.
• Thanks to Jason Rudolph, Glenn Vanderburg, and Greg Vaughn for reading an earlier draft of this article.
1. I took the Swing application example from the JRuby samples, and ported it to the other languages.
2. Clojure's proxy creates classes as necessary behind the scenes. In, the dichotomy of class and object is not constantly center stage.
• 2008/08/14. Updated Clojure example and prose per Rich Hickey's suggestion. Updated Groovy example to include pointer to SwingBuilder, per Andres Almiray. Updated JRuby example and prose based on suggestions from Nick Sieger and Ola Bini. Updated Scala example per Tony Morris's suggestion. Thanks for all the improvements!
• 2009/10/16. Update Clojure example to the modern (dot-requiring) version of doto.
Aug 04 2008
Comments Common Ground
This is Part One of a series of articles on In Part One, I will explore the common ground shared by the languages.
I have chosen four languages which together represent "": Clojure, Groovy, JRuby, and Scala. At first glance, these languages are wildly different. Clojure is a Lisp. Groovy is the "almost Java" choice. JRuby has the beauty of Ruby, and the mindshare of Rails. Scala, unlike the others, brings the notion that we need more static typing.
As you might imagine, there is heated debate about which of these languages is best for some purpose, or best in general. Lost in the debate is the fact that these languages share a ton of common ground. They all evolved against a shared background, the Java language. Their design decisions are all influenced by what has worked well in Java, and what has failed.
In this article I will demonstrate two important points about the common ground these languages share:
• Over the last decade of coding in object-oriented, VM-based languages, we have learned a lot about writing expressive, maintainable applications. incorporates this knowledge, enabling essence over ceremony.
• The "essence vs. ceremony" design choices add up to a very different way of programming. The mental shift from Java to is a bigger shift than the previous shift from C/C++ to Java.
I have distilled the shared advantages of to eight points, which are explored in more detail below.
• everything is an object
• low-ceremony property definitions
• expressive collections
• functional programming
• overriding operators
• maintainable exception handling
• adding methods to existing objects
• roll-your-own constructs
Everything is an object
In Java, we live every day with the distinction between objects and primitives. This causes three practical problems:
1. APIs must be duplicated: one method for objects, and another for primitives. Or worse, septlicated. One method for objects, and one each for different primitive types.
2. The default (efficient, easy-to-use) numeric types have range limitations. Exceed them and your program breaks in mysterious ways.
3. You cannot use intuitive math operators (+,-,etc.) with accurate numeric types.
In, everything is an object. You can invoke methods on all types using the same syntax.
; clojure
(. 1 floatValue)
// groovy
===> 1.0
# ruby
=> 1.0
// scala
res1: Float = 1.0
Low-ceremony property definitions
In Java, to create a property, you must define a field, a getter, a setter, and (often) a constructor, all with appropriate protection modifiers. In, you can define all of these in a single step.
; clojure
(defstruct person :first-name :last-name)
// groovy
class Person {
def firstName
def lastName
# ruby
Person =, :last_name)
// scala
If you need to override (or omit) a getter, setter, or constructor for a class, you can also do that, without having to spell out all boilerplate versions of the other pieces.
And that's not all. All of these languages embrace TMTOWTDI (There's More Than One Way To Do It), so there are multiple variants on the approaches shown above.
Expressive collections provides a convenient literal syntax for the most important collections: arrays and maps. In addition, you can string together multiple operations by passing function arguments, without having to write explicit iterators or loops. For example, to find the all the squares under 100 that are also odd:
; clojure
(filter (fn [x] (= 1 (rem x 2))) (map (fn [x] (* x x)) (range 10)))
(1 9 25 49 81)
// groovy
(1..10).collect{ it*it }.findAll { it%2 == 1}
===> [1, 9, 25, 49, 81]
# ruby
(1..10).collect{ |x| x*x }.select{ |x| x%2 == 1}
// scala
(1 to 10).map(x => x*x).filter(x => x%2 == 1)
res20: Seq.Projection[Int] = RangeMF(1, 9, 25, 49, 81)
There are similar conveniences for name/value collections, a.k.a. hashes or dictionaries.
Functional programming
The convenient collections described above are a special case of a more general idea: functional programming. supports functions as first class objects, allowing function arguments, functions that create new functions, and closures over the current scope. As a simple example, consider creating an adder function that adds some value chosen at runtime:
; clojure
(defn adder [x] (fn [y] (+ x y)))
// groovy
adder = { add -> { val -> val + add } }
# ruby
def adder(add)
lambda { |x| x + add }
// scala
def sum(a: Int)(b: Int) = a + b
Overriding operators
In Java, you cannot override operators. Math looks like this, for types like BigDecimal:
// Java math
balance.add(balance.multiply(interest)); allows you to override operators. This allows you to do create new types that feel like built-in types, e.g. you could write a ComplexNumber or RationalNumber that supports +, -, *, and /.
; Clojure
(+ balance (* balance interest))
// Groovy
balance + (balance * interest)
# JRuby
balance + (balance * interest)
// Scala (See [1])
balance + (balance * interest)
Maintainable exception handling
Checked exceptions are a failed experiment. Java code is bloated with checked exception handling code that tends to obscure intent without improving error handling. Worse yet, checked exceptions are a maintenance headache at abstraction boundaries. (New kinds of unrecoverable failures down the dependency chain should not necessitate recompilation!) does not require you to declare checked exceptions, or to explicitly deal with checked exceptions from other code. It is a testimony to the power of Java (the platform) that other languages are free to ignore the ugliness of checked exceptions in Java (the language).
Adding methods to existing types
In Java, you cannot add methods to existing types. This leads to absurd object-mismodeling, as developers create utility classes that defy the point of OO:
// Java (from the Jakarta Commons)
public class StringUtils {
public static boolean isBlank(String str) {
int strLen;
if (str == null || (strLen = str.length()) == 0) {
return true;
for (int i = 0; i < strLen; i++) {
if ((Character.isWhitespace(str.charAt(i)) == false)) {
return false;
In, you can add methods to existing types:
; Clojure
(defmulti blank? class)
(defmethod blank? String [s] (every? #{\space} s))
(defmethod blank? nil [_] true)
// Groovy
String.metaClass.isBlank = {
length() == 0 || every { Character.isWhitespace(it.charAt(0)) }
# Ruby (from Rails)
class String
def blank?
empty? || strip.empty?
// Scala
class CharWrapper(ch: Char) {
def isWhitespace = Character.isWhitespace(ch)
implicit def charWrapper(ch: Character) = new CharWrapper(ch)
class BlankWrapper(s: String) {
def isBlank = s.isEmpty || s.forall(ch => ch.isWhitespace)
implicit def stringWrapper(s: String) = new BlankWrapper(s)
Roll-your-own constructs
In Java, you have the language and the libraries. The two are clearly distinct: you can write new libraries, but you cannot add language features.
In, the line between language and libraries is blurry. You can create new constructs that work like core language features. For example, Clojure provides an and function.
; clojure
(and 1 2) => 2
But maybe your problem domain isn't so binary. You need a most function, that returns true if most of its arguments evaluate to true. Clojure doesn't have this, but you can write one:
; clojure
(most 1 2) => true
(most 1 2 nil) => true
(most 1 nil nil) => false
The point here is not "Does my language need a 'most' conditional?" Probably not. The point is that different domains have different needs. In, the boundary between the language and the libraries is a minimized. You can adapt the language to your domain, instead of the other way around.
As another example, consider Ruby's attribute syntax:
# Ruby
class Account
attr_accessor :name
dsl_attribute :type
attr_accessor is built into the language. dsl_attribute is a library method that I wrote, which allows you to omit the "=" when assigning values, e.g.
# normal attributes = "foo"
# equals-free attributes
account.type checking
The languages share a ton of common ground. Although I've used small isolated examples for explanation, the real power comes from using these features together. Combining all the features leads to an entirely different style of coding.
• You do not have to code defensively, using a slew of factories, patterns, and dependency injection to keep your code testable and adaptable. Instead, you can build a minimal solution and evolve it.
• Instead of coding in your language, you can develop internal Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) that better match your problem domain.
In my experience, this style of coding tends to reduce the size of a codebase by an order of magnitude, while improving readability.
Many people are looking for the "next big language." The next big language is already here, but it isn't a single language. It is the collection of ideas above (plus probably some I missed) as manifested in
Does the transition to deserve the name "big"? Absolutely. In my experience, the move from Java to is every bit as big as the previous tectonic shifts in the industry, both in learning curve and in productivity advantages once you make the transition.
As an industry, we need to reset the bar to include Once we have, we can have a conversation about the differences in these languages. I will take up the unique aspects of the languages in future installments of this series.
• This article is taken from the first half of the JVM Language Shootout talk that I wrote for NFJS. Check the schedule for a talk near you.
• Suggestions for improving the code samples above are most welcome.
• Thanks to Justin Gehtland, Jason Rudolph, Rob Sanheim, Glenn Vanderburg, and Greg Vaughn for reading an earlier draft of this article.
1. The BigDecimal example does not work as I would expect on the Scala build I have ( But the important point is that I could make it work by adding an implicit conversion. I am not dependent on the language designers, I can improve the language myself.
• 2008/08/04: fixed errata, better Clojure example for expressive collections.
• 2008/08/12: added Rich Hickey's improved blank? example for Clojure.
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Almond Joy/Mounds February 22, 2011
Filed under: Week 7 — valariehafner @ 8:11 pm
1. Describe how the company/business used the four P’s to add value and/or promote the product or service.
Product: Almond Joy and Mounds Candy Bars
Price: not specified
Promotion: Unwrap your paradise. It shows a guy in a cubicle at work unwrapping a Almond Joy and suddenly his dull workspace turns into a mini tropical paradise as he lounges on a hammock.
place: REAL TV around 8:00 pm during the show “Most Daring” on Sunday.
2. What industry(s) is the product or service a part of? Food industry.
3. Describe the target market (ie. what segments are being targeted)? People who have desk jobs that feel stressed or bored who usually snack when they are feeling these ways. Probably in the white collar group between the ages of 32 to retirement.
4. What unique value is the company trying to convey with the product or service? In the mundaneness of the job, choose an Almond Joy or Mounds for a bit of a break (vacation).
5. Does it work? Why or why not? Any general observations? Yes. The tropical paradise that the man finds himself in while eating the candy bar is shiny, full of sunlight, and bright, as opposed to the drab office surroundings with artificial light. When they break from the office scene to just the 2 types of candy bars, they have a bright blue (which psychologically, the color induces a peaceful emotion) background with a white that fades out into the blue, further giving the peace from the humdrum of office life. All in all the commercial itself is an eye catcher and agrees with the “id rather be somewhere else” attitude that is common with office (cubacle) workers.
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North Korea: Nine teenagers forcibly returned to N. Korea
By Amnesty International, , Index number: ASA 24/006/2013
Nine North Korean teenagers have been forcibly returned to North Korea where they are at serious risk of arbitrary detention, torture and other ill-treatment, enforced disappearance, forced labour and possible death.
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• Final Project (Persona)
For Intro to Photography Spring 2011
• My final project for my Intro to Photography class focused on the human persona, as defined by Jungian psychology.
• Persona focuses on masking the person with costumes to bring out the persona and stages in the persona, as specified by Jungian psychology.
The persona is the face or role that is used to define a person to the world, therefore a person can have multiple personas. There are also stages to the persona: Identification is when you find who or what you are supposed to be in the eyes of society. Disintegration is when the mask that you are known as is essentially lost. After disintegration there are two ways that are followed negative restoration or absence. Negative restoration is when someone tries to restore the previous anima, which is generally met with a negative response as the previous persona is something that cannot be regained. Absence of character is to live without asocial role, with this stage being almost virtually impossible, this is hard to obtain. Restoration of the self is the ultimate goal of someone who has gone through disintegration of the persona, contrary to the implications restoration is the generation of a newer more viable anima.
I have 3 sets of 5 photos in two different ways; the obvious being the set of 5 for each costume,the less obvious being the set of each costume in each stage of the persona. While keeping to this theme, and slight structure, I tried to tell a different story with each of the sets of costumes. | <urn:uuid:5503890d-f1e6-4c9f-8ec4-9ccef07563ff> | 2 | 1.703125 | 0.077039 | en | 0.954755 | https://www.behance.net/gallery/Final-(Persona)/1383767 |
Q&A: Affording Your First Home
• By MP Dunleavey
• October 05, 2009
Q: I am a 23-year-old professional, and I'm eager to buy a home. I just landed a new job with great pay and benefits. What's your advice to a young woman ready to spread her wings? {
A: First, you need to decide how much home can you afford.
learnIt's not an easy question. But figuring it out can be fun—in a treasure-hunting sort of way. Let's start with three of the most important factors that will drive your purchase:
• The estimated price of the home you want.
• The target amount of your down payment.
• How much you can afford to spend each month on ALL the expenses relating to home ownership.
Although you may know, say, what a one-bedroom condo is likely to cost in your area, you'll need to call a realtor to find out the maintenance charges, fees and property taxes.
Next, determine the amount you can save each month. If you can sock away $700 a month, it will take you at least 21 months to save a $15,000 down payment. Reality check, right?
Now, experiment with a mortgage calculator like this one.
If you earn $50,000 and put down $15,000, that could enable you to buy a $154,000 home, with a 30-year fixed mortgage of about $139,000, and an $1,166 payment (including insurance, taxes).
Can you afford that much house? Remember: You need to save a few thousand for closing costs. And if your down payment is less than 20% of the purchase price, you'll pay an extra sum for private mortgage insurance (PMI) each month. If you're buying a condo, factor in maintenance or building charges every month, too.
So, with a salary of $50,000 -- and approximate take-home pay of $35,000, or about $2,900 per month -- a mortgage payment of $1,166 leaves you only $1,750 to cover all your other expenses.
Ideally, your monthly payment should be about a third of your income. So start over: reconsider your target price, or making a bigger down payment, until the numbers add up to what you can afford comfortably. Happy treasure hunting!
Here's a great chart that detailing how much you can afford, broken down by salary level.
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Though NASA’s wheeled rovers have sent back a wealth of data and an astonishing array of photos, they really aren’t the nimblest of explorers. Virtually every inch of Mars holds something of interest, but some inches are frankly more interesting than others. Traveling between the different sites can be tricky — but a team of researchers in the UK has spent the past several years working out a possible solution to this problem: a Mars hopper. In the relatively low gravity of the red planet, they hope to take extraterrestrial mobility to new heights.
The design was first proposed more than three years ago, but at the time it was a purely hypothetical concept. Since then, the team, comprised of academics from Leicester University and private researchers with the Astrium space company, has worked out a wide variety of the specifics. Its design work is now funded by the European Space Agency, with calculations putting the project on-target for its 1000 kilogram weight goal. Combined with their proposed leg design, the one Earth-ton explorer (roughly 380 kilos under Mars gravity) would give the hopper a maximum range of over 900 meters.
Curiosity's path as of August 2013.
Curiosity’s path as of August 2013.
To put that in perspective, Curiosity’s estimated maximum speed in real (Martian) world conditions is about 200 meters per day. Add to this the obvious advantages of a mode of transport that can entirely bypass obstacles like valleys and rough terrain, and you’ve got an enticing rover design.
The jumping action would be powered by a radioisotope thermal engine, a rocket that uses liquid CO2 as fuel and a radioactive sample for ignition. The CO2 would be collected from the Martian atmosphere and pressurized into its liquid form, making it a sustainable fuel source for long-term missions. The only problem the team foresees is the collection rate: though it can travel rapidly, current designs could only fill the hopper’s tank with CO2 over the course of several weeks. Curiosity could theoretically cover a comparable distance in four-to-five days — though only if it didn’t need to circumnavigate some obstacle along the way.
Additionally, Curiosity virtually never travels at full speed since, as mentioned, there are wonders to stop and examine all over the surface of Mars. Though the team views an improved CO2 collection rate as a necessity for the hopper, it’s unlikely to need anything much quicker than a week or so.
Most landers use legs with an internal honeycomb structure designed to crumple on touchdown — like the crumple zones on cars, they cushion the shock of impact but — also like crumple zones — they leave the whole unit unfit for a second landing. The Astrium hopper would use a technology both familiar and novel, the principle of a simple science experiment scaled up to NASA proportions. Dropping a magnet down a copper tube creates eddy currents that generate a magnetic field in opposition to the pull of gravity, slowing the magnet’s descent. By using strong magnets in each of the hopper’s four legs, the hopper could land softly without the need for any limited-use crush legs or finicky compressible liquids.
This schematic view of the proposed hopper is more feasible than the artist's rendering seen above.
This schematic view of the proposed hopper is more feasible than the artist’s rendering seen above.
The hopper has a planned leg span of four meters, with a body size of about 2.5 meters. Its size and strength would leave room for about 20 kilograms of scientific equipment — that is, notably, quite a bit less than Curiosity’s roughly 75 kilograms of instrumentation. Advances in materials science might lighten the craft while maintaining size, allowing for greater storage. Any possible duo of explorers, a short-range rover that could hole up inside the hopper for longer-range transport, seems unlikely until the team figures out how to best these weight restrictions.
As of August, Curiosity had only traveled a few kilometers in total. Mobility is a major issue for Martian explorers, but this hopper is more about accessibility than overall speed. The ability to jump down into a canyon, or up onto a plateau, could open up whole new swathes of planet to discover. As we delve ever further into the history of Mars, it’s these extreme, hard-to-reach places that may end up holding the evidence we need the most.
Post a Comment
• pixelstuff
So why can’t we just build a faster rover? Is it simply an issue of conserving electricity or something else?
• Jamie MacDonald
We can easily, but if it’s moving fast and gets caught on a rock…game over.
• pixelstuff
I can think of a half a dozen ways to prevent a rover from getting permanently stuck on a rock or damaged from a 2 mph impact. Curiosity implements some of those already. But even without those various protection mechanisms, it seems like we should also be able to make the rover smart enough to simply stop or maneuver around any stationary obstacle large enough to cause a problem.
• Child
Look! A rocket powered penis! | <urn:uuid:582beb16-b4f0-4292-b5a3-71ae6c8c26b6> | 4 | 3.65625 | 0.029308 | en | 0.933784 | https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/167307-mars-hopper-could-jump-almost-kilometer-on-fuel-collected-from-the-atmosphere |
Mirrors. They were everywhere. Plastered on the walls, plastered on the ceiling, and some were even plastered on the floor. But you can't find a place like this just anywhere. You have to go to a special place. A place that's hidden in the forest. If you do try to look for it, go to the forest and then walk towards the middle. It's a mansion-like building with smoke coming out of the chimney. No plastered walls. Just glass. You can't miss it.
This place was indeed The Mirror Factory. Its founder was Granger and its co-founder was Guy Montag. Montag ran away from the life he lived in, met Granger, and now, a whole decade later, they got their factory up and running. The idea of this factory was to make people see. See what life is really about behind those walls, "family", burning books, and machines that do everything for you. They still had them of course. You can't just make technology disappear. But as more and more people entered the mirror factory, every bit of enhanced technology was being used less.
Now, people did understand what life was about. No one talked to their "family" anymore when they needed help. People even stopped buying walls and bought more books. The firemen lost their job of burning books. Now, they hosed down houses and other buildings that were set aflame. Thanks to The Mirror Factory, intellectual became a good word again. People not only wanted to know how to do things, but they also wanted to know the meaning behind it all. Everything was changing the way Granger and Montag planned it.
That is until Mildred decided to come back.
Montag hadn't seen her in a decade. Ten years ago, Mildred pulled the siren meaning that Montag had a book. Montag watched her get in a car and drive off. That's when Montag decided to run away.
It was a chilly December day but thanks to the sun reflecting off of the mirrors, it was warm inside. Montag was standing behind a ten year old boy that was looking at himself in a mirror. As Montag was explaining life, an employee of the factory ran up to him.
"Montag!" the employee yelled. Montag and the child looked at him. "Granger needs to see you. There's something going on downstairs."
Montag excused himself from the child's presence and walked downstairs to Granger's office with the employee on his tail. Granger's office door was open and Montag was able to hear some voices. One was Granger's for sure. The other one he couldn't make out.
"This isn't right," a woman's voice said. "There are books everywhere. People are reading them. Someone needs to notify the firemen!"
"The firemen can't do anything about this," Granger said. "They don't burn books anymore. They only hose down buildings that are on fire now."
"What's going on?" Montag asked as he walked in. He stopped in his tracks. Standing before him was a woman in maybe her forties and she had ear buds in both her ears. A frantic look was in her eye. Montag knew exactly who this woman was.
"Mildred?" he asked.
Mildred looked at him. "Guy? Why are you working here? Call the firemen!"
Montag shook his head. Didn't Granger just tell her what firemen do now? "Why are you here?"
"I saw this place. Didn't like it," Mildred said.
"But many people like it here," Montag said.
"Why? It's terrible! People are reading books! People know the meaning of things now! Nothing is hidden! Sadness everywhere! Anger everywhere!" Mildred exclaimed.
"Actually, there's less sadness and anger than before," Montag said.
"No! Firemen burned and took the things away that made us feel those things," Mildred said.
"Not exactly. If you were so happy, why'd you try to commit suicide ten years ago?" Montag asked. "Ever since this mirror factory opened, suicides have gone down. Books of tragedy are being published now, sure, but think about it. Someone needs to experience sadness in order to realize what happiness is really about."
Mildred kept quiet and looked down at the floor.
"Why don't you come upstairs and look at a mirror?"
Mildred's tiny head shook frantically.
"C'mon Milly," Montag said. "I was just with a ten year old up there. He was able to recite almost every verse in Hamlet. Oh, did you know they started publishing Shakespeare again? We went from having zero copies to millions!"
No response from Milly.
"The other day, a lady came in and brought some of the most confusing poems ever written. She was able to tell everyone what each line meant."
Mildred's ear buds beeped.
Montag sighed. "You know, there was once this man who was dragged in here. He didn't want to look in the mirrors. He wanted to stay inside his walls with his 'relatives'. But when he looked into a mirror, his whole world stopped. He looked at his reflection for who knows how long. Ever since then, all he did was read. If you ask him any question, even the most difficult one you can think of, he knows the answer." The story wasn't true but hopefully it would get Mildred to do something. "So why don't you just look in the mirror Mildred?"
Mildred sighed and walked over to Montag. Together, the two of them went upstairs. Mildred's eyes popped open when she heard all the laughter coming from The Mirror Factory. She grabbed Montag's hand. Montag guided her to a mirror that was on the other side of the room. Mildred didn't dare to look into it. She closed her eyes instead.
Montag handed her a book. "Open it. Then look at yourself in the mirror."
Mildred grabbed the book but kept her eyes closed.
"Please Milly?"
Mildred sighed. She opened the book and felt the pages. They were soft and thin between her fingers. Her ear buds kept ringing uncontrollably like they always did. Slowly, she opened her eyes. In the mirror was a woman with blue eyes and brown hair. An opened book was in her hand. Her husband stood behind her.
"Well, what do you think?" Montag asked. "What do you want to know?"
"Life," Mildred said.
Then she took her ear buds out of her ear and the "relatives" she once heard stopped talking.
"You have just the right book," Montag said with a smile.
Together, they began to read. | <urn:uuid:fd5b823b-a7ef-49f9-983a-f7256daaa04f> | 2 | 2.453125 | 0.501857 | en | 0.992207 | https://www.fanfiction.net/s/8418606/1/Just-Look-in-the-Mirror |
Summary: A morbid look at what happens when someone loses their creativity.
A/N: My inspiration for this came from the fact that I like to draw. I wondered how I would feel if suddenly, I couldn't create art the way I wanted to anymore. Thus, this story emerged. Enjoy.
Nathan didn't feel quite like other boys. Shy, reclusive, and awkward, he kept away from the world and lived very much alone. His mother worked here and there, stayed out late, and came home stupidly drunk most nights. She never made sure he had friends or did well in school.
Nathan didn't mind, because he had something to keep him busy. He always had a pen and some paper, and with a million things running through his untamed mind, he could always find something to draw. He thought up the most wonderful things—balloons that floated through the air with animals living inside them somehow; stairways that went up, up, and up and finally bent in on themselves; melting roads, bridges, and people. He never thought twice about anything he drew being foolish or strange. It was wonderful, beautiful, and new. Everything new thing he thought up and drew was fuel for the next thing.
It made Nathan happy to draw. He found comfort in his whimsical people and alien lands. They were his, and that made them special. He saved everything he drew and plastered his art all over his drab room. One day, he pasted a scribble of a gigantic, two-headed snake on his wall, stepped back, and realized he'd covered every wall in his room completely with drawings. His ceiling was also covered with them, and his floor had a huge stack of drawings in the far corner.
One day, Nathan was sitting on his bed drawing when there came a knock at the door. His mother was asleep, so he went to the door. It was a social worker, who'd been hearing reports about Nathan for months. He was tall and very confident. Nathan backed away.
"May I come in?" the social worker asked.
"No!" Nathan cried, and he slammed the door closed.
The next day, the man was back. A squat black woman stood beside him.
They came in without knocking and looked around. Nathan hid in his room where he felt safest. The two social workers checked all over the house. They checked the kitchen, the bathroom, his mother's room, the den, and finally, Nathan's room. They looked around for a moment and came over to talk to Nathan. The man knelt down on the floor so that he was at the boy's level.
"Are you Nathan Conway?" he asked.
Nathan nodded.
"Where's your mother?"
"She's shopping," Nathan lied. "She'll be back soon."
The woman was standing behind the man, her arms crossed. "We gonna wait for your momma to come home, ok, sweetie?" she said.
They waited for hours. The woman filled out a long list of papers. She went around re-inspecting the rooms, making faces of disbelief everywhere she looked. The man sat and talked with Nathan. When his mother finally came home, she screamed.
"Get. Out. Of. My. House!" she cried, spotting the black woman. The man stood up and rushed into the kitchen.
"Who are you?" the mother shrieked, her voice raising an octave. Nathan winced in his room.
The social workers explained. They explained about the house. It was in terrible condition. The mother had left her 11-year-old son home alone all day. She didn't make sure he attended school every day. She never did anything about his bad grades.
The duo left and they gave the mother a week to prepare her son to leave.
A week later, two men came to collect Nathan. His mother stood in the doorway teary-eyed and speechless. Inside, she felt a sense of relief along with her loss. One less thing to worry about.
Nathan was silent the whole car trip up the local children's home. He'd gotten to take a few of his drawing with him, but he couldn't take them all. He wondered what his mother would do with the ones he'd left behind and he started to cry.
His first month at the children's home proved to be optimistic. He was enrolled in a new school and given a clean slate. A tutor came over every Wednesday to help him and other children with their problem subjects. Nathan felt a bit more confident about school and life. He drew about some of the new things he learned. He drew Napoleon rearing up on a white stallion. He drew a native Indian fishing in a river.
Months passed. Nathan's grades went from Fs to As. He was a good student and a nice boy. The teachers and caretakers liked him very much. Nathan was beginning to feel content and happy in his new home. One day, he sat down after school and found one of his old drawings. It was the two-headed snake one. He smiled and thought of what else he could draw. He hadn't done anything creative since he'd been taken away. As he sat at his desk, pencil in hand, no ideas came to him. He froze in his own mind and wondered how this could be. How could he, the boy with an overflow of creative juices, have nothing exciting to draw?
After a few minutes, an idea came to him. It was a man with crab claws for arms. He had to admit, he'd seen something like that in a movie once, and it wasn't the best idea he'd ever had. He put the drawing away and found something else to do.
He didn't try drawing again for a long time. A year, perhaps. He had more important things to worry about—studying, friends, sports. But one day he was walking home and he passed a huge mural on a building. It was exotic and beautiful, like one of his old drawings. Nathan felt a moment of envy, and he rushed back to the home. Determined to draw something as fabulous as the mural, he sat down and pulled out a piece of paper. He'd learned so much in a year. He had so many new things in his mind. There was new movie he'd seen, books he'd read, plays he'd watched, people he'd met. He wanted to do something fantastic. Something that told him he still had it. He wanted an old part of himself back.
He sat still for a long time, trying to think up something wonderful. Nothing came. Every time he tried to think of something completely original, someone else's artwork or idea would pop into his mind. He searched and searched through his brain, suddenly desperate to find some trace of his old, happy self. He felt himself sinking in his chair. It was gone, he realized after a long moment. Gone forever. He couldn't fabricate any of those old, brilliant monsters and places he'd once been able to. Everything in his brain now was facts and other people's ideas.
Nathan went to school the next day feeling depressed. He'd spent all night trying to draw like he once had. He'd yearned for the creative spark to come back to him. It didn't. He paid very close attention to his teachers, trying to see if they ever said or thought anything creative and original. After his science class, he asked his teacher, "Ma'am, what would happen if there were no oxygen on Earth?"
His teacher stared at him for a second. "Why, we'd die, dear."
Nathan tried again. 'But what if we found a way to live without oxygen? Like we could breathe neon or hydrogen instead? What if we made our own oxygen in our bodies?"
His teacher smiled stupidly. "That's nonsense," she said. "Who would ever think something so ridiculous?"
"So it wouldn't be possible?"
"Of course not. There are plenty of things—that included—which are impossible and never will be," she said. "Does that help?"
Nathan didn't say anything as he walked away. A cold feeling crept up his spine. Was he alone with his crazy desire to create? Was this what school meant: no creativity? Is that how all adults were? Was that what he was becoming?
He tried once more at lunch, asking a fellow student a similar question. The answer was essentially the same. "Are you stupid or what? No duh, we can't do that."
Nathan didn't ask anyone else. He went home, and that night he looked around at his old drawings. He felt distant from them, like they weren't a part of him anymore. They'd been born from a pure mind. He didn't have that kind of a mind anymore.
He stood in the middle of his room for a long time feeling numb and removed. His brain raced. He didn't know what to do. Would he grow up and be like his teachers—unimaginative and boring? Would he always look at the world through facts and knowledge rather than the innocent mindset that anything was possible? He dreaded the thought, and yet it loomed over him. His beautiful, innocent world was slipping away into nothingness and when it did, he would be left empty. He would be like them.
No, he thought. Never. Nathan searched and searched for a way to avoid this inevitable fact. There had to be a way to make sure he never came any closer to being diluted with reality. There is a way, he thought suddenly. A very sure way. It didn't seem like a pleasant option, but it would ensure his mental freedom. Eventually, he concluded, it was the only way.
That night, he put his plan into action.
The next morning, Nathan Conway was found dead in his room, a noose around his neck. He was smiling. In his cold fist was a crumpled sheet of paper—the two-headed snake.
Ok, so it was a bit morbid, but hopefully everyone liked it. Please review!
-The Ember Raven | <urn:uuid:b054a3fc-3556-4be4-ace1-57a737c5aa9f> | 2 | 1.539063 | 0.417986 | en | 0.994174 | https://www.fictionpress.com/s/2995943/1/Innocence |
Is the universe a causal system?
1. A simple question. I might ask this as well: Is the universe causal?
The reason I'm asking this is that today I've ran into two guys having an argument about this, so I want to know.
Thank you.
2. jcsd
3. SteamKing
SteamKing 8,320
Staff Emeritus
Science Advisor
Homework Helper
And you want to jump into the middle of this argument because ...?
In any event, this question seems to fall more within the realm of philosophy than physics, and PF doesn't do philosophy according to its rules.
4. phinds
phinds 8,096
Gold Member
In classical mechanics, yes. In GR, you need to be very clear what you mean by causal.
5. I'm not jumping to the argument, it's just that those who were arguing seemed not to have any scientific background related. I'm simply curious.
I'll define causality like this: Causal System: A system whose output(s) depend on the current/past input(s).
6. phinds
phinds 8,096
Gold Member
Yes, that is the standard definition and in no way changes my original answer. As I understand it, that standard definition is too vague in relation to GR and QM.
7. Thank you for your response, but can you elaborate why is it too vague?
8. phinds
phinds 8,096
Gold Member
Unfortunately, I cannot. This is something that I heard once, thought was a bit weird and so briefly checked out on a couple of reputable sites and since it seemed to make sense, I just left it at that simple fact, since I did not want to delve further.
I assume you should be able to find stuff on the internet. Try Goggling "QM and causality"
9. what I want to know is whether or not the universe is memoryless
10. Drakkith
Staff: Mentor
What is thread even about?
11. phinds
phinds 8,096
Gold Member
I have no idea what oneamp is talking about, but what problem do you have with the OP's question? It seems perfectly reasonable to me, as do our interchanges. That is, the thread seems perfectly reasonable up until oneamp's interjection.
12. AlephZero
AlephZero 7,298
Science Advisor
Homework Helper
Even in special relativity, there is no concept of "universal absolute time". So there is no simple concept of "event A happens before event B". One observer might claim that A happens first, while another observer (moving relative to the first one) claims B happens first, and both of them are right.
if you can't even be sure in what order "stuff happens", the idea of "causation" is rather hard to nail down.
If you really want to get your head around this, you need to do a course on special relativity. Warning: pop-science books and websites may be seriously misleading, or just plain wrong.
13. Drakkith
Staff: Mentor
Perhaps, but I believe the order of events that an observer goes through will be seen the same by all other observers, right? For example, if I get up at 9 am my time and eat breakfast one hour later, all observers will agree that I woke up before I ate breakfast. Is that correct?
14. Chronos
Chronos 9,758
Science Advisor
Gold Member
Causality is invariant under SR. Since FTL travel is forbidden in both SR and GR, in no reference frame will you ever see a caused event precede its causative event. You need not worry about waking up full, Drakkith.
Last edited: Apr 6, 2014
15. Drakkith
Staff: Mentor
So no chance of waking up with the eggs already made then. Got it.
16. As I recall Einsteins General Relativity admits solutions that form closed time loops, so strict adherence to causality must be imposed by some other means.
And within the realm of Quantum Mechanics there is the eternal quest to inject determinism into (for example) the decays of states, thus giving a casual response to question of type "why did this particle decay at t=10?" and "why did the fourth Hydrogen atom spin-flip first?"
As for oneamps question, I know I have a memory in my computer (I remember buying it) so the universe is certainly not totally void of memories. If you can manage a more well defined version of that question you might get a better answer.
17. Uh, this might not be the right place, but I have a question for all of you PhysicsForums veterans with thousands and thousands of posts. I've just been incredibly impressed by the level of discussion here and I want to get where you are.
What are you educations? What did you focus on in college? How long have you been physics enthusiasts?
18. Drakkith
Staff: Mentor
This is best asked in the General Discussion forum. Otherwise we'll have to sic Phinds on you! (He's more bark than bite, but his slobber is the real threat) | <urn:uuid:17d559b5-6324-4737-9bb2-96d75c2fc757> | 2 | 1.90625 | 0.819592 | en | 0.957019 | https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/is-the-universe-a-causal-system.746233/ |
Problems and challenges associated with the generic issues of design and complexity permeate applied psychological science. For example, although research suggests that preschool programs can facilitate enduring psychological and social benefits over the life-course, continued evaluation of programs is always needed as part of the iterative redesign process, and also as part of the political and economic persuasion process, that is, to sustain continued investment by national and local government. Also, as culture, demographics, infrastructures, and local contexts change, there is always a requirement to reconsider the design of programs.
Similarly, programs that have been shown to be effective in one region may not replicate well outside of the original research context. Certain capacities are needed to operate and sustain the program with high quality, including having an organization and community that are fully knowledgeable and supportive of the program, a staff that is well trained and supported in the conduct of the program model, and real-time information on implementation of the program and its achievement of benchmarks to guide efforts in continuous quality improvement.
At the same time, unrealistic expectations can distort public opinion and political decision making. For example, while preschool education programs for children such as Head Start were originally touted in the political arena as a silver bullet to end poverty, crime, welfare dependency, and boost national IQ and educational achievement, the results of intervention research were more modest than expected. Even before the evidence was in, Head Start’s planners were reasonably modest in their expectations and never believed that a brief summer program would have much effect on life-course poverty and other big social problems. The problem is that the academics did not do a good job convincing policy makers and the public of this reality. The subsequent gap between the high expectations of the politicians and the public and the more realistic and modest expectations of the academics had a negative impact on research and program development.
Researchers and practitioners face a major challenge as they strive to design and implement effective programs that are cost effective and sustainable. The challenge of program design and collective action in the implementation of these programs can only be achieved by investing in a form of systems science that is generic enough in its design approach to facilitate the integration of knowledge and perspectives of multiple stakeholders.
Part of what is needed is (a) a social network of highly knowledgeable scientists and practitioners who, collectively, have a deep understanding of children and are (b) willing to come together as a team in the context of (c) a local problem situation and (d) work with local stakeholders to structure the local problem situation and (e) import their expert knowledge alongside the expert local knowledge of stakeholders in the design of resolution structures that inform the adaptive action of individuals and groups. If psychologists embrace this goal, psychology will need to embrace applied systems science.
Specifically, to bring about coherent, integrated change, we need an applied system science that incorporates at least five elements. According to John Warfield (Warfield, 2006), systems science is best seen as a science that consists of nested sub-sciences. It is presented most compactly using the notation of set theory. Let A represent a science of description. Let B represent a science of design. Let C represent a science of complexity. Let D represent a science of action (praxiology). Let E represent systems science. Then
A [ B [ C [ D [ E
We can learn something of systems science by first learning a science of description. Then we can learn a science of design which includes a science of description. The science of design is fundamental if our goal is to redesign systems. Next we can learn a science of complexity which includes a science of description and a science of design. The science of complexity is fundamental if our goal is to integrate the knowledge and perspective that different people have in relation to key problematic design issues. Next we can learn a science of action which includes a science of description, a science of design, and a science of complexity. The science of action is fundamental if our goal is to catalyze collective action for the purpose of bringing about system changes that are grounded in the science of description, design, and complexity. Effective applied systems science needs to embed these elements, one within the other.
As it stands, while the research on childhood program efficacy is seeking to guide the way we invest in our children — with key recommendations derived from psychological, social, economic, and political levels of analysis — the integration that is being constructed draws largely upon the science of description. By adding a science of design, complexity, and action we not only achieve a higher-level integration, we also shift the centre of power and influence and persuasion beyond the academic domain and into a domain of enquiry that includes all those who seek a better future for their children.
Reynolds, A., Rolnick, A., Englund, M., Temple, J. (2010). Childhood Programs and Practices in the First Decade of Life: A Human Capital Integration. Cambridge University Press
Warfield, J.N. (2006). An introduction to systems science, Singapore, World Scientific.
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Intestinal Malrotation
About Intestinal Malrotation
An intestinal obstruction is a blockage of the digestive tract that prevents the proper passage of food. Some intestinal obstructions are present at birth, while others are caused by such problems as hernias, abnormal scar tissue growth after an abdominal operation, and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).
Body Basics: Digestive System
• other defects of the digestive system
• heart defects
• abnormalities of other organs, including the spleen or liver
How It Can Happen
The small and large intestines are the longest part of the digestive system. If stretched out to their full length, they would measure more than 20 feet long by adulthood, but because they're folded up, they fit into the relatively small space inside the abdomen.
Malrotation occurs when the intestines don't position themselves normally during fetal development and aren't attached inside properly as a result. The exact reason this occurs is unknown.
Around the 10th week of pregnancy, the intestines move from the umbilical cord into the abdomen. When they don't properly turn after moving into the abdomen, malrotation occurs.
Malrotation in itself may not cause any problems. However, it can lead to other complications:
• Bands of tissue called Ladd's bands may form, obstructing the first part of the small intestine (the duodenum).
• In a condition called volvulus, the bowel twists on itself, cutting off the blood flow to the tissue and causing the tissue to die. The symptoms associated with volvulus, including pain and cramping, are often what lead to the diagnosis of malrotation.
• Obstruction caused by volvulus or Ladd's bands is a potentially life-threatening problem. The bowel can stop functioning and intestinal tissue can die from lack of blood supply if an obstruction isn't recognized and treated. Volvulus, especially, is an emergency situation, with the entire small intestine in jeopardy.
Signs and Symptoms
One of the earliest signs of malrotation and volvulus is abdominal pain and cramping caused by the inability of the bowel to push food past the obstruction. When infants experience this cramping they may:
• pull up their legs and cry
• stop crying suddenly
• behave normally for 15 to 30 minutes
• repeat this behavior when the next cramp happens
Infants also may be irritable, lethargic, or have irregular stools.
Vomiting is another symptom of malrotation, and it can help the doctor determine where the obstruction is located. Vomiting that happens soon after the baby starts to cry often means the obstruction is in the small intestine; delayed vomiting usually means the blockage is in the large intestine. The vomit may contain bile (which is yellow or green in color) or may resemble feces.
Additional symptoms of malrotation and volvulus may include:
• a swollen abdomen that's tender to the touch
• diarrhea and/or bloody stools (or sometimes no stools at all)
• irritability or crying in pain, with nothing seeming to help
• rapid heart rate and breathing
• little or no urine because of fluid loss
• fever
If volvulus or another intestinal blockage is suspected, the doctor will examine your child and then may order X-rays, a computed tomography (CT) scan, or an ultrasound of the abdominal area.
The doctor may use barium or another liquid contrast agent to see the X-ray or scan more clearly. The contrast can show if the bowel has a malformation and can usually determine where a blockage is located.
Adults and older kids usually drink barium in a liquid form. Infants may need to be given barium through a tube inserted from the nose into the stomach, or sometimes are given a barium enema, in which the liquid barium is inserted through the rectum.
Treating significant malrotation almost always requires surgery. The timing and urgency will depend on the child's condition. If there is already a volvulus, surgery must be performed right away in order to prevent damage to the bowel.
Any child with bowel obstruction will need to be hospitalized. A tube called a nasogastric (NG) tube is usually inserted through the nose and down into the stomach to remove the contents of the stomach and upper intestines. This keeps fluid and gas from building up in the abdomen. The child may also be given intravenous (IV) fluids to help prevent dehydration and antibiotics to prevent infection.
During the surgery, which is called a Ladd procedure, the intestine is straightened out, the Ladd's bands are divided, the small intestine is folded into the right side of the abdomen, and the colon is placed on the left side.
Because the appendix is usually found on the left side of the abdomen when there is malrotation (normally, the appendix is found on the right), it is removed. Otherwise, should the child ever develop appendicitis, it could complicate diagnosis and treatment.
If it appears that blood may still not be flowing properly to the intestines, the doctor may perform a second surgery within 48 hours of the first. If the bowel still looks unhealthy at this time, the damaged portion may be removed.
If the child is seriously ill at the time of surgery, an ileostomy or colostomy will usually be performed. In this procedure, the diseased bowel is completely removed, and the end of the normal, healthy intestine is brought out through an opening on the skin of the abdomen (called a stoma). Fecal matter passes through this opening and into a bag that is taped or attached with adhesive to the child's belly.
In young children, depending on how much bowel was removed, the ileostomy or colostomy is often a temporary condition that can later be reversed with another operation.
The majority of these surgeries are successful, although some kids have recurring problems after surgery. Recurrent volvulus is rare, but a second bowel obstruction due to adhesions (scar tissue build-up after any type of abdominal surgery) could occur later.
Children who require removal of a large portion of the small intestine can have too little bowel to maintain adequate nutrition (a condition known as short bowel syndrome). They may be dependent on intravenous nutrition for a time after surgery (or even permanently if too little intestine remains) and may require a special diet afterward.
Most kids in whom the volvulus and malrotation are identified early, before permanent injury to the bowel has occurred, do well and develop normally.
If you suspect any kind of intestinal obstruction because your child has bilious (yellow or green) vomiting, a swollen abdomen, or bloody stools, call your doctor immediately, and take your child to the emergency room right away.
Reviewed by: J. Fernando del Rosario, MD
Date reviewed: February 2011
Kids Health
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One Word Will Do (A-Z)
Random Language or vocabulary Quiz
Can you name the single word that can be used to complete each sentence*?
Featured Mar 5, 2012
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Example: "The bus will _____ at the next _____, where passengers will exit." [S: halt/station] The single-word answer would be "stop", which can mean both "halt" and "station". ANSWERS ARE IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER. (There is no clue for X).
Score 0/25 Timer 06:00
Phrase in which One Word can sufficeMissing WordFirst Letter & Meanings (in order)
The student was ___ confused, having not read ___ of the test instructions yet.A: utterly/each
For the ___ part of the day, the soldier's ___ strategy was to defend the fort.B: largest/greatest
A ___ friend often will stay ___ to you in times of trouble.C: dear/near
If you ___ the salad, I'll ___ the dishes.D: prepare/clean
The mower blade lost its ___, so the lawn near the ___ of the sidewalk wasn't cut.E: sharpness/border
The player used ___ language when the referee's whistle indicated his ___.F: vile/violation
Will time ___ more quickly for you if I ___?G: pass/leave
I just ___ to ___ those shoes!H: need/own
She was ___ to believe that the ski hill was ___ too steeply.I: disposed/sloped
The lawyer ___ meant to say that the decision did not seem ___.J: merely/fair
How ___ of you to bring me the ___ of flowers that I adore!K: considerate/sort
I ___ for spring, for it has been gone a ___ time.L: yearn/lengthy
Do you ___ to imply that I have been ___ to you just because you're worthless?M: purport/nasty
She felt it would be a ___ idea to include young wizards in her ___.N: unique/book
The King issued the ___ to his ___ of Knights, and they obeyed it.O: command/fraternity
You've made your ___, now please ___ that sword at someone else!P: suggestion/aim
With his ___ empty, the Yeoman watched his last arrow ___ on hitting the target.Q: sheath/shake
Let's ___ here for a while, and we can eat the ___ of our picnic snacks.R: pause/remainder
The repairman ___ the television ___ back onto its stand.S: placed/apparatus
I would certainly ___ fishing if I knew how to use the ___.T: attempt/equipment
It was no ___; my friend refused to discuss his drug ___.U: good/addiction
The thief broke into the ___, and tried to ___ over the wall during his escape.V: safe/hurdle
I'd like to have a ___ with you about disrespecting the letter 'X' in your ___ game.W: chat/vocabulary
An incredible ___ told of a weaver whose house was constructed out of ___!Y: tale/thread
The sightseer used the ___ setting, just in time to see the plane ___ upwards.Z: closeup/speed
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What are examples of science lab accommodations for students who have health impairments?
Date Updated
Some specific accommodations that might be useful to a student with a health impairment in a science lab include the following:
• Avoid chemical materials to which the student is allergic or provide an alternate assignment.
• Allow for a flexible schedule and time allocation.
• Provide detailed instructions.
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calculating clock love
calculating clock
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• 1623, Germany. Wilhelm Schickard invented a device called the Speeding Clock or the Calculating Clock. The device could add and subtract six-digit numbers and was used by Johannes Kepler to calculate astronomical tables. For this, Wilhelm Schickard was considered by some to be the "Father of Computer Age." (But see antikythera mechanism for an much earlier mechanical calculator.) See Calculating Devices.
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Changes in North Korea: For Better or Worse?
02 November 2012
A recent New York Times article on change in North Korea under Kim Jong Un emphasized a lack of progress for the majority. The facts cited in the article were most likely true, with the usual caveat concerning any information about that country. Many important observations were also made, such as spiking prices, the emergence of speculators, growing disappointment, efforts by the government to earn hard currency, bribery, disgust over inequality, and an increasingly realistic self-assessment (“I thought our country lived well,” she said, “but I was mistaken.”). But when it comes to interpreting these observations, we should be careful and avoid being one-sided.
To begin with, I find it hypocritical to imply that Kim Jong Un even theoretically had the chance to significantly improve the lives of a large number of his people within just ten months, and after having inherited such a big mess. In fact, it is quite surprising that he has been able to do anything at all. Most experts expected that he would be busy consolidating his power for at least a year or more; some even wondered whether he would remain in charge at all.
Furthermore, I find it difficult to understand why anybody would assume that with severely limited resources, Kim Jong Un would try to benefit everybody equally and simultaneously. Think about Deng Xiaoping’s “two speeds.” Faced with limited funds, politicians everywhere turn to their own constituencies first; I would have no difficulty coming up with a few examples from our Western democracies. To be sure, this is not fair; even less so in a country where the physical survival of the less favored groups is at stake. But my point is that this kind of asymmetrical attention is neither surprising, nor is it unique. Is self-righteousness justified here?
I also find it questionable that a leading newspaper in a liberal democracy that has millions of opponents to universal healthcare seems to imply that elsewhere, reforms towards a market economy will and should benefit everybody equally. One does not need to be a Nobel laureate to understand that market-oriented reforms of a hitherto egalitarian society lead to inequality. I don’t even want to start talking about the levels of disparity in Western countries—the US would be rather high up on that list—but even here in highly egalitarian Austria we have the rich, the middle class, and the poor. Of course the level of poverty is not even remotely comparable, but criticizing inequality in North Korea per se is a weak argument.
In fact, as odd as it may sound: shouldn’t we regard growing inequality in North Korea as a sign of progress in reform? The country needs to get out of its low-level equilibrium trap, and speeds in doing so will differ. A growing income and welfare gap between individuals indicates that the economy is on the move. The same is true for rising prices. Not only do the prices in the DPRK explode regularly, they actually swing up and down. And the allegedly socialist government lets that happen!
The extent of price variations is massive, and the resulting insecurity especially among the weaker parts of society is enormous. In addition to the political fallout of such events, shouldn’t we note that this is already proof of change towards economic liberalization? For decades, prices in North Korea were carved in stone, precisely because the leadership was afraid of inflation and price instability. This has obviously been given up, allowing producers to benefit at the expense of consumers. Doing so in a seller’s market is dangerous and causes inflation. But it is a necessary step if prices are supposed to reflect scarcity levels and to provide incentives to producers to increase their output.
The negative voices cited in the New York Times article in many ways add to my optimism about development in the DPRK. These people have gone abroad legally. More North Koreans are thus able to see what the outside world looks like, will compare this to what they have at home, and draw their own conclusions. Secondly, these people are ready to talk, even with Western journalists. This, in combination with the fact that they are Christians and expressive about it, would in past years have made the whole interview a bit suspicious. But provided these people and their stories are real, this lack of (or at least lessened) fear is another hopeful sign. Third, the very fact that people are unhappy, feel left behind, and are speaking up against their leadership is remarkable. The changes that started after Kim Jong Il took power in 1994 have slowly but steadily eroded the stability of a society where many people were poor, but equally so, silent, and without much of hope for an alternative.
Finally, the interviewees in the New York Times article make it very clear that the North Koreans have high expectations of the new leader. This is as much as we could possibly expect so far, and it corresponds with my own observations during two trips to the DPRK this year in April and September, compared to the many visits I have made to the country since 1991. With his verbal and non-verbal announcements, Kim Jong Un has created high expectations. This will now force him to act.
Nobody knows whether Kim Jong Un wants to reform North Korea. But do his intentions matter? Having created the above mentioned facts, he will reform, because he has to improve the living conditions of his people to maintain his legitimacy. He will be careful not to annoy the top and lower ranking elite who form the basis for his power and could constitute the biggest threat to him. He will follow a policy of unbalanced growth as his resources are limited, meaning that certain groups in society, the major cities, and key industries will benefit first. Kim Jong Un will reach out to the world market to increase income from trade and reduce his dependency on China. While doing all that, he will try to avoid a major disruption, knowing that to the south and across the Pacific there are economic, political, and military giants who would be ready to exploit any weakness on his side. He knows that the Chinese were able to do that trick, i.e. to reform their economy gradually without instantly losing political power. He also knows that the East Europeans failed miserably in a similar endeavor. More recently, he will have drawn his conclusions from developments in northern Africa and the Near/Middle East.
Serious concerns remain: the nuclear program, massive human rights violations and starvation. Many North Koreans can only dream about the increasingly luxurious life in Pyongyang, which so far remains the exception and in many regards a facade, even though some improvements seem to be trickling down. In particular, the remote areas to the north and northeast, and even the breadbasket regions south of the capital, according to the World Food Program, suffer from serious shortages of essential goods. All this and more is true and should be repeated on every occasion. But it is not the full story. We need a more balanced assessment of the situation that goes beyond listing the many obvious deficiencies and inequalities. Trying to belittle positive developments and focusing on the weaknesses of North Korea is not an objective assessment either. It will not improve our understanding of that country, and it will not benefit its people.
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7 Responses to “Changes in North Korea: For Better or Worse?”
1. […] Frank, Ruediger, “Changes in North Korea: For Better or Worse?”, 38 North, 02 November 2… […]
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3. Rudiger Frank says:
Realist Writer correctly points at the key dilemma in dealing with North Korea. If we support economic development there, we risk helping to fund the nuclear program and to extend the lifespan of the regime. But if we refuse to trade and invest, we risk severe economic hardship that will hit the weak parts of the population first, and provide a rationale for the Pyongyang leadership’s hardline policy. Frankly, I do not see how this dilemma can be resolved other than by a political decision. I vote for engagement, and am aware that this approach is not risk-free. But neither is confrontation.
4. Realist Writer says:
Leonid and Fred seems to think that reform has something to do with peace with South Korea. Fred views peace as a signal of reform, while Leonid thinks peace is a prerequisite for reform.
But all this talk for peace obscures two basic facts.
First, the North Korean regime relies on having a strong military, to protect from both internal and external threats.
Second, economic reform would lead to a booming economy, which would then be used to further fund the North Korean military and ensure its effectiveness on the battlefield. A strong economy will ultimately mean a strong military.
Therefore, reform has nothing to do with peace. In fact, if reform is successful, North Korea would not NEED peace. It can just crush all potential opponents. A strong, prosperous nation needs not to compromise with anyone. It’s only a weak nation that have to rely on food aid from the West and foreign aid from China.
5. Fred says:
Kim Jong Eun has only had a few opportunities to show whether or not he intends reform, granted.
He has thrown away those opportunities. On the economic front, the border with China is now more tightly controlled than before. On the military front, there have been repeated and highly specific threats to the ROK.
If he intends change, he’s off to a terrible start.
6. N_aTe says:
Your article offers great insight into the dynamics is faced with–of a very, very young leader–indebted literally, physically, and spiritually to so many millions who have made every day life into something that matters for their children for so many years, above and beyond what they cannot control–“they/the children/parents” have “scraped-up” for years, and “they” will continue to do so because it matters to “them”, their livelihood which equals their children’s advancement. “They” understand that/sacrifice in daily income. It is purist
I use open-sources to convince
It is the fear-of reprisal in the most hated-terms be it gulags with a long-death, that stymies “their” articulation-of simply wanting a better-life for their children. It is the un-documented story of just how well “South” Koreans raise their children/offspring to ensure “they” embrace that which enables a better life for “them”.
The average North Korean understands making it better for their offspring. The mirror he or she looks-to everyday has two-sides: a China that is increasingly acknowledging How does he make it better while not being consumed in the process. That is the real struggle for
7. KJU does not have any legitimacy to rule the country, and he knows that. Therefore, all his power is based on terror, not on benevolence. His intentions are focused on keeping the elites happy but fearful of being demoted to the rank of unpriviledged. Hence the “two speeds” – one for the trusted, and one for everyone else. This is what was in NK since the late 1950s and KJU simply continues the line of his gandfather and father. Don’t expect any reform from him until the Korean War is over, inter-Korean contest for legitimacy is resolved, and diplomatic recognition of DPRK by the US is secured. Then NK might reform only to realise that the Kims’ rule was a mistake. Then why would KJU bother himself with such experiment?
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Homonyms Quiz 2
Click on the answer button to see the correct answer.
Keep your score if you like.
1. We both walked ___foot in the sand.
a. bear
b. bare
2. It's rude to ___.
a. stare
b. stair
3. Do you want another bread ___?
a. role
b. roll
4. He has had ___ wives, you know.
a. two
b. to
c. too
5. The ___ is very bright today, isn't it.
a. son
b. sun
6. The dance hall isn't ___ anymore.
a. their
b. there
7. In olden days most women could ___ beautifully.
a. so
b. sew
8. The rent is ___ soon.
a. dew
b. due
9. There were ten perfect ___ of flowers in the garden.
a. rose
b. rows
10. Let's have a ___ for coffee.
a. brake
b. break
11. The wind ___ so hard that the trees fell over.
a. blue
b. blew
12. What's wrong? You look so ___.
a. blue
b. blew
13. He got so angry that he ___ his top.
a. blue
b. blew
14. We were going to ___ at 7:00, but he didn't come.
a. meet
b. meat
15. A traditional Sunday lunch for many people is ___ and two vegetables.
a. meat
b. meet
16. There was a bargain ___ at the department store, so I went shopping.
a. sale
b. sail
17. The Titantic set ___ from Southhampton on her maiden voyage.
a. sale
b. sail
18. Don't touch that, you might ___ it.
a. break
b. brake
19. If there are three pedals on the floor of a car, the middle one is the ___.
a. brake
b. break
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I have been trying to use the DX/D2 Overclocker app on a rooted Droid X and I have been having a hard time finding good sources of information about overclocking. The app provides preset profiles for stock settings and other overclock speeds, but not much information besides that. For instance, here are settings for the stock Droid X:
• Slot 1: 400000 / 27
• Slot 2: 700000 / 38
• Slot 3: 900000 / 50
• Slot 4: 1100000 / 56
As I have come to understand, slot 1 refers to the minimum speed and slot 4 is the max speed. I assume that the other slots are for levels in between the min and max, but what are these sections for? How can I figure out how to set these slots in order to get better performance out of the device?
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1 Answer 1
up vote 3 down vote accepted
Each slot refers to a specific clock speed that your phone's kernel allows (in your case, 400mhz to 1.1 ghz). Therefore, these clock speeds can vary between different kernels (different values or even more slots). In the case of the Droid X or Droid 2, you are stuck with the stock kernel due to the locked bootloader.
I'm more familiar with using SetCPU. SetCPU lets you manually choose which clock speeds you want your phone to run at. You choose a min clock speed, a max clock speed, and how you want it to scale (ondemand, performance, etc.). You can also setup profiles with SetCPU that allows your phone to run at certain clock speeds under certain conditions. For example, you would want to lower you clock speed when the phone's screen is turned off. You may also want to lower the clock speed when your battery is below a certain battery % to try and pro long battery life as long as possible.
If you're wanting to conserve more power, set the clock min and max clock speeds low. If you're wanting better performance, then set them higher. On my phone (Droid 1), I use an undervolted kernel and typically run at a 250mhz min, 600 mhz max clock speed to conserve battery.
If my answer doesn't fully answer your questions, leave a comment and I'll try to help you further.
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Your Answer
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Longevity and size of a celestial goldfish
The article told me everything except the one thing I need to know and that is how long does/can a Celestial Eye/Choten gan Goldfish live? I have had mine, Barney, about 2 years now, he/she has tripled in size and needs a bigger tank, I have a 2 gallon tank now and as awful as it sounds I don't want to go through the expense of buying a bigger tank if they don't live much longer. I need to know how big they get as well so I don't have to buy another tank again. I had to give up the Koi I had cause I didn't know how big they got, I had 7 I bought at 2" to 3" and they got 8" to 11". I almost fainted when I found out how long they live and how big they get. Thank You in advance, BJ Burger
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ahh well technically goldfish of all varieties live up to 20 years! a good 6-10 at least mine are nearly 4years i have 5. i started off very naive in keeping them in small 15 litres tanks and my early ones died or looked awful. get barney outta that small thing! search for tanks at carboot sales/ ebay/ even rescue centres can have sheds full of un used aquariums. the gneral rule is start at 20 gallons then ten gllons per extra fish no kid! though mine are 5 in a 30 gallon and are fine i keep them clean so it works out ok. plus in a bigger tank goldfish literally spread their fins and look amazing i swear their colours flourish and everything.
if you do get a larger one consider: reading as many other posts on goldfish you wont believe how much there is to learn!
when you fill the tank get info on the cycle it needs to go through so you dont get an ammonia spike or leave too many toxins in there etc.
bigger tank= more fish buddies :D
Goldfish are the same family as Koi, although a Koi is a larger fish. A well cared for goldfish can live 10-20 years. In extreme cases 30. The oldest goldfish known and recorded was 44 years old. He was a prize at a fair in 1955 and was owned by the same person until it's death in 1999. That fish was in England and oddly enough, the now oldest living goldfish is also in England and is 43 years old. Maybe it's the water? By he way, that 44 year old fish was only 4 1/2 inches long at it's death. That is small, and was possible attributed to remaining in small bowls for most of it's life, or the growth stunted by a high nitrate level in the water. Some special varieties of goldfish are bred to remain small.
You are looking for an average age. A Celestial Goldfish or Bubble Eyed Goldfish as it is also called, has an average lifespan of 6-7 years.
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