text:
Each week Living on Love and Cents searches online and in stores for the best deals on diapers. Here are the best diaper deals for this week (5/22/11- 5/28/11)! If you have a store that you would like included please email me! If you find a great deal not listed please leave a comment and share with others. This week's best deal is again Walgreens with Little Swimmers Diapers for $2.99. Other than that the best deals are on Amazon this week.
Buy 2 Pampers or Huggies Value Pack , Receive $10 Target Gift Card
- Huggies Little Movers, Snugglers or Snug & Dry $29.99
$3.00/1 Huggies Printable $2.00/1 Huggies Little Snugglers or Little Movers Diapers from SS 5/15
- Pampers Cruisers, Swaddlers or Baby Dry $29.99
$5.00/2 Pampers Diapers AND Pampers Wipes, Target Coupon RP 5/1
$1.50/1 Pampers Diapers or Pants PG 5/1
$2.50/1 Pampers Diapers or Pants PG 5/1
- Pampers Splashers $9.99
$1.50/1 Easy Ups, UnderJams, or Splashers 5/1 P&G
Walgreens: IN STORE DEAL OF THE WEEK
- Huggies Little Swimmers, 10 – 12 pk $6.99
Use $2.00/1 Huggies Little Swimmers Disposable Swimpants SS 5/15
And Use $2.00/1 Huggies Little Swimmers, 10–12 pk Walgreens May Booklet
Final Price: $2.99
- Huggies jumbo pack diapers or Pull Ups $8.99
Buy $15 in Huggies products, get $3 off your next purchase
Deal Idea:
Buy (2) Huggies jumbo packs $8.99 each
Use (2) $3.00/1 any Huggies diapers
Pay $11.98
Get back: $3.00 Coupon/Catalina
Final Price: $8.98 ($4.49 each!)
Rite Aid
- Pampers jumbo pack diapers and Easy Ups $9.99
$2.50/1 diapers or pants 5/1 P&G
Final Price $7.49
- CVS Jumbo pk. Diapers or Training Pants $6.99
Receive $2.00 Extra Bucks, Limit 1
Final Price: $4.99 After ECBs
Amazon has become my GO TO PLACE for diapers! Each week it seems like I find the best deals there. I will share with you the best deal for each size. Be sure you have signed up for a FREE Amazon Moms membership to get these discounts. Learn about signing up here.
Deals on Diapers (All prices are WITH Subscribe and SAVE option)
- Munchkin Super Premium Diapers, Size 1/Small Ultra (8-14 Pounds), 200 Count=$20.38 with Subscribe and Save Option
- Luvs Ultra Leakguards Diapers, Size 1, 300 Count=$30.09 with Subscribe and Save Option-– $.10 each! HOT BUY!
- Huggies Snug & Dry Diapers, Size 1-2, 192 Count – Packing May Vary=$21.45 with Subscribe and Save Option
- Luvs Premium Stretch Diapers with Ultra Leakguards, Size 2 (12-18 Lbs), 228 Count=$25.19 with Subscribe and Save Option
- Huggies Snug & Dry Diapers, Size 3, 156 Count=$20.69 with Subscribe and Save Option
- Seventh Generation Free and Clear Baby Diapers Super Jumbo Box, Stage 3, 76 Count=$14.69 with Subscribe & Save Option
- Huggies Snug & Dry Diapers, Size 4, 140 Count=$20.20 with Subscribe & Save Option
- Munchkin Super Premium Diapers, Size 4/Large Ultra (22-37 Pounds), 82 Count
Deal on Wipes:
- Seventh Generation Chlorine Free Baby Wipes, 350 Unscented Wipes= $8.32 with Subscribe and Save Option
- Pampers ThickCare 7x Wipes, Scented, 504 Count= $9.79 with Subscribe and Save Option
For more deals visit Living on Love and Cents


text:
Does God answer prayers of an unbeliever? I was in group of unbelievers and believers and one said he was sick and some unbelievers said they would pray for him. I said that's good, but prayers of unbelievers do no good. Was I right and if there are any verses to back this up? All I could find was Isaiah 1:15 where they talk about the wickedness of Judah.
Good question, because it goes to the heart of understanding who we are as sinners before the holy God our Creator and Judge and the absolute necessity of the saving work of Jesus Christ for us.
Twenty-some years ago President Jimmy Carter, an evangelical Christian, got himself in trouble when a reporter asked him if God hears the prayers of Jews. He answered (I have to paraphrase, I don't recall his exact words) that God hears the prayers of those who come to him through Jesus Christ. This created a public furor. President Carter then took back what he had said and said something like God hears the prayers of all sincere people, whatever their affiliation, or something like that. He was right the first time.
You're right, Isaiah 1:15 is about God's not hearing wicked Israelites when they pray. But later in the chapter (vv. 16-20) he calls them to repent and in Isaiah 55:6,7, promises to hear and forgive when they do turn back to him in repentance (see Luke 18:9-14). You could add to Isaiah 1:15, Proverbs 28:9, "He who turns away his ear from listening to the Law, even his prayer is an abomination" (see also Prov. 15:8, 21:27).
Psalm 24:3 asks the question: "Who is permitted to come into God's holy presence?" The answer given in vs. 4 is "He who has clean hands and a pure heart ..." That cuts us all out. With just one exception, no son or daughter of Adam has ever had (in himself, of himself) clean hands (free from committed sins) and a pure heart (sinlessly loving and delighting in God). "All have sinned and come short of the glory of God" (Rom. 3:23). All, that is, with one exception, and that one exception is the Son of God who came from heaven to redeem sinners. Jesus was telling it straight when he said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but by me" (John 14:6).
Those who reject the living God to worship false gods of their own making and those who profess some kind of faith in Christ but are actually unbelieving and hypocritical (Isaiah 29:13) should not delude themselves into thinking their worship or prayers are received and accepted by God. Those sinners who humble themselves before the Lord, confessing their sin and their total dependence on his grace in Jesus Christ, may be sure that he does hear their prayers—for Jesus' sake and because of his merits and atoning work. He is our great high priest, interceding for us at the Father's right hand (Hebrews 7:25, 10:19-22, 4:14-16).
Even then, not all that we ask in prayer may be done for us just as we ask. Even our Savior in the garden, praying in perfect and sinless devotion to his Father, submitted himself to his Father's will: "not my will, but yours be done."
So your saying "prayers of unbelievers do no good" is right. It is also very offensive to people to be told that. It runs absolutely counter to so much thinking in the world. The devil loves "religion." He wants people to think that being "spiritual" and praying, and such, they are good in themselves. He wants people to think that because they meditate or pray or go to religious services they are on the right side with God and do not need to fear the Day of Judgment and the wrath of God, but that person is a liar who uses religious activities to delude people and to keep them from seeing their need of Jesus Christ.
We need, however, to have the right attitude when we correct people in this area. When God gives you the opportunity to set someone straight on this, do it kindly and humbly ("I'm not saying this because I think I'm better than you. I know I'm a sinner, and the only way I can go to God is through his Son Jesus and what he did for me").
Hope this helps.
"Questions and Answers" is a weekly feature of the OPC website. The answers come from individual ministers in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church expressing their own convictions and do not necessarily represent an "official" position of the Church, especially in areas where the Standards of the Church (the Scriptures and the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms) are silent.
The questions come from individuals like yourself. If you have questions about biblical and theological matters, you are invited to send them by e-mail by using the "Pose a Question" link on the OPC home page or by clicking here.
At least one new question is posted each week, so there should always be something new here for you to read. (For those people who would like to look at previous questions and answers, they will continue to be available as well.)
The purpose of the OPC website's "Questions and Answers" is to respond to biblical and theological questions. Matters of church discipline, disputes, or debates go beyond the scope of our work. We recommend that you present your concerns in these areas to the appropriate judicatory. In most cases this will be to a local pastor, elder, or session. We do not want the website to replace personal involvement in, or commitment to, the local, visible church.
While we will respond to every serious questioner, we are not bound to give a substantive answer to every question, should we deem the question to be beyond the scope of our purpose or our own ability to answer.
You will receive an answer by e-mail. Please be patient as many of our respondents are busy pastors. The response to your question may take up to two (2) weeks. Some of the questions submitted will be chosen to be posted here, along with the corresponding answers.
Note that the "Questions and Answers" posted on the site have been editedall personal references are removed, Scripture references or from some source may be added, and sometimes portions are expandedto make the questions and answers more useful to a larger audience.
|© 2020 The Orthodox Presbyterian Church
Chaplains and Military Personnel

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Thread: Cancer cured by Ayurveda
- Join Date
- May 2012
- Location
- A-1,Gopur apartment, Kasar Falia, Opp.govt. Press, Kothi, Vadodara, Gujarat
- Posts
- 33
- Blog Entries
- 35
Cancer cured by Ayurveda
One woman named Mrs. Shobhna Rajendra Relan 35 years old living at Nizampur, District Dhule, Maharastra cured from bone cancer in 1996. Let us see her history in own words:
Approximately, in 1995 I feel pain in right hand. However, there was no relief after taking medicines from local and Dhules doctors. There was perceptive pain and inflammations occurred. Therefore, I was referring to Tata cancer hospital Bombay by the physicians of Dhule.
The doctors show all the reports and diagnosed for bone cancer. He operated my hand and I get relief. Nevertheless, there was cancers sign in bone-scan, yet CAMO and Radiations completed. Therefore, they advised us for Ayurvedic treatment.
We consulted Vaidyaraj Amrutbhai Prajapati and started Panchkarma and Ayurvedic medicines. After a year, there was no sign in bone-scan at Tata cancer hospital in follow up. I am normal until the date today 14, May 2012.
Moreover, I had taken only milk as a food since three years at 1995 to 1999 approximately. I got child at 2001 even though, many MD-DGO had refused to conceive previously! Vaidyaraj said that it is our side benefits of Ayurveda treatment! Previous, we adapted my sisters child as doctors advice. Now we have two.
Jay Dhanvantari.
Ayurvedyog Centre, A-1, Gopur apartment, Kasar falia, Opp. Govt. press, Kothi, Opp. SSG Medical Collage Gate, Vadodara, Gujarat.
Vaidyaraj Amrutbhai Prajapati
Ph: 9327711235.
E-mail: [email protected]
Web: http://www.ayurvedyog.com/
- Join Date
- Jun 2012
- Location
- Posts
- 11
Ayurvedic medicine are very helpful for the good health it increasing the ability of the body and it has no side effect, it helps to control the cancer ayurveda can control the tumor, decrease its size, decrease pain and other symptoms and it affect the overall lifestyle of the person.
- Join Date
- May 2013
- Location
- Shimla
- Posts
- 7
Ayurveda is a long process treatment. It take lot of time to recover. But Very effective and there is no side effect of this treatment.
- Join Date
- Feb 2016
- Location
- Mumbai, Maharastra, India
- Posts
- 90
There are number of species known in ayurveda best known for curing cancer.
- Join Date
- Jun 2016
- Posts
- 1
The major difference between Ayurveda and other treatments is that instead of just focusing on temporary relief from the disease, Ayurvedic treatment aims at uprooting the illness completely. This is often a slow process and requires changes in lifestyle as well. This is one of the main reasons why Ayurveda is still considered as an alternate medicinal practice.
You can check out the website to find and book Ayurveda treatments from trusted providers superbeing
- Join Date
- Nov 2017
- Posts
- 3
Phytoscience Double stemcell for proof physical condition of human as well as medical fields
Double Stem - cell- like cells that generate these 220 the most important stem cells at birth the placenta is found in the center of mother as well as child, who are create inside it intended for the protection currently available stem cell bank. If humans lose his cell for any disease and problem, double stem cell help to visit make cells back.
For more
.................................................. ............
Cancer Treatment Phytoscience
05-02-2018, 03:57 AM #7Parijatak AyurvedaGuest
Best Ayurvedic Treatment Paralysis India |Ayurveda for Paralysis Kerala
Ayurvedic Breast Cancer Treatment In Central India
About Breast Cancer
The first sign of breast cancer often is a breast lump or an abnormal mammogram. Breast cancer stages range from early, curable breast cancer to metastatic breast cancer, with a variety of breast cancer treatments. Male breast cancer is not uncommon and must be taken seriously.
Breast Cancer is cancer that forms in the cells of the breasts. After skin cancer, breast cancer is the most common cancer in women in all over the world. Breast Cancer can occur in both men and worm, but its far more common in women.
Breast Cancer survival rates have increased, due to a number of factors such as earlier detection, new treatments and a better understanding of the disease.
Signs And Symptoms Of Breast Cancer
Breast cancer may not cause any signs or symptoms in its early stages. Signs and symptoms often appear when the tumor grows large enough to be felt as a lump in the breast or when cancer spreads to surrounding tissues and organs. Other health conditions can cause the same symptoms as breast cancer.
The most common symptom of ducal carcinoma is a firm or hard lump that feels very different from the rest of the breast. It may feel like it is attached to the skin or the surrounding breast tissue. The lump doesnt get smaller or come and go with your period. It may be tender, but its usually not painful. (Pain is more often a symptom of a non-cancerous condition).
Lobular carcinoma often does not form a lump. It feels more like the tissue in the breast is getting thicker or harder.
Other symptoms of ductal and lobular breast cancer include:
a lump in the armpit (called the axilla)
changes in the shape or size of the breast
changes to the nipple, such as a nipple that suddenly starts to point inward (called an inverted nipple)
discharge that comes out of the nipple without squeezing it or that has blood in it
Late signs and symptoms occur as cancer grows larger or spreads to other parts of the body, including other organs. Late symptoms of breast cancer include:
bone pain
weight loss
loss of appetite
Ayurvedic Breast Cancer Treatment In Central India
Roganam Apurnabhavam
Ayurvedic Medicines For Breast Cancer
1.Gulguluthikthakam Kashayam-
Guggulutiktam Kashayam is an Ayurvedic medicine used in treating inflammatory conditions of skin, joints, and bones. It is in herbal decoction form.
- Join Date
- Apr 2018
- Location
- Posts
- 23
Abstinence from food and lifestyle that cause tridosha (vata, pitta, kapha) imbalance.
Eliminating toxins through Panchakarma.
Restoration of healthy jatharagni (digestive power) functions.
Rejuvenation through rasayanas.
- Join Date
- Nov 2018
- Posts
- 2
I knew that only Ayurveda cure cancer but if someone or anyone is looking for some information on cancer so please visit CancerBro they have latest and authentic information on cancer. I hope it will help someone who need it.


text:
The email from Denmark was only a few lines long. "It basically said, 'We have an opportunity for you here, but we can't tell you anything until you sign a nondisclosure agreement," says Steve Hassenplug, a soft-spoken software engineer from Lafayette, Indiana. The cryptic tone of the email from Lego headquarters hinted at something more than a simple customer survey, but Hassenplug didn't know what.
This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact email@example.com to report an issue.
He guessed it had something to do with Mindstorms, Lego's programmable robotics kit. After all, he's a master at assembling the plastic bricks into complex robots, like his wheeled, self-balancing machine dubbed the LegWay, and he's something of a celebrity in the Mindstorms world. But there hadn't been a Mindstorms update in nearly four years, and rumor had it Lego might abandon the product altogether.
Intrigued, Hassenplug signed the NDA, received a username and password, and was ushered to a secure online forum. Even there, he found no official information – just an email thread between a few peers: John Barnes, David Schilling, and Ralph Hempel. Hassenplug knew them well from Brickfest, the annual conference where Lego zealots show off their most elegant creations, from massive starships and richly detailed cathedrals to giant bipedal robots. The four Mindstorms experts speculated as to why they'd been tapped and sworn to secrecy. Lego probably needed beta testers for a Mindstorms update.
After lurking for a few days, Søren Lund, the director of Mindstorms, dropped in on the conversation. He told the crew that a revamped kit was, in fact, in the works. But Lego didn't even have a working prototype. It was way too early for beta testers; Lego needed a Mindstorms User Panel, or MUP, to help with the design. "I was surprised they were so early in their development, and I think everyone else was, too," recalls Barnes, an electronics engineer from Holland Patent, New York. "We realized that our input was going to be a lot more important than we had imagined."
Over the next 11 months, right up to the January launch of Mindstorms NXT at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the four men were de facto Lego employees. They exchanged countless emails with Lund and his team, reeling off ideas for new sensors, redesigned input ports, and stabilized firmware. The MUPers also met with Lund at Brickfest in the US and at Lego's Denmark headquarters to hash out specs for the computer that serves as the brain of every Mindstorms creation.
The one key difference between the four panelists and actual Lego staffers: a paycheck. For their participation, Hassenplug and his cohorts received a few Lego crane sets and Mindstorms NXT prototypes. They even paid their own airfares to Denmark. That was fine by Hassenplug. "Pretty much the comment from all four of us was 'They're going to talk to us about Legos, and they're going to pay us with Legos?'" Hassenplug says. "'They actually want our opinion?' It doesn't get much better than that."
Such loyalty isn't unusual among the fanboys who've swooned over Mindstorms since its 1998 debut. Four years after its release, version 2.0 still sells 40,000 units a year at $199 a pop – with no advertising – and has become Lego's all-time best-selling product. The market is almost evenly split between parents buying the kit for their budding engineers and grown-up geeks who build Mindstorms robots that can scale walls, solve Rubik's Cubes, or pick blue M&Ms out of a pile.
The kit, due in stores in August, looks nothing like 2.0 and isn't backward compatible. Users still program the bots from their PCs, but everything else about the experience has been changed. The centerpiece of a Mindstorms kit is the RCX brick, which acts as the robot's brain. It receives input from sensors and sends instructions to motors, breathing life into plastic-block creatures. The new brain has a 32-bit processor – a huge upgrade over the old 8-bit processor – allowing NXT bots to perform more-complex tasks than their predecessors, like ambling with a near-human gait or reacting to voice commands. The chunky yellow brick in the old kit – which looked like SpongeBob SquarePants – is gone, replaced by a gray rectangle that could be the love child of an iPod and a first-gen Gameboy. The programming language has been revamped, as have the sensors, motors, and I/O ports. As a result, Mindstorms NXT robots look and act far more realistic than their predecessors.
But the boldest part of the Mindstorms overhaul is Lego's decision to outsource its innovation to a panel of citizen developers. Relying on the MUP is a gamble that Lego hopes will lead not only to a better product but also to a tighter, more trusting bond between corporation and customer.
Let me borrow your tools there," Lund says, reaching across the table and motioning toward my pen and notebook. We're talking Mindstorms over beers and bland Danish food at the Hotel Legoland, steps from the company's modest offices in the sleepy town of Billund, Denmark. Lund, 37, speaks English at a lightning clip. He's been trying to explain how NXT pieces will differ from those in the 2.0 kit. He's now decided to illustrate the point.
I slide my notebook over to him, and he begins drawing the classic Lego block, the so-called two-by-four that was used in Mindstorms 2.0. Then he draws a piece from the new Technic line, a flattened tube pocked with holes – what enthusiasts call a "studless Lego." They'll be included in the NXT kit. Connected by tiny rods, the Technic pieces give the robots a sleeker, less boxy look. "We wanted to create robots with more personality," Lund says. "We wanted them to go from being more mechanical to more human."
Lego also wanted to create buzz with its new product, and that meant doing more than just freshening up the last version. In early 2004, when the company hatched the idea of a new Mindstorms, it was coming off its worst year ever – a $238 million loss in fiscal 2003. There were plenty of strategic blunders behind the dismal results: a misguided foray into making PC software games, expensive licensing arrangements (chiefly with Disney), and designs that puzzled rather than entertained. "We had started to make fire trucks that look like spaceships, building systems that no customer could truly appreciate," says Mads Nipper, a Lego senior vice president. "We had to clean that up."
Cleaning up meant ditching the software division, halving development times, and slashing product lines to reduce the number of unique pieces being manufactured in Billund from 12,400 to around 7,000. Meanwhile, Mindstorms was in limbo. The RCX bricks are expensive to manufacture, and Lego's specialty is toys, not electronics. But sales were still strong, and the company was enjoying good publicity from the First Lego League, a program in which teams of schoolchildren compete to build the best robot. All told, Lego officials say that nearly 1 million Mindstorms units have reached the market, a figure that includes retail sales and giveaways. So Lego asked Lund to come up with a new version that would attract as much attention as the original, which sold 80,000 in its first three months back in 1998.
Instead of cobbling together a 3.0 version, Lund decided to make a clean break with the past. Mindstorms' main flaw, he believed, was its complexity; many kids lost interest before completing their first robot. (The complexity had another unintended effect – Lego ended up with far more adult users than it originally anticipated. One company survey from 1999 found that 70 percent of Mindstorms users were adults.) Lund wanted novices to be able to construct and program a robot in 20 minutes. The biggest barrier to making that happen was the Mindstorms programming language, known as RCX-code. Though simple by computer science standards, it was too frustrating for many programming neophytes. The drag-and-drop commands – green shapes labeled with instructions like "Set direction" or "Set AC power 8" – could be confusing to link together and made it hard to program a bot to do anything more than move forward or backward.
But Lego didn't have the expertise to write more intuitive software in house, so Lund turned to National Instruments, an Austin, Texas, programming firm that specializes in creating user-friendly coding tools. Hiring outside help was a change for Lego, a family-owned company that has historically kept its own counsel. Sometimes it takes a nine-figure loss to convince management to rethink its insularity.
National Instruments designed a programming system made up of intuitive icons (like a microphone to represent the kit's sound sensor). "I call it Photoshop for robotics, or goofware," says Paal Smith-Meyer, a Lego creative director. "You just look at it and you know where to start, and you know how to goof around and have fun with it."
The Mindstorms team tested the new language by asking the members of Lego's executive board to play with an NXT prototype. "We created a robot in 20 minutes," Nipper says. With RCX-code, he admits, "it would have taken an hour, at least."
From combing the Mindstorms tech support logs, Lund knew that the most frequent complaint, by a wide margin, was the fickleness of the infrared tower, a black box that sends programming instructions from a PC to the robot's RCX. So Lund ditched infrared in favor of a USB 2.0 connection. His team also toyed with the idea of adding a camera so robots could be programmed to snap pictures. But they decided against it because it would mean exceeding the $249 price tag target for the NXT kit. Instead, the company added Bluetooth, allowing Mindstorms bots to be linked to – and even controlled by – camera phones.
Within weeks of the original Mindstorms debut, a Stanford graduate student named Kekoa Proudfoot reverse engineered the RCX brick and posted all of his findings, including detailed information on the brick's underlying firmware, online. Several other engineers quickly used Proudfoot's revelations to design their own Mindstorms tools, including an open source operating system (LegOS) and a C-like programming alternative to RCX-code (Not Quite C, or NQC). Lego's Danish brain trust soon realized that their proprietary code was loose on the Internet and debated how best to handle the hackers. "We have a pretty eager legal team, and protecting our IP is very high on its agenda," Nipper says. Some Lego executives worried that the hackers might cannibalize the market for future Mindstorms accessories or confuse potential customers looking for authorized Lego products.
After a few months of wait-and-see, Lego concluded that limiting creativity was contrary to its mission of encouraging exploration and ingenuity. Besides, the hackers were providing a valuable service. "We came to understand that this is a great way to make the product more exciting," Nipper says. "It's a totally different business paradigm – although they don't get paid for it, they enhance the experience you can have with the basic Mindstorms set." Rather than send out cease and desist letters, Lego decided to let the modders flourish; it even wrote a "right to hack" into the Mindstorms software license, giving hobbyists explicit permission to let their imaginations run wild.
Soon, dozens of Web sites were hosting third-party programs that helped Mindstorms users build robots that Lego had never dreamed of: soda machines, blackjack dealers, even toilet scrubbers. Hardware mavens designed sensors that were far more sophisticated than the touch and light sensors included in the factory kit. More than 40 Mindstorms guidebooks provided step-by-step strategies for tweaking performance out of the kit's 727 parts.
Lego's decision to tap this culture of innovation was a natural extension of its efforts over the past few years to connect customers to the company. On Lego's Web site, for example, fans can purchase online-exclusive sets and sign up for Lego's Internet club, which offers perks like a magazine filled with DIY projects, members-only kits, and a ticket to the Legoland theme park in Southern California. For those looking to further express their creativity, the company introduced Lego Factory, a customization program that lets users design, upload, and purchase their own unique Lego creation.
The MUP would push this cooperative model even further – giving a few stellar Mindstorms users the opportunity to help develop sets for the world. But who should be in the inner circle? By trolling through online user groups and Web sites, Lund and Smith-Meyer collected 20 names. They winnowed the list based on the candidates' experience and their desire to have a well-rounded panel of specialists in different areas – sensors, software, building, et cetera. Eventually, they had five names: the four pioneering MUPers, and another person who never responded.
One of the first things Lego executives discussed with the panel was the need for absolute secrecy. Keeping NXT on the down-low was necessary because of the abundance of eager competitors. But the company also wanted the relaunch to feel like a major event, a declaration of Lego's intentionto battle gaming consoles, action figures, and other products that have nibbled away at its market share. "Some companies work with a leak strategy," Lund says. "We decided to give it a big bang."
Once the MUPers signed on, they sent numerous suggestions to Lund and his team. The executives responded with appeals for feedback on planned improvements. "We would ask them about a planned feature," Lund says, "and within half an hour, there would be a four-page email on it."
The Lego team was eager to piggyback on the work MUP members had already done. Ralph Hempel, for example, is renowned for writing pbForth, a powerful, Mac/Linux-compatible version of the RCX brick's firm-ware. Lego was particularly wowed by the craftsmanship of John Barnes, the owner of HiTechnic, which manufactures an ultrasonic range sensor, a critical add-on that allows robots to sense when an obstacle is approaching. "They said, 'We really like your ultrasonic sensor – would you mind if we started making this?'" Barnes recalls. "I said, 'Go ahead. I have a whole list of sensors to get started on.'"
Last April, Hassenplug and Schilling flew to Billund for a Mindstorms tournament. They stayed an extra day and were ushered into Lego's research sanctum – the high-security Global Innovation and Marketing building that's strictly off-limits to nonemployees. Beneath a sign reading We will do for robotics what iPod did for music, Lund and the two MUPers examined prototypes for the NXT circuit boards, as well as the kit's proposed assemblage of Technic pieces.
Hassenplug had a serious problem with the studless Legos. Because they're linked by rods, it's tricky to make right angles. And that makes it difficult to construct square frames. He asked whether Lego could add a small L-shaped joint so Technic bars could be bolted at right angles. "One of the first things S�ren told us was 'We don't have the budget to make new pieces,'" Hassenplug says. "But then, after our talks, they decided it was really a good idea." Lego's designers located an L-shaped mold languishing in a pile of unused prototypes and added it to the production line.
Lego wasn't always so obliging, of course. The MUPers pushed for an AC power pack, for example, but it never materialized. They would have also liked a few additional ports and more memory for the programmable brick. "There are certain things that we thought were going to happen," Barnes says. "But they'd do a close analysis and say, 'We'd love to do this, but we just can't.' And we understand that they have to work within a budget."
The full MUP crew didn't meet face-to-face with the Mindstorms team until last August, after the annual Brickfest in Washington, DC. During the conference, which was attended by several thousand Lego hobbyists, the four panel members acted as if they knew nothing about the top-secret NXT project. "They didn't even say hello to me," Lund recalls. "They were so afraid someone might ask, 'How do you know that guy?' They were even more cautious than we were."
The day after the conference, the four MUPers gathered with Lund at a Washington hotel, where the group hashed out final details of the pieces the NXT kit would contain – almost 200 fewer than 2.0 – as well as specs for the motors, sensors, and firmware. The MUPers weren't getting paid. But they were playing a vital role in shaping a product they loved. "When I met S�ren, he said he wondered why we were all doing this," says Barnes, laughing. "I told him that if it had been any company other than Lego, I wouldn't be here."
In January, Lego put out word that it's looking for 100 more citizen developers. These volunteers won't enjoy the exalted insider status of the MUPers, whose ranks have recently grown to 14. But over the next few months, they will be allowed to buy prerelease versions of the NXT kits at discounted prices and asked to test them rigorously. Lund calls the new committee "a MUP extension" and says it's still not open to just anyone. "You have to argue why you should be part of this," he explains. "How will the community benefit from having you on board?"
Until recently, companies were skittish about customer innovation, fearing that outsiders might leak trade secrets or that they simply lacked the necessary technical skills. But Lego has warmed to the power of the open source ethos. It's clear to the Lego execs that Mindstorms NXT would be a lesser product without the MUPers' input.
Inviting customers to innovate isn't just about building better products. Opening the process engenders goodwill and creates a buzz among the zealots, a critical asset for products like Mindstorms that rely on word-of-mouth evangelism. In his book Democratizing Innovation, MIT professor Eric von Hippel says that "the joy and the learning associated with membership in creative communities" drives people to generously share their time. After his close encounter with four of the most passionate Mindstorms users, Lund wants every NXT customer to be able to have an effect on how Mindstorms is used and designed. His plans include a Lego-hosted Web site where brickheads can upload scripts for robot behaviors or peruse blogs detailing the building of a Mindstorms typewriter or pinball machine. "Imagine Flickr for robotics," says Lund, who admires the photography site for how it has made image-sharing accessible and, in turn, spurred demand for digital cameras.
Because of its popularity among gearheads already familiar with the open source model, Mindstorms was a perfect candidate for Lego's experiment with customer innovation. But if NXT is a hit, the strategy could be extended to the full range of Lego products; after all, who would know better how to improve the company's building systems than the people who spend hundreds of hours preparing for Brickfest every year?
In Billund, Denmark, not only is the customer always right, he's also a candidate for the R&D team. And he'll work for small plastic blocks.
Mindstorms: The Next Generation
BUILDING BLOCKS Mindstorms 2.0 2001: "Two-by-four" Lego blocks Mindstorms NXT 2006: Technic blocks, aka "studless Legos"
COMMAND CENTER Mindstorms 2.0 2001: 8-bit RCX programmable brick Mindstorms NXT 2006: 32-bit, iPod-like brick with larger LCD
USER INTERFACE Mindstorms 2.0 2001: Nonintuitive interface, RCX-code commands, PC only Mindstorms NXT 2006: Intuitive GUI, drag-and-drop icons, PC and Mac
SENSORS Mindstorms 2.0 2001: Two touch sensors and one light sensor Mindstorms NXT 2006: Redesigned touch and light sensors, new sound sensor and ultrasonic sensor
POWER Mindstorms 2.0 2001: Two motors Mindstorms NXT 2006: Three motors, redesigned for smoother operation
CONNECTORS Mindstorms 2.0 2001: Two-wire analog cables Mindstorms NXT 2006: Six-wire digital cables
The Dream Factory
Three design whizzes test-drive Lego's custom kit builder.
It's a common frustration: You set out to build a perfect replica of Babylon 5 (or whatever), only to find that you don't own enough gray plates for the twin particle arrays. It doesn't have to be this way. Now there's Lego Factory, a service that lets you create your very own Lego set.
Lego Factory starts with a downloadable 3-D modeling program that lets you design your virtual toy using as many bricks as you want. Upload your masterpiece to Lego's Web site and you – and any other Lego fan – can order the kit for your creation, complete with assembly instruction booklet. There are some rough edges: Instructions can be confusing, and blocks come in preset packages, meaning you often have to buy a whole bag to get a single piece. Still, it's a brilliant move. Customers get to make whatever they want, and Lego gets to transform its army of users into a massive product design team – 30,000 kits have been uploaded so far.
Not sure what to make? For inspiration we asked three creative pros to design kits for Wired. Now go build your own at lego.com/factory. – Sonia Zjawinski


text:
"That's Not the Democracy We Want"
Dr Josef Joffe, publisher and editor-in-chief of Germany's leading intellectual weekly 'Die Zeit' argues, that the Arab world "fell backwards" and has become impoverished mainly because it was unwilling to participate in globalisation. Do you share this point of view?
Tariq Ali: Let's just go through these countries in turn: Saudi Arabia – the Saudi monarchy which was handed the country first by the British empire and then by the American empire, backed with support initially by Britain, subsequently by the United States, military support…how can the people of the Peninsula be blamed for the Saudi family running it which was handed it by the United States like a mafia family? "This is your country, run it for us.
Keep the oil safe for us." These little sheikhdoms in the Arab world – imperial petrol stations – would be removed if it was not for western support. Or Egypt: how many billions of dollars has the United States given Mubarak to keep a reactionary government in power for one reason alone, that it made a deal with Israel? How can the Egyptians be blamed for it?
If you talk to people in Egypt, they will say to you, we want free elections. It's a puppet regime, why don't the United States push it to have free elections? Because they would lose. It's what Samuel Huntington is now calling the democratic paradox, that if you had democratic elections in the Arab world, a majority of these would produce governments that are hostile to the United States and their oil being siphoned off in the way it is. Then what would your ideologues say? You would have democracy, you would have governments which want control of their own oil. Then they'd have to be overthrown because it's not the democracy we wanted. This is the reality.
Of course in the Arab world you still have repressive regimes, and most of the mistakes the Arab leaders made themselves, but it's also a question of different imperialisms, first the British and then the American.
Do you see a new form of xenophobia rising in Europe?
Ali: Yes, I think this exists and I think this is an outcome of neo-liberal economic policies which have weakened collective solidarity in Western European society. Trade unions are much weaker than they were ever before, collective thinking, collective ways of operating are permanently under fire. Britain is the worst in this respect and so people are encouraged to be consumers. They are called customers. This is what is replacing citizenship, a form of consumerism. We are customers rather than citizens. And this leads people increasingly to the whole way in which modern capitalism is structuring itself to lead incredibly atomised existences. You think about yourself, full stop.
In this atmosphere there is a hostility to anything you feel might challenge your daily consumerist existence. Outsiders threaten it because you feel they are competitors. The west imposes legal and military sanctions against countries which do not accept the free market; and the movement of capital is sacred, but the movement of labour which should also be free is constantly stopped.
So capital movement has no restrictions but labour movement has restrictions: that's the way the west controls the world: "We will exploit you as much as we can but you can't come and be workers here because that affects the social fabric of our society", to which we say: "What you are doing globally affects the social fabric of Latin America, Africa, large parts of Asia."
Is the fear of Islamist terror in this context just a pretext? Would prejudices or even racism against the Arab world exist even without Islamist terror?
Ali: Since the end of the cold war the United States in particular has been looking for an enemy because unless you have an enemy it's impossible to justify the level of military spending or the priorities of the military industrial complex, which now dominates American economics and politics to a very large extent. In this situation it's not surprising that they used 9/11 to construct a new enemy.
And after 9/11 the whole world, the whole western world in particular, completely became uncritical of the United States for a while, then the Iraq war started that process again. But there is this xenophobia, the portrayal of Islam and Islamic people who are a potential threat, which is very foolish, but it exists. There is no doubt about it.
Current events may have weakened the reformist movements in the Islamic world, but are there still groups working for civil society in the Islamic world?
Ali: Yes, of course! You had elections in Pakistan many times. You had elections in Indonesia. You have a tradition of literature and poetry, especially in the Arab world, which is far more advanced than anything in the West. In some ways the repression forces people to go underground and they think in different ways, it also makes them more alert.
If you would tape record a conversation in a café in Damascus or Cairo or Baghdad today and tape record or film exactly at the same time cafés in the United States and then put them out then you would see what is being discussed in different parts of the world is very different. The Arab population is far more engaged, far more critical than its counterparts certainly in the United States and also in some states in Western Europe.
You read the poetry of Nizar Qabbani, of Saadi Youssef, of Mudhaffar al-Nawab, you find me their equivalents in the western world. I don't want to go too far, but what has Enzensberger written in Germany over the last 25 years? Nothing. Nothing which means anything. Instead the big trend of intellectuals in the west is to become people who are in the service in one way or the other of their respective governments.
The independence the intelligentsia used to have in Western Europe in the Sixties and Seventies is gone. France used to have Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoire, who is its leading intellectual today? Bernard-Henry Lévy, someone who does what is in the interest of French foreign policy. Let's get some sort of balance on this question of civil society and how it functions.
Who are the reformers in the Arab world?
Ali: The only reformers the west recognises are people who are complete stooges of the west, who are prepared to push through free market reforms. Those are the reformers, I don't accept that. I don't think these people do the Arab world a service. In Syria and in Iraq there were many, many problems under the Baathist dictatorship, we know that. But there are some things they have done which are not bad: the education of women, the integration of women in society, the health services that they have provided especially in Iraq – before the sanctions the country had one of the best health services in the Arab world. So they can't have it both ways.
Women in Syria and in Iraq were treated extremely well, educated, became doctors, teachers. You can walk in the streets of Damascus today and see large numbers of women wearing clothes of all sorts without their heads being covered. So what is this? I don't like these stereotypes of the Muslim world, each country has its different traditions.
What prospects have reform movements to succeed?
Ali: When I go to Arab countries, Egypt for instance, many good people have been so demoralised by what's been going on for the last twenty years that in this neo-liberal world, apart from individualism and consumerism, the global way this functions is by creating little non-governmental organisations which are given money by the West. These are groups of people who would otherwise be engaged doing something more useful, but they are paid big salaries to do research on gender relation on a cotton plant outside Cairo. Well, that's very interesting, but I'm sorry, academics in the universities should be doing this, not NGOs! It's a way of buying off people, this is not how civil society works.
Civil society would operate better if these people who are all in NGOs would form political organisations and offered alternatives to the religious groups and the corrupt regimes. That's the big problem in the Arab world today.
We have a set of corrupt venal regimes, most of them backed by the west, and poised against them in the field are the Islamists. But in the middle there is nothing. And that's the space which needs to be occupied by secular forces. I have always argued that secular intellectuals have to insist that they have just as much a right as the religious scholars to analyse and interpret the texts which are the common cultural property of everyone who lives in that region and break the monopoly of the clerics.
Interview: Tariq al-Arab, © Qantara.de 2004


text:
Business Services
Our Role
The Georgia Department of Law's Consumer Protection Division strives to ensure a level playing field for lawful businesses in Georgia and to protect them from fraudulent operators who would otherwise be competing for consumer revenue.
The principal law this office enforces, the Georgia Fair Business Practices Act, states as its purpose "to protect consumers and legitimate business enterprises from unfair or deceptive practices in the conduct of any trade or commerce in part or wholly in the state. It is the intent of the General Assembly," the Act continues, "that such practices be swiftly stopped, and this [law] shall be liberally construed and applied to promote its underlying purposes and policies [O.C.G.A. Section 10-1-391(a)]."
As an extension of its consumer-protective role, Georgia Department of Law's Consumer Protection Division has been charged by the state legislature with specific administrative responsibilities with regard to certain kinds of businesses. This includes acting as the custodian of official documents the law requires these companies to file.
Georgia Department of Law's Consumer Protection Division administers Georgia's Lemon Law and enforces the collection of Lemon Law fees from automobile dealers, as well as certifying vehicle manufacturers' informal dispute settlement programs. We issue licenses to buying services and pre-approve the membership contracts of health spas or fitness centers. Debt adjustment companies must file copies of their insurance policies and annual audits with our office.
You can find more information and any forms you are required to submit by following these links:
- Forms for Your Use
- Allowable ID Requirements
- Buying Service Licenses
- Child Support Collection Companies - Required Filings
- Debt Adjustment Companies - Required Filings
- Disposal of Customers' Business Records
- Emergency Price Controls
- Health Spas | Fitness Centers
- Kosher Food
- Motor Vehicle Dealers | Motor Vehicle Manufacturers
- Multilevel Distribution | Business Opportunity - Consent to Service


text:
Opportunities at FirstLine Schools
Thank you for your interest in career opportunities with FirstLine Schools!
Through this website, you can apply for available and future opportunities at any of our five schools and at our network office. The positions listed below include immediate vacancies, school specific positions for the 2012-13 school year, and future opportunities. We anticipate instructional vacancies across all grade levels and subject areas for the 2012-2013 school year and are accepting applications. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis for all positions and referred to the appropriate hiring manager. In some cases, this may mean that your application is referred to multiple schools.
Search Openings
Tips for filling out the online application:
Previous Applicants
If you have previously applied to a position on our website, please login below.
To fill out a general application form click here.


text:
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced today $23 million in grants for 371 humanities projects. This funding will support a wide variety of projects, including research fellowships and awards for independent scholars and college and university teachers, traveling exhibitions, the preservation of humanities collections in smaller institutions, and educational programs to prepare libraries, museums, and archives to preserve and enhance access to their collections. The grants will also support humanities initiatives at historically black, high Hispanic enrollment, and tribal colleges and universities and help institutions improve and secure long-term support for their humanities programs and resources.
Among the grants announced are research fellowships to produce a biography of Ella Fitzgerald and an examination of the U.S. State Department's sponsorship of musicians as part of its Cold War cultural diplomacy programs. Funding will also allow the Newark Museum to renovate and expand its African art galleries and support a project to collect, preserve, and develop curricular resources from the oral histories of elders of the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community. Thirty libraries across the country received grants to develop public programming around the life and work of Louisa May Alcott.
Several grants awarded this cycle will assist libraries, museums, and archives in environmental monitoring of humanities collections, disaster preparedness planning, and training staff in conservation techniques. Grants in this area will help preserve valuable humanities collections, including archival materials documenting Alexander Graham Bell's work with the deaf, a collection of 5,000 rare books that includes first editions of Ernest Hemingway and a 16th-century edition of The Aeneid at Pepperdine University, and the State Historical Society of Missouri's collection of oral histories documenting Missouri politics, rural life, and interviews with former WWII prisoners of war.
This funding cycle also marks the first Bridging Cultures through Film grant awards. This new grant program, part of NEH's signature Bridging Cultures initiative, supports documentary film projects that examine international and transnational themes in the humanities. Among the projects supported in this category is a film exploring the evolution of economic, social, and cultural relations between China and Africa from the fifteenth century to the modern day, and a documentary on the Balkan civil war and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia's prosecution of war crimes against women.
This award cycle, institutions and independent scholars in 49 states and the District of Columbia will receive NEH support. Complete state-by-state listings of grants are available at the top of the page.
Selected projects have received a We the People designation for their efforts to strengthen the teaching, study, and understanding of American history and culture. In this cycle, grants were awarded in the following categories:
- America's Historical & Cultural Organizations Planning and Implementation Grants support traveling or long-term museum exhibitions, library-based projects, interpretation of historical places or areas, websites, and other project formats that engage audiences in exploring humanities ideas and questions. Planning grants develop the content, interpretive approach, and formats of projects; implementation grants support their final development, design, and production.
- Bridging Cultures through Film Grants support the development and production of documentary films that examine international and transnational themes in the humanities.
- Challenge Grants strengthen the humanities by encouraging non-federal sources of support and helping institutions secure long-term improvements in and support for their humanities programs and resources. Recipients are required to match NEH funds on a three-to-one or, in some cases, two-to-one basis.
- Faculty Research Awards support advanced research in the humanities by teachers at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Institutions with High Hispanic Enrollment, and Tribal Colleges and Universities.
- Fellowships support college and university teachers and independent scholars pursuing advanced research.
- Fellowships for Advanced Social Science Research on Japan is a joint activity of the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission (JASFC) and the NEH. Awards support research on modern Japanese society and political economy, Japan's international relations, and U.S.- Japan relations.
- Humanities Initiatives for Faculty Grants are intended to strengthen and enrich humanities education and scholarship at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Institutions with High Hispanic Enrollment, and Tribal College and Universities.
- NEH On the Road Grants extend the reach of museum exhibitions redesigned for travel to smaller-scale institutions in cities throughout America.
- Preservation Assistance Grants help institutions—particularly small and mid-sized institutions—improve their ability to preserve and care for their humanities collections, including special collections of books and journals, archives and manuscripts, prints and photographs, moving images, sound recordings, architectural and cartographic records, decorative and fine arts, textiles, archaeological and ethnographic artifacts, furniture, and historical objects.
- Preservation Education and Training Grants help the staff of cultural institutions obtain the knowledge and skills needed to serve as effective stewards of humanities collections. Grants also support educational programs that prepare the next generation of conservators and preservation professionals, as well as projects that introduce the staff of cultural institutions to recent improvements in preservation and access practices.
- Small Grants to Libraries: Louisa May Alcott support library programming examining the life and work of Louisa May Alcott, building upon the NEH-supported documentary Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women and companion biography of the same name.


text:
Hurdle, staff to discuss details of expanded replay
BRADENTON, Fla. -- On the fields of Florida and Arizona, baseball players are working on playing the game right. Behind the scenes, players and managers are learning about playing the game differently.
The Pirates will be involved in post-practice Sunday meetings that will deal with the two major issues being introduced for the 2014 season.
Team player representative Neil Walker will participate in a gathering of Players Association officials to go over details of the proposed ban on plate collisions between catchers and baserunners. The players union has to ratify any change in that rule.
Concurrently, Bucs skipper Clint Hurdle and most of his coaching staff will represent one of six teams at an MLB presentation in Port Charlotte on the execution of expanded replay. It will be one of the MLB's barnstorming gatherings to go over rules governing the expansion of replay from merely boundary home run calls. The new rules will go into effect with the exhibition season, which the Pirates will begin with Wednesday's meeting with the Yankees in McKechnie Field.
Hurdle, along with managers of three or four other teams training in the vicinity, will get his first extensive debriefing on expanded replay since the Winter Meetings in early December.
"I've done my studies, and look forward to meeting with MLB," said Hurdle, who plans to use his manager's challenge "intelligently and with purpose to get a call right."
"There will be some strategy involved," Hurdle added. "It'll be like any other strategic move you make. That means, yeah, you're going to be second-guessed. That doesn't bother me. If I'm doing what in my heart I think is best for the club, I can live with it."


text:
When you first put a site on the internet you need to do something to drive traffic to your website. That's where off-site optimization comes in. Google wants the most popular and reputable sites to appear at the top of the search results, one of the the ways that they determine this is to review who is linking to you and how much traffic is coming into your site from other sites.
If you have not opened any inbound links and are doing anything to drive traffic other than having a site, you wont get a lot of first pages. Certainly not any very competitive search phrases.
There are a number of ways to do this. Ask your clients to link to you if you sell B2B, Write educational content and post it on opinion sites, use video optimization to drive traffic from YouTube and other video sites, and list your site in internet directories are the most common and effective means of offsite optimization.


text:
Ravens inside linebacker Jameel McClain returned to practice today for the first time since suffering a spinal cord contusion last December against the Washington Redskins.
McClain remains on the reserve-physically unable to perform list, but can be activated at any time. He participated fully.
Backup nose tackle Terrence Cody returned to practice from a sprained left knee. Cody has been sidelined since getting hurt against the Houston Texans.
Cody was limited in his return.
Just three players weren't practicing: defensive end Chris Canty inside linebackers Josh Bynes and Albert McClellan.
Bynes has an infected finger, which coach John Harbaugh said isn't serious.
McClellan has been not practicing during the week and then playing special teams on Sundays.
Canty was listed with a thigh injury.
Several players were limited, including cornerback Chykie Brown (hamstring), center Ryan Jensen (foot surgery), nose tackle Haloti Ngata (left elbow), outside linebacker Courtney Upshaw (foot) and cornerback Lardarius Webb (strained hamstring).
Ngata briefly left the game Sunday during a 19-17 loss to the Green Bay Packers before returning and finishing.
"It wasn't that bad," Ngata said. "It wasn't bad enough to keep me out."
Defensive end Marcus Spears (knee) and wide receiver Brandon Stokley (hip, groin) participated fully.
"Man, I feel pretty good," said Spears, who has been out the past two games. "I think the way we went about it was real smart. I can go out and play and be the guy that I am instead of trying to hobble along and not give the team the best chance. Everybody has been great about it."
The Steelers ruled out wide receiver Markus Wheaton (finger).
Rookie linebacker Jarvis Jones didn't practice due to a head injury.
Four players were limited: offensive tackle Marcus Gilbert (quadriceps), defensive end Brett Keisel (abdomen), tight end Heath Miller (non-injury reasons) and outside linebacker LaMarr Woodley (knee).


text:
(The Root) — Before we start our interview, Rod Paige wants to be clear. "I'm not speaking for the Romney campaign," he said. "I'm speaking for me."
As Mitt Romney's special adviser on education, Paige nonetheless offers, in addition to his own views, insights on the presidential candidate's education agenda. The former secretary of education under President George W. Bush, born in 1933 in segregated Mississippi, Paige was named to the Romney campaign last month. He has also served as a teacher, dean of the College of Education at Texas Southern University and superintendent of the Houston Independent School District.
His disclaimer, perhaps, comes on account of his reputation for being plainspoken. In 2004, for example, Paige likened the National Education Association, one of the nation's largest labor unions, to "a terrorist organization" (he later recanted). He was also mired in a scandal when officials of Houston's school system were found to have underreported dropout numbers during his tenure as superintendent.
In Paige's new role in the Romney campaign, he is helping the former Massachusetts governor shape a national education policy. "The current administration sees the solution to almost every problem as more federal mandates, more federal funding and more federal control," he told The Root, commenting on the primary difference between the two candidates' approaches. "Gov. Romney is [calling for] the opposite of that."
During the interview, Paige further explained why he thinks school vouchers are not only viable but necessary, warned that teachers unions are "too powerful" and identified the biggest challenge for low-performing public schools.
The Root: Gov. Romney has said that, if elected, he will either consolidate the Department of Education with another agency or otherwise significantly reduce it. As the former secretary of education, what are your thoughts on that?
Rod Paige: My view of it is that Gov. Romney wants the Department of Education to work as efficiently and effectively as possible. He's stated that he does see a federal role in education — and that's different from some of the people who have been calling for the Department of Education to go away. So for a new leader to come in and say he wants to take a look at the agency and make sure that it is an efficient organization, operating at a cost that is effective, I think is entirely appropriate.
TR: Gov. Romney's desire to cut education spending has been criticized by Democratic opponents who argue that this funding is critical for low-income students and public schools. Do you agree that education is an area from which spending can be cut?
Like The Root on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter.
RP: First of all, let me say clearly that Gov. Romney, as far as I know, has not laid out any specific cuts in education spending.
TR: He has supported the Paul Ryan budget, which makes education cuts from Head Start to Pell Grants, and has said that he would like to see it fully adopted.
RP: Laying out his own specific cuts for education spending is a different situation. I support the idea of making sure that spending is carefully targeted and meeting the needs that it's targeted to meet. Gov. Romney's saying that he wants to make sure that the dollars we are spending are getting the job done, and those dollars that are not should be eliminated.
TR: One specific proposal that Gov. Romney has made is putting federal education funds toward vouchers for low-income students to attend the school of their family's choice. How viable do you think this plan is for all low-income families who would want to do this?
RP: It is absolutely viable, and school choice is a necessary condition for effective school operations. I think it is [dubious] to tie a child to a school that's not performing well. That is not promoting the child's attention; that is promoting detention. Gov. Romney's idea of increasing school choice for parents should be applauded, especially for African-American families who are finding [an approximately] 25-point achievement gap relative to their Anglo counterparts all over the United States.
Clearly we have a capacity problem that we would need to work on. We want to make sure we find places where children can go that would improve their circumstances, but this is a step in the right direction.
TR: Meanwhile, what proposals do you have for helping low-performing public schools?
RP: The biggest challenge is structural capacity — having more great teachers. Although we have many great teachers, we need more. The number one way that we can improve our educational performance is to strengthen the structural capacity. If I had the whole [education secretary] thing to do over again, that is one area I would be much more forceful in. The Title II part of No Child Left Behind (pdf) should be strengthened to make sure that we provide maximum support for teachers.
TR: While visiting a Philadelphia charter school last month, Gov. Romney asserted that class size has no correlation with student performance, a point on which the school's teachers disagreed. Do you feel that the research showing that class size doesn't matter is definitive?
RP: Class size is important, but it is not the solution that it's been made out to be. If you're given a choice between a great teacher with a class size of 28 and a mediocre teacher with a class size of 20, what choice would you take? You would take the choice of the better teacher. In fact, here's a quote from your education secretary, Arne Duncan: "Class size is a sacred cow, and I think we need to take it on." He's saying almost exactly what I'm saying.
Although the teacher would be even greater in a smaller class, it is not the silver bullet that it is being promoted to be by many who would like to increase the number of teachers so they can pay more union dues. It's primarily the teacher unions that have promoted this idea.
TR: You've been very critical of teachers unions. How do you think they are blocking the education reforms you would like to see?
RP: I think that the teacher unions represent one of the most damaging burdens on reform initiatives to improve schools. They are one of the most powerful political entities in all of the education space. The National Education Association alone, the largest of the teacher organizations, contributes more to political campaigns than any other organization in the United States of America. More than Exxon Mobil, Wal-Mart and Goldman Sachs combined.
In many cases, school boards represent the entities that make school policy and negotiate issues around teacher salaries and teacher employment and termination. Teacher organizations are very influential in determining who the people sitting on these boards are, so you can see how they have unusual control over school operations.
TR: Do you propose limiting that influence in any particular way?
RP: I recognize the right for them to be involved politically, and I'm not suggesting that teachers unions go away. Unions serve a purpose. My uncle was a member of the Pullman porters' union, and I know all about how important that union was in developing the African-American middle class.
There's an important role for teachers unions, but they have grown to a point where they are too powerful. And that is a detriment to school reform. School reform is not going to happen, because they are not going to support anything that significantly changes the status quo. They are only going to support the marginal issues.
Cynthia Gordy is The Root's senior political correspondent.


text:
The crazy swings in temperature in the northeast make it a ripe season for a bumper crop of potholes, explains AccuWeather.
AccuWeather Global Weather Center — 17 January 2014 — AccuWeather.com reports another round of frigid air is moving into the United States, and the results could be messy for roadways in the Northeast.
Early January brought a string of icy, record-low temperatures to many parts of the Midwest and the East, with each state in the Union hitting the freezing mark in at least one location on Jan. 7.
The following warmup, with above-average highs, and a string of rain melted a good deal of snow across the country, particularly in the Northeast, triggering some flooding problems and ice jams. When water hits paved roads, it can seep into the asphalt and cracks in the streets and can remain below the surface.
Now as another piece of the polar vortex is invading the United States, that water melt will likely refreeze, causing expansion and frost heaves, much to the dismay of many commuters.
"The frost heaves the ground beneath [the roads] and creates some buckles in the pavement, followed by cracks," AccuWeather.com Senior Meteorologist Alex Sosnowski said. "Water gets in the cracks and freezes, expands, making the cracks bigger. Then traffic breaks off more pieces of pavement. A rainstorm can then get more water in there loosening up more pavement."
"Freeze and thaw cycles are the key. The more you have, the more potholes," he said.
The Massachusetts Department of Transportation's Klark Jessen agreed, adding that the weight of vehicles and the pavement's age, as well as snow and ice operations, are contributors to the pothole problem.
This cycle can be a headache for travelers and potentially damaging to vehicles. According to Popular Mechanics, running over a pothole too hard can bend tire rims, a damage costs that can run more than $150 to repair.
"Down South, they [typically] don't get the freeze that penetrates into the ground. Way up north most winters, they don't get the thaw until the spring, so pothole season is shorter," Sosnowski said.
The fluctuating pattern that the U.S. has been experiencing so far this season could be adding extra wear and tear on the roadways.
An additional problem for roadways in the winter months is that long-term solutions need warmer air to work properly. According to Jessen, "cold patch" asphalt, which is only a temporary solution, may be used in lower temperatures.


text:
GameBirdHunts.com is your online source for hunting & shooting news. All of our news is organized by US state to make it easy for you to quickly find the Pheasant Hunting News that is of interest to you! Click on the link below to browse your states upland hunting news or use the search box above! If you have a hunting story you would like to submit please use this link:
Pierre S.D.- Shouts of "rooster, rooster!" spread through South Dakota fields as pheasant season shifts into high gear. While that excitement is part of the thrill of the hunt, Game, Fish and Parks officials also remind hunters to exercise caution and restraint, especially when flushing low-flying roosters.
During 2008, many of South Dakota's reported hunting accidents occurred during pheasant hunts, quite often when hunters fired at low-flying birds.
"Several accidents occurred last hunting season where hunters swung their shotguns at birds and inadvertently fired in the direction of people in the background," said Hunter Safety Program Specialist Curt Robertson. "It's important to know what's beyond your target before you pull the trigger because someone's life may depend on it."
Hunters using the "walkers and blockers" method need to be extra careful. Last year, several walkers and blockers were injured.
Whether walking a cornfield, milo field or chest-high weeds, hunters in groups are at risk for injury from shots fired at low-flying roosters. "The shot string from a shotgun at a low-flying bird is typically at the upper body level," Robertson noted, "resulting in injuries to the head, neck, chest and arms."
Robertson stated that hunters should always wear orange hats, vests and protective shooting glasses.
"The key to a safe hunt is to know where all hunters in your party are at all times," he said. "If you don't know where they are, don't shoot."
The annual brood count taken last summer indicates that there are plenty of birds out there, Robertson said.
"Let the grass skimmers go and wait for the next chance. It's not worth the risk of injuring one of your hunting companions."
List Dog Breeders
Alabama Upland News
Alaska Upland News
Arizona Upland News
Arkansas Upland News
California Upland News
Colorado Upland News
Connecticut Upland News
Delaware Upland News
Florida Upland News
Georgia Upland News
Hawaii Upland News
Idaho Upland News
Illinois Upland News
Indiana Upland News
Iowa Upland News
Kansas Upland News
Kentucky Upland News
Louisiana Upland News
Maine Upland News
Maryland Upland News
Massachusetts Upland News
Michigan Upland News
Minnesota Upland News
Mississippi Upland News
Missouri Upland News
Montana Upland News
Nebraska Upland News
Nevada Upland News
New Hampshire Upland News
New Jersey Upland News
New Mexico Upland News
New York Upland News
North Carolina Upland News
North Dakota Upland News
Ohio Upland News
Oklahoma Upland News
Oregon Upland News
Pennsylvania Upland News
Rhode Island Upland News
South Carolina Upland News
South Dakota Upland News
Tennessee Upland News
Texas Upland News
Utah Upland News
Vermont Upland News
Virginia Upland News
Washington Upland News
West Virginia Upland News
Wisconsin Upland News
Wyoming Upland News


text:
2977 County Hwy. CX
Portage, WI 53901
Phone: (608) 742-3004
Free wireless Internet available
UW Health providers see patients at other health care facilities in Portage. Learn More
Building Hours: 8am-5pm Monday-Friday
Lab Hours: 8am-5pm Monday - Friday
Imaging Services: Diagnostic Imaging - 8:30am-5pm
With each visit to a UW Health clinic, we strive to exceed your expectations. You are welcome to contact the clinic manager if you would like personal assistance with any issue. Simply call the scheduling number for the clinic you visited and ask for the clinic manager. If you would care to Submit a Compliment, Concern or Complaint in a more formal manner, please contact Patient Relations.


text:
Teen suspect in Colo. girl killing to enter plea
Austin Sigg charged in slaying of Jessica Ridgeway
The teen accused of kidnapping, killing and dismembering a 10-year-old Colorado girl is expected to plead guilty Tuesday to the horrific crime because he told police he knew what he did was wrong and he wanted to give his victim's family some level of comfort.
Austin Sigg is charged with murder, kidnapping and sexual assault in the Oct. 5 disappearance and slaying of Jessica Ridgeway in the Denver suburb of Westminster. The case led parents and school officials to take extraordinary precautions to keep children safe, and residents were encouraged to report suspicious behavior by neighbors.
Sigg, who turned 18 in January, cannot face the death penalty because he was 17 at the time of the slaying. He faces life in prison with the possibility of parole after 40 years if convicted.
While investigators testified that Sigg confessed to strangling Jessica and then dismembering her body in a bathtub, he vehemently denied sexually assaulting her. No semen was found on the girl's body, according to previous testimony in the case.
It's unclear whether prosecutors will drop the sexual assault charges in exchange for a guilty plea to murder in order to avoid a prolonged trial. Prosecutors added the sexual assault charges because authorities said they found child pornography during the investigation.
Prosecutors and defense attorneys won't comment on whether Sigg will plead guilty to all or some of the charges because a judge has issued a gag order in the case.
Sigg also is charged with an earlier attack on a runner in Jessica's neighborhood.
Jessica, a fifth-grade student, disappeared after she left her house to meet a friend just two blocks away so they could walk to school together. Her torso was discovered in a field in the nearby suburb of Arvada, while other remains were found at Sigg's mother's house after she called police.
At a Feb. 23 preliminary hearing, investigators presented 911 recordings in which Sigg told police, "I murdered Jessica Ridgeway. I have proof that I did it."
Westminster police officer Albert Stutson testified that Sigg told him during questioning that he planned to plead guilty. He asked officials if it would give Jessica's family comfort if he were held accountable. Stutson said Sigg told him "he knew what he did was wrong and that he would make up for it someday."
Officers testified that Sigg told them that some of Jessica's remains were hidden in a crawl space in the home of his mother, where he lived. They said Sigg also told them how he abducted Jessica as she walked past his car. He bound her arms and legs with zip ties, placed her in the back seat and took her to his house, where he strangled her, police said.
Hundreds of local, state and federal officers canvassed the Westminster area after Jessica's disappearance, investigating leads and even taking residents' DNA samples. Parents waited with their children at school bus stops or drove them to and from school. The FBI took the unusual step of asking residents to keep an eye out on neighbors - and even family members - and report suspicious behavior.
One resident contacted authorities Oct. 19 to alert them about Sigg because he had a fascination with death, Westminster detective Luis Lopez testified. Sigg was interested in a mortuary science program at a local community college, police said. Two FBI agents responded and took a DNA sample from Sigg on Oct. 19.
Mindy Sigg told investigator Michael Lynch that her son appeared sick and confessed four days after the FBI visit. He opened the conversation by saying he was a "monster," she said.
Mindy Sigg then called 911 to say her son wanted to turn himself in and had confessed to killing the girl. When the dispatcher asked what her son had said, Mindy Sigg replied, "That he did it, and he gave me details, and her remains are in my house."
Sigg also faces an attempted kidnapping charge for the attack on a 22-year-old woman who was running at a lake across the street from Jessica's elementary school. An investigator testified that Sigg used homemade chloroform concocted with a recipe found on the Internet to attempt to subdue the woman.
Jessica lived in Westminster with her mother, Sarah Ridgeway. Jessica's father, Jeremiah Bryant, lives in the Kansas City suburb of Independence, Mo.


text:
September 2007
If You Want to Choose a School for Your Child
What to Look for in a School
If your child attends a Title I school that has not met Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) for the third year, you may want to transfer your child to another school. You may start by looking at the options offered by your school district. If your state says your child's public school is in need of improvement, the school district must give you the choice of having your child stay in that school or sending him or her to another public school. Also, if your state says your neighborhood school is "persistently dangerous," or if your child has been the victim of a violent crime at school, you can transfer your child to another school in the district. In addition, many school districts offer parents a range of choices based on academic need or interest—to attend a magnet school or charter school, for example, or to go to a school with an honors or advanced placement emphasis. And some places offer scholarships for students to attend private schools.
In choosing a public school for your child, ask the school district office what the public school choice policies and procedures are and how to enroll your child. Here are some steps to help you find the right fit for your child's needs:
Consider your child and your family. Think about what you want a school to do for your child. Your child may have special talents, interests or education needs. Consider your child's learning style: does he learn best by listening or by reading; or, does she like to work in groups or work alone? You may want to look at the location of the school: is it better to be close to your house or close to your work; or, do you want the school to be close to an after-school or tutoring program?
Gather information about the different schools. You may want to talk to friends or neighbors to find out about the schools their children attend. Also, look for local newspaper articles about how the public schools in the area are performing. You may want to call schools and ask about their school report cards, and you may want to go to parent fairs and school open houses. Take a look at the school's curriculum, approach to learning, behavior policy and safety record. Look too, at any special activities or programs the school might offer, such as sports or arts programs, and the services the school provides, such as access to computers, a school nurse on-site or after-school programs.
Visit and observe schools. If possible, tour a school during regular school hours and visit a few classes. Schedule an appointment with the school principal to discuss any questions you have. Try to understand the "culture" of the school—how does it feel being there? Do the students look happy? Are the teachers friendly and involved? Is the school building cheerful and clean? Does the school display student artwork, writings or awards?
Talk with the principal. Find out his or her approach to education and whether parent involvement is welcomed at the school. If so, what ways may a parent be active? Does the school have a parent-teacher association? If the school is a Title I school, does it have an active parent advisory council (PAC)? (If it is a Title I school, money is set aside to assist parents in helping their child.) What programs does the school have for Title I parents?
—Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings
One Parent's Story
Kisha was a very active child. She had been in preschool, and her mother knew she would need a stimulating and expressive environment when she started kindergarten. Kisha's mother looked at the different types of schools in her district. She worked with the school system to enroll Kisha in an arts magnet elementary school, which met Kisha's need to be creative while learning reading, math and science.*
*This anecdote is based on an interview with a parent conducted during the preparation of the Empowering Parents School Box. The story is for illustration only. The child's name has been changed to protect her privacy.
What are the different types of schools?
Public schools
Public schools are funded by tax dollars.
Neighborhood public schools are traditional public schools where your child is assigned by the school district, based on where you live.
Charter schools are public schools of choice, which generally operate free of many local and state regulations but are accountable to organizations that monitor their academic results and financial management.
Magnet schools are public schools designed to attract students from diverse social, economic, ethnic and racial backgrounds by focusing on a specific area such as science, technology or the arts.
Private schools
Private schools are elementary or secondary schools run and supported by private individuals, groups or corporations rather than by a government or public agency. Some are affiliated with religious organizations. Families pay a fee or tuition to attend private schools. Some private schools have scholarships for low-income families.
Your NOTES for Choosing a School—————————————————————————————————


text:
CLEVELAND - Kyrie Irving scored 35 points, including 13 in the final 2:52, and the Cleveland Cavaliers stunned the Oklahoma City Thunder 115-110 on Saturday.
One night after saying he was "disinterested" during a loss in Detroit, Irving was simply spectacular down the stretch. He single-handedly closed out one of the NBA's best teams, making his last five shots and showing why he's an All-Star at 20. Irving's biggest shot was a 3-pointer with 42 seconds left to make it 113-108.
Kevin Durant scored 32 points and Russell Westbrook had 28 for the Thunder, who came in 35-11 and with the league's best road record. Durant left briefly in the third quarter with an apparent back injury.
Marreese Speights scored 21 points, including eight straight in the fourth when Cleveland's reserves opened a lead.
SAN ANTONIO (AP) — Tim Duncan sprained his left knee and right ankle in the first half of the Spurs' victory.
Tony Parker scored 19 points, Danny Green added 15 and Tiago Splitter had 12 for San Antonio (38-11), which has won 18 straight at home.
John Wall scored 21 points and Martell Webster had 14 for Washington (11-35), which has lost 13 straight to San Antonio.
Webster rolled into the back of Duncan's legs while fighting for a rebound with 3:54 left in the second quarter, and there were audible gasps in the crowd while the All-Star was on the floor holding his left knee for several minutes.
Duncan left the locker room without speaking to reporters, but Parker said he talked to his fellow All-Star after the game.
"He's fine, he's fine," Parker said. "It's nothing big."
NEW YORK (AP) — Amare Stoudemire was 10 for 10 from the field for 21 points, and the Knicks unleashed a 38-4 run on Sacramento in the first half and went on to their fourth straight victory.
The Knicks actually trailed by 10 when Stoudemire entered in the first quarter, then went on to challenge the franchise-record victory margin of 48 points.
It was an awesome display by New York in front of some special guests: 150 children, their families and teachers from Sandy Hook Elementary School. The Knicks didn't even need much from Carmelo Anthony, who tied a season low with nine points and had his run of 20-point games snapped at 31, the longest single-season streak in franchise history.
J.R. Smith scored 25 points and Steve Novak added 15 as the Knicks made 19 3-pointers.
DeMarcus Cousins had 25 points and nine rebounds for the Kings.
HOUSTON (AP) — James Harden had 21 points, 11 rebounds and 11 assists for his first career triple-double, leading the Rockets to the victory.
Bobcats rookie Michael Kidd-Gilchrist was taken off the court on a stretcher in the fourth quarter after teammate Jeff Taylor collided with him going for a rebound. Kidd-Gilchrist was fitted with a neck brace and taken to the hospital.
The team said late Saturday night that Kidd-Gilchrist would be hospitalized overnight with a concussion. The X-rays and a CT scan were negative, the Bobcats said.
Chandler Parsons and Patrick Patterson scored 24 points apiece for the Rockets.
Kemba Walker scored 24 points and Ramon Sessions had 20 points for Charlotte.
The Rockets scored 28 fast-break points and shot 51 per cent (42 of 82) from the field.
ATLANTA (AP) — Luol Deng had 25 points and 14 rebounds, and the short-handed Bulls used their stifling defence to shut down the Hawks.
Playing without injured starters Kirk Hinrich, Joakim Noah and Carlos Boozer, Chicago dominated near the basket and got a lift from the frenetic play of Nate Robinson. The Bulls used only eight players for the second straight night, but it was more than enough for an impressive road win.
Taj Gibson had 19 points and a career-high 19 rebounds. Jimmy Butler added another double-double with 16 points and 10 rebounds. Robinson scored 20 points.
Josh Smith led Atlanta with 19 points and 13 rebounds but he scored only three points in the second half. Jeff Teague had 16 points, and Al Horford collected 14 points and 12 rebounds.
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Damian Lillard had 23 points and the Trail Blazers salvaged the second half of back-to-back games between division rivals.
Utah beat Portland 86-77 on Friday night in Salt Lake City.
J.J. Hickson added 21 points and 11 rebounds for the Blazers, who have won four of their last six after a season-high six-game losing streak. Nicolas Batum had 12 points, 10 rebounds and nine assists.
Randy Foye scored 23 points for the Jazz, who led by as many as 10 points in the third quarter.
The Blazers led 88-83 on Nolan Smith's reverse layup with 4:59 left in the game. He added a 3-pointer that made it 93-87 and Portland held off the Jazz the rest of the way.
OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) — Stephen Curry returned after missing two games with an ankle injury and scored 19 of his 29 points in the second half, leading Golden State to its fourth consecutive victory.
Harrison Barnes matched his season high with 21 points for the Warriors, who have won seven of nine overall. David Lee had 16 points and 12 rebounds, Klay Thompson added 17 points and Andrew Bogut finished with 11.
Curry, who twisted his right ankle in the third quarter of Monday night's win over Toronto, was 6 for 10 from 3-point range as Golden State beat Phoenix for the fourth straight time.
Michael Beasley scored 24 points for the Suns, who have dropped four of five. Jared Dudley added 16 points.
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Dante Cunningham scored a season-high 18 points, Nikola Pekovic added 14 and Minnesota snapped a six-game losing streak.
Cunningham hit all nine of his shots to set a franchise record for most consecutive field goals without a miss.
Anthony Davis scored 18 points for the Hornets, who played without Eric Gordon and finished their five-game road trip with four straight losses. Team doctors still haven't cleared Gordon to play in back-to-back games while recovering from knee surgery.
A night after committing 22 turnovers, New Orleans turned it over 23 times against the Wolves, who recorded their largest victory margin this season.
MILWAUKEE (AP) — Monta Ellis had 21 points and 11 assists as the Bucks handed the Magic their ninth straight loss.
Brandon Jennings scored 20 points and Larry Sanders had 17 points, 13 rebounds and six blocked shots for Milwaukee. Ersan Ilyasova added 16 points and eight rebounds.
Nikola Vucevic had 20 points, 12 rebounds and six assists for Orlando, and Maurice Harkless had 19 points and 14 rebounds.
The Bucks scored more than 100 points after failing to crack 90 in their two previous games, scoring 86 against New York on Friday, and 88 versus Chicago on Wednesday.


text:
- Home
- Products
- Bags and Pouches
- 5.75 x 7.75" Compostable Cellophane Bags
Other Details
Buy in Bulk and Save!
- Buy 10 - 24 and get 5% off
- Buy 25 - 49 and get 10% off
- Buy 50 or above and get 15% off
Discount will be applied at checkout
|This product is available for pre-order only
Product Description
These 5.75 x 7.75" cello bags are made with certified compostable films. They meet FDA requirements for direct candy and food contact. They are perfect for presenting or storing handmade candy, nuts, spices, cake mixes, baked goods, apparel, gifts, and more.
- Clear 1.2 mil Cellophane Bags
- Bag structure is made using 100% certified compostable, non-GMO films. The bag structure is not currently BPI certified.
- Meet FDA requirements for direct food contact
- Heat sealable with high oxygen barrier properties*
- Water and oil resistant
- FSC Certified wood-based Bioplastic
- Made in USA
- Bags branded "Compostable Elevate Packaging"
*These cello bags may be heat sealed, however the seal may not be air-tight. For an air-tight seal, stand-up pouches are recommended as they have a special sealing layer.
Need closure tabs or tape? Try our Compostable Closure Seals!
For bulk purchase 100+ packs please email firstname.lastname@example.com for pricing
Further Information
The compostable films used to produce our cello bags are derived from sustainable wood pulp. In support of regenerative agriculture practices, the films used to manufacture the bags are 100% compostable, vegan, and non-GMO.The films do not contain any bisphenol (including BPA and over a dozen other derivatives), and are free of phthalates. Our Wood-based BioFilm is made of 97% non-GMO biomass!
BioPlastic products are water-resistant, not Waterproof. Not intended for constant or regular contact with liquids, creams, or moisture. We recommend testing in the type of environment and with expected use from start to finish to be certain the material meets all requirements and expectations before purchase. The bags are suitable for anaerobic digestion, aiding the diversion of organic wastes from landfill.
The bioplastic material is made from FSC-certified wood cellulose fibers sourced using sustainable forestry principles, the best alternative to non-GMO PLA. The films used to produce these bags are 97 per cent renewable content (ASTM D6866 Carbon Testing) and meet the European EN 13432 and American ASTM D6400 composting norms for CA and other states. Complies with FDA regulations for food packaging.


text:
Cookies on the Epiroc website
No, I want to read more
Drill rigs
Loaders & trucks (LHDs)
Mechanical rock excavation
Excavator attachments
Raiseboring equipment
Rock drilling tools
Rock reinforcement
Ventilation systems
A reliable industry partner
Find out how our solutions can help you reach a better result
Water, oil and gas
With a comprehensive product and service offering
Demolition and recycling
Our full range of hydraulic demolition tools covers the whole process
Automation and information management
Custom engineered solutions
Fluid management solutions
Reman solutions
Replacement parts and kits
Rock drills and rotation units
Midlife services
Service agreements and audits
Service tools
Training products
Explore our complete range of products, all designed to help you achieve the highest possible productivity with the lowest possible maintenance costs within the mineral exploration industry.
Contact us
For us, safety always comes first. Our complete range of exploration drilling products comply with the most strict safety regulations.
We offer a wide range of exploration drilling rigs, which are designed to meet many different requirements and needs; including, ore body definition, reserve evaluation, ground investigation, surface "green field" exploration and also reverse circulation for obtaining high quality samples.
Exploration drilling companies are constantly looking for ways to increase productivity and reduce costs. Thanks to our commitment to sustainable productivity, we can match these needs by continuously developing our exploration drilling rigs.
Let us back up your equipment with solutions that deliver safety, high productivity and peace of mind
The world´s most comprehensive and productive range of rock drilling tools
Epiroc Deutschland GmbH
Helenenstraße 149,
45143 Essen
Postfach 10 02 25
+49 (0) 201 24678- 268
E-mail: email@example.com
General Terms and Conditions Epiroc Deutschland GmbH
Your contacts
Follow us


text:
If you watched season 2 of RuPaul's Drag Race, you will remember the winner, Tyra Sanchez, born James William Ross IV. And you may know that Tyra Sanchez has a now-seven-year-old son, Jeremiah. Drag Dad is a documentary about James and Jeremiah and Tyra; Tyra/James says: "I'm hoping it changes the ability for gay parents to adopt. I think gay parents are just like any other parents. We all love children; we all want children."
Drag Dad director Björn Flóki, a gay filmmaker who recently moved to Brooklyn from Iceland, explains further:
"We want to give audiences an in-depth look into the domestic life of one LGBT family, offering a rather 'extreme' representation of a gay parent, to show that gay parents are not so different from 'regular parents' when it comes to raising a child. Love and dedication to your child defies all labels. We have seen James and Jeremiah together, and the sweet nature of their relationship. We want to bring that relationship to the screen, and show that there is no one correct recipe for a good father."
The film is in need of funding, check out Kickstarter for more information.
Drag Dad [Official Site]


text:
Once in a lifetime: the Venus transit 2004
On 8 June 2004, you will be able to witness an astronomical event no living person has seen, a transit of Venus.
This happens when the planet moves directly between the Earth and the Sun. This will only be the sixth such event since the invention of the telescope - the most recent occurred in 1882.
The next Venus transit will take place in June 2012 but on this occasion it will already be in progress before the Sun rises in Europe. No one living today will see the one after that, as it will not take place until 2117.
Weather permitting, half of the Earth will have a view of the tiny black dot of Venus moving across the disk of the Sun (REMEMBER never to look at the Sun with unprotected eyes or through a telescope).
Past transits of Venus have enabled us to discover a lot about our Solar System and the Universe. In 1716 Edmund Halley proposed that the 1761 transit of Venus should test the concept of measuring distance using 'parallax'.
By observing the apparent shift in position of Venus against the background of the Sun as seen from two different places on Earth, observers could use trigonometry to calculate the distance from Earth to Venus.
Kepler's Third Law of Planetary Motion allowed the distances of the planets from the Sun to be calculated from measurements of their orbital periods. By knowing the distance to Venus we could calculate the distance from Earth to the Sun. In each successive transit, scientists have made better calculations of this distance.
Once the distance to the Sun was known, the distances to all of the other planets could be easily derived from our knowledge of celestial mechanics (the way things move in space) and from this, the size of the Solar System. ESA's Hipparcos mission has also measured the distance to 120 000 stars using this technique.
A transit of Venus causes a tiny reduction in light from the Sun. Knowing this, by careful observations from space starting with the COROT mission in 2006, scientists will search for Earth-like planets around distant stars by using highly sensitive instruments to observe tiny decreases in measured brightness.
Mysterious Venus
Much of our knowledge of Venus itself has come from just five observations of the transit of the planet. During the 1761 transit, Lomonosov used a telescope to observe that Venus had an atmosphere.
But although Venus is very similar to Earth in size and mass, it has evolved in a radically different manner, with a surface temperature hotter than a kitchen oven and a choking mixture of noxious gases for an atmosphere. Hurricane force winds permanently encircle the planet, and it has a very weak magnetic field.
In the past, both the Russians and Americans have sent spacecraft to Venus. As the closest planet to the Earth, it was a natural target. These studies revealed details about the surface of the planet but Venus has been out of the limelight during the last decade, despite several scientific puzzles remaining.
For example, what are the characteristics of the atmosphere? How does it circulate? How does the composition of the atmosphere change with depth? How does the atmosphere interact with the surface? How does the upper atmosphere interact with the solar wind? Why Venus rotates backwards and so slowly?
Enter Venus Express...
ESA is launching a mission next year to find out more about our enigmatic neighbour - Venus Express will be launched in November 2005. From idea in 2001 to launch, the Venus Express mission is one of the fastest ever to be developed.
The spacecraft is being built to the same design as Mars Express, using instruments originally built as flight spares for Mars Express and Rosetta, as well as two newly built instruments.
Venus Express will be the first spacecraft to perform a global investigation of the Venusian atmosphere and of the plasma environment, in an attempt to answer many of these still puzzling questions.