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What is hayfever? Symptoms Diagnosis Treatment
What is hayfever?
Allergic rhinitis is an allergic reaction affecting mostly the nose. Hay fever is a type of allergic rhinitis, as the name would suggest it is due to an allergy to pollen.
There are four types of allergies to affect cats.
- Food – As the name would suggest, this is an allergy to food and is the most common type of allergies in cats.
- Contact – This type of allergy is rare in cats; this type of allergy occurs when the cat comes into contact with an allergen, for example, wool, or medications.
- Insect – The most common cause of insect allergy is cat fleas, but other insects can also cause allergies.
- Inhalant – Unlike in humans who tend to develop hay fever (allergic rhinitis), most cases of inhalant allergy in cats present as skin conditions. Hay fever is a type of inhalant allergy.
Hay fever occurs when the cat's body reacts to pollen; common allergens include grasses. Exposure occurs when the cat either inhales the pollen or licks it during grooming. Usually, the body would ignore a benign substance such as pollen; however, in some cats, the immune system mounts an unnecessary allergic response. Anything the body has an allergic reaction to is known as an allergen.
How an immune response works:
- The first step is sensitisation. So, a foreign substance enters the body (in this case some pollen, via the nose), and cells called macrophages which are scavenger cells break up the invader. They then display the fragments of the invader on their cell walls for white blood cells (known as T cells).
- T-cells then secrete a chemical which activates another type of white blood cell known as B cells. These cells generate antibodies specific to that particular invader. Antibodies are known as immunoglobin E (IgE) and are attached to immune cells called mast cells and basophils. Mast cells are located in the tissues and basophils in the blood.
- The next time that particular foreign substance enters the body, the IgE cells on mast cells recognise the invader and attach to them. When this occurs, mast cells and basophils release a chemical substance known as histamine. Histamine causes capillaries in the nose to dilate (swell), causes redness, nasal secretions, swelling, and inflammation.
Depending on the allergen involved, symptoms may be seasonal, mainly if it's pollen related. Spring and summer are when pollen levels are at their highest.
The most common symptoms of hay fever in cats are a runny nose and sneezing. Other symptoms may include:
- Red, itchy, watery eyes.
- Pawing at the face.
- Noisy breathing.
- Blood may be seen in the nasal discharge after prolonged exposure due to blood vessels becoming damaged.
- Some cats may develop skin conditions, including lumps and bumps, itching, redness, and swelling.
As you can see, many of these symptoms are similar to that of a cat cold or flu, but shouldn't include fever or loss of appetite. While extremely irritating to your cat, he shouldn't appear unwell.
Your veterinarian will perform a complete physical examination of your cat and obtain a medical history from you. Hay fever will be suspected if there is a history of seasonal rhinitis.
If your veterinarian suspects an allergy, it will be necessary to perform a skin prick test to determine the allergen. This test injects small amounts of several common allergens into the skin to see if there is a reaction to any of them.
Minimising contact with the allergen is the main goal as well as controlling symptoms. It is not always easy to avoid exposure to pollens. Keeping windows shut, use air filters, regularly dust can reduce exposure.
Steroids to control inflammation and suppress the immune system. Your veterinarian will prescribe the lowest dose possible to manage symptoms, and it will be necessary to monitor your cat closely.
Allergen immunotherapy (allergy shots). These shots expose the cat to a tiny amount of the allergen, gradually increasing the amount given; this can help the cat's body get used to the allergen and reduce symptoms. The success rate is varied.
Keeping your cat indoors as much as possible during high pollen season. Pollen counts are at their highest from dawn to around mid-morning.
Medicated shampoos and conditioners can be used to clean the coat of pollens, to reduce the amount that the cat will inhale or ingest when it grooms which can also help to soothe inflamed and itchy skin.
Antihistamines are medications which block the effects of histamines and may be prescribed to offer relief to your cat. However, it is vital you speak to your veterinarian about the appropriate antihistamine to use as not all are suitable, particularly if your cat has an underlying medical condition.


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Divine Planning Intervention
The last time that you applied for a council building permit, it mightn't have been a 'divine' experience.
More often than not, the red tape involved with planning can be frustrating and difficult to understand. A Caulfield North synagogue has been given the go ahead on an SJB Planning permit to use the buildings and land at 1 and 1A Albany Court as a place of worship 7 days a week.
City of Glen Eira councillors voted on the application in late August, being 6-3 in favor of the plans. There have been several conditions put upon the approval however, including limiting use of the synagogue to religious services only. This won't include weddings, bar mitzvahs, child care etc.
The site is referred to by the Caulfield Leader as a private cul-de-sac – this is a point that one of the councillors also brought up as a reason for the site being inappropriate. Do you think that these conditions will impact upon the success and use of the synagogue – or do these conditions protect the residential nature of the cul-de-sac?
*Stockdale and Leggo Elsternwick has gathered this information to provide an interesting document for readers and subscribers. Information contained herein is gathered from a range of sources including but not limited to; local Victorian press both virtual and hardcopy, Valuer General Information & Agents own investigations. All efforts are made to verify the information provided. The information is not to be relied upon or used in dealings with third parties and people should make their own investigations regarding their own property or personal circumstances. Opinions and observations offered should not be treated as fact.

subset: commoncrawl


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NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde recognises the value of its workforce and is committed to supporting staff to provide high quality patient care. In collaboration with our neighbouring health boards we have developed a Care Assurance (CAS) Framework which is designed to help nurses, midwives and allied health professionals to demonstrate the quality of clinical care delivered by clinical teams.
CAS allows for the quality of care experienced by patients, relatives, carers and staff to be consistency demonstrated, communicated openly and with success positively celebrated.
The framework and standards clearly supports our "Facing the Future Together" organisational values and behaviours which are the fundamental values of nursing, midwifery and AHP staff.
The Link person ( Nurse/Midwife, all AHP's, Pharmacy staff ) is an integral role to introduce to ensure we embed the CAS Framework and its 13 professional care standards into our clinical teams and areas.
The definition and focus of this remit is about having a subject specific champion, whose proactive knowledge & skills for change and improvement will support Senior Charge Nurse/Midwives and their teams to implement the CAS standards.
Would you like to keep up to date with your local health news?


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While discussing the street side garden in SJC, I must include an update on the beautiful blue agaves that were planted three years ago. They are in a far corner, away from guests navigating getting in and out of their cars as well as children at play due to their ferocious spikes and thorny edges. They are so beautiful and producing lots of pups. There are additional succulents nearby as well as some lantana planted to intertwine with their blue spikes.
Three years ago this is what they looked like. All good things come to those who wait!
This is about life in my gardens. One is an acre on a hillside in Laguna Beach, California and the other is an acre in San Juan Capistrano, California.
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Agaves Grow
Posted by Sheila at 9:50 AM
Labels: Before and After, Drought tolerant, succulents
2 comments:
- Becc said...
I love agaves, what amazing growth yours are experiencing, do you have any special tips?
- September 20, 2011 at 9:16 PM
- Sheila said...
Becc, I must admit, these guys are rudely ignored all year with an exception of a weekly watering. I can take no credit!
- September 21, 2011 at 7:20 AM
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It's no secret that Disney's taking over the world one Disney princess at a time. But what we might not have realised is that it's not only our children who are targeted in the Empire's rambunctious revolution; it's us – adults…mums, dads, fashion fiends and comic book geeks. We're all suckers for a hefty onslaught of Disney ditz.
Francesca Gianesin who heads up fashion and lifestyle for the Europe, Middle East and Asia region for Disney Consumer Products, told Theguardian.co.uk:
"We did a lot of consumer research and discovered there was huge demand for adult product from Disney…When we see a movie, the first thing we think is will there be an emotional connection? What is it men and women would like to feel by wearing pieces of that movie?"
And sales are up by 13 per cent, with Frozen (that's right – Let it Go is not dead. We repeat: NOT DEAD), Avengers and Star Wars raking in the cash. Mickey and Minnie, and the Disney princesses (duh!) are also hot property when it comes to global domination. And now Disney is adding homeware to its arsenal, with Disney themed cushions, crockery and tea towels on the agenda for Gianesin and her team of money-makers designers.
Of course, the Purple Heels Shop has known about the awesome of Disney all along. Of course we have. In fact – we're happy to reveal that we are totally in on the act. When Disney becomes president we want front row seats (perhaps the Vice President's chair), which is why we stock some of the coolest, hippest, sassiest Disney merch, like, ever! Star Wars bedding, Alice in Wonderland tapestries, Disney Princess watches and new on our cyber shelves: a Little Mermaid Silhoette Anchor Heart Tote and Lilo & Stitch Angel Scrump Handbag. Skirts, shirts, bags and bikinis – you name it, we've got it!
Gianesin aptly articulates, "We are part of Pop Culture" – and the corollary; Pop Culture is a part of us. Own it!
Source: Theguardian.co.uk – "Disney pins its merchandise designs on an adult audience"


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Disaster Recovery
All businesses need telephones and if yours stops working for any reason, you'll lose money.
If a business depends on telephony and it's not working for any length of time it can even destroy it – according to a rather dubious American statistic, 44% of small businesses permanently close after a major fire.
There's obviously a large variance in the degree a business needs and uses telephony and there's an equally large variance in what can go wrong with it – from a flat mobile battery to a gas explosion in your call centre - so there can be no general solution to the problem of keeping your telephones going after the disaster.more
The Voipfone Network
Although anyone can use our service, we run a network particularly for small business users and you have told us that reliability of service is your number one requirement - we are aware how much you rely on us; as we do ourselves.
You are also concerned about call quality because for business use, call quality must be excellent at all times.
Consequently we have built a very robust network. Our up time since 2007, as measured independently by Monitor Us, has been 99.99%. The Voipfone network is housed in our secure data centres, and has resilient infrastructure, including multiple levels of 24-7 security
And, because we are UK based, fully digital and use client server technology which allows us to fully manage the quality of our service, call quality far exceeds a normal landline or mobile telephone call.
Data Centre
We've built a high quality, secure and reliable VoIP platform from the ground up starting with a robust IP network covering three locations: two within London for great connectivity, and one outside; for resiliency. Additionally, the platform's nodes are spread in multiple locations, giving multiple redundancy. The entire network is built without single points of failure - stacked switches, clustered firewalls, partial or full mesh topologies, multiple connectivity providers and multi-vendor policy. It is designed with sub-second failure-detection and fast re-convergence, using protocols such as BFD and RSVP-TE Fast-Reroute. The data centres themselves have resilient infrastructure, including multiple levels of 24/7 security, stable, high-capacity power supplies backed by UPS, stand-by diesel generators and SLA, fire protection, in-house support and environmental controls.
Connectivity & Network
We use multiple sourced connectivity from blue chip providers using managed services backed by SLA. Our network checks your connection to us and uses the best route to connect you. It has multiple levels of failover and redundancy - if we lose one network provider another kicks in, usually without loss of connection.
We peer directly - over two independent networks - with most large UK ISPs eg BT, Virgin (NTL, Telewest), Level3, Pipex, Telia, Tiscali, MFN, Easynet etc ie we do not use the public internet to carry your calls.
Call Termination
We connect to two Tier 1 Call Termination Providers by physical cable with peered internet back-up. This means that you get the best call quality possible and double redundancy enabling us to switch automatically between providers and type of connection should either have a problem.
Call Failover
Calls to exotic foreign destinations can occasionally fail because of distant end routing and congestion problems - not all countries have high quality networks and it's fairly common for some countries to give a network engaged answer on the first attempt.
With our network, a call that fails to connect first time will be switched automatically over several other routes and operators until a working connection is found. You will not be aware that any of this is happening and it will be a very rare event indeed if your call fails to connect entirely.
Intelligent systems that have been fully designed and developed in-house, continuously monitor all end-user connections and automatically signal staff whenever a connection is found to be operating under less-than-optimal parameters.
This allows us to be proactive about identifying problems that customers experience. Read the Overview of the Voipfone Broadband Network for more details.
Hardware and Hardware Redundancy
We use only Enterprise class equipment; Juniper routers and firewalls, Cisco switching and HP voice servers. Each hardware component in our network is duplicated or has a redundant and mirrored, hot back-up.
This means that a failure of an individual server should not cause any loss of service; the back-up will automatically take up the load on failover.
Voice Server Failover. Our voice and registration servers are load balanced and operate in failover mode. This means that if one fails the others just carry on regardless and also means that as we grow we can just add more without interrupting your existing service.
Customer Failover Diverts
In the real world, service interruption is more likely to occur at your end of the network than ours. So we have introduced PSTN Failover Divert.
You can now enter a PSTN or mobile telephone number for your calls to be diverted to if your telephones stop registering with us for any reason. You can find them here.
Operations, Notifications & Processes
As our network grows and our technology develops, we will still need to do continuous upgrades and routine maintenance. Because our network has been designed from the outset to scale linearly with growth our servers can be removed and worked on without service downtime and as much as we can, any service affecting work will be done out of office hours.
We will always warn you of this via our status page.
The status page is hosted in a separate building on a separate network from voipfone.co.uk so will be available in the unlikely event that we are not.
Monitoring and Alarms
We use Nagios monitoring (with a variety of plug-ins) across our entire network which provides real time alarms, notification and reporting across everything we do, from individual servers and processes to ports and routers and to peering and connectivity.
We also monitor and log individual user's connections on request for fault finding. This means that if any of our services has a problem, we know about it and fix it before you notice.
You can also subscribe to announcements which will alert you to anything we post about problems, new services or planned maintenance.
We believe that all this will give us a fully stable, reliable and scalable platform that we can build confidently on and provide you with the best possible service.
Unfortunately, it does not mean that we will never have problems. VoIP is a new technology, we are pushing development hard and do take some risks to get new services out to you - glitches are therefore still inevitable, particularly in new software but, barring Acts of God and terrorists, those problems that do occur should be rare and quickly resolve.
Speak to a Customer Services Representative
Voipfone can seem very confusing at first, but don't worry, this is quite normal and we are here to help! One of the great strengths of VoIP is that it can do so much more than an ordinary telephone network whilst costing an awful lot less. In practise Voipfone's services can be as simple as making a telephone call or as complicated as using a large business switchboard in several countries but anything new takes a bit of getting used to so if you have any questions please feel free to give us a call on 020 7043 5555


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Post 12/17/2008
Official Google Blog: Safety, education, and empowerment on YouTube
Safety, education, and empowerment on YouTube
(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog)
We've always been committed to providing you the tools to have the best possible YouTube experience. Educating parents, teens, and families on how to stay safe on our site is a critical part of that commitment, so we can't think of a more appropriate place to introduce our new Abuse and Safety Center than at the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) conference in Washington, D.C., today.
CATALYST CHICAGO :: News & Analysis
Seven years of reform experiments—some show promise, few taken to scale, modest gains in performance by Sarah Karp and John Myers December 15, 2008
The Best Places To Get Royalty-Free Music & Sound Effects | Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day...
I don't really give details about the sites I'm listing here because they're all very similar — the music and sounds here are royalty-free and it's just an easy matter of searching and downloading them. Of course, credit should be given to the source when they're used in online projects. I've also tried avoiding sites that have obvious content not appropriate for classroom use, but something might have slipped by me.
I also don't believe that any of the sites here require any software download or registration.
Here are my choices for The Best Places To Get Royalty-Free Music & Sound Effects:
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.


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Home Office finally approves UK cybercoppers
E-crime unit gets green light but overlap worries remain
The Home Office has finally approved the creation of a central police e-crime Unit(PCeU), a year after the idea was first proposed.
The cybercrime unit will be based at Scotland Yard and is expected to begin work early next year. The division will provide specialist computer forensics training and coordinate efforts to fight internet fraud across multiple police forces. It will become one of several police agencies in the UK dedicated to fighting cybercrime, but the Home Office is fighting suggestions that this might lead to either infighting or confusion over responsibilities.
The PCeU will be allocated £3.5m from central government and £3.9m from the Metropolitan Police Service over three years. The unit will also seek industry support. Original plans judged the cost of establishing the PCeU at about £5m in total, including £1.3m in start-up funding from the Home Office. The kernel of the division will be 50 officers from the the Met's Hi-tech Crime Unit.
Creation of the unit comes 12 months after the idea - developed by the Association of Chief Police Officers and the Metropolitan Police - was submitted to the Home Office, and follows pressure from industry and business in the two years since the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU) was borged by the Serious and Organised Crime Agency.
The Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) is tasked with tackling high-level international crime and only takes reports of cybercrime indirectly. So business victims of cybercrimewere left to deal with local police forces, which often lacked the resources or expertise to cope adequately. Consumer victims of internet fraud were told to report problems to their bank.
Home officer minister Vernon Coaker acknowledged problems in e-crime reporting and cybercrime investigation at a hearing before a House of Lords Committee back in May.
The solution at that point was to establish a law enforcement arm of the National Fraud Reporting Centre (NFRC) and for this division to become the lead agency for e-crime reporting.
"We'd like to see all reports of fraud sent to the NFRC ... which would become a one-stop shop for the reporting of fraud. We don't want a multiplicity of centres. We want to bring it together," Coaker told the House of Lords science and technology committee. "Different pieces of law enforcement do different things but there is a gap, without a shadow of a doubt. We need NFRC but then alongside that a law enforcement capability."


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You can use any of the following ways to pay your Business Rates.
Online Payments
Direct Debit
Automated Telephone Payments
Call 01353 616492 or 01353 616493 and follow the instructions given. Available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Bank Transfer
Please use the following details:
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Reference Number: You MUST enter your Business Rates reference number to ensure your payment is allocated correctly.


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Local Student Honored as Central Penn College Student of the Month
SUMMERDALE, PA (09/13/2012)(readMedia)-- Debra Driscoll, of Harrisburg, has been selected as the Central Penn College September Student of the Month. Beginning her college career at Central Penn during the winter 2012 term, Driscoll is slated to graduate with her bachelor's degree in accounting during the summer of 2014.
"I intend to have an office job where I can apply the knowledge this school has imparted on me," says Driscoll. "I want to make my degree work for me. I believe it's a physical representation of what I have learned and what I have been through. I just want to find my way to a place where I can make my degree speak volumes for me. That's my dream job."
# # #
Central Penn College has been helping students turn potential into career success since 1881, offering bachelor's and associate degrees in the fields of accounting, business administration, criminal justice, information technology, communications, healthcare, homeland security and legal studies. The College, currently serving students at its Harrisburg, Lancaster and Lehigh Valley locations, attributes its high rate of student success to a caring faculty and its hands-on learning approach. Based on Central Penn's most recent One-Year Graduate Survey, 82.9 percent of graduates were employed in their chosen field or continuing their education within one year of graduation. Central Penn College is accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, 3624 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104 (267-284-5000). The Middle States Commission on Higher Education is an institutional accrediting agency recognized by the U.S. Secretary of Education and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation. www.centralpenn.edu


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Ethnic simplification in Abkhazia
I happened to come across one more instance of the larger story of post-imperial ethnic simplification in the 20th century. (For some clarification of what I mean by the deliberately abstracted and ironically euphemistic phrase "ethnic simplification," see here & here.) This case involves Abkhazia, on the eastern coast of the Black Sea, which was absorbed into the Russian Empire in the early 19th century and was a semi-autonomous, multi-ethnic region of Georgia when Georgia was part of the Soviet Union.
Some selections from an openDemocracy piece by Thomas de Waal on "Abkhazia's archive: fire of war, ashes of history":
As de Waal explains, his perspective on the Abkhazia story happens to be Greek-centric, more or less by accident:
So it goes, unfortunately ...
=> It occurs to me, by the way, that de Waal's historical account of what happened in Abkhazia in the 1990s is incomplete in one potentially misleading respect. Russian troops were not the only outsiders who helped to carry out the expulsion of Georgians & other non-Abkhaz ethnic groups from Abkhazia. Muslim irregulars from various other parts of the Caucasus also played a significant role ... including, ironically, some of the same Chechen fighters who later wound up fighting a long and brutal war against the Russian army.
Yours for facing reality (though not necessarily accepting it without protest),
Jeff Weintraub
Some selections from an openDemocracy piece by Thomas de Waal on "Abkhazia's archive: fire of war, ashes of history":
[In May 1992] Abkhazia had only three more months of peacetime existence. In August that year the Georgian army - or to be precise a collection of ragged armed looters nominally subordinate to the embryonic military forces of a new and barely functioning state - entered and sacked Sukhumi and ousted the Abkhaz authorities. War broke out. The Abkhaz were first driven north by the Georgians, then in the autumn of 1993, with Russian help, turned into vengeful victors, driving out the Georgians.Abkhazia is still occupied by Russian troops, of course. The bulk of the ethnic cleansing in Abkhazia involved the ethnic Georgians, almost half the pre-1992 population, most of whom (200,000 or so) are living as refugees in Georgia proper. I already knew about that. What I didn't realize, I guess, is that the long-established Pontic Greek community in Abkhazia is also gone. By an interesting coincidence, I happened to discover a few weeks ago that Greece has taken in a number of ethnic-Greek refugees from Abkhazia (and Georgia) and resettled them in Thessaloniki–or, to use the alternative version of the name, Salonica. (Another instance of the centuries-old history of modern Greek 'Zionism', with its ingathering of the Greek diaspora from the Balkans, Anatolia, Ukraine, etc.) According to the local Greeks, the "Georgians" live predominantly in one ghetto-like part of the city, and a number of locals wonder whether all of them are actually Greeks. Whether or not those last observations are correct, I have no way of knowing ... but these are typical reactions, reminiscent of the way that "Old Greeks" reacted to the Greek refugees from Anatolia in 1923.
A history erased
It was ten years before I saw Sukhumi, the archive [of the cosmopolitan history of Abkhazia] and Ioannidi [the archivist] again. In the meantime I had covered the war in Chechnya and the aftermath of conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, but had not been back to my first conflict zone in the Caucasus.
I could barely make sense of the geography of the place I visited. Although fighting had ended eight years before, grass was growing in the streets of Sukhumi and half the city was still in ruins. The vast burned hulk of the Abkhaz parliament loomed over the town, a blackened shipwreck beached in the middle of the central square. There was an air of Pompeii about it: the city's largest community, its Georgians, had fled in their entirety, leaving Sukhumi the half-empty capital of a new separatist state, recognised by no one.
The Abkhaz had won a "victory", but the price was impossibly high.
As de Waal explains, his perspective on the Abkhazia story happens to be Greek-centric, more or less by accident:
I had a rather skewed view of this strange tense situation because all my companions [in 1992] happened to be Greek. I had chosen Abkhazia, pretty much at random, as a location to make a BBC radio feature about the plight of the Pontic Greeks, and the dilemma they were facing as the Soviet Union collapsed: should they abandon their ancient Black Sea habitat and emigrate to a strange country called Hellas?Then, when de Waal went back a decade later:
I spent several days, living in a wooden hut by the Black Sea, being plied with too much cognac, touring villages, schools and cultural societies - and never for a moment freed from the hospitable guard of my Greek hosts. It felt as though I was the captive of some long-lost Greek domain from the Byzantine era.
One day they took me to see the archive and its remarkable Greek curator, Nikolai Ioannidi. He was tall, gaunt, with parchment-pale skin and keen blue eyes - from his German mother, it seemed, rather than his Greek father. He smoked a lot, talked clearly and exactly and wore a navy-blue beret. He was the great expert about the history of Abkhazia and about the Pontic Greeks of the Black Sea.
Instead of an archive there was a damp square of ground with the low black empty shell of a building - one wreck amongst many. Ioannidi now worked out of two corridors in the cold wing of the university, piled waist-deep with cardboard packages. He told me the story of what had happened.As we know, in the whole area that was covered in 1900 by the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the western and south-western portions of the Russian Empire, that potential "multicultural road" very rarely survived the upheavals of the terrible 20th century. So this is not an isolated incident, but one more example of that larger process. And where that process of ethnic simplification wasn't completed by the end of the 20th century, it's often still going on.
Ioannidi lived in Sukhumi's "new town", a Soviet dormitory of tower-blocks two miles from the centre, where the archive was. On 22 October 1992, the city was under Georgian military control and curfew and he had made his precarious way home when it was still light, as the snipers were beginning their evening's work.
At 8pm a neighbour who lived next to the archive rang and said the building was on fire. There was no way Ioannidi could make his way back, so he had to wait until morning to find out what had happened during the night.
Late in the afternoon a car with five or six young Georgians wearing black uniforms of the Sukhumi military police had drawn up outside the archive. They broke down the door of the building, went in and set it on fire. Neighbours of all nationalities, including Georgians, rushed to put the fire out. However, the armed men returned forty minutes later. This time they drove away the neighbours with shots, ringed the building, poured kerosene over it and set it ablaze again. A fire-engine, which came to put out the fire, was not let through.
Frantic telephone calls to the KGB, the police, even the Orthodox bishop, yielded no result. It seemed as though the arson had been officially sanctioned, though no one would ever claim responsibility for it.
Ioannidi arrived at 6am the next morning to find it all gone. When he opened the safe in his wrecked office he believed for a moment that his own unpublished manuscripts had survived, only to see them turn to ashes from the heat before his eyes.
A crowd of curious onlookers gathered. Then the distinguished Abkhaz writer, Shalva Inal-Ipa, walked up stiffly and, observing the ritual of an Abkhaz funeral, bowed his head to the ground.
In a single night Abkhazia's documentary history had been virtually erased. 95% of the archive was destroyed. The only section that more or less survived at all was the radio archive from the 1930s. Nothing from the extensive 19th-century collection was preserved.
The following year, Abkhazia's Communist Party archive, kept in a different building, was annihilated in fighting, as the Abkhaz recaptured Sukhumi from the Georgians. Ioannidi estimates that of 176,000 archival documents in Abkhazia, before the war, 168,000 were destroyed. He ensured that at least some of it survived, for a long time keeping the remaining documents piled at home in his damp ninth-floor apartment, before he was allocated the empty rooms at the university, where the remnant of the archive is now housed.
A legacy project
It is a truism that combatants in war try to rewrite history. This is a chilling instance where one side succeeded comprehensively in actually destroying the history of its adversary. Part of the struggle between Georgians and Abkhaz is the complaint by the latter that their history was always belittled by their bigger neighbour. But there are multiple ironies here: Abkhazia was a cosmopolitan Black Sea territory with many different nationalities. By erasing the documentation of its rich multi-ethnic past, the Georgians were not only denying the Abkhaz their right to have a history of their own, they were also wiping out the complexity of the real history of this mixed region and sending it back to Year Zero. And of course they also erased themselves.
Nowadays, you would barely know that any Georgians had lived in Sukhumi as all traces of their heritage have been removed. And the Greek community of the city, amongst which Ioannidi grew up, has virtually disappeared. What Stalin began and the Georgian warlords continued, the Greek government helped complete by sending a big empty cruise ship to evacuate a thousand Greek citizens from Abkhazia at the end of the war in what they grandly called "Operation Golden Fleece".
Ioannidi stands as a dignified emblem of a multicultural road not taken. [....]
So it goes, unfortunately ...
=> It occurs to me, by the way, that de Waal's historical account of what happened in Abkhazia in the 1990s is incomplete in one potentially misleading respect. Russian troops were not the only outsiders who helped to carry out the expulsion of Georgians & other non-Abkhaz ethnic groups from Abkhazia. Muslim irregulars from various other parts of the Caucasus also played a significant role ... including, ironically, some of the same Chechen fighters who later wound up fighting a long and brutal war against the Russian army.
Yours for facing reality (though not necessarily accepting it without protest),
Jeff Weintraub


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PS100E01 series 0.2-4.5V ceramic pressure sensors are made with ceramic cell(Al2O3 96%) and work following the piezoresistive principle, the signal conditioning electronics are added on one side of ceramic diaphragm where the Wheatstone bridge is screen printed, offer 0.5-4.5V, 0.2-4.5V ratio-metric voltage signal (Customized is available), it has been developed for low cost applications, e.g. automotive applications.
PS100E01 series have the reinforced outer area(monolithic structure), the sensor can be mounted in a plastic or metallic case by using O-ring, and thanks to the good chemical resistance of the ceramic, the sensors can measure pressure in nearly all aggressive media.
Typical pressure (Bar)


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Centennial Park
Roots in the Past
Establishing the Park
Introducing Squirrels to the Park
The Coral Rock Fountain
War Memorials
Centennial Park at Christmas
Honoring Van Raalte
Buy-A-Brick Campaign
Article by Allyson Hoffman
Documentary by Joshua Briggs, Austin Garcia, Olivia Pilon, & Miriam Roth
Reverend Albertus C. Van Raalte originally set aside the land that is now Centennial Park, located at 10th Street and River Avenue, for a public market. However, after the fire of 1871, the land grew weedy and remained unused. In 1876, the park was named and created in honor of the nation's centennial celebration and has since hosted many celebrations in Holland. The park was restored in 1985. Today, the 5.6 acre park houses a gazebo with public restrooms, a coral rock fountain, several benches, and dozens of different trees and plants.
Roots in the Past: A Documentary
A team of Mellon Scholars created this documentary for their Sophomore Seminar during the 2014-2015 school year. Centennial Park was born in the midst of a greenspace movement that emphasized quiet enjoyment of natural beauty. This movement originated in mid-nineteenth century western Europe, largely in response to the increasing industrialization of large cities. Over time, the movement spread to the United States, and eventually new motivations and cultural attitudes transformed parks from serene pockets of nature into spaces for recreational activity and community gatherings. Centennial Park, while reflective of this movement, also developed its own legacy and unique identity.
Establishing the Park
The land for Centennial Park was intended to become market square, much like traditional European markets. Central Avenue was originally called Market Street because of this vision. Van Raalte helped clear the area of trees, but after the fire of 1871, the charred area became weed-ridden.
In 1876, Mayor John Van Landegend proposed the market square be turned into a park, which he wished to call Centennial Park in honor of the centennial celebration of the country. On March 8, 1876, Van Landegend brought his plans, including a diagram, to a council meeting and proposed the following:
- Setting out a row of Lombardy Poplar trees around the outside of the Square.
- Grading and leveling of the square; removal of the present knoll in the center in the form of an ellipse at a height of about two feet in the center, and the laying out and excavating the walkways according to the diagram he submitted.
- Erecting a Centennial Pole in the center of the new ellipse.
- The planting by individuals of a variety of Centennial shade trees throughout the Square in accordance with the diagram.
On April 17, 1876, the flagpole was placed in the park. Instead of planting poplar trees, maple trees were placed in the park. On the afternoon of April 29, 1876, community volunteers planted the maple trees.
Introducing Squirrels to the Park
In addition to the many improvements, the idea for a squirrel cage was also suggested. A journalist for the Holland City News remarked on the friendliness of squirrels in Ann Arbor, Michigan and suggested that Holland's Centennial Park could become a home for the friendly rodents. On August 28, 1913 the Holland City News reported:
The cunning little animals have been installed in their new home and the little boys and little girls as well as many older people have been making acquaintance with them. The four that have been put into the cage are to be followed by others which will be secure from time to time.
Soon after, the squirrels escaped but remained living in or near the park. Because the original plan allotted for the eventual release of the squirrels, attempts to recapture the animals quickly ended. Although the Park Commissioner requested that the squirrels not be bothered, he allowed people to continue feeding the squirrels.
Unfortunately for the city, citizens submitted several bills for the cost of nuts to feed the squirrels. In 1922, the squirrel cage was removed from the park.
The Coral Rock Fountain
In 1902, Tenuis Van Houten donated the coral rock fountain, a structure designed and built by Johannes Van Lente. The fountain stands 20 feet tall and is 12 feet in diameter. The fountain was stocked with fish. Citizens were encouraged to contribute their live catches from other locations to the fountain.
On occasion, mischievous children disturbed the fish by adding soap to the water or draining the fountain in order to retrieve the coins at the bottom. Local children were the presumed culprits responsible for the mysterious disappearance and return of 800 goldfish.
War Memorials
The City Council accepted a rock from the Grand Army of the Republic (G.A.R.) to commemorate those who served in the Civil War. in 1912, the rock was received. In 1953, the A. C. Van Raalte Relief Corps of Holland suggested a bronze plaque with the Gettysburg Address be placed in a stone near the G.A.R. rock. By 1977, the G.A.R. rock and the Gettysburg Address stone became part of the park's veterans memorial. Other memorials include a rock and plaque honoring the Medal of Honor recipients and a rock and tablet honoring Spanish American War veterans.
Two Civil War era howitzers sat in the park for several decades, along with the cannonballs. However, in 1942, the cannons and cannonballs were donated by the city as scrap metal for the World War II effort. Another cannon, which was kept in the shed at the old townhouse on the property, was fired off at celebrations. In 1937, the Holland City News reported the cannon had blown apart.
Centennial Park at Christmas
In 1920, the tradition of having a lighted Christmas tree in Centennial Park was established. The tree was located in the southeast corner of the park so patients at Holland Hospital could see it. That year, the tree was 30 feet tall. The tree was lit on Christmas Eve. Community members gathered to watching the lighting and sing Christmas carols.
The next year, in 1921, the tree was larger and had an electric star at the top. In 1925, two pine trees were planted, which served as they the city's Christmas trees each year. However, only one tree was lit in 1936, due to the death of the other pine. The tradition of singing carols around a tree was revived in 1996 as part of the Sinterklaas Parade.
Honoring Van Raalte
Every few decades, the suggestion arises that Centennial Park be renamed Van Raalte Park in honor of Rev. Albertus C. Van Raalte. Although the park has not been renamed, in 1997 a statue of Van Raalte was erected in the park and remains there today.
Buy-A-Brick Campaign
In 1985, a movement was started to create pathways through Centennial Park that were handicap accessible. Bricks were chosen as a suitable surface for the pathways. Fundraisers to and donations for the Buy-A-Brick Campaign contributed to the creation of brick paths in the park.


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Kevin Weeks of Seriously Good announced late last year that he was hosting a Mac-and-Cheese-Off on his blog today. "After the over-the-top holiday eating I like something something basic and homey," he wrote. "When CookieCrumb (CC) at I'm Mad and I Eat mentioned she was making mac-n-cheese, I thought it would be perfect meal for the first week of the New Year."
I'd been thinking about posting my macaroni and cheese recipe on the blog, and decided New Year's Day was the perfect time to make it. What better way to welcome the new year than on a cheesy, carby sea of goodness?
For my entire life, macaroni and cheese has always been made from scratch. The legacy began with my grandmother on my Dad's side, who used to bake up casseroles of it when I was a little girl. I remember her standing in her kitchen, stirring the sauce at her stove.
Mac and cheese from a box? It wasn't even in my consciousness.
I don't remember when I made mac and cheese for the first time, but I know I requested Grammy's recipe. It included the basic building blocks: butter, flour, milk, cheddar cheese, pasta. Dad weighed in with a secret: "You have to crumble Saltines on the top. That's what makes it good."
That's what makes it amazing, I'd argue.
I've spent my adult life chasing after the perfect macaroni and cheese. It's not that I wanted to one-up my Grammy, but rather that I wanted to take what she passed on to me and make it even better, even more spectacular than I remembered.
But there's a tipping point. You add too much, and it ceases to be mac and cheese, and becomes something else entirely.
Over time, I've developed a system that starts with cheese selection. I forgo the all-cheddar monarchy for a United Nations approach. Cheddar serves as a base to which I add something Swiss, something smoky, something of the Parmaggiano family, and now, something soft. The exact cheese combination changes depending on what's available when I'm shopping for the ingredients.
Take my latest batch, for example. I started with local cheddar made in Milton, Iowa. Next, I selected a Swiss Alpenzeller. I already had some grated Parmaggiano at home, so that would work for these purposes.
Next, I looked for smoked Gouda, but didn't find any in my local co-op's cheese case. I asked the woman behind the counter whether they had any that I'd missed, and she pointed me in the direction of some smoked provolone made in Wisconsin. "We don't carry smoked Gouda anymore because we can't get any that's actually smoked," she said. "It's all injected with flavor."
Never, ever use anything "injected with flavor" in your macaroni and cheese, people. It's just wrong.
Last of all, I tossed an 8 oz. package of Neufchatel cheese in the basket. My friend Tammy has recently picked up a new mantra: everything's better with cream cheese. I hadn't tried Neufchatel, which is a lighter version of cream cheese, in my recipe before, but my instincts told me to give it a whirl.
In the pasta aisle, I poked around until I found a box of orecchiete. I find this little pasta ("ear-shaped," in Italian) to be the world's best for mac-and-cheese. Purists, sit back down. Macaroni is not a requirement, and I don't call it Orecchiete and Cheese just because I use something different. But trust me on this: the shape is more like little cups than little ears, perfect for catching up the cheesy goodness of the sauce. Try it; then come back and thank me.
From then on, you just follow the basic theory. Make a roux with flour and butter. Add your milk and cook it slowly, stirring constantly, until the mixture thickens. Add most of the cheese and let it melt into the sauce. Mix the sauce and the cubed, smoked cheese with the cooked pasta, top it with a crackery-crumbly-herby topping, and bake it up until the topping is golden. Then eat until you can't eat any more. I promise…you'll be amazed how quickly the blue box loses its luster.
Macaroni and cheese (like you've never tasted before)
8 oz. sharp cheddar, shredded
8 oz. Swiss cheese, shredded (I like Gruyere or Alpenzeller)
8 oz. Neufchatel or cream cheese, cubed
8 oz. smoked Provolone, cubed
4 Tbsp. butter
4 Tbsp. flour
4 c. milk
A dash or three of hot sauce (optional)
16 oz. orecchiete, cooked and drained
For the topping:
1 sleeve Saltines, crumbled (I have also used whatever crumbly thing I have on hand, including breadcrumbs, tortilla chips, Triscuits, etc.)
3 Tbsp. shredded or grated Parmaggiano
2 Tbsp. chopped fresh sage
- Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
- Melt the butter in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add the flour and stir with a whisk, constantly, for about a minute. You want the mixture to be smooth, and you want it to have time to reach a golden-brown color.
- Begin adding the milk slowly, continuing to whisk constantly, until all the milk is incorporated. Settle in for a long, constant whisking process. This has to be done slowly or the milk will scald, so don't try to turn up the heat and rush this part.
- In about 15 minutes, maybe 20, the milk should be just below a simmer, steaming but not really bubbling, and the mixture should be thickening. That's when it's time to add the cheddar, the Swiss cheese and the Neufchatel. Whisk in the cheese until it has all melted and has incorporated into the sauce. Add some salt and freshly-ground pepper to the mix (about 1 1/2 tsp. of salt, and maybe three grinds with a pepper mill), as well as the hot sauce. (A note on the hot sauce: It will not make your mac-and-cheese spicy, but it will add another background flavor note. Trust me on this…it's good.)
- Pour the cheese mixture into the pasta and stir to mix it all up. At this point, add the smoked cheese cubes and mix it into the pasta-cheese sauce mixture.
- Pour the whole mixture into a greased casserole dish (I use a 9 x 13 stoneware pan for this – this means more surface area for the crunchy goodness on the top.).
- Mix the Saltines, the Parmaggiano, and the sage in a bowl. Sprinkle the combination evenly over the top of the casserole. Bake for 30 minutes, or until the topping is brown and the casserole is bubbly.
Photo credit for image of the stirring of the cheese: Steve McNutt


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Welcome to the Burnett's Family!
Burnett's has become the complete one stop shop! We are now competitively selling warrantied pre-owned vehicles as well as continuing to grow our repair facility to take care of our customers in every facet of the auto industry! Please welcome our new Sales Manager Nicholas Richardson! Visit our inventory tab to view our current inventory!
Providing excellent service since 1968!
Burnett's Service Center has been servicing the Howard county area for 49 years. Because of the years of high quality service, honesty, and low prices, Burnett's Service Center has had huge success and a great, loyal customer base. We are able to diagnose and fix your vehicle from brakes and oil changes to engines and transmissions and everything in between. We also do a great deal for our community by sponsoring vehicles for free for local not-for-profits (Bona Vista, Bridges, CAM, The Crossing and Jackson St.) as well as other charitable acts. We would love for you to give us the opportunity to improve your vehicle.


text: The spirit of Black Wall Street was shown in the foundation of our ancestors of Tulsa Oklahoma using their own consumer spending power and talents to create a self contained successful Black community with hundreds of Black owned and operated businesses within 35 city blocks. In that historic spirit. www.blackwallstreet.org | Facebook: BlackWallStreetUSA


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The term "Web 2.0" (2004–present) is commonly associated with web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design,[1] and collaboration on the World Wide Web. Examples of Web 2.0 include web-based communities, hosted services, web applications, social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, mashups, and folksonomies. A Web 2.0 site allows its users to interact with other users or to change website content, in contrast to non-interactive websites where users are limited to the passive viewing of information that is provided to them.
The term is closely associated with Tim O'Reilly because of the O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004.[2][3] Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but rather to cumulative changes in the ways software developers and end-users use the Web. Whether Web 2.0 is qualitatively different from prior web technologies has been challenged by World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, who called the term a "piece of jargon"[4] — precisely because he intended the Web to embody these values in the first place.
The term "Web 2.0" was coined in 1999 by Darcy DiNucci. In her article, "Fragmented Future," DiNucci writes:[5]
The Web we know now, which loads into a browser window in essentially static screenfulls, is only an embryo of the Web to come. The first glimmerings of Web 2.0 are beginning to appear, and we are just starting to see how that embryo might develop. The Web will be understood not as screenfulls of text and graphics but as a transport mechanism, the ether through which interactivity happens. It will [...] appear on your computer screen, [...] on your TV set [...] your car dashboard [...] your cell phone [...] hand-held game machines [...] maybe even your microwave oven.
Her use of the term deals mainly with Web design and aesthetics; she argues that the Web is "fragmenting" due to the widespread use of portable Web-ready devices. Her article is aimed at designers, reminding them to code for an ever-increasing variety of hardware. As such, her use of the term hints at – but does not directly relate to – the current uses of the term.
The term did not resurface until 2003.[6][7][8] These authors focus on the concepts currently associated with the term where, as Scott Dietzen puts it, "the Web becomes a universal, standards-based integration platform".[9]
In 2004, the term began its rise in popularity when O'Reilly Media and MediaLive hosted the first Web 2.0 conference. In their opening remarks, John Battelle and Tim O'Reilly outlined their definition of the "Web as Platform", where software applications are built upon the Web as opposed to upon the desktop. The unique aspect of this migration, they argued, is that "customers are building your business for you".[10] They argued that the activities of users generating content (in the form of ideas, text, videos, or pictures) could be "harnessed" to create value.
O'Reilly et al. contrasted Web 2.0 with what they called "Web 1.0". They associated Web 1.0 with the business models of Netscape and the Encyclopedia Britannica Online. For example,
Netscape framed "the web as platform" in terms of the old software paradigm: their flagship product was the web browser, a desktop application, and their strategy was to use their dominance in the browser market to establish a market for high-priced server products. Control over standards for displaying content and applications in the browser would, in theory, give Netscape the kind of market power enjoyed by Microsoft in the PC market. Much like the "horseless carriage" framed the automobile as an extension of the familiar, Netscape promoted a "webtop" to replace the desktop, and planned to populate that webtop with information updates and applets pushed to the webtop by information providers who would purchase Netscape servers.[11]
In short, Netscape focused on creating software, updating it on occasion, and distributing it to the end users. O'Reilly contrasted this with Google, a company which did not at the time focus on producing software, such as a browser, but instead focused on providing a service based on data. The data being the links Web page authors make between sites. Google exploits this user-generated content to offer Web search based on reputation through its "page rank" algorithm. Unlike software, which undergoes scheduled releases, such services are constantly updated, a process called "the perpetual beta".
A similar difference can be seen between the Encyclopedia Britannica Online and Wikipedia: while the Britannica relies upon experts to create articles and releases them periodically in publications, Wikipedia relies on trust in anonymous users to constantly and quickly build content. Wikipedia is not based on expertise but rather an adaptation of the open source software adage "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow", and it produces and updates articles constantly.
O'Reilly's Web 2.0 conferences have been held every year since 2004, attracting entrepreneurs, large companies, and technology reporters. In terms of the lay public, the term Web 2.0 was largely championed by bloggers and by technology journalists, culminating in the 2006 TIME magazine Person of The Year – "You".[12] That is, TIME selected the masses of users who were participating in content creation on social networks, blogs, wikis, and media sharing sites. The cover story author Lev Grossman explains:
It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.
Since that time, Web 2.0 has found a place in the lexicon; the Global Language Monitor recently declared it to be the one-millionth English word.[13]
Web 2.0 websites allow users to do more than just retrieve information. They can build on the interactive facilities of "Web 1.0" to provide "Network as platform" computing, allowing users to run software-applications entirely through a browser.[3] Users can own the data on a Web 2.0 site and exercise control over that data.[3][14] These sites may have an "Architecture of participation" that encourages users to add value to the application as they use it.[2][3]
The concept of Web-as-participation-platform captures many of these characteristics. Bart Decrem, a founder and former CEO of Flock, calls Web 2.0 the "participatory Web"[15] and regards the Web-as-information-source as Web 1.0.
The impossibility of excluding group-members who don't contribute to the provision of goods from sharing profits gives rise to the possibility that rational members will prefer to withhold their contribution of effort and free-ride on the contribution of others.[16] This requires what is sometimes called Radical Trust by the management of the website. According to Best,[17] the characteristics of Web 2.0 are: rich user experience, user participation, dynamic content, metadata, web standards and scalability. Further characteristics, such as openness, freedom[18] and collective intelligence[19] by way of user participation, can also be viewed as essential attributes of Web 2.0.
Web 2.0 draws together the capabilities of client- and server-side software, content syndication and the use of network protocols. Standards-oriented web browsers may use plug-ins and software extensions to handle the content and the user interactions. Web 2.0 sites provide users with information storage, creation, and dissemination capabilities that were not possible in the environment now known as "Web 1.0".
Web 2.0 websites typically include some of the following features and techniques. Andrew McAfee used the acronym SLATES to refer to them:[20]
While SLATES forms the basic framework of Enterprise 2.0, it does not contradict all of the higher level Web 2.0 design patterns and business models. And in this way, the new Web 2.0 report from O'Reilly is quite effective and diligent in interweaving the story of Web 2.0 with the specific aspects of Enterprise 2.0. It includes discussions of self-service IT, the long tail of enterprise IT demand, and many other consequences of the Web 2.0 era in the enterprise. The report also makes many sensible recommendations around starting small with pilot projects and measuring results, among a fairly long list. [21]
To permit the user to continue to interact with the page, communications such as data requests going to the server are separated from data coming back to the page (asynchronously). Otherwise, the user would have to routinely wait for the data to come back before they can do anything else on that page, just as a user has to wait for a page to complete the reload. This also increases overall performance of the site, as the sending of requests can complete quicker independent of blocking and queueing required to send data back to the client.
The data fetched by an Ajax request is typically formatted in XML or JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format, two widely used structured data formats. Since both of these formats are natively understood by JavaScript, a programmer can easily use them to transmit structured data in their web application. When this data is received via Ajax, the JavaScript program then uses the Document Object Model (DOM) to dynamically update the web page based on the new data, allowing for a rapid and interactive user experience. In short, using these techniques, Web designers can make their pages function like desktop applications. For example, Google Docs uses this technique to create a Web-based word processor.
On the server side, Web 2.0 uses many of the same technologies as Web 1.0. Languages such as PHP, Ruby, ColdFusion, Perl, Python, JSP and ASP are used by developers to dynamically output data using information from files and databases. What has begun to change in Web 2.0 is the way this data is formatted. In the early days of the Internet, there was little need for different websites to communicate with each other and share data. In the new "participatory web", however, sharing data between sites has become an essential capability. To share its data with other sites, a web site must be able to generate output in machine-readable formats such as XML, RSS, and JSON. When a site's data is available in one of these formats, another website can use it to integrate a portion of that site's functionality into itself, linking the two together. When this design pattern is implemented, it ultimately leads to data that is both easier to find and more thoroughly categorized, a hallmark of the philosophy behind the Web 2.0 movement.
The popularity of the term Web 2.0, along with the increasing use of blogs, wikis, and social networking technologies, has led many in academia and business to coin a flurry of 2.0s,[23] including Library 2.0,[24] Social Work 2.0,[25] Enterprise 2.0, PR 2.0,[26] Classroom 2.0, Publishing 2.0, Medicine 2.0, Telco 2.0, Travel 2.0, Government 2.0,[27] and even Porn 2.0.[28] Many of these 2.0s refer to Web 2.0 technologies as the source of the new version in their respective disciplines and areas. For example, in the Talis white paper "Library 2.0: The Challenge of Disruptive Innovation", Paul Miller argues
Blogs, wikis and RSS are often held up as exemplary manifestations of Web 2.0. A reader of a blog or a wiki is provided with tools to add a comment or even, in the case of the wiki, to edit the content. This is what we call the Read/Write web.Talis believes that Library 2.0 means harnessing this type of participation so that libraries can benefit from increasingly rich collaborative cataloguing efforts, such as including contributions from partner libraries as well as adding rich enhancements, such as book jackets or movie files, to records from publishers and others.[29]
Here, Miller links Web 2.0 technologies and the culture of participation that they engender to the field of library science, supporting his claim that there is now a "Library 2.0". Many of the other proponents of new 2.0s mentioned here use similar methods.
Not much time passed before "Web 3.0" was coined. Definitions of Web 3.0 vary greatly. Amit Agarwal states that Web 3.0 is, among other things, about the Semantic Web and personalization.[30] Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, considers the Semantic Web an "unrealisable abstraction" and sees Web 3.0 as the return of experts and authorities to the Web. For example, he points to Bertelsman's deal with the German Wikipedia to produce an edited print version of that encyclopedia. Others still such as Manoj Sharma, an organization strategist, propose that Web 3.0 will be a completely integrated world, cradle-to-grave experience of being plugged into a dynamic brave new world.[31] CNN Money's Jessi Hempel expects Web 3.0 to emerge from new and innovative Web 2.0 services with a profitable business model.[32]
Ajax has prompted the development of websites that mimic desktop applications, such as word processing, the spreadsheet, and slide-show presentation. WYSIWYG wiki sites replicate many features of PC authoring applications. In 2006 Google, Inc. acquired one of the best-known sites of this broad class, Writely.[33]
Several browser-based "operating systems" have emerged, including EyeOS[34] and YouOS.[35] Although coined as such, many of these services function less like a traditional operating system and more as an application platform. They mimic the user experience of desktop operating-systems, offering features and applications similar to a PC environment, as well as the added ability of being able to run within any modern browser. However, these operating systems do not control the hardware on the client's computer.
Numerous web-based application services appeared during the dot-com bubble of 1997–2001 and then vanished, having failed to gain a critical mass of customers. In 2005, WebEx acquired one of the better-known of these, Intranets.com, for $45 million.[36]
Advocates of "Web 2.0" may regard syndication of site content as a Web 2.0 feature, involving as it does standardized protocols, which permit end-users to make use of a site's data in another context (such as another website, a browser plugin, or a separate desktop application). Protocols which permit syndication include RSS (Really Simple Syndication — also known as "web syndication"), RDF (as in RSS 1.1), and Atom, all of them XML-based formats. Observers have started to refer to these technologies as "Web feed" as the usability of Web 2.0 evolves and the more user-friendly Feeds icon supplants the RSS icon.
Specialized protocols such as FOAF and XFN (both for social networking) extend the functionality of sites or permit end-users to interact without centralized websites.
Other protocols, like XMPP enables services to users like Services over the Messenger
Machine-based interaction, a common feature of Web 2.0 sites, uses two main approaches to web APIs, which allow web-based access to data and functions: REST and SOAP.
Often servers use proprietary APIs, but standard APIs (for example, for posting to a blog or notifying a blog update) have also come into wide use. Most communications through APIs involve XML or JSON payloads.
Web Services Description Language (WSDL) is the standard way of publishing a SOAP API and there are a range of Web Service specifications.
See also EMML by the Open Mashup Alliance for enterprise mashups.
Critics of the term claim that "Web 2.0" does not represent a new version of the World Wide Web at all, but merely continues to use so-called "Web 1.0" technologies and concepts. First, techniques such as AJAX do not replace underlying protocols like HTTP, but add an additional layer of abstraction on top of them. Second, many of the ideas of Web 2.0 had already been featured in implementations on networked systems well before the term "Web 2.0" emerged. Amazon.com, for instance, has allowed users to write reviews and consumer guides since its launch in 1995, in a form of self-publishing. Amazon also opened its API to outside developers in 2002.[37] Previous developments also came from research in computer-supported collaborative learning and computer-supported cooperative work and from established products like Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino, all phenomena which precede Web 2.0.
But perhaps the most common criticism is that the term is unclear or simply a buzzword. For example, in a podcast interview,[4] Tim Berners-Lee described the term "Web 2.0" as a "piece of jargon":
"Nobody really knows what it means...If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along."[4]
Other critics labeled Web 2.0 "a second bubble" (referring to the Dot-com bubble of circa 1995–2001), suggesting that too many Web 2.0 companies attempt to develop the same product with a lack of business models. For example, The Economist has dubbed the mid- to late-2000s focus on Web companies "Bubble 2.0".[38] Venture capitalist Josh Kopelman noted that Web 2.0 had excited only 53,651 people (the number of subscribers at that time to TechCrunch, a Weblog covering Web 2.0 startups and technology news), too few users to make them an economically viable target for consumer applications.[39] Although Bruce Sterling reports he's a fan of Web 2.0, he thinks it is now dead as a rallying concept.[40]
Critics have cited the language used to describe the hype cycle of Web 2.0[41] as an example of Techno-utopianist rhetoric.[42]
In terms of Web 2.0's social impact, critics such as Andrew Keen argue that Web 2.0 has created a cult of digital narcissism and amateurism, which undermines the notion of expertise by allowing anybody, anywhere to share – and place undue value upon – their own opinions about any subject and post any kind of content regardless of their particular talents, knowledgeability, credentials, biases or possible hidden agendas. He states that the core assumption of Web 2.0, that all opinions and user-generated content are equally valuable and relevant, is misguided and is instead "creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity: uninformed political commentary, unseemly home videos, embarrassingly amateurish music, unreadable poems, essays and novels", also stating that Wikipedia is full of "mistakes, half truths and misunderstandings".[43]
In November 2004, CMP Media applied to the USPTO for a service mark on the use of the term "WEB 2.0" for live events.[44] On the basis of this application, CMP Media sent a cease-and-desist demand to the Irish non-profit organization IT@Cork on May 24, 2006,[45] but retracted it two days later.[46] The "WEB 2.0" service mark registration passed final PTO Examining Attorney review on May 10, 2006, and was registered on June 27, 2006.[44] The European Union application (application number 004972212, which would confer unambiguous status in Ireland) remains currently pending after its filing on March 23, 2006.
Handbook of Research on Web 2.0, 3.0, and X.0: Technologies, Business, and Social Applications", San Murugesan (Editor)'http://www.igi-global.com/reference/details.asp?id=34850, Information Science Research, Hershey – New York, October 2009, ISBN 978-1-60566-384-5
Understanding Web 2.0, San Murugesan, IEEE IT Professional, 2007, http://www.computer.org/portal/web/buildyourcareer/fa009
Welcome to the Wikiversity learning project for Web 2.0. Participants in the learning project explore tools for creating media such as digital audio files, video files, information and file sharing, social networks, and participating in the creation of internet content.
During the 1990s, the World Wide Web provided a way for people to use a network of computers to efficiently exchange files. In general, content for the Web was created by a relatively small group of individuals or small "content development groups". Once created, the content (HTML pages and media files) was uploaded to servers and then downloaded by "content consumers" who used a web browser to display webpages. The average person was not involved with creation of Web content.
What is new about Web 2.0 is the gradual and continuing increase in technologies that allow more people to participate in Web content creation. These facilitating technologies include advances both at the level of the computer hardware available to most people and at the level of software that makes it easier for people to create Web content.
"Web 2.0 is both a usage and a technology paradigm. It's a collection of technologies, business strategies, and social trends. Web 2.0 is more dynamic and interactive than its predecessor, Web 1.0, letting users both access content from a Web site and contribute to it. Web 2.0 lets users keep up with a site's latest content even without visiting the actual Web page. It also lets developers easily and quickly create new Web applications that draw on data, information, or services available on the Internet."
Web 2.0 is an umbrella term encompassing several new Web technologies as outlined later. It "harnesses the Web in a more interactive and collaborative manner, emphasizing peers' social interaction and collective intelligence, and presents new opportunities for leveraging the Web and engaging its users more effectively."
During the past 15 years, increasing numbers of people have obtained access to computer technology and the Internet. Internet data traffic passed voice data traffic at about the turn of the century and Web traffic now greatly surpasses voice data transfer[1]. At about the same time, home internet access reached about 50% of homes in the USA. In this century, use of high-speed internet connections has increased rapidly with over 50 million U.S. residential broadband connections achieved in 2006. The emergence of smartphone technology is changing the landscape, still, of access to the Web, as people can easily carry Internet ready devices with them at all times. Smartphones comprise about 10 percent of the mobile phone market, a number that is only expected to increase in coming years.[2]
Web 2.0 is characterized by software that supports easy Web content creation in the form of blogs, wikis, digital media uploading websites, and new types of online social networking websites. Software advances make it easier for more people to participate as Web content creators. Websites where users are participants in Web content creation have brought an increasingly robust social nature to Web 2.0 that has built upon the spirit of simpler online communities that formed in the first decade of the World Wide Web. Another important trend influencing Web 2.0 is an increase in options for openness in the creation of software and the growing phenomenon of the Free Culture Movement.
The first widely used type of software that allowed computer users to upload files to servers was software that allowed users to make use of computer programming languages running on mainframe computers. One of the first types of nonprogramming-related software that allowed users of computer networks to upload content of their own design was email software. Computer networks with email systems pre-dated the Internet, but their use only became wide-spread in combination with the Internet and the World Wide Web. See w:Web-based email.
Some of the earliest online communities grew up around "bulletin board systems". "Message board" systems that were centers of social interaction in Bulletin board systems evolved into nternet forums. Some internet forums are email-based mailing lists (example) while others function independent of email or use a mixture of email and non-email-based methods for adding "posts" to the "community discussion" (example).
One of the most influential online discussion forums has been Usenet. Two serious problems for Usenet are spam and use of Usenet servers for pornography and illegal file transfers. Some Usenet groups have moderators who screen for off-topic postings. In terms of bandwidth use, most Usenet traffic is not text-based discussion, but rather digital media files such as illegally shared software, music and movies[3]. See: w:Warez.
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) provides another example of a text-based messaging system that spawned nternet-based communities pre-dating the growth of the World Wide Web in the late 1990s. With more powerful personal computers and higher speed nternet connections, voice chat and video chat have become increasingly popular. Such "live" channels for communication are useful for allowing members of nternet-based communities to communicate effectively and support community cohesion. See: Wikiversity:Chat.
In addition to online discussion systems (above), "Web 1.0" included a Web hosting service industry that provided users with server space for their own HTML pages and media files. Some web hosting companies attempted to develop a "community model" in which users with similar interests could "congregate" and interact online. One of the more famous examples is GeoCities. Geocities users could construct personal webpages and participate in topical discussion groups. Similar Web 2.0 websites host wikis (see wiki farm) and blogs.
While many "Web 1.0" online discussion systems featured message archive systems, the content of the online discussions was generally of transient relevance to the active participants. With the growth of the World Wide Web, some online discussion systems either made use of associated web pages or integrated into an HTML-based interface. A comprehensive approach to archiving Web content is the Internet Archive project, but many websites routinely exclude themselves from the archive. Even when an archive system exists for user-uploaded computer network content, the nature of email, online discussion forums and personal websites makes much of the content quickly dated and irrelevant.
Blogs, wikis, media uploading websites, and social networking sites are four examples of newer technologies that support broader participation in the process of content creation for the internet.
Some Usenet discussion group contributors and personal website authors were among the first bloggers (see Wikipedia). Starting in the late 90s, websites and software devoted to blogging became available via the World Wide Web. In the early part of this century blogging increased in popularity and is now an integral feature of many online communities and social networking sites such as MySpace. See also blogs here at Wikiversity.
Traditionally, the ability to edit a particular webpage is severely restricted, often to just one person. Wiki technology was first used in 1995 and introduced a simple way for many people to collaboratively edit a website's webpages. Wiki websites achieve functionality as an online community by providing user pages (where participants can describe their personal interests) and an assortment of forum and discussion pages where wiki participants ("editors") can participate in community discussions. Wikipedia was started in 2001 and became widely known by 2006, particularly among school age internet users. By mid-2007 Wikipedia had become a top 10 website and as many as 6 percent of internet users make use of Wikipedia[4]. Many smaller wiki websites exist, some facilitated by Wiki farms, other wikis are run independently by individuals or organizations.
Due to low bandwidth connections (dialup) available in the early internet, image files were the dominant media file format during the 1990s. Digital audio for CDs and larger hard drives made audio files an increasingly popular file format during the 1990s. DVD use did not surpass video tape until 2003. Digital cameras and personal computers with optical disk drives became increasing common in the early years of this century. Image sharing websites such as Flickr and video sharing websites such as YouTube allow users to upload and share their pictures and video. Broadband internet, larger hard drives and faster CPUs in personal computers now allow more individuals to work with digital video files. Websites such as YouTube provide user interfaces that include support for text-based special-interest discussion groups as well as video blogs.
There are a variety of social networking websites, including Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, and Twitter. These sites facilitate online communication through a variety of media. The interactive, interlinking environment supports the creation of personal and business webpages where information, photos and videos are shared. Social bookmarking sites, such as Delicious, allow people to organize and share their favorite links on the web and to access their own favorites from any personal computer.
For an overview on some of the recent research work and the resulting application on Web 2.0, refer to the
"Web 2.0" is a term that can be used to refer to a qualitatively new and different pattern of internet behavior: a shift from an older era of restricted and expensive technologies for creation and internet-based sharing of digital media files to a new era of increasingly accessible and inexpensive technologies. As more and more people become empowered to participate on the internet as content producers, new patterns of content ownership and sharing have come into existence. The traditional model was that expensive digital content was protected by copyright, copies were sold and derivative works were possible only via rare and expensive special licensing agreements.
An alternative approach to digital media began with the Open-source software industry. Recognizing that software innovation is promoted by making software "open" to a distributed community of developers, some software developers began to experiment with new strategies for licensing software. In 2001, Wikipedia was launched with contents licensed under the GFDL and the Creative Commons licenses began to be developed. A growing Free Culture movement supports the licensing of digital media files so as to facilitate file sharing and re-use of media for the creation of new works. In the collaborative environment of Web 2.0, sharing intellectual property, without the intermediate step of requesting permission directly from the owner, allows easier access to materials and fosters greater creativity. However, owners of intellectual property must consider whether the Free Culture Movement adds value or takes away value from their work. While some intellectual property might gain value from easier access, other intellectual property like artist's works might lose value.
Wikiversity learning resources for digital media file creation and editing.
See additional links at Topic:Internet audio and
See also: Template:Web 2.0
"Understanding Web 2.0", San Murugesan, IEEE IT Professional, 2007
"Handbook of Research on Web 2.0, 3.0, and X.0: Technologies, Business, and Social Applications", San Murugesan (Editor), Information Science Research, Hershey – New York, October 2009, ISBN 978-1-60566-384-5
Web and a version number (as used in software).
Web 2.0 (uncountable)
Web 2.0 (pronounced /Web 2 Point Oh/) is what people call new ways of showing or using things on the Internet.
Web 2.0 is considered beneficial because it is easy for people to publish their work, connect with other people, and exchange data.
To people who use the Internet, wikis and blogs are Web 2.0. Some think that Wikipedia is a great example of "Web 2.0". Web 2.0 is mostly about user-generated and interactive content.
Before Web 2.0, internet users could just read information on the web page. With Web 2.0, users can interact with the site and add information. In Web 1.0, the previous version, information was only written by the website author.
It builds on the Internet technologies which were in use since the inception of internet and WWW.
Many famous websites, such as Facebook and Youtube, are considered Web 2.0 Websites.


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Well a whole year gone... where did the time go? I cannot even believe that 2011 will be here in about eight hours!! Better start thinking of your New Year's resolution (if you make those, lol)! Anyway, hope everyone has a great New Year filled with lots of happiness!! I will be busy scrapping tomorrow, I am trying to get a book listed by Sunday night... I really love the way the book is looking and if I have time, I will share a photo tomorrow :0)
Have fun tonight everyone!!
Friday, December 31, 2010
Happy New Year!!
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Here is another USB hub, the Twister Ball USB Hub, which is bound to brighten up your geeky desk.
The Twister Ball USB Hub comes with 4 USB ports (unfortunately they are USB 1.1), each of the four ports can be revolved 180 degrees which could be quite hands for various USB devices.
The Twister Ball USB Hub is compatible with Windows and it measures 143 x 35 x 30mm and weighs in at just 50g.
Here are the specifications.
- Colorful ball shape design
- 4 ports hub
- Each ports can be revolved 180 degree
- Plug and play
- Support Windows XP/2000/Me/Vista
- Size: 143*35*30mm
- Weight: 50g
The Twister Ball USB Hub is available for $10 from Gadget4all.Filed Under: Gadgets News, USB Gadgets


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Rapier RDF/XML Parser 0.9.1 http://www.redland.opensource.ac.uk/rapier/ Rapier is an RDF/XML parser that I wrote for my Redland RDF application framework (RDF Parser for Redland - RaPieR) and although designed to integrate with it closely, works fine separate from Redland. It is free software / open source, has no memory leaks so far and is pretty fast. This is the second release of Rapier (since January) and has lots of improvements but it is still alpha quality; i.e. has known failures. Summary of changes: * Many bug fixes * Updates for Redland API changes * Fixed rdf:parsetype="literal" buffer overrun * Added better XML parser auto-detection for various expats and libxml The release consists of the full sources, RPM binary and source RPM packages for RedHat GNU/Linux 6.2. These are also available from the Redland SourceForge mirror site at http://sourceforge.net/projects/librdf/ The main web site also lets you browse the source in CVS and use Rapier in various demos (as part of Redland). WARNING: This is work in progress - the APIs will change, it is not feature complete and it needs lots of testing and conformance checking. There are known bugs - see the web site for details. I post updates about Redland and Rapier to the Yahoo! Groups list at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/redland/ and invite you to join if you are interested. DaveReceived on Wednesday, 6 June 2001 10:33:17 UTC
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.1 : Wednesday, 7 January 2015 15:07:36 UTC


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About Us
Passionflower Services began in 2003 as a part-time design and video-editing endeavor for owner/Art Director Lynn Hughes. Lynn is also a midwife with a background in midwifery education and community health. Now, after training in web design and development, Lynn is particularly interested in helping childbirth and women's health professionals further their important work by utilizing the power of the Internet.
Passionflower also benefits from the skills and talents of Walter Zamojski. Walter is a photographer, videographer and techie with keen esthetic sensibilities. He works magic when restoring antique photos, and his critical eye helps drive the high quality of Passionflower products. Walter has extensive experience in all aspects of print production and managed a large-format digital printing facility in a former life.
Passionflower's design capabilities are further enhanced by the artistry of Kelsey Hughes. A graduate of the Graphic Design program at Western Washington University with a focus in new media and work experience with companies like Pendleton, Sur La Table, Alaska Airlines and Zulily, Kelsey works with Passionflower on a freelance basis. She is expert with Adobe design software, and her superior eye for design is evidenced in any Passionflower project she touches.


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All those who are practicing sports, must have heard about cricket at least one time in their lives. This popular sport is the choice of numerous people, of all ages, regardless of gender or race. Due to its inherently enthusiastic progression and multiple similarities with baseball, one can call cricket "the European baseball".
This website aims at offering people a good look into this sport, which often-times might be neglected or insufficiently covered, despite its fascinating game play and characteristics. Having grown in popularity over the years, this sport has managed to grow exponentially and currently, there are numerous countries which have adopted it along with a great deal of practitioners.
Featuring a quite simple set of rules and accompanying gear, cricket has an almost irresistible appeal to many people all around the world, especially those found in the Anglophone countries, such as England, Australia and other former colonies all around the world. Since the English people carried with them the sport wherever they went into their conquests, there's no wonder how the sport managed to increase in popularity so quickly and has been adopted in so many different cultures.
One country which has seen an impressive implementation of cricket in its culture is India, where it managed to develop significantly. It has produced a number of competitive teams and great players, which compete with the Europeans and Canadians.
The ability to play cricket at clubs has greatly improved the public reception, making it accessible to all social classes and facilitating the spread and rise in popularity, even in the ranks of those who weren't part of the sports community.
For learning more about the history of cricket, its beginnings and other interesting facts about its emergence in the world, readers are invited to have a closer look on the following pages, where more details will be shared.


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Why Yachad
Yachad (the Hebrew word for together) is a collaborative program for teens in 9-12th grades from across Minneapolis. Yachad is the education program for all of our teens together. Eleven Minneapolis organizations collaborate together to provide one Jewish communal program for our teens. From more than ten local high schools, our teens come together weekly to eat, learn and socialize with other teens from across the metro area.
Core Principles
EXPERIENCE IT! Yachad uses on 21st C. educational practices to create meaningful and engaging learning opportunities for teens. Learning will be based on real world and hands-on experiences. Learning will focus on critical thinking skills and collaboration with others. The arts and technology will be integrated into most experiences.
Prep U (College Prep Program)
Prep U is a unique-to-Yachad program geared to prepare teens for college Jewish life. This program is an example of how Yachad staff listen and value feedback from families. With input from families, Yachad creates new ways to further engage Jewish teens.
There are three components to Yachad's Prep U program.
College Credit Opportunities
The University of MN's nationally accredited College in the Schools (CIS) program brings U of M faculty together with high school teachers and students to offer University courses in high school programs. Yachad will offer five levels of CIS Hebrew for college credit. Yachad also offer college credit courses through Gratz College in Philadelphia.
Unique Partnerships
Yachad offers unique partnerships with both local and national organizations to offer dynamic and engaging opportunities for teens.


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So you're stuck at home and the hurricane of the century isn't really going to get nasty until late tonight. You could keep watching the TV news coverage (yawn) or do something productive and positive with your day. Gizmo Guy has a few ideas.
Work that Netflix subscription: Today's a fine day to plow thorugh a full season of "24," "Freaks and Geeks," the cool new(er) "Sherlock" series, "Psych," "Porlandia" (the Fred Armisen/Carrie Brownstein cult comedy hit) or "Alfred Hiotchock Presents" (in the news again with two movies.) Or you might rally round the tube with the family for classics like "Free Willy" (where the weather's warm and water inviting) or "The Wiz" (Diana Ross and Michael Jackson in another kind of paradise). If you're a music fan, gotta hop to sunny Jamaica with the great documentary celebration of the reggae king (Bob) "Marley" also found on Netflix.
Stockpiling Satellite Content: Nab your TV content via satellite? You might experience some rain fade/lost signal problems in the heaviest waves of Hurricane Sandy's deluge. So to not spoil the evening, download a movie or two to the DVR portion of your receiver now. That content will then remain accesible even if all hell breaks lose (so long as you don't lose power.)
Upgrade your OS: Been putting off that install of Apple's iOS 6 for your tablet or phone - waiting for favorite apps to also be upgraded? It's safe to presume you can now move freely about the cyber-planet.
Live in Microsoft world? The new Windows 8 operating system boasting both a traditional desk top interface and Metro (aka tile) style touch friendly UI launched last Friday and is ready to download here. PC users running Windows 7, Vista and XP can upgrade to Windows 8 for $39.99 with a special offer good through Jan 31. Microsoft hosts the official unveiling of Windows Phone 8 at a press event this afternoon at 1 p.m. (East Coast time.)
Storm Proof Your Mobile Phone: In prep for a possible power outtage, shut off all unnecessary, battery draining features on your mobile phone - Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Location (GPS.) Also eliminate any apps running in the background. To do the latter with an iPhone, a fast double click of the home button brings up a bottom screen display of active apps. Press and hold one icon until all start wiggling. Now tap on the x's in the corners until all have disappeared. Don't worry - you haven't erased the apps, just closed them.
Winterize your heating system: Today's a fine day to clean or replace the filter in your forced air heating system and also replace the water-grabbing filter in a house humidifier. Don't forget to vacuum clean the vent grills, too. An unobstructed, free flowing heating system saves moolah. And if tonight's super windy/chilly storm finally makes you turn on the heat, you won't be hit with that usual blast of "dusty heat" smell.