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Firefox (xpcshell) being a pain
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#16 +Karl L.
Karl L.
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Posted 04 March 2013 - 01:32
Now I understand how its possible to run an ARM chroot on AMD64, but I submit that using qemu is cheating! You're technically running a chroot, but qemu is translating the ARM instructions into your processor's native instructions, hence "cheating". That said, it sounds a lot like the method implemented by qemubuilder (which builds packages for PowerPC on my 2.4 GHz Core2Quad much faster than I can build them natively on my 1.5 GHz G4 - despite the fact that qemu is wasting cycles doing translation on the former but not the latter). In my experience the packages built with qemubuilder work properly when installed on their target architecture.
#17 OP n_K
Neowinian Senior
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Posted 04 March 2013 - 08:55
There's 2 ways to build packages for different systems, one is using qemu and might work (just had a quick google and there's a bunch of people using qemu to compile MAME and whatnot for the raspberry pi, I was building kernels around 2 months after the RPi got released) but as qemu is an emulator, it's not guaranteed to ever work 100% like for example SNES emulators... The only accurate SNES emulator is bsnes!
The other method is doing a cross-compile using the GCC (or other compiler) tools compiled for your architecture but with all the code translation for the target system and not your processor (binaries are guaranteed to work this way as the compiler/assembler/linker is the same as if you were running it natively on the target system) and you can also do everything GCC can do such as distcc builds for faster compilation.
In terms of qemu you've also got the problem of the actual CPU architecture, e.g. the raspberry pi is an armv6h, h standing for hardware floating point, and from what I remember qemu emulates a generic ARM CPU not a specific type so if for exampleit emulated armv7, you'd be generating instructions that the armv6 isn't able to run. This isn't too much of a problem for other CPUs such as powerpcs or x86 CPUs for example, e.g. x86's got extra instruction sets added such as SSE1, SSE2, AES-on-chip, Intel TXT, etc. but these are not part of the core x86 instruction set (i686) and require special -mtune parameters when these features want to be used using GCC and other compilers. | <urn:uuid:dffbca15-3e5b-478e-a9fd-df090cb3dd77> | 2 | 1.890625 | 0.149305 | en | 0.924585 | http://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1139536-firefox-xpcshell-being-a-pain/page-2 |
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett and Holly Baxter of the Vagenda Magazine
A response to Rachel Cusk's New Statesman article "The anorexic statement".
The advertising campaign featuring Isabelle Caro.
The advertising campaign featuring French actress and anorexia sufferer Isabelle Caro. Photograph: Getty Images
In November 2010, almost exactly two years ago today, a 28-year-old French model called Isabelle Caro died from complications arising from anorexia. A few years before, in 2007, she had risen to increased prominence after appearing in an advertising campaign to raise awareness of eating disorders within her field. Stick-thin, with vertebrae clearly on show, she stared straight out of the billboards that lined Italian cities and were later (controversially) banned. The image was undoubtedly shocking; some even found it outright traumatic. Its accompanying message - "No Anorexia" - made a clear statement about the fashion industry when it was pushed out to the Italian public during fashion week.
If you’re looking for an "anorexic statement", then Caro’s is as close as you can get. She suffered from the disease from early adolescence, and she spoke about being in its grips as a personal struggle. She talked publicly of how she wished to be rid of the crushing mental illness, right up until the two months before her death. The "No Anorexia" campaign was about drawing attention to the downright ugliness of a body destroyed by an anorexic life, the ironic lack of glamour in an illness that pervaded industries priding themselves on allure and desirability. And these reasons are why, for many, Rachel Cusk’s recent article on anorexia in this magazine hurt so much.
Does every woman’s body make a statement? Cusk thinks it does. She claims that the anorexic state "returns the woman to the universality of a child", a pre-pubescent state wherein she doesn’t have to think about menstruation or lactation or childbirth or sex. She paints the sufferer of anorexia as a narcissistic martyr of the modern age, obsessed with her image, privileged enough to impose an illness upon herself, sitting "screaming about a spoonful of peas" while other people just get on with the practicalities. Needless to say, sufferers and former sufferers of the disease, as well as their loved ones, didn’t take kindly to this reductive and convenient analysis.
Why is such an analysis convenient? Precisely because mental illness is infuriatingly inconvenient in its individuality and nuance. Treatments and causes are varied and often inexplicable. Personalities are, by their nature, all very different. By positing an "anorexic type", Cusk makes the problem of anorexia wonderfully simple: it’s just a "sickness of the modern age" manifested in a certain type of defective personality. If they’d stop indulging themselves for one pea-eating second, or experienced some real type of hardship, then they’d snap out of it once and for all, right? If Isabelle Caro had really sat down and thought about it, then she could have saved herself the massive setback of dying during her anti-anorexia campaign.
Even aside from all of this offensive hypothesising, it’s strange enough that Cusk maintains throughout her article the idea that women speak with their bodies, but men don’t. She talks about periods and childbirth as physical states to escape from as if men are beings wholly removed from such concerns (because blood is a problem, but semen is supposedly totally cool.) And feminists have fought for a long time to remove the basic assumption that women are "naturally decorative", "speaking" through their bodies alone, expressing their complaints about society by getting thinner and a little bit childlike, while men are naturally intellectual, objective, and altogether more adult. We suppose that the last fifty years of feminist thought have passed Cusk by, as well as the fact that male sufferers of anorexia exist, unfortunately, in substantial numbers.
Indeed, Cusk appears to have done little research about the illness, instead relying on verbose rhetoric. At one point in her dense treatise, she implies that anorexics of craving visibility. The "anorexic statement", as she so coldly calls it, seeks attention. And yet, so many sufferers speak of wanting to disappear. This does not compute. Cusk speaks with the authoritative and detached voice of a scientist, but she is no scientist. Her overwrought prose serves to raise her essay up to the status of literature, concealing her crass generalisations beneath "sophisticated prose". And yet, it is lacking in any of the perception or insight associated with that term. Her continual use of "the anorexic" throughout the essay makes her seem emotionless and removed, and she seems to forget that this is a disease that affects real people, not simply medical cases whose motives must be dissected and speculated upon in florid prose.
Anorexia is a complex, awful, terrifying disease, the causes for which are a constant topic for research by medical professionals. Its causes do not fit neatly into a single tick-box, and thus lumping all its sufferers together into one group is supremely unhelpful. As a commenter who had reached recovery noted beneath the original article, "no book or article that I read has ever explained how I got there". To presume a statement on the part of another belies supreme arrogance. Cusk has projected that "statement" onto women and girls who are suffering from a life-threatening illness, women and girls whose friends and family may be reading Cusk’s words in between hospital visits. That she should imply that mental illness is a choice is verging on the unforgiveable as far as anyone who’s ever suffered one is concerned.
At one point in the piece, Rachel Cusk refers to the male gaze. She blames what she calls "the preponderance of male values", and yet there she is, judging these women’s bodies, projecting her agenda, her pseudo-psychoanalysis onto them. In other words, it is not their bodies speaking. It is not their story. Isobel Caro’s "anorexic statement" was just that because she, the sufferer made it, and no one else. In light of this, we should be aware that the only statement that Cusk is making in her article is applies to herself.
Next Article | <urn:uuid:c4039270-9d2a-47bb-8ed1-e477fc8f93b7> | 2 | 1.585938 | 0.01879 | en | 0.965814 | http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/2012/11/its-arrogant-say-anorexia-personal-choice-rather-mental-illness |
Carnatic music
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Carnatic Music
Sruti • Swara • Raga • Tala • Melakarta
Varnam • Kriti • Geetham • Swarajati • Ragam Thanam Pallavi • Thillana
Veena • Mridangam • Ghatam • Morsing • Kanjira • Violin
List of Carnatic composers
Carnatic music, also known as karṇāṭaka sangītam is one of the two styles of Indian classical music; the other is Hindustani music. The present form of Carnatic music is based on historical developments that can be traced to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries C.E.. Carnatic and Hindustani music shared a common history until the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, when, as a result of the increasing Persian influence (and as a result of the Islamic conquest) in North India, Hindustani music started evolving as a separate genre. Carnatic Music, which was based in South India, was substantially influenced by the pan-Indian bhakti movement which inspired the use of religious themes. In contrast to Hindustani music, the main emphasis in Carnatic music is on vocal music; most compositions are written to be sung, and even when played on instruments, they are meant to be performed in gāyaki (singing) style.
Carnatic music was traditionally taught in the gurukula system, where the student lived with and learned the art from his guru (master). Today most students visit their teacher daily or weekly to take lessons, while maintaining their academic careers.
Woman playing the Carnatic violin. From a painting by Ravi Varma.
Origins and history
Bharata natyam dancer Chitra Visweswaran and santoor player, Carnatic vocalist, composer, and western classical guitarist R. Visweswaran (her husband). Photo taken at Interlake High School, Bellevue, Washington, after a performance in the Ragamala series (Greater Seattle).
Like all art forms in Indian culture, Carnatic music is believed to have a divine origin, from the Devas and Devis,[1][2] but it is also generally accepted that the natural origins of music were an important factor in its development.[1] Ancient treatises describe the connection of the origin of swaras (the notes of Indian music) to the sounds of animals and birds, and man’s keen sense of observation and perception in trying to simulate these sounds. According to ancient theory, after hearing and distinguishing between the different sounds that emanated from bamboo reed when air passes through its hollows, man designed the first flute. In this way, music is venerated as an aspect of the supreme (nāda brāhmam).[3] Folk music is also said to have been a natural origin of Carnatic music, and many folk tunes correspond to specific Carnatic ragas.[1]
From several epigraphical inscriptional evidences and other ancient works,[4] the history of classical Indian musical traditions can be traced back about 2,500 years. The Vedas are generally accepted as the main probable source of Indian music. The Sama Veda is said to have laid the foundation for Indian music, and consists mainly of hymns of Rigveda, set to melodies that would be sung using three to seven musical notes during Vedic sacrifices.[1] The Yajur-Veda, which mainly consists of sacrificial formulas, mentions the veena (plucked string instrument) as an accompaniment to vocal recitations during the sacrifices.[5]
References to Indian classical music are found in many ancient religious texts, including epics like the Ramayana and Mahabharata. The Yajnavalkya Smriti states, "Veena vadhana tathvangna sruti, jathi, visartha talanjaaprayasena moksha margam niyachathi" ("The one who is well versed in veena, one who has the knowledge of srutis and one who is adept in tala, attains salvation without doubt.")[6] Carnatic music is based on music concepts mentioned in Bharata's Natya Shastra.[7] The Natya Shastra mentions many musical concepts (including swara and tala) that continue to be relevant to Carnatic music today.[1]
According to some scholars,[1] Carnatic music shares certain classical music concepts with ancient Tamil music. The concept of Pann is related to Ragas used in Carnatic music.[4] The rhythmic meters found in several musical forms (such as the Tiruppugazh) and other ancient literature, resemble the talas (rhythmical patterns) that are in use today.[4]
Carnatic and Hindustani music shared a common history until the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, when, as a result of the increasing Persian influence (and as a result of the Islamic conquest) in North India, Hindustani Music started evolving as a separate genre. Carnatic music remained relatively unaffected by these Arabic and Iranian influences. Carnatic Music, which was based in South India), was substantially influenced by the pan-Indian bhakti movement which inspired the use of religious themes. Other developments after the thirteenth century also contributed to its divergence from Hindustani music.[8]
Carnatic music experienced renewed growth during the Vijayanagar Empire through the Kannada Haridasa movement of Vyasaraja, Purandara Dasa, Kanakadasa and others.[9] Purandara Dasa, who is known as the Sangeeta Pitamaha (the grandfather of Carnatic music) laid out the fundamental tenets and a framework for teaching Carnatic music.[10][1] Venkatamakhin is credited with the classification of ragas in the Melakarta System and wrote his most important work; Chaturdandi Prakasika (c.1635 C.E.) in Sanskrit. Govindacharya expanded the Melakarta Scheme into the Sampoorna raga system, which is the system in common use today.
Did you know?
Even though the earlier writers on music, Matanga, Sarangadeva and others, were also from Karnataka, the music tradition was formally named Karnataka Sangeetha only in the thirteenth century when the Vijayanagara empire was founded.[9]
A unique development in instrumental carnatic music took shape under the patronage of the kings of the Kingdom of Mysore from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries. Composers used to play their compositions on traditional instruments such as the veena, rudra veena, violin, tambura, ghata, flute (venu), mridangam, nagaswara, and swarabhat. Some instruments uncommon to the southern region, such as harmonium, sitar and jaltarang, came into use, and British influence popularized the saxophone and piano. Even royalty of this dynasty were noted composers and proficient in playing musical instruments, solo or in concert with others.[11] Some famous instrumentalists were Veena Sheshanna(1852-1926),[12] Veena Subbanna (1861-1939),[13] and T. Chowdiah.[14]
Carnatic music is practiced and presented today by musicians in concerts or recordings, both vocally and with instruments.
In contrast to Hindustani Music of the northern part of India, Carnatic music is taught and learned through compositions which encode many intricate musical details, but also provide scope for free improvisation. Nearly every rendition of a Carnatic music composition is different and unique, as it embodies elements of the composer’s vision, as well as the musician's interpretation.
In Carnatic music, the main emphasis is on vocal music; most compositions are written to be sung, and even when played on instruments, they are meant to be performed in a singing style (known as gāyaki).[15] Like Hindustani music, Carnatic music rests on two main elements: rāga, the modes or melodic formulas, and tāḷa, the rhythmic cycles.[15]
However, as well as these musical elements, a Carnatic composition also has a component of the emotion or sentiment conveyed in the composition. It is probably because of this fact that most Carnatic music compositions are composed for singing. In addition to the rich musical experience, each composition brings out the knowledge and personality of the composer, and thus the words are as important as the musical element itself. This poses a special challenge for the musicians because rendering this music does not involve just playing or singing the correct musical notes; the musicians are expected to understand what was conveyed by the composer in various languages, and sing musical phrases that create the effect that was intended by the composer in his or her composition.
There are many types and forms of compositions. Geethams and Swarajatis (which have their own peculiar composition structures) are principally meant to serve as basic learning exercises, and while there are many other types of compositions (including Padam, Javali and Thillana); the most common forms are the Varnam, and the Kriti (or Keerthanam).
The varnam highlights every important aspect of a raga; not just the scale, but also which notes to stress, how to approach a certain note, and classical and characteristic phrases. Though there are a few different types of varnams, in essence, they all have a pallavi, an anupallavi, muktayi swaras, a charana, and chittaswaras. They are sung in multiple speeds, and are very good for practice. In concerts, varnams are often sung at the beginning as they are fast and grab the audience's attention.[16]
1. Pallavi. This is the equivalent of a refrain in Western music. One or two lines.
2. Anupallavi. The second verse. Also two lines.
This kind of song is called a keerthanam or a Kriti. There are other possible structures for a Kriti, which may in addition include swara passages named chittaswara. A chittaswara consists only of notes, and has no words. Other compositions have a verse at the end of the charana, called the madhyamakāla. It is sung immediately after the charana, but at double speed.
Prominent composers
Purandara Dasa
Many composers have contributed to Carnatic music. Purandara Dasa (1480 - 1564), known as the pioneer or father (Pitamaha) of Carnatic music, formulated the basic lessons of Carnatic music. He structured graded exercises known as Swaravalis and Alankaras, and at the same time, introduced the Raga Mayamalavagowla as the first scale to be learned by beginners. He also composed Gitas (simple songs) for novice students. Although only a fraction of them still exist, he is said to have produced around 475,000 compositions.[17]
The contemporaries Tyagaraja (1759-1847), Muthuswami Dikshitar, (1776 - 1827) and Syama Sastri, (1762-1827) are regarded as the Trinity of Carnatic music due to the quality of Syama Sastri's compositions, the variety of the compositions of Muthuswami Dikshitar, and Tyagaraja's prolific output in composing kritis.[18]
Prominent composers prior to the Trinity of Carnatic music include Annamacharya, Narayana Theertha, Bhadrachala Ramadas, Sadasiva Brahmendra and Oottukkadu Venkata Kavi. Other prominent composers are Swathi Thirunal, Gopalakrishna Bharathi, Neelakanta Sivan, Patnam Subramania Iyer, Mysore Vasudevachar, Koteeswara Iyer, Muthiah Bhagavathar, Subramania Bharathiyar, and Papanasam Sivan. The compositions of these composers are rendered frequently by prominent artists of today.
Composers of Carnatic music were often inspired by religious devotion and were usually scholars proficient in one or more of the following languages: Kannada, Sanskrit, Tamil, Malayalam, and Telugu. They usually included a signature, called a mudra, in their compositions. For example, all songs by Tyagaraja (who composed in Telugu) have the word Thyagaraja in them; all songs by Muthuswami Dikshitar (who composed in Sanskrit) have the words Guruguha in them; songs by Syama Sastri (who composed in Telugu) have the words Syama Krishna in them; and Purandaradasa, who composed in Kannada, used the signature Purandara Vittala. Gopalakrishna Bharathi used the signature Gopalakrishnan and composed in Tamil. Papanasam Sivan, who has been hailed as the Tamil Thyagaraja of Carnatic music,[19] also composed in Sanskrit, and used the signature Ramadasan.[19]
Important Elements of Carnatic Music
Śruti commonly refers to musical pitch.[20] It is the approximate equivalent of a tonic (or less precisely a key) in Western music; it is the note from which all the others are derived. It is also used in the sense of graded pitches in an octave. While there are an infinite number of sounds falling within a scale (or raga) in Carnatic music, the number that can be distinguished by auditory perception is twenty-two (although over the years, several of them have converged). In this sense, while shruti is determined by auditory perception, it is also an expression in the listener's mind.
Swara refers to a type of musical sound that is a single note, which defines the relative higher or lower position of a note, rather than a particular frequency.[21] Swaras also refer to the solfege of Carnatic music, which consist of seven notes, "sa-ri-ga-ma-pa-da-ni" (compare with the Hindustani sargam: sa-re-ga-ma-pa-dha-ni or Western do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti). These names are abbreviations of the longer names shadja, rishabha, gandhara. madhyama, panchama, dhaivata and nishada. Unlike other music systems, every member of the solfege (called a swara) has three variants. The exceptions are the drone notes, shadja and panchama (also known as the tonic and the dominant), which have only one form; and madhyama (the subdominant), which has two forms. A seventh century stone inscription in Kudumiyan Malai[22] in Tamil Nadu shows vowel changes to solfege symbols with ra, ri, ru, and so on, to denote the higher quarter-tones. In one scale, or ragam, there is usually only one variant of each note present. The exceptions exist in "light" ragas, in which, for artistic effect, there may be two, one ascending (in the arohanam) and another descending (in the avarohanam).
Raga System
A raga in Carnatic music prescribes a set of rules for building a melody - very similar to the Western concept of mode.[23] It specifies rules for movements up (aarohanam) and down (avarohanam), the scale of which notes should figure more and which notes should be used more sparingly, which notes may be sung with gamaka (a shake or oscillation of a note, also known as bending the pitch), which phrases should be used, phrases should be avoided, and so on.
Ragas may be divided into two classes: Janaka ragas (that is, melakarta or parent ragas) and janyaragas (descendant ragas of a particular janaka raga). Janya ragas are subclassified into various categories themselves.
There are potentially hundreds and thousands of ragas, of which with over five thousand have been used.[24]
Tala System
Tala refers to the beat set for a particular composition (a measure of time). Talas have cycles of a defined number of beats and rarely change within a song. They have specific components, which can be put together in over 108 combinations, allowing different compositions to have different rhythms.[21]
Carnatic music singers usually keep the beat by moving their hands up and down in specified patterns, and using their fingers simultaneously to keep time. Tala is formed with three basic parts (called angas) which are laghu, dhrtam, and anudhrtam, though complex talas may have other parts like plutam, guru and kaakapaadam. There are seven basic tala groups which can be formed from the laghu, dhrtam, and anudhrtam: Dhruva tala, Matya tala, Rupaka tala, Jhampa tala, Triputa tala, Ata tala, and Eka tala.
Raga Alapana
This is the exposition of the ragam of the song that is about to be performed. A performer will explore the ragam first by singing lower octaves then moving up to higher ones and touching various aspects of the ragam while giving a hint of the song to be performed. It is a slow improvisation with no rhythm.[25]
This is usually performed by the more advanced concert artists and consists of singing one or two lines of a song repeatedly, but with improvised elaborations. Niraval comes out of the manodarma sangeetha; the selected line is repeated within the tala timing to illustrate the beauty of the raaga.
Ragam Thanam Pallavi
This is a composite form of improvisation. As the name suggests, it consists of Raga Alapana, Thanam, and a pallavi line. The pallavi line is sung twice, and Niraval follows. After Niraval, the pallavi line is sung again, twice in normal speed, then sung once at half the speed, then twice at regular speed, then four times at twice the speed. Kalpanaswarams follow.
Learning carnatic music
A musician playing a violin at Carnatic music concert in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu. This picture illustrates the manner in which the violin is traditionally held in Carnatic music.
Carnatic music is traditionally taught according to the system formulated by Purandara Dasa. This involves swaravalis (graded exercises), alankaras (exercises based on the seven talas), Geethams or simple songs, and Swarajatis. After the student has reached a certain standard, Varnams are taught, and later, the student learns Kritis. It typically takes several years of lessons before a student is adept enough to perform at a concert.
The lesson texts and exercises are more or less uniform across all the South Indian states. The learning structure is arranged in the increasing order of complexity. The lessons start with the learning of the sarali varisai (solfege set to a particular raga).
Carnatic music was traditionally taught in the gurukula system, where the student lived with and learned the art from his guru (master). Musicians take great pride in letting people know about their Guru Parampara, or the hierarchy of disciples from some prominent ancient musician or composer, to which they belong. People whose The disciple-hierarchies of Thyagaraja, Muthuswami Dikshitar, Syama Sastri, Swathi Thirunal, and Papanasam Sivan are often referred to.
From the late twentieth century onwards, changes in lifestyles and the need for aspiring young musicians to simultaneously maintain an academic career, have made this system untenable. In modern times, it is common for students to visit their gurus daily or weekly to learn music. Though new technology has made learning easier with the availability of quick-learn media such as learning exercises recorded on audio cassettes and CDs, these are discouraged by most gurus who emphasize that face-to-face learning is best for students.
Notation is not a new concept in Indian music. However, Carnatic music continued to be transmitted orally for centuries without being written down. The disadvantage with this system was that in order to learn about a Kriti composed, for example, by Purandara Dasa, it was necessary to find a person from Purandara Dasa's lineage of students.
Written notation of Carnatic music was established in the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century, which coincided with rule of Shahaji II in Tanjore. Copies of Shahaji's musical manuscripts are still available at the Saraswathi Mahal Library in Tanjore, and they give us an idea of the music and its form. They contain snippets of solfege to be used when performing the mentioned ragas.
Carnatic music concerts are usually performed by a small ensemble of musicians who sit on a slightly elevated stage. Carnatic music concerts can be vocal recitals, accompanied by supporting instruments, or purely instrumental concerts. Whether it is vocal or purely instrumental, a typical concert features the compositions which form the core of this music. The lead musician must also choose a signature octave based on his or her (vocal) range of comfort. However, it is expected that a musician maintains that same pitch once it is selected, and so to help all the performers maintain the selected pitch, the tambura is the traditional drone instrument used in concerts. Today, tamburas are increasingly being replaced by śruti boxes, and now more commonly, the "Electronic tambura"
In a vocal recital, a concert team may have one or more vocalists, accompanied by instrumentalists. Other instruments such as the veena or flute can be found to occasionally accompany a lead vocalist, but usually a vocalist is supported by a violin player (who sits on his or her left), and a few percussion players including at least a mridangam (who usually sits on the other side of the vocalist, facing the instrumentalist). Other percussion instruments include the ghatam, kanjira and morsing, which accompany the main percussion instrument and play almost in a contrapuntal fashion along with the beats. The objective of the accompanying instruments is far more than following the melody and keeping the beats. The accompaniments form an integral part of every composition, and they closely follow and augment the melodic phrases outlines by the lead singer. The vocalist and the violinist take turns while elaborating or while exhibiting creativity in sections like raga, niraval and kalpanaswaram. Unlike Hindustani music concerts, where an accompanying tabla player can keep beats without following the musical phrases at times, in carnatic music, the accompaniments have to follow intricacies of the composition, since there are percussion elements such as eduppu, in several compositions. Some of the best concerts feature considerable interaction, with the lead musicians and the accompaniments exchanging notes, and accompanying musicians predicting the lead singer’s musical phrases.
Concerts usually begin with a varnam or an invocatory item which will act as the opening piece. The varnam is composed with an emphasis on the swaras of the raga, but will also have lyrics, the saahityam. It is lively and fast to get the audience's attention. An invocatory item may alternatively follow the varnam.
After the varnam and invocatory item, the artist sings longer compositions called kirtanas (commonly referred to as kritis). Each kriti sticks to one specific raga, although some, known as ragamalika (a garland of ragas), are composed with more than one raga.
Following the main composition, the concert continues with shorter and lighter songs. Some of the types of songs performed towards the end of the concerts are tillanas and thukkadas, bits of popular kritis or compositions requested by the audience. Every concert that is the last of the day ends with a mangalam, a thankful prayer and conclusion to the musical event.
The audience of a typical concert has a reasonable understanding of Carnatic music. It is also typical to see the audience tapping out the tala in sync with the artist's performance. As and when the artist exhibits creativity, the audience acknowledges it by clapping their hands. With experienced artists, towards the middle of the concert, requests start flowing in. The artist usually performs the requests, exhibiting his or her broad knowledge of the several thousand kritis that are in existence.
Modern concerts
Every December, the city of Chennai in India has a six week-long Music Season, which has been described as the world's largest cultural event.[26] The Music Season was started in 1927, to mark the opening of the Madras Music Academy. It used to be a traditional month-long Carnatic music festival, but since then it has also diversified into dance and drama, as well as non-Carnatic art forms.
Prominent carnatic music artists
Popularly referred to as the female trinity of the Carnatic music,[27] M. L. Vasanthakumari, M. S. Subbulakshmi, and D. K. Pattammal, together with the leading male vocalists Muthiah Bhagavathar, Mysore Vasudevachar, Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar, Musiri Subramania Iyer, Maharajapuram Viswanatha Iyer, Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer, Chembai Vaidyanatha Bhagavathar, G. N. Balasubramaniam, and Madurai Mani Iyer created a golden era for Carnatic music during the mid to late twentieth century.
Other popular prominent vocalists during this era include Alathur Venkatesa Iyer, Ramnad Krishnan, M. D. Ramanathan, S. Ramanathan, K. V. Narayanaswamy, Tanjore S. Kalyanaraman, Maharajapuram Santhanam, D. K. Jayaraman, T. K. Rangachari, Sirkazhi Govindarajan, P. S. Narayanaswamy, Madurai Somu, and Jon. B. Higgins.
Some of the most famous and accomplished senior vocalists performing today include Dr M Balamuralikrishna, Nedanuri Krishnamoorthy, T. N. Seshagopalan, R. Vedavalli, T. V. Sankaranarayanan, Neyveli Santhanagopalan, Dr.T.M.Sounderarajan, R. K. Srikanthan, K. J. Yesudas, S.R. Janakiraman, T R Subramaniam, Nookala Chinna Satyanarayana, Bombay Sisters, O. S. Thyagarajan, M. S. Sheela, Suguna Purushothaman, Parassala B. Ponnammal, and others.
Popular younger generation vocalists include Sudha Ragunathan, Nithyashree Mahadevan, Sanjay Subrahmanyan, Bombay Jayashri Ramnath, Aruna Sairam, Vijayalakshmy Subramaniam, P. Unnikrishnan, T. M. Krishna, S. Sowmya, Priya Sisters, Vani Sateesh, Ranjani-Gayatri, Sikkil Gurucharan, Carnatica Brothers (Shashikiran & Ganesh), Vijay Siva, Malladi Brothers - Sriram Prasad & Ravikumar, S Saketharaman, Sreevalsan J Menon, Abhishek Raghuram, T N S Krishna, S.P.Ramh, and Charulatha Mani.
T. Chowdiah, Rajamanikkam Pillai, Papa Venkataramiah, and Dwaram Venkataswamy Naidu excelled in violin, while Palghat Mani Iyer, Palani Subramaniam Pillai and C.S. Murugabhoopathy redefined the role of mridangam. T.H. Vinayakram is a very famous ghatam player. T.R. Mahalingam and Thyagarajan were famous flute (venu) players. Some of the well known veena players include S. Balachander, Veena Dhanammal, Doraiswamy Iyengar, K.S. Narayanaswamy, and Emani Sankara Sastri.
T.N. Krishnan, M.S.G Opalakrishnan, Lalgudi G. Jayaraman, Kunnakudi Vaidyanathan, Mysore Manjunath, Mysore Nagaraj, and A. Kanyakumari are among the living violinists who still perform. Other violinists of today include Ganesh and Kumaresh, Ranjani and Gayatri, Vittal Ramamurthy, Embar S. Kannan, Lalgudi GJR Krishnan, Lalgudi Vijayalakshmi, and others. Mridhangists include Karaikkudi Mani, Umayalpuram K. Sivaraman, T. K. Murthy, Guruvayur Dorai, Mannargudi Easwaran, T.V. Gopalakrishnan, I. Sivakumar, J. Vaidhyanathan, and Thiruvarur Vaidyanathan. T.H. Subhashchandran and N. Govindarajan continue to perform on Ghatam.
N. Ramani and the [[Sikkil Sisters, Kunjumani and Neela Sikkil, are the most well known flute players of today; others include Mala Chandhrashekharan, R. Thyagarajan, R. Atul Kumar, S. Shashank, T. Suresh. E. Gayathri, Kalpakam Swaminathan, and Jayanthi Kumaresh are known for playing the Veena. Kadri Gopalnath is known for his Carnatic talents on the saxophone, while N. Ravikiran is known for playing several stringed instruments, most notably the Chitraveena/Gottuvadhyam.
1. 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 The Canatic Group, History of Music, Origins. Retrieved July 3, 2007.
2. Vijaya Moorthy, Romance of the Raga (New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 2001, ISBN 978-8170173823), 17.
3. The Hindu, The music of we primates: Nada Brahmam. Retrieved December 12, 2007.
4. 4.0 4.1 4.2 P. Sāmbhamūrti, South Indian Music, Book VI (Chennai: The Indian Music Publishing House, 1969).
5. San Diego State University, Veena in Yajurveda. Retrieved December 12, 2007.
6. T. C. A. Ramanujam, The Nada Yoga of Tyagaraja TRIVENI (January, 1965). Retrieved May 4, 2011.
7. Canatic Music organization, Swaralaya. Retrieved July 3, 2007.
8., Split in HM and CM. Retrieved December 12, 2007.
9. 9.0 9.1 The Hindu, Fountainhead of Carnatic music. Retrieved December 12, 2007.
10. Vidushi Vasanthamadhavi, Theory Of Music (Prism Publications, 2005, ISBN 978-8172863555), 183.
11. Meera Rajaram Pranesh, Musical Composers during Wodeyar Dynasty (1638-1947 C.E.) (Bangalore: Vee Emm Publications, 2003), 54-55, 92, 162-163, 225-226.
12. Pranesh, 108.
13. Pranesh, 128.
14. Pranesh, 214.
15. 15.0 15.1 Barbara Breyer, Composers and Tradition in Karnatik Music, Asian Music 3 (1972): 42-51.
16. KarnATik, Glossary V. Retrieved December 12, 2007.
17. Galaxy of Composers, PURANDARADASA. Retrieved December 12, 2007.
18. The Hindu, The golden era. Retrieved December 12, 2007.
19. 19.0 19.1 The Hindu, Focus on veena's exalted status. Retrieved December 12, 2007.
20. KarnATik, Glossary S. Retrieved December 12, 2007.
21. 21.0 21.1 KarnATik, Glossary T. Retrieved December 12, 2007.
22. S. Santhanlingam, Kudumiyan Malai (Tamil Nadu Government Archeology Department publication, 1981).
23. KarnATik, Glossary M. Retrieved December 12, 2007.
24. KarnATik, Glossary R. Retrieved December 12, 2007.
25. KanATik, Glossary R. Retrieved December 12, 2007.
26. The Hindu, Musical Musings. Retrieved January 13, 2007.
27. The Hindu, Chords and Notes. Retrieved December 12, 2007.
• Moorthy, Vijaya. Romance of the Raga. New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 2001. ISBN 978-8170173823.
• Pesch, Ludwig. The Illustrated Companion to South Indian Classical Music. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999. ISBN 978-0195643824.
• Pranesh, Meera Rajaram. Musical Composers during Wodeyar Dynasty (1638-1947 C.E.). Bangalore: Vee Emm Publications, 2003.
• Sāmbhamūrti, P. South Indian Music, Book VI. Chennai: The Indian Music Publishing House, 1969.
• Santhanlingam, S. Kudumiyan Malai Tamil Nadu Government Archeology Department publication, 1981.
• Vasanthamadhavi, Vidushi. Theory Of Music. Prism Publications, 2005. ISBN 978-8172863555.
• Vijayakrishnan, K.G. The Grammar of Carnatic Music. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2007. ISBN 978-3110183139.
• Viswanathan, T., and Matthew Harp Allen. Music in South India the Karṇāṭak Concert Tradition and Beyond: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture. Global music series. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004. ISBN 978-0195145908.
• White, Emmons E. Appreciating India's Music; an Introduction, with an Emphasis on the Music of South India. Boston, MA: Crescendo Pub. Co., 1971. ISBN 978-0875970592.
External links
All links retrieved April 9, 2013.
• Carnatic Corner. This was the first comprehensive portal on Carnatic music. It has links to almost all the Carnatic sites in existence as well as a reference library and page of lists for ragas, compositions and lyrics.
• Carnatica Handbook. An innovative portal on Carnatic music. It has a great deal of information.
• carnaticindia.
• ART INDIA Carnatic. This site is perhaps one of the oldest sites with information on Carnatic music and also other styles of Indian classical music and dance. It also carries information on 'Madras Music Season'.
• Sangeetha Sampradaya Pradarshini A valuable and authoritative text on South Indian Musicology.
Research begins here... | <urn:uuid:161250c9-ffe6-4ebc-8900-3a03156fef07> | 3 | 2.859375 | 0.042579 | en | 0.930631 | http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Carnatic_music |
Lesson Plan
Dear Diary
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Grade Level:
Fourth Grade-Eighth Grade
Colonial History, Language Arts, Literature, Military and Wartime History, Reading, Revolutionary War, Women's History
30 minutes
Group Size:
Up to 24
National/State Standards:
Gr. 4: The Rev War in NYS
Gr. 5: Hist. of US
Gr. 7: Un. 2, Sec. 1, Obj. 2; Un. 2, Sec. 3, Obj. 4; Un. 3, Sec. 4, Cont.A2
NYSED Standards:
US Standards:
Gr. 4: 1 A,B; 2 A,B; 3 A,C,D,E
Gr. 5,7,8: Era 2 St. 1 B; 2 A,B,C; Era 3 St. 1 A,C; 2 C
The Battles of Saratoga not only had significant effects on national and world history, but also deeply affected those directly and indirectly involved. “Dear Diary” uses primary source documents—journals—to examine this crucial event through the eyes of participants.
Students will be able to:
1. analyze journal entries and discern factual data
2. analyze these journal entries to evaluate some of the effects the Battles of Saratoga had on participants
The journal entries use original spelling, grammar, and syntax, and may be unfamiliar to many readers. Reviewing the content before classroom use will be important. Also a good teachable moment to discuss how dictionaries with standardized spellings were not commonplace at the time.
Downloadable PDF documents:
"Dear Diary" worksheets
Teacher's answer key
Ask students how many have kept or do keep a journal or diary. Point out how doing so can be a good way of recording and remembering what goes on in a person's life, how one feels about the events, and what one learns from these events. Let students know that the practice of keeping a journal or diary is something people have done for many, many years, and that such documents from decades and centuries past can be fantastic sources of information on everyday life and on important events of past years.
Distribute worksheets, letting students know they are about to read entries from 200+ year old journal and diary entries of real people who participated in or were witness to the Battles of Saratoga. Also let students know about the lack of proper spelling and grammar often used in these old journals, and go over a few examples with them.
Let students know the activity will have them reading these journal entries to answer several questions. Students could do so individually, or in small groups, depending on the teacher's preferences.
Downloadable PDF answer key available.
Park Connections
Journal entries are from participants in or witnesses to the Battles of Saratoga.
School groups are able, in season, to sign up for free, self-guiding battlefield tours and for free, ranger-led education programs.
Have students keep their own journals, or a class journal, for a set period of time as a writing assignment.
Additional Resources
Downloadable PDF document: Student Resource Packet.
RECONNAISSANCE --scouting mission to find information
SENTRIES --guards watching over a camp or fortification
PIQUETS (pickets) --small listening posts with a few soldiers, positioned ahead or outside of a camp or fortification
RANK AND FILE --compact lines and rows of soldiers on the battlefield
LIGHT INFANTRY --specially trained soldiers acting as scouts, not usually involved in heavy fighting, working more spread out than the rank and file formation of soldiers
PENCE --pennies
SAVAGES --old term for Native Americans, reflects misunderstandings of its time | <urn:uuid:9964d34e-25ed-43a7-a59f-e04fcc83cec6> | 3 | 3.390625 | 0.053163 | en | 0.866797 | http://www.nps.gov/sara/learn/education/classrooms/dear-diary.htm |
Review the Bid
Here is where you get to look at your first bid package. And here is where we let you in on the secret to winning and making a profit on the contract you are bidding on:
Read the bid. Then read it again. And after you think you're finished, read it again.
Why is this so important? In most cases, when you submit your bid, all you have to do is fill in some of the blanks on the forms contained in the package and send the package back to the government. But here's the catch: Even though the government itself generated and provided the package, when you send it back to the government, it becomes your offer, and the government will look at it as if you had put the entire package together yourself and as if they had never seen it before.
A small safety equipment company had been doing government work for the military and doing quite well at it. When the owner died unexpectedly, the owner's widow and son continued running the business. Later, they received a bid package for a stretcher for the Navy, and since this was an item that they supplied, they submitted a bid and won the small dollar purchase order.
When the inspector came out to check the stretchers before shipment, the owners discovered that they had made a very serious error. The requirement in the contract called for more than a stretcher, it also called for the stretcher to be enclosed in a hanging unit for use on the wall of a ship, a requirement that they had missed because they didn't read the bid carefully. And since their bid reflected the cost of the stretcher, not the added cost of the hanging unit, completion of the contract at the price quoted would have broken their company.
We recommended that they try to plead their case to the commander at the buying office and ask to be let out of the contract. Luckily for them, the commander must have been having a good day and canceled the contract: a very rare occurrence for the government.
So, not reading the bid carefully could have cost the owners their business. They were lucky, but you may not be if you fail to carefully review the contract.
Therefore, you need to understand what's in the bid package because it is more than a solicitation for a bid; if and when the government signs it, it is also your binding contract. That means that you must carefully check out all portions of the contract, not just the description and specification portion. That also means that you can't just gloss over parts that you do not completely understand: You need to take notes as you go so you can address those parts later on.
The package contains all the information you need in order to bid intelligently. All you need to do is read it.
For more information, see these topics: | <urn:uuid:2ff2a47e-2f0b-4497-b22d-527516d84793> | 2 | 1.578125 | 0.088565 | en | 0.982274 | http://www.officedepot.com/a/businesstools/text/p09_2600/ |
J.T. Hike...
What's the significance of the symbols on the National Parks arrowhead?
5 years ago
Expert Answer
60 Answers
3Helpful Answer Rating
According to the National Park Service, the elements of the emblem symbolize the major facets of the national park system. The Sequoia tree and bison represent vegetation and wildlife, the mountains and water represent the scenic and recreational values, and the arrowheads represents historical and archeological values. Visit http://www.nps.gov/npnh/parknews/arrowheadhistory.htm for more information.
5 years ago
2 Answers
The Bison: represents wildlife.
The Sequoia Tree: represents plants or vegetation.
The Water: represents recreational values.
The Mountain: represents sceinic values.
The Arrowhead: represents historical and archeological values.
The arrowhead symbol was regestered in the US patent office on Feburary 9th, 1965 as the official emblem of the US NPS
5 years ago | <urn:uuid:5dd3a4ea-5060-4648-aabb-09449c9bdae6> | 3 | 2.96875 | 0.743631 | en | 0.787977 | http://www.ohranger.com/qa/15854/whats-significance-symbols-national-parks-arrowhead |
chinaIn China, every 30 seconds a baby is born with physical birth defects and now, officials are claiming 10% of those deformities are due to environmental pollution.
According to the state-run media, that adds up to nearly 1.1 million births a year.
The northern province of Shanxi, a coal-rich region with large-scale chemical industry, is a major source of pollution and reports the nation’s highest rate of birth defects.
Researchers blame China’s 8 main coal zones, saying if the rate of birth defects continues to increase it will soon become a social problem, disrupting economic development and quality of life.
Pollution from coal, specifically mercury emissions, has been linked neurological disorders in humans and animals.
Via the AFP. | <urn:uuid:e0432c67-36d6-4d68-9996-80883e81a80a> | 3 | 2.71875 | 0.456911 | en | 0.941678 | http://www.organicauthority.com/blog/health/pollution-to-blame-for-chinas-rise-in-birth-defects/ |
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third-rate Saltos de línea: third-rate
Definición de third-rate en inglés:
Of inferior or very poor quality: a third-rate boarding house
Más ejemplos en oraciones
appalling, abysmal, atrocious, abject, awful, terrible, dismal, dreadful, execrable, frightful, miserable, wretched, lamentable, deplorable, pitiful, inadequate, insufficient, unsatisfactory, unacceptable;
jerry-built, shoddy, tinny, trashy, rubbishy;
British cheap and nasty;
North American cheapjack
informal lousy, not much cop, not up to much, crummy, bum, diabolical, rotten, sad, tatty, tacky, dire, tenth-rate
British informal ropy, duff, naff, rubbish, pants, a load of pants, grotty
vulgar slang crap, crappy, shitty, chickenshit
Oraciones de ejemplo
• I don't befriend second-raters or third-raters.
Definición de third-rate en:
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Palabra del día fortissimo
Pronunciación: fɔːˈtɪsɪməʊ
(especially as a direction) very loud or loudly | <urn:uuid:b01385e3-e3d1-4096-87e7-143787ac4909> | 2 | 1.796875 | 0.325697 | en | 0.690937 | http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/es/definicion/ingles/third-rate |
Books Besides the Bible: The Case for Franny and Zooey
Every Monday in Books Besides the Bible, Ethan Bartlett considers the value and pleasure of reading for Christians.
When J.D. Salinger died a couple years ago, it made the news for approximately an hour. These days, when I poll a roomful of high-school-educated people, often no one recognizes his name; however, when I mention the title The Catcher in the Rye, there is usually everything from groans to grins of recognition.
This is probably because Catcher is one of those books, the ones commonly taught in high school English classes. And perhaps for good reason: besides being an intricate piece of literature, its protagonist is high-school age, and he is excellent at articulating the sort of alienation, general anger, and attitude of being the only sincere person in a world full of hypocrites that, in my experience of both being a teenager and observing teenagers, is a very common tendency in that particular age group. This passage, narrated by the main character, Holden Caufield, is typical:
Then he said, “I had the privilege of meeting your mother and dad when they had their little chat with Dr. Thurmer some weeks ago. They’re grand people.”
“Yes, they are. They’re very nice.”
There are a couple hundred pages of Holden generally hating the world like this. Of course, Holden turns around, in approximately the last sentence of the book, and sees that maybe he’s just as much a phony as any of the people he’s been talking about. But I have a feeling that this flies over most readers’ heads. (I have heard, though I cannot at the moment substantiate, that Salinger came to hate the book; perhaps this structural imbalance is one reason.) Question: do we really need to give teenagers a book which is about exactly how teenagers tend to feel?
Enter Franny and Zooey. A lesser known Salinger novel, the story is made up of two novellas, each named after one of the titular characters, a brother and sister. Franny is a freshman in college—therefore, like Holden, still a teenager—and she experiences a crisis and a worldview similar to Holden’s: everyone seems like a phony, the world seems like a mass of hypocrisy. Franny ends up on the couch at her parents’ place, refusing her mother’s chicken soup, clutching a curious talisman: a classic Russian Orthodox religious text, The Way of a Pilgrim.
This is a mystical text in which a Russian peasant sets out to find a way to literally fulfill Saint Paul’s admonition in 1 Thessalonians 5:17, “pray without ceasing.” He succeeds, at least in theory. Franny’s mother identifies this as the root of Franny’s problems.
In an effort to break Franny out of her funk, Franny’s mother sends in older brother Zooey to try to talk sense into her. Franny, perhaps knowing the likelihood of success any endeavor to reason with a teenager is likely to achieve, refuses at first. When Franny does talk to Zooey, he starts out by berating her; he tells her that she’s having a “tenth-rate nervous breakdown,” because of her “tenth-rate” attempts at religiosity. His diatribe could have been aimed at Christian liberals in Salinger’s own time:
I think you’ve got [Jesus] confused in your own mind with about five or ten other religious personages, and I don’t see how you can go ahead with the Jesus prayer until you know who’s who and what’s what… And you’re constitutionally unable to love or understand a son of God who says a human being, any human being… is more valuable to God than any soft, helpless Easter chick.
However, unlike Catcher, Franny and Zooey does not end with berating. Zooey gives his sister a way out: he tells her the identity of each and every one of those people Franny sees as hypocrites, as phonies: “It’s Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy.”
So, to sum up: on the one hand, we have The Catcher in the Rye, a long-winded diatribe in which everybody ends up as a hypocrite, even those who point out hypocrisy in others. On the other hand, we have Franny and Zooey, which spends the bulk of its energy showing how to break out of Holden Caufield’s brand of self-righteousness and into a state of humility. If I had an English curriculum with limited room, I know which novel I would give my kids.
Authenticating Ourselves to Death
The Kiddy Pool: Teaching Good Taste
Olympic Metaphors and Marriage
About Ethan Bartlett
• http://www.slowchurch.com John Pattison
I co-wrote a book called “Besides the Bible: 100 Books that Have, Should, or Will Create Christian Culture” (IVP, 2010). My co-authors and I wrote 70 of the essays. The other 30 essays were written by some of our favorite authors, pastors, theologians, artists, and thinkers. Anyway, one of the books on our list was “Franny & Zooey.” The essay was written by David Dark.
• Ethan
Thanks for that, John! That looks like an awesome book–just the Amazon preview had me fascinated. I would like to disclaim that I neither knew the title of that book when this column was named, nor have I read the Franny and Zooey essay in it; but I’m glad it’s on other Christians’ radar. It deserves to be read.
• Ethan
…though looking through the contents, the Lutheran in me can’t help but suggest that Luther’s “Bondage of the Will” or his Large Catechism should be in it. | <urn:uuid:7e62d0bc-0d49-401e-9144-0a6727163d7c> | 2 | 2.0625 | 0.018643 | en | 0.964652 | http://www.patheos.com/blogs/christandpopculture/2012/04/books-besides-the-bible-the-case-for-franny-and-zooey/ |
Forgotten Genius
Against all odds, African-American chemist Percy Julian became one of the great scientists of the 20th century. Airing February 6, 2007 at 9 pm on PBS Aired February 6, 2007 on PBS
Program Description
Forgotten Genius
PBS Airdate: February 6, 2007
NARRATOR: 1939: A chemist at a midwestern paint company makes a startling discovery, one that could improve the health of millions of people. The company wants him to stick to making paint, but this man has always gone his own way. He was the grandson of Alabama slaves, yet he went on to become one of America's great scientists.
HELEN PRINTY (Julian Laboratories Chemist): He had to fight to overcome the odds of being a black man in America.
JOHN KENLY SMITH (Historian): The chemical world was a club, and outsiders were not really all that welcome.
PETER WALTON (Julian Laboratories Employee): We lived, for the most part, in a highly stressed, very competitive environment.
NARRATOR: Outside the laboratory, he faced challenges of a different kind.
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): Once the violence began, Anna and I felt we had no choice but to stay.
PERCY JULIAN, JR.: My dad was angry when he came home, and clearly ready to fight.
PERCY JULIAN(Dramatization): For more than a century we have watched the denial of elemental liberty to millions of black people in our southland.
NARRATOR: He found freedom in the laboratory. His science helped unlock the secret chemistry of plants, a discovery that would help relieve one of the most crippling human diseases and plunge him into one of the fiercest battles in the history of science.
NARRATOR: A brilliant chemist, a volatile personality, a man whose devotion to science would not be denied.
WILLIE PEARSON (Sociologist): This man was "Exhibit A" of determination and never giving up.
V/O (Dramatization of Senate Hearings): Please state your full name for the record.
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): My name is Percy Julian.
NARRATOR: Every spring, in Oak Park, Illinois, people from all over the village would go out of their way to see the explosion of color at the home on the corner of East and Chicago Avenues.
PERCY JULIAN, JR.: The tulips just went on forever. My dad, he'd be out there in his black beret, and my sense was that he had this love affair with growing things.
NARRATOR: What many passersby didn't realize was that the tulip grower was also one of America's great scientists.
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): Well, ladies and gentleman, essentially, I'm going to talk to you about three plants, three marvelous plants, three marvelous plants that make the words of the Psalmist come true and ring true again, "Consider the lilies of the field: they toil not, neither do they spin, and yet Solomon in all his glory was never arrayed like one of these."
NARRATOR: It was not simply the beauty of plants that captivated Percy Julian, but their ability to produce an endless variety of powerful chemicals. In the 1930s, Julian set out to tap what he called the "natural laboratories" of plants, to make a new class of drugs that would help millions of people.
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): Spoiled? What do you mean spoiled?
NARRATOR: Julian fought through extraordinary obstacles to make a place for himself in a profession and a country divided by race.
JAMES ANDERSON (Historian): The message from white society is very clear: it is not your achievement or your merit or your accomplishments that matter, it's the color of your skin, and because of that you're rejected.
GREGORY PETSKO: Yet over and over again, he doesn't let this stop him. He presses on, sure that his vision of where he wants to go and how he wants to get there is right.
JAMES SHOFFNER (Chemist): After Percy Julian, nobody could say anymore that blacks couldn't do science, because he was at the very top of his profession.
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): The story I will tell you tonight is a story of wonder and amazement, almost a story of miracles. It is a story of laughter and tears. It is a story of human beings, therefore, a story of meanness, of stupidity, of kindness and nobility.
One beautiful morning, when I was 12 years old, I went berry-picking on my grandfather's farm in Alabama. I shall never forget how beautiful life seemed to me that morning, under the spell of an Alabama forest. But in the midst of that beauty, I came across a Negro body hanging from a tree. He had been lynched a few hours earlier. He didn't look like a criminal; he just looked like a scared boy.
On the way back, I encountered and killed a rattlesnake. For years afterward, every time I saw a white man, I involuntarily saw the contours of a rattlesnake head on his face. Many years later, a reporter asked me what were my greatest nightmares from my childhood in the South. I told him, "White folks and rattlesnakes."
NARRATOR: Percy Lavon Julian was born in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1899, at a time when southerners lived under a system of forced segregation called Jim Crow.
JAMES ANDERSON: I think the greatest consequence of Jim Crow is fear. You knew if you said the wrong thing or went in the wrong door or drank out of the wrong water fountain...that any of those things could lead to your death.
NARRATOR: To shelter his children from this oppressive atmosphere, Julian's father turned to the world of ideas.
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): Every penny my father could scrape together went into building a wonderful library for his children, for the public library was closed to us. My father created, in my imagination, brave new worlds to conquer.
NARRATOR: As a young man, James Julian had been a schoolteacher. His wife Elizabeth was a teacher, too. They believed education offered the path to a better life for black people.
Denied his own chance to go to college, James made it his mission to send his children instead, but it would not be easy. In Montgomery, and across most of the South, public schools for black children simply stopped after the eighth grade.
JAMES ANDERSON: The message from white society, to black students, was that you should have just enough education to be good field hands and good laborers, cooks and maids and so forth.
NARRATOR: With no high school to attend, Percy Julian completed two years at the local teacher training school for Negroes. In 1916, with barely a 10th grade education, Percy Julian became the first member of his family to live out his father's dream.
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): During the hectic week of preparations, my father had taken me aside for a long talk. "This is the greatest moment of your life," he told me. "But it is also a great responsibility, for you are now beginning to create a family, a family of educated people."
There they were, three generations of hope and prayer, waving to a fourth generation that was going off to college! And why? Because they had the simple faith that the last great hope of the Earth is education for all the people.
NARRATOR: Julian's destination was DePauw University, a small liberal arts college in Greencastle, Indiana. DePauw had accepted a few black students since the Civil War, but expected them to know their place.
JAMES ANDERSON: A black student entering a white university, if they didn't know before they arrived, they found out, pretty quickly, that they were not welcome in the university or in the community.
NARRATOR: Instead of being assigned to a dorm like his white classmates, Julian was shown to an off-campus room with a slop jar for a toilet.
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): I soon got up enough courage to ask Mrs. Townsend what time we would have dinner, but she tersely informed me that she was not expected to give me my meals.
NARRATOR: Julian wandered the streets of Greencastle for a day and a half before finding a diner that would serve a Negro.
He would continue to take his meals off-campus until he learned of an opening at the Sigma Chi fraternity. In exchange for waiting on his housemates and firing their furnace, Julian could have a room in the basement. He soon felt at ease in the fraternity; the classroom was a different matter.
JAMES ANDERSON: You sit in a classroom with kids who have read things that you never heard of, they've taken math courses that you haven't taken, and so one of the academic challenges is trying to hold on until you can catch up.
NARRATOR: For two years Julian would take remedial classes at a local high school in addition to his normal course load.
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): I remember writing to my father, "I know you and Mother have always known what was best for me, but I think you made a mistake by sending me to compete with these white students. They are so brilliant that I am always hopelessly behind."
NARRATOR: But by his sophomore year, Julian was gaining fast on his white classmates, thanks, in part, to the encouragement of chemistry professor William Blanchard. Blanchard had what one student called "a contagious enthusiasm for discovering the unknown." Under his tutelage, Julian began to dream of a career as a research chemist.
Only one African American had ever earned a doctorate in chemistry. His name was St. Elmo Brady. Julian decided that if Brady could do it, so could he. After four years, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and first in his class.
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): At commencement time, my great-grandmother bared her shoulders, and she showed me, for the first time, the deep scars that had remained from a beating she had received when, one day, during the waning days of the Civil War, she went through the Negro quarters and cried out, "Get yourselves ready, children. The Yankees are coming. The Lord has heard our prayers!"
And then, proudly, she took my Phi Beta Kappa key in her hand and said, "This is worth all the scars."
NARRATOR: Encouraged by Percy's success, his father moved the whole family north to Greencastle to send the rest of the children to DePauw. Eventually, Julian's two brothers would become doctors, and his three sisters would earn master's degrees.
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): I shall never forget an anxious week of waiting, in 1920, to see if I would get into graduate school. I stood by as, day by day, my fellow students in chemistry said, "I am going to Illinois," "I'm going to Ohio State," or "I'm going to Michigan." "Where are you going?" they asked. And they answered for me: "You must be waiting for the Harvard plum!"
I could stand the suspense no longer. I went to Professor Blanchard. And there he showed me numerous letters from men who had really meant "god" to me, great American chemists of their day. "Discourage your bright colored lad," they wrote. "We couldn't get him a job when he's done, and it'll only mean frustration. Why don't you find him a teaching job in a Negro college in the South? He doesn't need a Ph.D. for that."
JAMES ANDERSON: What happened to Julian was something that would have been common throughout the land. To have a good college education was way beyond anything that one would expect for an African American. And so there's the sense that he'd had enough. "Stop here. Be content with this. Go back and teach your people."
NARRATOR: In 1920, Julian reluctantly returned to the south to teach, but he clung to the dream of earning his Ph.D. At 21, he was embarking on a quest that would last more than 10 years.
His first stop was Fisk University in Nashville, one of the best Negro colleges in the country. His idol, St. Elmo Brady, had studied at Fisk. But Julian chafed at the limitations of the black college system: overcrowded classrooms, inadequate libraries and poorly equipped laboratories.
After two years, he was on the move again. Julian had won a scholarship to study chemistry at one of America's most famous universities.
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): No Negro has yet obtained his master's degree in chemistry at Harvard, and so I'm up against a hard situation again.
JAMES ANDERSON: When Julian arrived at Harvard, in 1922, the racial climate was probably worse than it had been at any point in the 20th century.
NARRATOR: President Abbott Lawrence Lowell had set the tone by banning black students from the dorms in Harvard Yard.
Julian sailed through his first year and earned his master's degree in the spring of 1923.
He continued his studies for three more years but left Harvard without his doctorate. Years later, he would bitterly tell friends he had been denied the teaching assistantship he needed to stay in school.
JAMES ANDERSON: If you were going to be a teaching assistant and teach white students, that was a no-no. That's just hardly acceptable at that time and that place. If you were denied that, you were also denied the opportunity to finance your education.
NARRATOR: Julian spent an unhappy year teaching at a small black college near Charleston, West Virginia. Then his fortunes turned. He was invited to join the faculty at the nation's most distinguished black university: Howard University, in Washington, D.C.
He was replacing St. Elmo Brady, who was returning to Fisk. Julian went straight to work, designing a new chemistry building and honing a distinctive lecture style.
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): I should warn you that scientists are traditionally poor speakers, because they have a hard time letting go of their gobbledy-gook. "Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home," becomes impossible when you must call the ladybird "coccinella bipunctata."
NARRATOR: Despite his growing stature at Howard, Julian was still determined to earn his Ph.D. In 1929, he finally got his chance. He won a fellowship that allowed him to take a leave from Howard to study at the University of Vienna, in Austria. He was about to begin a lifelong inquiry into the chemistry of plants.
GREGORY PETSKO: For thousands of years, long before there was such a thing as a science of chemistry, people were fascinated by plants, because they knew that plants contained substances that could affect people. Coffee will keep you awake. Tobacco contains something that will calm your nerves. Foxglove contains an extract that'll affect your heart. And the whole goal of chemistry in the early part of the 20th century was to understand what these natural products were, to characterize their chemical structures, and figure out how to make them. This was called "natural products chemistry." It was the main branch of chemistry. And in 1929, Vienna, in Austria, was the seat of natural products chemistry. And that's why Percy Julian went there.
NARRATOR: Julian arrived at Vienna's Chemische Institut with huge crates of ground glassware, items the Viennese students had heard about but never seen.
BERNHARD WITKOP (National Academy of Sciences Member): The unpacking became a big ceremony surrounded by fellow students, who "oohed" and "aahed" about the wonders that came out of these crates.
NARRATOR: Among the onlookers was Josef Pikl, a chemist who would become one of Julian's closest friends and collaborators. They had come to Vienna to study under the renowned scientist Ernst Späth. Späth was a giant in the field of natural products chemistry. He had a particular interest in a family of compounds called alkaloids.
GREGORY PETSKO: Of all the natural products, the ones that fascinated people the most were the alkaloids, because they seemed the most powerful. A thimbleful of some alkaloids would bring down an elephant.
NARRATOR: It's believed that many alkaloids evolved to protect plants from organisms that might eat or harm them, but these same compounds can have unexpected effects on people.
GREGORY PETSKO: We now know, for example, that it's an alkaloid, caffeine, that's responsible for the stimulant effect of coffee beans. We also know that it's an alkaloid called nicotine that's the calming influence in tobacco plants. Other alkaloids are things like morphine, strychnine, cocaine. A whole host of things that we now know are drugs turn out to be plant alkaloids.
NARRATOR: By 1929, it was known that an alkaloid from the root of a common Austrian shrub called Corydalis cava was effective in treating pain and heart palpitations. Späth asked Julian to find out why.
DAGMAR RINGE (Chemist): And so the question was which compound, which precise compound in this tuber, is responsible for the biological effect that one is seeing?
NARRATOR: Isolate the active ingredient in Corydalis cava, and then identify its chemical structure: this was the challenge Julian would have to meet to earn his Ph.D.
Free, at last, of teaching and administrative duties, he threw himself into his research as never before.
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): For the first time in my life, I represent a creating, alive and wide-awake chemist. I recognize that publications and research will be, for me, as natural a thing as going to bed and eating a meal. Truly, I was the luckiest guy in all the world to land here.
NARRATOR: Just outside the laboratory was a vibrant world that Julian was eager to explore. A fellow student, Edwin Mosettig, took the American under his wing. Soon Julian was joining the Mosettig family for ski trips, swims in the Danube and the opera.
BERNHARD WITKOP: The mother of Edwin Mosettig was a famous musician, and the Mosettig house was a center for social activity. So, in that way, Percy got access to layers of the society that were inaccessible in America. Black persons in Europe were very rare, and Percy, for the first time in his life, fully unfolded, because he was admired there.
NARRATOR: For Julian, the sense of freedom was exhilarating. In letter after letter, he described his busy social life to colleagues back at Howard.
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): And now a little news: I have the prettiest girl in Vienna. You have never gazed on such beauty. Monday night, we were in the opera and heard Beethoven's Fidelio.
Nature makes its demands, so I've made a date with my little German sweetheart. They didn't lie when they talked of beautiful Viennese women. Afterwards, we went to the sweetest wine cellar you ever saw and drank 'til 3 a.m.
NARRATOR: But at 7:55 each morning, Julian was back in the laboratory, working under the watchful eye of a man so severe he would immediately fail a student he considered lazy or untalented.
The pressure was mounting on Julian to isolate the elusive alkaloids on which his dissertation depended.
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): The last two months, I have passed through a hellish siege of work. Reaction upon reaction, and yet I stand at the door and knock, as it were. I don't know a damned thing.
NARRATOR: The alkaloids that puzzled Julian, like most of the molecules of life, are made, primarily, of carbon.
GREGORY ROBINSON (Chemist): Carbon is really the Super Glue of the chemical world, in the sense that carbon can bond to itself in almost an infinite number of ways.
DAGMAR RINGE: In this model, for instance, I can make a chain of carbons that continues, practically, infinitely. However, it can also come together into a ring structure, in this case a six-carbon ring structure.
NARRATOR: The carbon ring is one of nature's fundamental building blocks, found in an endless variety of compounds. Members of the alkaloid family all have one or more nitrogen atoms. But otherwise their structures vary widely, which presented Julian with a formidable challenge.
NED HEINDEL (Chemist): He was working in some very difficult chemistry. When you don't know anything about what the structure is of the material you're isolating, you have to tear your molecule apart, atom by atom, and try to deduce the structure.
DAGMAR RINGE: It's like finding a needle in a haystack. It requires stubbornness. It requires focus. It requires repeating, over and over, the same kinds of processes, until the answers come out.
NARRATOR: Slowly the answers did come. In his second year, Julian finally identified the active alkaloid in Corydalis cava, his first chemical triumph. This work with Späth would be the foundation of his future career.
BERNHARD WITKOP: When Ernst Späth was asked about his student, Percy Julian, he characterized him and said, "Ein ausserordentlicher Student wie ich in meiner Laufbahn noch nie gehabt habe," "an extraordinary student, the likes of which I have never had before in my career as a teacher."
NARRATOR: Julian returned to America, in the fall of 1931, with the doctorate he had pursued for more than a decade. The years in Vienna had dramatically increased his self-confidence. But they had also sown the seeds of a personal catastrophe that awaited him at Howard.
Back in Washington, Julian set out to turn Howard into a center for true chemical research, something his predecessor had been unable to do. Burdened with teaching responsibilities, St. Elmo Brady had not published a single research paper in the 15 years since earning his Ph.D. Julian was determined this would not happen to him.
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): I am going to give every damned ounce of my energy towards plans to flood the chemical market with as much research as the day's hours and my strength will allow.
NARRATOR: He brought Josef Pikl over from Vienna, and the two went straight to work on a series of papers.
When their first was accepted for publication, Julian proudly noted it was the first with a black chemist as senior author. Percy Julian was now America's preeminent black chemist and, at Howard, one of President Mordecai Johnson's rising stars.
But Johnson had made many enemies in his five years at Howard. Soon Julian would be caught up in university politics, with disastrous results. The trouble began when Julian, at the president's request, goaded a white chemist named Jacob Shohan into resigning. Shohan retaliated by releasing to the local black press the letters Julian had written to him from Vienna.
Julian's accounts of his romances, his criticism of faculty members, suddenly it was all public, ammunition to be used against Julian and Johnson by the president's enemies.
Just as Julian's letters began to appear in the press, there was another bombshell. His laboratory assistant, Robert Thompson, charged he had found his wife and Julian together. Lawsuits flew between Julian and Thompson. When Thompson was fired for going public with his charges, he released the letters that Julian had written to him from Vienna.
Through the summer of 1932, the Baltimore Afro-American published letter after letter from the man the newspaper dubbed "Howard's Prize Letter-Writer."
Finally, under pressure from Johnson and the Board of Trustees, Julian resigned. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Julian was a chemist without a laboratory, a black man without a job. Only a year after his triumphant return from Vienna, the career he'd worked so hard to build was in ruins.
When all seemed lost, Julian's mentor, William Blanchard, threw him a lifeline, bringing him back to DePauw as a research fellow to supervise lab sections. It was a big step down from full professor and department chairman, but he had a lab again, and his research partner, Josef Pikl, would join him at DePauw.
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): In much of my life I've had to pick up the broken fragments of chance and turn them into opportunity.
NARRATOR: Over the next three years, 11 of the student projects Julian supervised would lead to papers in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
NED HEINDEL: Eleven undergraduate papers published in JACS, out of a student body of that size, was not only unusual for the 1930s, it would be unusual now. Julian took the talent in those students and put that institution on the map for undergraduate research.
NARRATOR: DePauw's newest instructor left a powerful impression on undergraduate Ray Dawson.
RAY DAWSON (DePauw Alumnus): He put on a grand show. He would come into his lectures, in his white lab jacket, with a flourish. He was oratorical in a way some great scientist from London or Berlin might be. It was just a show, but a very good one.
NARRATOR: Julian had finally found fulfillment, a place where he could teach and research. But when the local American Legion assailed the school for hiring a Negro who had been dismissed from Howard University, Julian was forced to stop teaching. He could stay on as long as his research grant lasted, but his days at DePauw were numbered. Everything he'd work for was about to collapse again.
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): I decided I had to do things that would make people take more notice of me.
NARRATOR: What he did was take on a high-stakes research project, one that would either make him or break him.
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): It all began with a simple little bean, the Calabar bean. It was a beautiful, purple bean when I first got it. But it is not only beautiful in its appearance, but also in the laboratory it has within it.
NARRATOR: Chemists had been fascinated by the Calabar bean ever since British missionaries brought it back from Africa in the mid-1800s. From the bean, they had isolated an alkaloid called physostigmine—used to treat glaucoma—but no one had been able to synthesize the complex molecule.
NARRATOR: Synthesis was the highest calling for a chemist in the 1930s. A successful synthesis could bring great medical benefits, by making a scarce natural product more widely available. Just as important, it proved beyond a doubt that the chemist understood how the molecule was put together.
NED HEINDEL: There were very few alkaloids that had been made from scratch in Julian's time. The synthesis of physostigmine would bring recognition to whoever achieved it. And that's what Percy Julian set out to do.
NARRATOR: But Julian was not alone. At Oxford University, another chemist was at work on his own synthesis. His name was Robert Robinson.
NED HEINDEL: Sir Robert Robinson was sort of the dean of organic chemists in England. He was a much-respected creator of molecules, a trainer of many Ph.D. students. He was the premier organic chemist of his time.
NARRATOR: Moving step-by-step toward a final synthesis, Robinson had already published nine papers on physostigmine in Britain's leading chemical journal.
NED HEINDEL: It's a little bit of intimidation. The world is supposed to know, "I've got this domain; you stay out of it."
NARRATOR: But to Julian, Robinson's approach seemed clumsy. Convinced there was a simpler way, he set out to beat the Englishman to the synthesis. A high-profile scientific victory would be just the thing to get his career back on track, but it wouldn't be easy. Physostigmine was unlike any molecule that had been synthesized before.
NED HEINDEL: It bristled with spots around the molecule where methyl groups were hanging, that's a carbon with three hydrogens. There are actually four of these, and getting them in the right place is essential to making nature's molecule. It was a formidable chemical challenge for anybody to tackle in the early 1930s.
NARRATOR: Julian tackled it the way all chemists do: one step at a time.
GREGORY PETSKO: When you synthesize a molecule, you start with very small substances, substances you can buy or that you know how to make already. You then start assembling those into fragments of the thing that you're hoping to make in the end; they're called "intermediates." And what you're doing is you're following a particular path. This path takes you from the simple starting substances all the way to the final product, the natural product.
NARRATOR: To build his molecule, Julian drew on a battery of techniques for manipulating atoms.
NED HEINDEL: One can heat something to a very high temperature; that usually gets the atoms vibrating and makes new bonds possible. You can oxidize something—you can add oxygen to it. You can take oxygen out of a molecule; that's a reduction. We can expose it to pressure. Sometimes, we can expose it to light, to cajole the atoms to do what we want.
NARRATOR: At each step, Julian had to verify that he'd actually made the compounds he intended to. For this, he relied on a device called a combustion train.
NED HEINDEL: This technique takes an organic molecule which contains carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and burns it.
NARRATOR: By weighing the resulting gases, Julian could tell what atoms were present and in what ratio.
GREGORY PETSKO: How much carbon does it have? How much hydrogen does it have? How much nitrogen does it have? If your compound has the right ratio, you're a long way towards being sure you've made what you thought you made.
NED HEINDEL: And then you repeat this process of purification and of analysis for each intermediate, until you finally get to the natural product.
NARRATOR: Julian was under tremendous pressure to complete the research, pressure compounded by events in his personal life. He was engaged. His fiancée was the woman who'd been at the center of the Howard scandal, the former wife of his laboratory assistant, Robert Thompson.
Born Anna Roselle Johnson, she was a member of a prominent African American family from Baltimore. She had graduated Phi Beta Kappa and was now working toward a Ph.D. in sociology.
RAY DAWSON: They'd already set, I believe, two wedding dates, which he had canceled, and she told him that this was the last time. Unless he kept the new latest date, she would break off their engagement. And he was quite upset by this, but he had no choice but to proceed, because we were only a few weeks away from the end.
NARRATOR: In 1934, Julian and Pikl sent off their first paper on physostigmine, outlining a new approach to the synthesis. Julian attacked Robinson in the beginning lines of the paper.
NED HEINDEL: To have a young upstart taking on the pope of organic chemistry in England, naming him, and coupling the words "failure" and "embarrassing" and "low yield" is almost unbelievably aggressive.
GREGORY ROBINSON: In many regards, that was a pivotal point in Julian's career. If he were wrong, he could effectively, almost, write off any research career at that point.
NARRATOR: Working around the clock, Julian and Pikl synthesized a compound that was one step removed from physostigmine. Since that last step was already known, this would count as a complete synthesis. But before they could publish, Robinson struck again with his own synthesis of the same compound. The race was over.
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): The shock was almost unbearable. We were not the first, just the "me toos." Why did he, of so much fame, who didn't at all need the glory, have to snatch the prize from us?
Suddenly, my eye caught something. "Look, Josef, he's made a big blunder." Our crystals melted at about 39° Celsius, body temperature. Indeed, we were able to melt them by closing them in our armpits. His compound melted not at body temperature, but almost 50 degrees higher. "He hasn't got it!" I cried.
NED HEINDEL: The melting point of a molecule is a fingerprint. If Julian's melting point is correct then Robinson's can't be, and these can't be the same substance. And Julian quickly grasps on that and says, "You've got the wrong compound."
NARRATOR: Julian hurriedly wrote an addendum to their next paper.
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): "We believe that the English authors are in error." Josef was a very unhappy man. "If we are wrong, we are irretrievably ruined," he said.
It hit like a bombshell. Telegrams came in from all over the world. My old professor, Kohler of Harvard, he wrote: "I pray that you are right. If not, the future may be dark for you."
NED HEINDEL: Part of what he's just done here is a go-for-broke plan. He's working as an underpaid assistant in a liberal arts college. He desperately needs a break.
NARRATOR: Now the pressure was on Julian and Pikl to prove they were right.
RAY DAWSON: Percy was a bundle of nerves, but, yet, he had this underlying drive that didn't permit him to stop, to run away, to give up.
NARRATOR: To confirm his synthesis, Julian needed to take one final melting point.
DAGMAR RINGE: When chemists took a melting point, they would put some crystals into a capillary tube, strap that capillary tube to a thermometer, and then place the complete assembly into an oil bath. They're looking to determine the exact moment when the crystals begin to melt.
NARRATOR: To claim victory over Robinson, Julian had to show that another set of crystals from his synthesis melted at the same temperature as their natural counterpart, 135 degrees.
NED HEINDEL: This has got to be the ultimate high. "I've taken on the master, and I've beaten him."
NARRATOR: The physostigmine papers were immediately recognized as a milestone in American chemical history, an early example of what chemists call "total synthesis," the complete assembly of a complex molecule from basic chemical building blocks.
NED HEINDEL: Julian's pathway to physostigmine is so simple that it can be summarized in essentially two publications. Chemists look at them and marvel at..."How did he do that in so elegant of a sequence?"
JAMES SHOFFNER: To call a process "elegant" means that the synthesis is achieved in the minimal amount of steps necessary in order to bring about a product. And so that's really to give it the highest accolade that you can give, that it is elegant.
NARRATOR: In 1935, Percy finally married Anna in a private ceremony on Christmas Eve. As his bride went back east to finish her doctorate, Julian looked forward to new career opportunities his triumph would bring.
On the strength of the physostigmine work, William Blanchard had recommended his protégé for a permanent faculty position at DePauw.
DONALD "JACK" COOK (Former DePauw Chemistry Chairman): If DePauw had recognized Percy's capabilities and put him on the staff at that time, it would have been a historical event. It didn't happen.
NARRATOR: Julian applied to other universities, with the same result.
JAMES ANDERSON: Most institutions would not even tolerate, for a second, having an African American in the role of a teacher or a faculty.
WILLIE PEARSON: This was during a time of rampant scientific racism. There were a number of scholars at Harvard and other institutions that were doing scientific studies and reporting that African Americans did not have the capacity to do science, because they were actually an inferior race.
NARRATOR: In early 1936, Julian's research grant ran out. Now, with no hope of an academic career, he turned his attention to industry. America's leading chemical corporation, DuPont, had invited Julian and Pikl for an interview. DuPont executives offered Pikl a job. To Julian, he later recalled, they offered an apology: "We didn't know you were a Negro."
JOHN KENLY SMITH: The world of chemical research and development in industry, in this period, was overwhelmingly white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men, and outsiders were not really all that welcome.
NARRATOR: At Julian's insistence, Pikl took the job at DuPont and spent the rest of his career there. Julian returned to the job hunt.
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): Day by day, as I entered these firms, presented my credentials and asked for a job, the answer almost seemed like it had been transmitted by wire from one firm to the other. It ran like this: "We've never hired a Negro research chemist before. We don't know how it would work out."
NARRATOR: Finally, Julian caught a break. The Institute of Paper Chemistry, in Appleton, Wisconsin, was prepared to make him an offer.
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): And then they were informed by city attorneys that an old Appleton statute forbade Negroes from being housed in Appleton overnight. This, in the Year of our Lord, 1936!
But in that meeting, sat a board member, an Irishman named William J. O'Brien.
NARRATOR: O'Brien was vice president of the Glidden Company. He'd been looking for a sharp chemist to run the company's new Chicago laboratory. He offered Julian the job of Director of Research.
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): I had already wired Anna, several times, that I had landed jobs, so this time I was a little more cautious: "Am considering offer Glidden Company in research at $5,000." Her reply came back: "What do you mean `considering?'"
JOHN KENLY SMITH: The fact that Percy Julian was hired to be the director of a laboratory, not just a member of a laboratory, is truly remarkable and unprecedented.
JAMES SHOFFNER: That was 10 years before Jackie Robinson. You know? And we look toward the Jackie Robinson example as being pivotal in opening up not just baseball, but a whole lot of other opportunities for black people.
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): And so I came to Chicago and started in on another fascinating plant, the soybean.
NARRATOR: Neither Julian, nor anyone else in 1936, had any idea what a powerhouse the soybean would become.
Today the soybean is one of the pillars of American agriculture, second only to corn among the major crops. Seventy million acres of farmland are planted in soy, with an annual harvest worth more than $20 billion. Soy is used in a wide range of products, from food and medicine to paper and plastics.
TODD ALLEN (Soybean Farmer): It's a very widely used commodity. If you go down to the grocery store and look at the label, you'll find soybean oil in there somewhere.
Soybeans originally came into this country from China, as a hay crop for grazing, for beef cattle. But, also, it manufactures its own nitrogen, and back in the 1920s, well, then everybody needed that, because we didn't have a lot of commercial fertilizer back then.
But then, as our machinery developed, we learned that we could cut and process these soy beans and break them down into feed for our animals and soy oil for human consumption.
NARRATOR: But soybeans really took off in the 1930s, when industry discovered the plant, thanks, in part, to the efforts of an unlikely champion: automaker Henry Ford. Ford planted thousands of acres of soybeans, and alongside his Dearborn auto plant, he built a soybean laboratory and processing factory.
JOHN KENLY SMITH: Ford sets up a laboratory in the early 1930s, hires a young, self-trained chemist to run the laboratory, and they begin doing lots of experiments trying to figure how you could use soybeans in making cars.
NARRATOR: Out of his lab came new soybean-based auto paints, lubricating oils and soybean-based plastics that Ford turned into steering wheels, gearshift knobs and dent-proof fenders.
V/O (Film Clip): Industrial chemists are working to find new uses for soybean oil and soybean meal.
NARRATOR: Soon other industrialists were following Ford's lead, building soybean processing plants across the Midwest.
One of the first to embrace the "miracle bean" was Percy Julian's new boss, Adrian Joyce of the Glidden Company. Under Joyce, Glidden had grown from a single paint store in Cleveland into one of the nation's leading paint manufacturers.
JOHN KENLY SMITH: But Joyce didn't stop there. He diversified into a wide range of products. Durkee Famous Foods was a Glidden brand. He also moved into soybean processing.
NARRATOR: Convinced the soybean would be critical to Glidden's future, Joyce set up a new Soya Products Division in Chicago. The first assignment for his new research director: isolate the protein of the soybean, something that had never been done on an industrial scale.
Julian plunged into his new job, keenly aware that people were watching to see how this black chemist would measure up.
PETER WALTON: The people in the plant were always mindful of a white laboratory coat, a blur that might swoop down at any moment.
HELEN PRINTY: He would pester you at many times. He would keep, you know, wanting to know what was new, every half an hour, almost.
RISHER WATTS (Julian Laboratories Chemist): And he expected you to tell him something different every time he came in there, something that was favorable.
NARRATOR: But for more than a year, the news was not favorable.
RISHER WATTS: In chemistry, things don't ever go the way you plan it, because you've got reactions that are very critical; even a little variation in temperature, in concentration and time, and everything will give you a bad outcome.
NARRATOR: Eventually, Julian's chemists found just the right combination of time, temperature and acidity to pull the protein out of the soybean. Julian's "Alpha protein" was the first vegetable protein produced in bulk anywhere in America. It made millions for Glidden as a new industrial paper coating.
Later it would be a key ingredient in one of the first water-based, or "latex" house paints, Glidden's Spred Satin.
V/O (Paint Commercial): Get new Spred house paint.
NARRATOR: After Alpha protein, Adrian Joyce urged Julian to turn his attention to other parts of the soybean.
JOHN KENLY SMITH: Joyce was always trying to figure out every possible use for everything you have. Find out, "is there some chemical in here that we otherwise might be throwing down the drain, that we might be able to make money out of?"
NARRATOR: Julian drove his staff to turn the soybean inside out.
ARNOLD HIRSCH (Julian Laboratories Chemist): Julian wanted everyone to perform to the best of their ability, and he did everything in his power to motivate people to do that.
JAMES LETTON (Julian Laboratories Production Manager): I always thought he was a master psychologist. I think he was very much aware of what he was doing and who he was doing it to.
RISHER WATTS: His purpose was to get the best out of you. I think that's what it was all about.
NARRATOR: The chemistry invented by Julian and his team led to scores of new products. From soybean oil came lecithin, to make chocolate smoother, new salad oils and shortenings for Durkee, and a new non-spattering margarine.
HELEN PRINTY: Always when you were working on one thing, there was another thing coming up. You were always thinking ahead of time, what was the next big thing?
NARRATOR: From soybean meal came plastics, linoleum, plywood glue, high-protein livestock feed and dog food.
HELEN PRINTY: He was brilliant. He would set out a research project, and he would write the introduction and the description of the work, and a conclusion. He did everything except do the experiment.
GENE WOROCH (Glidden Chemist): And there would be a statement, something to the effect that, "The problem is solved; all that remains to be done is..." And many of us used to cringe at this, because it would be our responsibility to get this to work, and sometimes it didn't work.
RISHER WATTS: He was very demanding. And that was on a daily basis, I mean, because he had his hands on everything that went on.
V/O (Film Clip): Yes, there's magic in this Cinderella crop, and we've hardly scratched the surface.
NARRATOR: The stream of products coming out of Julian's lab joined the flood of household and industrial goods from Dow, DuPont and other companies whose chemistry was changing the way Americans lived.
V/O (Film Clip): ...nylon stockings, introduced in 1938. There's barely a minute of your time on Earth that is not in some way made secure and comfortable through chemistry.
JOHN KENLY SMITH: There was a tremendous amount of enthusiasm for chemicals in the 1930s.
V/O (Film Clip): Here are the headquarters of a group of super-sleuths, engaged in solving some of the major mysteries of the universe. They take molecules apart and put them together again, in a different form, to make new and incredible things.
NARRATOR: People saw the industry as sort of the leading edge of high technology, of providing goods and services that were going to make people's lives better and to keep the economy growing.
V/O (Film Clip): The nation's industrial skyline parted in the middle, to make room for the growing chemical industry.
NARRATOR: Glidden's new soybean division was a success. Julian's reward was a raise that allowed him to be reunited with Anna. For the first three years of their marriage, she had been back east, earning her Ph.D. and working in the Washington public schools. Now she joined Percy in Chicago, at last.
As the couple settled into their new home, in the Westside community of Maywood, Anna learned just how driven her husband could be when it came to chemistry.
"Science can be a hard taskmaster," she would remember. "Dinner can be at seven or 11, as far as the true disciple of chemistry is concerned."
Glidden was delighted with Julian's chemistry, but Julian was becoming restless.
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): I was itching to get away from dog foods, paint and oleomargarine, and to tackle nature again with more exacting methods.
HELEN PRINTY: Doctor Julian loved chemistry. He used to take the people that were working on the products for the Glidden Company and sneak us off and do other things that he was interested in, on the side.
NARRATOR: Julian was especially interested in a compound called progesterone.
V/O (Medical Film Clip): New ways of controlling fertility have begun to suggest...
NARRATOR: Discovered in 1934, progesterone was called the "pregnancy hormone," because it plays a central role in preparing a woman's uterus for childbirth.
HELEN PRINTY: Apparently, Mrs. Julian had had a couple of miscarriages. And doctors at that time had found that progesterone was essential to carrying a child to term.
WOMAN IN LABOR (Medical Film Clip): The pains are getting harder.
NARRATOR: In the 1930s, nearly one out every six pregnancies in America ended in miscarriage or premature birth.
DOCTOR (Medial Film Clip): Relax, your baby is almost here now.
NARRATOR: Hundreds of thousands of babies were lost each year. Julian realized that progesterone offered new hope. He and other chemists began looking for ways to make the hormone for pregnant women at risk.
Progesterone is one of a class of compounds called steroids, which scientists were just beginning to realize played many key roles in the body.
GREGORY PETSKO: They were involved in reproduction. They were involved in sexual development. They were involved in the response to injury and growth. And yet despite this enormous range of different physiological effects, these compounds all seemed to have similar chemical structures.
DAGMAR RINGE: The group of molecules that we call steroids all share a common framework, composed of these four-ring systems right here: a six-membered ring, fused to a second six-membered ring, fused to a third six-membered ring, fused to a five-membered ring.
NARRATOR: Dozens of steroid molecules are made by the body, ranging from cholesterol to digestive fluids to sex hormones, such as progesterone and testosterone. The anabolic steroids used by some athletes today are simply modified forms of the natural male hormone.
NED HEINDEL: Once it was recognized that the family of materials we call steroids had such an impact on human health, there became a global push: "Can we get these materials? Can we make them available?" And, "What sources do they come from?
NARRATOR: Chemists first tried isolating steroids from animal extracts like horse urine, but the process required vast amounts of raw material and yielded only tiny amounts of steroids.
GREGORY PETSKO: The breakthrough, in making steroids available, was the realization that you could take substances from plants that could form the starting point for the synthesis of steroids. That would give you a leg up on the process.
NARRATOR: In the mid-1930s, scientists had discovered that plants have steroids too, with the same four carbon rings found in animal steroids.
DAGMAR RINGE: It was only a very small leap to realize that one could convert a plant steroid into an animal steroid.
NARRATOR: The idea that plants made chemicals similar to human steroids was something Julian already knew. Back at DePauw, while researching physostigmine, Julian had set aside a dish of Calabar bean oil. A few days later, he found white crystals in the oil.
Searching the literature, he found that these crystals were a plant steroid called stigmasterol. Small amounts of stigmasterol were also found in soybean oil, and Julian now had plenty of that at Glidden. He was confident that he could convert it into progesterone, if he could find a way to extract this stigmasterol from the oil.
But Julian was not the only one who saw the potential of making steroids from plants. In 1938, a chemist named Russell Marker found a way to convert steroids from sarsaparilla root into progesterone, by chemically snipping off the "side chain" of extra atoms from the plant steroid. It was breakthrough chemistry, but progesterone made from sarsaparilla root was too expensive to be practical. The race was on for a cheaper source.
GREGORY PETSKO: I think that both Percy Julian and Russell Marker understood the medical implications of what they were trying to do, that they knew if those natural products could be provided in quantity, that the face of medicine would be changed.
NARRATOR: Marker published paper after paper, documenting his search for a plant that would yield cheap progesterone. Julian saw his chance slipping away. There wasn't much time for this kind of research amid the daily demands of his job.
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): One day the phone rang, and the fellow said, "Doc, something's happened. Some water's leaked into Soybean Oil Tank No. 1, and it's spoiled. "Spoiled?" I said. "Spoiled? What do you mean spoiled?" Now, you understand, this tank contained 100,000 gallons of refined soybean oil bound for the Durkee Famous Foods plant. If it were ruined, Glidden would be out $200,000. And such a blunder might cost me my job, so I was over there in a jiffy.
NARRATOR: Julian found the giant tank fouled with white sludge. But his despair vanished in a flash of recognition: there were crystals in the sludge at the bottom of the tank. They were stigmasterol, the same crystals he'd found in the dish of Calabar oil. Now he realized what had forced the stigmasterol out of both oils, water.
JACK COOK: You couldn't destroy a 100,000-gallon tank of soybean oil to get this steroid out, but when you add a little water to it, it falls out. It precipitates. It separates on its own.
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): And it was this little accidental discovery—the kind that characterize the development of science so often—that led to a practical method for the isolation of steroids from soybean oil.
NARRATOR: Now a step ahead of Marker, Julian developed an industrial process for converting stigmasterol into progesterone in bulk.
NED HEINDEL: Julian did not discover the primary chemistry that took stigmasterol over to progesterone—that came out of a German group five years earlier—but he was the first person to realize that it could be scaled up. A company that's in the paint business suddenly becomes a player in the human sex hormone game.
NARRATOR: In 1940, Julian sent a one-pound package of progesterone to the Upjohn pharmaceutical company. Shipped under armed guard and valued at nearly $70,000, it was the first commercial shipment of an artificial sex hormone produced anywhere in America.
Testosterone and other artificial sex hormones soon followed, bringing millions of dollars in unexpected revenue to Glidden.
Despite his growing stature, Julian was barred from a major hormone conference held at an exclusive resort in Maryland. Only after three days of protest by his white colleagues was he finally admitted.
Within a year, Julian would face a new challenge: his rival, Russell Marker, had discovered a giant yam in Mexico. It was even richer in steroids than soybeans. In 1944, Marker and two partners formed a company called Syntex to make hormones from the yam. For the rest of the decade, Syntex and Glidden would produce most of the world's supply of artificial sex hormones.
GREGORY PETSKO: I think the decision to make substances like steroids from plants, rather than from animal tissues, was a landmark in the history of medicine as well as the history of chemistry. It meant that you could take steroids that before were so rare that you barely knew what they were, and you could inject them into animals or people and see their effects on a variety of conditions. The possibilities that that opened up almost were limitless.
NARRATOR: The work of Julian and Marker would lay the foundation for a whole new class of medicines, including the birth control pill and a wonder drug that would soon take the world by storm.
By the mid-1940s, Julian's work at Glidden had won him national acclaim. With the outbreak of World War II, his Alpha protein became the chief ingredient in "bean soup," a fire-fighting foam credited with saving thousands of servicemen's lives. He was even featured in Reader's Digest, one of America's most popular magazines.
HELEN PRINTY: It was the beginning of white America's exposure to Dr. Percy Julian, and how he had to fight to overcome the odds of being a black man in America. And, in the context of the times, it made him a symbol.
JAMES SHOFFNER: Here was a person who looked like me, who was not only in the field, but succeeding magnificently at the top of his profession. That was profound.
NARRATOR: Julian was named to the boards of half a dozen colleges and universities. He was showered with awards and honorary degrees and sought after as a public speaker. The NAACP awarded him its prestigious Spingarn Medal, previously given to W.E.B. Du Bois, George Washington Carver, Paul Robeson and Thurgood Marshall. And the Chicago Sun-Times named him "Chicagoan of the Year."
As Julian's stature grew, so did his personal responsibilities. Anna had given birth to a son, Percy Jr., in 1940, and a daughter, Faith, four years later. With so many demands on Percy's time, Anna shouldered the parenting duties. "For the children," she later wrote, "an after-dinner visit with their father was a rare treat."
PERCY JULIAN, JR.: I hardly remember a weekend when he didn't work, but the time you had was quality time.
NARRATOR: By the end of the 1940s, the family had outgrown their Maywood home. The Julians began looking for a bigger one in a neighborhood that suited their new social status. They set their sights on Oak Park, one of Chicago's most affluent and exclusive suburbs.
The village was home to doctors, lawyers and wealthy businessmen. It had a reputation as a town for the educated and enlightened.
VIRGINIA CASSIN (Oak Park, Illinois Resident): It's always been a community that was...had a little sense of its importance as far as being, perhaps, a cut above others.
V/O MAN (Radio): Thanks to our good friends, the makers of Broadcast Brand corned beef hash.
NARRATOR: Oak Park even had its own radio show, familiar to listeners all over America as Breakfast with the Johnsons.
V/O CHILD (Radio): Daddy, I have to give a report in school, so I'm going to give it to you.
CLIFF JOHNSON (CBS radio host): These days, they'd call it reality radio, and that's what it was; 7:30 in the morning, Monday through Friday. The microphones were all over the house. The children would wander in, and the milkman would come in. We talked about us and the world around us.
NARRATOR: The world around the Johnsons was cultured, privileged and white. The few African Americans who lived in Oak Park worked as servants and laborers.
ROBERTA L. RAYMOND (Sociologist): When the Julians came along, I'm sure that this was a shock to many people who lived in Oak Park. Here they are, two very well educated people, both with Ph.D.s, he, a very successful chemist and businessman, and they purchased a house, a large house, on a large lot.
CLIFF JOHNSON: There was some nasty tongue-wagging going on: "Who do these people think they are that they can move in here and take over our neighborhood?"
NARRATOR: Trouble began even before the Julians could move in.
PERCY JULIAN, JR.: My dad was out of town, and my mom got a call from the Oak Park Fire Department. "Something has occurred at the house," this is the fire department, "could you please come." Even as a 10-year-old I knew that this was arson. There was no attempt to hide this, to make it look like an accident. I see these bottles, these huge bottles, and I could smell gasoline. The stairs were soaked all the way up to the second floor.
I think my mother was scared. But if she was, she didn't show it.
They lit the fuse on the outside. The door caught on, but it was sealed so well that the flames couldn't get under the door. But had the bottles caught, the flames would have gone right up the stairwell—a natural chimney—and the house could've been a total loss.
And I looked at my mom, and I said, "Why would anybody do this?" And she explained it: they didn't want us to live there and didn't want us to live there because of the color of our skin.
NARRATOR: Now Percy Julian, accomplished, affluent, ambitious, was face to face with the same violence African Americans all over Chicago were encountering as they tried to move into white neighborhoods.
VERNON JARRETT (Newspaper Reporter): After the war, when the ghetto was bursting at the seams and people trying to move out, every first Negro, they said, to move in a block was going to catch hell. A mob would be out there to greet you. I've seen it, covered it.
NARRATOR: There were no mobs in Oak Park, but the arson was a clear warning that some in the community would stop at nothing to keep the Julians out.
PERCY JULIAN, JR.: The arson attempt did not succeed in intimidating my mom and dad. Nor could it have. They were simply not intimidatable.
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): Once the violence began, Anna and I felt we had no choice but to stay. To leave would have been cowardly and wrong. The right of a people to live where they want to, without fear, is more important than my science. I was ready to give up my science and my life to bring a halt to this senseless terrorism.
NARRATOR: The Julians moved in. And when a few months passed with no further trouble, Percy and Anna felt confident enough to go out of town, leaving the children with a babysitter.
PERCY JULIAN, JR.: The first my parents saw of it was when they saw it in the paper the next day, with me pointing to the hole in the ground.
CLIFF JOHNSON: I'll never forget the morning my daughter Sandra said, "Daddy, they bombed my friend Percy Julian's house last night." And then she said, "Daddy, why did they do that? Why would they bomb their house?" I put on a record, because I didn't have the answer.
PERCY JULIAN, JR.: My dad was angry when he came home, I mean really angry, and clearly ready to fight. He looked at this as an attempt to murder his kids. For him, there was nothing redeemable about them at all. I'm taking this in like there's no tomorrow.
And actually, you know how everything has a good side? The good side was, as a kid I got to spend more time with my dad, and got to stay up late,'cause we'd sit in the tree outside. He'd sit there with a shotgun. And we'd talk about why someone would want to do this and how wrong it was and how stupid it was.
NARRATOR: The Julians would continue to receive threatening letters for years after. No one was ever arrested. Many Oak Park residents were horrified at the violence against the family.
VIRGINIA CASSIN: I think people were shocked that anyone should be treated that way. And there were people who came forward to say, there are a lot of us that don't feel that way.
CLIFF JOHNSON: There was at least 200 or more people that marched right up in front of the Julian house on East Avenue and said "He stays, he stays."
NARRATOR: Even as events in Oak Park threatened to upend his personal life, a new scientific challenge was drawing Percy Julian into one of the great medical dramas of the 20th century.
At the center was one of the oldest and most painful of human diseases, rheumatoid arthritis.
CHARLES PLOTZ (Rheumatologist): Arthritis is a generic word for inflammation of the joints, and encompasses a lot of different diseases. But the disease that truly inflames the joint and causes destruction of the cartilage and the bone within the joint is rheumatoid arthritis.
NARRATOR: Scientists had been seeking a cure for rheumatoid arthritis for hundreds of years. But by the middle of the 20th century those efforts had yielded only a bizarre assortment of mostly ineffective treatments: chin slings, gold injections, mineral baths, cobra venom, bee stings, even electricity.
CHARLES PLOTZ: People would swear by them, but nothing, over the long run, worked.
NARRATOR: The situation changed dramatically at the 1949 annual meeting of American rheumatologists. Philip Hench, of the Mayo Clinic, presented a film showing how arthritis patients responded to a new drug, called Compound E, and later named "cortisone."
CHARLES PLOTZ: They were severely crippled, having to drink by holding a cup in both hands. And Philip Hench gave them an injection, and within 12 to 24 hours, the same patients were having no difficulty at all. It was one of the most astonishing things that has ever happened in medicine. You didn't need a double-blind study. You just saw it happen. And the audience stood up and cheered.
Well, every patient with rheumatoid arthritis immediately wanted to be put on this magic drug.
NARRATOR: The problem was there was none to be had. Hench had performed his tests with a few precious grams of cortisone sent to him by Lewis Sarett, a young chemist at Merck.
Sarett had worked for years to synthesize cortisone from the bile of slaughtered oxen. But his chemical pathway was the most complex ever attempted in industry, requiring more than 30 steps. And thousands of cattle carcasses would be needed to make enough cortisone to treat a single patient for a year.
To treat the millions suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, scientists would need to find more a plentiful starting material and simplify the process of producing cortisone. Chemists from all over the world sprang to the challenge, launching one of the most intensive research efforts in the history of medicine.
Julian threw himself into the effort.
JOHN KENLY SMITH: The only reason that Glidden is in the great cortisone race is because of Percy Julian. He knows this chemistry, and so he can establish a position for them. The American pharmaceutical industry, after World War II, is not the giant that we know of today. This business is really just getting going, so there is room for entrepreneurs in this period.
NARRATOR: One of those entrepreneurs was Carl Djerassi, then a young chemist at Syntex, the small Mexican company that made hormones from yams.
CARL DJERASSI (Syntex Chemist): Julian and I were competitors, and we were in this race with people at Harvard, and at Oxford, and in Zurich, and at Merck, and, I mean, all the major companies. It was one time when basic research in industry competed on equal terms with that in universities.
NARRATOR: The prize these chemists were after was not actually a drug but a natural hormone. Cortisone is one of the many hormones made by the adrenal glands, two small organs that lie atop the kidneys. Small amounts of cortisone are always circulating in the bloodstream, controlling the body's responses to stress and inflammation, but much larger doses of cortisone were needed to relieve the symptoms of arthritis.
Julian hoped to make cortisone from soybeans, just as he had the sex hormones. Like progesterone, cortisone had the same four interlocking rings of carbon known as the steroid nucleus, but cortisone has an unusual feature: one of its oxygen atoms is in what chemists call position 11. Julian set out to make cortisone by first synthesizing an almost identical compound called Reichstein's Substance S, or Compound S.
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): Look at the two formulae. Compound S differs from cortisone by one lone little oxygen atom. And it couldn't possibly be so strikingly different in properties, I thought. And if it is, why in the devil, did nature have to put so much in the adrenal glands?
Well, if you really think nature is smart, your guess would be that it's there as a reservoir from which the adrenals can make cortisone as the body needs it, by simply sticking in this one oxygen atom.
NARRATOR: Julian hoped to convert Compound S into cortisone, as the body does, but he knew that inserting that one oxygen atom in exactly the right place would not be a simple matter.
GREGORY PETSKO: In the body, there's a special enzyme that knows how to do this, and does it, very elegantly, in a simple reaction. But to do this chemically, in the lab, in large quantities, was fiendishly difficult.
DAGMAR RINGE: In the laboratory, in order to add any atom to this carbon atom requires severe conditions, high heat, high pressure, very reactive reagents that will attack this atom. The difficulty with those conditions is that they will attack every other carbon atom on this skeleton as well.
GREGORY PETSKO: You want to put the oxygen only in that position. It doesn't do you any good to put it there if, simultaneously, you put it somewhere else where it's not supposed to be.
NARRATOR: Chemists across the world faced the same challenge. Whatever material they started with, plant or animal, they had to find a way to insert that one oxygen atom into just the right position. This was the single biggest obstacle to making cortisone.
As Julian struggled to find a solution, Glidden executives were losing patience with his Compound S approach.
GREGORY PETSKO: It's hard to read another chemist's mind, but I think that Julian probably knew that this was so close to the final structure of cortisone, that if he could make Substance S in large quantities, inexpensively, he would, eventually, or someone would, eventually, find a way to insert that troublesome oxygen into the 11 position, because that was the only remaining step needed to convert that substance into the full-blown hormone, cortisone.
NARRATOR: But the problem of inserting that one oxygen atom continued to frustrate chemists for more than two years. The cortisone shortage became a crisis, as the price topped $4,000 an ounce, one hundred times the price of gold.
CHARLES PLOTZ: I would get requests from all over the country, "Can't you get me some cortisone? Can't you get me a little cortisone for me? For my aunt? For my patient?" And I couldn't get it, for me or for anybody.
NARRATOR: Finally, in the summer of 1951, four teams of chemists announced they had found new ways to make cortisone. The winners included teams from Harvard, Merck and Syntex.
CARL DJERASSI: We got an enormous amount of publicity, including LIFE magazine and places like this, and that put Syntex on the scientific map.
NARRATOR: But the chemists' glory was short-lived. Six months later, they were upstaged by a surprising discovery from scientists at Upjohn, in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
V/O (Film Clip): From laboratories in Michigan comes the new process for making unlimited quantities of cortisone.
CARL DJERASSI: That bubble of conceit and pride and pleasure was completely punctured, when we discovered there were these yokels in Kalamazoo who, in one step, did something that took us 15 steps—very clever steps—to do.
NARRATOR: These so-called "yokels" had discovered a common mold that could effortlessly insert an oxygen atom into the 11 position.
GREGORY PETSKO: Upjohn figured out that they could do it by a fermentation process. In other words, it wasn't done in a chemistry lab at all. It was done by a microorganism that possessed an enzyme that was capable, just like the human body is capable, of attaching an oxygen in exactly the right place.
NARRATOR: Upjohn's discovery was the breakthrough that would end the cortisone shortage. Its mold could work its oxygen-inserting magic on a range of steroid materials, including Julian's Compound S.
GREGORY PETSKO: All of a sudden, Substance S was very important. This compound, that didn't have any particular important biological activities of its own, became ideal as a starting material to produce cortisone. And Julian was sitting on the process to make that.
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): Many well-meaning people have exaggerated my contribution to the chemistry of the cortisone family of drugs. I've even read somewhere that I was "the discoverer of cortisone." Not so. But we made a good choice, indeed, in choosing to synthesize Compound S as our first endeavor. Cortisone could now be made from Compound S simply by dumping it into a tank, throwing in a microorganism and fishing out cortisone after the organism has done its work.
NARRATOR: But Julian's Compound S was not the only material Upjohn's mold could transform into cortisone.
CARL DJERASSI: Suddenly, Upjohn came to Syntex—I still remember, because I was there—and said, "Would you quote us the cost of progesterone at a ton level." Well, we were completely flabbergasted. At that time, still, the world demand was a few hundred kilos.
NARRATOR: The request could mean only one thing: Upjohn had decided to produce cortisone from progesterone made by Syntex, not from Julian's Compound S.
Syntex had a big advantage: its starting material, the Mexican yam, was a richer source of steroids than the soybean, so cortisone made this way was cheaper.
But other companies were also gearing up to produce cortisone. Julian could still win their business, if he abandoned soybeans and made Compound S from the Mexican yam. But when Julian appealed to Glidden's chairman to make the switch, the answer was, "No."
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): I begged him to hold on; we could set up a simple yam processing plant in Mexico, and with Glidden's influence we could soon be masters of the field. But he had other plans for me in paint and varnish chemistry, new paint to prevent icing on airplane propellers, new shortenings that didn't spatter.
JOHN KENLY SMITH: I think the steroid work that Julian was doing was just one of those little businesses that no longer were seen as important to the company and its future direction.
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): They sent me to Europe, for a vacation, to forget about it. And, on my return, the chairman announced that Glidden was going out of the steroid business altogether.
HELEN PRINTY: This was a blow to the heart of Doc. And he said he didn't know whether he'd be able to stand that, because if there was no steroid research, there was nothing that he could really interest himself in.
NARRATOR: Joyce licensed Compound S to Pfizer and Syntex and ordered Julian to teach their chemists how to use the process he'd invented.
HELEN PRINTY: And things just kept getting worse and worse and worse, until finally it just became untenable for him.
NARRATOR: In late 1953, Percy Julian walked away from the job into which he'd put the most productive years of his life.
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): And when I left Glidden, I left behind 109 patents, for which I received $109 and other valuable considerations.
NARRATOR: One of those patents was for Compound S. Just as Julian predicted, it went on to become a key ingredient in the production of cortisone, helping to make the drug available to millions at a reasonable price.
GREGORY PETSKO: The fact that Julian could do what he did, while working in a paint company, strikes me as just remarkable. He didn't just do these things because glory would be his, if he succeeded. There always is, in Julian's work, this sense of aiming for something big, because it's going to be useful for people.
NARRATOR: But to fulfill his ambition Julian would now have to reinvent himself as a businessman in one of the most cutthroat industries in America.
Within a few months Julian was back on his feet as president of his own chemical company in Franklin Park, outside Chicago.
HELEN PRINTY: We had left the Glidden Company and moved out to this place that was loaded with rats and mice and everything else. You couldn't eat your lunch without a mouse coming out.
PETER WALTON: Working conditions, I guess, would be considered primitive.
NARRATOR: But for Julian it was the chance of a lifetime. After 18 years at Glidden, he was his own boss, free to focus on work that excited him.
His plan for success was simple: Julian Laboratories would make steroid intermediates, compounds that were often just one step short of a finished product. The big pharmaceutical companies would buy them, because Julian could make them faster and cheaper than they could.
From his old friends at Upjohn, Julian quickly landed a contract for $2 million worth of progesterone. More business followed from Ciba, Pfizer, Merck and others. There was just one obstacle: Syntex, the Mexican company that now dominated the hormone business.
Syntex controlled the supply of the Mexican yam, or barbasco, root. Julian needed an extract from the root to make his intermediates cheaply, but Syntex refused to sell him any. It was a setback that threatened the company.
PETER WALTON: Having put it all on the line with these major pharmaceutical companies, he had to deliver the goods, had to.
NARRATOR: To get around Syntex, Julian would have to build his own $300,000 barbasco processing plant in Mexico.
PETER WALTON: Dr. Julian didn't have the necessary capital himself. The conventional...normal banking sources were off limits to people of color, period.
NARRATOR: Using personal savings and money from friends and private investors, Julian was able to build the plant. But then, another roadblock: the Mexican government, closely tied to Syntex, refused him a permit to harvest the barbasco root. His expensive Mexican factory was useless.
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): And there we stood, with our beautiful plant, our beautifully lighted water tower with Laboratorios de Julian de Mexico emblazoned on it, a mausoleum. I sat in a hotel in Mexico City wondering whether I should shoot my brains out.
PETER WALTON: There was enormous pressure on Dr. Julian, because the financial stakes were huge, were huge. He had everything invested, between Franklin Park and Mexico, and so this was a pressure, pressure time.
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): And then a strange thing happened. There was a knock on the door, and in came a man named Abraham Zlotnik, a man that I had helped out of Hitler's Germany. Abe said he was sure the yam grew in Guatemala, and he volunteered to make an expedition for me. I told him I was broke, ruined. I didn't know when I could pay him back. But he said, "You've already paid me back."
NARRATOR: Zlotnik was as good as his word. His expedition found the barbasco root in Guatemala. Julian now had the raw material he needed to achieve his goal: making steroid drugs available to all who needed them.
JAMES LETTON: He always talked about being able to lower the cost of some of these anti-inflammatory agents, these steroids, so that the common man could buy them.
NARRATOR: Even if it meant lower profits for Julian Laboratories. One year his chemists found a way to quadruple the yield on a product on which they were barely breaking even.
JAMES LETTON: I thought, personally, that that was a good opportunity to recover some profits from the low yields of the previous year. Instead, he dropped the price of this stuff from $4,000 a kilo down to about $400 a kilo. And I couldn't understand why he would do that.
HELEN PRINTY: He wanted to make money, but he also wanted things to be available for people.
NARRATOR: Much of Julian's own money was still tied up in his idle Mexican plant. To make good on that investment he would have to resolve some unfinished business with an old rival.
V/O MAN (Senate Hearing Dramatization): Would Dr. Percy Julian come forward?
NARRATOR: Julian believed Syntex had used its influence with the Mexican government to keep his factory from opening. After other American companies made similar charges, the Senate held public hearings in 1956. Julian was the star witness.
HOLLABAUGH (Senate Hearing Dramatization): Was there any company in Mexico objecting to your getting a permit?
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): It became very evident that the Syntex Company was objecting to the permit. In fact, Dr. Somlo told me he would fight to the last to keep me and anyone else out of Mexico.
NARRATOR: As a result of the "wonder drug" hearings, the Justice Department took action against Syntex. Julian was finally able to open his Mexican plant, but the mounting pressures of running a business left him little time to savor the hard-won victory.
Every month there were shipments to make and severe financial penalties for missed deadlines.
PETER WALTON: We lived, for the most part, in a highly stressed, very competitive environment—a small company, limited resources, and dealing with a huge industry.
EARL DAILEY (Julian Laboratories Chemist): There were many occasions where 2, 3:00 in the morning would come, and you'd still be in the laboratory, working.
PETER WALTON: When I complained about the lack of sleep, Dr. Julian advised me that sleep could be dangerous for my health. I could die in my sleep, and "while you're contemplating that, go back out to the plant and continue to work. We have a shipment to get out."
JAMES LETTON: But there was an unusual sense of loyalty that made people work and want to see him and the company successful. How else could you get a crew to work 24 hours a day? This sort of thing.
NARRATOR: And successful it was. Julian Laboratories would eventually make its founder a millionaire, one of the wealthiest black businessmen in America. For his chemists, the reward was an opportunity hard to find anywhere else: a chance to work in their chosen field.
JAMES LETTON: When I was looking for a job, some people made excuses, and then there were some that just said, "We don't hire you people."
TOM WEST (Julian Laboratories Chemist): They told me that I was too well qualified to take a job. I felt that they were saying, "Come back maybe another time. Come back when you're white."
NARRATOR: Scores of chemists, unwelcome elsewhere, would use their years with Julian as a springboard to careers in industry and academia.
PETER WALTON: I'm proud to say that our laboratories in Franklin Park employed more black chemists than any other facility in America. On the other hand, for such a small organization to have such a significant role in true integration is a sad commentary on the state of affairs in America.
NARRATOR: Outside Julian's lab, America was still a nation divided by race, and Julian was constantly reminded of it, even at meetings of the American Chemical Society.
EDWARD MEYER (Glidden Chemist): When we went to the meeting he said, "Ed, grab me by the arm, when we go in, so people will know that we're together." Because he was afraid they'd...being a black man, they'd throw him out.
NARRATOR: Neither wealth nor fame could insulate Julian from bigotry. But with success came the chance to do something about it. Increasingly, he set aside his science to fight for racial equality.
He joined the NAACP and the Urban League in their battle against discrimination in jobs and housing. He led a national fundraising campaign to support civil rights lawyers. And in speech after speech, he preached that education and the pursuit of excellence, the hallmarks of his own life, were the keys to black advancement.
But many younger African Americans were impatient with traditional tactics and rejected the sermons of Julian's generation.
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): Our children and our grandchildren saw all of this and suffered for their oft-times "Uncle Tom" parents who seemed to be doing nothing about it. Finally, their pent up agony exploded on us.
PERCY JULIAN, JR.: I would say, "Explain this to me: how is it that this is all going to change?" He would say, "Well, it will. There are lawyers, and they are going to fight for change. And if you set an example, things will change." Well, I don't have forever.
NARRATOR: In the1960s, Julian's son drove to Nashville to join the effort to desegregate the city's lunch counters.
PERCY JULIAN, JR.: On the one hand, he was very proud, but on the other, he was very scared. One time he said to me, "You know, this is not a game. These people are playing for real." And my response was, "So are we."
NARRATOR: The '60s were an awakening for Julian. He came to see that the nation could not afford to wait for the old ways to work.
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): For more than a century, since the end of slavery, we have watched the denial of elemental liberty to millions of black people in our southland.
PERCY JULIAN, JR.: I think he saw that things were moving so fast, that if the country didn't change, there was going to be serious, serious trouble.
NARRATOR: By the late 1960s, Julian had come to support the more confrontational tactics of his son's generation.
PERCY JULIAN, JR.: My father wrote, later, it wasn't going to be enough just to be a model citizen, to be educated, to do all the things that anybody could possibly expect of you, because none of that would ever change the fact that you still couldn't go and eat in a restaurant that didn't want to serve you.
PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization): Branded, first, unfit to spend their money for food or drink in public places along with other Americans; denied the ballot and confined to ghettoes that stifled hope and ambition, victims of murder of the mind, heart and spirit: this is the story of the American Negro.
NARRATOR: Percy Julian's own story now entered its final chapter. Born in 1899, he was now in his 70s and a proud grandfather.
KATHERINE JULIAN, M.D. (Percy Julian's Granddaughter): I definitely was aware that my grandfather was special. I remember playing with a doll that had been sent to him by a woman, and the story was told me why it had been sent. She had such bad arthritis that she couldn't use her hands. And after using cortisone, she was able to knit this doll and sent it to him. And I remember holding the doll and playing with the doll, and realizing that he had helped her, and that that was something that was really special.
NARRATOR: For his contributions to humanity, Julian received 18 honorary degrees and more than a dozen civic and scientific awards.
BERNHARD WITKOP: There was hardly any college that didn't try to honor itself by naming Percy Julian as an honorary Ph.D., because that was the time when people tried to make up for past injustice.
NARRATOR: Julian's longtime friend Bernhard Witkop envisioned a higher honor. He secretly began a campaign to elect Julian to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences. It was an uphill battle.
BERNHARD WITKOP: We had, sometimes, prejudicial talk in the Academy, by old timers. Some were very famous people and Nobel laureates who couldn't get used to the new situation.
NARRATOR: Witkop persisted, and in 1973, Julian received an unexpected phone call from the Academy's home secretary.
BERNHARD WITKOP: He said, "Sir, may I inform you that you have just been elected a member of the National Academy. Congratulations."
NARRATOR: Julian was only the second African American to be elected. It was the crowning recognition of 40 years of chemical research.
NED HEINDEL: If you look at Percy Julian's career, you can say, if this man had not been black, he could have been a chaired professor at any Ivy or Big Ten institution. The breadth of his understanding of chemistry, and his fire in the belly to produce so many results in such a short period of time, this is Nobel Laureate stuff.
NARRATOR: Looking back in the autobiography he would never finish, Julian offered his own assessment of his life in science.
NARRATOR: In April 1975, a week after his 76th birthday, Percy Julian died of cancer. His pallbearers included the chemists who had been his friends and colleagues.
Every year, the U.S. Postal Service issues a commemorative stamp to honor an African American leader. In 1993, the choice was Percy Julian.
HELEN PRINTY: As a human being, I think that he was a source of inspiration to many, many, many people.
NARRATOR: In 1999, the American Chemical Society recognized Julian's synthesis of the glaucoma drug physostigmine as one of the top 25 achievements in the history of American chemistry.
The plaque is housed in the new Percy Julian Science Center at DePauw.
GREGORY ROBINSON: For him to have accomplished what he did, with the resources that he had, is still amazing.
NARRATOR: Across the world today, millions of people benefit from steroid medications based on the chemistry of plants. Some of these drugs are still made from soybeans, using chemical steps much like those Percy Julian pioneered.
GREGORY PETSKO: Here was a man who not only had to overcome the disadvantages of his race, but who, throughout his entire life, was in a situation that was never ideal for doing the big things he was trying to do. Looking over his life, one has a sense that here is a man of great determination. And it's a determination not just to succeed, but a determination to make a difference, to make a contribution.
JAMES ANDERSON: His story is really a contradictory one; it's two stories. It is a story of great accomplishments, of heroic efforts and overcoming tremendous odds. But it's also a story of talent squandered, of potential stifled. It's a story about this country. It's a story about who we are and what we stand for, and the challenges that have been there, and the challenges that are still with us.
Broadcast Credits
Forgotten Genius
Narrated by
Courtney B. Vance
Ruben Santiago-Hudson as Percy Julian
Edited by
Doug Quade
Written by
Stephen Lyons
Llewellyn M. Smith
Directed by
Llewellyn M. Smith
Words spoken by the Julian character in this program were drawn from Percy Julian's writings and congressional testimony.
Produced by
Llewellyn M. Smith
Stephen Lyons
Associate Producer
Franziska Blome
Director of Research
Meredith Woods
Project Director
Stephen Lyons
Claudio Ragazzi
Gary Henoch
Tom Fahey
Stephen McCarthy
Sound Recordists
Clint Bramesco
Steve Bores
(in order of appearance)
Percy Julian
Ruben Santiago-Hudson
Percy Julian 10 Yrs Old
Raymond Lambert
Lynching Victim
Shawn Agard
James Julian
Gregory Velez
Young Percy Julian
Ray Almeida
Percy's Mother
Bobbie Patrick
Great Grandmother
Carmen Dillon
Edward Logan
Ceoria Coates
Prof. Blanchard
Donald Watson
Josef Pikl
Jonathan Niles
Anna Julian
Pamela Lambert
Percy Julian Jr.
Langston Toxey
Counsel Hollabaugh
Sean McGuirk
Senate Chairman O'mahoney
Frank Harrison
Assistant Camera
Matt Thurber
Dick Williams
Assistant Directors
Brian Carlson
Mark Donadio
Art Direction
Katha Seidman
Lisa Nagid
Costume Design
Virginia Johnson
Robin Olinsky
Make Up
Joe Rossi
Trish Seeney
Jack McPhee
Key Grip
Thomas Doran
Brian Woodson
Pyro Effects
John McGrath
Stunt Coordinator
Jack McLaughlin
Casting Director
Victoria Thomas
Boston Casting, Inc.
Endeavor Talent Agency
Percy L. Julian Jr.
Story Consultant
Meredith Woods
Chemical Consultants
Frank M. Hauser
Arnold Hirsch
Rhoda & Jim Morris
Project Advisors
James Anderson
Evelynn Hammonds
Ned D. Heindel
Darlene Clark Hine
John Kenly Smith Jr.
Kenneth R. Manning
Willie Pearson
Christopher R. Reed
Leo Slater
Herbert Smitherman
Bernhard Witkop
Additional Associate Producers
Jennifer Callahan
Marty Johnson
Suzanne Schulz
Additional Research
Patricia Garcia-Rios
Production Assistant
Guarav Dwivedi
Sputnik Animation
Stills Animation
Berle Cherney
Online Editor
Daniel Birnbaum
Dave Markun
Sound Editor And Mix
John Jenkins
Archival Material
ABCNews Videosource
Afro-American Newspapers Archives and Research Center
American Chemical Society
AP/Wide World Photos
Archive Films/Getty Images
Chemical Heritage Foundation Image Archives
Chicago Historical Society
Corbis Motion
Ezra Stoller/Esto Gallery
Filmarchiv Austria
Fisk University Franklin Library's Special Collections
Getty Images
Life Magazine
MacDonald & Associates
Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University Archives
Museum of the City of New York
National Academy of Sciences
NBC News Archives
Historical Society of Oak Park and River Forest
Outagamie County Historical Society, Appleton, WI
Penn State University Archives, Pennsylvania State University Libraries
Producers Library Service
Royal Society of Chemistry
The Saturday Evening Post Society
Science News Letter / Science Service
Photo Researchers / Science Photo Library
UCLA Film and Television Archive
University of Pennsylvania Archives
University of Vienna Archives
WGBH Image Gallery
WABI TV5, Bangor, Maine
Additional Still Photography by
Percy L. Julian Jr.
NOVA extends special thanks to Dr. James P. Shoffner, a tireless champion whose efforts over eight years were critical to the making of this film.
Special Thanks
Chemical Heritage Foundation
Black Heritage Commemorative Society
Peg Botte & Linda O'Koniewski
Joan Bowman
Brandeis University
Cambridge City Hall
Cathedral High School
Wayne Cole
Jack and Marion Cook
Earl Dailey
Ray Dawson
DePauw University
Guilford Association, Inc.
Arnold Hirsch
Anne Hogan
Vernon Jarrett
Walter & Gretchen Jones
Clifford Johnson
Faith Julian
Katherine Julian
Victoria Kelley
Diane Korling
James Letton
Wesley Lyda
Tom Moore & Ann Carlson
Nahant Town Hall
Dennis O'Reilly
Greg Petsko
Gerolf Pikl
Dagmar Ringe
Cornelia Schweigler
Solae, LLC
Norbert Teclaw
Temple University
Thomas E. Worthley, UConn Cooperative Extension System
Valley Railroad Company
Peter Walton
Bernhard Witkop
NOVA Series Graphics
yU + co.
NOVA Theme Music
Walter Werzowa
John Luker
Musikvergnuegen, Inc.
Additional NOVA Theme Music
Ray Loring
Post Production Online Editor
Jim Ferguson
Closed Captioning
The Caption Center
NOVA Administrator
Ashley King
Eileen Campion
Anna Lowi
Yumi Huh
Lindsay de la Rigaudiere
Gaia Remerowski
Production Coordinator
Linda Callahan
Unit Manager
Carla Raimer
Raphael Nemes
Legal Counsel
Susan Rosen Shishko
Assistant Editor
Alex Kreuter
Associate Producer, Post Production
Patrick Carey
Post Production Supervisor
Regina O'Toole
Post Production Editor
Rebecca Nieto
Post Production Manager
Nathan Gunner
Supervising Producer
Stephen Sweigart
Producer, Special Projects
Susanne Simpson
Lisa Mirowitz
Coordinating Producer
Laurie Cahalane
Senior Science Editor
Evan Hadingham
Senior Series Producer
Melanie Wallace
Managing Director
Alan Ritsko
Senior Executive Producer
Paula S. Apsell
A NOVA Production for WGBH/Boston
© 2007 WGBH Educational Foundation
All rights reserved
Image composite
(Percy Julian)
© AP Photo
(calabar bean)
Public domain/Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen
Todd Allen
United Soybean Board
James Anderson
University of Illinois
Virginia Cassin
Oak Park resident
Donald J. Cook
Chemist, DePauw University
Earl Dailey
Chemist, Glidden and Julian Laboratories
Ray Dawson
DePauw University alumnus
Carl Djerassi
Stanford University
Ned Heindel
Lehigh University
Arnold Hirsch
Chemist, Julian Research Institute
Vernon Jarrett
Chicago journalist
Cliff Johnson
CBS radio host
Percy Julian Jr.
James Letton
Chemist, Julian Laboratories
Willie Pearson
Georgia Institute of Technology
Gregory Petsko
Brandeis University
Charles Plotz
Rheumatologist, Mount Sinai Hospital
Helen Printy
Chemist, Glidden and Julian Laboratories
Roberta L. Raymond
Oak Park sociologist
Dagmar Ringe
Brandeis University
Gregory Robinson
University of Georgia
James Shoffner
Columbia College, Chicago
John Kenly Smith
Lehigh University
Peter Walton
General Manager, Julian Laboratories
Risher Watts
Chemist, Julian Laboratories
Bernhard Witkop
National Institutes of Health
Eugene Woroch
Chemist, Glidden
The Life and Science of Percy Julian
The Chemical Heritage Foundation provides this detailed Web site on the life and work of Percy Julian, including photographs, supplemental readings, and lab activities you can try at home.
Percy Lavon Julian: 1899-1975
Read a biographical memoir of Percy Julian written by his friend, the chemist Bernhard Witkop, and published by the National Academy of Sciences.
Medical Miracles
On this Web site from the American Chemical Society, learn about Percy Julian's innovative work on the synthesis of physostigmine, hydrocortisone, and other medicinal substances.
Dr. Percy Lavon Julian
Find a brief biography of Percy Julian on this Web page from the archives of Howard University in Washington, D.C.
The Organic Chemistry Portal
Having trouble creating your own cortisone? Find links to dozens of organic chemistry-related resources on this Web portal.
General Chemistry Online!
Frostburg State University in Maryland offers this helpful resource for students of general chemistry. Find a searchable library of common compounds, lab notes, tutorials, simulations, and much more.
Beyond Small Numbers: Voices of African American PhD Chemists
by Willie Pearson, Jr. Elsevier, 2005.
Principles of Biochemistry
by David L. Nelson and Michael M. Cox. W. H. Freeman, 2004.
Chemistry: Concepts and Problems: A Self-Teaching Guide
by Clifford Houk and Richard Post. Wiley Press, 1996.
"Studies of the Indole Series. V. The Complete Synthesis of Physostigmine (Eserine)." by P. L. Julian and J. Pikl. Journal of the American Chemical Society, April 1935.
"Percy Lavon Julian" by W. Montague Cobb. Journal of the National Medical Association, March 1971.
"The Man Who Wouldn't Give Up" by Paul DeKruif. Reader's Digest, August 1946.
Education and Outreach Resources
Library Resource Kit
Welcome to NOVA's Forgotten Genius Library Resource Kit. This kit accompanies NOVA's program about Percy Julian—his work and his life—which is scheduled to air February 6, 2007, at 8 pm. (Check local listings as dates and times may vary.) We hope you will use this kit to create displays, conduct science activities, create library programs, and plan community events to help engage your audiences in the excitement of science.
Complete Library Guide
PDF version
Welcome Letter
HTML version | PDF version
Science Lesson
This classroom activity explores chemistry. For grades 6-8 and 9-12. Find it at:
Who Was Percy Julian?
Use this handout to help your patrons discover more about the life of Percy Julian.
HTML version | PDF version | HTML expanded version
Program Ideas and Tips
Find ideas to help you incorporate NOVA's Forgotten Genius into your event and program schedule and tips for how you can work with partner organizations to interest your audiences in Percy Julian and other scientists. This section includes:
• Programs and Events
• Activities Using Library Resources
• Library Display Ideas
HTML version | PDF version
Use the bibliography to create displays and activities using reference books, or to help patrons learn more about Percy Julian. The bibliography includes resources for:
• Percy Julian's Life and Work
• Breakthroughs in Chemistry
• Civil Rights Milestones
• Scientists of Color
HTML version | PDF version
Percy Julian Activities
Use the activities with programs you host at your library or copy them to distribute to patrons.
Social Studies Activities
Science Activities
Display Sheets
Use the display sheets to create or supplement an exhibit on Percy Julian.
HTML version | PDF version
Full program available for streaming through
Watch Online
Full program available | <urn:uuid:c1281f3c-faa5-419c-b988-3067e6c294f9> | 3 | 2.5625 | 0.043727 | en | 0.974032 | http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/forgotten-genius.html |
The push to make technology work not just faster but more efficiently too is a new enough concept that its ramifications are still being understood. The more time is spent thinking about it, the more places waste and inefficiency are identified and targeted.
Take Ethernet. You probably hadn't thought twice about that gray Ethernet cable on the floor, but an IEEE task force has been staring at it for well over a year, trying to make the darn thing more efficient.
The goals of the IEEE 802.3az task force are pretty straightforward: define a mechanism to reduce power consumption during periods of low link utilization and a protocol to coordinate transitions to or from a lower level of power consumption. It'll work only on new hardware, of course, but that hardware should be fully backward-compatible.
Parsing through some of the publicly available documents yields an awful lot of complex circuit diagrams ... and a bit of interesting information. According to a presentation by Hossein Sedarat of semiconductor manufacturer Aquantia, "channel staggering" in combination with a few other technologies may lead to a 75% power savings. That's in 10GBase-T, a wicked fast form of Ethernet. But it's not unreasonable to guess that ordinary 100MB Ethernet could see similar savings.
The task force hopes to finish a draft specification this month, which will go through an approval process next year. The final spec won't be released until March of 2010. To learn more, I talked with a few members of the task force--their comments after the jump!
Read the rest of this post at GoodCleanTech: "IEEE 802.3az: Energy Efficient Ethernet in the Works" | <urn:uuid:acef1c2d-cd32-402c-86d2-0da9d9b22cf0> | 3 | 2.8125 | 0.018515 | en | 0.949956 | http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2329511,00.asp |
A Guide to Windows 7 Networking
Select the types of content that you wish to share with the HomeGroup.
Let's start with an enhancement aimed primarily at home users and home businesses: With Windows 7, Microsoft introduces the concept of HomeGroup. The HomeGroup feature serves two primary purposes: (1) to make sharing files and resources between computers on a home network easier, and (2) to protect shared files and resources from guests or wireless-network intruders.
Windows 7 automatically assigns a password for the newly formed HomeGroup.
Using a HomeGroup simplifies the process of sharing files, folders, and other network resources with trusted computers on your home network. At the same time, it enables you to allow visiting guests to connect to your wireless network for Internet access without also granting them access to the shared content and resources. It also prevents any unauthorized rogue wireless connections from gaining access to shared resources.
VPN Reconnect
Roaming users rely on VPNs (virtual private networks) to provide a secure connection between their computer and the internal company network. When a user is sitting in a hotel room, or in a conference room at a customer site, and establishes a VPN connection, the user's PC will generally remain connected unless there is some other network issue that interrupts the connection.
However, users who rely on wireless broadband connectivity to establish a VPN connection while on the move are faced with frequent dropped connections and a cumbersome process for reauthenticating and reestablishing the VPN connection each time.
The VPN Reconnect feature allows Windows 7 to automatically reestablish active VPN connections when Internet connectivity is interrupted. As soon as Windows 7 reconnects with the Internet, Windows 7 will also reconnect with the VPN. The VPN will still be unavailable as long as the Internet connection is down, and the process of reconnecting will take a few seconds after Internet access becomes available again, but VPN Reconnect will ensure that users stay connected with the network resources they need access to.
VPN Reconnect is basically an IPSec tunnel using the IKEv2 (Internet Key Exchange) protocol for key negotiation and for transmission of ESP (Encapsulating Security Payload) packets. ESP is part of the IPSec security architecture that provides confidentiality, authentication of data origin, and connectionless integrity.
In situations such as viewing streaming video over a VPN connection while riding on a commuter train, users typically lose all buffered data and have to start the video over every time connectivity is lost. The features of the IKEv2 IPSec tunnel and ESP help ensure a persistent connection even if the IP address changes during the reconnect and allows the streaming video to resume from the point it was at when VPN connectivity was lost.
What's better than a VPN that automatically reconnects and retains its connection state? How about not needing a VPN in the first place? DirectAccess is one of the most compelling and game-changing features of Windows 7, both for users and for administrators faced with a remote and roaming work force.
Aside from the issues mentioned above for users trying to stay connected on a VPN and access internal network resources, roaming users also pose a problem for administrators. Mobile computers that aren't connected to the network miss out on security updates, software patches, and Group Policy updates. They will get the updates when they eventually connect, but days or weeks might go by with those remote systems missing critical updates.
DirectAccess provides a persistent and seamless bidirectional connection between the internal network and the Windows 7 system, as long as that Windows 7 system can connect to the Internet. With DirectAccess, remote and roaming users experience the same access to corporate shares, intranet sites, and internal applications as they would if they were sitting in the office connected directly to the network.
DirectAccess works both ways. Not only can the computer access the network seamlessly across any Internet connection, but the IT administrator can also connect to DirectAccess client computers--even when the user is not logged on. With DirectAccess, IT Administrators can monitor, manage, and deploy updates to DirectAccess client computers as long as they are connected to the Internet.
Subscribe to the Business Brief Newsletter | <urn:uuid:54df8457-c49a-4e9c-8388-e92c7df6571b> | 2 | 2.15625 | 0.217721 | en | 0.924291 | http://www.pcworld.com/article/172268/windows_7_networking_guide.html |
The intersection of general relativity and quantum mechanics
Recording Details
Scientific Areas:
PIRSA Number:
Domains were introduced in computer science in the late 1960\'s by Dana Scott to provide a semantics for the lambda calculus (the lambda calculus is the basic prototype for a functional programming language i.e. ML). The study of domains with measurements was initiated in the speaker\'s thesis: a domain provides a qualitative view of information expressed in part by an \'information order\' and a measurement on a domain expresses a quantitative view of information with respect to the underlying qualitative aspect. The theory of domains and measurements was initially introduced to provide a first order model of computation, one in which a computation is viewed as a process that evolves in a space of informatic objects, where processes have informatic rates of change determined by the manner in which they manipulate information. There is a domain of binary channels with capacity as a measurement. There is a domain of finite probability distributions with entropy as a measurement. There is a domain of quantum mixed states with entropy as a measurement. There is a domain of spacetime intervals with global time as a measurement. In this setting, similarities between QM and GR emerge, but also some important differences. In a domain, if we write x | <urn:uuid:9e2c43ff-dc20-4ff0-8ead-8ffb817efc42> | 3 | 2.640625 | 0.037011 | en | 0.944843 | http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/videos/intersection-general-relativity-and-quantum-mechanics |
Family: Cyperaceae
Order: Poales (or Cyperales)
Class: Angiosperm: Monocotyledon
A large, cosmopolitan family of mostly herbaceous plants, Cyperaceae occur primarily in moist temperate to wet tropical regions of the world; several species are of economic importance.
Sedges are mostly perennial or sometimes annual herbs. Because many species have a tufted growth habit, long, thin-textured, narrow, flat leaves with a sheathing base, a jointed stems and much-branched inflorescences of tiny flowers, they are often described as graminoid, meaning grass-like. Indeed, many horticultural references include sedges under the general heading of grasses! Furthermore, many grasses and sedges do not fit the graminoid image at all, for example, having leaf blades rounded in cross section or no leaf blades at all, or having compact, head-like inflorescences. So we end up with some grasses and sedges being called graminoids, and others being called simply herbs. To minimize confusion we prefer to restrict the term graminoid to true grasses (Family Poaceae), and to apply the new term cyperoid to members of the sedge family. All members of the sedge family such as the giant herb, papyrus, the few climbers (in genus Scleria ) and the Xerophyta -like Microdracoides from West tropical Africa, with a woody branching stem, can be comfortably accommodated by this term.
Along with the similarities to grasses there are many features that distinguish sedges (such as usually leaves arranged in threes, and usually a solid stem that is triangular in cross section, and usually a conspicuously bracteate inflorescence), but they are not all observable with the naked eye. As in grasses, the basic unit of the inflorescence in sedges is the spikelet. Within the family there is enormous variation in spikelet and inflorescence structure. The spikelet consists of one to several, tiny, male, female or bisexual flowers, each borne in the axil of a boat-shaped glume (tiny bract) which is coloured in shades of green or brown, red, occasionally white or bright yellow. Mostly petals are absent, but when present, they are concealed within the glume and consist of bristles or scale-like structures.
Costularia natalensis Fuirena angolensis
After pollination, the ovary wall thickens and hardens to become the fruit wall and is often beautifully sculptured.
Albigaardia ovata Fimbristylis dichtomous
The unit of dispersal is therefore a single-seeded, dry (fleshy in a few non-African species) indehiscent fruit, termed a nutlet or achene.
Name and History
Sedges have featured in literature since antiquity. The family is well circumscribed and uncontroversial. It was formally described by De Jussieu in 1789; the name is derived from the genus name Cyperus, originally from the Greek kupeiros, meaning sedge. Spikelet and inflorescence structure, together with other evidence, forms the basis for classification within the family. Because the spikelet is very small and the inflorescence structure very complex, interpretation is difficult and there is still controversy over recognition of subfamilies, tribes and genera.Molecular studies in the family are still in the early stages and have not, as yet, yielded any real solution to the problem.
There is controversy at higher levels too, so that sometimes Cyperaceae are included in the Order Poales and sometimes in their own order Cyperales. For southern African families, the only close relationships that have been demonstrated reasonably well are those between Cyperaceae and Juncaceae (rushes) and Poaceae and Restionaceae (Cape reeds).
Economic and cultural value
Many species are utilized by humans for food, such as the starchy, protein-rich corms of tiger-nut or chufa (Cyperus esculentus var. sativus) and Chinese water chestnut (Eleocharis dulcis varieties). Corms of the former are also used to make a drink, and many species are used for perfume, as medicine, and probably also for magical purposes.
They are traditionally used for construction e.g. boat and house-building on Lake Titicaca, Peru (Schoenoplectus californicus), thatching, paper-making (Cyperus papyrus) and for weaving household items: various mats, baskets, beer-strainers and other utensils.
A modern usage for sedges is in artificially constructed water purification beds, because the rhizomes of several species are able to grow anaerobically, at least for a period of time. In Europe Schoenoplectus lacustris is commonly used for this purpose.
Several species are used in horticulture for waterside planting such as Cyperus papyrus, the various umbrella sedges (C. involucratus, C. textilis), smaller species (e.g. Carex species); a novel usage is the tiny annual, Isolepis cernua (cat's whiskers) sold as a groundcover for bonsai trays.
We should also not forget that two of the world's worst weeds, Cyperus rotundus and C. esculentus hail from the sedge family. In irrigated lands, ploughing spreads their tubers and corms to such an extent that the crop plant is totally smothered, necessitating the use of herbicides to combat these weeds.
In the Garden Sedges are generally used as 'architectural' plants, especially in damp or wet places alongside water features. As with any plants it is important to try to reproduce conditions in their native habitat. They are attractive when allowed to form large masses, but do need some attention from time to time. Cyperus papyrus, C. prolifer and C. textilis have already been featured as Plants of the Week
References and further reading
• Archer, C. 1998. Grasses and grass-like plants. PlantLife 18: 14-16.
• Archer, C. 2000. Cyperaceae. In O.A. Leistner, Seed plants of southern Africa : families and genera. Strelitzia 10: 594-605.
• Archer, C. & Craven, P. 2004. Cyperaceae in Namibia. SABONET News 9: 18-28.
• Goetghebeur, P. 1998. Cyperaceae. In K. Kubitzki, The families and genera of vascular plants IV: Alismataneae and Commelinanae (except Gramineae) : 141-190. Springer-Verlag, Berlin.
• Mabberley, D.J. 1997. The plant-book, edn 2. Cambridge University Press.
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| <urn:uuid:a3c6c8f2-b501-43e6-bd9f-d01c821ff3ca> | 4 | 3.671875 | 0.035356 | en | 0.935027 | http://www.plantzafrica.com/plantcd/cyperaceae.htm |
Stand Your Ground’s Hideous Double Standard of Prosecuting African-Americans
more from Rmuse
Sunday, April, 15th, 2012, 10:00 am
The application of a different principle for a similar situation or different people in the same situation is generally regarded as a double standard. The tragic murder of Trayvon Martin has engendered questions that if the roles had been reversed and Martin, an African American teenager, had shot and killed George Zimmerman, would he have been immediately arrested and charged with murder. Whether or not race played a role in the incident may never be determined, but there is a case in Georgia in which the stand your ground law did not protect an African American man who shot and killed a white man on his own property. The case is the ultimate example of applying a different principle for a similar situation based on race.
Advocates of the stand your ground law and most conservatives insist that race had no relevance in law enforcement’s failure to immediately arrest George Zimmerman for killing Trayvon Martin. A public outcry and subsequent investigation resulted in Zimmerman’s arrest, and his legal defense is that he acted in self-defense out of fear of great bodily harm or death at the empty hands of Trayvon Martin. Georgia’s stand your ground law allows citizens to use deadly force “if they reasonably believe force is necessary to prevent death or great bodily injury,” and their Castle Doctrine law justifies the use of deadly force to defend one’s home. In the Trayvon Martin case, Zimmerman was not defending his home and was not in jeopardy of great bodily harm from an unarmed teenager, but John McNeil of Georgia, an African American man was at his home and defended himself from great bodily harm and is in prison for the rest of his life.
In early 2005, McNeil hired Brian Epp’s construction company to build a new home and after many heated confrontations with Epp decided to end the increasingly threatening business relationship. Epp and the McNeil’s agreed that the contractor would finish the work within ten days and then stay away from the property. Epp did not keep the agreement and in December of 2005, McNeil’s 15-year-old son called his father and told him an unrecognizable man was “lurking in the backyard,” and after the son told the man to leave, Epp pulled out a knife, pointed at the teen’s face and said, ”why don’t you make me leave?” Mr. McNeil was still on the phone and recognized Epp’s voice and told his son to go inside and wait while he called 911 to report the incident. McNeil arrived home and Epp went to his truck to get something he concealed in his pants and came at him prompting McNeil to grab a gun and fire it at the ground insisting that Epp stop his advance. Epp continued approaching McNeil “really fast” while reaching for his knife and a shot in the head stopped Epp.
A neighbor corroborated Mr. McNeal’s story about his deadly encounter with Epp and police initially determined the shooting was a case of self-defense and did not charge him. A year later the district attorney decided to prosecute Mr. McNeil after a rash of letters and emails demanded the prosecutor investigate and charge McNeil with murder. Most of the letters were written anonymously and one was from Epp’s widow.
It was not Epp’s first case of threatening homeowners. In 2004 a white couple, David Samson and Libby Jones testified they carried a gun around Epp as a precaution because of his threatening behavior. Jones testified that Epp nearly struck her during a meeting after she expressed dissatisfaction with his work and their lawyer sent a letter to Epp warning him to stay away from their home. Mr. Samson testified that Epp would park across the street from their home and that “it got to the point where my wife and I were in total fear of this man.”
The North Carolina NAACP State Conference president, Rev. William Barber, argued that “the NRA would be screaming about the injustice of his conviction if John had been white and shot a black assailant that came at him on his property armed with a knife,” and he has a valid point. There has been an outpouring of support from gun rights activists for George Zimmerman, and it explains the “history and legacy of discriminatory application of the law” according to Reverend Barber who is firmly against stand your ground laws because “they give cover to those who may engage in racial profiling and racialized violence.” In Mr. McNeil’s case, a federal lawsuit is challenging Georgia’s stand your ground law because of the double standard in not applying it equally to African Americans, and civil rights activist Markel Hutchins accused courts of accepting a victim’s race “as evidence to establish the reasonableness of an individual’s fear in cases of justifiable homicide.”
There is a stark contrast in the treatment of George Zimmerman and John McNeil’s use of the stand your ground defense because Zimmerman was afforded the benefit of his race despite Trayvon Martin being unarmed. Whether or not Zimmerman racially profiled Martin is a decision for the courts, but there is the appearance of a double standard that cannot be denied in how long it took to charge Zimmerman. Instead of addressing, or even considering the issue of race, conservatives and the NRA have dismissed it out-of-hand as a canard from the left even though there are few miscarriages of justice when white people are involved in killing African Americans.
Stand your ground laws are meant to give legal cover for citizens to protect their lives on their own property, and if a person is legitimately in fear of their life, one might justify the use of deadly force as a last resort. John McNeil is spending the rest of his life in prison because he did use deadly force to protect his own life on his own property, but all appearances inform that George Zimmerman may be acquitted because there is no way to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he did not fear for his life and was therefore justified in murdering Trayvon Martin. Apparently, stand your ground and Castle Doctrine laws do establish reasonableness for justifiable homicide, but only if the victim is African American and it leaves one to ponder; how many other African Americans are spending the rest of their lives in prison because the stand your ground laws are not applied equally?
America desperately needs a conversation on racial bigotry and how to expose it. It is hypocritical that the NRA, conservative groups, and ALEC have not come to Mr. McNeil’s aid because he is the poster child for their beloved stand your ground law, but Mr. McNeil made the mistake of being African American while defending his life on his own property. When critics ask what would have happened if the roles were reversed in the Trayvon Martin case, they only need to look to Georgia to understand that the double standard they assume would apply is alive and well in the person of John McNeil, and he is living testament that stand your ground laws fail to give legal cover to protect one’s life if they are African American.
Image: AP images
Stand Your Ground’s Hideous Double Standard of Prosecuting African-Americans was written by Rmuse for PoliticusUSA.
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A+ A- | <urn:uuid:89a31134-fb8b-478e-ba43-8bc19b2236c3> | 2 | 2.25 | 0.102541 | en | 0.97837 | http://www.politicususa.com/2012/04/15/whites-only-stand-your-ground.html |
Any ship can be a minesweeper—once. So goes the gallows humor referring to the threat that naval mines pose to ships.
But that sardonic phrase underlies a more pressing reality: In recent months, the United States and other countries have grown increasingly concerned about Iran's ability to mine the Strait of Hormuz, essentially cutting off a critical international waterway. Iran's leadership has already threatened to shut down the international shipping route, while also crowing about its growing fleet of mini submarines that are difficult to detect and can be used to lay mines.
The problem with mines at sea, as with roadside bombs on land, is that they can be fairly easy to build but difficult to detect and clear. "You take an existing bomb and fit it with target detection, and voila! your bomb is now a mine," says Scott Truver, a naval consultant who has written extensively on mine warfare.
Like their land-based counterparts, even crude mines can be costly and deadly. Mine warfare experts like to cite the case of the USS Samuel B. Roberts, a frigate that struck an Iranian-laid mine in 1988. The warship didn't sink, but the mine, based on a Russian model from 1908, caused nearly $100 million in damage.
In fact, some naval officials are already talking about mines as the next improvised explosive device threat. "We've been there before, we just called it an IED," Rear Adm. Frank Morneau, deputy director for Expeditionary Warfare Division, told an audience at a naval conference earlier this year.
The Navy maintains a "triad" of capabilities to battle mines, which includes ships, aircraft, and divers. It also employs dolphins, whose echolation—the biological equivalent of sonar—is still one the most effective ways for finding and clearing certain mines. Like bomb dogs on land, the dolphins are actually sent to locate the mines (the marine mammals can also place a charge on the mines to destroy it). The push now, though, is to develop unmanned systems—drones in the sea—that can hunt down and neutralize the mines while keeping humans away from the threat.
The Navy recently unveiled a model of Knifefish, an unmanned submarine that would be used to hunt mines, but it won't be ready for use until at least 2015. The Navy has reportedly purchased dozens of SeaFox drones to target Iran's underwater mines. In another effort, AAI, a business unit of Textron, is hoping to sell the U.S. Navy its own unmanned surface ship that uses a command and control system based on the Shadow unmanned aerial vehicle, which has been used extensively by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. The company says it's already demonstrated mine detection capabilities and is hoping to win U.S. navy business.
But for any immediate threat, the Navy will have to rely on its existing technology to clear mines, and that's probably why it's hoping that politics—rather than technology—will ultimately stave off the mine threat. Truver says that Iran mining the Strait of Hormuz would be regarded as act of war and would likely cause immediate retaliation. "They would not put many weapons in the water," he says—maybe a handful before the United States and other countries would likely intervene.
Perhaps to emphasize that point the U.S. Navy last month took part in a military exercise in the Persian Gulf that involved over 30 other nations' naval forces. Though officially the mine clearing exercise was not aimed at Iran, it was intended to send a strong signal to the country's leadership.
Retired Navy Capt. Robert O'Donnell, who was involved for many years in mine warfare, says that the exercise clearly sent a signal to Iran that the international community was ready to act together but added that he still hopes the next exercise will focus more on the actual clearing of mines. "The emphasis [this time] was not on hunting or clearing mines," says O'Donnell, who attended the exercise. "The emphasis was on resolve and communication."
What Do You Think? | <urn:uuid:b5676b51-85e7-48bc-a379-7b0cc42a86bb> | 2 | 2.484375 | 0.137668 | en | 0.971094 | http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a8158/irans-naval-mines-the-ied-of-the-seas-13541405/?click=pm_latest |
Trekking Guidelines
1. Clothing appropriate to season and altitude must be provided to porters for protection from cold, rain and snow. This may mean: windproof jacket and trousers, fleece jacket, long johns, suitable footwear (leather boots in snow), socks, hat, gloves and sunglasses.
2. Above the tree line porters should have a dedicated shelter, either a room in a lodge or a tent (the trekkers’ mess tent is no good as it is not available till late evening), a sleeping pad and a blanket (or sleeping bag). They should be provided with food and warm drinks, or cooking equipment and fuel.
3. Porters should be provided with the same standard of medical care as you would expect for yourself, and life insurance.
4. Porters should not be paid off because of illness/injury without the leader or the trekkers assessing their condition carefully. The person in charge of the porters (sirdar) must let their trek leader or the trekkers know if a sick porter is about to be paid off. Failure to do this has resulted in many deaths. Sick/injured porters should never be sent down alone, but with someone who speaks their language and understands their problem, along with a letter describing their complaint. Sufficient funds should be provided to cover cost of rescue and treatment.
5. No porter should be asked to carry a load that is too heavy for their physical abilities (maximum: 20 kg on Kilimanjaro, 25 kg in Peru and Pakistan, 30 kg in Nepal). Weight limits may need to be adjusted for altitude, trail and weather conditions; experience is needed to make this decision. | <urn:uuid:640cab7c-9fce-47cc-bdf0-b5eadbf8570b> | 2 | 1.851563 | 0.15388 | en | 0.947795 | http://www.portersprogressuk.org/advice-for-trekkers/trekking-guidelines/ |
The Ideal Climate Citizen? North Korea
Apparently. Well, there’s North Korea’s enviable carbon footprint to point to I suppose. When you use no energy, the UN bureaucrats will love you. When I have pointed out that the energy use targets of the Climatistas for the year 2050 would involve the U.S. reducing its per capita hydrocarbon use to the level of Somalia, Haiti, and North Korea, the Climatistas usually change the subject as fast as they can, or start yelling the “denier” chant—a neat trick coming from the energy math deniers.
What this piece really reveals is that the Climatistas are not so secretly envious of North Korea, for the obvious reason. Take in a few samples:
Like many poor countries, North Korea, where [climate change] problems are endemic, is least able to cope with climate change impacts. These weaknesses include food insecurity, energy shortages, economic fragility and a rigid political system. So North Korea is using the UNFCCC as a vehicle for projects designed to increase agricultural output and build the resilience of the agricultural system to disasters. . .
The answer? Wait for it—you knew this was coming:
That would be the “Kyoto Protocol” that is essentially defunct? These guys never let go.
That’s it! Starve your people and generate carbon credits! Should pay for the new iPhones the Nork ruling class covets. But the author inadvertently (?) gives away the main reason why North Korea is supposedly joining the climate bandwagon: self-preservation of their tyrannical regime:
There you have it: a frank recognition of climate change policy as a tool for perpetuating tyranny. And the Climatistas wonder why conservatives don’t like them.
JOHN adds: You likely have already seen it, but in case you haven’t, this is a photo from space, taken at night, in which you can see South Korea, brightly lit, and to the north, China. That dark area in between? It’s North Korea:
All we have to do to satisfy the climate fanatics is ban electricity. | <urn:uuid:66dc6147-2f19-4a66-a606-7f6a3bf68b80> | 2 | 1.703125 | 0.104675 | en | 0.928393 | http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/05/the-ideal-climate-citizen-north-korea.php?tsize=large |
Travel and Tourism Play Key Role as Vehicle for Job Creation, Economic Growth and Development, According to Leaders Declaration at G20 Summit 2012
UK's Prime Minister David Cameron states, "Mexico joining global elite of world economic powers"
One of the main themes of the recent G20 Summit in Los Cabos, Mexico was the importance of tourism and international travel to the job market. In the Leaders Declaration at the G20 Summit, the significance of tourism on the vital recovery of the world's economy was highlighted, "we recognize the role of travel and tourism as a vehicle for job creation, economic growth and development, and, while recognizing the sovereign right of States to control the entry of foreign nationals, we will work towards developing travel facilitation initiatives in support of job creation, quality work, poverty reduction and global growth."
At the G20 Summit in Los Cabos, Mexico, The United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) and the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) advocated this link between economic recovery and tourism. The tourism sector of the economy can create countless employment prospects for individuals and can spur a significant amount of growth in the GDP of the G20 countries in question.
Furthermore, the tourism market is anticipated to make up $2 trillion of the world's GDP and create as many as 100 million new jobs on a global scale this year. Cultural tourism and ecotourism can tackle the problem of unemployment in an imperative fashion, creating jobs and securing opportunities for individuals containing a variety of different skill sets. This in turn will reduce some of the damaging effects attributed to unemployment, including poverty.
UK Prime Minister David Cameron Praises Mexico in Joining Global Elite of World Economic Powers
During an official lunch with the United Kingdom's Prime Minister David Cameron, the European official praised Mexico as a global leader in Latin America and in the world. In a video, Cameron spoke about his visit to Mexico by saying, "This is my first visit to Latin America as Prime Minister, and it is no coincidence that Mexico should be my first destination. Mexico is joining the global elite of world economic powers, not just as a brilliant host of the G20, but as a major force in its own right."
And when giving some key facts he knew about Mexico, the UK Prime Minister stated, "Which country is the largest trading nation in Latin America and set to become one of the world's top five economic powers by 2050? Brazil? Argentina? No, it is Mexico. Who was voted best central banker in the world in 2012? Was it Mervyn King at the Bank of England? Was it Ben Bernanke at the U.S. Fed[eral Reserve]? Was it Mario Draghi at the European Central Bank? No, it was Agustin Carstens, the Governor of the Bank of Mexico. Which country has the largest number of Facebook users in the world? America? Indonesia? You don't need the multiple choice options. It is of course, Mexico."
Speaking on the Mexican people, Cameron also said, "Its people are becoming ever more influential in every part of the global community."
SOURCE Marca Pais - Imagen de Mexico
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Mobile Site You Are Here > > > The P-F-R Win Probability Model
News: s-r blog:SRS Calculation Details
The P-F-R Win Probability Model
New for the 2013 NFL season, we introduced in-game tweets and graphs showing win probabilities for each team in a given matchup. This page is designed to explain, in as much detail as possible, the process by which those are calculated.
Winston’s Equations
The roots of our win probability model lie in the theory put forth in chapters 43 and 45 of Wayne Winston’s book Mathletics.
Using previous research by Hal Stern[1], Winston posited that the final margin of victory for an NFL team in a given game can be approximated as a normal random variable with a mean of the Vegas line and a standard deviation between 13-14. (Winston and Stern’s exact number, derived from the 1981, 1983, & 1984 regular seasons, was 13.86; I’m using 13.45, based on the overall NFL average from 1978-2012.)
To quote Winston:
“A normal random variable can assume fractional values, but the final margin of victory in a game must be an integer. Therefore we estimate the probability that the home team wins by between a and b points (including a and b, where a < b) is: probability(margin is between a - 0.5 and b + 0.5). The Excel function
gives us the probability that a normal random variable with the given mean and sigma is less than or equal to x.
(If) the Colts are a 7-point favorite in Super Bowl XLI, what is the probability that they will win the game?
Here we assume the point spread equals the mean outcome of the game. The Colts can win with a final margin of 1 point or more or win with, say, a 0.5 probability if regulation time ends in a tie. The probability the Colts win by 1 or more:
= 1 - NORMDIST(0.5,7,13.86,TRUE) = 1 - 0.3196 = 0.6804.
The probability regulation ends in tie:
= NORMDIST(0.5,7,13.86,TRUE) - NORMDIST(-0.5,7,13.86,TRUE) = 0.0253.
Therefore, we estimate the Colts’ chance of winning Super Bowl XLI to be 0.6804 + 0.5*(.0253) = 0.693.”
This forms the structural basis of our win probability model. We run the formula above (using 13.45 as the standard deviation of scoring margin instead of 13.86) for every game, plugging in the Vegas line as the mean expected point margin to generate pregame win probabilities for each team.
In-Game Probabilities
During games, the process gets slightly more complicated. First, we need to modify Winston’s formula to account for the diminishing amount of time remaining in the game. To quote Winston again:
“If we assume that the changes in margins during different parts of the game are independent and follow the same distribution (the technical term is identically distributed), then the standard deviation of the margin during n minutes of [a] game is:
(game standard deviation of margin) / sqrt(fraction of game that n minutes is)”
Using the 13.45 standard deviation we derived earlier, that formula is as follows for NFL games:
STDEV = (13.45 / SQRT((60 / minutes_remaining)))
So after 1 quarter, the expected standard deviation of scoring margin goes from 13.45 at pregame to 11.65, etc.
In addition to modifying the standard deviation about the mean, we also need to adjust the mean (the Vegas line) itself to account for the reduced amount of time remaining in the game. Though he doesn’t address this issue directly in Mathletics, in an email exchange with P-F-R, Winston suggested to scale down the Vegas line linearly based on how much time had elapsed. For instance, if the pregame mean is +3 for 60 minutes, then after a quarter (for the remaining 45 minutes) it would be 0.75 * 3 = +2.25.
This means the home team’s probability of winning after a quarter of play -- assuming perfectly neutral possession, down, distance, and field-position conditions -- can be computed using the following Excel function:
Accounting for Down/Distance/Field Position
The equations above work fine for the beginning of each half, since conditions are by definition neutral (possession isn’t carrying over from a previous quarter). However, to compute in-game probabilities for any other situation, we have to make one last modification to account for who currently has the ball, in addition to their down, distance, and field position.
Recall that in 2012, we introduced Expected Points (EP). EP measures the average number of future net points we would expect to be produced on the very next scoring play of the game (regardless of which team does the scoring).
As an example, when a team has the ball on 1st and 10 at their own 20, their Expected Points are 0.28, meaning the next scoring play of the game is likely to net them 0.28 points on average. Gain 3 yards on 1st down (making it 2nd and 7 from the 23), and the EP falls to 0.14, since it accounts for a decreased probability of getting the first down, in addition to what’s likely to happen after a punt. Conversely, gain 10 yards on 1st down (making it 1st & 10 from the 30), and the EP grows to 0.94 -- the product of a new set of downs, as well as better field position.
In other words, EP captures the expected average scoring consequences of the current game situation. This makes it perfect for our win probability calculations, which to this point have accounted for scoring margin, time remaining, and the Vegas line, but also assumed neutral game conditions. EP can help us handle that final missing piece, if we add EP to the current margin of the game (generating a de facto “current expected margin” based on game conditions) and plug that into the formula above instead of the actual point margin.
For instance, from Winston’s formula we would expect a team (say, “Los Angeles”) favored by 3 and leading by 7 with 10 minutes left in the game to win 91.3% of the time. But if the opponent had the ball on 1st & 10 from L.A.’s 20 -- a 4.24 EP situation for the opponent -- Los Angeles’ WP would fall to 72.3%, which is a more accurate snapshot of the current situation. This is the modification we apply to all plays (other than the start of each half) when computing the WP metric you see in the graphs and tweets.
Since this is our first foray into the world on NFL win probability (a field that others, most notably Brian Burke, have occupied for a while now), we fully expect there to be questions, comments, and critiques, even though we’re generally pretty happy with the version described above. As always, please email us with any feedback, and we’ll be happy to respond and/or consider changes to the system if appropriate.
[1] “On the Probability of Winning a Football Game,” American Statistician 45, no. 3 (August 1991): 179–83 | <urn:uuid:ca35ffa5-fc30-4176-8e28-5ff4c67c7037> | 2 | 1.804688 | 0.366613 | en | 0.924977 | http://www.pro-football-reference.com/about/win_prob.htm |
How to Clean Blood Stains
Image for How to Clean Blood Stains Article
Whatever the reason, you might just have to confront some bothersome blood stains in your house or on your clothes. Perhaps you'll have to deal with a blotch of blood on your best pair of jeans, carpet, bed sheets, sofa, counter tops – and unfortunately, blood really isn't a pretty decoration for your fabric or furniture. If a blood stain is taken care of right way, it can be more easily removed. However, if it has time to settle into fabric or a piece of furniture, you're in for a real challenge.
So here's how to remove those ugly and annoyingly stubborn blood stains.
First off, you will remove a blood stain based on where it is. Blue jeans require a different cleaning method than jewelry, for example. So let's take on the most common victims of pesky blood stains and discover how to make them spotless.
What about fabric? Well, there are so many different kinds of fabric out there! Since a lot of clothes are made of nylon, cotton, and polyester, let's talk about how to remove blood stains from those types of materials. If a blood stain hasn't set in much, you can wash the clothes with cold water and usually that will do the trick. However, if this doesn't work, you still have options. You can soak the blood-stained fabric in liquid laundry detergent, warm water, and ammonia. Then you can scrape or brush off the blood and lightly blot it with a cloth. After the stain disappears, rinse the fabric with water.
For items made of vinyl and most copper and gold jewelry, you can simply apply sudsy water to the blood stain and you're good to go. Note, however, that silver should be washed with warm water – not cold water.
As well, many materials don't require very intensive work to get a blood stain out. For concrete, sandstone, marble, brick, and granite floors, for instance, only a sponge soaked in cold water is necessary. For marble, if cold water doesn't work, you can add powdered detergent to the mix. Same goes for sandstone, concrete, brick and granite – except typically liquid detergent is better in these cases.
Carpets are a lot more challenging than those smoother, rockier surfaces. You're going to have to rely on some more sophisticated products to remove a blood stain from a carpet. But you might want to mix the carpet stain solution with some detergent as well (in addition to water, of course). It's crucial that you only gently blot the stain; if you are too aggressive, you'll only rub the blood more deeply into the carpet, rather than remove it. If you still are looking at that blood stain after all this effort, you might have to turn to ammonia. Use a cloth to gently rub the ammonia and water onto the surface. Let the carpet dry on its own.
(Unlike with many stains that don't survive when attacked by vinegar, ammonia is more of the standard go-to cleaner for blood stains.)
Leather and suede materials are especially unique when it comes to stains, and blood stains are no exception. They must be handled carefully. Mix some water with the suds from a mild soap (like Dove), and lightly apply it to the stain. Make sure you don't spread the stain! After this, you can apply some leather conditioner to the area.
If you have a blood stain on wallpaper, you need to try to remove it as quickly as possible. Because once blood gets comfortable on such material, it will stay there for ever. Again, use a cloth dipped in cold water to battle the stain. Make sure the cloth isn't soaking wet, however, as water can carry the stain to other parts of the wallpaper. After you've softly rubbed the stain with the cloth, get a drier cloth to help it dry. You will actually use this same method for wood! However, wood should be exposed to water for less time than the wallpaper.
An additional tip that you might find useful is that peroxide apparently can get rid of an especially irksome blood stain. But considering that peroxide has powerful chemicals, you'll want to research it before you go around attacking stains with it left and right!
The basic rule of thumb for a blood stain, or any stain for that matter, is to deal with it right away. You may like to put chores off, but when it comes to this, you can't afford to procrastinate. We all will endure cuts and bruises in our lifetime, but we don't have to have permanent reminders of it on our clothes, furniture, floors, and walls. And it's not likely your guests will want to have reminders either!
So hopefully this article has enlightened you about how to clean blood stains and you can make sure that when the color red pops up in your house, it is part of a planned color scheme and not an unplanned accident.
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54 Subjects: including geometry, English, reading, GED
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Los Angeles, CA
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Special Education 472
EDSP 472: Characteristics of Students with Disabilities who Access the General Education Curriculum
Prerequisites: EDSP 360 or EDSP 361 or PSYC 401, 2.5 GPA
Credit Hours: (3)
Provides future educators an understanding of definitions, characteristics, and the learning and behavioral support needs of students with disabilities who are accessing the general education curriculum at the elementary, middle, and high school levels. Characteristics and educational needs of students with learning disabilities, intellectual disabilities, emotional and behavioral disabilities, other health impairments, traumatic brain injury, developmental delays, autism, multiple disabilities, and orthopedic impairments will be addressed. Students will understand how the experiences of individuals with disabilities can impact families, as well as the individual’s ability to learn, interact socially, and live as a fulfilled, contributing member of their communities.
Detailed Description of Content of Course
The course allows future educators to understand how exceptional conditions can interact with the domains of human development and to learn how educators can use this knowledge to respond to the varying abilities and behaviors of individuals with disabilities. This course examines key topics such as cognitive functioning, including attention, memory, perception, and critical thinking. Additional characteristics including language development, social development, emotional and behavioral regulation, and medical aspects will be examined. Students will understand how the nature and severity of disabling conditions as well as factors relating to age/developmental level, cultural/ethnic and socioeconomic background affect participation in the general education curriculum.
Specific topics will include:
• Current and past definitions of disability categories
• Physical, social, psychological, behavioral, academic, and medical characteristics of students with disabilities and how these characteristics impact varying aspects of student learning
• Characteristics and effects of the cultural and environmental milieu of the student with disabilities
• Etiology and diagnosis related to various theoretical approaches
• Sources of supports and services for individuals with varying disabilities, their families, and professionals serving them
Detailed Description of Conduct of Course
Lecture, class discussion, audio and visual presentations, simulations/role-playing, independent and assigned readings, small group problem solving, case studies, applied technology assignments, and class presentations.
Goals and Objectives of the Course
1. Provide educational implications of characteristics of various disabilities (CC2K2)(VGCB1)
2. Outline the major historical foundations in the development of knowledge about and the provision of services for persons with varying disabling conditions. (GC1K3)
3. Provide characteristics and effects of cultural and environmental milieu of the individual with exceptional learning needs and their family. Discuss issues in definition and identification procedures for students from culturally and/or linguistically diverse backgrounds, family systems and the role of families in supporting development. (CC2K3)(CC2K4)(VGCB1) (VPS1)
4. Discuss variations in beliefs, traditions, and values across and within cultures and their effects on relationships among individuals with disabilities’ learning needs, family and schooling (CC2K3) (CC3K4)(VGCB1)
5. Describe the differing ways of learning of individuals with disabilities including those from culturally diverse backgrounds and strategies addressing these differences. (CC2K5)(VGCB1)
6. Describe the effects of various medications on individuals with disabilities and the etiologies and medical aspects of conditions affecting individuals with disabilities including the types and transmission routes of infectious diseases (CC2K7) (GC2K3) (GC2K6) (VGCB1)
7. Describe the impact of sensory impairments, physical and health disabilities on individuals, families, and society and explain the common etiologies and the impact of sensory disabilities on learning and experience (GC2K2) (GC2K5)(VGCB1) (VPS1)
8. Discuss the impact of disabilities on auditory and information processing skills. (GC3K1)(VGCB1)
9. Describe the psychological and social-emotional characteristics of individuals with disabilities (GC2K4)(VGCB1)(VPS1)
10. Share information regarding the etiology and diagnosis related to various theoretical approaches (GC2K1)(VGCB1)
11. Describe the impact of learners’ academic and social abilities, attitudes, interests, and values on instruction and career development.(CC3K2)(VGCB1)
12. Explain the impact of disabilities on reading, auditory skills, academic skills, critical thinking, and social skills.(VGCB1)
13. Relate levels of support to the needs of the individuals (GC3S1)(VGCB1)
14. Identify appropriate adaptations and technology for all individuals with disabilities (GC4S7)
Assessment Measures
Written exams, class presentations and projects on the characteristics of students with disabilities, class participation, and written critique of articles from professional journals.
Other Course Information
Review and Approval
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Why do we have Recurring Dreams?
Recurring dreams can be blessings in disguise.
Although I am sure you want to stop having the same dream again and again…try to understand that these dreams are of importance to your mental well being.
Recurring dreams are significant as they point to repeated patterns of behaviour that are obviously unhealthy for you to keep repeating.
Until you recognize what it is you are repeating in your waking life the dream will continue…over and over and over again until you get it!
Dreams can repeat only for short periods of time when certain situations are occurring or they can go on for years. Generally when the particular situation ceases, i.e. you leave a job or end a relationship, then the dream can quite often cease as well.
Unless something else triggers the same emotional response in which case the dream may begin again.
Quite obviously these dreams occur when issues have not been dealt with.
Dreams will continue to use the same imagery again and again in order to try and gain closure.
These dreams can indicate that we are stuck in a rut of some sort, and are unable to move forward in some area in our lives.
Dreams will repeat as part of Post Traumatic Stress, in which there are unresolved feelings or concerns. These dreamers will relive their trauma again and again, forcing them to go through painful experiences over and over. Over time these generally lessen in frequency.Some nightmares or bad dreams can also be recurring in nature.
In many such dreams we are working through problems and attempting to find some solution for how we are approaching things in waking life. Try and find a connection between your dream, and how you respond to it with some circumstance in waking life.
Dreams that repeat over and over can bring about realizations that we can miss when we are awake.
Whether or not the dream is calling on past memories you can assume the dream is related to some aspect of your current life situation. Usually there will have been some trigger during the day to trigger the dream.
What if the recurring dream keeps recurring?
If these dreams don't let up it may be worth your while to seek assistance from a therapist who could help you change the dream through hypnosis.
However there are some things you could attempt on your own:
1. You can change a dream ending quite easily by deciding beforehand what the new ending will be. Think about your dream during the day and imagine it playing out with your new ending.
2. When you are drifting off to sleep use the power of suggestion and repeat over and over to yourself that you want “X and Y” to happen in your dream.
3. There are certain medications that can relieve recurring dreams. Anti-anxiety drugs like MAO inhibitors, a drug that represses the part of sleep in which you dream, can also suppress recurring dreams.
If changing your dream on your own doesn’t help, there are therapists with more advanced techniques that may work. And therapists may be able to help you better understand your dream meanings which in the end could mean the dream will stop.
Return from Recurring Dreams to Nightmares
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Internal Revenue Service Form 1040 grows more complicated than ever. Wednesday, assuming you have filed your federal income tax on time, means you can forget about the U.S. tax code for another year.
BEHOLD IRS Form 1040, due Wednesday. Nearly a century after the creation of the federal income tax, Form 1040 is still one piece of paper. That ought to be a sign of simplicity, but is not.
Each year, Form 1040 becomes ever more bejeweled, much of it with generous intent.
Line 24, for example, offers a write-off of “certain expenses of reservists, performing artists and fee-basis government officials.” What a fee-basis official is, you have to discover for yourself.
Line 42 asks if you have “provided housing to a Midwestern displaced individual.” A Pacific Northwestern displaced individual does not count. But if you helped a Midwesterner, you can go to page 36 of the instructions and see if you win.
Form 1040 refers more than 30 times to the “instructions,” which in itself contains Tax Tables and forms to fill out called “worksheets.” The 1040 refers additionally to Form 4797, Form 2106 and about 30 other forms. It refers also to schedules A, B, C, D, E, F, H, SE and R.
Each schedule and form comes with instructions, some more difficult to fathom than the forms.
Here is a paragraph from the instructions for Form 1116, Foreign Tax Credit: “You pay or accrue tax to a foreign country or U.S. possession on income from foreign sources that is effectively connected with a trade or business in the United States. But if you must pay tax to a foreign country or U.S. possession on income from U.S. sources only because you are a citizen or a resident of that country or U.S. possession, do not use that tax in figuring the amount of your credit.”
An entire industry has arisen to find meaning in sentences like this. The tax industry employs thousands, though it is work untying the knots in which the people have trapped themselves. Others struggle with the tax code on their own, confident they can still wrestle it to the floor.
For them, April 15 should be a special day. It means they are done. | <urn:uuid:fd9b43a4-dfce-4a44-8ad8-511762977553> | 2 | 2.140625 | 0.170186 | en | 0.962909 | http://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/a-taxing-day-thanks-to-form-1040/ |
Can cellulitis be prevented?
A Answers (1)
• To prevent cellulitis, keep careful watch over your skin so that it will not become cracked, cut, or scraped. The bacteria that cause the infection enter through small cuts or cracks in the skin. Use lotion to keep your skin hydrated, and keep your fingernails and toenails short and take care not to cut the skin around them. Additionally, you should wear shoes that fit properly and protective gear when playing sports. If you already have a cut on your skin, keep it clean and covered with a bandage. You can also use antibiotic ointmeny to prevent bacteria from invading the area. Watch the cut for redness, drainage, or pain and see your doctor right away if you notice any of these signs of infection.
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Can you plead guilty and maintain your innocence?
Can you plead guilty and maintain your innocence?
Answers to your questions about the news.
Nov. 5 2001 4:30 PM
Can You Plead Guilty and Maintain Your Innocence?
Last week, former Symbionese Liberation Army member Sara Jane Olson pleaded guilty to having planted bombs under police cars 25 years ago and then denied her guilt to reporters moments later, telling them she entered the plea because she feared she couldn't get a fair trial in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The next day, her judge scheduled a hearing to determine whether to set aside her plea. Does a criminal or civil defendant have to believe sincerely in her plea for it to stick in a court of law?
No. In a landmark 1970 case, North Carolina v. Alford, the defendant pleaded guilty to second-degree murder to avoid a trial on a first-degree murder charge—which carried a possible capital sentence. When entering his plea, the defendant claimed he was innocent of the crime but too afraid of the death penalty to risk a trial. The judge accepted Alford's plea, and the U.S. Supreme Court later held that a guilty plea made out of alleged fear or coercion is still valid. "[T]hat he would not have pleaded except for the opportunity to limit the possible penalty does not necessarily demonstrate that the plea of guilty was not the product of a free and rational choice." A 1970 California Supreme Court decision also holds that as a matter of state law, a defendant can plead guilty while still asserting innocence if there is enough evidence against her to support a finding of guilt.
While nothing required Olson's judge to reopen proceedings, based on her public statements of innocence, nothing prohibited him from reopening the case or rejecting her plea and forcing the case to go to trial. Judges in criminal cases are uniquely responsible for determining whether a plea entered is fair and uncoerced. Whether or not a judge is willing to accept a plea that may have been motivated by fears turns more on that judge's theory of coercion than anything else. Since up to 90 percent of criminal convictions result from plea bargaining, and at least 90 percent of the people in prison seem to insist that they are innocent, it stands to reason that the criminal justice system will not necessarily invalidate a guilty plea simply because the defendant makes out-of-court statements about his innocence.
Bonus Explainer: Daisy Manufacturing Co. recently settled a product liability suit for approximately $18 million after a BB was dislodged and shot from an allegedly defective magazine in one of their BB guns, leaving a 16-year-old boy in a near-vegetative condition. Having paid out on the settlement, Daisy's position remains that nothing is wrong with their product. Does that claim affect their settlement?
No. Some settlement agreements can contain "gag provisions" barring the parties from discussing the settlement. For the most part, however, the rules of free speech and the efficiencies of the settlement process mandate that no criminal defendant, or civil litigant, must say they were wrong publicly in order to be found wrong in the eyes of the law. Judges tend to view civil settlements with even less suspicion than plea bargains, considering them private agreements between parties and without the inherently coercive dangers of a criminal prosecution.
Explainer thanks professors Robert Weisberg at StanfordLawSchool and Laurie Levenson at LoyolaLawSchool.
Slate Plus
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How dangerous is hail?
How dangerous is hail?
Answers to your questions about the news.
April 3 2006 6:29 PM
How Dangerous Is Hail?
Can a grapefruit-sized ice ball kill you?
At least 27 people died as tornadoes and hailstorms struck the Midwest and the South on Sunday. So far it seems like the strong winds—and not the "softball-sized" balls of falling ice—have done most of the damage. A tree fell on one person, another died when his mobile home rolled over, and a baby was blown down the street. Do giant hailstones ever kill anyone?
Daniel Engber Daniel Engber
Daniel Engber is a columnist for Slate
Adults do get hit, but they're less likely to perish from their injuries. "I got hit so hard I thought I was going to pass out," one Fort Worth, Texas, victim of "softball-sized" hail told the Associated Press in 1995. "I started running and got hit in the head. Blood was everywhere," said another.
Hailstone deaths in other countries are somewhat more common. A few years ago, the Chinese government reported that at least seven people in Zhengzhou died in a storm of "egg-sized" hail. Dozens more ended up in the hospital. In Bangladesh, a giant storm of "grapefruit-sized" hail killed almost a hundred people in 1986. Some of the stones weighed more than 2 pounds.
Hailstones do come in different shapes, but there's little evidence that a spiky ball of ice does any more damage than a round sphere. Stones can also come in elongated forms, in cross-shapes, or with rings around the middle.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Slate Plus
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Australian Immigration -Who can migrate
July 21st, 2010
This has prompted the Australian Immigration authorities to put a cap on the number of immigrants who are given entry into the nation.
Australia is a continent which was discovered last much after the discovery of the new world. The continent as a whole was inhabited by aborigines who were pushed to the interiors by the immigrants mostly from England.
A large part of the skilled work force of Australia comprises of migrants from the third world. Most of the immigrants come in search for a better living standards.
Having said that it does not mean that Australia has shut the door on all forms of immigration. What Australia really wants is to improve the quality of the immigrants with those who can contribute to the Australian Economy.
Minister for Australian Immigration and Citizenship Senator Chris Evans, has confirmed that the skilled occupation list is being changed and many new trades have been introduced.
In fact immigrants mostly people who are opportunists enroll themselves in little known institutions and obtain diplomas in trades like hairdresser or as cook. Once the person gets a diploma he can apply for work permit and stay in Australia. It is exactly these kind of people which the nation want to put an end. The policies of Australian immigration are more driven by economic considerations. Australia will not be a dumping ground for unskilled or low skilled workers. If the number of immigrants is taken as a bench mark Australia allows the highest number of immigrants.
There are 181 occupations which has been designated in the SOL or the skilled occupation list. This list has been finalized by an independent agency Skills Australia, who prepared this list in accordance with the requirements of the Australian economy. The list was long overdue and it has finally been revised. The Australian Immigration will be more dictated by the economic requirements. There will a complete revision of the rules pertaining immigration. People who are eligible according to the SOL will be welcome and no more immigration of unskilled workers. The Australian immigration cannot be dictated by the courses which are studied by the immigrants rather than those immigrants who can make a contribution to the Australian economy and provide the population of the country with better services.
In short the Australian immigration authorities is trying to filter out and allow entry of those persons who are highly skilled and can contribute to the Australian Economy. People who are highly skilled will have no problem and the the Australian government will ensure a hassle free entry of such persons. This is bad news for low skilled workers like hairdressers who made use of the lax immigration rules of the previous government will find the options of immigrating to Australia closed. In 2007-08 41000 skilled visas were issued and Hairdressers numbered more than 5000. In the latest SOL vocations like Hairdressing and Cooking has been removed and many new highly skilled vocations has been introduced. Therefore the number of immigrants allowed continue to be the same; only the quality and composition of the immigrants have been changed.
One Response to “Australian Immigration -Who can migrate”
1. gay travel says:
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Magazine, website & books written by teens since 1989
Two Sides
He walked through the hallway with his head down, ignoring the bully slamming a kid against a locker. He walked past the putrid marijuana smoke cloud emanating from inside the bathrooms. He dodged the stumbling teen that had obviously been drinking, and He barely made it into his first class before the bell rang. His teacher began rambling about the weekend, and she purposely ignored what she was supposed to be teaching. Like He did on most days, He didn’t pay attention to the majority of the class that was texting on their cell phones. He didn’t even look up when one of the girls made a malicious remark about the teacher’s uncanny ability to be absolutely boring. When lunch came around, He sat at a table by himself, barely touching his food. After a few minutes, He looked to his left and saw Her. He knew who she was. She used to be one of the most encouraging, well-behaved, and beautiful girls in the school. But when her mother committed suicide, she turned to drugs and alcohol. That dealer currently talking to her had taken advantage of her situation ever since he found out, fueling her habit at his gain and her expense. The drug dealer must’ve had lots of experience doing that, He thought with a hollow feeling in his chest.
When walking to his next class, He almost tripped over someone on the ground. He wasn’t surprised to see it was another bullying victim, with more bruises on her body than He could count. He stepped over her without sympathy and continued on his way to the class, dreading the mountain of homework He would inevitably have. After school let out, heavy rain soaked through his light clothes and chilled him to the bone as He walked to his run-down house with his eyes downcast, all the while asking himself why it had to be this way.
He walked through the hallway confidently, giving a smile and a wave to his friends. He nodded at the student who stood up for the kid, telling the bully to get lost or face the principal. He breathed in the clean spring air from the breeze blowing through an open window. On his way to his first class, He caught a student by the arm as she stumbled, steadying her. She flashed him a quick smile as she rushed in the opposite direction down the hallway. He made it to the classroom with plenty of time. When the bell rang, the teacher asked everyone if they had their essays done. She was more than pleased with them when everyone said yes. She began writing important details for the upcoming test on the whiteboard while the entire class took out their notebooks. He carefully copied what she was writing, and He made a small note when one of the girls asked about something the teacher forgot. When lunch came around, He sat at a table with his friends, and He invited a new student to sit with them. When He looked to his left, He saw the two of them sitting together. She was one of the most encouraging, well-behaved, and beautiful girls in the school. But when her mother was killed in an accident, she would have turned to drugs if it hadn’t been for the person sitting next to her. The guy heard about what happened, and he had challenged himself to help her. He had been there for her through it all, and had kept her motivated even when times were tough. He shared a joke with her, and she smiled for the first time in a month. It may have been a small one, but it was a smile nonetheless.
When He was walking to his next class, He saw a friend apologize and help another student up after they ran into each other accidentally. He walked past them, nodding to both. When He got to the classroom, He accepted the mountain of homework He would inevitably have, knowing He would get it done. After school let out for the weekend, He strolled unhurriedly towards his house while listening to the birds sing, all the while thinking about how life was good.
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Friday, September 16, 2011
FREE LANGUAGE ARTS LESSON - “Back-to-School Brain Teaser/Vocabulary Builder”
by Margaret Whisnant
4th - 8th Grade
This back-to-school brain teaser doubles as a vocabulary builder. Students are challenged to use definitions and clues to identify words that contain the sound ooh, such as school rule, cool, and classroom. Answers to the first set of forty items are relatively common words, The more difficult second set requires the identification of less familiar words, such as boudoir, fondue, and elusive. A companion graphic organizer for writing presents an opportunity for each student to create (on paper) a "Marvelicious, Super Cool School" with his/her choice of transportation, hours, building, decor, rules, teachers, and curriculum--the makings of an attention-getting bulletin board. Six pages, including full answer keys.
1 comment:
1. Thanks so much for featuring one of my freebies. I am truly honored! | <urn:uuid:c068c2bc-9840-4978-bb40-357f14507f94> | 3 | 3.3125 | 0.034629 | en | 0.924474 | http://www.thebestofteacherentrepreneurs.net/2011/09/free-language-arts-lesson-back-to.html |
A Lot Of What People Think About Transgender Athletes Is Wrong
By: Mary Odell / July 1, 2013
Fallon Fox received a lot of attention and abuse in March" href="http://www.thefrisky.com/2013-03-07/mixed-martial-arts-fighter-fallon-fox-comes-out-as-trans/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Fallon Fox received a lot of attention and abuse in March after she was forced to come out as a transgender woman. Fallon had been a professional mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter for six years, but as soon as she came out, she was faced with a barrage of transphobic comments, and many people accused her of having an unfair advantage because she was once physically a man. Some argued that she had more testosterone in her body than a cisgender (people who identify with the gender they were assigned at birth) woman. Others claimed that she would have larger or denser bones than a cisgender woman.
One myth about trans women is that, even after hormone replacement therapy, they produce more testosterone in their bodies than cisgender women. The truth is, however, that trans women actually produce less testosterone than cisgender women, Outsports explains. Testosterone, the hormone largely responsible for the production of muscle mass, is secreted from just three glands in the human body: the testes, the ovaries, and the adrenal glands. A cisgender woman produces testosterone in both the ovaries and the adrenal glands, which are located just above the kidneys. A trans woman, however, produces testosterone exclusively in the adrenal glands. What this basically means is that it is actually more difficult for trans women to build and maintain muscle mass than it is for cisgender women.
Another myth is that a trans woman has a “man’s body” so her bone structure must give her an unfair advantage in sports. This is also false. If you go outside and people watch for even just a few minutes, it becomes clear that people come in many shapes and sizes. Sure, men are larger than women on average, but there is no hard and fast rule saying that men have denser bones than women. In fact, bone density varies more by race than it does by gender. Bone density also does not actually provide a discernible advantage in athletic competition. Why do you think you’ve never heard about the bone density of other athletes before?
Right now Fallon Fox’s career is garnering an enormous amount of visibility for the trans community. “If Fallon has any advantage over her competitors it is her courage,” wrote Heather Hargreaves on Outsports. As long as these myths persist, there is still much work to be done for trans athletes to truly be on a level playing field with their peers.
[Bloody Elbow]
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Authorities accused of failing to tackle causes of breast cancer
· Women 'are sold myth that disease is normal'
· Campaign group flags possible link to pollution
The government and the "cancer establishment" are today accused of failing to tackle the causes of breast cancer, in a report that claims environmental pollutants have played a significant part in its epidemic rise.
The report, by an umbrella organisation called the UK Working Group on the Primary Prevention of Breast Cancer, pulls together evidence on what is known of the effect of gender-bending chemicals, carcinogens and toxins on animals and humans. While there is no proof of a direct link between chemical pollution and breast cancer, the report says there is cause for concern.
"We need a massive rethink of priorities," said Diana Ward of the small charity Breast Cancer UK, the principal author of the report, which was funded by the European Public Health Alliance Environment Network, Unison, the Co-Op Bank and the Scottish Breast Cancer Campaign. "Government and the cancer establishment promote treatment and control and call this prevention. It's a travesty of the meaning of the word."
"I think they are flagging up an area that in other countries is being addressed much more seriously," said Professor Andrew Watterson, head of the occupational and environmental research group at the University of Stirling. "US toxicologists are very concerned about this.
"There is some evidence about the contraceptive pill having caused a problem, albeit a small one, but it is one of those areas where we have people saying there isn't a problem when there isn't evidence that that is the case."
Breast cancer numbers have steadily risen since the middle of the last century. In 1996, one woman in 12 was expected to get breast cancer in her lifetime, but within five years the figure was one in nine, the report points out.
Cancer specialists predict a further rise and talk of breast cancer as a disease women will have to learn to live with, like diabetes.
"Women have been sold the myth that breast cancer is normal and inevitable. It's not," Ms Ward said. "Breast cancer is preventable, but government and the cancer industry determinedly ignore the evidence."
The report's thesis is controversial. Research into the causes of breast cancer has only managed to pinpoint a handful of factors. They include the tendency for women to have their first child later in life, not to have many children and not to breastfeed. Also implicated are the earlier age at which girls start to have their periods, and genes, although only in a small minority of cases. Rates have also risen because women live longer, and because of population screening which finds cancers that might have gone undetected in the past.
The report points out that 350 human-made chemicals have been found in breast milk. Fatty tissue tends to store toxins. An analysis of blood from the umbilical cords of babies, carried out by WWF and Greenpeace this month, found that babies are born with a large number of chemicals in their bodies.
Some of the chemicals used in plastics, detergents and pesticides are endocrine disruptors - they mimic natural hormones such as oestrogen. Many breast tumours are oestrogen-dependent and can be treated by drugs which reduce the amount of oestrogen in the body.
Vyvyan Howard, a toxico-pathologist at the University of Liverpool, who is quoted in the report, agrees that the evidence is circumstantial, but says there are "strands of information" that suggest low doses of chemicals could be having an effect on the development of the human body. It is hard to assess the impact of environmental pollution on our bodies.
"We have got the introduction into the environment and into our bodies of tens of thousands of very complex chemicals," he said. "We have no tools for analysing a mixture of this complexity."
But it made sense to try to work towards prevention of possible ill-effects. "We need to be addressing the preventative side and trying to get the breast cancer rates down to where they were."
The Department of Health said the causes of breast cancer were complex. "The World Health Organisation's international programme on chemical safety concluded in 2002 that there is no direct evidence that environmental chemicals (endocrine disruptors) are a cause of breast cancer," it said in a statement.
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Laptops cause infertility: official
Attack of the ‘nad-roasting killer PCs
Pretty well every IT news site worth its salt has in the last week reported on the chilling conclusions of a report in the Oxford Journals online into the long-term effects of laptop use on male fertility.
To summarise, laptops roast your gonads and that will be an end to your reproductive career unless you take immediate action to rectify the situation. Here is the spine-tingling abstract of the boffins’ testicular probe:
Scrotal hyperthermia has been identified as a risk factor for male infertility. Laptop computers (LC) have become part of a contemporary lifestyle and have gained popularity among the younger population of reproductive age. LC are known to reach high internal operating temperatures. We evaluated the thermal effect of LC on the scrotum. METHODS: Right and left scrotal temperature (ScT) was measured in 29 healthy volunteers in two separate 60 min sessions. ScT was recorded from thermocouples on a digital datalogger every 3 min with the working LC in a laptop position and in the same sitting position with approximated thighs without LC. RESULTS: ScT increased significantly on the right and left side in the group with working LC (2.8°C and 2.6°C, respectively; P<0001) and without LC (2.1°C, P<0.0001). However, ScT elevation with working LC was significantly higher (P<0.0001). CONCLUSIONS: Working LC in a laptop position causes significant ScT elevation as a result of heat exposure and posture-related effects. Long-term exposure to LC-related repetitive transient scrotal hyperthermia is a modern lifestyle feature that may have a negative impact upon spermatogenesis, specifically in teenage boys and young men. Further studies of such thermal effects on male reproductive health are warranted.
Crikey. Naturally, there is a solution at hand. And it’s not, as you might imagine, putting the computer on a table, because the emissions from these things can apparently penetrate 18ft of lead shielding sandwiched between 4ft of concrete. Chernobyl? Pah!
Nope. The real solution is to buy a Lapdesk computer pad by Port Technologies, allegedly guaranteed to keep your sperm motile, eager and ready for conceptive action. We'd give you a pointer in the direction of this technological wonder but there wasn't a link in the press release and after 11 seconds on Google we lost interest in the whole thing.
And here's why - what on earth is wrong with infertile laptop users anyway? We can view the whole process as a sort of technogical natural selection whereby self-important IT journalists*, keyboard-hammering suits shouting into mobes aboard trains and pizza-scoffing propellorheads tweaking their Linux OSes would be - over a generation or so - completely eliminated from the face of the earth, thereby leaving the planet's limited natural resources entirely at the disposal of car manufacturers and flatscreen TV developers. Think about it.
*Myself included, before the flame warriors unsheath their CAPS LOCKS. I've got enough bloody kids anyway.
Related stories
Computers make you blind: official
Computers make you sick: official
Mobiles in hospitals now safe: official
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Computer Programming Tutorial
Computer Programming Tutorial
Computer Programming is fun and easy to learn provided you adopt a proper approach. This tutorial will take you through simple and practical approach while learning computer programming.
This tutorial has been prepared for the people who are struggling to learn computer programming but they are unable to learn it due to lack of proper guidance and approach. I'm confident that after completing this tutorial you will be at a level where you can code in C Programming language and will have basic understanding of Java and Python programming languages as well and you can continue further from that point onwards.
If you are completely new to Computer Programming, then my recommendation is to read this tutorial twice or even thrice. First reading will not give you much idea, but during your second reading, you will start grasping most of the concepts and you will enjoy while writing great computer programs.
I do not expect much from your as pre-requisites to teach you computer programming but I assume that at-least you have basic knowledge about computer and its peripherals like keyboard, mouse, screen, printer, etc. If you know more than this like word editor, good typing speed, internet search, etc., then it will help you a lot while doing your computer programming.
(1) Computer Programming Quick Guide
A quick reference guide for Computer Programming.
Computer Programming Quick Guide
(2) Computer Programming Useful Resources
A collection of Computer Programminge Sites, Books and Articles is given at this page.
Computer Programming Useful Resources
(3) Computer Programming Tutorial in PDF
Download a quick Computer Programming tutorial in PDF format.
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Analog devices intros signal splitter for set-top boxes
The Analog Devices ADA4302-4 active RF splitter offers a lower noise level and better composite second order distortion.
Analog Devices has introduced an active RF splitter IC that uses four-way signal-splitting technology to resolve design challenges in multi-tuner cable set-top boxes (STBs) and advanced televisions.
The ADA4302-4 delivers video or data content to multiple applications simultaneously, enabling features such as picture-in-picture capability and personal video recording. By dividing an input into four outputs without degrading the signal quality, the device enables low noise and distortion, while reducing design work and overall system cost.
The lower noise and distortion levels allow systems to be sensitive to smaller signals, resulting in fewer signal interruptions and clearer pictures. The splitter has 2dB lower noise figure and 16dB better composite second order distortion (CSO), all within a compact (4mm x 4mm), single-chip solution.
For cable set-top box manufacturers to achieve functionality beyond just receiving and decoding digital broadcast signals, RF system designers require advanced signal splitting technology, said Curt Ventola, product line director, Analog Devices. An STB equipped with an ADA4302-4 can receive one incoming signal and divide and deliver it to four tuners, or three tuners and a cable modem, enabling a consumer to simultaneously view one televised program, set a digital video recorder for recording another program, use a cable modem to access the Internet and run picture-in-picture settings.
The ADA4302-4 is available in a 4mm x 4mm lead frame chip-scale package (LFCSP).
For more information, visit www.analog.com.
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Heifer International Case Study: Philippines*
Key Issues: Logging and Agricultural Change, Flooding, Indigenous Groups in Southeast Asia
The plight of indigenous peoples in Southeast Asia is often overshadowed by the many other pressing issues of the region. However, an examination of some of the challenges faced by indigenous groups is extremely instructive in helping us to understand the broader issues facing the region, especially in the realm of food security and the environment. Hundreds of indigenous groups lie scattered throughout the relatively remote parts of Southeast Asia, especially in jungle and mountain environments where accessibility is difficult and the dominant cultures of Southeast Asian states have historically found it difficult to control the population or, perhaps, have been uninterested in controlling because these places are so marginal and remote. However, the modernization of the economies of Southeast Asia and the growth of industries which utilize the territories traditionally occupied by these groups is bringing their plight into much greater focus than ever before.
Perhaps the greatest threats to these people are the mining in and commercial logging of the tropical forests in which they have traditionally lived. The entry of Southeast Asian economies into the global market, the high demand for tropical wood, and the availability of machinery that makes mining and logging in remote tropical regions possible has all meant that many areas that were once out of the way are coming under increasing commercial pressures. To the people living in these regions, commercial logging means the end of a way of life, but to the countries that allow this logging to take place it means the opportunity to economically develop and supply a high demand resource to the developed world. As a result, many countries in Southeast Asia support the development of logging as a means to economic development, despite the negative consequences to those who make these forest lands their home. After all, those in power in these countries reason, population densities are very low in these places, and many of the indigenous people do not have clear title to the land. Their own economic activities are often very difficult to track and they are usually very culturally marginal, often speaking their own language.
In addition, the farming techniques of indigenous people are usually of a subsistence nature and provide very little in the way of taxable revenues that the central government can use. Many indigenous groups practice swidden agriculture, also known as slash and burn or shifting cultivation. As the soils of tropical areas are usually poor, farmers burn off a tract of forest, releasing nutrients into the soil. Farmers can then grow their crops, often starchy tropical root vegetables, for a few years before moving on to another plot of land. While swidden agriculture is very destructive on a small-scale, under traditional methods it is so limited in scale that the forest is able to recover and ecological damage is minimized. But, it is often seen by outsiders as a wasteful form of agriculture that utilizes only a small portion of the available arable lands. In many of these parts of tropical Southeast Asia, the development of large-scale plantation agriculture, especially palm trees for palm oil production, is seen by government and developers as a better use of the land. So, logging is doubly productive in the minds of many because after an area is commercially logged, it can be converted to plantation agriculture.
These forces are often exacerbated by the growth of population and the migration of non-indigenous populations into more marginal lands to meet growing food and economic demands. As in-migrants begin to practice swidden cultivation on ever larger tracts of land, deforestation becomes increasingly severe and the land becomes more and more damaged. As a result of all of these pressures, indigenous peoples, most of whom are politically disorganized and essentially voiceless, face increasing impoverishment and the destruction of their local environments. In fact, environmental problems are even more significant when considering the climatic conditions found in these often mountainous areas.
Much of Southeast Asia, particularly the mountain zones, experiences annual monsoon conditions. Monsoons are wind and precipitation patterns that bring significantly higher rainfall to a place for several months than would otherwise be expected given the climatic conditions. For example, while a tropical rainforest might average 8” of rain/month with a monthly high of 10” to 14”, a climate with a monsoon might experience 3-5 months with an average rainfall as high as 20”. Huge amounts of precipitation like this, coupled with deforestation, create a number of environmental problems. Flash flooding can become regular occurrences and these floods bring with them significant amounts of soil erosion, in addition to the hazards of the flood itself and possible landslides on denuded slopes. Soil erosion is, of course, a huge challenge in areas that already have relatively weak soils, but it also creates problems downstream as rivers and bays and even rice paddies, which depend on regular floods, are filled with too much sediment. These problems damage agricultural potential and can even jeopardize fisheries. Further, with the mountains stripped of their forests, winter droughts can become a problem as streams dry up too quickly.
These are the sorts of problems that are faced by indigenous families on the island nation of the Philippines. In places like Agusan del Sur Province in the southern islands of the Philippines, many of the issues described above are impacting the local residents. It is considered to be one of the poorest parts of the Philippines in a country that is beset with rural poverty. Deforestation has led to significant problems with flooding in the area and many of the lowland’s rice paddies have been damaged by the flooding and subsequent sedimentation that has filled them and made them less productive. The region is one that faces significant food security concerns. Many are undernourished in the area and gender inequities ensure that the problems of population growth will continue to impact the region.
Heifer Philippines partnered with Bóthar, an Irish non-governmental organization, to bring some relief to this part of the Philippines through a holistic development project for marginalized families. Heifer Philippines worked with local NGOs and organizations in the field using a number of techniques to raise the standard of nutrition and living in the area while also improving local environmental conditions. Below are listed some of the key aspects of this project:
• Improving local nutrition: Participating families were given a number of opportunities to improve their basic level of nutrition. Of course, animals were distributed in the project, including water buffalo, cattle, goats, pigs, and chickens. The project participants were trained in the use of integrated livestock-cropping techniques to ensure that inputs in the agricultural system were minimized. Farmers were taught to use manure to improve soil quality and to practice efficient methods of crop rotation to maintain high fertility levels. By reusing animal wastes, the possible deleterious effects of animal waste were also minimized. When necessary, the project also helped farmers to establish sanitary systems for the disposal of human waste. In addition, farmers were trained in organic food gardening techniques to help maximize the production of nutritious local food. Families were given seeds and basic farming tools to aid in the development of these agricultural techniques.
• Flooding and forest resources: To reduce the negative effects of flooding, Heifer helped locals to establish individual and community agro-forestry areas. Every family was encouraged to participate in tree planting and tree nurseries and seed banks were established to encourage sustainable agro-forestry practices. Biogas systems were also established through the project. Biogas helps to reduce the impacts of deforestation by recycling human and animal waste so as to generate cooking fuel. This, in turn, reduces the demand for wood for cooking fuel. Seminars also promoted the use of agricultural systems that reduced soil erosion.
• Community Development: Heifer International also worked with local groups to build organizational capacity. Training in organization, financial management, and entrepreneurship were among the activities pursued. In addition, Heifer helped local farmers to develop their linkages to local markets as well as their ability to engage in enterprise activities through micro-lending.
Project Story:
Elizede Edas is a project participant of Heifer’s Revitalizing the Environment through Indigenous Vantage Enterprises (REInVent) project (a sub-project related to this main project). Life has been hard for the 34-year old farmer and his wife and they often find it hard to provide for the needs of their four children. “Living in an upland area, we have very few opportunities for food production. My family often experiences a lack of rice and food and there are times that I have to borrow money from neighbors so my family can eat,” he said.
Elizede saw hope when he was chosen as a participant of the REINVENT project. He received a boar and a sow, training, seeds, fruit and forest tree seedlings and other inputs. He learned how to take good care of his pigs and to establish an agro-forestry farm. Elizede’s patience and meticulous care paid off when his sow gave birth to eight piglets. The boar he received was rented for breeding services and he was able to receive two piglets as payment. Elizede now has 12 pigs. A buyer offered to buy all the weaned piglets. Elizede chose the best two piglets to pass on and sold the rest. He deposited most of the proceeds in their savings group fund and with the rest he bought enough rice for his family until the next harvest.
In his agro-forestry farm, Elizede maintains rice and vegetables in between fruit trees and looks forward to harvesting the fruit. Elizede’s wife is very happy now that the family is living better. For Elizede, however, the best gifts he received from Heifer are the Cornerstones. “The cornerstones inspired me to work harder for my family,” he said. Asked what is his favorite among the Cornerstones, Elizede smiled and quipped, “All of them, it’s like loving all parts of your body.”
* Information for this case study was drawn from unpublished texts provided by Heifer International. The project described is based on project #22-0520-08. | <urn:uuid:51ceb6ad-cbc3-4d46-95a9-1733226614da> | 3 | 3.15625 | 0.019009 | en | 0.970336 | http://www.uaa.alaska.edu/ges/faculty/afdv/local/south/heifer/philippines-case-study.cfm |
UPI en Espanol
Change in jet stream could mean longer, harsher winters
A slower, snake-like jet stream is pushing colder weather farther south and warmer weather farther north.
By Brooks Hays | Feb. 18, 2014 at 2:43 PM
CHICAGO, Feb. 18 (UPI) -- The jet stream is taking a slower, more circuitous route across North America, the result being longer-lasting, more extreme weather patterns -- scientists say.
Presenting their findings at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, held recently in Chicago, researchers Jennifer Francis and Mark Serreze said the change in jet stream behavior is likely due to rapidly warming temperatures in the Arctic.
“This does seem to suggest that weather patterns are changing and people are noticing that the weather in their area is not what it used to be,” Francis, a professor at Rutger University’s Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences, told meeting attendees.
The jet stream, a typically fast-moving, fairly straight line of air, is driven by the temperature difference between the poles and the tropics. As that difference has lessened, researchers say, the jet stream is circulating with less gusto. And like a river that slows down, the jet stream is taking a longer, more serpentine path -- pushing cold weather farther south and warm weather farther north.
The slow speed of the jet stream also means new and unusual weather patterns are sticking around for longer periods of time, with storms dumping larger amounts of snow and rain.
Serreze, the director of the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado, said the loss of ice sheets in the polar regions has helped accelerate rising Arctic temperatures.
[Science Recorder]
Related UPI Stories
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Top Definition
A type of anarchism which maintains that an anarchist society can come about through action by workers organised in unions - typically grassroots unions with direct democracy or without officials. Workers' organisation is to culminate in a general strike which overcomes capitalism, as well as generating day-to-day resistance which weakens capitalist control.
The IWW and IWA have always been the main anarcho-syndicalist groups.
The IWW, or Wobblies, believed in the formation of one big union involving all workers, as a prelude to a general strike. They still exist, but were most successful in pre-WW2 America, when they successfully organised many workers.
The IWA is an international federation of groups of anarcho-syndicalists in various countries. Unlike the IWW, it organises as a federation of individuals and not as a union divided up into industries and occupations.
The Spanish union, CGT, is federated to the IWA and is the largest syndicalist group anywhere today. It was even bigger in the 30s, when it was one of the main organisers of the resistance to Franco's attempt to seize power. It provoked controversy, however, by entering government, in breach of anarchist principles.
by free-range egghead May 03, 2004
1 more definition
The form of government advocated by "Dennis the Peasant" in the famous Monty Python Movie "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"
If you don't believe me you haven't watched it enough
"I told you, we're an anarco-sydicalist commune. We take it in turns to be a sort of executive officer for the week..."
Though anarcho-syndicalism is funny in the movie, only true idiots would be proponents of such a dumb system
by Lookinglass November 21, 2005
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35. Hannibal Threatens Rome. Rome, like Greece, had a great enemy. While she was growing strong in Italy, a rival city, Carthage, was prospering in northern Africa.
Carthage stood only a few miles from the modern city of Tunis. We sometimes think of northern Africa to-day as a land.of desert and mountains, inhabited only by ferocious Moors, but in ancient times it contained many splendid cities which had been founded by the Phoenicians and the Greeks.
Of these Carthage was the chief. Her first settlers had been Phoenicians, who brought with them, their love of trade and of the sea. The white sails of Carthaginian merchant ships were seen everywhere on the Mediterranean, and her numerous colonies brought her a great commerce. Carthage is said to have had a million inhabitants, and was famous for her wealth and luxury.
Between Carthage and Rome rolled the blue waves of the Mediterranean. But midway lay the valuable island of Sicily, and over this the two cities were drawn into conflict.
Was the leader of the world to be a city of Europe or of Africa? The wealth of Carthage, and her great fleet of ships, gave her an advantage over Rome. She had also very skillful generals and statesmen. But her people were not such good soldiers as the stern Romans. For her armies she had to rely largely on hired troops and the forces of subject peoples, while in those days every Roman citizen was a stout soldier, willing, if need be, to pour out his blood for his fatherland.
In the first war the Romans were successful and drove the Carthaginians out of Sicily. But the latter went only to Spain, and began to take possession of that country. Soon war broke out again.
The leader of the Carthaginian forces was then the great general Hannibal. This famous man was one of Rome's most bitter enemies, for when still a small boy his father had made him swear a solemn oath that he would wage unceasing war upon the Italian city, the great foe of his country. Throughout his long life Hannibal never forgot. In Spain he gathered an army made up of all the various peoples over whom Carthage ruled. Spaniards, Gauls, and Africans filled his ranks, and there was a body of splendid African cavalry, the best horsemen in the world. But most curious of all was the long line of war elephants which he took with him, for the Carthaginians employed these huge beasts to trample down their foes.
From Spain across Gaul, as France was then called, and over the mountains into Italy Hannibal's army made its way. It was a wonderful march, for there were no roads, and the country was almost a wilderness. Great rivers had to be crossed, savage tribes encountered, and finally the mighty snow-crowned Alps towered before them.
But inspired by their leader they struggled on. As they climbed the steep mountain passes, urging along the huge, unwieldy elephants, they were beaten by fierce tempests and the savage mountaineers rolled great rocks down the steep slopes upon them. It seemed that they must retreat or perish. At last, although suffering heavy losses, the Carthaginians reached the summit and looked down upon Italy, with its rich fields and great cities.
Rome gathered her armies to meet them, but though her soldiers were brave, she had no general to match Hannibal. He planned so cleverly that in every encounter the Romans had little or no chance of success. For fifteen years this skillful commander held his own in Italy.
His greatest victory was at the battle of Cannac. To avenge former terrible defeats the Romans gathered an immense army of eighty-six thousand men and advanced to crush the invader. Hannibal had only fifty thousand, but he trusted to his skill. He chose for the battlefield a plain where his magnificent horsemen could be used to advantage. Then he drew up his footmen somewhat in the form of a crescent. In the center Hannibal's line was rather thin, but on each flank he formed his best infantry in heavy masses.
The brave Romans advanced impetuously and easily drove back the center of the Carthaginian line. But suddenly they were attacked from both sides by Hannibal's veterans, and at the same time his horsemen, scattering the Roman cavalry, swooped around and fell upon their rear. Seventy thousand Romans were left dead or wounded on the field. It is said Hannibal sent to Carthage a peck of rings of the Roman nobles slain in the battle.
But to capture the city of Rome was too great a task even for Hannibal, unless he should receive reënforcements. Carthage, therefore, sent another army, under Hannibal's brother, to aid him, but the Romans fell upon it and destroyed it before it could reach him. The first news Hannibal had of the defeat was when his brother's head was hurled into his camp by a Roman soldier.
Encouraged by this success, the Romans continued the struggle and finally "carried the war into Africa" by sending a Roman army directly against Carthage. In spite of all his victories, Hannibal must now return to protect his own city. In the battle of Zama he was at last beaten, and Carthage surrendered. (202 B.c.)
Hard indeed were the terms Rome imposed. Carthage must give up her fleet, pay a great sum of money, and give annual tribute to Rome. But even this did not satisfy the Romans. When later the prosperity of Carthage began to revive they attacked her again, and destroyed her absolutely. Even the place where Carthage had stood was sown with salt so that nothing might grow there.
It was a terrible fate for one of the most splendid cities of the world, but mighty Rome would not endure a rival.
36. Romans Conquer All Nations. When Carthage had been beaten, no other nation could successfully resist Rome. She soon sent her armies against Macedonia, against the Greek cities, and against the kingdoms of Asia which had grown out of the empire of Alexander the Great. There were many wars, but no armes were a match for those of Rome. The stout Roman soldiers were always victorious, and one after another all the peoples around the Mediterranean Sea fell under Roman rule.
The Roman method of fighting was different from the Greek. The Romans used horsemen and light-armed soldiers with arrows and slings, but their main reliance was upon bodies of foot soldiers called "legions." Each soldier of a legion was armed with a heavy javelin or spear intended to be thrown, and a short but keen-edged sword. He had a helmet, breastplate, and shield. The legions were not drawn up in heavy masses like the Greeks, but the soldiers took their stand in separate ranks with open spaces between. Thus the men could move backward and forward easily, and so well drilled were the Roman soldiers that even in the heat of battle each man knew just what to do. Every legion carried as a standard a bronze figure of an eagle, and if in battle the ranks were broken the soldiers rallied about this symbol. Seldom indeed could the enemy succeed in capturing an eagle.
When the legions approached the enemy the soldiers in the first line threw their javelins and then, drawing their swords, charged. If the foe was not then broken, the other ranks charged after the first.
The Romans owed success also to their good generals. In fighting the Macedonians, with their close ranks and long spears, the Roman commanders planned matters so skillfully that the battles took place in woods or on rough ground. Thus the enemy was thrown into disorder and easily defeated.
37. Conquest Does Not Make Rome Better. Nations that conquer their enemies in war are not always the happiest. The Romans had been a simple country people. Each man had had his little farm. Here he raised his own crops and lived in humble contentment with his wife and children. Few were rich and none were very poor. But as they subjugated other people the Romans became proud and cruel. Many among them gained great wealth and established huge estates or plantations where all the work was done by slaves, often captives taken in war.
There came to be thousands upon thousands of these slaves in Italy. Many of them were indeed rough barbarians, only useful to till the fields, but others were cultured Greeks, or people from Asia who knew more than their Roman masters. The field slaves had little to eat or wear, and were very harshly treated. So it is no wonder that there was always danger of a dreadful outbreak of those poor creatures. But many of the slaves lived in the houses of the rich Romans and were regarded more like the servants of our own time.
A rich Roman generally had not merely a splendid house or palace in the city, but a beautiful residenceon his estate called a "villa." This was adorned with fountains, statues, and paintings copied after those of the Greeks, and provided with every luxury then known. Here the fortunate Roman and his family too often lived a life of idle pleasure, and with wine and music entertained their friends at magnificent feasts which went on far into the night.
No wonder wealthy men and women did not become stronger or better!
But while some Romans thus became rich, others grew poor. Since so much grain was raised on the great farms of the nobles, the man who had only a little farm could not get a good price for what he had to sell. Sometimes, too, his land was seized by a rich neighbor and he could not get it back. Thus many men had no occupation, and went to the city of Rome itself, where they became "loafers," ready for any mischief or violence. Soon the city was obliged to give them food, and shiploads of grain were brought from Egypt or northern Africa for distribution. But the mob was seldom satisfied, and there was always danger that they would rise and do some dreadful thing.
Some wise Romans saw how bad all this was. Foremost among them were two brave young men named Gracchus (the Gracchi). The Gracchi were not satisfied simply to complain that things were going wrong, but tried to take some of the land from the rich and give it again to the poorer people. But as soon as such a thing was spoken of all the wealthy Romans became their bitter enemies, and bribed people to attack them.
Feeling sure that they were in the right, the Gracchi tried to carry their measures through in violent ways. As a result there were terrible riots, and both young men were slain. We remember the Gracchi with gratitude because they were brave and tried to help the poor. But though they saw what Rome should do, they did not know how it should be done. After their death matters became worse than ever.
The Leading Facts. 1. The great enemy of Rome was Carthage, a city in northern Africa. 2. To decide which should be the leading city of the world, Rome and Carthage engaged in a series of wars. 3. The great Carthaginian general, Hannibal, invaded Italy and defeated the Romans in many battles. 4. Finally Carthage was beaten and destroyed. 5. Rome then conquered Macedonia, Greece, and all the other countries around the Mediterranean Sea. 6. Because of their victories the Rornans became proud and cruel. 7. Some of them became very rich, and had thousands of slaves. 8. The rest grew poor and became idlers in the city of Rome. 9. Two brave young men called the Gracchi tried to have the land divided more equally, but failed, and lost their lives.
Study Questions. 1. Locate Carthage. 2. Why did Rome and Carthage quarrel? 3. What advantages did Carthage have over Rome? 4. In what ways was Rome stronger? 5. Tell the story of Hannibal's march as if you yourself had been a soldier in his army. 6. Why did Hannibal fail? 7. Why did Rome finally destroy the city of Carthage? 8. Why was it comparatively easy for Rome to conquer Greece? 9. Tell how the Roman armies fought. 10. Why did their victories not make the Romans happy? 11. Describe how the wealthy Romans lived. 12. Why did the poor give up their farms? 13. Why do you think the poor were not content in Rome? 14. Why did the Gracchi fail in their reforms? 15. Why do people remember the Gracchi? 16. What were the results of their work?
Suggested Readings. Tappan, The Story of the Roman People, 72-122; Kaufman, Our Young Folks' Plutarch, 330-343; Harding, The City of the Seven Hills, 125-165; Yonge, Young Folks' History of Rome, 151-202; Lang, The Red Book of Heroes, 43-94; Haaren and Poland, Famous Men of Rome; Guerber, The Story of the Romans.
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© 2000 by Lynn Waterman | <urn:uuid:45167f53-b5dd-4b32-824d-f00f0fc2c69b> | 3 | 3.390625 | 0.761053 | en | 0.987872 | http://www.usgennet.org/usa/topic/preservation/geo/europe/page13.htm |
Even before 1850 doctors had been advocating flannel underclothing, and by mid century vests or undershirts were worn. Hand- or machine-knitted natural wool, recommended by Dr Jaeger, was endorsed at the International Health Exhibition held in London in 1882. The woollen vest and underpants worn next to the skin might also be joined to form combinations, patented in 1862 but not commonly worn until the 1880s, when another innovation for men, the sleeping suit, began to replace the nightshirt. Originally from India, pyjamas (pajamas in the US) were of silk or wool in various colours, often striped, and by the late 1890s The Tailor and Cutter noted that 'The doom of the sleeping shirt is written'; but country folk and elderly or conservative men continued to wear nightshirts for a decade or so into the 20th century.
Victorian Web Victorian Dress Victorian Dress
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Big John Wants Your Reading List
Has the Attorney General Been Reading Franz Kafka?
During the congressional debate on John Ashcroft's USA Patriot Act, an American Civil Liberties Union fact sheet on the bill's assaults on the Bill of Rights revealed that Section 215 of the act "would grant FBI agents across the country breathtaking authority to obtain an order from the FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] court . . . requiring any person or business to produce any books, records, documents, or items."
This is now the law, and as I wrote last week, the FBI, armed with a warrant or subpoena from the FISA court, can demand from bookstores and libraries the names of books bought or borrowed by anyone suspected of involvement in "international terrorism" or "clandestine activities."
Once that information is requested by the FBI, a gag order is automatically imposed, prohibiting the bookstore owners or librarians from disclosing to any other person the fact that they have received an order to produce documents.
You can't call a newspaper or a radio or television station or your representatives in Congress. You can call a lawyer, but since you didn't have any advance warning that the judge was issuing the order, your attorney can't have objected to it in court. He or she will be hearing about it for the first time from you.
I have been told that at least three of these court orders have been served, but that's all the information I was given—not the names of the bookstores or the libraries. And I can't tell you my source.
Courts do infrequently impose gag orders preceding or during trials, and newspapers sometimes successfully fight them. But never in the history of the First Amendment has any suppression of speech been so sweeping and difficult to contest as this one by Ashcroft.
For example, if a judge places a gag order on the press in a case before the court, the press can print the fact that it's been silenced, and the public will know about it.
But now, under this provision of the USA Patriot Act, how does one track what's going on? How many bookstores and libraries will have their records seized? Are any of them bookstores or libraries that you frequent? Are these court orders part of FBI fishing expeditions, like Ashcroft's mass roundups of immigrants?
And if the FBI deepens its concerns about terrorist leanings after inspecting a suspect's reading list, how can everyone else know what books will make the FBI worry about us?
As one First Amendment lawyer said to me, "What makes this so chilling is that there is no input into the process." First there is the secrecy in which the subpoenas are obtained—with only the FBI present in court. Then then there is the gag order commanding the persons receiving the subpoenas to remain silent.
Has John Ashcroft been reading Franz Kafka lately?
As I often do when Americans' freedom to read is imperiled, I called Judith Krug, director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association. I've covered, as a reporter, many cases of library censorship, and almost invariably, the beleaguered librarians have already been on the phone to Judy Krug. She is the very incarnation of the author of the First Amendment, James Madison.
When some librarians—because of community pressure or their own political views, right or left—have wanted to keep books or other material from readers, Judy has fought them. She is also the leading opponent of any attempt to curb the use of the Internet in public libraries.
As she has often said, "How can anyone involved with libraries stand up and say, 'We are going to solve problems by withholding information'?"
I called to talk with her about the FBI's new power to force libraries to disclose the titles of books that certain people are reading—and she, of course, knew all about this part of the USA Patriot Act. And the rest of it, for that matter.
She told me how any library can ask for help—without breaking the gag order and revealing a FISA visit from the FBI. The librarian can simply call her at the American Library Association in Chicago and say, "I need to talk to a lawyer," and Judy will tell her or him how to contact a First Amendment attorney.
The reason the president and the attorney general have so far been able to trade civil liberties for security is they know from the polls that they can count on extensive support. Most Americans are indeed willing to forgo parts of the Bill of Rights for safety.
Only by getting more and more Americans to realize that they themselves—not just noncitizens—can be affected by these amputations of the Bill of Rights will there be a critical mass of resistance to what Ashcroft and Bush are doing to our liberties.
Accordingly, the press ought to awaken the citizenry not only to the FBI's harvesting lists of what "suspect" Americans read, but also to the judicial silencing of bookstores and libraries that are being compelled to betray the privacy and First Amendment rights of readers.
I would welcome any advice from civil liberties lawyers on ways to counter both this provision of the USA Patriot Act and the gag order, which is the sort of silencing you'd expect of China or Iraq. Remember the repeated assurances by the president, the attorney general, and the secretary of defense that any security measures taken in the war on terrorism would be within the bounds of the Constitution?
Whose Constitution?
Today, the public doesn't even know about this provision in the strangely titled USA Patriot Act. A lot of people are still afraid to get on a plane. Is Ashcroft fearful that if people find out about his interest in what they're reading, they'll be afraid to go to libraries and bookstores—and will start asking questions about what the hell he thinks he's doing? And where is Congress?
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The Dangers of Running at High Altitudes
Posted Nov 29 2009 8:30am
I am certain the more seasoned runners have their stories and years of experience of running races throughout the country. Well I am slowly collecting my own. As a check in point before the Vegas half next weekI decided to do the Sparks Turkey Trot on Thanksgiving. Just a 10k... no biggie right? I knew it was at a high altitude than my stomping grounds but I figured that Vegas was alsoso it could help with training...
Altitude Check
San JoseCA -- 85 feet above sea level
Las VegasNV -- 2,001 feet above sea level
SparksNV -- 4,494 feet above sea level
Yeah... so about that jump... it means there is no freakin air up there!!! Having lived in Wyoming for college at 7200 feetI was aware of the dangers of exercising at high altitudes. And I had taken all of the precautions I could. From flying in two days before. Hydrating. Slowing down my pace time.
I went into this 10k with the hope of beating my 10k time from July but recognizing that altitude might slow me down. My primary goal was to finish and chalk it up to training.
SPOILER: I did finish.
I felt fit that morning. I had done all of my prep worklaid out my new long sleeve tech tee and other gear the night before. I woke up and had my normal on the road running brekkie (half a larabar since I was full at half). I had my caffeinated cliff shot 15 minutes before start since I have issues drinking coffee the morning of the race. And I had packed some Luna Moons just in case.
My sister was running her first 10k ever. She is a high school cheerleader and runs a couple miles for training and had a pretty quick time but had never gone 6.2 before. We talked about the altitude and what is might mean for heralthough she lacked the asthma and other medical issues I have (lucky duck!). She understood she should slow down if she got light headed or started wheezing (which to her translated into: play with the dogs along the trail as her rest break!).
We were in the middle of the pack when the race started. There was also a 2 mile walk/run that started in the wave after us. It didn't take me long to figure out that despite the race not having a pace or sweep timethe slower folks were going for the two miler. How did I figure that out? While I can normally go for 8 minutes without breaking for a walkI could barely breathe after 3. So I waved my sister on and recognized I was not going to be the fastest person on the course. And then proceeded to watch most of the city of Sparks pass me by.
At mile two there was a loop around where you could pass the people in front of you and then pass those behind you. I waved at my sister when she passed meand I am willing to admit I was a touch jealous. I was even more frustrated when I saw only a handful of people behind me.
But I reminded myself that this race wasn't about time but rather endurance. Between miles 3 and 4 I traded places with some race walkers as I continued to hold to my revised walk/run intervals. At mile 4the race walkers passed me as I stopped at the water station to recover from the beginning of what I should have recognized as an asthma attack. I began coughing and wheezing something pretty bad.
I saw an 8 year old pass me walking and whimpering. I caught up with him and we chatted for a bit about how he wanted to be done and his family was all ahead of him. We agreed we would try jogging together for a whole minute and then we would take a walking break. One of my favorite things to do is motivate othersso motivating the kid to finish renewed my energy. Even if he didn't want to run again after that walk break and waved me on.
The last 1.75 miles was around a lake. A lake where everyone else was hanging out because they were done. I am pretty sure I was the last one who was waved through to finish the race because when I finally got around that lake I saw the last couple folks (including the 8 year old and his brother) being waved straight to the finish.
In the last .2 miles my chest got tighter and breathing got harder but this is the part of the race where people are all watching. I was getting words of encouragement from everyone and I didn't want to walk it. But I did walk part of it before jetting for the finish line.
I crossed it and checked my time but forgot to stop my watch. It was 1:30:? (15?30?45? it was one of those three!) and my previous 10k PR at sea level was 1:29:25. Yes... I am a slowpoke. But better slow than not at all!
I won't know what my actual time was from my start but I look forward to seeing the clock time when the results get published. Why did I miss my time?
I collapsed on the street corner while having an acute asthma attack. My right lung felt like a solid rock and I couldn't take in any air. I asked for a medic and was told there wasn't one at the race site. People went off to look for a race organizer while I attempted to use my inhaler but I couldn't even intake enough oxygen to use my inhaler. I yelled out to ask for oxygen but I don't know if anyone was even paying attention. I got dizzier and the rest of my chest clutched up. Every intake of oxygen got to the back of my throat and caused me to wheeze and hack. My mom and sister finally got to me and asked if anyone had called 911. No one had. By the time my family was able to figure out what was going on and was about to call 911my chest had relaxed a bit and I was able to intake oxygen. I convinced my mom that at this pointan ambulance wasn't necessary and I would let her know if I needed to go to the hospital. I managed to get in a dosage from my rescue inhaler and started to feel betterso despite wheezing and some soreness in my chestI figured I was fine. (I did go see a doctor on Friday and aside from some lung irritationI really am fine now).
So running at a higher altitude can be dangerous. And something every runner should take into consideration if they don't already. Don't have asthma? My sister who is healthy was wheezing and had minor chest tightness as well. She felt light-headed and dizzy towards the finish and had to rest after finishing.
I will compete the 13.1 miles next weekendand while the altitude is not as high as SparksI will recognize that I might need to take more walk breaks than I had planned. Luckilythe Rock and Roll organization has a medic station at almost every mileso what happened at the finish line of my 10k shouldn't happen again!
(Although in the end... even if my finish was 1:30:45... I still only missed my PR by 1:20!!!)
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There are so many people that for one reason or the other, are sad, alone, and spend many nights in their homes, behind locked doors, and in need of comfort. We walk the streets and might meet a homeless person, his only bed a piece of cardboard, spread out on the hard concrete. He might have lost his family, or lost his home, or his job, and yet we walk by ignoring him, instead of attempting to comfort him. There are just as many sad people, as there are happy people, and yet, we tend to ignore the sad, and team up with the happy.
1. 1
Stop and befriend someone you come across, who is crying, or obviously in need of comfort, and friendship. Offer a helping hand,have an open mind and listen. Do not respond, until they have finished talking. Think about your response, what you might say can upset the person even more so. Focus on the persons needs. Remember that you can leave a lasting impression on anyone, especially those who are in need of comfort. Trying to fix things for others can be very dis-empowering.
2. Comfort Someone Who Is Sad Step 2.jpg
Offer to help, ask them how, and place a hand on their shoulder. This one simple gesture could allow them to feel less alone, but be aware that touching needs to be dealt with carefully and best done only if invited to do so or checking that it is alright first.
3. Comfort Someone Who Is Sad Step 3.jpg
Be understanding and compassionate. Never judge them or blame them, even if you feel they should be. Maybe give them a bear hug.
4. Comfort Someone Who Is Sad Step 4.jpg
Think of yourself, if you were in their place. Perhaps you will meet them in the hospital waiting room. Their loved one might have been in a bad accident, and they might be waiting alone. Sit next to them. Ask them what happened. When a person is in a desperate need of comfort reassure them to keep hope and faith in their hearts. Other times a person can cry uncontrollably, the best thing to do in a case like this is divert their attention to something else. This will give them time to calm down and tell you what their problem is. Don't be afraid to offer comfort. Remember that the only difference in being a good Samaritan is acting when no one else will. When you are done comforting your friend, parent, sibling, kids, spouse, or a complete total stranger remind them that they have made a new friend or that you will always be there to give them an ear and an open heart when ever they need it.
5. Comfort Someone Who Is Sad Step 5.jpg
Before you leave, ask them if there is anything else you can do or if there's anything else they need to talk about. If they say no, say, "Come here, don't worry, I'm here for you if you need me." BUT, keep your word and if they need to talk even in the middle of the night, be there for them, be supportive, listen, and do not act annoyed with them, or complain about their needing you.
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• Try to have empathy and to feel their pain.
• And, of course, listen, really listen to their words, the meaning behind them.
• Be careful when approaching someone living on the streets. Not all strangers welcome an approach.
• Allow the person some time alone, especially when a relative has just died. It's not every day that you lose someone. Those who have, will need time to get over it. It will affect them throughout their life, but they will get back together.
• Offer a smile of understanding, to those who seem to be left alone. A smile will help them know that you care.
• Spend time with them, as much as they need, or make time for them, as long as 2 or 3 hours if you think they will need it.
• Don't try to come up with solutions or advice for someone who is sad. Quietly listen to them.
• Asking others about their personal problems, might entice them. If they look as if they prefer to be alone, then do not approach them. Some people like to be alone when they are sad, and that's okay. If that's the case, have to just let them work it out by themselves.
• Make them laugh.
• Tell them that there's always help, no matter what the situation.
• Tell funny jokes and give them candy
• If you can sing, sing them a nice song.
• NEVER force someone to tell you what is wrong, or get upset with them for not telling you. When they're ready to tell you, they will. You need to understand that they may need some privacy, and respect them enough to let them have it.
• Do not judge, or over-evaluate.
• If they don't want your help at the moment, don't give it to them. They might get mad, on top of upset.
• More often than not, they just need a sympathetic ear. Don't try to offer advice or your opinion, or try to fix it for them. Just be there, be supportive, be compassionate, sensitive to their feelings and emotions, be sympathetic, and empathetic. Even cry with them, do not be afraid to feel their pain and cry with them. Sometimes it helps them feel better to know someone cares, is there, understands, and feels their pain. But do not try to force yourself or them to cry.
• Some people have personal space issues, so if it's a person you don't know that well, ask before you hug them.
• If anyone is suicidal, tell an adult or call for help IMMEDIATLEY!
Things You'll Need
• Love
• Compassion
• Sympathy
• Empathy
• Concern
• Courage
Article Info
Categories: Maintaining Relationships
In other languages:
Español: Cómo consolar a alguien que está triste, Italiano: Come Consolare Qualcuno Che è Triste, Português: Como Consolar Alguém Que Está Triste, Русский: успокоить того, кому грустно
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Noun: sable sey-bul
1. An artist's brush made of sable hairs
- sable brush, sable's hair pencil
2. The expensive dark brown fur of the marten
3. A very dark black
- coal black, ebony, jet black, pitch black, soot black
4. A scarf (or trimming) made of sable
5. Marten of northern Asian forests having luxuriant dark brown fur
- Martes zibellina
Adjective: sable sey-bul
1. Of a dark somewhat brownish black
Derived forms: sables
See also: achromatic, neutral
Type of: black, blackness, brush, fur, inkiness, marten, marten cat, pelt, scarf
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How Europe Can Create Jobs
The case study of Spain's labor market.
Last week Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy proposed his fourth round of spending cuts and tax hikes since taking office in December. He is following the IMF-Brussels orthodoxy, but he'd do better if he reversed the labor policies that have led to a 24% jobless rate.
Consider a few examples:
• After Cyprus, Spain ties with Malta for the most public holidays (14) in Europe. The Spanish Workers' Statute also guarantees 22 days of paid vacation annually, 15 days to get married and two to four days when anyone in an employee's family has a wedding, birth, hospitalization or death.
Mr. Rajoy has tried, with only moderate success, to tweak the public-holiday schedule and discourage "bridge" weeks—when, say, the Assumption of Mary falls on Wednesday and your entire staff takes off Thursday and Friday too. But if Mr. Rajoy wants a reform that would also be popular, why not ditch the statute's clause that bars employees from trading vacation time for extra pay? If Spaniards could earn greater rewards for taking fewer holidays, they might eventually want to scrap state-mandated vacations.
• Sick employees can get most or all of their wages for 18 consecutive months if they have a doctor's note. An employer could opt to fire chronically ill employees—and pay up to 24 months of guaranteed severance. That's excessive. Then again, the mandatory national insurance to cover sick wages, severance pay, health care and so forth takes 39.9% from the gross average Spanish wage.
Mr. Rajoy has trimmed unemployment benefits and pledged to reduce compulsory "social contributions" by one percentage point next year and another in 2014. He could do much better by letting Spaniards opt out of some entitlements entirely, such as paternity pay or child-care coverage. Spain would be a far better place to work and hire if its laborers and businesses could choose how to spend more of what they earn.
• Spain's 52% youth unemployment remains the subject of countless government training programs and tax exemptions for businesses hiring those under age 30. The programs don't work but they are expensive.
A free alternative: Repeal the Workers' Statute clauses that forbid most trainees and apprentices from earning less than 60% of the wages of full employees and from working more than 85% of a regular shift. It's harder to hire young people if you know you'll get much less work out of them for not much less pay.
Mr. Rajoy could also expand the one-year period during which businesses may dismiss new employees without severance. This only applies to firms with fewer than 50 workers, which helps explain why 99% of Spanish companies have no more than 49 employees of any age.
• Once a Spanish business reaches 50 employees, its workers must also elect five workplace reps to bargain on wages and conditions. These delegates must each receive at least 15 paid hours off monthly for their duties, and the quotas rise as companies grow. By the time a business hires its 751st staffer, it must have at least 21 workplace reps, each getting a minimum of 40 paid hours off per month.
Eliminating these costly sops and letting workers negotiate individually would no doubt provoke a declaration of war from labor bosses. So what? Fewer than 16% of Spaniards today opt to unionize, and far fewer than that join in already-frequent union demonstrations.
• Spain taxes corporate profits up to €300,000 at a 20% rate for companies with 25 or fewer workers. The rate goes to 25% once profits exceed €300,000 or headcount hits 26, whichever comes first. Companies with profits of more than €300,000 and more than 25 workers are taxed at 30%. Deductions are available for businesses that invest in the "cultural interest," operate in Spain's North African territories, hire women, etc.
A flat rate, closer to 20% than 30%, would expand Spain's tax base by eliminating the marginal tax on 26th hires. If Madrid closed its loopholes, it could increase revenues considerably by making avoidance, evasion and fraud more trouble than they're worth.
We could go on. The Spanish labor market has been protected, regulated, mandated and taxed nearly to death. Mr. Rajoy won the election by hammering "unbearable and unacceptable" unemployment—which was lower than it is now. But after eight months and timid reforms, the Prime Minister says he sees nothing more his government can do to get Spain working. If that's true, he might as well nominate himself for unemployment.
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Is Android a stolen product?
Summary:Jobs: "I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this."
Excerpts of the upcoming Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson are doing the rounds, and it's all fascinating stuff. But there's one but that I keep coming back to, and that is what Steve Jobs thought of Google's Android mobile operating system.
It's clear that Jobs really didn't like Android:
"I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank [at the time ... this has grown massively since], to right this wrong. I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this."
In a meeting in March of 2010 with Eric Schmidt, then Google's chief executive, at a cafe in Palo Alto, California, Jobs made it clear he wasn't interested in settling lawsuits:
And it's this mindset that has led to the seemingly endless patent infringement lawsuits between Apple and Android device makers. As I've pointed out before, Apple doesn't need the hassle of scrabbling for nickels and dimes in patent loot (like Microsoft is doing) because the company already has more cash than it knows what to do with. Apple's not litigating for money, it's doing so to keep the iPhone unique.
The areas of conflict between Apple and Android are well known and include features such as numbers and addresses being turned into clickable links, icons on a touch screen and the use of the pinching gesture for resizing.
But is it 'stealing'?
[UPDATE: Some readers have asked for my opinion here (so they can flame me ... LOL!). Honestly, I don't know. The iPhone was certainly revolutionary in its time in that it was a complete touchscreen device, and since then hundreds of clones have sprung up. But patents are tough to interpret and it is hard to distinguish between inspiration and rip-off. Some aspects of Android, based on my reading of patents, certainly do seem to have stolen from the iPhone. But patents are notoriously complex and ultimately these issues have to be decided by a court.]
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Is Coalition's NBN endgame up in the air?
Summary:It's still not clear just how the Coalition plans to meet its difficult FttN NBN goals. But as new information about its operating parameters continues to emerge, it's worth considering one way it might make everything work.
With his draft strategic review finally in hand, Malcolm Turnbull will now be planning the Coalition's next moves on the NBN very carefully. By connecting the dots, however, it's becoming increasingly possible to figure out just what he might be planning – and it ain't pretty.
Somewhat out of character, this time I mean that literally, and not figuratively.
Could this be the new home of the Coalition's FttN NBN?
Clues come from the recent proposal by Tasmania's Labor premier Lara Giddings, who recently lodged a proposal with the Commonwealth government that it roll out the fibre-optic cables supporting the fibre-to-the-node (FttN) network across existing telephone poles around the state.
It's an approach that has been tried before, successfully, in the NBN's pilot trials in Townsville. Indeed, Labor's original NBN Co plan included plans for around 25 percent of the cables to be strung up this way – although under the previous Labor government NBN Co struggled to resolve an impasse with New South Wales' Liberal government over the price of such access.
Those with slightly longer memories will remember the last major rollout of cables across power lines, when Telstra and Optus chased each other through the suburbs stringing hybrid fibre-coax cables as they went their merry way. This rollout was widely opposed by citizen action groups, which argued vociferously that the cables were unsightly intrusions of modernity into bucolic lives where telephone poles and wires were... well, they were already everywhere.
But that's a minor technical detail. The upshot is that the rollouts were eventually stopped, neighbours on network footprint boundaries had to visit each other to get access to premium TV channels, and Telstra eventually bludgeoned Optus into a pay-TV stupour.
Turnbull's real trick
Reviving the overhead rollout approach would facilitate the delivery of the fibre part of the Coalition's FttN policy – and do so in such a way that the fibre-connected nodes could literally be serviced by broadband from Heaven. So to speak.
More importantly, it would also reduce the Coalition's reliance on underground Telstra cabling ducts – already leased from the government for a tidy $11 billion and change –so that the FttN rollout could proceed more quickly and reach more properties than if the project had to continue being shoved through asbestos-riddled Telstra ducts.
Put it all together his is where it may very well all be coming together to justify Turnbull's long-held (and often-questioned) assertion that the government could access Telstra's entire copper network at no additional cost.
The only way that would be possible would be if the government could renegotiate an arrangement that would substantially reduce the actual amount of duct required – such as the almost ubiquitous use of overhead lines.
As mentioned above, Labor struggled with this – but Australia's current red-washed political landscape means the Coalition government should find state governments far more receptive to allowing NBN Co to string up its fibre on their poles.
Doing so would give the government credit in the bank, so to speak, that it could then use to fund the purchase or leasing of Telstra's copper access network (CAN). Telstra hasn't yet fixed an asking price on the value of that network, but I'd bet that with a bit of cajoling and the promise of a looser regulatory environment Turnbull might be able to get Telstra CEO David Thodey to do exactly what he wants.
If this is Turnbull's endgame, it is hardly going to be an easy innings. People power has a way of interfering with things like overhead rollouts, although there's no telling whether a politically-fatigued public would even be able to muster the grassroots willpower to make a dent in the policy.
Then there are issues such as the underlying financial position of any FttN rollout, which is becoming more and more challenging every day given the steady stream of revelations from the recent leak of NBN Co documents.
Those documents have highlighted a range of issues facing the project, including "high risk" IT systems redevelopment ; the recommendation that the rollout be completed in one go and not two as the Coalition is currently planning; and challenges around the deployment of FttN cabinets and ramping up skills.
Then again, Turnbull may have an entirely different plan up his hand; all will only become clear when the findings of his Strategic Review are published. Given the potential for the Senate to force its publication, it may not be long.
What do you think? Would it work? Should it?
Topics: NBN, Broadband, Government : AU
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Neuroenergetics: Modeling of brain cell metabolic phenotypes
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Background: Brain cells were shown to rely on two energy subtrates to sustain their activity: glucose and lactate. Each of these substrates are taken up by brain cells via specific transporters and metabolized in classical biochemical pathways. The critical question remains: Between metabolism and transport, what is the limiting step for the utilization of each energy substrate under resting vs. activated condition?
Goal: The goal of the project is to model different brain cell metabolic phenotypes (neuron vs astrocyte) in order to determine the biochemical characteristics specific to each cell type. Also, we want to investigate whether transport of the main energy substrates for the brain, glucose and lactate, can become rate-limiting following an increase in cerebral activity.
Mathematical tools: The student will learn to use a mathematical software (Matlab) in order to conduct simulations from a given set of parameters and equations derived from Michaelis-Menten kinetics.
Biological or Medical aspects: The “biology supervisor” will provide background of the main aspects related to brain energy metabolism and Michaelis-Menten kinetics.
Supervisors: Luc Pellerin & Aitana Morton de Lachapelle
Students: tba
1. Barros LF, Porras OH, and Bittner CX. Why glucose transport in the brain matters for PET. Trends Neurosci 2005 Mar; 28(3) 117-9. doi:10.1016/j.tins.2005.01.002 pmid:15749163. PubMed HubMed [barros]
Presentation : Media:Presentation_neuroenergetics.ppt
Intermediate students presentation : Media:Présentation_intermédiaire_neuro2010.ppt
(Project in Course: "Solving Biological Problems that require Math") | <urn:uuid:fade1b02-d8ea-4004-a177-3ee1a248e943> | 2 | 1.773438 | 0.728135 | en | 0.751748 | http://www2.unil.ch/cbg/index.php?title=Neuroenergetics:_Modeling_of_brain_cell_metabolic_phenotypes |
Status: Common, Native Resident
(Mustela frenata)
The long-tailed weasel belongs to the Mustelid family, a group of mammals known for their long bodies, short legs, and strong scent glands. The Latin name is Mustela frenata refers to a bridle-like mask that is characteristic of weasel
populations in the southern United States, but lacking in South Dakota weasels. The Lakota word for weasel is (h)itunkasan. In summer the long-tailed weasel is brown with white underparts and brownish feet. The tail, the longest of any North American weasel, is brown with a black tip. This black tip confuses predators into mistaking the tail for the head, thereby drawing the focus of an attack away from the vulnerable portion of the body. During the winter, the weasel changes from the brown summer color to entirely white, except for the black of it's eyes, nose and tip of the tail. The color change in the weasels occurs gradually from early October to early December and then again from February to late April. These changes seem to be genetically controlled, not environmentally influenced. Experiments have shown that if a weasel from the northern regions is moved to the south, its coat will continue to change color according to the northern seasons
The body of the long-tailed weasel is long, slender, and sinuous, having a long tail and short legs. They range from 11 to 22
inches (28-56 cm) in length with the tail measuring an additional 3 to 6 inches (8-15 cm). The long-tailed weasel weighs
between 3 and 9 ounces (85-267 g) with males being about twice as large as the females. The weasel has between 28 and 38
teeth with long, sharp canines that it uses to deal the killing blow to a victim with a sharp bite to the back of the neck.
Long-tailed weasels range across much of the United States, southwestern Canada, and as far south as northern South
America. In South Dakota the species is found throughout the state. in 3 recognizable subspecies: M.f. alleni is the smallest
in size and is endemic to the Black Hills; M.f. spadix is the darkest in color and is found only in the eastern one-fourth of the state; and M.f. longicauda , the most common and largest in size, occupies the remaining areas in the state. The long-tailed
weasel shows a preference for open areas covered with brush or tall grass near water. Weasels live in dens made from
hollow logs, tree stumps, among rock piles, or in burrows that it has taken over by killing the former occupants.
Natural History
The long-tailed weasel is an aggressive carnivore, preying primarily on mice, but also attacking animals much larger than
itself. Prey species include rabbits, chipmunks, shrews, rats, snakes, frogs, and birds, especially poultry. Weasels have even
been know to attack humans when being handled or when cornered. Not only is this species of weasel aggressive, but it
displays great agility and determination. In order to capture a squirrel, weasels have been known to climb 20 feet (6 m) up a
The weasel is prone to violent killing sprees. Weasels are notorious for killing entire coops of chickens. The killing instinct
in the weasel is thought to be brought on by the smell of blood. Nothing that is injured and in its vicinity is safe from attack.
Siblings and even their own young can be killed and eaten. It is a common misconception that weasels will suck the blood
out of its victims. This fabled ability stems from the fact that weasels being seen with blood on their snout after they have
The long and slender body of the weasel allows it to move, almost flow, over terrain. This body design makes it an effective
predator, able to follow its prey into the narrow tunnels of its den. Sometimes the weasel takes over the den of its prey and
will line the den with the fur of its victim. Long-tailed weasels can swim and climb quite effectively, but not with the
proficiency of its cousins the ermine and the fisher. Because of its slender body style, the weasel has a high metabolic rate.
In winter months it will use almost half of the food that it eats to maintain body heat. Weasels at rest will coil up with the
head to tail in the shape of a circle in order to conserve heat.
Female long-tailed weasels reach sexual maturity at 3 to 4 months of age, while males usually don't reach maturity until their
second year. Weasels may drag their rumps during mating season. This is thought to be a way of leaving scent trails for
members of the opposite sex. Males also use this scent to declare their territory to other males. Long-tailed weasels usually
breed in July or August and show the ability to delay the implantation of the embryo into the uterus for about 7 months after
fertilization. This delay is thought to be a adaptation to giving birth when conditions are at their most favorable. Litters, from
1 to 10 pups, are born in underground nests that are lined with rabbit or rodent fur. The young are born without fur and are
essentially blind. The nest is part of an elaborate underground den that has several branches, some serving as latrines and
others as food storage areas. The pups do not remain with the mother long. At 7 to 8 weeks, the male pups are already larger
than their mother and the young leave the den not long after.
Weasels do not pose a serious threat to humans other than threatening the poultry industry. Weasels are in fact a benefit in
that they destroy much of the rodent population that harms crops
Conservation Measures
Weasels are not considered an endangered species since they are found throughout the North American continent. The main
threats to weasels are often predators such as the gray fox, red fox, coyotes, hawks, large snakes and owls. Man is the
weasel's greatest enemy as weasels are taken for their pelts, even though the fur itself is not of great value.
Canines - the eye teeth found next to the incisors.
Carnivore - those animals that primarily eat meat.
Endemic - known only from a particular locality.
Subspecies - is a population of a species that is physically or behaviorly different from other populations of the species but
still capable of interbreeding with them.
Terrestrial - living on land.
Forsyth, Adrian, 1985. Mammals of the American North. Camden House Publishing Ltd. Toronto,
Nowak, Ronald M., 1991. Walkers Mammals of the World. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD.
Grzimek, H.C. Bernard, 1975. Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia, Vol 12 (Mammals III). Van Nostrand and Reinhold
Company New York.
Whitaker, John O., 1980. The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mammals. Alfred A. Knopf Inc.
Written by:
Casey Dreis, biology student, Northern State University, Aberdeen, SD. 1997.
Illustrated by:
Kathy Colavitti, independent artist, Green Bay, WI.
Reviewed by:
Doug Bucklund, Resource Biologist, S.D. Department fo Game, Fish, and Parks, Pierre, SD.
Publication of the Long-tailed Weasel fact sheet was funded by the South Dakota Department of Game, Fish and Parks,
Division of Wildlife, Pierre, SD. | <urn:uuid:ebeb5f15-af28-4d28-8858-578027be191c> | 4 | 3.8125 | 0.054215 | en | 0.944275 | http://www3.northern.edu/natsource/MAMMALS/Longta1.htm |
Railroad snow plow trains in heavy snow - videos
Home » Online videos » Railroad snow plow trains in heavy snow - videos
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Railroad snow plow trains in heavy snow - videos
This is something I had never seen before a snow plow train. Its interesting to see that the huge power of the train is still unable to stop it from getting stuck.
I wonder what they would do next?
Dig it out?
Looking down the track it seems that the snow was that deep for a long distance. I guess they need a bigger engine. :)
Was that a turbine engine? It sounded like a jet engine.
This site has a commentary on the video http://www.dropshots.com/ge...
Here's another railroad snow plow. Its an impressive sight up close.
And a third
The snow wave is big enough to go over that telephone pole.
snowplow-train.jpg - 3.94kb
By netchicken: posted on 15-12-2007
yes this is rare to see because the tains are not timed and dont stop unless they need fuel or to swich out drivers. And on the one where the train gets stuck, the reason the engine sounded like a jet engine was because the metal wheels where sliding on the metal track. And you can do 1 of 2 tings. You could dig it out(they might of did) or you can call for 2 or 3 more engines and hook them all together and pull it out but then they would use all of the engines to try to go through all that snow
By shanetankdolan: posted on 4-1-2008
You could dig it out and latch on with several power units and tow it backward and try and clear the snow again...
Or you could sneak up on it from the other direction with a rail snow blower. I've never seen one personally but they are used in the mountains of British Columbia when my Dad was young. I've seen some old photos that are really spectacular with snow being launched a long, long way and high. The photo looked like the locomotive was completely in a trough as high or higher than it was.
I've never seen a plow like the one on the diesel-electric in the video. That was uber-impressive!
Here's a historic rail site that kept a list of the remaining rotary plows in North America up until 1998 by Andrew Toppan and picture of an older retired one in BC.
By AccessGranted: posted on 7-1-2008
Wow thats some rotary fan!
I guess the brute power of modern locos obviate the need for rotary systems, it would be neat to see running. I imagine it would be slower at clearing the snow than the plow system.
By netchicken: posted on 7-1-2008
Much slower I would think than edge plows... some of the quotes I've seen are that these old 12 foot swath rotaries were 3000HP and spun at 150RPM. Some eye candy!
Source: NE Railfan
Source: NE Railfan
EDIT: To append non-working link. http://www.hazegray.org/rai...
Source: hazegray.org
It would seem that jet-melters and blowers are now the norm when a plow won't cut it... there are still a few rotary plows
A large steam rotary chews big snow - circa 1910
Source: Collections Canada, a federal government of Canada heritage site.
I'm still looking for a picture similar to one I saw years ago... it was B+W and the head-end of the rotary was a good as buried and snow was flying hundreds of feet... it was in a rock cut and the snow was basically a trench taller than the locomotive.
Oh, and just for fun Collections Canada (a federally funded heritage site) has some nifty UFO links!!!!
A URL for a search that I did that leads to some official government documents... I will look more later. RG-77 (Records Group 77) and some others are of interest.
http://search-recherche.collectionscanada.ca/fed/searchResults.jsp?SourceQuery=&ResultCount=5&PageNum=1&MaxDocs=-1&SortSpec=score+de sc&Language=eng&Sources=amicus&Sources=mikan&Sources=web&QueryText=UFO
By AccessGranted: posted on 8-1-2008
The Rotary Snow Plow. See how this snow clearing beast clears the tracks from snow and ice in the Winter over Donner Pass. This promo is a preview for what is to come in a 1+ hour documentary program on DVD from BA Productions
rotary-snow-plow.jpg - 7.03kb
By netchicken: posted on 4-1-2011
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Churchill stood strong against tyranny
You’re the head of government of an island nation that sits about 25 miles off the coast of a continent that’s been overrun by one of history’s most despicable tyrants.
That tyrant then sets his sights on your small, but resolute nation. The despot believes with all that passes for his heart that if he conquers your nation, the rest of the world will fall. It will be his for the taking.
The tyrant then launches an aerial blitz against your nation, hoping to bomb your people into submission. The planes keep flying over and dropping their fiery ordnance on your people.
What do you do? How do you react? How do you fend off the threat?
You do what British Prime Minister Winston Churchill did. You take to the radio airwaves and you offer stirring words of comfort amid tragedy and you tell the world that you will do whatever it takes — at whatever cost — to protect your nation against the aggressors.
“Churchill: The Lion’s Roar” airs Sunday at 7 p.m. on KACV-TV. It is the second of a three-part PBS series chronicling the life and times of the great British statesman.
The Battle of Britain was fought in the air over Great Britain. The German air corps, the Luftwaffe, was thought to be invincible. It had more planes and more pilots than the British Royal Air Force that was called on to defend the British Isles. The RAF rose to the challenge. Its pilots simply outmaneuvered, outflew and outfought their enemy.
Churchill lauded his country’s air corps, saying that humankind never had “owed so much to so few.”
The RAF pilots who fended off the Nazis’ aerial onslaught helped turn the tide of World War II. They bought the British time — when the Brits were fighting the Nazi war machine virtually alone. The Nazis did attack the Soviet Union in June 1941, never bargaining on the terrible cost in human lives that campaign would bring to them. The Red Army — with help from the severe Russian winter weather — eventually would turn the Nazis back.
And another thing happened to lend aid to the Allies battling Adolf Hitler’s war machine: The Japanese attacked the United States Navy at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, an act that brought the overpowering industrial and military might of the United States into the worldwide conflict.
“Churchill: The Lion’s Roar” will walk KACV-TV viewers through those dark days and will offer clear and convincing proof — as if it’s needed — of Winston Churchill’s place among the pantheon of world leaders.
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Olaworks, Inc. is a Korean computer vision company that creates face and object recognition technology. Olaworks' products include camera-based applications for mobile devices and a visual search platform called ScanSearch. In addition to recognition, the company's technologies perform detailed image and video annotation, such as indexing and tagging. Olaworks was founded in 2006 and currently holds more than 60 patents.
When Olaworks began developing its architecture, the company estimated that it would need to acquire 100 servers at a cost of approximately $500,000, with associated maintenance and operating fees of $10,000 per month.The company would also need to hire at least three system administrators to help maintain the servers. Instead of making such a large investment in hardware and staff, the company turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Olaworks' large-scale image recognition system can register billions of images and recognize an individual image within one second. The AWS-based infrastructure supporting this impressive system consists of one hundred Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, rather than 100 physical servers. Olaworks' Amazon EC2 instances use the Auto Scaling feature to help manage unpredictable usage increases and decreases.
To house its vast amount of image files and associated data, the company uses Amazon's highly-scalable storage option, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), as well as Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), which provides block level storage volumes for individual Amazon EC2 instances.
Amazon's flexible, non-relational data store, Amazon SimpleDB, manages Olaworks' annotation data. This collection of data is particularly complex because different categories require unique fields of information, such as Title and Author fields for an image of a book, and Actor and Producer fields for a movie clip. Kim Tae-hoon, Olaworks' Chief Scientist, explains, "It is well known that efficiently developing a system for storing and retrieving data with various fields is not easy. However, we achieved this by simply using Amazon SimpleDB, which provides a way to handle this type of data while still guaranteeing a high level of performance."
When Olaworks' engineers develop a new feature, they must test with millions of images before implementation. If the company relied on a small collection of physical servers as a pre-production environment, such testing could take several days. However, the company conducts its testing in Amazon Elastic MapReduce in just a few hours. Amazon Elastic MapReduce's Hadoop framework runs on Amazon EC2 instances and provides instant capacity for such data-intense computing.
Not only does Olaworks credit Amazon Elastic MapReduce with helping to decrease its testing time, the service allows the company to introduce a wider variety of features while improving the core technology. Kim Tae-hoon says, "Because of the Amazon Elastic MapReduce, we can try more features and maximize the performance of our image recognition."
Olaworks still maintains a number of applications in a traditional datacenter. The company's developers spend roughly ten percent of their time maintaining these physical servers. Olaworks believes this is an unnecessary burden and is in the process of moving its entire system to AWS.
Olaworks estimates that AWS will help the company save $650,000 in the near term, with the potential to save millions more in coming years. This savings, paired with the stability of AWS, are key ingredients in the development of exciting new recognition technologies. Kim Tae-hoon says, "Instead of focusing our attention on the reliability of our system, AWS helps us focus on accelerating the improvement of its performance and quality."
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Why do we require students to take history/social studies?
Why do I have to take history and social studies?
Why do I have to take history/social studies? That is a mantra that many of my students repeat, over and over. Of course, I tell them that those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it. I tell them that I am counting on them to become an educated person, so that they know the context of things, and the warning signs. With all that has been happening around the world in the past few weeks, months, and years, that historical context has become even more important.
There is a video circulating around FaceBook that really drives that point home. Save this post on your computer so that as you make your way through world history courses, you can use the video to help you visualize what happened over time. It is all connected. It all has implications. Never forget that. You see, by knowing how we have traveled through time as a human race, we begin to understand that decisions, events, and actions are not as random as we think. Knowing the connections and potential outcomes can help to make us more mindful. Mindfulness can bring true progress.
Take a look at the video. As we journey through the continuing developments in Russia, Syria, and more, stay aware and mindful!
About Kate Kresse
This entry was posted in education and career, politics and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.
2 Responses to Why do we require students to take history/social studies?
1. Kate, I’ve been substitute teaching at a Christian school and I’ll tell you what. Even though my degree is in English and I enjoy teaching those classes, I’ve come to really enjoy subbing in the history/social studies and American Government classes as well. Students today need to be reminded to look outside of their own little bubbles of life.
• Kate Kresse says:
oh they need that so very much. {I LOVE teaching government/civics—to inspire them to be part of the process, part of the voters, part of the ones keeping an eye on the body politic….}.
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Monday Nov 15, 2010
Having my secured cake and Cloning it too (aka Encryption + Dedup with ZFS)
The main goal of encryption is to make the (presumably sensitive) cleartext data indistinguishable from random data. Good file system encryption usually aims to have the same plaintext encrypt to different ciphertext at least when written at a different "location" even if the same key is used. One way to achieve that is that the initialisation vector (IV) is some how derived from where the blocks of the files are stored on disk. In this respect the encryption support in ZFS is no different, by default we derive the IV from a combination of what dataset / object the block is for and also when (its transaction) written. This means that the same block of plaintext data written to a different file in the same filesystem will get a different IV and thus different ciphertext. Since ZFS is copy-on-write and we use the transaction identifier it also means that if we "overwrite" the same block of a file at a later time it still ends up having a different IV and thus will be different ciphertext. Each encrypted dataset in ZFS has a different set of data encryption keys (see my earlier post on assured delete for more details on that), so there we change the IV and the encryption key so have a really high level of confidence of getting different ciphertext when written to different datasets.
The goal of deduplication in storage is to coalesce matching disk blocks into a smaller number of copies (ideally 1, but in ZFS that nunber depends on the value of the copies property on the dataset and the pool wide dedupditto property so it could be more than 1). Given the above description of how we do encryption it would seem that encryption and deduplication are fundamentally at odds with each other - and usually that is true.
When we write a block to disk in ZFS it goes through the ZIO pipeline and in doing so a number of transforms are optionally applied to the data: compress -> encryption -> checksum -> dedup -> raid.
The deduplication step uses the checksums of the blocks to find suitable matches. This means it is acting on the already compressed and encrypted data. Also in ZFS deduplication matches are searched for in all datasets in the pool with dedup=on.
So we have very little chance of getting any deduplication hits with encrypted datasets because of how the IV is generated and the fact that each dataset has its own set of encryption keys. In fact not getting hits with deduplication is actually a good test that we are using different keys and IVs and thus getting different ciphertext for the same plaintext.
So encryption=on + dedup=on is pointless, right ?
Not so with ZFS, I wasn't happy about giving up on deduplication for encrypted datasets, so we found a solution, it has some restrictions but I think they are reasonable and realistic ones.
Within what I'll call a "clone family", ie all datasets are clones of the same original dataset or are clones of those clones, we would be sharing data encryption keys in the default case, because they share data (again see my earlier post on assured delete for info on the data encryption keys). So I found a method of generating the IV such that within the "clone family" we will get dedup hits for the same plaintext. For this to work you must not run 'zfs key -K' on any of the clones and you must not pass '-K' to 'zfs clone' when you create your clones. Note that dedup does not apply to child datasets only to the snapshots/clones, and by that I mean it doesn't break you just won't get deduplication matches.
So no it isn't pointless and whats more for some configurations it will actually work really well. A common use case for a configuration that does work well is a set of visualisation image (maybe filesystems for local Zones or ZVOLs shared over iSCSI for OVM or similar) where they are all derived from the same original master by using zfs clones and that all get patched/updated with the pretty much the same set of patches/updaets. This is a case where clones+dedup work well for the unencrypted case, and one which as shown above can still work well even when encryption is enabled.
The usual deployment caveats with ZFS deduplication still apply, ie it is block based and it works best when you have lots of available DRAM and/or L2ARC for caching the DDT. ZFS Encryption doesn't add any additional requirements to this.
So we can happily do this type of thing, and have it "work as expected":
$ zfs create -o compression=on -o encryption=on -o dedup=on tank/builds
$ zfs create tank/builds/master
$ zfs clone tank/builds/master@1tank/builds/project-one
$ zfs clone tank/builds/master@1 tank/builds/project-two
General documentation for ZFS support of encryption is in the Oracle Solaris ZFS Administration Guide in the Encrypting ZFS File Systems section.
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Welcome to my Blog
Hello my dear visitors, welcome to my blog.This blog is designed for my assignment of Social Media Network for Business paper.This is my first blog in wordpress.com.
I hope you guys enjoy my postings and please remember to give me any feedback, if you have any questions, i am really happy to hear from you, by doing this, just click on the Contact Me Header in the top of my blog, just fill in your name , email address and comment, i will get back to you as soon as possible. Thank you again and hope you have a nice day.
Definition of WEB 1.0 2.0
Web 1.0 is the first generation of the World Wide Web, the most important factor of Web 1.0 is to center around a top-down approach to the use of the web and its user interface which the user can only view the webpages but can not edit or make any contribution to the content of the webpages. According to Cormode, G. and Krishnamurthy, B. (2008): “”content creators were few in Web 1.0 with the vast majority of users simply acting as consumers of content.”
Web 2.0 is a latest version of the World Wide Web, it doesn’t refer to update to any technical specification, but rather to cumulative changes in the ways of software developers and end-users use the Web. With Web 2.0 site, it allows users to cooperate with others and be able to create a virtual community. Blogs, wikis, video sharing sites are good examples for Web 2.0 sites.
Security Issue with using social medianetwork to communicate as an organisation
Relying on internet also have a big security risks. Hackers are attracted to social networking sites because they see the potential to commit fraud and launch spam and malware attacks. Having a infected computer in a organization can cause a big problem due to others computers might get infected and huge amount of data or information that store inside the company’s computer might be loss or used by others.
Increase productivity by using social media to facilitate communication
Most of executive team knows social media is a tool now for building brand reputation and connecting with world.
Nowadays, many companies are using Facebook, YouTube, Twitter… as well as internal networks such as Microsoft Communicator and Central Desktop to have a better control over the companies and also help the company to get faster respond regarding to their competitors.
Also, by using the company’s intranet, it can create a better environment for stakeholders to participate in some projects and be able to understand and get notice of the overall company’s vision and goals.
It can provide an on-demand access for employees to perform more effective in their roles because they can access data and information as they need without time and geographic limitation.
Cook’s 4Cs
When people start to talk about 4Cs we can think of the following four approach: Communication, Connection, Cooperation and Collaboration.
Communication is a way of connecting with others, which can be achieved by messaging, video calling, emailing and so on.
Cooperated company allows people to use their licensed software and share with others. For example, most of the opensource software is free to use and their users can be able to see the internal codes and modify the software or even establish the same software.
Collaboration encourages people to come together as a team and work with others to accomplish specific projects or solve specific problems and tasks.
Connection. Nowadays, people can use network to associate with others or sharing information.
In my point of view, I think these 4Cs are really important and really helpful within an organization. In 21st Century, teamwork can attain the fastest, most effective, and precise products and services to be able to take one step ahead to their competitors. Also the connection within organization is really important and effective, video conference can help a lot of organization to connect others in difference geographic areas.
Adavantages and disactanges about social media to facilitage communication
“Social media is not just a platform for easy and simple advanced online marketing, it is also the revolution of our century!”
We can all figure out some specific field of advantages, such as increasing communication within the organization, allowing employees to discuss ideas, provide wider business ideas, target larger clients, improve business reputation and increase the market campaigns and expands market research, as well as disadvantages, such as security risks, online scams, negative comments. And we all know, most of the advantages and disadvantages are based on the platform itself, features it provided and the organization itself. | <urn:uuid:2d36dec8-fb2d-40da-af59-72fc0f2f1633> | 2 | 1.640625 | 0.02032 | en | 0.948004 | https://cocolococo2013.wordpress.com/ |
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STL/CLR Library Reference
The STL/CLR Library is a packaging of the Standard Template Library (STL), a subset of the Standard C++ Library, for use with C++ and the .NET Framework common language runtime (CLR). With STL/CLR, you can use all the containers, iterators, and algorithms of STL in a managed environment.
To use STL/CLR:
• Include headers from the cliext include subdirectory instead of the usual Standard C++ Library equivalents.
• Qualify library names with cliext:: instead of std::.
STL/CLR exposes the generic types and interfaces that it uses in cross-assembly scenarios in the .NET assembly Microsoft.VisualC.STLCLR.dll. This DLL is included in .NET Framework 3.5. If you redistribute an application that uses STL/CLR, you will need to include the .NET Framework 3.5, as well as any other Visual C++ libraries that your project uses, in the dependencies section of your setup project.
cliext Namespace
Discusses the namespace that contains all the types of the STL/CLR Library.
STL/CLR Containers
Provides an overview of the containers that are found in the Standard C++ Library, including requirements for container elements, types of elements that can be inserted, and ownership issues.
Requirements for STL/CLR Container Elements
Describes minimum requirements for all reference types that are inserted into STL containers.
How to: Convert from a .NET Collection to a STL/CLR Container
Describes how to convert a .NET collection to an STL/CLR container.
How to: Convert from a STL/CLR Container to a .NET Collection
Describes how to convert an STL/CLR container to a .NET collection.
How to: Expose an STL/CLR Container from an Assembly
Shows how to display the elements of several STL/CLR containers written in a C++ assembly.
In addition, this section also describes the following components of STL/CLR:
Community Additions
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Reconnecting to a Database Mirroring Session
If an established connection to a database mirroring session fails for any reason, for example, due to a database mirroring failover, and the application attempts to reconnect to the initial server, the data access provider can attempt to reconnect using the failover partner name stored in the client's cache. Reconnecting is not automatic, however. The application must become aware of the error. Then, the application needs to close the failed connection and open a new connection using the same connection string attributes. At this point, the data access provider redirects the connection to the failover partner. If the server instance identified by this name is currently the principal server, the connection attempt usually succeeds. If it is unclear whether a transaction was committed or rolled back, the application must check on the state of the transaction, in the same way as when reconnecting to a stand-alone server instance.
Reconnecting resembles an initial connection for which the connection string supplied a failover partner name. If the first connection attempt fails, connection attempts alternate back and forth between the initial partner name and failover partner name until either the client connects to the principal server or the data access provider times out.
SQL Server Native Client verifies that it connects to a principal server instance but not whether this instance is the partner of server instance specified in the initial partner name of the connection string.
If the connections use TCP/IP and the client uses Windows XP or later, the connection retry algorithm determines the amount of time allotted to the connection attempts in each round. For more information, see Using Connection String Keywords with SQL Server Native Client.
Important noteImportant
If the client gets disconnected from the database, the data access provider does not attempt to reconnect. The client must issue a new connection request. Also, if an application shuts down on losing the connection, it will lose the cached partner names. If the connection was lost because the principal server became unavailable, the only way that the application can reconnect to the mirror server is by supplying the failover partner name in its connection string.
After a failover, the data access provider redirects the connection to the current principal server instance. However, the redirection is transparent to clients. To a client, a redirected connection appears to be a connection to the server instance identified by the initial partner name. When the initial partner is currently the mirror server, the client can appear to be connected to the mirror server and updating the mirror database. Actually, however, the client has been redirected to the failover partner, which is the current principal database, and the client is updating the new principal database.
After being redirected to the failover partner, a client can experience unexpected results when using a Transact-SQL USE statement to use a different database. This can happen if the current principal server instance (the failover partner) has a different set of databases than the original principal server (the initial partner).
Community Additions
© 2015 Microsoft | <urn:uuid:0a202e7d-de5c-446b-b7f7-17002bdc79a8> | 2 | 2.421875 | 0.059983 | en | 0.892516 | https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms366199(v=sql.105).aspx |
input_reader Define and read input files with an API inspired by argparse input_reader ============ A python module to facilitate reading input files ------------------------------------------------- ``input_reader`` is used to define and read a general input file for a program. This ``README`` only contains a *brief* synopsis of what ``input_reader`` can do. For a more detailed description of the API, please see the documentation at The API is inspired by that of the ``argparse`` module from the python standard library, so hopefully it will be easy to learn. The Problem ----------- Let's say you have to write a program that cooks a meal. You have the following requirements: 1) The user must specify one and only one of breakfast, lunch, or dinner. a) For breakfast, the user must specify scrambled or poached eggs and how many eggs. Also, the user specifies waffles or pancakes, and specifies if they want butter and/or syrup. The user may optionally request bacon. b) For lunch, the user must specify if they want a sandwich (BLT, ham, or turkey) or soup (vegetable or chili). The user also specifies if they want bread. c) For dinner, the user specifies steak (rare, medium or well), salmon, or pasta (red or white sauce). There is a choice of soup or salad. The user may also choose to have dessert. 2) The user must specify a drink, and that drink can be water, milk, OJ, beer, soda, or wine. 3) The user can request an organic meal and/or gluten-free. How We Want the Input Files --------------------------- Let's say that someone wants a scrambled egg breakfast with syrupy pancakes and bacon, and OJ for a drink. Here is how we might define the input:: drink oj breakfast eggs 2 scrambled pancakes syrup bacon end Or, what if someone with a gluten allergy wants dinner with wine. They want a medium steak with salad, and they want the dessert. Here is the input:: nogluten drink wine dinner steak medium salad dessert end The ``input_reader`` Code ------------------------- To define the above requirements, we would use the following code: .. code:: python import sys from input_reader import InputReader, ReaderError reader = InputReader() # Gluten free or organic meal? These are simple booleans reader.add_boolean_key('nogluten') reader.add_boolean_key('organic') # The drink has an argument, and accepts a specific list of values reader.add_line_key('drink', type=('water', 'milk', 'oj', 'beer', 'soda', 'wine')) # We are allowed to specify breakfast, lunch or dinner, so we use # a mutually exclusive group. We need one of these, so we call this # required. meal = reader.add_mutually_exclusive_group(required=True) # We define the breakfast block bfast = meal.add_block_key('breakfast') # Eggs, number of eggs then the style bfast.add_line_key('eggs', type=[int, ('scrambled', 'poached')], required=True) # Pancakes OR waffles. Syrup and/or butter is optional wp = bfast.add_mutually_exclusive_group(required=True) wp.add_line_key('waffles', type=None, glob={'len':'*', 'type':('syrup', 'butter')}) wp.add_line_key('pancakes', type=None, glob={'len':'*', 'type':('syrup', 'butter')}) # BACON! bfast.add_boolean_key('bacon') # The lunch block lunch = meal.add_block_key('lunch') # Bread? lunch.add_boolean_key('bread') # Sandwitch or soup ss = lunch.add_mutually_exclusive_group(required=True) ss.add_line_key('sandwich', type=('blt', 'ham', 'turkey')) ss.add_line_key('soup', type=('vegetable', 'chili')) # The dinner block dinner = meal.add_block_key('dinner') # Dessert? dinner.add_boolean_key('dessert') # Soup or salad? ss = dinner.add_mutually_exclusive_group() ss.add_boolean_key('soup') ss.add_boolean_key('salad') # Main course mcourse = dinner.add_mutually_exclusive_group(required=True) mcourse.add_line_key('steak', type=('rare', 'medium', 'well')) mcourse.add_boolean_key('salmon') mcourse.add_line_key('pasta', type=('red', 'white')) You can read in and analyze the file in a manner given below: .. code:: python # Assuming the input file is in argv[1], read in the input file try: inp = reader.read_input(sys.argv[1]) except ReaderError as e: sys.exit(str(e)) # Is the meal gluten free? if inp.nogluten: ... # Is lunch served? if inp.lunch: # If so, what type of soup? if inp.lunch.soup == 'chili': ... # Etc... Author ------ Seth M. Morton History ------- 01-16-2014 v. 1.2.0 ''''''''''''''''''' - Added input_reader.h to provide easy C interface to this python module - Added include_path attribute to input_reader module for C compilations - Removed (cause install problems for some) - Unit tests pass for both Python 2.7 and Python 3.x - Updated documentation 04-13-2013 v. 1.1.1 ''''''''''''''''''' - Added the filename attribute to the InputReader class 01-25-2013 v. 1.1.0 ''''''''''''''''''' - Increased code coverage of tests to ~98% - Refactored code to reduce copy/paste and be open for future improvements 01-14-2013 v. 1.0.2 ''''''''''''''''''' - Added input_file attribute to InputReader class - Fixed typo in documentation - Updated version updating code 12-22-2012 v. 1.0.1 ''''''''''''''''''' - Fixed error in 12-16-2012 v. 1.0.0 ''''''''''''''''''' - Fixed bugs in unit tests - Finished documentation with doctests - Added a post_process method to InputReader that can be subclassed - Made improvements to the setup process 12-3-2012 v. 0.9.1 '''''''''''''''''' - Added unit tests - Added extra checks for bad input Seth M. Morton 2fd8fdd8f9f58515e7c3ac3721b337afa22c4d89 1.2.0 | <urn:uuid:16eae575-ce10-40a1-81e3-78814991e611> | 3 | 2.828125 | 0.160515 | en | 0.655858 | https://pypi.python.org/pypi?:action=doap&name=input_reader&version=1.2.0 |
LUV News on Job Creation
Although the training only costs $4,000 for a commercial driver’s license, the money is not available as millions are unemployed and lacking the money, all while companies are in need of drivers. Job training funds have dried up.
When we ask how we got to this point, we recall that, after their massive global financing schemes went awry, Wall Street banksters were loaned trillions of dollars from the federal government and Federal Reserve, much of it in secret and all of it backed by the taxpayers, so that they could pay themselves billions of dollars in bonuses — the top priority of the American banking system.
The banksters still have trillions of dollars, but they’ve put it into the highest paying investments, much of it abroad chasing slave labor, child labor and prison labor, as American small businesses are desperate for financing loans, and American workers are desperate for training.
The banksters’ve invested some of the millions into the presidential and Congressional elections, which give the biggest returns, ensuring the American people will continue to be sold out into the future.
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Connecting to %s | <urn:uuid:7e70109e-a23a-4f3b-9f20-0ab77d4a78f1> | 2 | 2.25 | 0.02675 | en | 0.928856 | https://seniorsforademocraticsociety.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/luv-news-on-job-creation/ |
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Capricornus (constellation))
Jump to: navigation, search
Click for larger image
List of stars in Capricornus
Abbreviation: Cap
Genitive: Capricorni
Right ascension: 21 h
Declination: −20°
Area: 414 sq. deg. (40th)
Main stars: 9, 13
Bayer/Flamsteed stars: 49
Stars known to have planets: 3
Bright stars: 1
Nearby stars: 3
Brightest star: δ Cap (Deneb Algedi) (2.85m)
Nearest star: LP 816-60 ( ly)
Messier objects: 1
Meteor showers: Alpha Capricornids
Chi Capricornids
Sigma Capricornids
Tau Capricornids
Bordering constellations: Aquarius
Piscis Austrinus
Visible at latitudes between +60° and −90°
Capricornus is one of the constellations of the zodiac. It is often called Capricorn, especially when referring to the corresponding astrological sign. Its name is Latin for "horned male goat" or "goat horn", and it is commonly represented in the form of a sea-goat: a mythical creature that is half goat, half fish. Its symbol is Capricorn symbol 2.png (Unicode ♑).
Capricornus is one of the 88 modern constellations, and was also one of the 48 constellations listed by the 2nd century astronomer Ptolemy. Under its modern boundaries it is bordered by Aquila, Sagittarius, Microscopium, Piscis Austrinus and Aquarius. The constellation is in an area of sky called the Sea or Water, consisting of many water-related constellations such as Aquarius, Pisces and Eridanus.
Notable features[change | change source]
The constellation Capricornus as it can be seen with the naked eye.
Capricornus is the second faintest constellation in the zodiac after Cancer. Its brighter stars are on a triangle whose corners are α2 Capricorni (also known as Giedi), δ Capricorni (Deneb Algiedi), and ω Capricorni.
Deep sky objects[change | change source]
Capricorn has several galaxies and clusters. Messier 30 is a globular cluster that is one degree south of the galaxy group NGC 7103. The constellation also harbors the wide spiral galaxy NGC 6907.
Named stars[change | change source]
Bayer Name Origin Meaning
α Algiedi Arabic goat
α¹ Prima Giedi
α² Secunda Giedi
β Dabih Arabic The butcher
β¹ Dabih Major
β² Dabih Minor
γ Nashira Arabic Bringer of news
δ Deneb Algiedi Arabic goat's tail
ζ Yen Chinese
η Chow Chinese
ν Al Shat Arabic the sheep
ψ Yue Chinese battle ax
History[change | change source]
Despite it being very faint, Capricornus has one of the oldest mythological associations. It has consistently been represented as a cross of a goat and a fish since the Middle Bronze Age. The earliest picture of Capricornus is on a cylinder-seal dating c. 21st century BCE,.[1] From the mid second Millennium it became a popular motif on boundary stones.[2] It was explicitly recorded in the Babylonian star catalogues as MULSUḪUR.MAŠ "The Goat-Fish" before 1000 BC. The constellation was a symbol of Ea and in the Early Bronze Age marked the winter solstice.[3]
Because of the precession of the equinoxes the December solstice no longer takes place while the sun is in the constellation Capricornus. The astrological sign called Capricorn now begins with the solstice. The sun's most southerly position is now called the Tropic of Capricorn. This term also applies to the line on earth where the sun is directly overhead at noon on that solstice.
In Chinese astronomy, constellation Capricornus is in The Black Tortoise of the North (北方玄武, Běi Fāng Xuán Wǔ).
Mythology[change | change source]
Capricorn the sea goat was a goat that decided to take over the world. The gods of Greece looked down upon that and sent there wrath and killed him with one of Zeus thunderbolts. Then they hung him in the sky to humiliate him.
Astrology[change | change source]
As of 2002, the Sun appears in the constellation Capricornus from January 19 to February 15. In tropical astrology, the Sun is considered to be in the sign Capricorn from December 22 to January 19, and in sidereal astrology, from January 15 to February 15.
Diagram of an alternative way to connect the stars of the Capricornus constellation.
Visualizations[change | change source]
Early 1800 rendition of Capricornus as a sea-goat.
Ptolemy's method of connecting the stars of Capricornus has been influential.[4]
H. A. Rey has suggested an alternative way to join the stars, which graphically shows a goat.[5] The goat's head is formed by the triangle of stars ι Cap, θ Cap, and ζ Cap. The goat's horn sticks out with stars γ Cap and δ Cap. Star δ Cap, at the tip of the horn, is of the third magnitude. The goat's tail consists of stars β Cap and α2 Cap: star β Cap being of the third magnitude. The goat's hind foot consists of stars ψ Cap and ω Cap. Both of these stars are of the fourth magnitude.
Capricornus as the name[change | change source]
USS Capricornus (AKA-57) is once of United States navy ship.
Citations[change | change source]
1. Master's Thesis of Peeter Espak, 2006 page 104 "[1]"
2. Babylonian Star-lore by Gavin White, Solaria Pubs, 2008. Page 118ff
4. [2]
5. Rey, H. A. (1997). The Stars — A New Way To See Them (Enlarged World-Wide Edition ed.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-24830-2 .
Related pages[change | change source]
Other websites[change | change source] | <urn:uuid:47b65051-f892-4078-81bb-1cc039b0e788> | 3 | 2.90625 | 0.03332 | en | 0.890097 | https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capricornus_(constellation) |
G-sharp major
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
G major
Relative key E minor
Parallel key G minor
Notes in this scale
G-sharp major is a major scale based on the musical note G sharp. Its key signature has six sharps and one double sharp.[1]
To make reading easier, G-sharp major is usually written as its enharmonic equivalent of A-flat major. However, it does appear as a secondary key area in several works in sharp keys, for example in the Prelude and Fugue in C sharp major from Bach's Well-Tempered Klavier, Book 1. The G sharp minor Prelude and Fugue from the same set end with a Picardy third in G sharp major. G sharp major is used for a short time in several of Chopin's nocturnes in C sharp minor.
References[change | change source]
Scales and keys[change | change source] | <urn:uuid:42e52677-80c5-4b1e-b79f-00999fdba335> | 3 | 3.125 | 0.569336 | en | 0.882246 | https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-sharp_major |
A Second Chance
Disclaimer: I don't own the movie Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica.
Note: This is an idea I got when I saw what happened to the Colony in Daybreak and what happened on the Star Trek movie. Please read and hopefully you will enjoy it.
The Jellyfish was a 24th century starship commissioned by the Vulcan Science Academy in 2387 for the transport of red matter. The ship was described as being "our fastest ship" and featured a unique rotating "tail."
The Jellyfish featured a chamber designed for the safe storage and transport of "red matter", as well as a means of extracting the matter for the purposes of its mission. In addition, the ship contained a pair of forward mounted particle weapons and a warp drive.
Red matter was an unstable matter with distinct gravitational properties, specifically a propensity to condense into quantum singularities, first seen in the 24th century. The Romulan known as Nero used the red matter that was aboard the Jellyfish to create a black hole in the center of Vulcan, destroying the planet. His ship however was destroyed Spock rammed the Jellyfish into the Narada. The red matter that was aboard the Jellyfish ignited, creating a massive black hole which crushed the Narada before devouring it.
However no one was able to notice that a small container of red matter had survived the crash and fell into the massive black hole. The Enterprise was nearly pulled into the black hole, but the ship was saved when chief engineer Montgomery Scott ejected the ship's warp core and detonated it, the shockwave from the blast propelling the Enterprise to safety. The black hole closed as it sucked in the antimatter radiation and the small container spun at high velocity inside the now closed black hole. It was propelled through space and time for what could be considered an eternity until finally it found an opening.
The Colony, a large biomechanical structure similar in composition to the Basestars. After the Cimtar Peace Accord, the Final Five and the Cylon Centurion Model 0005 units retreated to this place, a space borne Cylon homeworld. The vessel was used by Samuel Anders, Tory Foster, Ellen Tigh, Saul Tigh, and Galen Tyrol to travel to the Twelve Colonies from the devastated remains of Earth, backtracking the path their ancestors had taken from Kobol and then following the path of the twelve tribes of humanity.
It was positioned in a stable orbit inside the accretion disc of a naked singularity until a spread of nukes knocked it off its stable orbit around the black hole. However in just on instant a small red container came out and collided with an asteroid falling into it. That asteroid set of something huge. The container exploded and in its place a giant red star came to life and all around it was a hurricane of destruction.
A second black hole came to life inside the first one as the Colony fell from its orbit. The Galactica had jumped away just in time as the Colony vanished.
"Coming out of warp now, Captain."
Captain James T. Kirk sat in the command chair at the center of the bridge. "Very well."
"No inhabited planets in this system, Captain." said Science officer Spock.
The USS Enterprise was the most advanced powerful starship produced by Starfleet yet. It also served as the flagship for the Federation fleet as more ships of her class were being constructed at the shipyards. Its class had succeeded the Kelvin as the design for Starfleet. Measuring around six hundred meters long and one hundred ninety meters in height the Enterprise sported state of the art deflector shields complete with point defense phasers along with a photon torpedo launcher on the neck of the ship and the most advanced warp drive designed yet.
Suddenly the alarm went off and the seemingly normal day with just the boring routines was over.
"Status." said Kirk.
"A black hole has opened up seven hundred thousand kilometers away." said Spock looking at the scanner.
"On screen."
The view screen showed a giant black hole opening up in the middle of nowhere but instead of sucking up anything in its path it was instead spitting something out. A gigantic spider like ship. It fell out of the black hole and tumbled through space.
"Spock?" asked Kirk.
"Scanning, Captain. The structure appears to be biomechanical of unknown origin. Various vessels docked aboard her while armed with high explosive missiles and quadruple high-velocity kinetic projectile weapons. It poses no serious threat to the ship." said Spock.
"Captain, the vessel appears to realigning itself." said Sulu.
In space the gigantic ship had stopped tumbling and had already placed itself in a stable position.
"Captain, the hull appears to be some kind of techno-organic resin that seems to have bonded with the ships hull. It's working to repair the hull, slowly." said Spock.
"A self healing ship?" asked Kirk.
"It appears so." said Spock.
Kirk took a close look at the new ship.
"Life readings?"
"Scanning . . . Affirmative but sensors show the life sign in critical condition. The power has conserved to keep the life support system activated." said Spock.
"So we can beam aboard." said Kirk.
"Affirmative." said Spock.
"Get a boarding party and alert Dr. McCoy. Tell him to meet us in the transporter room." said Kirk as he entered the turbo lift.
The Enterprise had parked itself close to what seemed to be the docking area on the large ship. It apparently functioned as a spacedock and a vessel. The docking area was not compatible with the Enterprise so Sulu parked her as close she could get. Inside the massive ship four beams of light came to existence and faded leaving Captain Kirk, Scotty, Dr. McCoy, and a security guard.
All of them were armed with phasers while Dr. McCoy was carrying a med-pack. They pulled out their phasers and looked around. The hall was covered with what looked like bullet holes, empty old twentieth century guns, and several humanoid bodies. Bones took out his medical scanner and examined the bodies.
"They're human but some of these humans seem to have a mixture of human DNA and nanites. Micro silicate in the brain mixed with the tissue." said Dr. McCoy.
"But they're human?" asked Kirk.
"For the most part yes." said Bones.
"Let's find out what happened here. Bones and Charles head off and find anyone alive. Scotty and I will look for the control room on this ship." said Kirk.
Everyone split up and parted. | <urn:uuid:43f77979-006d-4c46-ada1-c694cab44cad> | 2 | 2.34375 | 0.059042 | en | 0.970737 | https://www.fanfiction.net/s/5109575/1/A-second-Chance |
Useful facts
Earth and the Solar System
Scaling factors: if the distance between the Earth and the Sun is scaled to one inch (2.5 cm) then one light year is one mile (1.6 km) [this is a remarkably good scale, correct to better than 1%!]. Therefore:
• If the distance between the Sun and the Earth is one inch, the nearest star is over 4 miles away
• If the distance between the Sun and the Earth is one inch, the distance to the centre of our Galaxy is 25000 miles (once round the Earth)
• If the distance between the Sun and the Earth is one inch, the nearest large galaxy is two million miles away (8 times the distance to the Moon)
Also useful:
"If your teacher drives at 70 mph down the Solar System motorway, it will take him/her:
• Nearly 5 months to reach the Moon
• 150 years to reach the Sun
• About 4500 years to reach Neptune
• 40 million years to reach the nearest star
• The Earth's orbital speed around the Sun: 30 km/s (108,000 km/h, ~70,000 mph)
• The Sun's orbital speed around the Galaxy: ~200 km/s (720,000 km/h, 450,000 mph)
• The speed of the ground beneath your feet, as a result of the Earth's rotation: 1000 km/h (600 mph) at the latitude of Sheffield (53 degrees); it goes up to 1670 km/h (1000 mph) at the equator
• The speed of light: 300,000 km/s (1.08 billion km/h, 670 million mph)
• The speed a rocket needs to attain to escape the Earth's gravity: about 8 km/s (5 miles/second, 29000 km/h, 18000 mph)
• The speed a rocket needs to attain to escape the Sun's gravity, starting from Earth orbit: about 45 km/s (i.e. about 15 km/s in addition to Earth's orbital speed)
• The speed a rocket needs to attain to reach the Sun: about 30 km/s, because it needs to cancel out Earth's orbital speed - so it is about twice as hard, in terms of speed needed, to reach the Sun as it is to reach the outer planets (about 4 times as hard in energy terms, because energy is proportional to speed squared)
• Of the Solar System: 4.6 billion years (1 billion = 1000 million)
• Of the oldest stars in the Galaxy: about 12 or 13 billion years
• Of the Universe: about 14 billion years
• Of multicellular life on Earth: about 700 million years
• Of tool-using hominids: about 3 million years
• Of modern humans: about 35000 years
• Of writing: about 5000 years
• The object in the Kuiper belt that is larger than Pluto: Eris (the Greek goddess of strife, because of all the fuss it caused!)
• The Galilean moons of Jupiter, in order from Jupiter out: Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto
• The moons which are larger than Pluto, in decreasing order of size:
Ganymede [J], Titan [S], [the planet Mercury], Callisto [J], Io [J], the Moon [E], Europa [J], Triton [N], [the dwarf planet Eris], [the dwarf planet Pluto] (the initials after each moon indicate its primary planet)
• The largest asteroids, in decreasing order of size:
1 Ceres, 2 Pallas, 4 Vesta, 10 Hygiea (the number in front of an asteroid's name is order of discovery; 10 Hygiea is very dark, and so fainter than several smaller asteroids, hence its slightly later discovery (1849)).
Numbers of moons:
• Mercury 0
• Venus 0
• Earth 1
• Mars 2
• Jupiter (at least) 63
• Saturn (at least) 56, not counting ring particles
• Uranus (at least) 27
• Neptune (at least) 13
• Pluto 3
• Eris 1
Several asteroids have moons.
All four giant planets also have ring systems, though Saturn's is much the largest and the only one visible with a small telescope.
Most of the moons of the giant planets, as well as Mars' two, are very small and are probably captured asteroids or fragments of larger bodies which broke up. | <urn:uuid:317a2701-3cf6-496f-9ac9-57fe5f4c6b97> | 4 | 3.578125 | 0.035623 | en | 0.888559 | https://www.iop.org/activity/outreach/resources/pips/topics/earth/facts/page_43079.html |
Asymmetric Clipped Waveform - find RMS
1. I have an asymmetrical clipped repeating waveform and I want to be able to find the root mean square.
The function is as follows, with r and b constants:
2. jcsd
3. marcusl
marcusl 2,100
Science Advisor
Gold Member
This simplifies to y=1/b * tanh(bsin(t)). If b is small, tanh is approximately linear and you can expand the function to calculate the rms. Alternately, you can calculate the result numerically for various values of b. Note that you must have |b|<1 for convergence. | <urn:uuid:fdfdbb9e-0177-4ddd-8eae-f9cea52ec54a> | 2 | 2.25 | 0.991588 | en | 0.88153 | https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/asymmetric-clipped-waveform-find-rms.671075/ |
Jane Hirshfield is the author of seven books of poetry, including most recently Come, Thief, and the classic collection of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. Who better to ask: Why write poetry? Here are her in-depth, thought provoking answers to this two-part question:
Jennifer Haupt: Why do you write poems, and why would anyone want to write a poem?
Jane Hirshfield:
Poetry magnetizes both depth and the possible. It offers widening of aperture and increase of reach. We live so often in a damped-down condition, obscured from ourselves and others. The sequesters are social—convention, politeness—and personal: timidity, self-fear or self-blindness, fatigue. To step into a poem is to agree to risk. Writing takes down all protections, to see what steps forward. Poetry is a trick of language-legerdemain, in which the writer is both magician and audience. You reach your hand into the hat and surprise yourself with rabbit or memory, with odd verb or slant rhyme or the flashing scarf of an image. This is true for discovering some newness of the emotions, and also true of ideas. Poems foment revolutions of being. Whatever the old order was, a poem will change it.
When young people ask writing advice, I sometimes say, “Open the window a few inches more than is comfortable.” As with all offered advice, the words are tuned first to my own ear and own life.
It may be that some other writer is quite unlike me: reckless, feckless, undefended, fearless before joy and grief, pain and incertitude. For this writer I am now imagining, words come easily, perhaps to the point of glibness. For her or him, poetry will serve in other ways. Art’s marrow-request for shapeliness, particularity of experience, arc, may be what is useful. The increase of density and saturation that poetry requires may be what is useful.
There is also the matter of connection. You can’t write an image, a metaphor, a story, a phrase, without leaning a little further into the shared world, without recognizing that your supposed solitude is at every point of its perimeter touching some other. You can’t read a poem—a good poem, at least—by someone else, and not recognize in their experience your own face. This is a continual reminder of amplitude, intimacy, and tenderness. The slightest dust-mote of the psyche altered is felt... there is magnitude in an altered comma. Art is a field glass for concentrating the knowledge and music of connection. It allows us to feel more acutely and accurately and more tenderly what is already present. And then it expands that, expands us.
J. Haupt: We live in a time of what seems continuing crisis—politics, questions of the environment and climate change, even the “natural” disasters of earthquakes and weather are amplified in their interactions with our human-altered environment. Do you think poems and the arts in general have a role to play in our response to these things, and in the larger transformation of society?
I know I would not want a vision of art that is purely utilitarian—that would not be not art, it would be advertising or propaganda. A sonnet is neither a wrench nor a voting booth. And yet, even useless joy is not inconsequential. Joy is reasonless and “accomplishes” nothing, yet is an indispensable enlargement of measure in any life. Why do we want justice, or any other diminishment of suffering, if not for the increase of simple happiness it brings? Or why would we want what Buddhism might call a right sorrow, for that matter, as we—I at least—do want that? We know when a pool is clarified, when it is muddied. We know when a poem of darkness is opulent, in its saying, in its relationship to existence—Hopkins’s “Carrion Comfort,” for example—and that the existence of opulent grief, fully offered, is a counterweight even to despair.
I’m not saying that art is a matter of beauty, solace, or calmness, though it can be, and that can be welcome. I’m not saying that art is about rectification of character or making visible the existence of injustice, though it can be, and that can be welcome. I suppose I’m saying that good art is a truing of vision, in the way that a saw is trued in the saw shop, to cut more cleanly. And that anything that lessens our astigmatisms of being or makes more magnificent the eye, ear, tongue, and heart cannot help but help a person better meet the larger decisions that we, as individuals and in aggregate, ponder.
That the rearrangement of words can re-open the fate of both inner and outer worlds—I cannot say why I feel this to be true, except that I feel it so in my pulses, when I read good poems.
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A nameless girl's question helped me to let go of my own childhood wounds. | <urn:uuid:08d6949c-e0ad-41ff-80f2-ad577591fe12> | 2 | 2.15625 | 0.08479 | en | 0.950936 | https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/one-true-thing/201401/jane-hirshfield-why-write-poetry?tr=MostEmailed |
Tuesday, July 22, 2014
2014-07-21 (M) Conductive Paint Experiment
Commercially available conductive paint was tested by stirring and painting lines in the same manner as the other samples. The commercially available conductive paint was much more liquid so it produced thinner traces. All traces were dried for at least five hours in the order to test their resistance as it would be in a finished project. Each substance was measured again with fixed-width probes. Close-up pictures were taken of each sample using a macro lens. The lens has a very shallow depth of field which is not flat so the samples are not entirely visible. Acrylic paint with graphite powder is the most conductive sample in this experiment when painted in a line like a circuit trace.
Thick line
Thin line
18.8 KΩ
10.5 KΩ
11.2 KΩ
Titebond III
115.1 KΩ
75.2 KΩ
9.9 KΩ
Acrylic paint
1.8 KΩ
60 Ω
1.161 KΩ
1.490 KΩ
338 Ω
26.1 KΩ
Sampling surface
Glue-All samples being tested
Titebond III samples being tested
Acrylic paint samples being tested
Commercially available conductive paint samples being tested
Close-up of Glue-All and graphite sample
Close-up of Titebond III and graphite sample
Close-up of acrylic paint and graphite sample
Close-up of commercially available conductive paint sample
Stirring the commercially available conductive paint to show viscosity
To do:
• Translate to an Instructable
• Devise a distribution method
Journal page
A list showing of all the final posts of COMPLETED projects.
1. Did you do any testing with different COLORS of acrylic paint? I don't know what they make the pigments out of, but isn't it possible that some are more conductive than others? Some might be metal-based.
2. Also, some very inconsistent results in readings.
Glue all resistance goes up only 6.6% from thick to thin line.
Tite Bond III actually does DOWN with a thinner line. Doesn't make sense.
Acrylic goes up by 1935 times from thick to thin line.
Wire Glue goes up by 7700 times from thick to thin line.
Since in every case the conductive medium is graphite, I would expect more consistent results. I suspect the Titebond results are reversed.
3. I only tested a single color of paint which I had on hand but I suspect some metallic sheen paints would conduct differently. If I were going to make a large batch I would likely choose those paints over plain colors now that you mention it. You got my brain ticking again and here I thought I was done with this project.
The pictures for the readings tell the story and you are right that the test results didn't make logical sense. All I was looking for was for was a rough idea of which medium conducted well while maintaining a usable consistency. The paint stood out as a clear winner so I called it. The tests I ran were not scientifically rigorous in fact I would put them on par with a high school science experiment.
4. I was thinking more in terms of normal paint pigments based on metal compounds, not metallic ones. For example, cadmium, antimony and chrome compounds are used for different colors. I can't take that information too far because I'm not really knowledgeable about pigment chemistry. But the thought occurred to me the pigment might matter. I don't even know if any of those compounds are even conductive even though they are metal compounds.
Anyway, you're the first guy I know who has actually done anything about this application, and I applaud you for that.
I've been a ham for 57 years and spend most of my time designing and building circuits, not yakking on the radio. So the idea of a reasonably conducting paint looks like an interesting direction to spend my time on.
1. I see what you're saying. I'm probably less of a chemist than you but I think some reds may use iron oxide as a pigment and that has a lot of potential. At least it would when I applied voltage. Sorry, I couldn't resist that joke. Or that one.
I wonder how the hobby store would feel about me opening all their paints and dipping my probe leads in. They probably wouldn't be too keen on it and I don't think paint inspector is a real thing.
My analog/digital communications teacher was a HAM operator and had been for years. When they finally dropped the necessity to learn Morse Code he really pushed us to get our licenses. Sadly I didn't and now the hack space I go to has a HAM station I could use if I were licensed.
If you make a winning recipe I will gladly link from this site. Good luck.
5. Not too late, Brian. A couple weekends of study (mostly FCC regs and a little theory), and take a test with a Volunteer Examiner through any of a number of ham radio clubs, and you're licensed. Your hack space guys will know exactly what you need to do. No code, but lots of new hams are discovering code is fun and VERY practical for weak signal work because of very low bandwidth, and the fact it is the only digital mode that the human brain can copy. Anyway, glad I found your blog and your work with conductive paints.
When I give it a try, I'll post here as I don't have a blog. You can use the info any way you choose then.
6. Maybe you can give the sales pitch for ham radio to me and anyone else following this comment thread. The internet can provide all the communication I need so what's the appeal of doing it over analog?
I have heard that when tragedies strike that civilian radio operators are some of the first to respond and instrumental as a communication hub. To date that's the most appealing thing I've heard.
It would be awesome if you found a recipe that tested better than what I've done and I think the readers would appreciate another set of hands testing!
7. Those of us who fly RC sailplanes could easily put in motors and bore holes in the sky, but we'd probably fall asleep out of boredom. My guess is that HAM operators would feel the same way about the internet. I imagine they like playing around with antennas and mastering all sorts of technical info. Somewhere I have a stack of radio contact cards that my ex's father gave me. Rather interesting, from a bunch of different far away places.
On the conductive paint, my guess is that a lot of the resistance is at the junction between the voltmeter probe and the material. You've got a variably shaped surface with very little contact area. It's also not clear that the proportion of graphite to paint is constant all the way through the material. Maybe in some cases the paint/glue comes to the outside. You might try making some standard size copper pads and running tracks between them. Or figure out how to make a really consistent, large surface, and use a good sized chunk of metal placed on it instead of a voltmeter probe. Maybe you can just built it up thick and sand it down flat?
Curious as to exactly what sort of graphite you're using. (Brand, composition, etc.)
Someday, I am going to get my van de Graaff generator going again, and it needs a better terminal. Metal spinning is kind of expensive. | <urn:uuid:a099c145-c233-4d5a-9c5f-00389aa58299> | 3 | 2.78125 | 0.073942 | en | 0.965052 | http://24hourengineer.blogspot.ca/2014/07/2014-07-21-m-conductive-paint-experiment.html |
Texas Showdown: GOP Stronghold Favors McCain
Always a big player on the nation's political scene, Texas' 34 coveted electoral votes have gone to Republicans in the last four presidential elections. It may have helped that the current president was the Lone Star State's governor when he first sought the country's highest office in 2004. And while Texas is, today, seen as an unwavering red state, it wasn't always the case. When President John F. Kennedy aimed for 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in 1960, he didn't think he could win without putting...Full Story
Commenting on this article is closed. | <urn:uuid:009171a9-cf24-4193-99e8-beb4e705c5f0> | 2 | 1.523438 | 0.259209 | en | 0.966892 | http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/5050/comments?type=story&id=5781100 |
King Penguins, South Georgia Island
Photograph by Cedric Favero, Your Shot
After a swim in Fortuna Bay, king penguins come ashore on South Georgia Island in the southern Atlantic. Standing about a foot shorter than the emperor, the king is the second largest penguin. As many as 150,000 pairs have made up South Georgia's largest king penguin rookery.
| <urn:uuid:1c931129-46d3-476e-9f51-f684797f9ce1> | 3 | 2.625 | 0.418892 | en | 0.891954 | http://adventure.nationalgeographic.com/wallpaper/travel/best-of-travel-365/may-2013/king-penguins-fortuna-bay-south-georgia/ |
Defusing Mount Kelud
Indonesia is certainly not a destination for those wanting the geologically quiet life; its close proximity to a subduction zone is a recipe not just for large, potentially tsunami generating, earthquakes, but also a significant number of explosive volcanoes. Mount Kelud (aka Mount Kelut – I presume this is a transliteration issue as they’re definitely talking about the same volcano) is the current focus of concern for the Center for Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation, who have ordered an evacuation of 30,000 people living around its rumbling crater (pictured below in more tranquil times).
One of the reasons this particular volcano is considered to be so dangerous is its large crater lake. During an eruption, the water within is superheated and explosively ejected from the crater, and mixes with erupted volcanic ash to form devastating mud flows, or lahars. Lahars generated during an eruption in 1919 overwhelmed villages and farmland as far as 40 km from the crater, and killed more than 5000 people.
So here we have another example of people choosing to live within spitting distance of a malevolent geological entity, and refusing to budge even when it is rumbling threateningly at them. What’s interesting in this case, though, is that the Indonesians have apparently been quite proactive in attempting to reduce the threat posed by this particular volcano. Following the 1919 eruption, they set out to cripple Mount Kelud’s lahar-generating ability, by digging a series of tunnels that would drain the crater lake.
After completion in 1926, this drainage system reduced the volume of the crater lake by over 90%, from 40 million cubic metres to less than 2 million. This impressive engineering feat undoubtedly saved countless lives during Kelud’s next big eruption, in 1951: compared to 1919, the lahars produced were severely limited in scope, extending less than 5 km down the volcano’s slopes. Sadly, it was a Phyrric victory: the drainage tunnels were damaged, and material excavated during the eruption had lowered the crater bottom, allowing 20 million cubic metres of water to accumulate inside by the time of the next large eruption in 1966. The resulting lahars were almost back to 1919 levels of destruction, and killed nearly 300 people. The Indonesian authorities learnt from that mistake, however, and by 1967 had dug a new, deeper tunnel, which allowed the crater lake to be drained to its present volume of 2.5 million cubic metres.
It’s a small comfort to know that, thanks to some all-to-rare foresight, the people currently digging in their heels on Kelud’s threatening slopes are a little bit safer than perhaps they would have been.
1. Suryo, I and Clarke, MCG. (1985). Quarterly Journal of Engineering Geology and Hydrogeology 18(1), p 79-98.
2. Kelud Volcano. A report from the Commission of Volcanic Lakes.
Categories: geohazards, volcanoes
Comments (10)
1. Cool stuff, but man! How would you like to be the guy that dug those last few lakeside feet of tunnel?
2. J-Dog says:
This is cool – or should I say hot? Anyway, I didn’t realize that people were actually trying to minimize damages from volcanos, so thanks. Anybody working on defusing Vesuvius that you know of – aren’t there a LOT more people at risk there?
3. Comstock says:
How is the evacuation decided upon? How confident are the volcanologists that rumbling is related to eruption?
4. pete says:
Is there a webcam that we can link to for real time feeds? Also, is there a seismicity recorder that can show real time tremors at about lat. 7.93 / long 112.31 for Kelut?
5. magma says:
How is the evacuation decided upon?
Nerve-wrackingly? I can’t decide which would be more stressful: air traffic controller, or volcanologist.
6. Harold Asmis says:
I like the idea from an engineering perspective, although these opportunities are rare. You can tap into the lake and use it for power, or irrigation in the dry season. As soon as it starts to rumble, you open the taps and let it drain!
7. Harold Asmis says:
A note on the guy worrying about the last shovel on that drainage tunnel. We do this all the time for intake tunnels for nuclear power plants. You go as far as you dare go, you excavate a big sump under the potential opening, and then you load it up with explosive. Then you run far away, and blow it! Actually, you fill up the tunnel with water, and close the gates, so it’s not that much fun…
8. vincent says:
I used to live in a near by town of Blitar and experienced the eruption in 1990. We were fortunate that no lava came to town as many people had feared. I remember when my family and I evacuated to a neighbor’s house that had a second story.
9. Edward Pronk says:
Having relatives in the area I am not sure where Mount Kelud is located. Maps of the regions do not indicate specific location; is it near Malang/Batu or closer to Kediri.
10. Chris Rowan says:
It’s about equidistant between the two, at 112 18.5 N 7 56′ S (Google Earth placemark) | <urn:uuid:a3ba2194-666d-4345-a51a-a25c12dfdeb0> | 3 | 3.1875 | 0.093892 | en | 0.960808 | http://all-geo.org/highlyallochthonous/2007/10/defusing-mount-kelud/ |
Hsing I’s Five Fists
– by Allen Pittman
The combative theory behind Hsing-I (Xing Yi) is based on starting after, but arriving before, the opponent’s attack. Because of this, the movements must be precise.
Be aware not to add “curly-cues,” bounces or wobbles or any other extraneous movements. Additional flairs and decorations may seem to make the art prettier or more dramatic, but remember that Hsing-I is not a performing art – it is an internal art with martial applications.
It is “Form-Intent Boxing,” so it is basically the release of an idea. Thus you must have the ideas in mind as you do it. The main ideas are found in the Five Elements or Five Catalysts:
1. Splitting
Hung Splitting
Splitting is like an ax falling. It can be a short chiseling action like splitting a shingle, or a great swing like chopping wood. The raising of the arms raises the ribs, which makes room for the lungs to expand and take in breath as you inhale. As the arms swing down, exhale. Try to feel the feet at all times and notice how the upper and lower torso connect in the midsection – particularly around the naval.
Be sure the back foot does not “follow-step” too much. A half step is a good length. Sometimes the shorter people in class (due to their stride) must follow-step a bit more to keep up with the movement of the group. This is fine, but at home they should work at the other way with a shorter follow-step. Keep an eye on your back foot which should have an angle of about 30-45°, depending on where your knee is pointing. Over time your bones will change and your knee-to-toe shape will alter as your ankle gets more flexible. Give this time. It usually takes a month or so of regular daily practice of a half-hour to an hour a day. Lacking daily practice will slow down the process.
2. Drilling
Hung Drilling
Some teachers put Crushing in the number two position, but the older cosmologies, for ritual and healing reasons, put it second. You can practice either way. Notice your expanding lower ribs over the kidneys when you do this form. Sit well back into the follow-step. This form uses oppositional or tearing energy in the hands as they move in opposite directions. The actual drilling is in the front fist as it goes from palm down to up. This form, like splitting, goes straight ahead.
3. Crushing
Hung Crushing
Older forms of this usually hit with a downward arc. It is assigned to the liver (Wood) and easily targets this organ (unless the person is unusually tall or short!). The “Tiger-Mouth,” or the outstretched area between thumb and forefinger is best aligned with the armpit and let the turning of the hips align the fist to your body-center. The pulling of the opposite hand is very important for good posture, as well as function. This can vary in some styles from a straight stabbing action to an overhead hammer-like strike, stabbing downward. This one also goes straight ahead.
4. Pounding
Hung Pounding
The arm, which guards the head, can vary considerably in position. The compact version, from teacher Hung I-Mien, is as though you are a unicorn holding your own horn. The expanded version of Chen Pan-Ling swings the elbow well back, like in archery, and works well on a long-armed “hay-maker” type of punch. This form moves on a “Seven-Star step,” or follows a zigzag pattern. Keep the zigzag relatively narrow in order to protect your knees. Imagine going down a narrow corridor.
This form, which goes with “Fire,” strengthens the heart and targets it as well. Do not wait for the follow step to punch. Get the hand out early with the initial front step. Or drill with the guard hand with the first step then punch with the rear hand in coordination with the rear follow-step.
5. Crossing
Hung Crossing
According to Huang Po-Nien, in his old Ba Gua book, Crossing is the same as Ba Gua’s “Single Palm-Change.” Remember that the arm that crosses does so from outside the retracting arm. The movement varies from a purely lateral swing across the diaphragm – to a corkscrew into a descending hammer-like action. The footwork is along a wavy circular line. This fist is also called “The Mother” because within its articulations can be found all of the other 4 fists of Hsing-I. Crossing is paired with the Stomach and Spleen, and targets the same. In combat, one may target under the chin or throat too.
Remember the contact of the strike can be well before the end of the movement.
The Five Fists are an excellent foundation for all else in martial arts. They give you correct footwork, alignment, strong legs and lungs and develop the cross-crawl reflex. The empty-handed movements easily transfer to wielding a knife, hammer or an axe. Obviously the main thing when using a weapon is to not cross the arms. The transition for empty hand to weapon creates a whole new set of logistics which largely hinge on weapon length, placement of edge, and shape of blade (if there is one). Some of the well-known practitioners of Hsing-I were known for their skill with a spear.
The geometry of the movements, alignments of the limbs (the Six Harmonies), verticality of the spine and rooted-ness of the legs allow one to move forward with a fortress like fortitude. | <urn:uuid:376d9ffa-827c-43aa-8cf4-b1d563cacf29> | 2 | 2.140625 | 0.056018 | en | 0.94312 | http://apittman.com/blog/east/hsing-i/articles/hsing-is-five-fists |
Arama They Didn't
A recent government survey has shown that the number of people in support of a reform of the civil code to allow married couples to keep their own surnames has declined, with equal numbers of respondents now being in favour of the reforms and against them.
While in Korea and China it is standard practice for women to keep their surnames upon marriage, in Japan, the woman marries into and becomes part of her husband’s family. Traditionally, this meant that she would no longer visit her own family, since she had broken all links to them, changing her name in the family register and erasing her original surname from the register since only one family name can be recorded.
As more and more women have careers in which their names are an important part of their success, it is only natural that some may opt to keep their surnames while still wanting to marry their partners. With the law as it currently stands, this is not possible, however it is technically possible for a man to take his wife’s surname.
Translated below is a popular article on the issue from Yahoo! News, along with the most upvoted netizen comments accompanying the article. It seems that many netizens see the proposal as a negative one, with opinion being overwhelmingly against allowing couples to take separate names.
From Yahoo! Japan:
Cabinet Office Survey: Equal Numbers of People in Favour of and Against Married Couples Keeping Separate Surnames; Trend Shows Decline in Number of Those in Favour
On February 16, the Cabinet Office published the results of the ‘Public Opinion Survey On Family Legislation’ which was carried out in December 2012. Regarding the introduction of an elective system of keeping one’s surname upon marriage, according to the results 35.5% of respondents accepted this, saying ‘I don’t mind if the law is reformed’, and 36.4% were against it, saying ‘Legal reform is unnecessary’, making the results more or less balanced. Those in favour of the reform have decreased in both this survey and the previous survey in 2006, demonstrating that in the current situation, the introduction of the reforms is not gathering momentum
An elective system where spouses can chose to keep their surname rather than take a married name was included in an outline for proposed amendments to the Civil Code recommended by the Legislative Council of the Ministry of Justice in 1996. Following this, although both the LDP and the DPJ administrations had movements to investigate these reforms, opposition was deep-rooted, and the reforms never reached a stage whereby a bill could be submitted. In the survey held in 2001, 42.1% of respondents were in favour of the reforms, which was considerably more than the 29.9% of respondents who were against them; however, in the 2006 survey 36.6% accepted the reforms, and 35.0% were against them, making the results just about on a par with each other, and this time these results were reversed.
Among those who answered that they were in favour of a system where spouses could retain their own surnames, 23.5% of them said that they would want to keep their own surname, and 49.0% said that they would not.
Comments from Yahoo! Japan:
If a couple want to have different surnames, then that just means they don’t have to put them in the family registry.
If we have a system where a married couple can have separate names, then it would be the same is it is in China and Korea.
If this passes then Japanese people will cease to be Japanese. I’m completely against it!
Those who agree with this must be disgusting feminists and traitor bastards, right?
If you prefer to keep your own name then don’t get bloody married.
I’m against separate names. This is just going to end up in the destruction of Japan’s ancient family links. Rather than separate names, they should stop allowing foreigners resident in Japan to take legal aliases.
I want the abolition of legal aliases.North Koreans take Japanese names. They’re not even Japanese, but they take Japanese names. If you think about it, it’s strange, isn’t it?
All this means is that left-wing North Koreans will get rid of their family registers and try to erase their pasts. We absolutely cannot agree to these reforms.
If legal aliases are not abolished at the same time as the separate name law comes into effect, then it’s pointless!(`o´)
I don’t really understand the point of such a proposal being made in the first place. Does this mean that there are a lot of cases where couples have been troubled by not being able to have separate names?
It’s only zainichi North Koreans who are going to be happy to keep their own surnames. That’s precisely why the DPJ was moving ahead with it.
I’m completely against separate surnames.
The very idea is nonsense! I’m completely against it! Prime Minister Abe should also be against it.
It’s like it is in China and Korea. It seems like stuff like ‘gender free’ and so on just aims to destroy the system. There’s nothing in it for us Japanese.
Your surname is essentially the name of the family. When you become a married couple, you become a family. Therefore, I’m against separate surnames.
Separate surnames for couples will not suit Japanese culture. There is absolutely no need to go out of the way to change things.
I’m firmly against this law that will attempt to destroy Japanese family culture. The family ties of those in the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami are a beautiful traditional custom of the Japanese people, and is a very Japanese thing.
Why do people want separate surnames? I don’t get it. Does this mean that the assumption is that they’ll divorce? Dumb.
If you want separate surnames, how about not getting married?
I’m against this, at least. Because it’s a Japanese tradition.
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A man walks past the Ten Commandments monument on Nov. 18, 2002, in the rotunda of the Alabama Judicial Building. A federal judge ordered the monument to be removed. / Kevin Glackmeyer, Montgomery, Ala., Advertiser
MONTGOMERY, Ala. -- A House committee approved a constitutional amendment Wednesday that would authorize governments and schools to display the Ten Commandments, but an American Civil Liberties Union attorney said the law can't "trump the Constitution."
The legislation, sponsored by GOP Sen. Gerald Dial would allow public schools and public bodies to display "historically significant displays which reflect the foundations of the rule of law in America, notwithstanding that such displays may also have religious significance."
The Senate approved the measure last month 23-1. The committee approved the amendment on a voice vote; it now goes to the House of Representatives. If approved there, the amendment would go to voters in 2014.
As introduced, the bill explicitly authorized the display of the Ten Commandments. Dial said at a meeting of the House Constitution, Campaigns and Elections committee that the language was changed in an attempt to stave off potential lawsuits.
"That would certainly result in us going to court, because of challenges based on religious content," he said.
After the meeting, Dial said he hoped the measure would defend local communities that wanted to display the Ten Commandments.
"We changed to historically significant religious documents," he said. "That would include the Ten Commandments, that would include the Pledge of Allegiance, you could even display a coin that said 'In God We Trust' in your building and not worry about being sued by someone."
Dial argued that the Ten Commandments would be considered a "historically significant" document, claiming the Founding Fathers had implemented it in the creation of the U.S. Constitution.
But the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a similar argument made in Stone v. Graham, a 1980 decision that struck down a Kentucky statute requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public school classrooms.
The Kentucky statute required displays of the Ten Commandments to include language saying the "secular application" of the Ten Commandments "is clearly seen in its adoption as the fundamental legal code of Western Civilization and the Common Law of the United States." The Supreme Court said the Ten Commandments were a "sacred text," and that "no legislative recitation of a supposed secular purpose can blind us to that fact."
"The Commandments do not confine themselves to arguably secular matters, such as honoring one's parents, killing or murder," the court wrote. "Rather, the first part of the Commandments concerns the religious duties of believers: Worshipping the Lord God alone, avoiding idolatry, not using the Lord's name in vain, and observing the Sabbath Day."
The historically significant context, Dial said afterward, would not authorize the display of other religious documents, such as the Quran.
Current Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore brought the public display of the Ten Commandments to the forefront during a legal and political fight over him displaying the Commandments on a more than 2-ton granite monument he had placed in the state judicial building.
Moore originally was removed from office almost a decade ago for refusing a federal judge's order to remove the monument, which also depicted other historic documents. Moore ran again last year and reclaimed his seat.
Heather Weaver, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union's Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief, said in an interview Wednesday that "state law can't trump the First Amendment," which provides for separation of church and state.
She warned the state was setting itself up for lawsuits.
"It's a power grab by the state, and it injects the state into these deeply personal religious matters," Weaver said. "Religious liberty for individuals and groups can only be guaranteed when government remains neutral."
The amendment includes language banning the use of public funds "in defense of the constitutionality of this amendment."
Dial argued that the display of the commandments, particularly the Fifth Commandment's prohibition of killing, would be "worth it" if sight of the commandment inspired a student to avoid violent acts. That drew skepticism from Democratic Rep. Juandalynn Givan.
"People see these words every day, and I don't think they've stopped anyone yet," Givan said after the meeting. "You have to have the mindset, as well as the heart, not to kill."
Copyright 2015 USATODAY.com
Read the original story: Ala. proposal to legalize Ten Commandments advances
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The full truth about the Second Amendment
February 14, 2013|Steve Chapman
Viewing the proposals offered since the Sandy Hook massacre, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., concludes the supporters intend "to completely GUT our Second Amendment rights." The Utah Sheriffs Association warned President Barack Obama, "No federal official will be permitted to descend upon our constituents and take from them what the Bill of Rights — in particular Amendment II — has given them."
The logic is simple: The Second Amendment protects the rights of gun owners. Gun control laws violate those rights. Therefore, any such measure is unconstitutional.
But that's not quite how constitutional liberties work. The First Amendment protects freedom of speech — but the government may require permits for a political protest, outlaw child pornography, forbid incitement to violence, allow libel suits and more.
The First Amendment does not protect your right to tell an airport security screener you're fond of bombs. Yet some Second Amendment champions see no limit to the scope of their favorite freedom.
It's odd that they regard it as so vulnerable to abuse. For a long time, this provision was treated as an irrelevant antique. Until 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court had never interpreted it to protect an individual right to own or use guns for self-defense. Now that the "right to keep and bear arms" has gained full recognition, however, its admirers treat it as perpetually in peril.
Many of the old fears, though, are no longer warranted. Limits on "assault weapons" will lead to bans on handguns? No way. Registration of guns will end in house-to-house confiscation? Not in a million years. The Supreme Court has established firm limits on how far gun control can go — and it's not terribly far.
But there's another side to it. The Second Amendment does not preclude general regulation of firearms. And it doesn't disqualify some of the favorite ideas of gun control advocates.
That's not simply the view of liberal academics and anti-gun groups. It's also the view of many distinguished conservative legal experts. I called two, Eugene Kontorovich, of Northwestern University law school, and Eugene Volokh, of UCLA law school. Though they do not concur on all particulars, they agree that many common ideas would likely pass constitutional muster.
The most popular idea at the moment is expanding federal background checks to include all private sales. "I think the courts will say it's permissible," Volokh told me. "No problem, assuming the criteria are legitimate," Kontorovich said. The reason: It's a minimal obligation that does not substantially interfere with a person's right to obtain a gun for self-defense.
An assault weapons ban? Volokh suspects this law would be upheld mainly because it's so ineffectual. Outlawing certain guns that might be used for self-defense is probably OK because many other virtually identical weapons would remain legal.
Kontorovich thinks a limit on the size of magazines would be struck down because it could inhibit an individual's ability to stop multiple attackers. "Limiting magazine capacity is like saying a print magazine could be only 32 pages," he says. What would not be allowed in the context of press freedom should not be allowed in the context of gun rights, he says.
Surprisingly, both think the Second Amendment would allow some laws that are far more ambitious. A law mandating the mere registration of all guns, says Volokh, would probably be seen as no more objectionable than an ordinance requiring a permit for a parade.
Requiring a license to buy a gun or ammunition (as Illinois does), Kontorovich believes, would be "relatively unproblematic" as long as the goal is not to discourage such purchases. Neither regulation would deprive ordinary people of their right to obtain guns for protection, which is the core of the Second Amendment.
In practice, the Second Amendment allows many things — and many of the things it forbids could never be passed anyway. So gun rights supporters, a group that includes me, had better focus on explaining why the great majority of gun control ideas won't work. The Constitution won't save us from all bad ideas. It's not supposed to.
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(Page 5 of 5)
Text of President Barack Obama's address to Parliament
Nov 8, 2010, 06.35pm IST
Faced with such gross violations of human rights, it is the responsibility of the international community-especially leaders like the United States and India-to condemn it. If I can be frank, in international fora, India has often avoided these issues. But speaking up for those who cannot do so for themselves is not interfering in the affairs of other countries. It's not violating the rights of sovereign nations. It's staying true to our democratic principles. It's giving meaning to the human rights that we say are universal. And it sustains the progress that in Asia and around the world has helped turn dictatorships into democracies and ultimately increased our security in the world.
Promoting shared prosperity. Preserving peace and security.
In your lives, you have overcome odds that might have overwhelmed a lesser country. In just decades, you have achieved progress and development that took other nations centuries. And now you are assuming your rightful place as a leader among nations. Your parents and grandparents imagined this. Your children and grandchildren will look back on this. But only you-this generation of Indians-can seize the possibility of this moment.
We believe that no matter where you live-whether a village in Punjab or the bylanes of Chandni Chowk...an old section of Kolkata or a new high-rise in Bangalore-every person deserves the same chance to live in security and dignity, to get an education, to find work, and to give their children a better future.
And we believe that when countries and cultures put aside old habits and attitudes that keep people apart, when we recognize our common humanity, then we can begin to fulfill the aspirations we share. It's a simple lesson contained in that collection of stories which has guided Indians for centuries-the Panchtantra. And it's the spirit of the inscription seen by all who enter this great hall: 'That one is mine and the other a stranger is the concept of little minds. But to the large-hearted, the world itself is their family."
This is the story of India; it's the story of America-that despite their differences, people can see themselves in one another, and work together and succeed together as one proud nation. And it can be the spirit of the partnership between our nations-that even as we honor the histories which in different times kept us apart, even as we preserve what makes us unique in a globalized world, we can recognize how much we can achieve together.
| <urn:uuid:cc7f7a97-d9f9-4e15-b776-e49f33c90c51> | 2 | 2.203125 | 0.119386 | en | 0.955264 | http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2010-11-08/news/27600054_1_largest-democracy-innovators-indian-americans/5 |
Take the 2-minute tour ×
When I launch any application from terminal, then the terminal gets locked until I close that application. What I want is just to use terminal for launching programs and then use the same terminal for other purpose without closing that application.
I googled up and found that one solution is running the process in background like
gedit &
Is n't there any other way by which I only type "gedit" and then return to command prompt? Because I have seen such use in fedora terminal. How is it done in fedora by default ?
Thank You.
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1 Answer 1
There is no way to do what you are asking without patching either bash or every application you wish to give this behavior to. However if you want to put a program running on a terminal into the background (as though you had run it with & is to switch to the terminal it is running on, press CTRL-Z and then type bg. The first thing says to suspend execution of the process and the second says to restart it in the background.
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what I wanted to ask is , how we can open apps in fedora terminal in background without using '&' and not in ubuntu ?? – Jignesh Mar 3 '13 at 12:47
You cannot. I tried this just a few minutes ago. With the exception of apps that implement the background functionality (such as xdg-open, which you might want to try out) the functionality is the same as in ubuntu. This is mostly because the behavior is specified in bash, which both distro's use the same version of. – Alex L. Mar 3 '13 at 20:24
Your Answer
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Top 10% of CEOs
© Getty Images
Qualities Of A Leader
9 Qualities The Most Successful CEOs Share
Let's be honest. There are a lot of nice CEOs but if you don't have the ability to build a product that matters to people, then no one will remember your name.
This answer, by Robert Scoble, originally appeared on Quora. We think it's worthwhile reading, so we're sharing it here.
I've interviewed thousands of CEOs and [here are] some things that stand out to me:
1. Good At Hiring And Firing
Whenever you find a really great CEO you find someone who has a knack for hiring. That means selling other people on your dream or your business. Especially when it doesn't seem all that important or seems very risky. I used to work for a CEO who was awesome at hiring, but couldn't fire anyone. Doomed the business. Many of the best CEOs get others to follow no matter what.
2. Builds A Culture, Not Just A Company
The best CEOs, like Tony Hsieh at Zappos, build a culture that gives everyone a mission. They stand out in a sea of boring companies.
3. Listens And Acts
Many CEOs want to tell you what they are doing, but the best ones listen to feedback, and, even, do something with that feedback. My favourites even give credit back. Mike McCue, CEO of Flipboard, tells audiences that I was responsible for a couple of key features.
4. Is Resilient
Airbnb took 1,000 days for its business to start working. Imagine if they gave up on day 999? The best CEOs find a way to dig in and keep going even when it seems everything is going against them.
5. Has Vision
Let's be honest. There are a lot of nice CEOs but if you don't have the ability to build a product that matters to people, then no one will remember your name. Can you see a way to make billions with wearable computers? I guarantee some can and they are the CEOs who will bring me interesting new products.
6. Stays Focused
A friend who worked for Steve Jobs told me that what really made him different is that Jobs wouldn't let teams move off their tasks until they really finished them.
7. Speaks Clearly
A great CEO is clear, crisp, concise. Quotable. So many people just aren't good at telling a story in a way that's easy to remember. The best are awesome at this. Since it's the CEO's job to tell the company's story, it's extremely important that this person be able to clearly tell a story about the company and the product.
8. Is A Customer Advocate
The best CEOs understand deeply what customers want and when they are making anti-customer choices.
9. Good At Convincing Other People
CEOs have to deal with conflicting interest groups. Customers often want something investors don't. So, a good CEO is really great at convincing other people to get on board, even at changing people's opinions.
Extra credit if you are:
- Nice: Yeah, Steve Jobs wasn't always nice. But he was an exception in many ways. People remember assholes and try to avoid them. That's not something that's easy to work around.
- A builder: Yeah, you can be a CEO if you aren't a builder, but you are swimming up stream. It's one reason I haven't run my own business. The CEOs that seem to work the best are ones who could write some code, or build a new design using a 3D-printer.
- Integrity: The best CEOs are survivors and it's really hard to survive if you have dirt in your closet or treat people differently behind closed doors than you do in public.
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The Epistles of Paul to the Corinthians.
The Harvard Classics. 1909–14.
The First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians
[1] FOLLOW after love; yet desire earnestly spiritual gifts, but rather that ye may prophesy.
[2] For he that speaketh in a tongue speaketh not unto men, but unto God; for no man understandeth; 1 but in the spirit he speaketh mysteries.
[3] But he that prophesieth speaketh unto men edification, and exhortation, 2 and consolation.
[4] He that speaketh in a tongue edifieth 3 himself; but he that prophesieth edifieth 4 the church.
[5] Now I would have you all speak with tongues, but rather that ye should prophesy: and greater is he that prophesieth than he that speaketh with tongues, except he interpret, that the church may receive edifying.
[8] For if the trumpet give an uncertain voice, who shall prepare himself for war?
[9] So also ye, unless ye utter by the tongue speech easy to be understood, how shall it be known what is spoken? for ye will be speaking into the air.
[10] There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and no 5 kind is without signification.
[11] If then I know not the meaning of the voice, I shall be to him that speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh will be a barbarian unto 6 me.
[12] So also ye, since ye are zealous of spiritual 7 gifts, seek that ye may abound unto the edifying of the church.
[13] Wherefore let him that speaketh in a tongue pray that he may interpret.
[14] For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prayeth, but my understanding is unfruitful.
[16] Else if thou bless with the spirit, how shall he that filleth the place of the 8 unlearned say the Amen at thy giving of thanks, seeing he knoweth not what thou sayest?
[18] I thank God, I speak with tongues more than you all:
[19] Howbeit in the church I had rather speak five words with my understanding, that I might instruct others also, than ten thousand words in a tongue.
[20] Brethren, be not children in mind: yet in malice be ye babes, but in mind be men. 10
[21] In the law it is written, By men of strange tongues and by the lips of strangers will I speak unto this people; and not even thus will they hear me, saith the Lord.
[22] Wherefore tongues are for a sign, not to them that believe, but to the unbelieving: but prophesying is for a sign, not to the unbelieving, but to them that believe.
[23] If therefore the whole church be assembled together and all speak with tongues, and there come in men unlearned or unbelieving, will they not say that ye are mad?
[24] But if all prophesy, and there come in one unbelieving or unlearned, he is reproved 11 by all, he is judged by all;
[25] the secrets of his heart are made manifest; and so he will fall down on his face and worship God, declaring that God is among 12 you indeed.
[27] If any man speaketh in a tongue, let it be by two, or at the most three, and that in turn; and let one interpret:
[29] And let the prophets speak by two or three, and let the others discern. 13
[30] But if a revelation be made to another sitting by, let the first keep silence.
[31] For ye all can prophesy one by one, that all may learn, and all may be exhorted; 14
[32] and the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets;
[33] for God is not a God of confusion, but of peace.
As in all the churches of the saints,
[36] What? was it from you that the word of God went forth? or came it unto you alone?
[38] But 15 if any man is ignorant, let him be ignorant.
[39] Wherefore, my brethren, desire earnestly to prophesy, and forbid not to speak with tongues.
[40] But let all things be done decently and in order.
Note 1. Gr. heareth. [back]
Note 2. Or, comfort. [back]
Note 3. Gr. buildeth up. [back]
Note 4. Gr. buildeth up. [back]
Note 5. Or, nothing is without voice. [back]
Note 6. Or, in my case. [back]
Note 7. Gr. spirits. [back]
Note 8. Or, him that is without gifts: and so in ver. 23, 24. [back]
Note 9. Gr. builded up. [back]
Note 10. Gr. of full age, Comp. ch. 2. 6. [back]
Note 11. Or, convicted. [back]
Note 12. Or, in. [back]
Note 13. Gr. discriminate. [back]
Note 14. Or, comforted. [back]
Note 15. Many ancient authorities read But if any man knoweth not, he is not known, Comp. ch. 8. 3. [back]
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Wednesday, July 6, 2011
A Wrinkle for Umpire Charles Daniels
The first use of shin guards in baseball is not as "cut and dried" as one would think (or hope). Catcher Roger Bresnahan is generally credited with being the first to introduce the protective equipment to the game, but this is simply not the case. The best account of the history of shin guards in baseball's early days is found in Peter Morris's invaluable book A Game of Inches, a must-read for anyone interested in baseball history. But, here I'd like to present what I believe is a new discovery: the earliest definitive use of shin guards in baseball.
Tucked away in their weekly "Notes and Comments" column, The Sporting Life of May 30, 1888, published the following observation:
International [League] umpire Jerry Sullivan wears leg-pads like a cricketer. Daniels originated the wrinkle.
This innovator named Daniels was none other than Charles F. Daniels, a veteran arbiter who first umpired in the major leagues in 1874. On July 15, 1876, when St. Louis pitcher George Bradley tossed the second no-hitter in major league history (and the first in the annals of the National League), Daniels was the man who called the balls and strikes ... and everything else. Remember, these were the days of just one umpire per game. He also umpired Johnny Ward's perfect game of June 17, 1880: the second such masterpiece ever tossed in the big leagues. Additionally, in 1886 Daniels was the manager of Hartford of the Eastern League when that club sold a young catcher named Cornelius McGillicuddy to Washington of the National League. Perhaps you've heard of this future Hall of Famer, more commonly known as "Connie Mack?" When Daniels passed away in 1932, his New York Times obituary led with the following statement:
The man who introduced Connie Mack to major league baseball died today.
Now, nearly 80 years since his passing, here's a new claim to fame for Charles Daniels. On April 25, 1888, the New York Giants held their home opener at the Polo Grounds, hosting the Philadelphia Phillies. The umpire for the game was our man Daniels. Photographer Joseph Hall captured the festive scene just prior to the start of the game. The wonderful photograph, showing the two clubs, their managers, and umpire Daniels, is part of the collection at the National Baseball Library. Here is a detail:
Collection of the National Baseball Library
Look closely at Daniels at far left:
Note that his right hand holds his umpire mask while his right leg is adorned with the above noted "leg guard." Why Daniels is wearing just one shin guard is a mystery. Maybe he had yet to affix the other one when it came time to take the photograph? Or perhaps for reasons unknown he only used one while umpiring? Who knows?
Still, the photo is clear evidence of the first definitive use of a shin guard in baseball, over 120 years ago. Who'd have guessed its debut was on the leg of an umpire? | <urn:uuid:5c01e803-a800-4b34-8aa9-6eb3798adc48> | 3 | 2.515625 | 0.03576 | en | 0.973991 | http://baseballresearcher.blogspot.com/2011_07_01_archive.html |
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
How to Use Caliber to Convert Bookshare Books Into ePub
Caliber is a free eBook conversion software that can convert Bookshare books into ePub format. ePub is the format used by most eReader. There are other methods of converting Bookshare books such as Don Johnston's Daisy to ePub software. (Click Here for article about Daisy to ePub) Caliber is a free program for Mac and PC. Caliber can input and output many different book formats which makes it more versatile than Daisy to ePub. Converting a book using Daisy to ePub is easier then using Caliber. The benefit of Caliber is that it is free and Daisy to ePub costs $99. When using Caliber you must first convert your Bookshare book into a PDF by copying the text and images of the book into word document and saving the document as a PDF. This step is necessary because PDF is one of the supported Caliber formats. The next step is to add the PDF into your Caliber library and convert it to ePub format. Once the book is in ePub you can put it on your iPad or other eReader. If you put your book onto the iPad you can use VoiceOver to listen to the book. Caliber is not perfect, sometimes the spacing and original formatting is not left intact. Even with its flaws Caliber is still a great tool for converting Bookshare books into ePubs. Watch the video above for step by step instructions.
1. It is actually easier than this by one step. Instead of creating a PDF, simply save the file from your browser, changing the file extension from .xml to .html in the save dialog box. Be sure to leave the default option of the file format as "web page, complete."
Then simply open it in Calibre and convert to your preferred format.
2. +1 to converting from HTML. I tried to use Caliber for plain DAISY book and got runtime error. I followed the recommendation of Anonymous and did the following:
1) extract files from zip archive
2) open .xml file in browser (I used Firefox)
3) save document as HTML file
4) open HTML book in Caliber and successfully convert it to EPUB format
The book did not loose formatting and is finely opened with my Pocketbook360.
3. converting text to epub is very simple, but can Calibre convert daisy files to text or epub or mobi?
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4 “Missing Links” Are Missing
As a college student I was convinced that evolution was true and that, in time, scientists would find the missing pieces. I thought science would ultimately provide us with an unbroken chain of evidence supporting the evolution and relationship of all things. Many scientists are still hoping for this evidence. However, Stephen Jay Gould, former Professor of Geology and Paleontology at Harvard, believes that the unbroken chain of evolutionary evidence will never be found—that what we see in the fossils and in living creatures is more accurately explained with the creation model. Gould was still an evolutionist, but he wrote:
The birds of Massachusetts and the bugs in my backyard are unambiguous members of species recognized in the same way by all experienced observers.
This notion of species as “natural kinds”...fit splendidly with creationist tenets....
But how could a division of the organic world into discrete entities be justified by an evolutionary theory that proclaimed ceaseless change as the fundamental fact of nature?43
Dr. Gould is making a statement about what we see as opposed to what evolution theorizes we ought to be seeing. We see discrete entities, distinct species. In the fossil record, there are fish, turtles and cockroaches. They are individually distinct, identifiable creatures. In life, we can also see fish, turtles and cockroaches. We can identify them. They are not ½ fish and ½ turtle or ½ turtle and ½ cockroach. We do not see elephants evolving fins or whales evolving wings. The discrete entities we see in the fossil record and in life are not “questionable” species. They are not transitional forms, as evolution would require. This is a problem for the evolutionist. If evolution is true, creatures should not be so easily identifiable. Every creature should be difficult to categorize, classify and name, if evolution is correct (and life is “evolving along”). Could it be that evolution is not correct? That each animal is easily identifiable (as giraffe or beetle or fish or turtle or cockroach) truly does “fit splendidly with creationist tenets.” Ceaseless change in the fossils or living plants and animals does not appear to be “...the fundamental fact of nature (Emphasis added).”44
God Created Kinds
God tells us He created each plant and animal after its own kind (Genesis 1:11, 12, 21, 24, 25). Nothing evolved from some lower life form and nothing is presently evolving into a higher life form. From a creationist position, what we see in the fossil record and in life is exactly what we would expect to see. And what should we expect to see with our Biblical worldview glasses on? We should see discreet, identifiable living and fossil forms which are or were fully functional, designed and made according to the wisdom and power of Almighty God the Creator! This is exactly what we see. Each form of life displays the attributes of its own kind of flesh: flesh of fish, flesh of birds, flesh of beasts, flesh of humans, etc. (1 Corinthians 15:39).
The lack of transitional forms in fossil and living entities is why evolutionists have the “missing link” problem, although some deny this. The “missing links” are missing. They are completely absent in the fossil record and in living organisms. They never will be found because the Creator did not create transitional forms between kinds of creatures.
God created each plant and animal after its own kind, therefore, you would not expect to see “missing links.” Even the most famous missing link, Archaeopteryx, is no longer considered, by many evolutionists, to be a “link.” Years ago, Archaeopteryx was believed to be a link (transitional form) between reptiles and birds. Now it is known to be a bird even in evolutionary circles.45
“Missing Links” Or “Unbroken Ties”
The evolutionist’s propaganda machine constantly barrages us through public TV, magazines and newspapers with broad ambiguities and undocumented claims supporting evolutionary theory. A letter in The Dallas Morning News by Drs. Alvin and Joel Taurog of Southwestern Medical School exemplifies this type of propaganda:
Biological evolution asserts that all living organisms are interrelated by unbroken ties of genealogy. Although referred to as a theory, evolution is as much a fact as anything discovered by science, as well confirmed as the rotation of the planets around the sun or the roundness of the earth. The concept of evolution is central to biology and a massive body of evidence corroborates the evolutionary origin of all living organisms, including humans. While much remains to be learned regarding the mechanisms of evolution, the evolution of species is accepted by biologists as proven fact.46
Let us evaluate this paragraph of Drs. Taurog. If “...all living organisms are interrelated by unbroken ties of genealogy,” then the leading evolutionary thinker of Harvard, Dr. Stephen Jay Gould, is wrong. Gould states:
“Gradualistic evolution” means evolution of one creature into a more sophisticated and more complex creature over long periods of time. One creature gradually becomes another if given enough time. Gradualistic evolution, if true, should have evidence of transitional intermediate life forms in fossils and in living animals. Gould continues:
What Gould is saying is that the missing links remain missing. There are no transitional (in-between) forms. No plant or animal is evolving into a higher form as far as the fossils can confirm. Even in living forms we do not see any chickie-ducks or duckie-chicks!
“Sunrise” Or “Earth Turn”
Where are these “unbroken ties” referred to by Drs. Taurog? They present no scientific evidence to support their view. The evidence is only implied. They do appear to erect a “straw- man-creationist” and to take a few sideways swipes at him. In mentioning the “rotation of the planets around the sun or the roundness of the earth” as true science, are they implying that the Bible and creationists believe in the “sun rising on a flat earth?” How accurate are these doctors in the use of language? Do they say to a patient, “Did you see the beautiful sunrise this morning?” Or would they be scientifically accurate and ask, “Did you see the beautiful earth turn this morning?”49 The Bible uses common, ordinary language. That the earth is not flat, but a sphere is taught in Isaiah 40:22: “It is he that sitteth upon (above) the circle of the earth...” (KJV). The Bible teaches that as God looks down upon earth, it appears as a sphere or circle. Psalm 19 is a scripture that uses normal language and refers to the sun rising. The Bible is not inaccurate because it uses common figures of speech.
Where can we find the “massive body of evidence [that] corroborates the evolutionary origin of all living creatures, including humans,” as Drs. Taurog allege? The “massive body of evidence” proving the evolution of man would not fill a single casket according to evolutionist and prolific author Dr. Lyall Watson:
Drs. Alvin and Joel Taurog say still more:
When religion and science come into conflict, it is generally in the realm of belief.... Scientific belief is based solely upon evidence that is validated by observation, experiment and prediction; neither religious belief, nor any other belief system, is subject to these constraints.51
Apparently, Drs. Taurog believe that the evolution model of one cell to man is science and thus can be validated with the scientific method. Creation science is apparently religious belief in their view. They add, “The interrelationships among living organisms from microbes to man have never been clearer...” It is not clear precisely what these doctors are referring to, but from the smallest life forms to the largest, from the simplest to the most complex, there is no scientific evidence to prove that they (small to large or simple to complex) are related as ancestors to or progeny from each other. Natural History, May 1977, p. 14, published the words of the late Dr. Stephen Jay Gould:
Christians Raise The White Flag Of Surrender!
Do we Christians realize how much the world’s culture has affected us? In the late 1800’s, Darwinian evolution became popular. It appeared that the evolutionists had proven the universe to be billions of years old. It seemed so obvious that people came from a monkey-like creature. What did our theologians do? Up came the white flag! They invented theistic evolution in order to squeeze evolution into the Bible.
In so doing, they subjected the Bible to “science” rather than subjecting “science” to the Bible, and surrendered to the current cultural fad of Darwinism. But we gained the approval of the academicians and intellectuals, didn’t we? (See John 5:44; 12:43.)
Now the slow, gradual evolution over millions of years idea is passing out of favor. Dr. Gould has popularized punctuated equilibria, apparently due to the “extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record.” Atheist and evolutionist Richard Milton, England’s premier evolutionary science journalist writes:
The difficulty with punctuated equilibrium is that it is wholly speculative and has been introduced simply to account for the lack of fossils that ought to exist in the neo-Darwinist theory.52
What are the Christians doing? We are moving with our culture away from Darwinian evolution (theistic evolution is Darwinian evolution with Bible verses tacked on) into punctuated equilibria which we have renamed “Progressive Creation.” (Progressive creationism, as far as this writer can discern, is Gould’s punctuated equilibria with Bible verses tacked on!) The apparent leader in the progressive creation camp is Hugh Ross. Ross believes that the universe is 16 billion years old and the Flood was a local river overflow. Further, he believes that a soulless race of people roamed the earth before Adam. They lived and died for thousands of years before Adam sinned and God proclaimed death as the penalty for sin! Death before death is an interesting idea.
Both theistic evolution (Christianized Darwinism) and progressive creationism (Christianized punctuated equilibria) demand billions of years of earth history and eliminate the global flood of the days of Noah. Neither of these ideas is Biblically accurate or acceptable. You see, if the Flood was only 4500 years ago as the Bible teaches, the evolutionists claim there could not yet be all the diversity of animal and plant life—there would not have been enough time for all of these life forms to evolve. So the theistic evolutionists and progressive creationists, following the lead of the pagan evolutionists, hold to the old earth idea. And this is even in spite of evolutionists in their areas of specialty saying the creationists have the better arguments!
Molecular Biology Disproves Evolution
Even at the level of molecules, evidence to support evolution is lacking. In Chapter 2, we discussed the fact that at the cellular level of living creatures there are important differences that distinguish between basic kinds of flesh. For instance, the cells that make up the flesh of birds and fish are not the same. Scientists are studying even smaller entities than cells as they examine the molecules of the cell. This field of study is named Molecular Biology.
A book that every Christian family (and non-Christian, as well) should have is, Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins. Written by creationists as a supplemental high school biology textbook supporting the view that life demands a designer, this book deals with the molecular evidence for creation.
The study of living things on the molecular level is a relatively new field. The information that scientists derive from molecular biology may be used to compare and categorize organisms, a field known as biochemical taxonomy. Biochemical analysis holds out the promise of making taxonomy a more precise science, because it allows differences between various organisms to be quantified and measured....
Proponents of intelligent design read similarity in structure as a reflection of similarity in function. All living organisms must survive in the same universe and must fit its ecological web. All must fit into a food chain. The need to function within a common universe puts common physical and chemical requirements on all organisms. It would be both logical and efficient for an intelligent agent to design living things with a common biochemical base....
The significant new contribution biochemistry offers is a mathematically quantifiable means of determining how similar classes of organisms are. But when several similarities are put side by side, the pattern that emerges contradicts all expectations based on evolution (Emphasis added).53
Animals that evolutionists have always believed to be closely related in the evolutionary chain are now known to be unrelated when studied at the molecular level. Kenyon and Davis continue:
To use classic evolutionary terminology, amphibians are intermediate between fish and the other land-dwelling vertebrates. Yet, analysis of their amino acids does not place amphibians in an intermediate position. This is true no matter what species of amphibian we choose for comparison. Based upon the evolutionary series, we would expect some amphibians to be closer to fish (“primitive” species) and others to be closer to reptiles (“advanced” species). But this is not the case. No matter which species are taken as the basis for comparison, the distance between amphibians and fish, or between amphibians and reptiles, is always the same....
The revolution in molecular biology has given us new, mathematically quantifiable data on the similarities in living things. But the data have served to support a picture of the organic world consistent with the theory of intelligent design (Emphasis added).54
Author Michael Denton [Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (Harper and Row, 1986)], a Ph.D. in molecular biology (who is not a creationist as far as I know), argues that evolution from one cell to man is not indicated at the level of the molecule. After looking at molecules for evidence of “missing links” between the different classes of creatures, Denton writes (p. 286):
There is a total absence of partially inclusive or intermediate classes, and therefore none of the groups traditionally cited by evolutionary biologists as intermediate gives even the slightest hint of a supposedly transitional character.
Of course, if there is no evidence for evolutionary relationships at the level of molecules, which are the basic building blocks of nature, then the idea of evolution of enzymes, proteins, plasma and tissue is totally absurd. The Bible says:
For thus saith the Lord, that created the heavens;
God himself that formed the earth and made it;
he hath established it, he created it not in vain,
he formed it to be inhabited:
I am the Lord; and there is none else...
and there is no God else beside me;
a just God and a Savior;
there is none beside me (Isaiah 45:18,21b).
Dr. Vincent Sarich, an evolutionist and Professor at the University of California at Berkeley, did a series of studies at the molecular level on the evolution of man. At first, his evolutionary colleagues scorned his studies. He had the audacity to announce in 1967 that Ramapithecus (proclaimed by Elwyn Simons and David Pilbeam of Yale to be one of the earliest ancestors of man) was not at all ancestral to man, but more probably an ancestor to the orangutan.
The year was 1967. Sarich and his partner, Allan Wilson, were comparing blood proteins from human beings, chimpanzees and gorillas—finding them remarkably similar. After analyzing the slight differences, they decided that the ancestors of human beings must have diverged from those of the African apes only about 5 million years ago, instead of the 20 million to 30 million years that fossil evidence seemed to suggest.
Their conclusion was regarded by many paleontologists as heresy. It was bad enough that Sarich and Wilson were challenging the conventional estimate of the age of the human line. Worse, they were doing it with test tubes and biochemistry—all but ignoring the fossils on which so much evolutionary theory was based. Most experts then believed that human beings could trace their ancestry at least as far back as a 14 million-year-old creature called Ramapithecus, and paleontologist Elwyn Simons, then of Yale, spoke for many of his colleagues when he pronounced the Sarich-Wilson work “impossible to believe.”
Times have changed. While Simons still thinks Ramapithecus may be a human ancestor, he has little company. New fossil discoveries have convinced many experts that the animal was ancestral to the orangutan.55
Molecular research is eliminating the supposed evolutionary ancestors of people, one by one.
He gathered the waters of the sea together as an heap: he layeth up the depth in storehouses.
The counsel of the Lord standeth for ever, the thoughts of his heart to all generations (Psalm 33:6-11).
43 Stephen Jay Gould, “A Quahog is a Quahog,” Natural History, Vol. 88 (7), August- September 1979, p. 18.
44 Ibid.
45 See The Dallas Morning News, Science Update, by Matt Crenson, October 23, 1995, and Nature of the same month.
46 Drs. Alvin and Joel Taurog, The Dallas Morning News, March 6, 1987, Letters to the Editor.
47 Stephen Jay Gould, “Is a New and General Theory of Evolution Emerging?” Paleobiology, Vol. 6 (1), January, 1980, p. 127, as quoted in The Quote Book, p. 8.
48 Stephen Jay Gould, “The Return of Hopeful Monsters,” Natural History, Vol. LXXVI (6), June-July, 1977, p. 24. Quoted in The Quote Book, p. 8.
49 There is another idea called “Geocentricity.” It teaches that the earth is stationary and everything else revolves around it. There is apparently no way to conclusively prove either view without stepping outside of our universe to observe how the stars, planets, etc., are moving in relationship to each other.
50 Dr. Lyall Watson, “The Water People,” Science Digest, Vol. 90, May 1982, p. 44.
52 Richard Milton, Shattering the myths of Darwinism (Rochester, Vermont: Park Street Press), 1997, p.215.
53 Percival Davis and Dean H. Kenyon, Of Pandas and People (Dallas: Haughton Publishing Co., 1989), pp. 34-36.
54 Ibid., pp. 37, 38.
55 Kevin McKean, “Preaching the Molecular Gospel,” Discover, Vol. 4 (7), July 1983, p. 34. | <urn:uuid:b46e030a-b62a-4b00-be88-1239988cdabd> | 3 | 2.859375 | 0.080579 | en | 0.948244 | http://biblicaldiscipleship.org/content/4-%E2%80%9Cmissing-links%E2%80%9D-are-missing |
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Python Closures and Decorators (Pt. 2)
Edit: got complaints that code was hard to read, trying out Pygments.
In part 1, we looked at sending functions as arguments to other functions, at nesting functinons, and finally we wrapped a function in another function. We'll begin this part by giving an example implementation on the exercise I gave in part 1:
>>> def print_call(fn):
... def fn_wrap(*args, **kwargs):
... print("Calling %s with arguments: \n\targs: %s\n\tkwargs:%s" % (
... fn.__name__, args, kwargs))
... retval = fn(*args, **kwargs)
... print("%s returning '%s'" % (fn.func_name, retval))
... return retval
... fn_wrap.func_name = fn.func_name
... return fn_wrap
>>> def greeter(greeting, what='world'):
... return "%s %s!" % (greeting, what)
>>> greeter = print_call(greeter)
>>> greeter("Hi")
Calling greeter with arguments:
args: ('Hi',)
greeter returning 'Hi world!'
'Hi world!'
>>> greeter("Hi", what="Python")
Calling greeter with arguments:
args: ('Hi',)
kwargs:{'what': 'Python'}
greeter returning 'Hi Python!'
'Hi Python!'
So, this is at least mildly useful, but it'll get better! You may or may not have heard of closures, and you may have heard any of a large number of defenitions of what a closure is - I won't go into nitpicking, but just say that a closure is a block of code (for example a function) that captures (or closes over) non-local (free) variables. If this is all gibberish to you, you're probably in need of a CS refresher, but fear not - I'll show by example, and the concept is easy enough to understand: a function can reference variables that are defined in the function's enclosing scope.
For example, take a look at this code:
>>> a = 0
>>> def get_a():
... return a
>>> get_a()
>>> a = 3
>>> get_a()
As you can see, the function get_a can get the value of a, and will be able to read the updated value. However, there is a limitation - a captured variable cannot be written to:
>>> def set_a(val):
... a = val
>>> set_a(4)
>>> a
What happened here? Since a closure cannot write to any captured variables, a = val actually writes to a local variable a that shadows the module-level a that we wanted to write to. To get around this limitation (which may or may not be a good idea), we can use a container type:
>>> class A(object): pass
>>> a = A()
>>> a.value = 1
>>> def set_a(val):
... a.value = val
>>> a.value
>>> set_a(5)
>>> a.value
So, with the knowledge that a function captures variables from it's enclosing scope, we're finally approaching something interesting, and we'll start by implementing a partial. A partial is an instance of a function where you have already filled in some or all of the arguments; let's say, for example that you have a session with username and password stored, and a function that queries some backend layer which takes different arguments but always require credentials. Instead of passing the credentials manually every time, we can use a partial to pre-fill those values:
>>> #Our 'backend' function
... def get_stuff(user, pw, stuff_id):
... """Here we would presumably fetch data using the supplied
... credentials and id"""
... print("get_stuff called with user: %s, pw: %s, stuff_id: %s" % (
... user, pw, stuff_id))
>>> def partial(fn, *args, **kwargs):
... def fn_part(*fn_args, **fn_kwargs):
... kwargs.update(fn_kwargs)
... return fn(*args + fn_args, **kwargs)
... return fn_part
>>> my_stuff = partial(get_stuff, 'myuser', 'mypwd')
>>> my_stuff(3)
get_stuff called with user: myuser, pw: mypwd, stuff_id: 3
>>> my_stuff(67)
get_stuff called with user: myuser, pw: mypwd, stuff_id: 67
Partials can be used in numerous places to remove code duplication where a function is called in different places with the same, or almost the same, arguments. Of course, you don't have to implement it yourself; just do from functools import partial.
Finally, we'll take a look at function decorators (there may be a post on class decorators in the future). A function decorator is (can be implemented as) a function that takes a function as parameter and returns a new function. Sounds familiar? It should, because we've already implemented a working decorator: our print_call function is ready to be used as-is:
>>> @print_call
... def will_be_logged(arg):
... return arg*5
>>> will_be_logged("!")
Calling will_be_logged with arguments:
args: ('!',)
will_be_logged returning '!!!!!'
Using the @-notation is simply a convenient shorthand to doing:
>>> def will_be_logged(arg):
... return arg*5
>>> will_be_logged = print_call(will_be_logged)
But what if we want to be able to parameterize the decorator? In this case, the function used as a decorator will received the arguments, and will be expected to return a function that wraps the decorated function:
>>> def require(role):
... def wrapper(fn):
... def new_fn(*args, **kwargs):
... if not role in kwargs.get('roles', []):
... print("%s not in %s" % (role, kwargs.get('roles', [])))
... raise Exception("Unauthorized")
... return fn(*args, **kwargs)
... return new_fn
... return wrapper
>>> @require('admin')
... def get_users(**kwargs):
... return ('Alice', 'Bob')
>>> get_users()
admin not in []
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 7, in new_fn
Exception: Unauthorized
>>> get_users(roles=['user', 'editor'])
admin not in ['user', 'editor']
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 7, in new_fn
Exception: Unauthorized
>>> get_users(roles=['user', 'admin'])
('Alice', 'Bob')
...and there you have it. You are now ready to write decorators, and perhaps use them to write aspect-oriented Python; adding @cache, @trace, @throttle are all trivial (and before you add @cache, do check functools once more if you're using Python 3!).
Blaag created 120301 19:04
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Historic presidential race, but slavery persists in US
Surrounding the election of the first black President of the United States, much was made of the country overcoming its legacy of slavery, leading a reasonable person to conclude that slavery is actually history in the U.S.
But, from the agricultural fields of Florida flows a steady stream of reports of migrant workers being subjected to modern-day slavery – forced labor, beatings and withholding of pay included. (According to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), in the last 10 years, 7 federal trials on farm labor slavery were prosecuted in Florida, involving 1,000 workers.)
CIW, with the help of The Alliance for Fair Food, the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative and other allies in the human rights movement, has been battling not only the State of Florida to take a more pro-active role in labor rights protections, but also has been taking on some of the biggest fast food chains in the world, including Subway, McDonald’s, Taco Bell and Burger King, which buy the tomatoes and other products they harvest, for better wages and working conditions.
CIW signed agreements with some of the companies on wage and conditions issues, but a statement from a Florida Department of Agriculture spokesperson in December again set off alarms that the state was underplaying the significance of the ongoing abuses in the field.
The Coalition is now asking Florida Governor Charlie Crist to step up his involvement, and have a letter-writing action on their site.
Dear Gov. Crist, didn’t you get the election night memo? Slavery is out.
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Fair use and documentaries
By Mark McKenna
Thanks to Eric for inviting me to post here. It’s my first real blogging experience, so I’m hoping it goes smoothly.
Most of the press related to copyright law these days has to do with filesharing. There is good reason for that – filesharing is a big economic concern for major studios, and there have have been a number of high profile cases on the subject (which seem to have had little effect on user norms).
But there are many ways in which copyright impacts consumption of much less glamorous (but likely more important) material. The status of the well-known documentary Eyes on the Prize is a great example.
As most of you probably know, Eyes on the Prize is one of the most famous accounts of the civil rights movement. It first aired on PBS in 1987, and according to Clayborne Carson, a Stanford University history professor and editor of Martin Luther King Jr.’s papers, remarked that “it is the principal film account of the most important American social justice movement of the 20th century.” For more information about the film, go here.
Unfortunately, despite the film’s importance, it has been unavailable on video or television for the last 10 years. Why? Expired copyright licenses. Apparently the film’s creators secured licenses to use a variety of material, such as news footage, photographs, songs and lyrics, including Happy Birthday, which is included in some of the footage. Yes, Happy Birthday is under copyright. Congratulations, you all may be copyright infringers.
Well, at least some of the licenses expired in 1995, and the film’s producers could not afford to pay the renewals. Thus, people who want to view the documentary (which in and of itself likely counts as fair use) have to search for old copies, largely in libraries and/or archives.
Lots of other people are really outraged at this story because it represents all that is terrible about copyright law – the way it locks up important pieces of our cultural heritage in the name of incentives to create new works. What it made me wonder is why the film’s producers had to license the works they used in their documentary in the first place. The answer? The modern fair use test.
As the law currently stands, the fair use test turns almost entirely on the question effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work [technically there are 4 factors, but the other factors tend not to do much work, as Barton Beebe seeks to confirm empirically). The problem with that test is that it imports futurity into the equation – the issue is not simply whether the use has an effect on the current for the copyrighted work, but whether it might have some effect on a hypothetical future market for the work. It’s also somewhat circular – use of these materials in a documentary is likely to have an effect on the market for licensing works for use in a documentary if and only if the general rule requires documentary film makers to license the works. If there were a different rule, perhaps one that categorically exempted certain kinds of uses like this one, then there would be no market for licensing to documentary film makers and thus no effect on a potential market.
But of course we can say that about any sub-market, with the possible exception of parodies. So the end result is that, without creating categorical exemptions, the fair use test has the potential to swallow up just about all non-parody uses. That is particularly true in the digital age, when the costs of setting up niche markets continues to fall.
This concerns me quite a bit. If I were advising a documentary film maker, I think I would have to conclude that very little of what she did could be deemed fair use. Thus, she would have to pay to use any materials she included, even though the chances of her making any money on the documentary are very small (Farenheit 911 and March of the Penguins notwithstanding). This would seem to be a disincentive to create documentaries, despite their social value, and even though the creators of other works almost certainly didn’t create on the hope they would be able to license to documentary film makers.
Reviewed by on. Rating: | <urn:uuid:03c8fee2-8183-429c-9540-a1cc7d035b7a> | 2 | 2.03125 | 0.031362 | en | 0.963297 | http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2005/09/fair_use_and_do.htm |
Diablog follow up
I really appreciated the video we watched in class on Monday and believe it correlates well with our readings. I thought it was really interesting the way the narrator put into light how certain poses and imagery perpetuate the ideas of feminine weakness and male strength. I have found this topic to be enlightening and overall very intriguing. I never really realized until now how strong of a hold gender has on our society.
But what I have found to be the most valuable is the idea that gender is a not placed into two categories but instead placed inside a long spectrum. I think that this is an excellent way to represent gender to the children of the next generation. Then people won't be able to say marriage is only between a "Man" and a "Woman", because what defines male and female if there is such a large spectrum of genders? Instead they will have to resort to saying marriage is only between a penis and a vagina.
To promote a little discussion I ask that you comment with some more examples you've noticed either in society, in the media or where ever of gender roles we "act" out in order to play our parts.
Here are some I thought of;
(these are not always true)
Women cross their legs when sitting and keep their arms closer to themselves
Women are more caring or nurturing
Men hold their heads up when they walk
Women fidget with their hands
Men aren't as interested in romantic relationships as women
The clothing men and women share divides men into a functional and logical clothing category based on the notion that men don't engage in frivolous things, like ridiculous things like heels. Women are made to wear clothes and shoes that inhibit motion and put them in awkward positions to accentuate their helplessness. Not to mention that the clothing itself links women to childhood like the video pointed out.
I think that is an excellent point. Women are encouraged to buy all sorts of clothing/accessories that are completely useless in terms of warmth, coverage, etc. Things like jewelry, make-up, high-heels as you mentioned and countless others. They all only serve one purpose and that is to look pretty. Pretty but useless is then something we view woman as as a whole.
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March 3, 2014
by Jonas Bendiksen
In the far northern corner of Xinjiang province, in the Altai mountains, one can find the last remnants of an ancient culture. The area is populated by a mix of ethnic Kazakhs, Mongolians and Tuwas, who handmake their own wooden skis in the same way as their forefathers thousands of years ago. Archeological finds indicate that this region might possibly be the origin of skiing, with a ski history that surpasses northern European countries.
For thousands of years, the skis have been used to hunt elk, bear and other animals, and only a few skiers still know these ancient winter hunting skills. The skis, with horse-hair skins underneath to give traction on the uphill, shows what skis might have looked like in centuries past. With modernity approaching with new winter roads, internet and access to cities, the ancient skills are likely to die out quickly. In January 2013, Jonas Bendiksen went to document the ways of these ancient skiers. He had the rare privilege to join their skiing and hunting trips, and to follow see the making of these traditional skis. | <urn:uuid:f9c8dfdd-faf3-43a3-8b66-430ca08ecbb2> | 3 | 2.828125 | 0.133468 | en | 0.953311 | http://blog.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=MAGO31_4&VBID=2K1HZOQ8FP3TIR&IID=2K1HRG5Y0D_3&PN=6 |
Rescuers pull Troutdale man and his old dog to safety
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on October 23, 2007 at 8:15 PM, updated October 23, 2007 at 8:54 PM
Tebo is a 15-year-old black Labrador with congestive heart failure and bad hearing. He's unsteady on his feet, but he's a good pet. So when sunny skies beckoned Dick Caldwell today, he took Tebo on their first hike together in a year and a half.
Just down the street from Caldwell's single-level Troutdale home, they embarked on Beaver Creek Trail, a narrow gravel path that winds about 100 feet down to Beaver Creek. A sign there warns hikers in big red letters: "Danger ... A Beautiful But Challenging Place."
Caldwell and Tebo had been on the trail "a million times" before today. They won't be going back.
Not more than 100 feet into their journey, Caldwell took Tebo off his leash. But the old dog lost his footing and went over the side of the trail, about 75 feet down a steep embankment, until he got stuck in a blackberry bush.
A startled Caldwell called 9-1-1 from his cell phone, stayed on the line, then immediately climbed down after Tebo.
"I probably would have went after my dog, too," said 11-year-old Will Auda, one of about a dozen neighbors who spent part of the afternoon watching Gresham Fire Department rope rescuers work the terrain.
Caldwell, 53, began climbing down but couldn't see Tebo. He figured he would reach his dog then hike to the bottom of the canyon. Eventually, he found Tebo and pulled him from the bush, then quickly realized they couldn't continue down.
In fact, they were a few feet from falling over a ledge. And Caldwell couldn't carry his dog back up. So they waited.
Rescuers arrived but couldn't see the pair. They called out to one another, like a game of Marco Polo, as firefighter Mark Bancroft descended down the canyon. Firefighter Danny Lickteig followed, using a machete to cut greenery and clear a path for their return. The rescuers strapped Caldwell into a harness and tucked Tebo into an enclosed, sled-like device attached to a rope.
Then, just before 4 p.m., the 12-person team of rescuers pulled man and dog to safety.
Standing in his driveway after the incident, Caldwell blamed himself. He figured he should have known better, but he had a hard time placing limits on his longtime playmate.
"I thought I could drag him on one more walk," he said. "I take the leash off and he falls down the cliff. So it's my fault."
Soon, a fire engine drove by and Caldwell waved. Tebo limped around the driveway.
"Look at him," Caldwell said. "All that trouble he caused."
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A book by any other name Next post: A book by any other name
8 gaming words Previous Post: 8 words every gamer needs to know
When is a book a tree?
The obvious answer to ‘when is a book a tree?’ is ‘before it’s been made into a book’ – it doesn’t take a scientist to know that (most) paper comes from trees – but things get more complex when we turn our attention to etymology.
The word book itself has changed very little over the centuries. In Old English it had the form bōc, and it is of Germanic origin, related to for example Dutch boek, German Buch, or Gothic bōka. The meaning has remained fairly steady too: in Old English a bōc was a volume consisting of a series of written and/or illustrated pages bound together for ease of reading, or the text that was written in such a volume, or a blank notebook, or sometimes another sort of written document, such as a charter.
The argument for…
The pages of books in Anglo-Saxon times were made out of parchment (i.e. animal skin), not paper. But nonetheless a long-standing and still widely accepted etymology assumes that the Germanic base of book is related ultimately to the name of the beech tree. Explanations of the semantic connection have varied considerably. At one point, scholars generally focused on the practice of scratching runes (the early Germanic writing system) onto strips of wood, but more recent accounts have placed emphasis instead on the use of wooden writing tablets.
Words in other languages have followed this semantic development from ‘material for writing on’ to ‘writing, book’. One example is classical Latin liber meaning ‘book’ (which is the root of library). This is believed to have originally been a use of liber meaning ‘bark’, the bark of trees having, according to Roman tradition, been used in early times as a writing material. Compare also Sanskrit bhūrjá- (as masculine noun) ‘birch tree’, and (as feminine noun) ‘birch bark used for writing’.
…and against
This explanation has troubled some scholars. There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, the words for ‘book’ and ‘beech’ in the earliest recorded stages of various Germanic languages belong to different stem classes (which determine how they form their endings for grammatical case and number), and the word for ‘book’ shows a stem class that is often assumed to be more archaic than that shown by the word for ‘beech’.
Secondly, in Gothic (the language of the ancient Goths, preserved in important early manuscripts) bōka in the singular (usually) means ‘letter (of the alphabet)’. In the plural, Gothic bōkōs does also mean ‘(legal) document, book’, but some have argued that this reflects a later development, modelled on ancient Greek γράμμα (gramma) ‘letter, written mark’, also in the plural γράμματα (grammata) ‘letters, literature’ (this word ultimately gives modern English grammar), and also on classical Latin littera ‘letter of the alphabet, short piece of writing’, also in the plural litterae ‘document, text, book’ (this word ultimately gives modern English literature).
In light of these factors, some have suggested that book and its Germanic relatives may show a different origin, from the same Indo-European base as Sanskrit bhāga- ‘portion, lot, possession’ and Avestan baga ‘portion, lot, luck’. The hypothesis is that a word of this origin came to be used in Germanic for a piece of wood with runes (or a single rune) inscribed on it, used to cast lots (a practice described by the ancient historian Tacitus), then for the runic characters themselves, and hence for Greek and Latin letters, and eventually for texts and books containing these.
However, many scholars remain convinced that book and beech are ultimately related, and argue that the forms and meanings shown in the earliest written documents in the various Germanic languages already reflect the results of a long process of development in word form and meaning, which has obscured the original relationship between the word book and the name of the tree. For some more detail on this, and for references to some of the main discussions of the etymology of book, see the etymology section of the entry for book in OED Online.
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History articles and history books: How to research the history of humankind
Pop quiz time! For all you history buffs, plowing through your history books and articles, let’s delve into a short history of the human race and see where you stack up!
History of humankind
How far back does the oldest human (hominid) date from?
A) 250,000 years
B) 500,000 years
C) 1,000,000 years
D) 2.3 million years
E) 4.4 million years Read more | <urn:uuid:84b579d6-f959-4c5c-b660-5d80a27363d4> | 3 | 2.515625 | 0.808207 | en | 0.766231 | http://blog.questia.com/tag/origin-of-humans/ |
Food for thought
This is what it’s like in the trenches of the battle to spare the hardest-hit victims of a horrible economy from outright misery. This is a story of trying to feed people.
In Schenectady, the word comes from a food pantry that the reality of the need that arises in an era of stubbornly high unemployment, mortgage foreclosures, escalating consumer debt and, yes, soaring food prices goes beyond the emergency provisions that charities can provide.
“Food pantries have become a fabric of our emergency safety net, and we deal with people who have chronic emergencies,” says the Rev. Phillip Grigsby, director of the Schenectady Inner City Ministry. “People don’t have enough money to live on.”
So he and his colleagues at similar entities employ the logical remedies. They are increasing, yet again, the number of times people can come to receive emergency food allotments designed to last all of three days. It used to be four times a year. Come January, it will be once a month.
Such anecdotes and examples reverberate across the Capital Region. So what can be done to help people who literally lack enough to eat, let alone maintain a healthy diet?
The availability of emergency provisions, funded statewide to the tune of $29 million a year, is at once essential yet incomplete.
There is a solution. Congress will be taking up the farm bill next year. Legislation that’s renewed just once every five years is an opportunity to reduce hunger and improve public health.
About 70 percent of what’s tentatively budgeted at $98.1 billion goes toward the food stamp program. The increased frequency of visits to food pantries is ample evidence that even $70 billion isn’t enough.
So why can’t food stamps include subsidies for the purchase of healthy foods, rather than those so high in sugar (corn) and fats (soy)? Nutrients need to be as affordable as calories.
What’s already being done in some parts of New York City on an experimental basis should be the norm. State efforts, like allocating $20 million a year to encourage food stamp recipients to patronize farmers markets, should be increased as well.
“We still push hard for food and monetary donations because who knows what tomorrow will bring,” says Mark Quandt of the Regional Food Bank of Northeastern New York.
If only that would mean more foresight.
Charity is of course noble. But sensible public policy is better.
2 Responses
1. clifjay37 says:
I would like to see churches and other NGO’S take on the task of feeding the underprivileged in our society. This should not be a function of government and the primary reason is that governments are not really efficient without creating large bureaucracies which are extremely wasteful. Tasks like this are much more efficient when handled by people who really want to help and assist others. i also think the IRS rules should be much more lenient in dealing with such charitable donations as an incentive for more people to donate.
2. Alisa Costa says:
This piece does a solid job hilighting the efforts already being done to help our neighbors who cannot afford enough to eat. While I wish our local food pantries could meet the entire need, right now, it is inconceivable.
The fact is, it is often more convenient and better to shop at your local grocery store where your money goes right back into the comunity you live in. In fact, for every food stamp dollar spent, it generates $1.85 into the local economy. And last year, the Food Stamp Program lifted more people out of peverty in New York, than any other state in the nation.
It is clear we need increased outrach efforts to help hungry New Yorkers learn about the Food Stamp Program and help them apply. There is some help in the Capital District. Visit | <urn:uuid:d13936dc-b463-4074-af13-f4235c4394f4> | 2 | 2.203125 | 0.022423 | en | 0.953118 | http://blog.timesunion.com/opinion/food-for-thought/16489/ |
Smell a lady, shrug off flu – how female odours give male mice an immune boost
By Ed Yong | March 7, 2010 12:00 pm
Sex might be fun but it’s not without risks. As your partner exposes themselves to you, they also expose you to whatever bacteria, viruses or parasites they might be carrying. But some animals have a way around that. Ekaterina Litvinova has found that when male mice get a whiff of female odours, their immune systems prepare their airways for attack, increasing their resistance to flu viruses.
Litvinova worked with a group of mice that were exposed to bedding that had previously been soiled by females in the sexually receptive parts of their cycle. She compared them to a second more monastic group that were isolated from female contact.
Male mice use smells to track down females who are ready to mate. They’ll follow markings of faeces and urine and when they actually find the female, they’ll continue sniffing her nose and genitals. Each of these nasal encounters could be a source of infection. She then pitted both groups against a flu virus. Influenza doesn’t affect wild populations of house mice, so the virus in this case is acting as more of an indicator of the animals’ defences, rather than a representative of a real threat.
Both groups of mice lost a bit of weight, but at certain doses of virus, those that had been exposed to female aromas kept more of their grams on. They also fared better in the long run – just 20% of them died, compared to 46% of those that had only smelled male odours.
Their lungs revealed the secret behind their resistance. After sniffing the female bedding, the males had conscripted white blood cells to their airways – some of the most potent defences against respiratory infections. This flood of new recruits led to a defensive force almost three times as strong as those marshalled by isolated males. The arrival of white blood cells into the lungs can sometimes cause inflammation, which hampers a mouse’s lung capacity. But Litvinova found that the bedding sniffers weren’t affected in this way. Their aerobic abilities were normal.
Of course, mouse bedding is a smorgasbord of different chemicals and it isn’t exactly free of infectious viruses and bacteria itself. Perhaps when males sniffed the bedding, these resident microbes triggered an immune response that allowed them to resist the later flu attack? Litvinova doesn’t rule out this possibility, but she thinks that it’s an unlikely explanation. After all, the male mice were all housed in groups. Even those that were isolated from females still got to sniff the bedding of other males, and they weren’t significantly protected against the flu.
Instead, she thinks that it’s a sensible strategy for mice to get an immune boost if they smell the scent of a sexually receptive female. With mating and close-quarters contact on the cards, it’s worth giving yourself better odds of warding away any pesky infections that might transfer alongside those bodily fluids. However, the best test of this hypothesis is one that hasn’t been carried out yet – to see if males get different degrees of protection if they smell females at different parts of their sexual cycle.
Reference: Litvinova, E., Goncharova, E., Zaydman, A., Zenkova, M., & Moshkin, M. (2010). Female Scent Signals Enhance the Resistance of Male Mice to Influenza PLoS ONE, 5 (3) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0009473
Photo by Rama
More on immune responses:
Comments (3)
1. donK
What happens when mice are housed communally? According to this hypothesis the males would exhibit chronic hyper immune activity. That should be easy to determine. Even with divided housing the bedding would be same, and if it is a chemical, and not microbial, response you should see the same result. If the immune response cycles with the female’s receptivity, you have your answer.
A better test would be to isolate the causative agent “mouse bedding is a smorgasbord of different chemicals and it isn’t exactly free of infectious viruses and bacteria itself”
2. The best part of further research would be to see if a similar thing happens in humans! Let’s get some ethics approval and DO IT!
3. Remember, there are three Fs that stress readies us for. Not only fight and flight but also fornicate. Furthermore, the fight can occur at the microscopic level.
I would suggest that as the male mouse goes into “heat” an increase in dopamine levels would occur as they do in other anticipatory conditions. Devoino showed as early as 1984 that dopamine stimulates cytokines associated with the cellular immune system (Th1) while serotonin suppresses them. She could not use current terminology for it had not yet been described and her concepts of the thymus and adrenal may be more Selye than 2010.
The monoamine systems take part in the mechanisms of immunomodulation: the dopaminergic one accelerates and the serotoninergic system inhibits the development of immune response, the final result being determined by their interaction. The immunomodulation is actualized by the dopaminergic system through the thymus and by the serotoninergic one–through the adrenals
The rat would be primed to combat viral and bacterial infections. Of course, if there is excessive allostatic load, the immune system falls apart. Best example, AIDS.
As Ader, Cohen and many others have shown, one can not separate emotions from the immune system. IMHO, every psychotropic is an immunomodulator.
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| <urn:uuid:c8c25645-7c53-4d89-b3b2-fa3601cab45b> | 2 | 2.5 | 0.082852 | en | 0.952274 | http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/03/07/smell-a-lady-shrug-off-flu-how-female-odours-give-male-mice-an-immune-boost/ |
Most Americans, including most Republicans, oppose any significant spending cuts
If you’re wondering why the politicians in Washington are having such a difficult time reaching a deal to reduce federal deficits, the blame lies largely with the American people. The politicians are not getting any clear message from ordinary folks on what to do about spending.
President Obama, with the strong support of most Americans, wants to make at least a dent in the deficit problem by raising taxes on the richest two percent. But most Republican lawmakers oppose that idea. They argue (falsely, of course) that a tax hike on the rich would be bad for the economy.
Beyond the tax issue, however, there’s no pubic mandate for reduced federal spending — at least not in specific terms.
Consider THESE RESULTS from a new poll:
A majority of respondents opposed cuts to Medicare, changes to the program’s eligibility age, cuts to Social Security, letting the current payroll tax cut expire, letting the Bush tax cuts expire on everyone, eliminating the tax deduction for charitable contributions, cutting spending on Medicaid, reducing the home mortgage interest tax deduction. The only proposal supported by a majority is raising taxes on the wealthy. This tells you a lot about why the fiscal cliff negotiations are moving so slowly, and why it’s so difficult to for Congress come to agreement on a budget deal.
What’s particularly revealing, though, is what you see when you single out the poll’s self-identified Republicans. Unlike the overall polling sample, a majority of the poll’s Republicans do not support raising taxes on the wealthy. But they don’t support any of the spending cuts mentioned in the poll either. Not to Medicare or Medicaid, and not to the tax loopholes surveyed either. Republicans, in other words, don’t support much of anything except leaving things the way they are now. Which is exactly what we can’t do.
Might there be some spending cuts that Republicans do support that just didn’t get included in this poll? Probably. Polls suggest that most voters are open to cuts in foreign aid. Cutting subsidies for public broadcasting usually plays well with the GOP base. But polls also tell us that voters consistently overestimate how much of the budget is spent on those sorts of things by a large margin: Surveys have shown that respondents estimate that 10-25 percent of the federal budget goes to funding foreign aid, and about 5 percent goes to public broadcasting. The reality is that only about 1 percent funds foreign aid, and only about 0.1 percent is used to subsidize public broadcasting.
This confusion, and the unwillingness to face up to our actual long-term budgetary challenges, explains a lot about why the GOP’s last presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, talked a big game about cutting deficits and reducing the debt, but when asked for specifics focused heavily on small-ball spending cuts. It also helps explain why Republicans now are so often wary of talking about overhauling the entitlement system. And it also speaks to a larger confusion within the party about what government should do and be: In theory, the GOP is the party of small government. But polls like this one suggest that it’s really the party of the status quo.
1. It’s not the Republicans, it is all of our elected officials.
The Republicans are at least willing to admit that cuts in government spending, including entitlements, need to take place.
The Democrats can’t even be that bold because their entire electoral strategy is based on promising free stuff to people in order to garner their votes.
The elected are going to need to lead, not just continue to worry about how to get re-elected.
2. doc: But most Republican politicians won’t countenance any significant cuts in defense spending. They are owned by the same military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned against in his farewell as president.
Some of your so-called frugal Republicans insist on wasting taxpayer dollars on weapons systems the Pentagon says it doesn’t want or need. Hypocrites!
3. Why does it make them hypocrites to say they don’t want to cut defense spending?
It may make them irresponsible, but hypocrite doesn’t seem like the correct word.
4. doc: Sometimes I wonder why I bother explaining such simple concepts to you.
When a lawmaker who postures as an opponent of wasteful spending approves wasteful expenditures on unneeded weapons systems, he or she is a hypocrite.
That’s what I said, in effect, in the second paragraph of my previous comment, but it seems to have just flown over your empty head.
5. Someone and something have to give somewhere, or the working (Middle?) class is going to shoulder even more than they are now. Things are going to get much worse than they have been as of late. Cuts can’t come from Social Security or Medicare/Medicaid.
The wealthy can absorb a tax increase far easier than the working (Middle?) class. Things almost seem to be moving toward there being three new classes of citizen in America:
1. The Wealthy
2. The Working Poor
3. The Destitute
I don’t mean to sound like an unfeeling bastard, here, but I think that there is a lot that we can cut with respect to foreign aid. America, as much as I love it, just isn’t, nor can it continue to try to be, the world’s Superman anymore.
6. JGordon: You say “there is a lot that we can cut with respect to foreign aid.”
I guess you didn’t read the part of the above post where it says that foreign aid amounts to barely one percent of the federal budget.
Surveys show that most Americans think that between 10 and 25 percent goes to foreign aid, but most Americans are wrong — way wrong — about that.
7. I didn’t realize that foreign aid represented such a low percentage…I guess I just focused on the amounts reported in dollar figures ($ x amount to country A, $ x amount to country B, etc.).
I just read another of your posts about how top-heavy we are with “Military Brass”. Interesting reading, to say the least. We just seem to be hemorrhaging money in every direction. What a mess.
8. What percentage of the federal budget will the “tax on the wealthy” cover?
9. Craig Knauss
The area I live in now is dominated by Republicans. Cong. Doc Hastings is always talking about reducing federal spending. However, he and the rest of the Republicans never mention reducing the agricultural subsidies, the irrigation subsidies, the power subsidies, the oil subsidies, the freeways, the locks and dams, the airports, etc. that their constituents enjoy. They only want to cut someone else’s spending. You don’t think that’s hypocritical? I sure do.
10. Brian Opsahl
More than it did under your buddy Bush…Doc. most of our rich folks wont even notice there taxes got raised unless they happen to call there accountent….poor babys
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Who Knew?
In getting ready for last night’s interview with State Senator Kimberly Lightford, I was stunned to learn that under current state law, Illinois children are not required to go to school until age 7. That means that most kids don’t legally have to be in school until second grade.
I just assumed that all kids (besides those being home-schooled) had to be in school by kindergarten. But that’s not the case. If a parent enrolls a child before the child is 7, that parent is not under a legal obligation to make sure the child actually attends. So even if a school district has truant officers, those officers are helpless to do anything but request that a truant child return to school. In other words, there is no enforcement mechanism.
Lightford is proposing a bill that would lower the required attendance age to 5 years instead of 7. Other states have done that. And the evidence about the benefits of early schooling seems irrefutable. Other than home-schoolers, what parent would not want their child to have the benefit of those early education years?
To help make up your mind, watch last night’s segment:
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Subject: Re: Taxes Are Much Higher Than You Think Date: 12/12/2012 11:10 AM
Author: brewer12345 Number: 659630 of 767506
That's weird. It's almost as if high taxes reduce the incentive to work and start businesses.
I would say it depends on the facts and circumstances. What the tax code does for sure is introduce distortions in the market, and often it is unintended distortions.
Take my DW, for example. A decade ago she quit full time work. We had moved to the burbs and were planning to start a family. DW has two master's degrees from a top shelf university and is highly employable, but I earned more and all her income was effectovely at a high marginal tax rate. So what did she do? Chiefly she chases the kids, but she started a sole proprietorship as well. This allowed her to keep her skills sharp and have some adult contact. It is also highly favored by the tax code. We pass on a variety of potential deductions (home office, etc.) because they are audit flags and could potentially be disallowed according to the letter of the law. Instead, we just use a solo 401k to shelter all of her net income. She pays the self employment taxes and ducks all of the federal and state income taxes without a fuss. So long as she does not earn more than she can shelter (about 23.5k next year), the income will be extremely lightly taxed. Would she so limit herself if the tax code were otherwise? Hard to say, but there would certainly be an incentive to make more if her effective tax rate did not go from 15% to close to 50% once she crossed a seemingly arbitrary income level. OTOH, you could argue that this quirk of the tax code was a strong incentive for her to start her business.
Regardless of where tax rates fall, I think this is a strong case for simplification of the tax code. | <urn:uuid:c94bb338-b95c-4620-91cd-b13fc171c813> | 2 | 1.765625 | 0.407571 | en | 0.973007 | http://boards.fool.com/MessagePrint.aspx?mid=30427740 |
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MUSCL Interpolation and Limiters
The previously discussed flux discretization schemes require that the solution is known at the cell face boundaries in order to evaluate the flux. It is alternately possible to calculate the flux at the cell center and extrapolate it to the boundary, but limited research has indicated that this method is less desirable than calculating the flux at the interface boundaries by extrapolating the solution variables to the same cell faces. So, with this need in mind, the solution available at the cell centers must make use of some kind of geometric interpolation to estimate the solution at the interface boundaries.
There are a great many ways to do this, and the choice of interpolation scheme is an entire field of study in itself. One must consider both the stenciling of the scheme (i.e. upwind, centered, downwind, a combination, etc.) and the resulting order of accuracy of the interpolation when considering a scheme. The output of the code is highly dependent on this choice. For Gryphon, one established choice has been selected that is known as Monotone Upwind Schemes for Scalar Conservation Laws (MUSCL). MUSCL interpolation is actually a brand name for a whole type of reconstruction-evolution methods originally pioneered by Van Leer. After his original work, many variations were invented, and all of these derivatives are still often referred to as "MUSCL." Thus there are many different possibilities. The reconstruction-evolution technique as programmed in Gryphon is given here.
A one parameter family of upwind biased schemes can be defined for any given cell j as shown in eqns. (65) and (66):
+1/2 cell face
+1/2 cell face
-1/2 cell face
-1/2 cell face
This form of the scheme is a stencil consisting of three points, the cell center j, and the adjacent cell to each side, j+1 and j-1. The parameter phi is not really a parameter. It is a flag for either first order or higher order reconstruction. First order reconstruction can be performed by setting phi equal to 0 -- regardless of the parameter value. Setting phi equal to 1 results in higher order reconstruction, which is a useful feature of this method. The valid range for kappa is between -1 and 1 inclusive. A value of less than one results in an upwind biased scheme, while a value of exactly one results in a centered scheme. Any value of kappa results in a second order reconstruction with the exception of 1/3. which results in a unique 3rd order accurate reconstruction. Sample values of kappa employed by Gryphon are given in Table 2.
Table 2. One Parameter High Order MUSCL Reconstruction Schemes as Programmed in Gryphon
1st order
3rd order
This form of the MUSCL reconstruction provides a straightforward, powerful, high order solution to the problem of interpolating the conservative independent variables. There is only one exception. In the presence of shocks, one finds that employing any of the schemes outlined using eqns. (65) and (66) and Table 2 other than first order results in large non-physical oscillations occuring near the shocks. This is a numerical issue related to the sharp, sudden change in the independent variables. Schemes that correctly model this effect are called Total Variation Diminishing, or TVD, schemes. TVD is a mathematical property which means that as time progresses the sum of all the steps (differences) between adjacent points must remain the same or decrease. Thus, the amount of "variation" and a TVD scheme starts with is the maximum that it can ever have. Unfortunately, higher order finite volume schemes of this nature do not have the TVD property, and thus the non-physical oscillation are allowed to develop as iteration proceeds.
The standard way around this is through the use of limiters. Gradient limiters limit the forward and backward gradient terms of the above MUSCL reconstruction to force the scheme to have the TVD property in a region of strong shocks. Limiters can perhaps more simply be seen as a tool to limit the ratio of the forward and backward gradients of a given cell to avoid a non-physical interpolation result. One seeks to limit the slope of the forward and backward gradients in such a way that the interpolated points do not create a new minimum or maximum. If, for example, at a given cell, the value of the conservative variable is increasing from left to right and from the j-1 index cell to the j+1 index cell, then one needs to enforce the conditions that the right cell face boundary must be less than or equal to the value in the j+1 cell to avoid a new maximum. Likewise, the value at the left cell boundary must be greater than or equal to the j-1 cell value to avoid a new minimum. These constraints are summarized in eqn. (67).
If one uses eqn. (65) for example to evaluate the variable at the left cell boundary, one finds that the following relation occurs subject to the constraint of eqn. (67), as given in eqn. (68) (by simply doing some algebra to simplify the inequality).
TVD limit
This inequality forms the basis for the MIN-MOD limiter. Many other limiters are available, each with their own slightly unique approach to solving the problem of localized maxima and minima created by the interpolation stenciling. Remember that this is a direct consequence of the TVD property. In other words, a scheme that adhere's to the TVD property cannot -- by definition -- be capable of generating any new minima and maxima. For the purposes of Gryphon, the MUSCL stenciling has been placed in a standard format given in eqn. (69) and (70).
left state limited form
right state limited form
In the stenciling formulas, the limited gradients are in all cases a function of the appropriate gradient ratios. The gradient limiters can be selected from the list given in eqns. (71), (72), (73), and (74). Note that all the limiters return 0 if the gradient ratio is less than zero (negative). The case where the gradient switches direction indicates that there is a shock within the cell range and the local reconstruction is reduced for first order in this instance.
MIN-MOD Limiter
min mod limiter
Van Albada Limiter
Van Albada limiter
Van Leer Limiter
Van Leer limiter
Superbee Limiter
Superbee limiter
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Hazel Rose Markus and Shinobu Kitayama, "Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation"
In America, "the squeaky wheel gets the grease." In Japan, "the nail that stands out gets pounded down." American parents who are trying to induce their children to eat their suppers are fond of saying "think of the starving kids in Ethiopia, and appreciate how lucky you are to be different from them" Japanese parents are likely to say "Think about the farmer who worked so hard to produce this rice for you; if you don't eat it, he will feel bad, for his efforts will have been in vain" (H. Yamada, February 16, 1989). A small Texas corporation seeking to elevate productivity told its employees to look in the mirror and say "I am beautiful" 100 times before coming to work each day. Employees of a Japanese supermarket that was recently opened in New Jersey were instructed to begin the day by holding hands and telling each other that "he" or "she is beautiful" ("A Japanese Supermarket." 1989).
Such anecdotes suggest that people in Japan and America may hold strikingly divergent construals of the self, others, and the interdependence of the two. The American examples stress attending to the self, the appreciation of one's difference from others, and the importanc eof asserting the self. The Japanese examples emphasize attending to and fitting in with others and the importance of harmonious interdependence with them. These construals of the self and others are tied to the implicit, normative tasks that various cultures hold for what people should be doing in their lives (cf. Cantor & Kihlstrom, 1987; Erikson, 1950; Veroff, 1983). Anthropologists and psychologists assume that such construals can influence, and in many cases determine, the very nature of individual experience.
Despite the growing body of psychological and anthropological evidence that people hold divergent views about the self, most of what psychologists currently know about human nature is based on one particular view-the so-called Western view of the individual as an independent, self-contained, autonomous entity who (a) comprises a unique configuration of internal attributes (e.g., traits, abilities, motives, and values) and (b) behaves primarily as a consequence of these internal attributes (Geertz, 1975; Sampson, 1988,1989; Shweder & LeVine, 1984). As a result of this monocultural approach to the self (see Kennedy, Scheier, & Rogers, 1984), psychologists' understanding of those phenomena that are linked in one way or another to the self may be unnecessarily restricted (for some important exceptions, see Bond, 1986,1988; Cousins, 1989; Fiske, in press; Maehr & Nicholls, 1980; Stevenson, Azuma, & Flakuta, 1986; Triandis, 1989; Triandis, Bontempo, Villareal, Asai, & Lucca, 1988). In this article, we suggest that construals of the self, of others, and of the relationship between the self and others may be even more powerful than previously suggested and that their influence is clearly reflected in differences among cultures. In particular, we compare an independent view of the self with one other, very different view, an interdependent view. The independent view is most clearly exemplified in some sizable segment of American culture, as well as in many Western European cultures. The interdependent view is exemplified in Japanese culture as well as in other Asian cultures. But it is also characteristic of African cultures, Latin-American cultures, and many southern European cultures. We delineate how these divergent views of the self-the independent and the interdependentcan have a systematic influence on various aspects of cognition, emotion, and motivation.
We suggest that for many cultures of the world, the Western notion of the self as an entity containing significant dispositional attributes, and as detached from context, is simply not an adequate description of selfhood. Rather, in many construals, the self is viewed as interdependent with the surrounding context, and it is the "other" or the "self-in-relation-to-other" that is focal in individual experience. One general consequence of this divergence in self-construal is that when psychological processes (e cognition, emotion, and motivation) explicitly, or even quite implicitly, implicate the self asa target or as a refer ent, the nature of these processes will vary according to the exact form or organization of self inherent in a given construal. With respect to cognition, for example, for those with interdependent selves, in contrast to those with independent selves, some aspects of knowledge representation and some of the processes involved in social and nonsocial thinking alike are influenced by a pervasive attentiveness to the relevant others in the social context. Thus, one's actions s are more like likely to be seen as situationally bound, and characterizations of the individual will include this context Furthermore, for those with interdependent construals of the self, both the expression and the experience of emotions and motives may be significantly shaped and governed by a consideration of the reactions of others. Specifically, for example, some emotions, like anger, that derive from and promote an independent view of the self may be less prevalent among those with interdependent selves, and self-serving motives may be replaced by what appear as other-serving motives. An examination of cultural variation in some aspects of cognition, emotion, and motivation will allow psychologists to ask exactly what is universal in these processes, and it has the potential to provide some new insights for theories of these psychological processes.
In this analysis, we draw on recent research efforts devoted to characterizing the general differences between American or Western views of personhood and Eastern or Asian perspectives (e.g., Heelas & Lock, 1981; Hofstede, 1980; Marsella et al., 1985; Roland, 1988; Schwartz & Bilsky, 1990; Shweder, 1990; Shweder & LeVine, 1984; Stigler, Shweder, & Herdt, 1990; Triandis, 1989; Triandis & Brislin, 1980; Weisz et al., 1984). We extract from these descriptions many important differences that may exist in the specific content, structure, and functioning of the self-systems of people of different cultural backgrounds. The distinctions that we make between independent and interdependent construals must be regarded as general tendencies that may emerge when the members of the culture are considered as a whole. The prototypical American view of the self, for example, may prove to be most characteristic of White, middle-class men with a Western European ethnic background. It may be somewhat less descriptive of women in general, or of men and women from other ethnic groups or social classes.' Moreover, we realize that there may well he important distinctions among those views we discuss as similar and that there may be views of the self and others that cannot easily be classified as either independent or interdependent.
Our intention is not to catalog all types of self-construals, but rather to highlight a view of the self that is often assumed to be universal but that may be quite specific to some segments of Western culture. We argue that self-construals play a major role in regulating various psychological processes. Understanding the nature of divergent self-construals has two important consequences. On the one hand, it allows us to organize several apparently inconsistent empirical findings and to pose questions about the universality assumed for many aspects of cognition, emotion, and motivation (see Shweder, 1990). On the other hand, it permits us to better specify the precise role of the self in mediating and regulating behavior.
The Self: A Delicate Category
Universal Aspects of the Self
In exploring the possibility of different types of self-construals, we begin with Hallowell's (1955) notion that people everywhere are likely to develop an understanding of themselves as physically distinct and separable from others. Head (1920), for example, claimed the existence of a universal schema of the body that provided one with an anchor in time and space. Similarly, Allport (1937) suggested that there must exist an aspect of personality that allows one, when awakening each morning, to be sure that he or she is the same person who went to sleep the night before. Most recently, Neisser (1988) referred to this aspect of self as the ecological self, which he defined as "the self as perceived with respect to the physical environment: 'I' am the person here in this place, engaged in this particular activity" (p. 3). Beyond a physical or ecological sense of self, each person probably has some awareness of internal activity, such as dreams, and of the continuous flow of thoughts and feelings, which are private to the extent that they cannot be directly known by others. The awareness of this unshared experience will lead the person to some sense of an inner, private self.
Divergent Aspects of the Self
Some understanding and some representation of the private, inner aspects of the self may well be universal, but many other aspects of the self may be quite specific to particular cultures. People are capable of believing an astonishing variety of things about themselves (cf. Heelas & Lock, 1981; Marsella et al., 1985; Shweder & LeVine, 1984; Triandis, 1989). The self can be con strued, framed, or conceptually represented in multiple ways. A cross-cultural survey of the self lends support to Durkheim's (1912/1968) early notion that the category of the self is primarily the product of social factors, and to Mauss's (1938/1985) claim that as a social category, the self is a "delicate" one, subject to quite substantial, if not infinite, variation.
The exact content and structure of the inner self may differ considerably by culture. Furthermore, the nature of the outer or public self that derives from one's relations with other people and social institutions may also vary markedly by culture. And, as suggested by Triandis (1989), the significance assigned to the private, inner aspects versus the public, relational aspects in regulating behavior will vary accordingly. In fact, it may not be unreasonable to suppose, as did numerous earlier anthropologists (see Allen, 1985), that in some cultures, on certain occasions, the
individual in the sense of a set of significant inner attributes of thePerson, may cease to be the primary unit of consciousness. instead, the sense of belongingness to a social relation may become so strong that it makes better sense to think of the relationship as the functional unit of conscious reflection.
The current analysis focuses on just one variation in what people in different cultures can come to believe about themselves. This one variation concerns what they believe about the relationship between the self and others and, especially, the degree to which they see themselves as separate from others or as connected with others. We suggest that the significance and the exact functional role that the person assigns to the other when defining the self depend on the culturally shared assumptions about the separation or connectedness between the self and others.
Two Construals of the Self: Independent
and Interdependent
The Independent Construal
In many Western cultures, there is a faith in the inherent separateness of distinct persons. The normative imperative of this culture is to become independent from others and to discover and express one's unique attributes (Johnson, 1985; Marsella et al, 1985; J. G. Miller, 1988; Shweder & Bourne, 1984). Achieving the cultural goal of independence requires construing oneself as an individual whose behavior is organized and made meaningful primarily by reference to one's own internal repertoire of thoughts, feelings, and action, rather than by reference to the thoughts, feelings, and actions of others. According to this construal of self, to borrow Geertz's (1975) often quoted phrase, the person is viewed as "a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against a social and natural background" (p. 48).
This view of the self derives from a belief in the wholeness and uniqueness of each person's configuration of internal attributes (Johnson, 1985; Sampson, 1985, 1988, 1989; Waterman, 1981). It gives rise to processes like "self-actualization," "realizing oneself," "expressing one's unique configuration of needs, rights, and capacities," or "developing one's distinct potential?' The essential aspect of this view involves a conception of the self as an autonomous, independent person; we thus refer to it as the
independent construal of the self Other similar labels include individualist, egocentric, separate, autonomous, idiocentric, and self-contained. We assume that, on average, relatively more individuals in Western cultures will hold this view than will individuals in non-Western cultures. Within a given culture, however, individuals will vary in the extent to which they are good cultural representatives and construe the self in the mandated way.
The independent self must, of course, be responsive to the social environment (Fiske, in press). This responsiveness, however, is fostered not so much for the sake of the responsiveness itself. Rather, social responsiveness often, if not always, derives from the need to strategically determine the best way to express or assert the internal attributes of the self. Others, or the social situation in general, are important, but primarily as standards of reflected appraisal, or as sources that can verify and affirm the inner core of the self.
The Interdependent Construal
In contrast, many non-Western cultures insist, in Kondo's (1982) terms, on the fundamental connectedness of human beings to each other. A normative imperative of these cultures is to maintain this interdependence among individuals (De Vos, 1985; Hsu, 1985; Miller, 1988;Shweder& Bourne, 1984). Experiencing interdependence entails seeing oneself as part of an encompassing social relationship and recognizing that one's behavior is determined, contingent on, and, to a large extent organized by what the actor perceives to be the thoughts, feelings, and actions of others in the relationship. The Japanese experience of the self, therefore, includes a sense of interdependence and of one's status as a participant in a larger social unit (Sampson, 1988). Within such a Construal, the self becomes most meaningful and complete when it is cast in the appropriate social relationship. According to Lebra (1976) the Japanese are most fully human in the context of others.
This view of the self and the relationship between the self and others features the person not as separate from the social context but as more connected and less differentiated from others. People are motivated to find a way to fit in with relevant others, to fulfill and create obligation, and in general to become part of various interpersonal relationships. Unlike the independent self, the significant features of the self according to this construal are to be found in the interdependent and thus, in the more public components of the self. We therefore call this view the interdependent Construal of the self The same notion has been variously referred to, with somewhat different connotations, as sociocentric, holistic, collective, allocentric, ensembled, constituitive con contextualist, connected, and relational. As with the independent self, others are critical for social comparison and self-validation, yet in an interdependent formulation of the self, these others become an integral part of the setting, situation, or context to which the self is connected, fitted, and assimilated. The exact manner in which one achieves the task of connection therefore, depends crucially on the nature of the context, particularly the others present in the context. Others thus participate actively and continuously in the definition of the interdependent self.
The interdependent self also possesses and expresses a set of internal attributes, such as abilities, opinions, judgments, and personality characteristics. However, these internal attributes are understood as situation specific, and thus as sometimes elusive and unreliable. And, as such, they are unlikely to assume a powerful role in regulating overt behavior, especially if this behavior implicates significant others. In many domains of social life, one's opinions, abilities, and characteristics are assigned only secondary roles-they must instead be constantly controlled and regulated to come to terms with the primary task of interdependence. Such voluntary control of the inner attributes constitutes the core of the cultural ideal of becoming mature. The understand of one's autonomy as secondary to, and constrained by, the primary task of interdependence distinguishes interdependent selves from independent selves for whom autonomy and its expression is often afforded primary significance. An independent behavior (e.g., asserting an opinion) exhibited by a person in an interdependent culture is likely to be based on the premise of underlying interdependence and thus may have a somewhat different significance than it has for a person from an independent culture... The fundamental units of the self-system, the core conceptions, or self-schemata are thus predicated on significant interpersonal relationships.
An interdependent self cannot be properly characterized as a bounded whole, for it changes structure with the nature of the particular social context. Within each particular social situation, the self can be differently instantiated. The uniqueness of such a self derives from the specific configuration of relationships that each person has developed. What is focal and objectified in an interdependent self, then, is not the inner self, but the relationships of the person to other actors (Hamaguchi 1985)
The notion of an interdependent self is linked with a monistic philosophical tradition in which the person is thought to be of the same substance as the rest of nature (see Bond, 1986; Phillips, 1976; Roland, 1988; Sass, 1988). As a consequence, the relationship between the self and other, or between subject and object, is assumed to be much closer. Thus, many non-Western cultures insist on the inseparability of basic elements (Galtung, 1981), including self and other, and person and situation. In Chinese culture, for instance, there is an emphasis on synthesizing the constituent parts of any problem or situation into an integrated or harmonious whole (Moore, 1967; Northrop, 1946). Thus, persons are only parts that when separated from the larger social whole cannot be fully understood (Phillips, 1976; Shweder, 1984). Such a holistic view is in opposition to the Cartesian, dualistic tradition that characterizes Western thinking and in which the self is separated from the object and from the natural world.
Examples of the interdependent self An interdependent view of the self is common to many of the otherwise highly diverse cultures of the world. Studies of the mainland Chinese, for example, summarized in a recent book by Bond (1986), show that even among the most rapidly modernizing segments of the Chinese population, there is a tendency for people to act primarily in accordance with the anticipated expectations of others and social norms rather than with internal wishes or personal attributes (Yang, 198 I b). A premium is placed on emphasizing collective welfare and on showing a sympathetic concern for others. Throughout the studies of the Chinese reported by Bond, one can see the clear imprint of the Confucian emphasis on interrelatedness and kindness. According to Hsu (1985), the supreme Chinese virtue, lenj implies the person's capability to interact with fellow human beings in a sincere, polite, and decent fashion (see also Elvin, 1985).
Numerous other examples of cultures in which people are likely to have some version of an interdependent self can also be identified. For example, Triandis, Mann, Lisansky and Betancourt (1984) have described the importance of simpatico among Hispanics. This quality refers to the ability to both respect and share others' feelings. In characterizing the psychology of Filipinos, Church (1987) described the importance that people attribute to smooth interpersonal relations and to being "agreeable even under difficult circumstances, sensitive to what others are feeling and willing to adjust one's behavior accordingly" Similarly Weisz (in press) reported that Thais place a premium on self-effacement, humility, deference, and on trying to avoid disturbing others. Among the Japanese, it is similarly crucial not to disturb the Wa, or the harmonious ebb and flow of interpersonal relations (see also Geertz, 1974, for characterizations of similar imperatives among the Balinese and Moroccans).
Beattie (1980) claimed that Africans are also extremely sensitive to the interdependencies among people and view the world and others in it as extensions of one another. The self is viewed not as a hedged closure but as an open field. Similarly Marriott (19 76) argued that Hjndu conceptions assume that the self is an open entity that is given shape by the social, context. In his insightful book, Kakar (1978) described the Hindu's ideal of interpersonal fusion and how it is accompanied by a personal, cultural sense of hell, which is separation from others. In fact, Miller, Bersoff, and Harwood (1990), in a recent, carefully controlled study on moral reasoning, found that Indians regard responsiveness to the needs of others as an objective moral obligation to a far greater extent than do Americans. Although the self-systems of people from these cultures are markedly different in many other important respects, they appear to be alike in the greater value (when compared with Americans) that is attached to proper relations with others, and in the requirement to flexibly change one's own behavior in accordance with the nature of the relationship.
Even in American culture, there is a strong theme of interdependence that is reflected in the values and activities of many of its subcultures. Religious groups, such as the Quakers, explicitly value and promote interdependence, as do many small towns and rural communities (e.g., Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton, 1985). Some notion of a more connected, ensembled, interdependent self, as opposed to a self-contained, independent self, is also being developed by several of what Sampson (1989) calls "postmodern" theorists. These theorists are questioning the sovereignty of the American view of the mature person as autonomous, self-determined, and unencumbered. They argue that psychology is currently dominated by a view of the person that does not adequately reflect the extent to which people everywhere are created by, constrained by, and respon sive to their various interpersonal contexts (see Gergen & gen, 1988; Gilligan, 1982; Miller, 1986; Tajfel, 1984).
Further definition of the interdependent self
Theorists of Japanese culture are beginning to characterize the interdependent self much more specifically than was previously attempted. These descriptions offer some more refined ideas of how an interdependent view of self can depart markedly from an inde.. pendent view of self (see Nakane, 1970; Plath, 1980; R. J. Smith, 1983). For example, building on a study of L. T. Doi (1973); Bachnik (1986) wrote:
(in Japanese society) rather than there being a single social reality, a number of possible perspectives of both self and social life are acknowledged. Interaction in Japanese society then focuses on the definition of the appropriate choice, out of all the various possibilities. This means that what one says and does will be different in different situations, depending on how one defines one's particular perspective versus the social other. (p. 69)
In Japan, the word for jibun, refers to "one's share of the shared life space" (Hamaguchi 1985). The self, Kimura (cited in Hamaguchi, 1985) claimed, is "neither a substance nor an attribute having a constant oneness" (p. 302). According to Hamaguchi (1985), for the Japanese, "a sense of identification with others (sometimes including conflict) pre-exists and selfness is confirmed only through interpersonal relationships
.... Self-ness is not a constant like the ego but denotes a fluid concept which changes through time and situations according to interpersonal relationships" (p. 302).
The Japanese anthropologist Lebra (1976) defined the essence of Japanese culture as an "ethos of social relativism" This translates into a constant concern for belongingness, reliance, dependency, empathy, occupying one's proper place, and reciprocity. She claimed the Japanese nightmare is exclusion, meaning that one is failing at the normative goal of connecting to others. This is in sharp contrast to the American nightmare, which is to fail at separating from others, as can occur when one is unduly influenced by others, or does not stand up for what one believes, or when one goes unnoticed or undistinguished.
An interdependent view of self does not result in a merging of self and other, nor does it imply that one must always be in the company of others to function effectively, or that people do not have a sense of themselves as agents who are the origins of their own actions. On the contrary, it takes a high degree of self-control and agency to effectively adjust oneself to various interpersonal contingencies. Agentic exercise of control, however, is directed primarily to the inside and to those inner attributes, such as desires, personal goals, and private emotions, that can such disturb the harmonious equilibrium of interpersonal transaction. This can be contrasted with the Western notion of control, which primarily implies an assertion of the inner attributes and a consequent attempt to change the outer aspects, such as one's public behaviors and the social situation (see also Weisz et al., J984).
Given the Japanese notion of control that is inwardly directed, the ability to effectively adjust in the interpersonal domain may form an important basis of self-esteem, and individualized styles of such adjustment to social contingencies may contribute to the sense of self-uniqueness. Thus, Hamaguchi (1985). for example, reported that for the Japanese, "the straightforward claim of the naked ego" (p. 303) is experienced as childish. Self-assertion is not viewed as being authentic, but instead immature. This point is M. White and LeVine's (1986) description of the meaning of sunao, a term used by Japanese parents to characterize what they value in their children:
A child that is sunao has not yielded his or her personal autonomy for the sake of cooperation; cooperation does not suggest giving up the self, as it may in the West; it implies that working with others is the appropriate way of expressing and enhancing the self. Engagement and harmony with others is, then, a positively valued goal and the bridge-to open-hearted cooperation, as in sunaois through sensitivity, reiterated by the mother's example and encouragement. (p. 58)
Kumagai (1981) said sunao "assumes cooperation to be an act of affirmation of the self" (p. 261). Giving in is not a sign of weakness; rather, it reflects tolerance, self-control, flexibility, and maturity.
The role of the other in the interdependent self
In an interdependent view, in contrast to an independent view, others will be assigned much more importance, will carry more weight, and will be relatively focal in one's own behavior. There are several direct consequences of an interdependent construal of the self. First, relationships, rather than being means for realizing various individual goals, will often be ends in and of themselves. Although people everywhere must maintain some relatedness with others, an appreciation and a need for people will be more important for those with an interdependent self than for those with an independent self. Second, maintaining a connection to others will mean being constantly aware of others and focusing on their needs, desires, and goals. In some cases, the goals of others may become so focal in consciousness that the goals of others may be experienced as personal goals. In other cases, fulfilling one's own goals may be quite distinct from those of others, but meeting another's goals, needs, and desires will be a necessary requirement for satisfying one's own goals, needs, and desires. The assumption is that while promoting the goals of others, one's own goals will be attended to by the person with whom one is interdependent. Hence, people may actively work to fulfill the others' goals while passively monitoring the reciprocal contributions from these others for one's own goalfulfillment. Yamagishi (1988), in fact, suggested that the Japanese feel extremely uncomfortable, much more so than Americans, when the opportunity for such passive monitoring of others' actions is denied.
From the standpoint of an independent, "self-ish" self, one might be led to romanticize the interdependent self, who is ever attuned to the concerns of others. Yet in many cases, responsive and cooperative actions are exercised only when there is a reasonable assurance of the "good-intentions" of others, namely their commitment to continue to engage in reciprocal interaction and mutual support. Clearly, interdependent selves do not attend to the needs, desires, and goals of all others. Attention to others is not indiscriminate; it is highly selective will be most characteristic o relationships with "in-group" members. These are others with whom one shares éi common fate such as family members or members of the same lasting social group, such as the work group. Out-group members are typically treated quite differently and are unlikely to experience either the advantages or disadvantages of interdependence. Independent selves are also selective in their association with others but not to the extent of interdependent selves because much less of their behavior is directly contingent on the actions of others: Given the importance of others in constructing reality and regulating behavior, the in-group-out-group distinction is a vital one for interdependent selves and the subject eboudaiy of one's "in-group" may tend to be narrower for the interdepen dent selves than for the independent selves (Triandis, 1989).
To illustrate the reciprocal nature of interaction among thosewith interdependent views, imagine that one has a friend over for lunch and has decided to make a sandwich for him. The conversation might be: "Hey, Tom, what do you want in your sandwich? I have turkey, salami, and cheese?' Tom responds, "Oh, I like turkey." Note that the friend is given a choice because the host assumes that friend has a right, if not a duty, to make a choice reflecting his inner attributes, such as preferences or desires. And the friend makes his choice exactly because of the
belief in the same assumption. This script is "natural," however, only within the independent view of self. What would happen if the friend were a visitor from Japan? A likely response to the question "Hey, Tomio, what do you want?" would be a little moment of bewilderment and then a noncommital utterance like "I don't know" This happens because under the assumptions of an interdependent self, it is the responsibility of the host to be able to "read" the mind of the friend and offer what the host perceives to be the best for the friend. And the duty of the guest, on the other hand, is to receive the favor with grace and to be prepared to return the favor in the near future, if not right
at the next moment. A likely, interdependent script for the same situation would be: "Hey, Tomio, I made you a turkey sandwich because I remember that last week you said you like turkey more than beef. And Tomio will respond, "Oh, thank you, I really like turkey" -
The reciprocal interdependence with others that is the sign of the interdependent self seems to require constant engagement of what Mead (1934) meant by taking the role of the other. It involves the willingness and ability to feel and think what others are feeling and thinking, to absorb this information without) being told, and then to help others satisfy their wishes and realize their goals. Maintaining connection requires inhibiting the"!" perspective and processing instead from the "thou" perspective (Hsu, 1981). The requirement is to "read" the other's mind and thus to know what the other is thinking or feeling. In contrast, with an independent self, it is the individual's responsibility to "say what's on one's mind" if one expects to be attended to or understood.
Consequences of an Independent or an Interdependent
View of the Self
In the current analysis, we hypothesize that the independent versus interdependent construals of self are among the most general and overarching schemata of the individual's self-system. These construals recruit and organize the more specific self-regulatory schemata.' We are suggesting here, therefore, that the exact organization of many self-relevant processes and their outcomes depends crucially on whether these processes are rooted in an independent construal of the self or whether they are based primarily on an interdependent construal of the self. For example, in the process of lending meaning and coherence to the social world, we know that people will show a heightened sensitivity to self-relevant stimuli. For those with an independent view of self, this includes information relevant to one's self-defining attributes. For one with an interdependent view of self, such stimuli would include information about significant others with whom the person has a relationship or information about the self in relation to another person.
Affect regulation involves seeking positive states and avoiding negative ones. Positive states are those that enhance or promote one's view of the self, and negative states are those that challenge this view. For a person with an independent view of self, this involves seeking information that confirms or enhances one's internal, private attributes. The most desirable situations are those that allow one to verify and express those important internal attributes and that convey the sense that one is appropriately autonomous. In contrast, for a person with an interdependent view of self, one might expect the most desirable states to be those that allow one to be responsive to one's immediate context or that convey the sense that one is succeeding in his or her interdependent relationships or statuses.
A third importnat function of the self-concept suggested by Markus and Wurf (1987) is that of motivating persons, of moving them to action. The person with an independent view of self should be motivated to those actions that allow expression of one's important self-defining, inner attributes (e.g., hardworking, caring, independent, and powerful), whereas the person with an interdependent view of self should be motivated to those actions that enhance or foster one's relatedness or connec tion to others. On the surface, such actions could look remarkably similar (e.g., working incredibly hard to gain admission to a desirable college), but the exact source, or etiology, of the energizing motivation may be powerfully different (De Vos, 1973; Maehr & Nicholls, 1980).
In the following sections, we discuss these ideas in further detail and review the empirical literature, which suggests that there are significant cognitive, emotional, and motivational consequences of holding an independent or an interdependent view of the self.
Consequences for Cognition
If a cognitive activity implicates the self, the outcome of this activity will depend on the nature of the self-system. Specifically, there are three important consequences of these divergent self-systems for cognition. First we may expect those with interdepcpdcnt selves to be more attentive and sensitive to others than those with independent selves. The attentiveness and sensitvity to others, characterizing the interdependent selves, will result in a relatively greater cognitive elaboration of the other or of the self-in-relation-to-other. Second, among those with interdependent selves, the unit of re sentation of both the self and the other will include a relatively specific social context in which the self and the other are embedded. This means that knowledge about persons, either the self or others, will not be abstract and generalized across contexts, but instead will remain specific to the focal context. Third, a consideration of the social context and the reactions of others may also shape some basic, nonsocial cognitive activities such as categorizing and counterfactual thinking.
In exploring the impact of divergent cultural construals on thinking, we assume that how people think (the process) in a social situation cannot be easily separated from what they think about (the content; Shweder, 1990; Shweder & Bourne, 1984). Extensive research on social cognition in the past decade has suggested the power of content in social inference (e.g., see Fiske & Taylor, 1984; Markus & Zajonc, 1985, for reviews). It is the nature of the representation (e.g., self, another person, a weed, or clam chowder) that guides attention, and that determines what other relevant information will be retrieved to fill in the gap of available sense data. For example, investigations by D)ndrade (1981) and Johnson-Laird (1983) indicate that the greater the familiarity with the stimulus materials, the more elaborate the schemata for framing the problem, and the better the problem solving. In general, then, how a given object is culturally construed and represented in memory should importantly influence and even determine how one thinks about the object. Accordingly, the divergent representations of the self we describe should be expected to have various consequences for all cognition relevant to self, others, or social relationships.
More interpersonal knowledge. If the most significant elements of the interdependent self are the self-in-relation-toothers elements, there will be a need, as well as a strong normative demand, for knowing and understanding the social surrounding, particularly others in direct interaction with the self. That is, if people conceive of themselves as interdependent parts of larger social wholes, it is important for them to be sensitive to and knowledgeable about the others who are the coparticipants in various relationships, and about the social situations that enable these relationships. Maintaining one's relationships and ensuring a harmonious social interaction requires a full understanding of these others, that is, knowing how they are feeling, thinking, and likely to act in the context of one's relationships to them. It follows that those with interdependent selves may develop a dense and richly elaborated store of information about others or of the self in relation.
Kitayama, Markus, Tummala, Kzrokawa, and Kato (1990) examined this idea in a study requiring similarity judgments between self and other. A typical American finding i that the self is judged to be more dissimilar to other than other is to the self (Holyoak & Gordon, 1983; Srull & Gaelick, 1983). This finding has been interpreted to indicate that for the typical American subject, the representation of the self is more elaborated and distinctive in memory than the representation of another person. As a result, the similarity between self and other is judged to be less when the question is posed about a more distinctive object (Is self similar to other?) than when the question is posed about a less distinctive object (Is other similar to self?). If, however, those with interdependent selves have at least as much knowledge about some others as they have about themselves, this American pattern of findings may not be found.
To test these predictions, Kitayama et al. (1990) compared students from Eastern cultural backgrounds (students from India) with those from Western cultural backgrounds (American students). As shown in Figure 2, for the Western subjects, Kitayama et al. replicated the prior findings in which the self is perceived as significantly more dissimilar to the other than is the other to the self. Such a finding is consistent with a broad range of studies showing that for individuals with a Western background, supposedly those with independent selves, selfknowledge is more distinctive and densely elaborated than knowledge about other people (e.g., Greenwald & Pratkanis, 1984). This pattern, however, was nonsignificantly reversed for the Indian subjects, who judged the self to be somewhat more similar to the other than is the other to the self. It appears, then, that for the latter, more interdependent subjects, knowledge about others is relatively more elaborated and distinctive than knowledge about the self. Asymmetry in similarity judgments is an indirect way to evaluate knowledge accessibility, but a more direct measure of cross-cultural differences in knowledge of the other should reveal that those with interdependent selves have more readily accessible knowledge of the other.
Context-specific knowledge of self and other.
A second consequence of having an interdependent self as opposed to an independent self concerns the ways in which knowledge about self and other is processed, organized, and retrieved from memory. For example, given an interdependent self, knowledge about the self may not be organized into a hierarchical structure with the person's characteristic attributes (e.g., intelligent, competent, and athletic) as the superordinate nodes, as is often assumed in characterizations of the independent self. In other words, those with interdependent selves are less likely to organize knowledge about the "self in general" or about the "other in generaL" Specific social situations are more likely to serve as the unit of representation than are attributes of separate persons. One learns about the self with respect to a specific other in a particular context and, conversely about the other with respect to the self in a particular context.
In exploring variations in the nature of person knowledge, Shweder and Bourne (1984) asked respondents in India and America to describe several close acquaintances. The descriptions provided by the Indians were more situationally specific and more relational than those of Americans. Indian descriptions focused on behavior; they described what was done, where it was done, and to whom or with whom it was done. The Indian respondents said, "He has no land to cultivate but likes to cultivate the land of others," or "When a quarrel arises, he cannot resist the temptation of saying a word," or "He behaves properly with guests but feels sorry if money is spent on them" It is the behavior itself that is focal and significant rather than the inner attribute that supposedly underlies it. Notably this tendency to provide the specific situational or interpersonal context when providing a description was reported to characterize the free descriptions of Indians regardless of social class, education, or literacy level. It appears, then, that the concreteness in person description is not due to a lack of skill in abstracting concrete instances to form a general proposition, but rather a consequence of the fact that global inferences about persons are typically regarded as not meaningful or informative.
Americans also describe other people in terms of the specifics of their behavior, but typically this occurs only at the beginning of relationships when the other is relatively unknown, or if the behavior is somehow distinctive and does not readily lend itself to a trait characterization. Rather than saying "He does not disclose secrets," Americans are more likely to say "He is discreet or principled?' Rather than "He is hesitant to give his money away," Americans say "He is tight or selfish?' Shweder and Bourne (1984) found that 46% of American descriptions were of the cntext free variety, whereas this was true of only 20% from the Indian sample - -
A study by J. 0. Miller (1984) on patterns of explanation among Indian Hindus and Americans revealed the same tendency for contextual and relational descriptions of behavior among Indian respondents. In the first phase of her study, respondents generated two prosocial behaviors and two deviant behaviors and then explained why each behavior was undertaken. For example, in the prosocial case, respondents were asked to "describe something a person you know well did re cently that you considered good for someone else." Miller coded the explanations for reference to dispositional explanations; for reference to social, spatial, temporal location; and for reference to specific acts or occurrences. Like Shweder and Bourne (1984), she found that on average, 40% of the reasons given by American respondents referred to the general dispositions of the actor. For the Hindu respondents, dispositional explana tions constituted less than 20% of their responses.
In a second phase of the study, Miller (1984) asked both American and Indian respondents to explain several accounts of the deviant behaviors generated by the Indian respondents. For example, a Hindu subject narrated the following incident:
This concerns a motorcycle accident. The back wheel burst on the motorcycle. The passenger sitting in the rear jumped. The moment the passenger fell, he struck his head on the pavement. The driver of the motorcycle-who is an attorney-as he was on his way to court for some work, just took the passenger to a local hospital and went on and attended to his court work. I personally feel the motorcycle driver did a wrong thing. The driver left the passenger there without consulting the doctor concerning the seriousness of the injury-the gravity of the situation-whether the passenger should be shifted immediately-and he went on to the court. So ultimately the passenger died. (p. 972)
Respondents were asked why the driver left the passenger at the hospital without staying to consult about the seriousness of the passenger's injury On average, Americans made 36% of their attributions to dispositions of the actors (e.g., irresponsible, pursuing success) and 17% of their attributions to contextual factors (driver's duty to be in court). In comparison, only 15% of the attributions of the Indians referred to dispositions, whereas 32% referred to contextual reasons. Both the American and the Indian subjects focused on the state of the driver at the time of the accident, but in the Indian accounts, the social role of the driver appears to be very important to understanding the events. He is obligated to his role, he has a job to perform. Actions are viewed as arising from relations or interactions with others; they are a product of obligations, responsibilities, or commitments to others and are thus best understood with respect to these interpersonal relations. This preference for contextual explanations has also been documented by Dalal, Sharma, and Bisht (1983).
These results call into question the exact nature of the fundafundamentla attribution error (Ross, 1977). In this error, people, in their efforts to understand the causes of behavior, suffer from an inescapable tendency to perceive behavior as a consequence of the internal, personal attributes of the person. Miller's (1984) Indian respondents also explained events in terms of properties or features of the person, yet these properties were their role relationships-their socially determined relations to specific others or groups. Because role relationships necessarily implicate the social situation that embeds the actor, it is unclear whether the explanations of the Indian respondents can be viewed as instances of the fundamental attribution error. It may be that the fundamental attribution error is only characteristic of those with an independent view of the self.
The tendency to describe a person in terms of his or her specific behavior and to specify the context for a given behavior is also evidenced when those with interdependent selves provide self-descriptions. Cousins (1989) compared the self-descriptions of American high school and college students with the self-descriptions of Japanese high school and college students. He used two types of free-response formats, the original Twenty Statements Test (TST; Kuhn & McPartland, 1954), which simply asks "Who Am I?" 20 consecutive times, and a modified TST, which asks subjects to describe themselves in several specific situations (me at home, me with friends, and me at school). When responding to the original TST, the Japanese self-descriptions were like those of the Indians in the Shweder and Bourne (1984) study. They were more concrete and role specific ("I play tennis on the weekend"). In contrast, the American descriptions included more psychological trait or attribute characterizations ("l am optimistic:' and "lam friendly"). However, in the modified TST, where a specific interpersonal context was provided so that respondents could envision the situation (e.g., me at home) and presumably who was there and what was being done to whom or by whom, this pattern of results was reversed. As shown in Figure 3, the Japanese showed a stronger tendency to characterize themselves in psychological trait or attribute terms than did Americans. In contrast, Americans tended to qualify their self-descriptions, claiming, for example, "I am sometimes lazy at home?'
Cousins (1989) argued that the original TST essentially isolates or disembeds the "I" from the relational or situational context, and thus self-description becomes artificial for the Japanese respondents, who are more accustomed to thinking about themselves within specific social situations. For these resPondents, the contextualized format "Describe yourself as you are with your family" was more "natural" because it locates the self in a habitual unit of representation, namely in a particular terpersonal situation. Once a defining context was specified, Japanese respondents were decidedly more willing to make generalizations about their behavior and to describe themselves abstractly using trait or attribute characterizations.
American students, in contrast to their Japanese counterparts, were more at home with the original TST because this test elicits the type of abstract, situation-free self-descriptions that form the core of the American, independent self-concept. Such abstract or global characterizations, according to Cousins (1989), reflect a claim of being a separate individual whose nature is not bound by a specific situation. When responding to the contextualized self-description questions, the American students qualified their descriptions as if to say "This is how I am at home, but don't assume this is the way I am everywhere?' For American respondents, selfness, pure and simple, seems to transcend any particular interpersonal relationships.
Basic cognition in an interpersonal context.
One's view of self can have an impact even on some evidently nonsocial cognitive activities. I. Liii (1986) described the emphasis that the Chinese place on being loyal and pious to their superiors and obedience to them, whether they are parents, employers, or government officials. He claimed that most Chinese adhere to a specific rule that states "If your superiors are present, or indirectly involved, in any situation, then you are to respect and obey them" (I. Liu, 1986, p. 78). The power and the influence of this rule appear to go considerably beyond that provided by the American admonition to "respect one's elders?' I. Liu (1986) argued that the standard of self-regulation that involves the attention and consideration of others is so pervasive that it may actually constrain verbal and ideational fluency. He reasoned that taking account of others in every situation is often at odds with individual assertion or with attempts at innovation or unique expression. This means, for example, that in an unstructured creativity task in which the goal is to generate as many ideas as possible, Chinese subjects may be at a relative disadvantage. In a similar vein, T. Y Liu and Hsu (1974) suggested that consideration of the rule "respect and obey others" uses up cognitive capacity that might otherwise be devoted to a task, and this may be the reason that Chinese norms for some creativity tasks fall below American norms.
Charting the differences between an independent self and interdependent self may also illuminate the controversy surrounding the debate between Bloom (1981, 1984) and Au (1983, 1984) over whether the Chinese can reason counterfactually (for a thorough review of this debate, see Moser, 1989). Bloom's studies (1981) on the counterfactual began when he asked Chinese-speaking subjects questions like "If the Hong Kong government were to pass a law requiring that all citizens born outside of Hong Kong make weekly reports of their activities to the police, how would you react?" Bloom noted that his respondents consistently answered "But the government hasn't," "It can't:' or "It won't?' Pressed to think about it anyway, the respondents became frustrated, claiming that it was unnatural or un-Chinese to think in this way. American and French respondents answered similar questions readily and without complaint. From this and subsequent studies, Bloom (1981, 1984) concluded that Chinese speakers "might be expected typi cally to encounter difficulty in maintaining a counterfactual perspective as an active point of orientation for guiding their cognitive activities" (1984, p. 21).
Au (1983) challenged Bloom's conclusions. Using different stimulus materials and also different translations of the same stimulus materials, she reported that Chinese subjects performed no differently from their Western counterparts. The controversy continues, however, and many investigators remain unconvinced that the differences Bloom and others have observed in a large number of studies on counterfactual reasoning are solely a function of awkward or improper translations of stimulus materials.
Moser (1989), for example, discussed several of Bloom's (1981, 1984) findings that are not easily explained away. He described the following question that Bloom (1981, pp. 53-54) gave to Taiwanese, Hong Kong, and American subjects in their native language.
Everyone has his or her own method for teaching children to respect morality. Some people punish the child for immoral behavior, thereby leading him to fear the consequences of such behavior. Others reward the child for moral behavior, thereby leading him to want to behave morally Even though both of these methods lead the child to respect morality, the first method can lead to some negative psychological consequences-it may lower the child's self-esteem.
According to the above paragraph, what do the two methods have in common? Please select only one answer.
A. Both methods are useless.
B. They have nothing in common, because the first leads to negative psychological consequences.
C. Both can reach the goal of leading the child to respect morality
D. It is better to use the second.
E. None of the above answers makes sense. (If you choose this answer, please explain
Bloom (1984) reported that 97% of American subjects responded C, but that only 55% of the Taiwanese and 65% of the Hong Kong respondents answered C. In explaining his results, he wrote:
Most of the remaining Chinese-speaking subjects chose D or E and then went on to explain, based on their own experience and often at great length and evidently after much reflection, why, for instance, the second method might be better, or why neither method works, or why both methods have to be used in conjunction with each other, or perhaps, why some other specified means is preferable. For the majority of these subjects, as was evident from later interviewing, it was not that they did not see the paragraph as stating that both methods lead the child top morality, but they felt that choosing that alternative and leaving it at that would be misleading since in their experience that response was untrue. As they saw it, what was expected, desired, must be at a minimum an answer reflecting their personal considered opinion, if not a more elaborated explanation of their own experiences relevant to the matter at hand. Why else would anyone ask the question? American subjects, by contrast, readily accepted the question as a purely "theoretical" exercise to be responded to according to the assumptions of the world it creates rather than in terms of their own experiences with the actual world. (Bloom, 1981, p. 54)
It is our view that the differences in response between the Americans and the Chinese may be related to whether the respondent has an independent or interdependent construal of the self. If one's actions are contingent on, determined by, or made meaningful by one's relationships and social situations, it is reasonable to expect that respondents with interdependent selves might focus on the motivation of the person administering the question and on the nature of their current relationship with this person. Consequently in the process of responding, they might ask themselves, "What is being asked of me here? What does this question expect of me or require from me? What are potential ramifications of answering in one way or another in respect to my relationship with this person?" In Lebra's (1976) terms, what is "my proper place?" in this social interaction [i.e., me and the interviewer], and what are the "obligations attached to [it?]" (p. 67). To immediately respond to the question as a purely abstract or theoretical exercise would require ignoring the currently constituted social situation and the nature of one's relationship with the other. This, of course, can be done, but it does not mean that it will be easily, effortlessly or automatically done. And this is especially true when the pragmatics of a given context appears to require just the opposite. It requires ignoring the other's perspective and a lack of attention to what the other must be thinking or feeling to ask such a question. One's actions are made meaningful by reference to a particular set of contextual factors. If these are ignored or changed, then the self that is determined by them changes also. Those with relatively unencumbered, self-contained, independent selves can readily, and without hesitation, entertain any of a thousand fanciful possible worlds because there are fewer personal consequences-the bounded, autonomous self remains essentially inviolate.
One important implication of this analysis is that people with interdependent selves should have no disadvantage in counterfactual reasoning if the intent of the questioner and the demand of the situation is simply to test the theoretical reasoning capacities of the person. One such situation would involve an aptitude test such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). Indeed, on the quantitative portion of the SAT that requires substantial hypothetical and counterfactual reasoning (e.g, "If Tom walked 2 miles per hour, then how far will he have walked in 4 hours?"), both Taiwanese and Japanese children perform considerably better than their American peers (Stevenson et al., 1986).
It would appear important, therefore, to distinguish between competence and performance or between the presence of particular inference skills and the application of these skills in a particular pragmatic context (see also Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, 1982). The discussion thus far implies that regardless of the nature of the self-system, most people with an adequate level of education possess the skills of hypothetical reasoning and the ability to think in a counterfactual fashion. Yet, the application of these skills in a particular situation varies considerably with the nature of the self-system. Some people may invoke these skills much more selectively. For those with interdependent selves, in contrast to those with independent selves, a relatively greater proportion of all inferences will be contingent on the pragmatic implications of a given situation, such as the perceived demands of the interviewer, the convention of the situation, and the rules of conversation.
Do styles of thinking and inference vary above and beyond those that derive from the pragmatic considerations of particular social situations? This question has yet to be more carefully addressed. However, given the tendency to see people, events, and objects as embedded within particular situations and relationships, the possibility seems genuine. Chiu (1972), for example, claimed that the reasoning of American children is characterized by an inferential-categorical style, whereas the reasoning of Taiwanese Chinese subjects displays a relationalcontextual style. When American children described why two objects of a set of three objects went together, they were likely to say "because they both live on a farm" In contrast, Chinese children were more likely to display a relational-contextual style, putting two human figures together and claiming the two go together "because the mother takes care of the baby" In the latter case, the emphasis is on synthesizing features into an organized whole. Bruner (1986) referred to such differences as arising from a paradigmatic versus a narrative mode of thought. In the former, the goal is abstraction and analyzing common features, in the latter, establishing a connection or an interdependence among the elements.
Consequences for Emotion
In psychology, emotion is often viewed as a universal set of largely prewired internal processes of self-maintenance and self-regulation (Buck, 1988; Darwin, 1896; Ekman, 1972; LeDoux, 1987). This does not mean, though, that emotional experience is also universal. On the contrary, as suggested by anthropologists Rosaldo (1984), Lutz (1988), and Solomon (1984), culture can play a central role in shaping emotional experience. As with cognition, if an emotional activity or reaction implicates the self, the outcome of this activity will depend on the nature of the self-system. And apart from the fear induced by bright lights and loud sounds, or the pleasure produced by a sweet taste, there are likely to be few emotions that do not directly implicate one's view of the self. Thus, Rosaldo (1984) contended "feelings are not substances to be discovered in our blood but social practices organized by stories that we both enact and tell. They are structured by our forms of understanding" (p. 143), and we would add, specifically, by one's construal of the self. In an extension of these ideas, Lutz (1988) argued that although most emotions are viewed as universally experienced "natural" human phenomena, emotions are anything but natural. Emotion, she contended, "can be viewed as cultural and interpersonal products of naming, justifying, and persuading by people in relationship to each other. Emotional meaning is then a social rather than an individual achievement-an emergent product of social life" (Lutz, 1988, p. 5).
Among psychologists, several cognitively oriented theorists of emotion have suggested that emotion is importantly implicated and embedded in an actual social situation as construed by the person (e.g., De Riviera, 1984; Roseman, 1984; Scherer, 1984). Accordingly, not only does the experience of an emotion depend on the current construal of the social situation (e.g Frijda, Kuipers, & ter Schure, 1989; Shaver, Schwartz, Kirson, & O'Connor, 1987; C. Smith & Ellsworth, 1987), but the experienced emotion in turn plays a pivotal role in changing and transforming the very nature of the social situation by allowing anew construal of the situation to emerge and, furthermore, by instigating the person to engage in certain actions. From the current perspective, construals of the social situation are constrained by, and largely derived from, construals of the self, others, and the relationship between the two. Thus, emotional experience should vary systematically with the construal of the self.
The present analysis suggests several ways in which emotional processes may differ with the nature of the self-system. First, the predominant eliciting conditions of many emotions may differ markedly according to one's construal of the self. Second, and more important, which emotions will be expressed or experienced, and with what intensity and frequency, may also vary dramatically.
Ego-focused versus other-focused emotions.
The emotions systematically vary according to the extent to which they follow from, and also foster and reinforce, an independent or an interdependent construal of the self. This is a dimension that has largely been ignored in the literature. Some emotions, such as anger, frustration, and pride, have the individual's internal attributes this or her own needs 1oals, desires, or abilities) as the primary referent. Such emotions may be called ego focused. They result most typically from the blocking (e.g., "I was treated
unfairly"), the satisfaction, or the confirmation (e.g., "I performed better than others") of one's internal attributes. Experiencing and expressing these emotions further highlights these self-defining, internal attributes and leads to additional attempts to assert them in public and confirm them in private. As a consequence, for those with independent selves to operate effectively, they have to be "experts" in the expression of these emotions. They will manage the expression, and even the experience, of these emotions so that they maintain, affirm, and bolster the construal of the self as an autonomous entity. The public display of one's own internal attributes can be at odds with the maintenance of interdependent, cooperative social interaction, and when unchecked can result in interpersonal confrontation, conflict, and possibly even overt aggression. These negative consequences, however, are not as severe as they might be for interdependent selves because the expression of one's internal attributes is the culturally sanctioned task of the independent self. In short, the current analysis suggests that, in contrast to those with more interdependent selves, the ego-focused emotions will be more frequently expressed, and perhaps experienced, by those with independent selves.
In contrast to the ego-focused emotions, some other emotions, such as sympathy, feelings of interpersonal communion and shame, have another person, rahter than one's internal attricbutes, as the primary rferent. Such emotions may be called other focused They typically result from being sensitive to the other, taking the perspective of the other, and attempting to promote interdependence. Experiencing these emotions highlights one's interdependence, facilitates the reciprocal ex-
changes of well-intended actions, leads to further cooperative social behavior, and thus provides a significant form of self-validation for interdependent selves. As a consequence, for those with interdependent selves to operate effectively, they will have to be "experts" in the expression and experience of these emotions. They will manage the expression, and even the experience, of these emotions so that they maintain, affirm, and rein-
force the construal of the self as an interdependent entity. The other-focused emotions often discourage the autonomous expression to inhibition and ambivalence. Although among inde selves these consequences are experienced negatively (e.g., as timidity) and
can, in fact, have a negative impact, they are tolerated, among interdependent selves, as the "business of living" kakar1978 p. 34). Creating and maintaining a connection to others is the primary task of the interdependent self. In short, this analysis suggests that, in contrast to those with more independent selves, these other-focused emotions will be more frequently expressed and perhaps even experienced among those with interdependent selves.
Ego-focused emotions-emotions that foster and create independence.
In a comparison of American and Japanese undergraduates, Matsumoto, Kudoh, Scherer, and Wallbott (1988) found that American subjects reported experiencing their emotions longer than did Japanese subjects, even though the two groups agreed in their ordering of which emotions were experienced longest (i.e., joy = sad > anger guilt > fear = shame = disgust) Americans also reported feeling these emotions more intensely than the Japanese and reported more bodily symptoms (e.g., lump in throat, change in breathing, more expressive reactions, and more verbal reactions) than did the Japanese. Finally, when asked what they would do to cope with the consequences of various emotional events, significantly more of the Japanese students reported that no action was necessary.
One interpretation of this pattern of findings may assume that most of the emotions examined, with the exception of shame and possibly guilt, are what we have called ego-focused emotions. Thus, people with independent selves will attend more to these feelings and act on the basis of them, because these feelings are regarded as diagnostic of the independent self. Not to attend to one's inner feelings is often viewed as being inauthentic or even as denying the "real" self. In contrast, among those with more interdependent selves, one's inner feelings may be less important in determining one's consequent actions. Ego-focused feelings may be regarded as by-products of interpersonal relationships, but they may not be accorded privileged status as regulators of behavior. For those with interdependent selves, it is the interpersonal context that assumes priority over the inner attributes, such as private feelings. The latter may need to be controlled or dc-emphasized so as to effectively fit into the interpersonal context.
Given these differences in emotional processes, people with divergent selves may develop very different assumptions about the etiology of emotional expressions for ego-focused emotions. For those with independent selves, emotional expressions may literally "express" or reveal the inner feelings such as anger, sadness, and fear. F those with interdependent selves, however. an emotional expression may be more often regarded as a public instrumental action that may or may not be related di- with this analysis, Matsumoto (1989), using data from 15 cultures, reported that individuals from hierarchical cultures (that we would classify as being generally interdependent; see Hofstede, 1980), when asked to rate the intensity of an angry, sad, or fearful emotion displayed by an individual in a photograph, gave lower intensity ratings than those from less hierarchical cultures. Notably, although the degree of hierarchy inherent in one's cultures was strongly related to the intensity ratings given to those emotions, it was not related to the correct identification of these emotions. The one exception to this finding was that people from more hierarchical cultures (those with more interdependent selves) were less likely to correctly identify emotional expressions of happiness. Among those with interdependent selves (often those from hierarchical cultures), positive emotional expressions are most frequently used as public actions in the service of maintaining interpersonal harmony and, thus, are not regarded as particularly diagnostic of the actor's inner feelings or happiness.
For those with interdependent selves (composed primarily of relationships with others instead of inner attributes), it may be very important not to have intense experiences of eüo-focused emotions, and this may be particularly true for negative emotions like anger. Anger may sriously threaten an interdendent self and thus may be highly dysfunctional In fact, some anthropologists explicitly challenge the universalist ilist view that all people experience the same negative emotions. Thus, in Tahiti, anger is highly feared, and various anthropological accounts claim that there is no expression of anger in this culture (see Levy, 1973; Solomon, 1984). It is not that these people have learned to inhibit or suppress their "real" anger but that they have learned the importance of attending to others, considering others, and being gentle in all situations, and as a consequence very little anger is elicited. In other words, the social reality is construed and actually constructed in such a way that it does not lend itself to the strong experience, let alone the outburst, of negative ego-focused emotions such as anger. The same is claimed for Ukta Eskimos (Briggs, 1970). They are said not to feel anger, not to express anger, and not even to talk about anger. The claim is that they do not show anger even in those circumstances that would certainly produce complete outrage in Americans. These Eskimos use a word that means "childish" to label angry behavior when it is observed in foreigners.
Among the Japanese, there is a similar concern with averting anger and avoiding a disruption of the harmony of the social situation. As a consequence, experiencing anger or receiving anger signals may be relatively rare events. A study by Miyake, Campos, Kagan, and Bradshaw (1986), which compared Japanese and American infants of 11 months of age, provides suggestive evidence for this claim. These investigators showed each infant an interesting toy and paired it with a mother's vocal expression of joy, anger, or fear. Then they measured the child's latency to resume locomotion toward the toy after the mother's utterance. The two groups of infants did not differ in their reactions to expressions of joy or fear. But, after an angry vocal expression of the mother, there was a striking difference between the two groups. The Japanese children resumed locomotion toward the toy after 48 s, American children after only 18 s. It may be that the Japanese children are relatively more traumatized by their mother's anger expressions because these are such rare events.
Notably, in the West, a controversy exists about the need, the desirability, and the importance of expressing one's anger. Assuming a hydraulic model of anger, some argue that it is necessary to express anger so as to avoid boiling over or blowing up at a later point (Pennebaker, 1982). Others argue for the importance of controlling one's anger so as not to risk losing control. No such controversy appears to exist among those in predominantly interdependent cultures, where a seemingly unchallenged norm directs individuals to restrain their inner feelings and particularly the overt expression of these feelings. Indeed, many interdependent cultures have well-developed strategies that render them expert at avoiding the expression of negative emotions. For example, Bond (1986) reported that in China discussions have a clear structure that is explicitly designed to prevent conflict from erupting. To begin with, discussants present their common problems and identify all the constraints that all the participants must meet. Only then do they state their own views. To Westerners, such a pattern appears as vague, beating around the bush, and not getting to the heart of the matter, but it is part of a carefully executed strategy of avoiding conflict, and thus perhaps the experience of negative emotions. Bond, in fact, noted that among school children in Hong Kong and Taiwan, there is a tendency to cooperate with opponents even in a competitive reward structure and to rate future opponents more positively than others who will not be opponents (Li, Cheung, & Kau. 1979, 1982).
In a recent cross-cultural comparison of the eliciting conditions of several emotions, Matsumoto et al. (1988) also found that Japanese respondents appear to be avoiding anger in close relations. Specifically, for the Japanese, closely related others were rarely implicated in the experience of anger. The Japanese reported feeling anger primarily in the presence of strangers. It4 thus appears that not only the expression but also the experience of such an ego-focused emotion as anger is effectively averted within an interdependent structure of relation. When anger arises, it happens outside of the existing interdependence, as in confrontation with out-groups (e.g., Samurai warfare in feudal Japan). In _contrast Americans and Western Europeans report experiencing anger primarily in the presence of closely r-elate others. This is not surprising, given that expressing and experiencing ego-focused, even negative emotions, is one viable way to assert and affirm the status of the self as an independent entity. Consistent with this analysis, Stipek, Weiner, and Li (1989) found that when describing situations that produce anger. Chinese subjects were much more likely than American subjects to describe a situation that happened to someone else ("a guy on a bus did not give up a seat to an old woman"). For Americans, the major stimulus to anger was the situation where the individual was the victim ("a friend broke a promise to me").
Other emotions, such as pride or guilt, may also differ according to the nature of the mediating self-system. As with anger, these expressions may be avoided, or they will assume a somewhat different form. For example, if defined as being proud of one's own individual attributes, pride may mean hubris, and its expression may need to be avoided for those with interdependent selves.' Consistent with the idea that pride in one's own performance may be inhibited among those with interdependent selves, Stipek et al. (1989) found that the Chinese were decidedly less likely to claim their own successful efforts as a source of pride than were Americans. These investigators also reported that the emotion of guilt takes on somewhat different connotations as well. Among those with independent selves, who are more likely to hold stable, cross-situational beliefs and to consider them self- definitional. "violating a law cause of guilt. Among however, the most com reported source of guilt was "hurting others psychologically."
Other-focused emotions-emotions that create and foster interdependence. Those with interdependent selves may inhibit the experience, or at least the expression, of some ego-focused emotions, but they may have a heightened capacity for the experience and expression of those emotions that derive primarily from focusing on the other. In Japan and China, for example, there is a much greater incidence of cosleeping, cobathing, and physical contact between mother and child than is typically true in most Western countries. The traditional Japanese mother carries the child on her back for a large part of the first 2 years. Lebra (1976) claimed that Japanese mothers teach their children to fear the pain of loneliness, whereas Westerners teach children how to be alone. Japanese and Chinese socialization practices may help the child develop an interdependent self in the first place, and at the same time, the capacity for the experience of a relatively greater variety of other-focused emotions.
The greater interdependence that results between mothers and their children in Japan is reflected in the finding that the classification of infants according to the nature of their attachments to their mothers (i.e., secure, ambivalent, and avoidant) departs markedly from the pattern typically observed in Western data. Specifically, many more Japanese infants are classified as "ambivalently attached" because they seem to experience decidedly more stress following a brief separation from the mother than do American infants (Ainsworth, Bell, & Stayton, 1974; Miyake, Chen, & Campos, in press). This finding also indicates that a paradigm like the typical stranger situation is inhere linked to and independent view of self and thus may not be appropriate for guaging attachment in non-Western cultures.
In Japan, socialization practices that foster an intense closeness between mother and child give rise to the feeling of amae. Amae is typically defined as the sense of, or the accompanying hope for, being lovingly cared for and involves depending on and presuming another's indulgence. Although, as detailed by Kumagai and Kumagai (1985), the exact meaning of amae is open to some debate, it is clear that "the other" is essential. When a person experiences amae, she or he "feels the freedom to do whatever he or she wills" while being accepted and cared for by others with few strings attached. Some say amae is a type of complete acceptance, a phenomenal replication of the ideal mother-infant bond (L. T Doi, 1973). From our point of view, experiencing amae with respect to another person maybe inherent in the formation and maintenance of a mutually reciprocal, interdependent relationship with another person. If the other person accepts one's amae the reciprocal relationship is symbolically completed, leading to a significant form of self-validation. If, however, the other person rejects one's amae, the relationship will be in jeopardy.
For the purpose of comparing indigenous feelings, such as amae, with the more universal ones, such as anger and happiness, Kitayama and Markus (1990) used a multidimensional scaling technique which allows the identification of the dimensions that individuals habitually or spontaneously use when they make judgments about similarities among various emotions. Recent studies have demonstrated that people are capable of distinguishing among various emotions on as many as seven or eight cognitive dimensions (Mauro, Sato, & Tucker, 1989; C. Smith & Ellsworth, 1987). In these studies, however, the dimensions have been specified a priori by the experimenter and given explicitly to the respondents to use in describing the emotions. When the dimensions are not provided but allowed to emerge in multidimensional scaling studies, two dimensions are typically identified: activation (or exciteint) id pleasantness (e.g., Russell, 1980). And it appears that most Western emotions can be readily located on a circumplex plane defined by these two dimensions. Thus, although people are capable of discriminating among emotions on a substantial number of dimensions, they habitually categorize the emotions only on the dimensions of activation and pleasantness.
More recently Russell (1983; Russell, Lewicka, & Nut, 1989) applied the same technique to several non-Western cultural groups and replicated the American findings. He thus argued that the lay understanding of emotional experience may indeed be universal. Russell used, however, only those terms that have clear counterparts in the non-Western groups he studied. He did not include any emotion terms indigenous to the non-Western groups such as amae It is possible that once terms for such indigenous feeling states are included in the analysis, a new dimension, or dimensions, may emerge. To explore this possibility, Kitayama and Markus (1990) sampled 20 emotions from the Japanese language. Half of these terms were also found in English and were sampled so that they evenly covered the circumplex space identified by Russell. The remaining terms were those indigenous to Japanese culture and those that presuppose the presence of others. Some (e.g., fureai [feeling a close connection with someone else]) refer primarily to a positive association with others (rather than events that happen within the individual, such as success), whereas others refer to interpersonal isolation and conflict (e.g., oime [the feeling of indebtedness]). Japanese college students rated the similarity between 2 emotions for each of the 190 pairs that could be made from the 20 emotions. The mean perceived similarity ratings for these pairs were then submitted to a multidimensional scaling.
Replicating past research, Kitayama and Markus (1990) identified two dimensions that closely correspond to the activation and the pleasantness dimensions. In addition, however, a new dimension emerged. This third dimension represented the extent to which the person is engaged in or disengaged from an interpersonal relationship. At the interpersonal engagement end were what we have called other-focused emotions, such as shame, fureai [feeling a close connection with somebody else], and shitashimi [feeling familiar], whereas at the disengagement end were found some ego-centered emotions, such as pride and tukeagari [feeling puffed up with the sense of self-importance], along with sleepiness and boredom. This interpersonal engagement-disengagement dimension also differentiated between otherwise very similar emotions. Thus, pride and elation were equally positive and high in activation, yet pride was perceived as considerably less interpersonally engaged than elation. Furthermore, anger and shame were very similar in terms of activation and pleasantness, but shame was much higher than anger in the extent of interpersonal engagement.
More important, this study located the indigenous emotions within the three-dimensional structure, permitting us to understand the nature of these emotions in reference to more universal emotions. For instance, amae was low in activation, and neither positive nor negative, fairly akin to sleepiness, except that the former was much more interpersonally engaged than the latter. This may indicate the passive nature of amae, involving the hopeful expectation of another person's favor and indulgence without any active, agentic solicitation of them. Completion of amae depends entirely on the other person, and, therefore, amae is uniquely ambivalent in its connotation on the pleasantness dimension. Another indigenous emotion, oime, involves the feeling of being psychologically indebted to somebody else. Oime was located at the very negative end of the pleasantness dimension, perceived even more negatively than such universal negative emotions as anger and sadness. The extreme unpleasantness of oime suggests the aversive nature of unmet obligations and the press of the need to fulfill one's obligations to others and to return favors. It also underscores the significance of balanced and harmonious relationships in the emotional life of those with interdependent selves.
The finding that the Japanese respondents clearly and reliably discriminated between ego-focused emotions and otherfocused emotions on the dimension of interpersonal engagement versus disengagement strongly suggests the validity of this distinction as an essential component of emotional experience at least among Japanese and, perhaps, among people from other cultures as well. In a more recent study Kitayama and Markus (1990) further tested whether this theoretical dimension of emotion also underlies and even determines how frequently people may experience various emotions and whether the frequency of emotional experience varies with their dominant construal of self as independent or interdependent.
Kitayama and Markus (1990) first sampled three emotions common in Japanese culture that were expected to fall under one of the five types theoretically derived from the current analysis. These types are listed in Table 2. Ego-focused positive emotions (yuetukan [feeling superior], pride, and tukeagari [feeling puffed up] are those that are most typically associated with the confirmation or fulfillment of one's internal attributes, such as abilities, desires, and needs. Ego-focused, negative emotions (anger, futekusare [sulky feeling], and yokyufuman [frustration]) occur primarily when such internal attributes are blocked or threatened. Also included were those correspondingly positive or negative emotions associated with the maintenance or enhancement of interdependence. Thus, three emotions are commonly associated with the affirmation or the completion of interdependent relationships (fureai [feeling of connection with someone], shitashimi [feeling of familiarity to | <urn:uuid:dbd64ac1-bea2-4db2-a8de-29d4dc891ec0> | 3 | 2.796875 | 0.092097 | en | 0.952048 | http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/honors130/culture.html |
City Journal Special Issue 2009
New York’s Tomorrow
Special Issue 2009
Table of Contents
Tablet Editions
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City Journal
Peter D. Salins
Liberating Development
Zoning should spur building, not prevent it.
Special Issue 2009
Swaths of Coney Island and other attractive sites remain barren, . . .
Marilyn Genter/The Image Works
On paper, at least, the Bloomberg administration’s plans for New York City’s future development are as comprehensive, sophisticated, and visionary as those of any major city in the nation. The City Planning Commission, in cooperation with several sister agencies, has drafted ambitious, far-reaching plans for all five boroughs and taken numerous steps to implement them. The proposals, easily accessible online, are comprehensive and compelling. If ever fully realized, they could make New York the world’s most attractive, livable, and economically vibrant metropolis.
The catch is in the clause if ever fully realized, because it is highly unlikely that they will be. The city’s plans for its physical environment suffer from the same philosophical flaw that pervades all its policies: the assumption that Gotham is so desirable that no price is too high, no burden too great, for the privilege of locating there (or, in this case, building there). During the recent boom years, developers did indeed put up with restrictive regulations and procedural delays that cut into their profits. But after the collapse of Wall Street and the collateral collapse of the city’s real-estate market, it is highly unlikely that they will continue to do so. New York may have to begin acting like other American cities, which welcome with open arms those willing to invest millions of private dollars to expand and renew their physical stock. And a good place for New York’s reorientation to begin is a comprehensive overhaul of its phenomenally complex and outdated zoning ordinance.
Now present in just about every American municipality, zoning was born in New York in 1916. In its first phase, best characterized as “simple rules to guide developers in a rapidly growing city,” New York’s zoning was a crisply designed and straightforwardly implemented scheme. It aimed merely to prevent three kinds of potential development harm: excessive building density, which could prevent light and air from reaching street level; the juxtaposition of highly incompatible residential and commercial structures; and egregious visual assaults on the shared civic landscape. The 1916 ordinance served the city well. Under its rules, much of iconic New York as we know it today was built: Rockefeller Center, Times Square, most of the financial district, and the Woolworth, Chrysler, and Empire State Buildings. So was a lot of the outer boroughs’ highly serviceable residential development (think Forest Hills, Riverdale, the Grand Concourse, and miles of modest but attractive row houses in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx).
In 1961, the Wagner administration replaced the 1916 framework with one mirroring the planning fashions of the day. Reflecting the now-discredited “towers-in-a-park” approach to urban design, New York’s second-phase zoning did away with the 1916 ordinance’s concern with sunlight at street level, replacing it with a new approach to regulating the size of buildings: FAR, the “floor area ratio” between the area of a site and the permissible enclosed volume of a building on that site, an idea that has turned out to be both aesthetically unsound and functionally undesirable. The 1961 ordinance was also far more complex, with 21 zones (compared with five in the earlier law, and eventually swelling to over 50 today, not counting special districts). And it unwisely set aside excessive amounts of land for the city’s shrinking manufacturing sector. New York’s second-phase zoning might best be described as “unworkable rules to prevent developers from building what the market wanted.”
By the late 1970s, the city’s zoning regime had morphed into its third and most pernicious phase, the one we live with today. Call it “exquisitely negotiated rules that allow the richest, most patient developers to build what city planners and the ‘community’ think best.”
Under zoning ordinances anywhere, any proposed structure that doesn’t conform precisely to the zoning rules as written must gain some kind of project-specific government approval, such as an administrative variance or a legislated change in the zoning law. But because New York’s 1961 rules seldom allow builders to erect the projects that they believe the market wants, almost every significant development needs project-specific city approval.
To secure it, three sets of actors need to agree. First, of course, there is the developer, along with its financiers. Second, we have representatives of New York City’s government—professional planners in the City Planning Department, their superiors on the mayorally appointed City Planning Commission, and economic development officials—all of whom have very specific ideas about what should be built and where. Finally, the procedural requirements attending all zoning exceptions—notably, the city’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, adopted in 1975, and its City Environmental Quality Review, enacted in 1977—invite interest groups to weigh in on the merits of development proposals. At the neighborhood level, one finds community boards and ad hoc “coalitions” formed solely for the purpose of killing or recasting proposed projects. Outside the neighborhood, the players are such powerful groups as the Municipal Art Society, the self-appointed guardian of New York’s civic and aesthetic interests, and Acorn, an advocacy group that invariably attempts to extort some “affordable” housing (read: subsidized by the developer). Typically, by the end of negotiations, many proposed projects never see the light of day or are transformed in ways that are economically or functionally undesirable.
There are many different permutations in this three-way dance, but four highly publicized projects in New York City illustrate the tortuous dynamics that bedevil most new development proposals. In each instance, current zoning provisions couldn’t accommodate the kind of development being sought, the project could be realized only by changing some aspect of the standing zoning rules, and the necessary zoning changes had to make their way through a painful approvals process. These cases also illustrate the various ways in which the development process is distorted when private-sector initiative and economic judgment wind up overridden by officials and citizens with no personal financial stakes in the outcome.
The first example is Coney Island. Tattered and shabby, this legendary beachside playground for working-class New Yorkers has clearly fallen on hard times, with most of its famous rides shuttered and summer beach attendance way down. You would think that the city and the community would be thrilled if someone would come forward to redevelop the place, especially if it could happen with little in the way of taxpayer support. But after a regional developer, Thor Equities, bought Coney Island’s Astroland amusement park and adjacent properties, hoping to build a twenty-first-century amusement-park complex that included hotels and large retail facilities, it got nothing but grief. The city’s planners and the local community scorn the hotels and big-box stores—which the developer believes are necessary to make the project economically viable—preferring more amusements and “affordable” housing. The Municipal Art Society, meanwhile, doesn’t like either the city’s or the developer’s ideas and wants a Disneyland-scale amusement park.
Put aside the question of which proposal has the greatest merit. The problem is that the city and the interest groups are blocking a welcome, and presumably economically feasible, undertaking to rebuild one of the city’s most symbolically resonant neighborhoods—an undertaking, moreover, by a private corporation refreshingly relying on its own assets and financing rather than on a taxpayer handout. Why the resistance? Because both the city and the “community” consider their visions for the site superior to the developer’s. In the end, either nothing will be done with Coney Island, or its rebuilding will take years longer.
For another example of thwarted developer-initiated development, look at Fordham University’s proposal to expand its Lincoln Center campus substantially. Here again, we have a private (in this case, a nonprofit) entity wanting to undertake—without city help—a beneficial project that would not only add high-quality physical facilities to one of Manhattan’s key districts but also contribute to the city’s economy in one of its important growing sectors: higher education. The city’s planning department gave the project a green light, but the neighborhood opposed it, on the grounds that the proposed buildings were too dense and too tall—though, if anything, they were smaller than most structures recently erected in the area. When the project came up for review, activists besieged the local community board, which unanimously withheld its approval. Fordham seems willing to scale its project back to win the required approvals, and, at this point, it looks as though the project—diminished by several hundred thousand square feet—may eventually move forward. Even so, we shouldn’t be pleased about the evisceration of such a valuable addition to New York’s economy and physical plant.
. . . thanks in part to special interests, like the Church of Stop Shopping, that exploit the city's complex zoning code.
Even as market-validated, unsubsidized projects like Thor’s and Fordham’s get derailed, city and state planning and economic-development agencies, deploying hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars and formidable land-acquisition powers, work mightily to get developers to build what and where they otherwise wouldn’t. In Willets Point, Queens, a dismal precinct of marginal factories and small industry, the city’s Economic Development Corporation is prepared to buy vast tracts of land and deploy tax subsidies to create an ambitious mixed-use commercial and residential district. Predictably, significant local opposition has arisen, mainly from the area’s small businesses. Until now, the city’s planners have shown far greater interest in the project than any developers have, making city government the community’s primary antagonist and putting the plan’s economic feasibility in serious doubt.
Further along, at the edge of downtown Brooklyn, planners have conceived another elaborate mixed-use development of housing and commercial structures, called Atlantic Yards, centered on a new basketball stadium for the New Jersey Nets. The lead developer, Forest City Ratner, would never have undertaken the project without half a billion dollars in subsidies, as well as assistance in land acquisition, from the city and state. Despite a solid government-developer alliance, the project has been held up—and perhaps permanently wounded—by vociferous community contentions that it’s too big and doesn’t include enough affordable housing.
The dysfunction of third-phase zoning was long disguised by New York’s dramatic economic and demographic revival over the last two decades. Since the city’s nadir in the late 1970s, its population has grown by over 1.2 million, and its economy, by the eve of the current meltdown, had gained 1 million jobs. Outsize bonuses fed Wall Streeters’ desire for luxurious apartments; outsize profits fed their bosses’ desire for luxurious offices; and a vast influx of immigrants brought new demands for residential and commercial space to uptown Manhattan and the other four boroughs. All this fueled what seemed an insatiable appetite for new development throughout the city.
Developers, at least the best-capitalized ones, were willing to put up with long procedural delays and with high project costs, which they were able to pass on to purchasers or tenants. City hall, for its part, began to believe that it could make any demands it wanted on developers and that the market would bear the cost.
Negotiated zoning didn’t make much sense even in the heady days of New York’s economic boom. Today—with an excess of recently built residential and commercial space, a severely distressed housing market, and huge job losses—we no longer have a development environment in which planners and community activists can call the shots. If the city is to have any hope of increasing and revitalizing its physical stock, its approach to zoning must change radically. New York needs to move from third-phase negotiated zoning to what I will call Phase Four: “simple rules that promote the development of economically feasible, unsubsidized projects with high standards of urban design and respect for neighborhood identity and scale.”
The objective of comprehensive rezoning should be to spur building and rebuilding. Fourth-phase zoning, therefore, must be designed to facilitate the rapid development of any reasonable project anywhere in the city—even in its densest sections—without requiring subsequent review and approval, other than by the buildings department to assure conformity to whichever specifics of the new zoning code do apply to a particular project.
This will require a massive behavioral reorientation on the part of the three key actors in the development process. City officials, while able to shape the form and character of the city’s districts when they establish the underlying zone specifications, must be willing to give up their power to design, actively or reactively, each significant development. Neighborhood residents and citywide advocates, while likewise playing a major role in agreeing to the initial rules, must be willing to give up their ability to block or modify individual proposals. Perhaps the greatest behavioral reorientation will have to come from the builders. Even as they complain about the costs and delays of the current system, they have become convinced over the years that they can always negotiate their way to a more desirable development outcome. (Indeed, the prices they pay for sites often reflect not the returns that those sites would yield under current zoning restrictions, but what they would yield after negotiated exceptions to those restrictions.)
To ensure that fourth-phase zoning can operate with a minimal level of site-specific review and revision, it needs to jettison some of the failed ideas of the 1961 ordinance in favor of rules that promote good urban design and respect neighborhood scale and character. For one thing, building density should no longer be regulated according to floor area ratios. FARs are easily manipulated, letting developers build structures wildly out of scale with their surroundings; sometimes, for instance, developers are allowed to include in the ratio the area of adjacent sites that they own. New York should instead constrain structure density and scale, as most traditional zoning codes do, with specific height and bulk specifications—or else, as the original 1916 law did, with a “sky exposure plane,” an imaginary diagonal drawn from street level that required progressively greater setbacks as building height increased. (Hence the resemblance of many classic New York buildings to ziggurats or wedding cakes.)
Another part of the current zoning regime that should be scrapped is the way it treats use restrictions. Under a traditional zoning ordinance, like New York’s 1916 law, a municipality establishes a broad set of permissible “uses”—usually, several categories of residential, commercial, and industrial facilities—and specifies the geographic districts in which they are permitted. Further, because it is impossible to know how much land should be devoted to each use, uses are customarily organized in a hierarchy based on their “external costs,” with less harmful activities generally permitted in districts zoned for more harmful ones. A factory, for example, would not be permitted in a commercial or residential zone, since it might degrade the quality of life there, but a retail complex could open in a manufacturing zone, and homes could go anywhere.
In 1961, New York abandoned the hierarchical-use principle and began specifying precisely which uses could operate in each zone. The idea was to protect manufacturing in the Garment District and along the East River by preventing residential development there. But the inflexibility of the new approach, exacerbated by the current ordinance’s voluminous schedule of uses, has been one of the leading causes of project-specific negotiation. Fourth-phase zoning should be organized around a limited number of broad use categories, and it should return to the traditional hierarchical practice.
Something like this new zoning regime was proposed nine years ago, during the Giuliani administration, with the initiative led by Joseph Rose, then chairman of the City Planning Commission. The effort failed because of the vehement opposition of the real-estate industry (mainly at the behest of its best-capitalized developers), which was convinced in those days that despite the time and money lost in zoning negotiations, the old rules would permit them—after the negotiations were concluded successfully—to build taller structures than the proposed new ones would. But that was back when the city’s economy and real-estate market were booming and a fair amount of development made it through the dysfunctional zoning process. Now, during a moment of high economic anxiety and stalled development, may be a more opportune time to revisit zoning reform.
Further, though Mayor Giuliani accomplished a great deal, notably in reviving New York’s economy and lowering its crime rates, reordering the city’s physical environment was not among his priorities. Mayor Bloomberg, by contrast, cares a great deal about New York’s physical condition, as evidenced by his championing of physical renewal efforts across all five boroughs, his issuing of PlaNYC (a vision for New York’s physical condition in 2030), and the quality of his appointments to the city’s planning and housing agencies.
To the Bloomberg administration’s credit, its City Planning Department has sought, in many parts of the city, to replace strictly project-specific discretionary action with legislated rezoning, initiating more local zoning changes than at any time since the passage of the 1961 ordinance. Yet many of these rezonings just amount to negotiated zoning at a more institutionalized scale. If the administration really wants to give New York a face to match its grandest twenty-first-century aspirations, it must recast zoning comprehensively, adopting a new ordinance that promotes the development of market-validated projects all over the city, with rules designed to expand the city’s economy, enhance its quality of life, and reflect the highest standards of contemporary urban design. That should be something that the city’s government, real-estate and development interests, and specialists in planning and zoning can easily agree about.
Peter D. Salins is a Manhattan Institute senior fellow and a professor of political science at SUNY’s Stony Brook University. He is the coauthor, with Gerard Mildner, of Scarcity by Design.
The Downtown Development Drag
Nearly eight years after al-Qaida destroyed the World Trade Center, uncertainty at the site still delays downtown’s recovery. Developer Larry Silverstein holds the right to rebuild much of Ground Zero’s commercial real estate under a lease he signed with the site’s owner, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, six weeks before 9/11. But years of political dithering have kept Silverstein from building. New York, under Governors George Pataki, Eliot Spitzer, and David Paterson and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, could never quite figure out what to build or how to build it. Pataki became infatuated with fanciful office-tower designs by starchitect Daniel Libeskind. Bloomberg questioned downtown’s viability as an office hub, withholding rebuilding funds until Silverstein surrendered the right to construct two of his original five towers, including the much-heralded Freedom Tower, to the Port Authority.
Government delay has cost more than time. Silverstein needs outside financing to build his remaining towers. (The insurance money that he got after the attack has dwindled, much of it paid out in rent to the Port Authority, and was never enough to rebuild completely, anyway.) Three years ago, he likely could have found it in the private market. Today, in a deep recession precipitated by the meltdown of New York’s prime industry, it’s impossible to raise money for speculative office towers without government guarantees. So Silverstein wants more than $3 billion in such guarantees to build his towers. The Port Authority will offer about a third of the guarantees needed, but it wants Silverstein to put up additional money, and it wants the city to chip in, too, before it will consider more.
But the Port Authority and the state, though they have caused many of the delays, shouldn’t try to fix their mistakes by providing financial guarantees of office buildings, which should be a private-sector enterprise—especially at a time of huge budget deficits. Direct government involvement in Ground Zero’s towers pushes the city’s other private developers into greater competition with the government, which can undercut commercial rents. If commercial tenants can take advantage of government-subsidized rates downtown, prospects for real-estate development elsewhere in the city could suffer. (None of this is to say that the Port Authority shouldn’t restructure its lease to offer Silverstein more time to complete his buildings; it’s even possible that the authority will end up owing Silverstein money for the continuing delays.)
The state, the authority, and the city should instead focus on their real job: building downtown’s Fulton Street subway hub, the PATH train station for New Jersey commuters, and other public infrastructure at and near Ground Zero. Once the private sector sees that government can build the infrastructure that the site needs, private financing will materialize for the office towers, just as it will for other projects now on hold across the city. To doubt that the private sector will eventually build office space in a major New York business center is to doubt the very possibility of New York’s recovery.
—Nicole Gelinas
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Bibliography from (W) like Wardhaugh, my initiator to sociolinguistics to (Z) like Zangwill the creator of the Melting Pot
Links to my bibliography from A to Z:
A B C D E F G H I J K L
M N O P Q R S T U V W/X/Y/Z(this page)
Last Update: Nov. 15, 2012
Waggoner, D. (1981). Statistics on language use. Language in the USA. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 592.
Wagner, Peter (2005), ‘In time and Space: on the Possibility of a Cultural Theory of Modernity’, in Neil J. Smelser, University of California, Berkeley (ed.), 37th International Institute of Sociology Conference: Sociology and Cultural Sciences (Folket Hus, Kongresshallen A: European University Institute, Italy,).
other Presenters:
[Hannerz, 2005 #9]
Commentator Margaret Archer, University of Warwick, UK
On the possibility of a cultural theory of modernity. Attempts to understand our modern times. Modernity between cultural and sociological tensions.
78-79, sociology, well established then. Firm grip on study of modern society. Sub disciplins were corresponding to society, based on the assumption of social fabric.
culture: part of well ordered society. more within anthropology. modern society was seen as not needing culture. Jeffrey Alexander saw modernity as institutionalization of freedom.
Now human beings are seen as having political or cultural bonds.
culture changed meaning.
Move from anthropology away from understanding of common value to interactionist approach.
Cultural linguistics: life is constituted through language thus interpretation.
Culture seen as more important than economics or social today.
Modernity: three different ways to approch in
Globalization superficially studying the decline. More globalization, thus not much social left between Global, neoliberal thinking, cosmopolitanism
3-Hardening: Huntington
Critical mainstream: implIcation for theorizing modernity. Modernity as double commitment to autonomy (freedom) and power (mastery)
3- Culture approach: bourdieu. Behind the façade something else is going on. Modernity as interpretation. Eurocentric view of european modernity. Origins of modernity in Europen then spreading to the rest of the world (globalization)
Rupture in History. Set of Revolution. Scientific, industrial, liberal development revolutions: Modern Society
1- 19TH century: strong organization of cultural and linguistic identities claship between each other. Cultural variety of interpretation of modernity leading to WW1
2- Post-colonial studies depict the wide array of traditions left aside
WW1: Second break in tradition in European History. Big civilization of failure. Concpetualized as break in time (H. Arendt)
US Modernity: modern yet different from Europe. Puts Europe in inferior term. Self critical term in memory.
By examples, we use specificity in time and space of modern experience at given moments.
Waho, Toni (2011)paper given at World Conference on the Education of the Indigenous People, Peru.
-– (2012), ‘Te Rei Māori – The Māori language- in the City’, paper given at Languages in the City, Berlin, 21-24 August, 2012.
cf his ppt. Te Reo Māori in the City gives a background to the Māori Language Revitalisation effort. This presentation was prepared by Toni Waho who is the Co-ordinator of an urban based multi tribal organisation called Mana Tamariki. Mana Tamariki means “chidrens’ power.” Toni is also a Trustee of the National Te Kōhanga Reo Trust Board which is the governing body for the total immersion pre-school movement Te Kōhanga Reo. He is the Chairman of Te Rūnanga Nui o ngā Kura Kaupapa Māori (Association of total immersion Māori language schools), a director of Te Māngai Pāho – the Māori Broadcasting Funding agency and an active tribal leader. Toni was a member of the panel that reviewed the New Zealand Government’s Māori language strategy and its $600M spend in support of the Māori language in 2011.
In this presentation Toni explains the emergence of the Māori language revitalisation movement nationally and how Mana Tamariki was developed as part of the journey Māori people have undertaken to protect, revitalise and regenerate the indigenous language in Aotearoa New Zealand. Māori language revitalisation is predominantly urban based because most Māori people live in towns and cities. Mana Tamariki is a case study shared here in Berlin to give insight to issues relating to the once rural tribal based Māori residing often miles away from their tribal homelands. In Mana Tamariki Fishman’s critical stage 6 – family, neighbourhood and community – is the focus resulting in the re-growth of Māori language families.
Māori people arrived from Eastern Polynesia – Tahiti, Rarotonga – in Aotearoa about 1000 years ago. The Polynesian islands amongst the Polynesian triangle had been populated by waves of migrants from the Western Pacific and Eastern Asia. DNA research suggests the Polynesian ancestors originate in Taiwan.
The Māori language is closely related to all the other Polynesian languages especially Rarotonga Cook Island Māori, Tahitian, Marquesan, Rapanui (Easter Island) and Hawaiian. The root languages of the Polynesian language group are Samoan and Tongan which are quite distinct. They all have a similar syntax and grammar but Samoan and Tonga use consonants not found in the others.
There are seven main dialects of the Māori language. Within each dialect grouping are principal tribes. There are 57 main tribal groups. Each tribal group is made up of smaller sub-tribes. In the 1820s some northern tribal dialect groups relocated to the south of the North Island and the top of the South.Māori people first experienced contact with Europeans when the Dutchman Abel Tasman travelled via South Africa south of Australia to the west coast of the top of the South Island. The encounter was not a happy one. The Dutch fired a canon. The Māori pursued the Dutch the next day and clubbed some sailors to death. The Dutch fired on and killed one of the Māori. The Dutch did not land on Aotearoa soil. They mapped the west coast of the islands and named the country New Zealand.
120 years later in 1769 the British sent James Cook to the Pacific ocean to track the path of Venus. His expedition took his crew to Aotearoa – now known by the Western World as New Zealand. His arrival marked another violent encounter between Europeans and Māori. As he approached shore his crew shot one of the leading Māori chiefs. Cook erected the Union Jack to claim the country for Britain. He sailed around the islands mapping the shoreline. On his return to England the official British response to this claim to new British territory was to leave New Zealand to the natives. Britain could no longer afford to colonise having spent 400 years expanding its interests in India, China, Japan, the Americas, Canada and Africa.
In around 1800 it is approximated there were between 100-200,000 Māori people. British, American and French traders had established a presence. About 2,000 Europeans lived in whaling, sealing and forestry camps. By 1815 Anglican missionaries arrived to convert the savages to Christianity.
Pressure was put on the British government to take over New Zealand. In 1840 the Māori tribes signed the Treaty of Waitangi which gave the British Crown sovereignty while acknowledging Māori peoples’ autonomy and control over their domains. This lead to the colonisation of our country by the English.
Māori people identify colonisation, loss of land, the drop in population and the role of the Education system as the primary causes of the loss of the Māori language.
Prior to the Treaty there was very little tension between European and Māori. Battles between Māori had sorted out a natural pecking order. The early acquisition of guns by one tribe lead to warfare and a pursuit by the other tribes to acquire guns. A balance of power was struck after 10 years. English and French missionaries had established schools in the Māori language. Most Māori were bilingual and bi-literate, unlike most European who were monolingual and illiterate.
From the time the Treaty of Waitangi was signed, tension grew. Māori resisted European pressure on them to sell land. Europeans established a Parliament that excluded Māori. Pressure for land and the exclusion of Māori from the halls of power lead to the New Zealand wars. After the resisting tribes were subjugated their lands were confiscated. A Land Court was established. The only access Māori could have to cash was to sell land. European diseases had a devastating affect on Māori. By 1900 the European population had increased to 750,000. The Māori population had dropped to 40,000.
In 1867 the New Zealand Government established a free compulsory education system. However Māori had to provide land and buildings for schools. The Māori language was banned from schools and Māori children were punished, physically beaten for using the Māori language at school.
Prior to World War II 90% of Māori lived in rural tribal villages. They lived off the remaining land they owned or worked as rural agricultural labourers and domestic servants for Europeans. Their first language in the home was the Māori language. They engaged in English beyond the village, at school, in shops and at work. Most Māori community events, ceremonies and celebrations took place in the Māori language.
Most Māori tribes sent their young men to join the New Zealand defence force in support of the United Kingdom during World War II. At the end of the war, New Zealand grew in industrialisation. New factories required workers. The Government encouraged Māori to move to the cities for work and education. By the mid-1950s 80% of the now 100,000 or so Māori had moved from their rural villages to the urban and city areas.
Prior to this there had been very little contact between most Europeans and Māori. The influx of Māori to the cities was met with racist negativism. The government “pepper potted” individual Māori families amongst predominantly white communities to “assimilate” them to European ways. Māori were generally expected to become “white” the sooner the better. The Māori language was not welcome in the cities. Māori parents, themselves punished for using the Māori language at schools based in their home villages, raised their families speaking only English to them. Within one generation the Māori language was no longer intergenerationally transmitted.
By 1970 urban Māori youth, inspired by the American Black liberation movement, rose up in protest against the breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi and language loss. By 1979 only 8% of the 300,000 Māori people could speak Māori.
In 1972 a petition with 30,000 signatures was taken to Parliament calling for the official recognition of the Māori language and for the Māori language to be taught in schools. This lead to an increase in the teaching of Māori language and an official Māori language day. Māori Language Day eventually became Māori Language Week.
The Māori language movement built in momentum, moving to adopting language acquisition strategies such as total immersion learning methodologies. In 1981 the first major organisation to develop was Te Ataarangi, a total immersion adult learning programme based on Caleb Gattegno’s Silent Way.
A year later Māori elders called for more to be done for the younger generations. Te Kōhanga Reo – the language nest – was launched. Native speaking elders, predominantly women – volunteered to spend their days with the grandchildren generation using only the Māori language as the language of communication.
Three years down the track it was evident that the movement of kōhanga reo children into schools has a negative impact on their language. Within 6 months they stopped using the language. An urban based Māori organisation established the first total immersion Māori language school.
In 1975 a process was established whereby Māori can lay grievances against the Crown (Government) for breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi. A leading Māori language organisation laid a claim against the Crown for its role in the loss of the Māori language, especially through Education policy. The result was the official legal recognition of Te Reo Māori as an official language and the establishment of the Māori Language Commission as the principal policy advisor to the Government on Māori language matters.
In 1989 the Education Act was reviewed and renewed. Kura Kaupapa Māori – total immersion Māori language schools became included as a fully state funded option. This precipitated total immersion teacher training programmes. At the same time Kōhanga Reo became funded in the same way as English language Early Childhood Centres. $70M is now allocated annually to the pre-school language nests.
In 1990 there were 900 kōhanga reo centres with 14,000 children but only 6 kura kaupapa Māori with only 150 children.
By 2011 over half the native speakers that were used to support kōhanga reo had died. This resulted in halving the number of centres and a drop in numbers of children by a third. Meanwhile schools have grown in number. There are now several options of Māori language programmes. Full immersion schools number about 100 with 7,000 children.
Education has been the Māori peoples’ main focus in language revitalisation and regeneration. The shift is now on homes, families, neighbourhood and community is now the focus.
Education has contributed to a massive increase in speakers of the Māori language – 25.2% of 400,000 Māori were fluent speakers in 2001, saving the language from the brink of extinction having dropped to 8% of 300,000 Māori in 1979. But there is a worry that in 2006 there had been a 2% drop.
In 2011 the Government reviewed its $600M spend, the bulk of which is in Education ($350M), followed by Broadcasting ($75M for Māori language radio and television) and then community language initiatives. In 2011 there was no funding for Te Ataarangi, the adult immersion programme.
The Independent Review panel recommended that the $600M should be shifted from the myriad of Government departments to a central pool governed by a single strategy that has home, family, neighbourhood and community for intergenerational transmission as the target. This recommendation has yet to be given traction.
Mana Tamariki is an organisation based in New Zealand’s 5th largest city. The building here is our permanent base, opened in 2007 after we had occupied 8 other temporary facilities over a 15 year period.
As stated above Palmerston North is New Zealand’s 5th largest city with a population of 85,000 of which Māori make up 12%. This reflects the national percentage of Māori within the national population In 1990 there were five Kōhanga Reo in the city. A group that Toni co-ordinated had launched the campaign to establish a Kura Kaupapa Māori for these Kōhanga Reo. The new school would require large numbers of new entrants. He and his friends decided to open a new 6th Kōhanga Reo called Mana Tamariki.
It opened with 12 children and followed the trend of the time. The language focus was on the children and not their parents, family or community. Mana Tamariki relocated to expand the role growing batches of 21 children, graduating 4-5 a year to the Kura Kaupapa Māori. In 1995 as a result of the Kura Kaupapa Māori expanding to a size that was larger than desirable for language quality control Mana Tamariki opened its own private school with 8 students.
In 1990 Mana Tamariki like all the Education efforts for Māori language revitalisation focussed on teaching the children the language with no link to parents or community.
After Toni and others of the Mana Tamariki leadership had carried out socio-linguistic research in 1995 they adopted the Fishman stage 6 critical stage of language revitalisation. Mana Tamariki put in place a new entry criteria. At least one parent is required to speak only the Māori language at all times to the children enrolled in Mana Tamariki including their own. The preference is both parents speak only Māori and there were several families able to uphold this. However the one-parent-one-language approach was proven in the research as being enough to create intergenerational transmission and so that is the approach Mana Tamariki adopted.
The entry criteria had an immediate galvanising of the commitment and spread of the Māori language beyond the pre-school and school education facilities to the home, the neighbourhood and community. Mana Tamariki families spread the language amongst the city as they shopped, played sport and attended community events. The Mana Tamariki entry criteria is singularly responsible for minority language spread and reversing language shift.
This rather complex messy diagram attempts to show how the focus on language relationships in answering the question “who will speak which language to whom” regenerates the language.
Three generations are the goal of intergenerational transmission so that the third generation naturally and normally uses the language to the generations immediately above and below (generation 4 not shown). In 2005 the original Mana Tamariki families achieved the creation of three generations of engagement in the Māori language with the birth of the first grandchild of one of the founding families. However, the first child born to a Mana Tamariki Kōhanga child was only born in 2010. There are now several children born of Mana Tamariki raised children with the Māori language naturally and normally being transmitted across three generations. We still have a long way to go.
The impact of taking the Fishman Stage 6 approach has been profound in our community. In 1985 Toni and his partner Penny Poutū were the only practitioners of intergenerational transmission of the Māori language within the family in Palmerston North. They were joined by a second family in 1988. Their two families established Mana Tamariki. Since 1995 the number of families has grown so that now we have 50 families, 85 children enrolled – 30 in the Kōhanga Reo and 55 in the Kura Kaupapa Māori. 150 highly fluent speakers engage regularly within and beyond Mana Tamariki at high levels of proficiency. All this language growth, regeneration, reversing language shift and revitalisation occurs in a city where 80% of the population speak only English (allowing 8% for immigrant families). The commitment by families to regenerate the Māori language as their language of the family, neighbourhood and community overcomes any negative reaction from the predominantly English monoglot community. Mana Tamariki has provided a safe zone for families who return to their homes having been buoyed and bolstered to continue using the Māori language with their children through their connection to Mana Tamariki.
There are many challenges to maintain a high quality total immersion Māori language learning environment and families within our English language city.
Families need support. In Mana Tamariki there are NO native speakers of the Māori language. As learned speakers parents continuously need access to vocabulary, phrases, correction in grammar. Mana Tamariki requires parents to be enrolled in a language programme. There are several providers of Māori language courses within the city. Many parents travel afar, returning to their own tribal areas to spend time with the remaining native speakers of their dialects.
Teenagers with all their teenage foibles are a challenge in themselves. Their natural resistance to being made to do something presents a challenge to the language zealots like the leaders of Mana Tamariki who attempt to maintain strict total immersion Māori language and pure language relationships.
In conclusion, Mana Tamariki has been able to contribute to and make a positive impact on the recent deliberations about the way forward for the Māori language revitalisation effort.
Te Reo Mauriora was published by the independent panel that reviewed the Government’s Māori language strategy. It noted the Government spends $600M on the Māori language, predominantly in Education ($350M) through several Government Departments: Education, Māori Affairs and Cultural and Heritage.
The panel recommended shifting the $600M underneath a single Minister and establish a Māori language authority to administer and distribute the funds to ensure the Māori language outcomes were achieved in
Families, neighbourhoods and communities
The Government has not yet adopted the recommendations, however there is a growing support for the panel’s recommendations amongst Māori language leaders. Discussions are pointing towards co-ordination and collaboration amongst Māori language leaders. The desired language outcome is the intergenerational transmission of the seven tribal dialects.
The cities have been the place where Māori people have resided for over 50 years. Te Reo Māori in the cities has been the focus for 40 years. The effort has been multi tribal and multi dialectal. Every dialect has been embraced – any Māori language is better than none. This approach has seen the stronger dialects merging as if to morph in to a general Māori language. During the review of the Māori language strategy tribal leaders called for support of the dialects as well as the general Māori language that has emerged.
Halting the recent drop in fluent speakers is a major priority for the revitalisation of the Māori language and it is hoped that a sharper, more focussed and co-ordinated approach through all Māori language organisations collaborating.
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The term ‘multilingual education’ which embodies the idea of using at least three languages in education, namely, the mother tongue, a regional or national language, and an international language was adopted by the United Nations’ Educational, Social, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) at its General Conference in 1999. As one of its important roles, the organization provides international frameworks and parameters for educational policy makers to guide their decisions about complex issues. Language, or rather the choice of the language of instruction, is one such area. A 2003 UNESCO position paper about mother tongue and multilingual education makes this observation: “While there are strong educational arguments in favour of mother tongue (or first language) instruction, a careful balance also needs to be made between enabling people to use local languages in learning, and providing access to global languages of communication through education.”
The UNESCO deals with the linguistic rights issue in multilingual societies in accordance with three basic principles:
UNESCO supports ….
1) “… mother tongue instruction as a means of improving educational quality by building upon the knowledge and experience of the learners and teachers”,
2) “… bilingual and/or multilingual education at all levels of education as a means of promoting both social and gender equality and as a key element of linguistically diverse societies”,
3) “… language as an essential component of inter-cultural
education in order to encourage understanding between different
population groups and ensure respect for fundamental rights”.
The ‘multilingual’ education system we are so assiduously working to establish will most likely give rise to a situation where the sort of linguistic rights concerns we have seen raised by linguists in affluent countries with concentrations of immigrants from diverse cultures could apply in respect of our indigenous languages Sinhala and Tamil. This will be so unless we keep a due sense of proportion in the pursuit of excellence through English. In a context where English occupies an privileged position the speakers of local mother tongue languages are at a disadvantage; and it will be again monolingual education through English, not multilingual education. It could be a scenario which will call for the invocation of principles established over the past half a century by the UN for the protection of the linguistic rights of especially minority communities.
As early as 1984 Professor Tove Skutnabb-Kangas of the University of Roskilde, Denmark suggested four different definitions of mother tongue from the perspectives of origin, identification, competence, and function. Mother tongue by origin, she explained, is the first language that a person learns; mother tongue by identification is of two kinds: a) by internal identification, i.e. the language one identifies oneself with, and b) by external identification, i.e. the language that others associate one with; if competence is the defining element, then one’s mother tongue is the language that one knows best; and finally, mother tongue by function means the language that one uses most.
Professor Skutnabb-Kangas discusses her ideas again in an essay in 2008. She considers how definitions of mother tongue could be made relevant to linguistic minorities found within a multilingual society including such linguistic minorities as the deaf who need an appropriate sign language, and the forcibly assimilated Indigenous or other minority children. She thinks that the four short definitions she has described converge for a linguistic majority; but she avers that for linguistic minorities “often a combination of mother tongue definitions by origin and by internal identification is a good mother tongue definition.”
Professor Skutnabb-Kangas’s attempts in this connection reveal her concern for the protection of the linguistic human rights of minorities. The same attitude is shared by other Western linguists such as Jim Cummins of the University of Toronto, Canada, and Nadine Dutcher of the Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington, DC. USA, who have had the experience of pitting minority languages against a dominant majority language (e.g. in Denmark the sole official language is Danish which is spoken by 90% of the population, while among the minority/foreign languages are English 86%, German 58%, and French 12%; in France the single official language is French with minority languages such as Maghrebi Arabic, Berber, Turkish, etc). They are especially interested in the language rights of immigrant populations in the affluent European and North American societies, and in allied countries where the local languages are both the majority languages and the dominant languages, and where ‘linguicism’ is identified as threatening the linguistic rights of minorities. { Linguicism is a concept and a coinage proposed in the mid-1980’s by Professor Skutnabb-Kangas. It denotes what she calls “ideologies and structures which are used to legitimate, effectuate, and reproduce unequal division of power and resources (both material and non-material) between groups which are defined on the basis of language.” The words quoted are reproduced from Wikipedia.}
The suitability of what Skutnabb-Kangas suggests as a good definition of ‘mother tongue’ for minorities (“a combination of mother tongue definitions by origin and by internal identification”) to contexts where the language of power is also the language of the majority as in the European and North American countries is clear: it recognises the right of individual members of linguistic and cultural minorities in such societies to adopt, out of the diversity of languages available, the language that is closest to them as their mother tongue.
Sri Lanka’s multilingual situation is the reverse of that found in Europe and North America because the language of the majority (Sinhalese) cannot be called the dominant language here. Both Sinhala and Tamil are official languages, and English is designated in the constitution as a link language. Those who can speak English form a little less than 10% of the population (9.9%). Only about 10,000 people out of a population of roughly 20 million are said to use English as their first language. (“First language” here must be taken as identical with mother tongue, for if the term ‘first language’ is defined as the language someone mainly uses to function in in day to day life, as in education, scientific research, professions, and commerce, then this figure should be substantially higher since English serves as the first language in this sense for many educated Sri Lankans whose mother tongue is Sinhalese or Tamil, which is their usual home language.) The significant thing, nevertheless, is that English dominates the linguistic scene in our society. So, whereas in UK, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand etc English dominates as the language of the majority, in Sri Lanka it dominates as the language of a minority. In other words, we have the case of a (numerically) minority language usurping the place of a majority language.
In the Sri Lankan context, however, the term ‘minority language’ when applied to English can be misleading in view of this reality. Though it is the language of a numerical minority, in terms of its influence particularly in such fields as education, research, business, and international communication, it functions as a ‘majority’ language pushing the indigenous languages into ‘minority’ language status in that sense. This dominance of English is not one of choice, but the result of a complex of historical, political, and economic factors specific to our country reinforced by the impact of the phenomenon known as globalization.
A new manifestation of the West’s capitalist domination of the world, globalization is an inescapable fact of life today. It may be an unmixed blessing for business people and industrialists since it opens extensive markets for industry and commerce. Yet it’s not so for others. Though it’s mainly to do with business, it draws the nations together in all important spheres including education, leading to general progress in those areas. But globalization is not always for their benefit. Among the iniquities that it brings in its wake is its tendency to increase the gap between rich and poor nations. Political instability, terrorism, and civil unrest either caused or compounded by economic hardships encourage large movements of people as helpless refugees or desperate job seekers from poor countries to rich countries.
The movement of populations is thus usually from the poor countries to the rich. The resultant cultural diversity of societies in the host countries is viewed in opposite ways by sections of the local populations: some tolerate it, some don’t. In Canada, for instance, according to Jim Cummins of Toronto University the neo-fascists want immigrants expelled or at least excluded from mainstream society, while the more liberal groups want them to be assimilated. Professor Cummins feels that exclusion and assimilation are similar in that both regard cultural diversity as ‘a problem’ that should be made to disappear.
In Cummins’s view, this way of looking at the phenomenon of cultural diversity that is dominant in EU and North American countries can have disastrous consequences for children and their families. The reason is that assimilation policies tend to discourage students from retaining their native language and culture for fear that it would hinder their ability to identify with the mainstream culture. The subliminal message that is conveyed to them is that they must renounce their allegiance to their home language and culture if they want to be properly integrated into the host society. This involves a violation of UN-recognized human rights (related to language) of communities affected.
Apropos of the multilingual situation in Sri Lanka, there is no question about transforming our education system from monolingual to multilingual status. Probably, however, what multilingual education in our specific context does or should mean is still not clear to many though they think they know. The popular perception seems to be in terms of a so-called quality education through the medium of English with or without a knowledge of Sinhala and Tamil (the mother tongues of 95% of the population). (I’m not saying that this notion corresponds to the policy of the official trilingual plan now underway.)
It has been long established that for a child’s proper education, particularly in the first years, the mother tongue/the home language is the best medium of instruction. Cummins refers to his own writings, and those of others such as Baker and Skutnabbs-Kangas among more recent researches in the field to confirm the importance of the mother tongue for the education of bilingual children. As educators these authorities hold that “children’s cultural and linguistic experience in the home is the foundation of their future learning and we must build on that foundation rather than undermine it; every child has the right to have their talents recognized and promoted within the school”. School education should not squander “the linguistic, cultural, and intellectual resources they bring from their homes to our schools and societies”. Though these statements were made in connection with multilingual societies different to ours, the importance of the mother tongue for children’s education, and through it to the society at large is the same.
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Let me add, that whatever predilection the Americans may have for their native European tongues, and particularly the British descendants for the English, yet several circumstances render a future separation of the American tongue from the Englsih, necessary and unavoidableWebster, N. (1789, reimp.1967). Dissertations on the English Language: With Notes, Historical and Critical. Meniston, Meniston.
It must be considered further, that the english is the common root or stock from which our national language will be derived. all others will gradually waste away- and within a centuray and a half, North America will be peopled with a hunder millions of men, all speaking the same language.
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Western Galicia
ethnolinguistic distinctness: isolation, germanic mixed constructions language contact
Decline of language and culture.
School and church in Polish
Austria (-Hungarian administration – bilingual (German-polish)
regional ensemble using more and more Wilamowecean in teir repertoire.
Standardized orthography is under way. 1200 entries with many examples.
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Chap.4: le multiculturalisme
82: Le substantif ” multiculturalisme “, tout comme son adjectif ” multiculturaliste “, sont d’usage récent et particulièrement confus.
Ils renvoient en effet de manière constatne, et en les amalgamant, aux trois registres que nous avons d’emblée disgingués dans cet ouvrage -sociologique, pholosophique et politique – ou, pour reprendre les catégoties de Chrstiine Inglis, “démographique-descriptif”, “idéologique-normatif”, programmatique et politique” (Inglis, C. 1996. ‘Multiculturalism: New policy Responses to Diversity, Most’ : UNESCO.). La fusion des registres constitue ici une opération courante. Dans les cas exgtrêmes, elle est inséparable du refus de penser et de dépbattre serinement, pour s0apparenter é une disqualification de ceux labellisés comme “multiculturalistes”. Ainsi en France, pour imposer leur point de vue, les tenants d’un universalisme raidi autour d’idée “républicanistes” s’en sont-ils pris sur un ton violent, tout au ong des années 90, à ceux qui demandaient que des demandes de reconnaissance culturelles bénéficient d’un traitement politique dépmocratiques. Ces derniers se vient ainsi traités de “multiculturalistes”, parfois de “communautaristes” – “à l’américaine” précisait-on pour faire bonne mesure- , selon un procédé récurrent de stigmatisation dans la vie des idées en France. La confusion se trouvait de surcroît redoublée par certians préjugéps relatifs, sonon à l’hénérogénéité culturelle des Etats-Unis- et plus largement, des pays qui se sont construits par vagues d’immigraiton-, du moins à l’homogénéité supposée des pays du Vieux continent. “Si nous voulons développer une réflexion s’appuyant, dans le champs du multiculturalisme, sur les leçons de la comparaison interncontinentales, note avec force arguments à l’appui Giovana Zincone, nous devons d’abord en finir avec l’idée de nation d’Europe culturellement homogènes et que viendraient miner les nouvelles vagues de l’immigration”(Zincone, G. 1998. ‘Multiculturalism from Above: Italian Variations on a European Theme’ in Baübock, R. and Rundell, John (eds.) Blurred Boundairies: Migration, Ethnicity, Citizenship. Vienna: Aldershot.)
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Wilford, John Noble (2010), ‘Hunting One Language, Stumbling Upon Another’, New York Times, October 11, 2010.
Two years ago, a team of linguists plunged into the remote hill country of northeastern India to study little-known languages, many of them unwritten and in danger of falling out of use.
On average, every two weeks one of the world’s recorded 7,000 languages becomes extinct, and the expedition was seeking to document and help preserve the endangered ones in these isolated villages.
At a rushing mountain river, the linguists crossed on a bamboo raft and entered the tiny village of Kichang. They expected to hear the people speaking Aka, a fairly common tongue in that district. Instead, they heard a language, the linguists said, that sounded as different from Aka as English does from Japanese.
After further investigation, leaders of the research announced last week the discovery of a “hidden” language, known locally as Koro, completely new to the world outside these rural communities. While the number of spoken languages continues to decline, at least one new one has been added to the inventory, though Koro too is on the brink of extinction.
“We noticed it instantly” as a distinct and unfamiliar language, said Gregory Anderson, director of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages in Salem, Ore.
Dr. Anderson and K. David Harrison, a linguist at Swarthmore College, were leaders of the expedition, part of the Enduring Voices Project of the National Geographic Society. Another member of the group was Ganash Murmu, a linguist at Ranchi University in India. A scientific paper will be published by the journal Indian Linguistics.
When the three researchers reached Kichang, they went door to door asking people to speak their native tongue — not a strenuous undertaking in a village of only four bamboo houses set on stilts. The people live by raising pigs and growing oranges, rice and barley. They share a subsistence economy and a culture with others in the region who speak Aka, or Miji, another somewhat common language.
On the veranda at one house, the linguists heard a young woman named Kachim telling her life story in Koro. She was sold as a child bride, was unhappy in her adopted village and had to overcome hardships before eventually making peace with her new life.
Listening, the researchers at first suspected Koro to be a dialect of Aka, but its words, syntax and sounds were entirely different. Few words in Koro were the same as in Aka: mountain in Aka is “phu,” but “nggo” in Koro; pig in Aka is “vo,” but in Koro “lele.” The two languages share only 9 percent of their vocabulary.
The linguists recorded Kachim’s narrative in Koro, and an Indian television crew had her repeat it in Hindi. This not only enabled the researchers to understand her story and her language, but called attention to the cultural pressures threatening the survival of such languages, up against national languages dominant in schools, commerce and mass media.
In “The Last Speakers: The Quest to Save the World’s Most Endangered Languages,” published last month by National Geographic Books, Dr. Harrison noted that Koro speakers “are thoroughly mixed in with other local peoples and number perhaps no more than 800.”
Moreover, linguists are not sure how Koro has survived this long as a viable language. Dr. Harrison wrote: “The Koro do not dominate a single village or even an extended family. This leads to curious speech patterns not commonly found in a stable state elsewhere.”
By contrast, the Aka people number about 10,000 living in close relations with Koro speakers in a district of the state of Arunachal Pradesh, where at least 120 languages are spoken. Dr. Anderson said the coexistence of separate languages between two integrated groups that do not acknowledge an ethnic difference between them is highly unusual.
As Dr. Harrison and Dr. Anderson expanded their research, comparing Koro with several hundred languages, they determined that it belonged to the Tibeto-Burman language family, which includes 400 tongues related to widely used Tibetan and Burmese. But Koro had never been recognized in any surveys of the approximately 150 languages spoken in India.
The effort to identify “hot spots of threatened languages,” the linguists said, is critical in making decisions to preserve and enlarge the use of such tongues, which are repositories of a people’s history and culture.
In the case of Koro speakers, Dr. Harrison wrote in his book, “even though they seem to be gradually giving up their language, it remains the most powerful trait that identifies them as a distinct people.”
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quoted Reverend Jackson:.”..just as we were called colored, but were not that…and then Negro, but not that…to be called Black is just as baseless…Black tells you about your skin color and what side of town you live on. African American evokes discussion of the world.”
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Cité par McArthur, T. (1998). The English Languages. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press: 199:
“Robert L. Williams entitled Ebonics: the True Language of Black Folks, was published in 1975 by the Institute of Black Studies in St Louis, Missouri. Williams coined the term in 1973, blending ebony, a euphemizing synonym for black, with phonics, a method of teaching reading and spelling based on regular sound/spelling correspondences: probably a nuniqe approagch to naming a language variety. “
Wilson, R. W. (1976). The Blacks in Canada: A History. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University.
Williams, Lisa (2012), ‘Cymraeg yn y Didnas – An old Language in a Modern City.’ paper given at Languages in the City, Berlin, 21-24 August, 2012.
misleading bilingual signage. No capital city till 1955. Official language as of 1957. Certain aspects of legal system are becoming more welsh. Very small country. A lot of welsh speakers complain that welsh was once spoken all over britain. It could be seen as a language of the past but there’s more beyond. Welsh was widely spoken and is still proudly spoken. Mentioned the pride of being welsh. Last figures show an increase in Welsh speakers. Cardiff, heart of industrial revolution. There were always some welsh communities there but due to industrial revolution, it was largely taken over by english speaking. 1978, 1st Welsh school. The initial director had to pass protest pannels while driving to his school. Now 3 Weslsh medium and two bilingual primary schools plus starter units in several English medium school. From September 2012, all 3-7 year olds in EM schools following the bilingual Foundation Phase. Ingreased focus on attaining bilingualism in all EM 11-19 school. Lots of non-welsh origin school children are enrolling. Success right now but what about the future….
Wimmer, A. (1997). A note from your Conference Organizer. European Association for Studies in Australia Newsletter: 1.
Certain hints were dropped last July and August (which were, in turn, roundly condemned by a Jaspanese historian as indicative of a new OZ racism!) that Howard would not fully endorse Keating’s swing twards Asia and might re-orientate some aspects of Asutralia’s policies in favour of Europe and the USA. This would be welcomed by Australianists here. While Australia must centre its economic policies on Asia, SE Asia in particular, this need not be blindly followed by a similarly thourough re-orientation in cultural policy
Winant, H. (1994). Racial Conditions. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Winograd, Carol (2012), ‘Moving Women to the Fore and Advancing Peace.’ J Street: Making History (Washington D.C.).
practitioner on activism. Women Donors Network.
Trip with congress women.
Inclusive, no talking heads, no more than 15-20 mn speeches then Q&A
5 of 6 congress women are african american.
heart of congressianl black caucus.
changing the conversation in touches.
Winstein, B. (1983). The Civic Tongue. New York: Longman.
Winter, G. (2000). Coca-Cola Settles Racial Bias Lawsuit. International Herald Tribune. Zurich.
In the largest settlement ever in a racial discrimination case, Coca-Cola Co. has agreed to pay more than $156 million to resolve a lawsuit brought by black employees. The settlement agreed to Thursday also madates sweeping changes,which will cost the company an additional $ 36 million, and requires Coke to relinquish broad monitoring powers to a panel of outsiders.
The lawsuit, filed in April 1999, accused Coke of erecting a corporate hierarchy in which black employees were clustered at the bottom of the pay scale, wehre they typically earned $26,000 a year less than white workers in comparable jobs. As redress, the settlement provide each of the 2,000 current and former emplyees in the class with an average of $40,000 in cash, while the four plaintiffs will receive up to $300,000 apiece.
(…)Perhaps more suprising than its size, the settlement gives an outside panel, appointed equally by Coke and the plaintiffs’ lawyers, limited authority to dictate company policy. Serving as a watchdog with some access to the company’s books, the panel is charged with ensuring that Coke’s record of paying and promoting all minority workers and women improves.
(…)Though withholding final judgement, civil rights leaders applauded the accord. It sets a new standard for corprate settlements” says the Reverend Jesse Jackson, referring to Colke’s agreement to tie executives’ salaries to how well they meet the company’s diversity goals. “The internal cultures of companies have been built on patterns of exclusion based on gender and race. This is a step in the right direction”-
Wire (2000) La Cour d’appel de Paris accorde un interprète en basque à ”Kantauri”. Associated Press.
PARIS (AP) — La chambre d’accusation de la Cour d’appel de Paris a reconnu mercredi le droit à José
Luis Arizkuren Ruiz, alias ”Kantauri”, ancien chef de l’ETA militaire, de s’exprimer en langue basque
devant la Cour et a ordonné la présence d’un interprète pour la prochaine audience fixée au 25 octobre.
Interlocuteur désigné de l’ETA avec l’Etat espagnol lors des négociations, Kantauri avait fait valoir qu’il
n’avait pas d’avocat et qu’il ne maîtrisait pas assez la langue française pour se défendre. Il a par ailleurs
fait savoir qu’il ne parlait pas l’Espagnol.
Malgré les réquisitions contraires de l’avocat général, Bernard Aldigé, la Cour présidée par Gilbert Azibert a estimé qu’elle ”ne
saurait se substituer” à Kantauri pour évaluer ses connaissances linguistiques et qu’elle devait ”conformément à la convention
européenne des droits de l’homme” lui fournir un interprète basque, langue officiellement reconnue dans la province autonome
Il n’y a cependant plus d’interprète officiel inscrit sur les listes des tribunaux parisiens depuis plusieurs années. Certains présidents
de chambres s’étaient donc résignés à accepter les services de personnes présentes à l’audience en leur faisant prêter serment.
”Ils n’ont qu’à prendre des sympathisants”, s’est enervé mercredi un magistrat proche du dossier qui craint des ”pressions sur les
La majorité des magistrats parisiens étant de toute façon hostile à accorder des interprètes en langue basque aux prévenus, la
décision de la chambre d’accusation peut être interprétée comme une victoire pour les nationalistes basques qui militent pour le
droit de s’exprimer dans leur langue.
”Je suis Basque, j’ai le droit de m’exprimer en basque”, avait fait valoir mercredi José Luis Arizkuren, avant de repartir en
Auparavant il avait renié son identité, obligeant la Cour à suspendre l’audience pour comparer ses empreintes digitales à celles du
La chambre d’accusation devait se prononcer mercredi sur 7 des 21 demandes d’extradition formulées par l’Espagne à l’encontre
du chef historique de l’ETA. Ces examens ont été repoussés au 25 octobre. Six demandes avaient déjà reçu une réponse
favorable de la justice française, notamment celle concernant le dossier de la tentative d’attentat contre le roi Juan Carlos en
1995 à Majorque.
Wire (1987). Survey: Most Think English Is official U.S. Language. Associated Press.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1940), Remarques mêlées (2002 edn.: GF Flammarion).
Il faut parfois retirer de la langue une expression et la donner à nettoyer – pour pouvoir la remettre en circulation »
— (1984), Culture and Value trans. Peter Winch (University of Chicago Press) 195.
LW: Né en 1889 mort en 1951
googlebooks excerpts.
We tend to take the speech of a Chinese for inarticulate gurgling. Someone who understands Chinese will recognize language in what he hears. Similarly I can often discern humanity in a man.
Ein neues Wort is Wie ein frischer Same, der in den Boden der Diskussion geworfen wird: A new word is like a fresh seed sewn on the ground of the discussion.
Woerhrling, J. (2010). La cour suprême du Canada et la réflexion sur la nature et les fondements des droits linguistiques. “Language, Law and the Multilingual State” 12th International Conference of the International Academy of Linguistic Law Bloemfontein, Free State University.
Wolfram, W. (1969). A sociolinguistic description of Detroit Negro speech. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics.
quoted by Labov in Labov, W. (1972). Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. Philadelphia, PA, University of Pennsylvania Press. As having made the mistake of taking black english vernacular as a disability of black children.
Woo, E. & C. Mary (1996). California Educators Give Black English a Voice. International Herald Tribune and Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles.
Woodhouse, D. (1998), ‘‘The Judiciary in the 1990s’, Policy and Politics, (26:), 458-70.
quoted by Morris, Lydia (2012 ), ‘Citizenship and Human Rights’, The British Journal of Sociology 2, 63 (1).
Wren, H. (1997). Introduction. In Eggington, W. & H. Wren (eds.) Language Policy: Dominant English, pluralist challenges. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. xxv-xxvii.
Wren, H. (1997). Making a Difference in Language Policy Agendas. In Eggington, W. & H. Wren (eds.) Language Policy: Dominant English, pluralist challenges. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. 3-28.
Wright, J. (1985). We Call For A Treaty. Sydney: Fontana.
mentionné par Nettheim, G. (1988). “Peoples” and “Populations” – Indigenous Peoples and Rights of Peoples. The Rights of Peoples. J. Crawford. Oxford, Clarendon Press: 107-126.
Wright, S. (1994). The Contribution of Sociolinguistics. Current Issues in Language and Society 1. The Greek Media & Jounalists.
The handwritten, then the later printed, circulars and newsletters of the
Greek Orthodox communities, and of the regionalbrotherhoods,
associations and clubs provided the first manifestation of a Greek
media industry in Melbourne. A number of them -for instance, Ulysses,
the official journal of the Ithacan Philanthropic Society – have a long
tradition. The first Greek newspaper inAustralia was published in
Melbourne in 1913 by Stratis Venlis, a settler from Lesvos, under the
title Afstralia (Australia). In December 1922, that paper was bought by
the Marinakis brothers and published in Sydney, under the new name of
Other newspapers began to appear in Australia during and just after
World War II, including Salpinx (Bugle), Ethniki Salpinx(National Bugle)
and Phos (Light) in Mclbourne. Aftcr the war the Greek press
understandably flourished in response to themassive increase in
immigration. At one stage there were 20 Greek ncwspapers in
Melbourne alone. The most famous was Afstraloellinas (Greek
Australian) which came out in 1955 and changed its name to Neos
Kosmos (New World) in 1957. Neos Kosmos was one of the few
newspapers to survive the strong competition. It is a liberal, biweekly
newspaper with a good balance of Greek and Australian news together
with feature articles on political, social and cultural issues, a coverage
of events and happenings, and a supplement in English (Generation
Extra) in its Monday edition. In brief, it provides a lot of information and
guidance for Greek-Australians which are not available in the
English-language press. The general editor and founder of Neos Kosmos
is Dimitri Gogos. The chief of staff is Sotiris Hatzimanolis. The other
journalists on the staff include: Jim Antonopoulos, Elias Donaidis,
Kathie Kambouropoulos, Vivienne Morris, Kostas Nikolopoulos, Nikos
Psaltopoulos, and Stella Tsombanakis. Other well-known newspapers
that have survived in Melbourne are Nea Ellada, Greek Kosmos and Ta
Ta Nea is owned by Spiro Stamoulis. The paper, which is published once a
week, has been in existence only since March 1995. It has already
experienced rapid success under the management of Peter Souvatzis,
who is also the General Manager of 3XY. Peter attributes the success of
the paper to a number of factors, in particular, to the introduction of
new ideas. The paper initiated full colour printing and provides
well-researched articles focusing on specific issues facing the Greek
community, such as the plight of the elderly, employment issues,
dietary habits and current community events. The paper also devotes
space to enable subscribers to express their views on various issues.
Peter has 40 persons on his staff, many of whom are in their twenties or
thirties. Some of his closest collaborators include Tassos Neratzis
(editor), Rena Frangioudakis (program manager), Jim Papanikolaou
(products manager), Jim Theodorikakos (political reporter) and Maggy
Margritis(entertainment editor).
In addition to providing news and information specially relevant to the
community, Greek newspapers have played a vital role in promoting a
Hellenic consciousness in the Greek community, the Greek language and
an awareness of Greek traditions and values. They have taken up
causes and galvanized the Greek community to take action on particular
matters, as well as helping individuals.
There are also a number of journalists of Greek origin who work for the
mainstream press. One of the best-known Greek-Australian journalists,
originally from Melbourne, is George Megalogenis. He is a senior political
and economic reporter for The Australian and is based in Canberra.
Kathy Kizilos works as a sub-editor for The Age in Melbourne. Tricia
Drivas is an editorial assistant with the Herald Sun.
There are few Greek magazines in Melbourne. The most recent one to be
launched is a monthly Greek-Australian review in Greek, Nea Parikia.
The magazine is the brainchild of Christos Mourikis, the former assistant
editor of Neos Kosmos. It focusses largely on developments in Australia
and targets the younger generation. Christos plans to have his
magazine published in both Greek and English in the course of 1996.
The development of what is now called “ethnic radio” has provided an
additional, and highly effective means of communication. Its aim is to
give ethnic communities the possibility of broadcasting in their own
language. The first Greek language program on radio began in the
Victorian country town of Wangaratta in 1951. In 1954 George
Giannopoulos started his commercial programs in the Greek language
on 3AK. A number of other stations which broadcast ethnic programs
have come into existence – including 3EA, 3ZZZ, 3XY and 3CR. Some of
them, 3EA for example, have commanded very large audiences. Rena
Frangioudakis, Dino Melidonis, and Amalia Vasiliadis are among those
who have developed a large personal following on this and other
stations. The issue of alternative radio has become a controversial
community and political issue on various occasions since its
Ethnic radio has also experienced a number of problems in connection
with finances and is now under the administration of the Special
Broadcasting Service(SBS), a statutory authority. SBS has its own radio
Greek language program. It is headed by Eugenia Yokarinis. Others who
are involved with the program are: Ntina Gerolymou, Bill Gonopoulos,
Alexis Ntountoulakis and Angela Pirdas.
The introduction of multicultural television in 1980-’81 gave an
enormous boost to the Greek community, and ethnic minorities
generally. The frequent screening of Greek programs and films has
attracted a large Greek audience. In the early months of 1996 alone
there were no fewer than four regular Greek drama series on SBS each
week: Girlfriends, Hote1 Amore, Red Dyed Hair and The Respectable
Ones. The news services and commercial films in various languages
have ensured SBS a wide audience in Australia’s migrant communities,
and the quality of its programs generally has attracted the admiration
of the Australian community as a whole, as well as that of overseas
Wyld, H. C. (1939). A history of modern colloquial English. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Yacoub, J. (1995). Les Minorités: Quelle Protection? Paris: Desclée de Brouwer.
Yataco, Miryam (2011), ‘Peruvian Indigenous Languages and the Spanish Supremacy’, paper given at World Conference on the Education of the Indigenous People (WIPCE 2011).
After Tupac Amaru, Spanish only.
Language policy, very tied to educational policy. Castellanization, implied language loss, imposition of the written culture, cognitive violence against the language and speakers but against the way they use knowledge. Schooling meant and means relinquishing mothertongue and native literacies.
Quechu language, considered the main language in terms of numbers, overshadowing all other native languages. 8 to 14 million speakers. Spread throughout 6 S. American languages. Yet large variety. Cf. Seran Palomino.
What does it mean to be in 2011 to be anative speaker of an indigenous language in Peru when you live in a society in which the school is characterized by a long tradition of hegemonic Spanish-onliy monolingual school system. What does it mean to attend a school in which indigenous bilingualism and consequently indigenous children are discriminated against?
Language Rights: 1975, first officialization of Quechua, 1979 Constitution
Legislation 806 approved in June 2010 by Peruvian Congress and after much negociation, legislation 29735 approved in June 24, thge text about the situation of discrimination against indigenous languages
We have challenged the prevailing ideology. Spanish-only policy in Latin America meant exclusion, homogenizing, imposing one language over the diversity of languages in the territories. It’s a linguistic apartheid. Humala could bring the Republic of Indians.
Exerpt from Bill 809 (2010) article 3 the rights of all people.
Showed the Congress woman Maria Sumire who refused to take oath in Spanish, not even to be translated in Spanish, Shuar Velazquez and Quechua artists.
Yataco, Miryam (2012), ‘Les politiques de l’Etat et l’exclusion des langues autochtones au Pérou’, Droit et Cultures, 63 (S’entendre sur la langue), 101-26
Yearwood, G. (ed.) (1982). Black Cinema Aesthetics. Athens,: Ohio University Press.
Yehoshua, Abraham B. (2011), ‘Juifs de la Diaspora, c’est votre droit d’agir’, in David Chemla (ed.), JCall: les raisons d’un appel (Paris: Liana Levi ), 117-24.
ntervention prononcée lors de la première réunion organisée par JCall à Paris, le 6 Octobre 2010
117: Je suis venu participer à votre conférence pour trois raisons principales:
Vous apporter mon soutien et renforcer votre légitimité à vous exprimer à partir de votre appel.
Vous faire part de mes impressions sur l’état d’esprit existant aujourd’hui au sein de l’opinion israéienne auqnt au processus de paix.
Vous présenter quelques idées nouvelles sur la question des colonies.
Chacun est (…) libre d’exprimer son opinion sur n’importe quel sujet, n’importe quel problème qui se passe quelque part sur cette terre.
(…)C’est pourquoi il est capital pour chacun de s’insormer sur l’essentiel des problèmes compliqueés de ce monde et de prendre posiition pour essayer d’avoir une influence sur eux en fonction de sa propre conviction du monde. Pour le peuple juif, ce n’est pas seulement un devoir mais une obligation.
118: Si nous nous considérons comme un seul peuple, les Israéliens ont raison de donner leur avis sur l’existence juiven en diapora, de prendre position et d’agir dans le cadre d’un dialogue démocratique pour essayer d’influencer les orientations et les idées des Juifs en diaspora.
De même, il est juste et approprié que les Juifs en diaspora,, angoissés par le destin et la situation d’Israël, se donnent le droit d’exprimer leur opinion sur la politique israélienne et essayent d’influencer démocratiquement le public isrélien pour qu’il change de position ou pour soutenir telle ou telle orientation
118-119: A la différence de certains de mes amis du camp de la paix, je n’ai jamais soutenu que les Juifs de diaspora aux idées nationalistes, n’avaient pas le droit de dire au gouvernement et au public isréliens de poursuivre la colonisation ni de s’opposer au retrait des Trritoire. Je ne leur ai pas dénié ce droit en arguant que ni eux ni leurs enfants ne supporteraient les conséquences de la poursuite de l’hostilité et de la guerre. Je suis convaincu que même les idées franchement nationalistes prônées par certains Juifs en diapsora, opposés aux concessions, proviennent d’une identification profonde, d’un amour et d’un vrai souci pour Israël. Ces Juifs ne paieront pas physiquement le prix des idées extrêmes qu’ils proclament, mais ils ont pleinement le droit sur un plan moral d’exprimer leur opionion et de condamner les décisions légitimes d’un gouvernement qui appellerait à des concessions ou au retrait des Territoires.
De même, quand vous, Juifs de diapora, vous vous réveillez enfin et que vous vous adressez publiquement au gouvernement isrélien en lui demandant d’une façon beaucup plus énergique que par le passé de changer sa politique et d’avancer de façon plus résolue vers la paix(…)Je sais que vous vous opposez continuellement à l’antisémitisme et à l’antisionisme qui se développent en Europe. C’est pourquoi je suis venu vous saluer et renforcer votre voix.
119-120: Quel est l’état d’esprit en Israël aujourd’hui au sujet de la paix? Sur cette question (…)je dis seuelemnt que ma longue expérience (…) me permet de discerner ces dernières années un phénomène nouveau. Grâce au calme sur le plan sécuritaire, à la stabilité politique, au développpement économique accéléré dans les territoires de Judée Samarie ces dernières années et à la demande réitérée de l’Autorité palestinienne d’une paix basée sur les frontières de 67 se renforce en Israël une position politique et réelle: celle d’une division du pays en deux, avec la création d’un Etat palestinien à côté d’Israël comme seule et nécessaire solution pour faire avancer la paix dans la région. Cette position vise principalement à ne pas créer un Etat binational qui se transformera en enfer pour les deux peuples.
Mais parallèlement à cette évolution de la conscience politique vers plus de réalisme, que l’on retrouve aussi dans les positions officielles du gouvernement, se développent des opinions nationalistes et extrémistes avec, ici et là, des expressions racistes.
Je ne me souviens pas par le passé avoir rencontré un tel mélange de modération politique et intellectuelle et d’exrémisme émotionnel. Et l’explication principale est simple: il y a une peur de la paix et de son prix. La peur est liée principalement au fait qu’une évacuation par la force des colonies et des colons (même s’il ne s’agit en fait que de 100 0000 d’entre eux) puisse entraîner la société israélienne dans une guerre fratricide doloureuse. Le bouleversement profond et dificile, les douleurs et les tempêtes qui ont accompagné l’évacuation des 9 000 colons du Goush Kati sont encore inscrits dans un traumatisme difficile pour tous. Et dans ce cas il ne s’agissait que d’un nombre minime de colons vivant dans les enclaves au milieu d’un million et demi de Palestiniens, majoritairmeent des réfugiés, et dans une région où il était évident depuis le début qu’il n’y avait aucune chance qu’elle soit annexée un de ces jours par les Juifs. (…)
121: (cette évacuation) est restée gravée dans la conscience populaire comme un événement difficile et douloureux.
Une autre crainte s’ajoute à l’incertitude existante quant aux personnes qui pourraient pénétrer dans le nouvel Etat palestinien: celle de voir des éléments étrangers, non palestiniens, profiter peut-être de l’indépendance pour y venir et commencer à faire des provocations afin d’allumer un incendie dans la région.
Enfin la perspective de diviser Jérusalem en deux capitales, situation qui n’existe nulle part ailleurs dans le monde, obligerait à aire un découpage si délicat et compliqué qu’il y a une grande crainte qu’il n’en résulte une catastrophe sanglante.
En conséquence, l’appréhension de l’éventualité d’un accord avec les Palestiniens qui y semblent prêts entraine une réaction émotionnelle d’échappatoire et la mise en avant d’une argumentation visant à les délégitimer fondamentalement et ce justement parce qu’ils semblent, maintenant, être réellement des partenaires pour un accord de paix.
121-122: Et cela m’amène au troisième point qui m’importe.
Il ne fait aucun doute que les colonies dans les territoires de Judée Samarie sont le plus grand obstacle à la création d’un Etat palestinien dans ce que sont peu ou prou les frontières de 67, avec de légères modifications de part et d’autre. N’oublions pas que les frontières de 67 donnent aux Palestiniens un quart des terres de Palestine, et que c’eest du moint de vue de la morale et de la justice le minimum qu’ils sont en droit de se voir attribuer pour constituer un Etat indépendant.
Par ailleurs, supposant qu’un accord comprenne un échange de territoires permettant l’annexion à Israël de certains blocs important de colonies, l’évactuation de force de 100 000 à 200 000 colons de leurs maisons entraînera des douffrance pour des milliers de familles et semble être au-delà de ce que la société israélienne peut supporter tant sur le plan économique que social et moral. Cela pourrait provoquer une fracture irréparable dans la société israélienne et creuser plus encore le fossé entre laïcs et religieux. Rappelons-nous que la destruction du Deuxième Temple en l’an 70 a été marquée par une guerre civile merutrière entre Juifs. Ceux qui sont conscients de l’ampleur, de la profondeur et de la vigueur de l’installation juive dans les territoires palestiniens sont efrayés par la perspective d’arracher de force des milleirs de personnes de leurs maisons.
122-123: Il est essentiel et urgent d’arriver à un large consensus national dans le un processus auquel le camp de la paix doit être activement associé, visant à trouver des solutions élaborées et réalistes qui permettent aux colons de choisir entre deux alternatives: accepter une évacuation volontaire accompagnée d’un dédommagement adéquat ou continuer à résider dans leur lieu d’habitation et devenir des citoyens à part entière du futur Etat palestinien.
123: Dans les entretiens avec les Palestiniens, il se dégage une tendance à accepter une telle perspective, mais à la condition que l’Ett palestinien s’étende sur une superficie égale à la totatlité du territoire occupé en 67 suite à des échanges de terre multuellement consentis. De plus, dans le pire des cas, il s’agirait d’une minorité nationale juve qui ne représenterait pas plus que 2% de l’ensemble de la population palestinienne. Il faut se rappeler par ailleurs qu’en Israël la minorité nationale palestinienne représente plus de 20%. Cette idée que le maintien des implantations dans un Etat palestinien est préférable au déracinement et à leur évacuation fait son chemin même dansle noyau idéologique dur des colons. Ceux qui décideraient de rester et de constituer une minorité nationale (avec une reconnaissance officielle de leur langue et de leur culture spécifique comme c’est le cas pour la minorité palestinienne en Israël) ne partent pas en exil. Les territoires de Judée Samarie font parite du patrimoine historique national israélien de la même manière de Nazareth, Jaffa, Saint-Jean-d’Acre ou Sashnin font partie du patrimoine palestinien. Rappelons-nous que l’ensemble du territoire des implantations (sans compter les routes qui y conduisent) ne représente pas plus de 2% du territoire du futur Etat palestinien. Israël pourrait en compensation transférer aux Palestiniens un territoire équivalent.
Et n’oublions pas qu’une colonie située au coeur du terroire palestinien n’est pas plus éloignée de Tel-Aviv que Fontainebleau ne l’est de Paris. La pluplart des colonies se trouvent, elles, à une distance semblable à celle existant entre Neuilly et l’est de Paris. Les colons, citoyens de l’Etat palestinien, conserveront leur nationalité israélienne comme c’est le cas pour tous les Israéliens vivant à l’étranger, avec en plus le droit de voter à l’élection de la Knesset ainsi qu’à celle du parlement palestinien. Ils pourront continuer à travailler en Israël, qui se trouve à moins d’une heure de voiture, et à y avoir une vie sociale et culturelle.
Cette solution pourrait créer par ailleurs une dynamique qui contribuerait le moment venu au développement de relations économiques et culturelles entre le jeune Etat en devenir et sa soeur aînée Israël.
Je n’ai fait qu’ébaucher ici quelques principe d’une solution dans un souci de désamorcer ce qui me semble être le plus grand blocage du côté israélien. Une proposition détaillée et plus élaborée nécessitera une profonde réflexion par les deux parties ainsi que par la communauté internationale.
Yermeche, Ouerdia (2011), ‘Le français au contact de l’arabe et du berbère: le mixlangue dans les production langagières de jeunes Algériens’, paper given at Langues en contact: le français à travers le monde, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, 16-18 septembre 2011.
mixlangue: coexistence de langues (standard, national, étrangères). national et officiel, national arabe algérien et tamazight
locuteurs algériens multilingues via école…
français pression interne au niveau de l’emprunt et mélanges codiques
parler algérien: langue hybride dans lesquelles se mélangent deux voire trois langues
usage courant et spontané des trois codes linguistique selon procédés d’hybridation linguistique ou insertion de segments lexicaux. Emprunts sous forme locale avec significations particulière.
recherche: énoncés oraux d’étudiants en licence en différentes situation de communication (dans et hors enceinte uni et en salle de classe)
alternance docdique dans les converstations de locuteurs algériens:
alternance intra-phrasique
tour de parole
éléments et procédés linguistiques déclencheurs des types d’alternance en conversation
monèmes lexicaux: monèmes fonctionnels (bessah, fi, beli, verbe dire, pronoms démonstratifs, pronoms personnels)
, gramatiquaux et procédés linguistiques
expression idiomatiques (inchah allah)
verbe avoir
formes empruntées mais adaptées à la locution algérienne: yerkhdam fort (il travaille fort), activi chouya, amany ma’n pardonniche, dillili gosto (fais-moi plaisir) vient de l’espagnol
avonsi lor (reculez), avansilqadam (avancer)
pikani wahed lizoursin (un oursin m’a piqué)
hittiste (hit mur ) = chomeur
nerfaza (nervosigé)
trabendiste (qui pratique une activité informelle)
mdigouti (j’étais dégouté)
Métissage linguistique est une pratique languagière admise. elaborent stratégies discursives et former énoncés bilingues originaux. Jeu sur les langues qui fait fi de la langue et des barrières linguistiques.
La langue française est tellement intériorisée que les locuteurs en usent à leur guise dans sa forme, structure et sémantisme.
algérianismes: concepts souvent nouveaux et spécifiques au milieu algérien.
Young, I. M. (1989). Polity and group difference: a critique of the ideal of universal citizenship. Ethics: 250-74.
Young, I. M. (1990). Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Young, J. (1994). New Line Cinema: it was a very good year. The New York Times. NY. H13, 20-1.
Yuval-Davis, Nira (1993), ‘Gender and nation’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 16 (4), 621-32.
Zahidi, Mohamad (2012), ‘Universal Vision and Philosophical Framework’, in Surendra Pathak (ed.), Teacher Education for Peace and Harmony (New Delhi and Shardarsahar).
What do we mean by peace? Why do we need it? Is this a moral value, a useful piece for life? Is Peace possible?
Historically, no good news
Zangwill, I. (1908). The Melting Pot.
Zeitoun, M. (1979). Le Judaïsme américain et sa position face à l’Etat d’Israel: Etude d’une minorité aux Etats-Unis et de son influence sur la politique extérieure américaine, 1948-1972. Dir. Claude Fohlen. Paris: Paris 1.
Zellner, W., M. Arnd & B. Amy (2000). Etats-Unis cherchent immigrés désespérément: en phase de croissance, l’immigration amène un élan supplémentaire et protège l’économie des risques de surchauffe. Le Point Edition Affaires avec Business Week. x-xii.
L’Amérique s’est longtemps enorgueillie d’être un pays d’immigrés. Aujourd’hui, alors que la situation économique est au beau fixe, cette fierté a cédé le pas à l’inquiétude.
Selon les économistes, l’afflux des travailleurs étrangers donne un élan supplémentaire et appréciable à une économie en plein essor.
Ziehl, S. (2004). globalization, migration and family pattern. 36th World COngress International Institute of Sociology.
lack of dialogue between globalization and family theorist. Globalization is merely economic. Also has to due to gender family theorist is primarily female research.
cf. Runaway world, Giddens: connection between the 2. Cf. Manuel Castells.
Zincone, G. (1998). Multiculturalism from Above: Italian Variations on a European Theme. In Baübock, R. & Rundell, John (eds.) Blurred Boundairies: Migration, Ethnicity, Citizenship. Vienna: Aldershot.
citée par Wievorka, M. 2001. La Différence. Paris: Balland p. 17 et p. 83 et 94
Zizek, Slavoj (1997), ‘Multiculturalism, or the cultural logic of multinational capitalism’, New Left Review, 225 (September-October ), 28-51.
Zuckermann, Ghil’ad (2012), ‘Sleeping beauties awake: Linguists and revivalists worldwide have much to learn from Hebrew’s remarkable, hybridic modern-day rebirth’, Times Higher Education, 19 January.
Revived Hebrew, or what I usually refer to as Israeli, is the most cited example of language revival. But to be truthful, the modern-day vernacular spoken in urban Tel Aviv is a very different language, typologically and genetically, from that of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) or of the Mishnah, the first major redaction of Jewish oral traditions.
Even so, Israeli is so far the most successful known reclamation of a sleeping beauty tongue. As a language movement it has been in progress for more than 120 years. By comparison, language revival movements elsewhere are in their infancy. With globalisation, homogenisation and coca-colonisation, there will be more and more groups added to the forlorn club of the lost-heritage peoples. Language revival will therefore become increasingly relevant as people seek to recover their heritage. There is an urgent need to offer comparative insights and provide information about the Hebrew revival to other linguists, language endangerment experts and revival activists.
I propose the establishment of revival linguistics, a new discipline studying the universal mechanisms and global constraints apparent in revival attempts across all sociological backgrounds. As a branch of both linguistics and applied linguistics, it is closely related to contact linguistics (when different languages interact) and complements the established field of documentary linguistics.
For linguists, the first stage must involve a long period of observation and careful listening while learning, mapping and characterising the specific indigenous or minority or culturally endangered community. Only then can one inspire and assist. That said, there are linguistic constraints applicable to all revival attempts. Mastering them would help revivalists to work more efficiently: for example, to focus more on basic vocabulary and verbal conjugations than on sounds and word order. Revival linguistics may also help revivalists to be more realistic and to abandon discouraging slogans such as “Give us authenticity or give us death!”
Take, for example, revived Kaurna, an Aboriginal language spoken in South Australia. The language was subject to linguicide by Anglo-Australians and the last native speaker died in the 1920s, but it is currently being reclaimed.
However, the impact of the revivalists’ mother tongue (Aboriginal or Australian English) on reclaimed Kaurna is far-reaching. Consider sounds: a retroflex “r” in classical Kaurna is pronounced in neo-Kaurna as the English “r”. Consider vocabulary: there are numerous calques (loan translations): cricket (the sport) is replicated as yertabiritti (the term for the insect with the same name in English). Consider word order: while in classical Kaurna it was free but tending to be subject-object-verb, in neo-Kaurna it is subject-verb-object, replicating the English.
Now let us look at Israeli. Consider sounds: the classical Hebrew “r” was pronounced like the Arabic “r”. But the Israeli “r” is the one occurring in most dialects of the revivalists’ mother tongue, Yiddish (as in German). Consider vocabulary: there are numerous calques such as ma nishma (“What’s up?”, literally “what’s heard?”) from the Yiddish vos hert zikh and parallel expressions in Polish, Russian and Romanian. Consider word order: in Biblical Hebrew it was verb-subject-object, but in Israeli it is subject-verb-object, replicating Yiddish and Standard Average European.
Unlike Hebrew and Kaurna, where there are no native speakers of the sleeping, original tongue, in Hawaii one can observe both. Hawaii is a fascinating case of both a severely endangered language (classical Hawaiian, fewer than 1,000 speakers) and a reclaimed language (neo-Hawaiian, approximately 3,000, still non-native, speakers). Hawaiian offers scholars a unique laboratory to explore the constraints of language revival. Genetically engineered neo-Hawaiian can indeed be systematically compared to the organically evolving classical Hawaiian, as the latter is still spoken by several hundred people, who are unfortunately not involved in the reclamation.
One day we may invent devices to “inject” a language into our brains. But until then, any attempt to reclaim a hibernating language will result in a hybrid that combines components from the revivalists’ and documenters’ mother tongues and the target tongue. In the immortal words of Jerry Seinfeld: “Not that there’s anything wrong with that!”
The punch line? One, if your language is endangered, do not allow it to die. Two, if your language dies: stop, revive, survive. Three, if you revive a language, embrace its hybridity.
Postscript :
Ghil’ad Zuckermann is professor of linguistics and endangered languages and an Australian Research Council Discovery fellow at the University of Adelaide, Australia.
7 thoughts on “Bibliography from (W) like Wardhaugh, my initiator to sociolinguistics to (Z) like Zangwill the creator of the Melting Pot
Oh well maybe one day…. :)
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Maximize Your Metabolism!
by Rachelle on June 27, 2014
If you’ve been very diligent when it comes to eating right and exercising regularly, but the scale still doesn’t budge, then your metabolism may be to blame!
Metabolism is the process by which your body makes and uses energy (caloric intake) for everything from absorbing nutrients to running a marathon. The more calories your body burns per day, the easier it is to achieve and maintain a healthy body weight. What you eat, how you eat, the type of exercise you do and even how you sleep can all impact your metabolism. So if you feel like your metabolism is running at a turtle-like speed, here are 5 tips that will speed up your body’s motor and drive the numbers on the scale down.
Drink plenty of water
You need to stay hydrated to flush out all the toxins and metabolic byproducts your body creates daily. As you lose weight, you create even more toxic byproducts as fat is burned. If these products build up in your body, they can drain your energy as well as affect your health. Drinking at least 64 ounces of waterdaily will help to ensure you’re hydrated. Cold water may also give your metabolism a small boost because some energy is required to heat the body, so try drinking a glass of ice water with each meal.
Avoid stressful situations
Although it’s easier said than done, lowering your stress level is essential if you want to successfully lower the scale. Both physical and emotional stress stimulate the release of stress hormones. Avoiding stress, or reducing stress, can help decrease the production of this hormone and in turn elevate your metabolism.
Challenge your muscles!
Around the age of 30, your metabolism will start to slow down. This age-related decline in metabolism is due to a loss of lean body mass or muscle. Muscle is the most important predictor of how well you burn calories and body fat. Regular strength training with weights or resistance bands is crucial to building muscle mass and slowing down age related muscle loss. The more muscle mass you maintain and develop, the more calories you’ll burn each day; even as you’re sleeping!
Eat breakfast
When you skip breakfast, you disrupt the rest of your day and your weight loss efforts. When you eat breakfast, you’re doing two things. You’re jump-starting your metabolism, and you’re preventing excessive hunger that’s more than likely to occur later in the day if you skip a meal, which can lead to cravings and overeating.
Catch some Z’s
When your body doesn’t get enough sleep (recommended 7-8 hours a night), the physical stress placed on your body is even higher. Fatigue can trigger food cravings and increased appetite, making it challenging to stay on track with a healthy eating plan. To make matters worse, lean body mass is regenerated in the last few hours of restful sleep, which, if missed, can lead to a smaller percent of lean body mass production, slowing your metabolism.
Health Contributor at Creative Bioscience
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