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A Launch to Remember (Part 7) May 1, 2011
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Science, Space Exploration.Tags: A Launch to Remember, Biology, Space Shuttle
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Sunday Morning: We headed to the Press Center at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) this morning to see what's what. No press briefing has been scheduled, but we're expecting one after the launch team makes a determination. The buzz around KSC is that the launch will be no earlier than May 8 or maybe May 10. The simple thermostat swap-out, for which we were hoping, isn't the planned fix; it's a much bigger problem.
In the meantime, we've kept ourselves busy, and Lofty Ambitions isn't just about the space shuttle. KSC, in addition to being an active launch facility for both NASA and the Air Force, is a wildlife refuge. Alligators are protected here, and the area hosts 350 species of birds. As native Midwesterners, we're used to seeing squirrels and bunnies, not reptiles and long-legged birds. Here are some photos of the creatures we've seen during our visit to the east coast of Florida.
We'll have another update later today. We'll likely be heading home well before Endeavour launches. While that's disappointing, this trip has been utterly worthwhile, and we have more to share than we've been able to keep up with. Stay tuned.
Guest Blog: Ken Kremer April 18, 2011
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Guest Blogs, Science, Space Exploration.Tags: Art & Science, Biology, Mars
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Today, we feature a guest blogger who will catch us up with two of the space program's greatest accomplishments, the Mars rovers. Anna met Ken Kremer as part of the press core for STS-133 back in November and was especially impressed by his range of knowledge about NASA and his enthusiasm.
Ken Kremer is a freelance science writer and scientist who regularly publishes writing and photography in online and print venues, including New Scientist, Science News, Aviation Week, and Spaceflight Now. For more of Ken Kremer's work at Universe Today, click HERE. He does lectures around the country at museums, universities and schools, and clubs. He's served as a Solar System Ambassador since 2005.
Photo credit for the three panoramic photographs here: NASA/JPL/Cornell, Marco Di Lorenzo, Kenneth Kremer.
NASA's twin Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity surely rank as one of the greatest triumphs in the history of space exploration.
Seven years ago, the dynamic duo landed on opposite sides of the Red planet on January 3 and January 24, 2004. They were originally designed to operate for just 90 Martian days, or sols, with an outside possibility they might last a few months longer. In actuality—during the extended mission phase—they have endured light years beyond the mere three-month warranty proclaimed by NASA as the mission began with high hopes following the nail-biting so-called six minutes of terror as the twins plunged through the Martian atmosphere with no certainty as to the outcome of the landing.
Since 2004, the rovers' longevity has far exceeded all expectations, and no one on the science and engineering teams that built and operate the twins can believe they lasted so long and produced so much.
Spirit and Opportunity have accomplished a remarkable series of scientific breakthroughs, far surpassing the wildest dreams of all the researchers and NASA officials. Indeed, both rovers are positioned at scientific goldmines on the red planet's surface. Opportunity is still alive and trekking across the Martian plains, now 84 months into the three-month mission. By the time of her last dispatch from Gusev crater, Spirit had lasted for nearly six years of bonus mission time.
New images taken by the rovers appear at NASA's Mars Rover websites on a continuing basis. The raw images have inspired myself and others to assemble panoramic mosaics from the individual snapshots to illustrate the broader context of what Spirit and Opportunity see. This blog post includes a few photomosaics created by Marco Di Lorenzo and myself to show the current environments explored by both rovers.
Spirit last communicated with mission controllers back on Earth on March 22, 2010. The rover had entered hibernation mode as the autumn sunlight available to power her life giving solar arrays was diminishing. NASA hopes to reawaken Spirit from a long slumber and reignite her illustrious campaign of exploration and discovery. No one is giving up hope for Spirit, and NASA is stepping up operational efforts to contact the plucky rover since the amount of springtime Martian sunlight is now increasing over the next few months.
Although Spirit has been stalled at a place called Troy since April 2009, the rover made a significant science discovery at that exact spot. Spirit examined the soil in great detail and found key evidence that water, perhaps as snow melt, trickled into the subsurface fairly recently and on a continuing basis. While driving on the western edge of an eroded over volcanic feature named Home Plate, Spirit unknowingly broke through a hard surface crust (perhaps 1 cm thick) and sank into hidden soft sand beneath. At Troy, the rover discovered that the crust was comprised of water related sulfate materials and therefore found further evidence for the past flow of liquid water on the surface of Mars – a great science discovery! Our photomosaic shows the very last panoramic view taken by Spirit at Troy.
Meanwhile, Opportunity is blazing a trail of discovery in the Meridiani Planum region of Mars. This rover completed exploration of the stadium-sized Santa Maria Crater which holds deposits of water bearing minerals that will further elucidate the potential for habitability on the red planet. The rover arrived at the western edge of the relatively fresh impact crater on December 16, 2010 (Sol 2451). This intermediate stop on the rover's 19-kilometer journey from Victoria Crater to giant 14-kilometer-wide Endeavour Crater provides important ground truth observations to compare with the orbital detection of exposures of hydrated sulfate minerals.
Opportunity is driving to different vantage points around the steep walled crater and snapping a series of gorgeous Martian vistas. The rock-strewn crater is a Martian geologist's dream. As our photomosaics show, the robot was imaged on New Year's Eve in exquisite high resolution from Mars orbit while parked at the sharp edge as she was simultaneously snapping a multitude of awesome views peering inside the stunning and scientifically interesting crater.
Santa Maria is just six kilomters from the western rim of Endeavour which shows spectral signatures of phyllosilicates, or clay bearing minerals, which formed in water about four billion years ago and have never before been directly analyzed on the Martian surface. Phyllosilicates form in neutral aqueous conditions that could have been more habitable and conducive to the formation of life than the later Martian episodes of more harshly acidic conditions in which the sulfates formed that Opportunity has already been exploring during her seven-year overland expedition. See the Astronomy Picture of the Day featuring Opportunity HERE.
Opportunity remains healthy and has abundant solar power for the final leg of the long eastward march to Endeavour, with arrival later in 2011. See the rover's progress HERE. And click HERE for Google Mars.
Guest Blog: Leslie Adrienne Miller April 4, 2011
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Guest Blogs, Science, Writing.Tags: Art & Science, Biology, Museums & Archives
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April is National Poetry Month, so Lofty Ambitions welcomes poet Leslie Adrienne Miller to the Guest Blog spot today.
We met Leslie when she was on a panel about research and writing across the genres that Doug organized for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference. Anna had read and appreciated The Resurrection Trade and, though she and Leslie had never met, encouraged Doug to contact her because there was clearly a lot of research behind the poems in that book. We were especially interested because the research blurred the distinction between science and art. The anatomical images were fascinating and the way Leslie talked about their role in her research and writing made for a good conference talk, which she's adapted for our blog.
Leslie Adrienne Miller is the author of six poetry collections, including Y, which is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2012. She teaches at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Many of the poems in my collection The Resurrection Trade are ekphrastic pieces on anatomical images of women gleaned from archival materials. Initially inspired by my reading of Natalie Angier's Woman, An Intimate Geography, where I first encountered the history of medical constructions and images of the female body (for example, Leonardo da Vinci's anatomical works and the Hippocratic corpus), I became interested in the way misunderstandings about female anatomy persist long after science has presumably corrected them. These misunderstandings offered paradoxes that poetry could reframe in interesting ways.
Angier's book led me to other, more detailed histories of art, anatomy and midwifery in Europe from the medieval period through the 19th century, historical depictions of pregnancy and the female body in art and science of the periods, advancements (so to speak) in female anatomy, and fascinating works on "the Resurrection Trade," the business of grave robbing and its impact on the lives of women and families in 18th century Europe. I also made use of online image collections at libraries of medical history: the Bibliothèque de L'Académie Nationale de Médecine in Paris (which allowed me to spend valuable time with an original edition of Gautier D'Agoty's amazing Anatomie des parties de la generation, 1773, from which portions of my title poem are drawn); the Wellcome Library in London, the National Library of Medicine's "Dream Anatomy" Exhibition (from which the cover image comes), the Clendening Library in Kansas City, the Anatomia Collection at Fisher Medical Library in Toronto, the Delmas-Orfila-Rouvière Museum at the Paris Institut d'Anatomie, and the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, to name a few.
Ludmilla Jordanova in her book Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries writes that "medicine bears an especially ambivalent relationship to the public/private dichotomy, in being rooted in the latter yet making claims in the former, a situation that explains the predisposition in medical writings and representations to the breaching of taboos" (52). When I read this passage, I understood clearly why this subject is so potent for poetry: poetry too has to navigate that odd dichotomy of public and private: forged in the intimacy of an individual's mind, a poem, like an anatomical illustration, is a private act destined for a public audience, at once shockingly intimate and deliberately public.
The Resurrection Trade evolved with a focus in the 18th century where I found the real crux of the issues to reside in medical constructions of sexuality. It is the period of the enlightenment in Europe that brings anatomical studies completely into the same frame, historically, with issues of gender that interested me. It is also during the 18th century that the medical care of women passed largely from midwives, women themselves, into the hands (literally) of male doctors. Gross misunderstandings of female anatomy (comical and tragic) persisted well into the 20th century, and the seeds of these misunderstandings still reside in contemporary cultural constructions of women, as I hope the poems demonstrate via my juxtaposition of 20th century notions and ideas with those of earlier periods. I chose very specific stories and details to get at larger interdisciplinary issues: namely the intercourse, and/or lack thereof, between art and science, medical practice and science, and the history of gender construction as we find it written on the collective body of women.
In addition to Angier's and Jordanova's books, others that led very directly to poems in this collection included Elmer Belt's Leonardo the Anatomist; Bynum and Porter's William Hunter and the Eighteenth-Century Medical World; Robert Dickinson's (delightfully odd) Human Sex Anatomy: A Topographical Hand Atlas; Barbara Duden's The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor's Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany; and Nina Rattner Gelbart's The King's Midwife: A History and Mystery of Madame du Coudray. The poems borrow freely from these sources and, I hope, serve as invitations to the reader to seek out these authors.
Antique medical drawings offer interest at so many levels: as the productions of working fine artists, they say something about art; as the tools of medical professionals, they say something about how we came to understand the physicality of the female body; as images which necessarily were almost always accompanied by text, they also have much to say about language[s]: hence my deliberate (mis)translations of notes in French accompanying the drawings, notes which seemed to say much more than the authors intended and, in combination with the images, allow us to look again at how science, art, and language itself have been co-conspirators in the construction of gender in the West. I'm certain there is more to learn and say and see in this area of study, but I intend the poems to offer a way in, to invite readers to indulge their own curiosity and collect their own idiosyncratic bodies of knowledge.
To view Dream Anatomy at the National Library of Medicine, click HERE.
Pie with Einstein March 14, 2011
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Aviation, Science, Space Exploration.Tags: Apollo, Biology, Books, Einstein, Math, Nobel Prize, Physics, WWI
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We're working on our regular post for Wednesday, thinking about scale in the wake of the earthquake in Japan, and wishing things were better than they are there.
For now, we've distracted ourselves because today is Pi Day. The shorthand for today's date is 3/14, and that's the start of the numerical representation of the mathematical constant pi: 3.14. A circle's circumference is always its diameter multiplied by pi. Because homonyms matter, celebrate today with a piece of your favorite kind of pie! In fact, it's Pie Week at the Olde Ship, one of the places where we meet for our weekly writing night.
March 14 is also Albert Einstein's birthday; he was born in 1879. When we created tags and a tag cloud for Lofty Ambitions just more than a week ago, we discovered that beer was somehow weightier than Uncle Albert. Today, we try to rebalance our attention.
Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921 for discovery of the photoelectric effect and not for his special theory of relativity, though articles on both ideas were published in 1905. Sure, the photoelectric effect is important, but the slight of his work on relativity was a snubbing of his heritage, his pacifism, and his preference for thought experiments over the laboratory.
Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson and J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Life by Abraham Pais and Robert Crease both point to J. Robert Oppenheimer's description of Albert Einstein's character: "There was always in him a powerful purity at once childlike and stubborn." Pais and Crease also quote Oppenheimer's eulogy of Albert Einstein: "His presence among us stayed us from the worst folly, and touched those who knew him with the light of magnanimity."
For another take on Albert Einstein, click HERE to read what our Guest Blogger Brain Foster, a physicist and daily practitioner of the violin has to say. For the post in which we mention Einstein's brain, click HERE.
Of course, Einstein—his life, his work—is enough fodder for a blog post—for many posts. But since this post is one of our on-this-date pieces in which we see how much we can reasonably cover, we turn to Gervais Raoul Lufbery, the French-American World War I pilot who was born on this date in 1885. Eddie Rickenbacker, another WWI ace, a native of Colmubus, Ohio, and CEO of Eastern Air Lines, credited Lufbery with the modern airport pattern—downwind-base-final—for visual flight rules. The Lufbery circle, however, which Lufbery may or may not have invented, is a defensive tactic in which planes, especially the slower bombers, fly in a horizontal circle when they come under attack. A circling of wagons, knowing that no one would take a wagon out without packing a rifle.
March 14 is also the birthday of two other men who took to the air—and beyond. Apollo 8 and Gemini 7 astronaut Frank Borman was born on this date in 1928. Lest you think this post is a little weak on connections, Borman, like Rickenbacker, served as CEO of Eastern Air Lines. Eugene Cernan is the other astronaut born on March 14, in this case in Chicago in 1934. Cernan went to space on Gemini 9A, Apollo 10, and Apollo 17, when he became the last man to walk on the Moon. According to Rocket Men author Craig Nelson, who was in the OC last week, NASA conned the astronaut crew of Apollo 10 into believing they didn't have enough fuel for a Moon landing, when they actually did.
But everyone talks about Einstein, and we spend a lot of blog space on astronauts. So here's something new: Lucy Hobbs Taylor was born on March 14, 1833. Taylor was the first American female dentist. She studied and practiced in Ohio, Iowa, and Chicago—all places we've lived. Celebrate her birthday with Anna by going to the dentist this week!
Science Writing across Genres March 2, 2011
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Collaboration, Science.Tags: Art & Science, Biology, Books, Cancer, Physics, Science Writing
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Recently, we wrote about the Literary Science Writing panel at this year's Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference (click here to read that post). Now, we're recounting another AWP panel on science writing from last year's conference in Denver: "Black Holes No More: The Importance of Science Storytelling Across All Genres."
The panel was chockfull of well-published writers: M.G. Lord, Rebecca Skloot, Leslie Adrienne Miller, and Carol Muske-Dukes,. M.G. Lord, author of Astro Turf, moderated the discussion. Latecomers who poked their noses in to decide if they were in the right place were provocatively inveighed to come in and sit down: "You're in the right place. Science publishing is the last part of publishing still making money." She then encouraged attendees who were already seated to pat themselves on the back for choosing to witness this panel, citing again the correlation that science publishing was the healthy part of a publishing industry hit hard by the economy and struggling to figure out the future of the book. The presence of new rock star Rebecca Skloot was the emphatic punctuation on Lord's statements.
Rebecca Skloot is the author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Sixty critics called it one of the best books of 2010, and Oprah wants to make it into an HBO movie. Henrietta Lacks, a descendant of slaves, was a Southern tobacco farmer whose cells were taken without her knowledge and used in a variety of scientific research. Her grave didn't have a headstone until 2010, and her family didn't know of HeLa cells until twenty years after her death. The story of HeLa cells—and of the development of the polio vaccine, cancer research, atomic effects testing, and more—is the story of science, ethics, and this woman. As Rebecca Skloot put it during the panel, "People need stories in order to read the science."
Leslie Adrienne Miller, who was also on the panel about writing and research across genres that Doug organized for AWP 2010, is the author of five poetry collections. The most recent is The Resurrection Trade. That term—the resurrection trade—refers to the commerce involving corpses used for, among other things, anatomical study and the artwork that documents this study. Miller's interest was in the women whose bodies are depicted in these drawings and paintings as well as in the bodies themselves. The poems explore how the female body—and its related stories—has been understood and misunderstood. She adds to the story of the science of anatomy by imagining the lives these women led and what happened to their physical selves.
In her talk, Leslie Adrienne Miller invoked a scientist who wrote poetry. We met Miroslav Holub while Anna was working on her MFA at the University of Maryland. After Holub's reading, Michael Collier invited the passel of hangers-on out to the local watering hole to spend a few hours leaning in to hear the avuncular poet speak. When Doug asked why he thought more Americans weren't writing poetry as well as having a career in science or another field, Miroslav Holub lamented that Americans worked too much, that we were putting our souls at risk because we focused on one thing—our job—intensely and left little room for complementary pursuits.
Holub is known for using scientific metaphors in his poems, which is a topic Carol Muske-Dukes discussed during the panel. Muske-Dukes, the author of seven poetry collections and four novels and California's Poet Laureate, teaches just up the road from us at the University of Southern California, where she has occasion to converse with scientists. As soon as a theoretical physicist discovered she wasn't conversant in math, he quickly switched to employing metaphor to talk about science. When she spoke with a molecular biologist, that scientist took longer to figure out she didn't have the scientific language, but the metaphors ended up being much richer: "think molecular scissors."
M. G. Lord's book is the most autobiographical story in this particular mix (click here for an article Lord wrote about her writing). Astro Turf recounts the pain of growing up with a distant scientist father. The gap between daughter and father widens when her mother dies and her father retreats into his Cold War-era job as a rocket scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. Other gaps that Lord plugs include the gender gap in the sciences and the possible prevalence of Asperger's syndrome among scientists and engineers. The story of the individual people offers insight about the larger field and the larger culture, too. As Lord writes in her book's introduction, "Never mind the differences in age, ethnicity, and background, every engineer I spoke to is, in a psychological sense a stand-in for him [my father]."
The panel abstract contained a focus around which all the authors' points coalesced: "the importance of filling gaps in history of science by recovering lost figures and dramatizing their stories." All four panelists use their writing to recover stories that had been misplaced or forgotten. Most good science writing fills in gaps and dramatizes stories. Of course, the story doesn't need to be lost to make for an important piece of science writing. Scientists talk with each other about HeLa cells and Mars rovers. But science writing isn't about scientists writing for other scientists. Much of the story and history of science is obscured—perhaps hidden from daily view, perhaps made murky with unfamiliar jargon. Science writing translates science so that those of us who aren't scientists can understand it too.
Literary Science Writing February 16, 2011
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Science.Tags: Art & Science, Biology, Books, Nobel Prize, Physics, Science Writing
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Given that two-thirds of the mandate we set for ourselves here at Lofty Ambitions is Science and Writing (as a couple), it will come as little surprise that we hold science writing in particularly high esteem. In each of our lives, books about science have either confirmed that we were doing the right things with our lives—in our educations and our careers—or these books have spurred us on to investigate new or adjacent paths.
For Doug, reading Richard Rhodes's The Making of the Atomic Bomb as an undergraduate proved to be a foundational experience. The first third of the book provided a compelling narrative of the development of early twentieth-century physics, a story that both confirmed his choice of physics as an undergraduate major and shifted his interest from artifacts to personalities so that he began to understand history as interwoven narratives. As Doug has worked on his novel about the Manhattan Project, Richard Rhodes's book has been one of his go-to references.
Later, while Doug was employed at the NASA Center for AeroSpace Information, he read James Gleick's Chaos and Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine. These texts played an important part in persuading him to examine computers and computer science. While he was in graduate school, reading Matt Ridley's Genome nearly convinced Doug to switch to computational biology and genomics.
Anna, too, has latched onto several books about science, some of which have shifted her thinking about what she does as a poet and as a teacher. Recently, as we've written at Lofty Ambitions, Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From captured our imaginations—and offered some ways to explain how imagination and creative thinking work. That book made for interesting connections with other books that Anna had read on cognitive science, including Nancy Andreasen's The Creating Brain, Alice Flaherty's The Midnight Disease, and Lennard Davis's Obsession.
Both of us also read Steven Johnson's earlier book Emergence. It's a fascinating exploration of collaboration, complexity, and the whole becoming more than the sum of its parts. Albert-Laszlo Barabasi's Linked gives a different take on the same subject; it offers more of the nitty-gritty explanation, but doesn't get as swept up with the story. There exist a dozen other good books on this broad topic of networks. And Malcolm Gladwell tackles somewhat related subjects in Blink and Outliers, mixing science with its cultural context. We rather like those books that have the feel of storytelling, without sacrificing the science—and as writers ourselves, we admire such an achievement.
As we mentioned in last week's post, at the most recent Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference, Doug attended a panel on science writing, "Literary Science Writing: Don't Be Scared," moderated by David Everett (also a colleague of our novel-writing friend Leslie Pietrzyk) and featuring Nancy Shute, James Shreeve, and Christopher Joyce. Because of our own reading preferences, we latched onto one of the panel's takeaway ideas: the best science writing isn't as much about science as it is about people.
The first panelist to speak was James Shreeve, author of The Genome War, The Neandertal Enigma, and (with Donald Johanson, discoverer of the first Australopithecus afarensis, Lucy) Lucy's Child. Shreeve's experience in researching and writing Lucy's Child and The Neandertal Enigma likely led to the panel's best literature-themed one-liner: "In science, paleoanthropology is as close as you can get to FICTION [writing]." He followed up with a quip to amplify his point about how a detail becomes a story: "Look, a tooth! Must have been a tool-user."
Shreeve talked of his own reading preferences and influences at the begging of his career as a science writer: James Watson's Double Helix and Horace Freeland Judson's The Eighth Day of Creation. Even now, he holds David Quammen's "Strawberries under Ice" in particularly high regard. Along with reading, what jump-started Shreeve's career was his willingness to knock on doors and say, "What are you doing?" The answers to that question led to much of his own writing over the years. No wonder that he emphasized that great science writing is focused on people and that, in his words, "Science writing's great advantage over literary fiction: there's always something to write about."
Nancy Shute, president of the National Association of Science Writers and a blogger for U.S. News and World Report, spoke next. Shute thought enough of Jonathon Weiner's Time, Love, Memory—which discusses the life of Seymour Benzer, a physicist who became a molecular biologist, and his work on Drosophila melanogaster (the common fruit fly)—to make special mention of it. Shute also offered the following perspective on writing about science: "Science gives us a way to grapple with how the world works—and how the world works on US."
The final panelist was Christopher Joyce, a science correspondent for National Public Radio and author of Witnesses from the Grave. A touchstone for which people often reach when discussing the intersection of Literature (with a capital "L") and science writing is Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Joyce indicated that, as an exemplar of literary writing, Darwin doesn't make the cut, but that E. O. Wilson does a better job. (Anna quibbles with Wilson's overarching approach in Consilience, because it privileges science over the arts, but we do appreciate his style.) Joyce described that his own goal as a radio correspondent was to make "a little movie in your head."
Writing and doing science, as distinct endeavors, have much in common; both activities seek to make sense of some aspect of the world: observed, experienced directly, or imagined. As the "Literary Science Writing: Don't Be Scared" panel made clear (and as our own reading experiences have shown us), when the activities merge in the form of writing about doing science, the outcome spans the gamut from turgid recitations of facts and figures to narratives that speak deeply to the human condition. One of the happiest outcomes of attending the recent panel was coming away with a reinvigorated reading list. We always welcome suggestions of good science books to read.
Happy Birthday, Colo! December 22, 2010
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Science.Tags: Biology, Cognitive Science, Museums & Archives
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On this date in 1956, Colo was born. Her birth marked the first time a gorilla was born in captivity. And she's thrived better than most. At 54 years of age today, Colo is the oldest captive gorilla living in the world. She shares today as her birthday with her grandson J.J.
Colo's mother rejected her at birth. This rejection is a relatively common but not fully understood occurrence for captive-born gorillas. This lack of understanding isn't particularly surprising, as researchers don't know much about gorilla births in the wild. Her early human caretakers, who hand-reared the baby gorilla, briefly referred to her as Cuddles. Her name was chosen through a contest and is short for her birthplace: COLumbus, Ohio. Those caretakers bottle-fed Colo and dressed her in clothes. Colo would go on to bear three children of her own, with her mate Bongo. She did not raise those gorillas, though Colo did care for twin grandchildren.
On the one hand, anthropomorphizing this gorilla—dressing her in clothes, referring to second-generation offspring as grandchildren—is evidence of our own self-centeredness. It's awfully presumptive to think that Colo shares our emotions and ways of thinking about the world. When we project our thoughts and feelings onto an animal—or another human, for the matter—to explain their behavior, we may miss the opportunity to understand that individual more deeply.
Empathy is a tricky thing; it depends on our ability to understand and project our own emotions, but ultimately requires the broader ability to understand another's perspective in addition to our own. In the issue of American Scholar out this week, Richard Restak explains that the medial prefrontal cortex in the brain "is concerned with representing our own thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, as well as providing us with representations of the mental states of other people." When we anthropomorphize gorillas without understanding their mental states, though, we may jump to conclusions and miss other interesting and relevant possibilities.
On the other hand, it's no wonder we think of these great apes as very much like humans. Depending on how one parses it, since some genes vary more than others, gorillas share about their 95% of DNA with human beings. The chimpanzee and bonobo are our only closer genetic relatives, with 98% similarity. We remember first coming across this fact, at the Columbus Zoo, where Colo has lived all her life. We read the fact on a placard as we watched a woman bottle-feed a bonobo behind the glass.
Gorilla gestation is about 8½ months, nearly identical to that of humans. Baby gorillas stay with their mothers for three or four years, a timeframe reminiscent of human children, who generally, in the United States, go off to kindergarten at age five. Females mature at about age 11, often earlier in captivity. Human girls reach menarche at about age 12, often earlier if heavier. Gorillas have even been seen having sex face to face.
We've long known apes are social animals, living in troops with one or a few mature males, several females, and their young. Recent studies indicate that gorillas may be empathetic, too, which makes sense for social creatures. Richard Restak, in his discussion of empathy in humans, links our social nature with our ability to empathize: "The research finding that out thoughts and feelings about ourselves and others are processed in the same brain areas confirms what sages and religious thinkers have been saying throughout the ages: we're not isolated components in an impersonal social network but, rather, deeply social creatures capable of imagining each other's internal experiences."
What if apes, being social creatures, are also empathizers? One researcher points out that both humans and apes console each other after, say, a defeat, whereas monkeys do not. In 2008, a gorilla in a German zoo clutched her dead baby, the second offspring she had rejected, and the zookeeper there said that mothers in the wild sometimes carry around their dead babies for weeks. Researchers in Scotland observed chimpanzees dealing with an impending death through increased grooming of the sick chimp. The chimps suffered fitful sleep in the immediate wake of the death and avoided the spot where the chimp had died. Another researcher found that orangutans share the phenomenon of contagious laughing with humans. Still other research shows that ape babies make pouting faces to get their mothers' attention and, in one experiment, tried to make the experimenter smile.
We know, too, that gorillas use tools, turning sticks into digging implements or weapons. And there's Koko, the gorilla who has been taught sign language to communicate with humans (see video below). Koko is the subject of a long-term research project. Because gorillas don't have the physical capacity for human speech, the researchers use sign language with Koko to study interspecies communication and its possibilities. The thinking is that each species has its own communication system; gorillas use gestures, facial expressions, and vocalizations to communicate with each other. And some species are sufficiently intelligent and aware to be taught ways, like American Sign Language, to communicate with humans; Koko scored in the 80s and 90s on IQ tests. One wonders whether her researchers would do as well on a test designed and administered by Koko.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) lists the Western Gorilla—Colo's species—as critically endangered. IUCN uses this classification based on projections, as of 2008, that the gorilla is likely to face an 80% population reduction over three generations (66 years, from 1980 to 2046). Hunting—poaching—and disease, particularly Ebola, have devastated the wild gorilla population in Africa over the last two decades. Mining, the timber industry, farming, and climate change threaten the gorillas' habitat. The Eastern Gorilla—the Mountain and Eastern Lowland gorillas—is considered endangered, but not yet critically endangered. Twenty years ago, the Western Gorilla—the Western Lowlad and Cross River gorillas—was considered vulnerable; ten years ago, this gorilla was endangered. Now, this gorilla is critically endangered, and the next step on this trajectory is to become extinct in the wild.
This morning, Nancy Roe Pimm was on hand at the Columbus Zoo to sign her book Colo's Story. The zoo celebrated Colo's birthday with cake for the apes, and special cake for the zoo's visitors too. More than a year ago, Colo was anesthetized for a series of medical tests, because her keepers worried about her bouts of fasting and lethargy. She seemed to be depressed, perhaps showing signs of aging. But the tests showed nothing wrong physically, and her heart was strong. Undoubtedly, Colo didn't think of her lethargy, medical tests, or her birthday party today the same way the humans do. Yet this celebration offers Lofty Ambitions an opportunity to ponder how animals are studied and considered.
Good Day to Be Born, if you want a Nobel Prize (or to donate blood) August 13, 2010
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Science, Space Exploration.Tags: Apollo, Biology, Chemistry, Nobel Prize
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German chemist Richard Willstätter was born on August 13, 1872. He studied plant's pigment structures, including the structure of chlorophyll. For that work, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1915.
Italian microbiologist Salvador Luria was born on this date in 1912. He shared the Noble Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1969 for work with bacteria and inheritance. That's especially important in understanding antibiotic resistance today. Because we like to point out connections, we note that Enrico Fermi helped Luria secure a fellowship at Columbia University, and his first graduate student (at Indiana University) was James Watson, who went on to share a Nobel Prize with Francis Crick for their discovery of the structure of DNA. Perhaps, there exists more than one kind of inheritance in science.
English chemist Frederick Sanger was born on August 13, 1918, and went on to be awarded two Nobel Prizes. His 1958 prize was for work on amino acid sequences in insulin, and his 1980 prize was for developing a method for DNA sequencing. Only three others have been awarded two Nobel Prizes: Marie Curie (see earlier post), Linus Pauling, and John Bardeen.
But if you think birth date is good predictor of your chance at a Nobel Prize, think again. University affiliation—either as an alum or faculty member—at Columbia University, University of Cambridge, University of Chicago, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or Harvard University matters more. Each of those institutions "claims" more than 70 Nobel Laureates among its faculty and alums. Chapman University, our affiliation, has one Nobel Laureate on its faculty: economist Vernon L. Smith.
Today is also the date, in 1969, that Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Michael Collins were released from quarantine for a ticker-tape parade in New York, then a state dinner in honor of their receipt of the Presidential Medal of Freedom for taking that great step for humankind (especially for Americans, who were happy to have beat the Soviets to the Moon). Watch a rare Neil Armstrong public appearance below.
Finally, on August 13, 1910, Florence Nightingale died. In her memory, consider donating blood at your local Red Cross.
Museum of Science & Industry (Part 1) August 10, 2010
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Collaboration, Science.Tags: Biology, Museums & Archives, Railroads
2 comments
Just as Doug had a childhood of airshows (while Anna married into the experience), Anna's childhood was steeped with Friday afternoon visits to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago (MSI). Doug's first visit—our first visit together—was over the December holidays in 1992. We went to see the "Christmas Around the World" exhibit, a display of evergreens, each decorated with ornaments representing a different country. Though not related to science or industry, the exhibit had started in 1942 as a tribute to the Allies in World War II. Likewise, Colleen Moore's Fairy Castle has little connection with the museum's main focuses. It's a gorgeous, intricate simulacrum, but it's not science. It demonstrates detail-oriented craftsmanship and industriousness, but it's not about Chicago—or American—industry. Once a tradition takes hold at the Museum of Science and Industry, though, it tends to stay a long time. We like tradition; we appreciate the power of ritual.
What we especially enjoy about the MSI, and other museums like it, is that it's a buffet for the mind, inviting us to stop and sample (the two of us have been known to overindulge). As children, we were interested in one thing one week, and another thing the next. Our tastes change inexplicably (even as adults, it turns out). Sometimes, it's trains, but then it's planets. And a museum like this one introduces interests we might not have thought to otherwise have. As a five-year-old, Anna didn't know that a thing called a submarine existed, until she saw it nestled up to the museum—of course, then she was intrigued.
When Anna and her sister were young, their parents would sneak out of work in downtown Chicago on a Friday afternoon, head home to South Shore Drive, and haul the girls to the nearby museum for an hour (it was free in those days). Each girl could choose one exhibit to see. Brigid usually chose either the baby chicks hatching—their beaks cracking the shells from the inside until they could emerge wet and unable to stand under the heat lamps—or the Coal Mine, there since the museum opened in 1933, as opposite as could be from the feather clumps that become adorable, hopping chicks.
On our first visit together, we waited in the line up the stairs (there's always a line) and finally entered the Coal Mine's cage, its rickety, enclosed elevator. The ride is loud and dark, bodies packed together in a box descending with a racket into the mine. Doug's claustrophobia only added to his sense of adventure, and even after we exited the cage, the mine shaft didn't offer much more wiggle room. The lights went out, the lamp flame exploded with a pop, everyone jumped (even when you're expecting it, you start), and the guide told us about methane gas build-up. This exhibit sucks you into believing—you can't help but pay attention and, therefore, learn something new.
Though longtime visitors insisted the original ride not be altered, some updates to the Coal Mine—mostly to add modern-day technology (and probably safety)—occurred in 1997. That's nostalgia, but it's also evidence of the way we think about the world and our lives in it. As children, we take for granted that what is in a museum is true and always has been. We don't have the perspective yet to know how much the world changes. We don't really understand that time elapses over longer periods than we have lived. Pluto is another example of this phenomenon: it's not really a planet, and we know there are objective rules about these categories, but don't we wish, at some level, that Pluto still was a planet?
The nine-foot walk-through heart was a favorite, too, often added to a childhood visit when there was a little extra time. The plaster-of-Paris heart was like a playground ride—only it was something inside your body too! When we went to the museum together, Doug didn't find it as impressive as Anna had led him to expect. She admitted that it seemed a little smaller than she remembered, but found it pretty amazing to see an organ from the inside. That heart was installed in 1950 and replaced (oh no!) last year with a 14-foot throbbing heart that matches its beats to a visitor's pulse. We all grow up.
On the other hand, walking into the hall that's housed "The Great Train Story" since 1941, we were struck by its enormity. That's an odd sensation for a 1/48-scale model to evoke. Its scale is small, but the model spans from Chicago to Seattle, with 30 trains on 1400 feet of track running through all manner of terrain and industrial regions. Looking at Chicago, we recognize Sears (now Willis) Tower, but there are also beachgoers and Gene Kelly singing in the rain, a waterfall and a gas station, the American flag and pink flamingos. The detail is so accurate that the tiny figures waiting at the Red Line subway station are based on a photograph of people waiting for a train at that actual station in 2002, when the exhibit was expanded. Trains—we'll have to come back to this topic in future posts.
Anna's childhood memories of MSI remain so powerful that they drive the title poem of her poetry collection Constituents of Matter. Just as our childhood toys (see earlier post) created ways for us to see parts of the world we couldn't otherwise imagine, the Museum of Science and Industry gives us ways to see the world and how it works. And to see a lot in a day. And to want to go back for more. Really, it's delicious and nourishing!
What Toys Did You Have? August 4, 2010
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Collaboration, Science.Tags: Biology, Chemistry, Physics
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Last week, a friend posted a story from Science Daily that reported that having books in the home has as great an influence on a child's eventual level of education as does the parents' levels of education. We've long felt that the books in our homes (see our earlier post on encyclopedias) helped shape who we've become and fueled our curiosity about the world. But of course, that doesn't tell the whole story.
Both our fathers grew up with Erector sets, those artifacts of an era before product safety lawyers were part of toy design teams. Even the heavy green metal case had corners and edges that could gash a careless child's hand. Doug and his brother Richard inherited the Erector set that their father and uncle shared as children. The next generation whiled away hundreds of hours using the metal girders, bolts, electrical motor, and pulleys to construct small new worlds around them. Anna never played with an Erector set, in large part because her father, as the last of four boys, had the weakest claim to ownership of the family's set. But even as an adult, his childhood memories were so fondly fixed that he bought an incomplete set at a yard sale on vacation in Wisconsin. The Erector set, first patented in 1913, is an open-ended toy, one that stimulates the imagination.
When we were in fourth grade, we each received such a gift for the mind's eye: a microscope. Our optical microscopes were nothing fancy, just inexpensive stamped metal. They used a mirror as the light source so that we had to exert painstaking care to position the tool near a bright lamp or sunny window and then tilt the round mirror just so. We secured each slide—maybe a hair with a split end, maybe a stained paramecium—between pieces of glass and under the silver clips to hold it in place. Compared with grown-up microscopes, the magnification was unimpressive, and the coarse focus—moving the eyepiece down and then up slowly until the image sharpened—required patience. And yet, it opened our eyes to worlds we hadn't imagined—to the structures of fabric, leaves, skin, blood. The microscope came with prepared slides, and we made more. Doug made dozens. The joy of peering through the eyepiece came from discovering something that's there, but that can't be seen otherwise. What's next, we wondered. Look!
So too with the Visible Woman, one of Anna's gifts from Santa. Her parents may have thought the investment in an anatomical model was a waste, for she never painted the plastic organs as the written instructions directed, nor did she fit the many pieces all together at once to make the body whole. Instead, Anna would put some organs into the clear plastic shell, then take them out again, turning them this way and that. Look around, and that's what bodies are: singular entities. No, the Visible Woman was fascinating because it was a bunch of parts, each of which fit into the digestive system, the respiratory system, or somewhere else, somewhere specific. But looking at each unhinged from its context was as important as seeing the connections. Unlike the Visible Man, the Visible Woman had extra parts that could be swapped out for pregnancy—bulging breasts and abdomen, a fetus in utero. There was a "real" quality to this toy that other childhood toys (Barbie was the closest equivalent in size and shape) didn't share. Anna didn't become a surgeon based on her hours with the Visible Woman, though she'd thought about it. Our childhood experiences aren't often that directly practical, or at least aren't solely focused. Still, indirectly, the Visible Woman showed Anna a way to look at things, to appreciate details, to know that there's more than meets the eye.
In Genius, his book about Richard Feynman, James Gleick writes, "it was said that physicists could be divided into two groups, those who had played with chemistry sets and those who had played with radios." Since reading that book, Doug has wondered what influence receiving a young scientist kit had on his adult pursuits, particularly whether that kit instigated his tendency to change jobs, even careers, every few years. In that white box could be found the very same things as Feynman-era physicists—chemistry and electronics—but Doug grew up in the age of Apollo, so his kit also included rocks and minerals, a rubber-band-powered airplane, and a model rocket. The model rocket's instructions frequently mentioned nichrome wire, a phrase as aesthetically pleasing as it was functionally necessary to ignite the engine. Perhaps the path of Doug's career (career also means rushing forward while swaying here and there) might be explained by the fact that, after working his way through the first few experiments, he decided that he was happiest reading the instruction manual over again. He's now very happy as a bookish librarian. The imaginative thinking that reading stimulated was even more satisfying than the physical outcomes of, say, the change of color in a pH strip.
For each of us, there existed different triggers for our childhood imaginations. Each of these tools—Erector set, microscope, Visible Woman, young scientist kit—invited, even demanded, we create new experiences. Each toy has a context and a process appropriate to that context. Yet each time we pulled out the microscope and raised the window shade to get the best light, we had to interpret anew. It's not so different from story-telling, as when Jane Smiley reinterprets King Lear in A Thousand Acres or the Coen brothers recast Homer in O Brother, Where Art Thou? It's all been done before, and it's all new. Who knows what might unfold next?


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CU: Home • A to Z • Campus Map
Chemical and biological engineering students and faculty at the University of Colorado Boulder have launched several innovative technologies that are fueling Colorado's economy by creating jobs and drawing significant funding to the state, including a $155 million investment in Sundrop Fuels in July.
University of Colorado Boulder engineering faculty are leading a $7.2 million multidisciplinary research initiative on soil blast modeling and simulation for the U.S. Department of Defense.
The U.S. Senate has voted to confirm University of Colorado Boulder Distinguished Professor Carl Lineberger as a member of the National Science Board. He was nominated for the position by President Barack Obama in April.
Several University of Colorado Boulder faculty and students are participating in NASA's Juno Mission to Jupiter, now slated for launch Aug. 5 from Florida's Kennedy Space Center and which is expected to help steer scientists toward the right recipe for planet-making.
An international team of researchers has combined data from multiple sources to provide the clearest account yet of how much glacial ice surges into the sea following the collapse of Antarctic ice shelves.
The Colorado economy will grow at a modest pace throughout the second half of 2011 with slow but positive job growth, according to economist Richard Wobbekind of the University of Colorado Boulder's Leeds School of Business.
Colorado business leaders remained confident, although generally less optimistic about the economy looking ahead to the third quarter, according to the most recent quarterly Leeds Business Confidence Index, or LBCI, released today by the University of Colorado Boulder's Leeds School of Business.
The National Science Foundation has awarded the University of Colorado Boulder a six-year, $5.9 million grant to continue intensive studies of long-term ecological changes in Colorado's high mountains, both natural and human-caused, over decades and centuries.
An international research team led by Japan and including the University of Colorado Boulder may have taken a significant step in discovering why matter trumped antimatter at the time of the Big Bang, helping to create virtually all of the galaxies and stars in the universe.
Ten University of Colorado Boulder students have received Fulbright grants to pursue teaching, research and graduate studies abroad during the 2011-12 academic year, a record for the university.

subset: commoncrawl


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ROYSE CITY – A Royse City man critically wounded his wife and then killed himself with one gunshot to his head in the street in front of their house this morning.
Neighbors say that after Scott Arthur Croop, 39, and his wife, Kara Elizabeth Croop, were arguing inside their home in the 400 block of Cookston Ln. shortly before 9 am and then the argument continued outside. Cookston is located just south of I-30, between SH 548 and Circle Ln.
Croop then shot his wife several times. She was in critical condition when she was transported to Baylor Medical Center by Rockwall E.M.S., according to Royse City Police Chief Jeff Stapleton.
Kara Croop's attorney, Lisa Baker Canterberry, told CBS11-TV News that the couple were separated, had filed for divorce last November and it was to be finalized next week. The couple shared an 11-year-old daughter, Alexandria, and Scott had recently tried to reconnect with her. Scott was also set to retire from the military today, after recently returning from serving overseas in Bahrain.
At the time of the shooting, Alexandria was at school. Administrators and teachers at that campus were made aware of the situation and counselors were active there today.
Police say that no one else was involved and they are interviewing witnesses and neighbors to determine what may have led to this incident.


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Virginia Williams Pink Lipstick
A soft rose-colored lipstick gave Virginia a youthful and feminine beauty look.
Virginia Williams False Eyelashes
To give her a totally doe-eyed look, Virginia Williams opted for a feathery false lash.
Pink Lipstick also worn by:
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- OR - Select an option belowWalk into this authentic Irish Pub and you will be instantly transported to a small farmtown in the countryside without leaving the confines of Dania Beach. Not only can you get a proper Guinness, Smithwicks, Harp or Strongbow on tap, you can add a nip of whiskey, and an order of blood pudding. The heavy wood tables at the Field are the perfect place to slam them when you're done. The bar top is as Irish a smiling lass in Carlingford, and the seats are just as comfortable. Nautical adornments, weathered art, vintage books, and an ancient looking fireplace fill out the space.


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Community Food Assessment
The purpose of a community food assessment (CFA) is to determine the locations and incidence of food deserts—that is, areas with limited healthy and fresh food access—and inform decision makers of those areas that need intervention. Some resources include:
Resource Library/ White Papers
Healthier Food Retail: Beginning the Assessement Process in your State or Community [PDF - 522 KB]
The CDC fact sheet provides data sources for helping states and communities understand their food retail environment.
A Guide to Community Food Assessment. Available at: http://www.foodsecurity.org/CFAguide-whatscookin.pdf [PDF - 254 KB].
The USDA published the Community Food Assessment Toolkit, which provides a series of standardized measurement tools for assessing food security within a community. Available at: http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/efan-electronic-
The Food Security Learning Center with World Hunger Year is an advocate for innovative, community based solutions to hunger and poverty. The Center provides information on community food security strategies such as CFAs and community supported agriculture program assessments (CSAs), community gardens, Food Policy Councils, and land use planning. Available at: http://www.whyhunger.org/getinfo.
The State of Michigan produced The Nutrition Environment Assessment Tool (NEAT) as an online evaluation of a community's environment and nutrition policies relative to healthy eating and produce accessibility. Available at: http://mihealthtools.org/neat/.
Journal Articles
Glanz et al. Healthy nutrition environments: concepts and measures. Am J Health Promotion 2005;19(5):330–3, ii.
Hosler AS, Rajulu DT, Fredrick BL, Ronsani AE. Assessing retail fruit and vegetable availability in urban and rural underserved communities. Prev Chronic Dis 2008;5(4). Available at; http://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2008/oct/07_0169.htm.
McCullum C, et al. Evidence-based strategies to build community food security. Journal of the American Dietetic Association Feb 2005;278–83.
Pothukuchi K. Community food assessment: a first step in planning for community food security. Journal of Planning Education and Research 2004;23:356–77.
Whelan A, Wrigley N, Warm D, and Cannings E. Life in a "food desert." Urban Studies 2002;39(11):2083–100.
Contact Us:
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
1600 Clifton Rd
Atlanta, GA 30333 - 800-CDC-INFO
Contact CDC-INFO - New Hours of Operation
8am-8pm ET/Monday-Friday
Closed Holidays


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DEMOForeign trade statistics
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Home Imports and exports Importers in ITUPEVA CLIPTECH INDUSTRIA E COMERCIO LTDA. ITUPEVA Sao PauloTelephone number: (+55 #) Fax ID Email, nome do contato and website Address: RUA ALIPIO SIMOES 170 180 - TERREO District: JARDIM SANTA JULIA Locality: ITUPEVA State: Sao Paulo Zip Code: 13295-000 Country: Brasil Activities: Imports Years of operations of Foreign Trade: 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2001 Export Until 10 products (HS CODES) imported by the company CLIPTECH INDUSTRIA E COMERCIO LTDA. and another Importers of related products of Brazil85.36 85364100 Electrical machinery and equipment and parts thereof; sound recorders and reproducers, television... Electrical apparatus for switching or protecting electrical circuits, or for making connections to or in electrical circuits (for example, switches, relays, fuses, surge suppressors, plugs, sockets, lamp-holders, junction boxes), for a voltage not exceedi See the complete reports of CLIPTECH INDUSTRIA E COMERCIO LTDA. |
Customs data: Trade data reports - ComexCLIPTECH INDUSTRIA E COMERCIO LTDA. does not currently advertise comprehensive company & product information with Comxport Trade Data. We cannot guarantee the accuracy of company and product information. ServicesDEMOForeign trade statistics Business inteligence advice Incoterms Insurance and freight CompaniesBuyers and sellers of this areaWorld companies, South Korea, United States of America, China, Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Brasil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, India, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela ContentUpdate the company detailsRemove company of the web-site Terms and conditions Contact Comxport Trade Data | Foreign trade |


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After Gucci went on a Twitter tirade calling out all the celebs he claims to have slept with and Nicki fired back with her own scorching disses, the Atlanta rapper deleted his Twitter account. Has he had enough of all the online drama?
It looks like Gucci Mane, 33, scares easy! Nicki Minaj, 30, Iggy Azalea, and rapper Tyga all fired shots back at Gucci after his insanely inappropriate Twitter rant on Sept. 9, and Gucci responded by completely shutting down his Twitter account just two days later. Guess he couldn't take the heat!
Gucci Mane Deletes Twitter Account — No More Tweets After Nicki Minaj Beef
No one seemed to buy Gucci's claims that he had sex with Nicki, Keyshia Cole, rapper Tyga's girlfriend, and a long list of others.
Some even believe his tweets were just a publicity stunt to boost album sales or get his career going again after he was dropped from Atlantic Records.
Whatever the reason behind the rant was, Gucci seems to regret it because he deleted his Twitter account on Sept. 11. It seems the backlash was just too much for him.
Gucci Mane Claims His Twitter Account Was Hacked
On the night of Gucci's now infamous rant, his brother, Young Throwback, sent out a tweet in his defense, claiming Gucci's Twitter account had been hacked. "Eh this gucci brother sum1 hack brah twitter. Yall tr y sabotage brah. Dat messed up let gucci b. GOD kno d truth. Hackers," Young Throwback tweeted.
Gucci immediately retweeted his brother's tweet, and then sent a follow-up tweet on Sept. 11 claiming his ex-manager Coach K was the one who hacked his account and sent the spew of inappropriate tweets.
Many find this hard to believe, because one day after the rant, Gucci sent out a tweet to promote his new album, which was released via iTunes on Sept. 10.
Gucci announced his album on Twitter, saying, "10 17 pm tonight dropping album on iTunes diary of a trap god" — but he later decided to give his music away for free. Sounds like Gucci is backing out of a lot of things!
What do YOU think, HollywoodLifers? Are you glad Gucci deleted his Twitter account?
WATCH: Gucci Mane Says He Paid Nicki Minaj For Sex In New Diss
– Faith Egbuonu
More Nicki Minaj News:
- Nicki Minaj's New Minajesty Perfume Details Revealed
- Nicki Minaj Goes All Pink For New Fragrance Ad Campaign
- Nicki Minaj Signs First Fragrance Deal — Will You Try Her Scent?
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Brand related information as context: the impact of brand name characteristics on memory and choice
- Sridhar Samu,
- H. Shanker Krishnan
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Consumer exposure to new brand names can occur in contexts with or without brand information being present. Whereas previous research has examined the effects of brand name characteristics (association set size and word frequency) on memory in the presence of brand information, this paper also assesses brand name effects in contexts without brand related information and extends it to brand consideration and choice. Two different processes are found to be operating as consumers retrieve brands and make a choice. Recall seems to benefit from a distinctiveness based route, which also guides consideration and choice. In contrast, implicit memory is influenced by familiarity, with corresponding consideration and choice effects. The implications are that firms' choice of brand names and media needs to consider the combination of brand name characteristics that will lead to desired outcomes vis-à-vis distinctiveness or familiarity based processes.
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- Title
- Brand related information as context: the impact of brand name characteristics on memory and choice
- Journal
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science
Volume 38, Issue 4 , pp 456-470
- Cover Date
- 2010-08-01
- 10.1007/s11747-009-0175-8
- Print ISSN
- 0092-0703
- Online ISSN
- 1552-7824
- Publisher
- Springer US
- Additional Links
- Topics
- Keywords
- Brand names
- Memory and recall
- Implicit memory
- Brand associations
- Brand consideration
- Brand choice
- Industry Sectors
- Authors
- Sridhar Samu (1)
- H. Shanker Krishnan (2)
- Author Affiliations
- 1. Indian School of Business, ISB Campus, Gachibowli, Hyderabad, 500 032, India
- 2. Marketing Department, Kelley School of Business, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, 47405, USA


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The Forensics Department collected a variety of samples that will give them an opportunity to look at an "all inclusive picture" of evidence taken from a fire.
Andrea Headrick, chemistry discipline chief for the State Forensics Lab, said the opportunity to be around for a controlled burning of a house is beneficial because the State Forensics Department normally arrives after a fire has occurred. This type of data collection allows them to identify ignitable liquids before and after a fire.
Positive samples were placed throughout the structure, including gasoline, lamp oil, mineral spirits and lighter fluid. Neutral samples came from debris in which ignitable samples were not used. Both positive and negative samples were collected from the house following the controlled burn.
Headrick said another advantage of this type of experiment is the fact that older materials can be collected and studied.
"You can't simulate what you're going to find in a house fire," she said. "If you're looking at this house here that's probably been here for 30 years, we have materials from construction from over that time period. So I'm not looking at vinyl flooring that I can buy today, I'm looking at stuff that was bought 30 years ago. It matters because different materials were manufactured differently and it's going to give us different patterns."
Headrick said that after a fire, it is much harder to tell what was in a house because "if it's burned, you don't know what it is."
The Forensics Department was assisted by PerkinElmer, a company that builds scientific instruments for the purpose of analysis. PerkinElmer is responsible for building significant portions of the Hubble Telescope.
"What we're going to do is analyze samples for the state from this burn," said Jesse Hines, LCMS (Liquid Chromotography Mass Spectrometry) project specialist for PerkinElmer. "Then we'll try to see if there are ways we can enhance the results."
Hines said PerkinElmer would use a DSA Tof, a $300,000 piece of equipment, to "see what kinds of different things we can see in the samples that you can't see otherwise with the conventional system. We're adding more high tech instrumentation to try to answer more questions."
Hines said PerkinElmer's analysis would try to determine if ignitable fluids could actually show up the same as other debris, such as burning vinyl. He said if there is a mixture from different compounds, PerkinElmer has the equipment to separate those mixtures out "at very low levels."
"It's adding a new capability that didn't exist," Hines said.
Lt. Tim Kurzejeski said Wednesday's controlled burn was important to the Pell City Fire Department as well, because firefighters, especially new ones, need to be able to step back and see what is going on outside a burning house.
"You learn just as much by watching fire progression and growth from the outside," he said. "There's beneficial training inside a house, but there's just as much beneficial training outside a house."
Kurzejeski said firefighters need to know the dangers that are present, not just from the interior of a burning home, but from the entire structure and surrounding area as well.
Contact Kenny Farmer at email@example.com.


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The Office of Internal Audit and Investigations (OIAI) conducted an investigation concerning possible undocumented and/or unauthorized changes made in the payroll system. This investigation was predicated upon test work conducted on another investigation. That test work provided sufficient information to initiate this investigation.
10-205 Final 12162010.pdf — PDF document, 226Kb


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Wild Mystery Program
Solve a Michigan wildlife mystery with the use of clues. Examine the animal's skull adaptations to determine its size, body shape, and even behaviors. Use your own wildlife ecologist observations skills to reason the height, number legs, vision, diet, behaviors, and the animal's habitat. After examining clues, each person can suggest species identification thoughts. When the species is revealed, Ranger Steve will show image details about the life, family members and ecology.
Host: Howard Christensen Nature Center program presented by Ranger Steve.
Date: 18 March 2013
Time: 6:30 p,m. Program length – 45 minutes.
Location: Cedar Springs United Methodist Church recreation hall
Program: Michigan Wildlife Mystery
Who: You, your family, friends, and all interested in nature's mysteries


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lonely hours pass into days
and I know not where I should turn
in the dead of a summer haze
my sorry heart doth mutely yearn
with comfort and caress long gone
and hope but a fanciful dream
should all reveries be withdrawn
and solitude held in esteem
where is reason and where is rhyme
they move not forward nor restart
the pulse of life and love mark time
and dimly march upon my heart
what's it called - this place without name
this place without beat and cadence
perhaps … inertial reference frame
or is it ... a place to commence
© Kate Little
January 2012
For you, I think it's a place to commence.
To evaluate our lives before we decide to stay or move on.
A place to commence...we have all been there at some point.
this was truly amazing
Fully connect with this line..."and hope but a fanciful dream" R
neatly wound
words well wrapped
about a beating heart
and our own..
thanks! R
Do not enter into Limbo's gates!
For rhythm is surely never lost;
While hearts stay open at any cost.
Splendid, bittersweet and full of vulnerability. xo
Patricia K asks a good question...how the heck do you write like this with such range?
Rated...very rated.
Hang in there, Kate, you have much to offer us with your poetry and your kind heart. : )
& the pendulum swings ~ a mesmerising meditation, Kate, on what must be the condition of our times : the great void, that space, that ache.
I love this for its rhythm, the way it reads aloud, & the journey within.
It ends exactly right, with a question, & the possibility ...
Thank you all so very, very much for your support, encouragement, friendship and care.
My sincere and deep gratitude to you all. Thank you.
Thanks for these thoughts and words - I especially liked: "dimly march upon my heart" and I hope this feeling leaves you soon. Here's to new beginnings!


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About Us
Flagler Estates Community Improvement Association, Inc is a
non-profit organization that has been established to assist in
sustaining a healthy and safe community.
Flagler Estates Community Improvement Association ,Inc
Using your donations to change the lives of many
Our Mission
F.E.C.I.A.,Inc is here to
assist Flagler Estates in becoming a healthy, safe and
sustainable Community
We are a non profit 501(c) (3) organization.
We were established in April 2007, to work with other local
agencies to help us sustain a healthy and safe community.
In accordance with Federal law and U.S. Department of
Agriculture policy, this institution is prohibited from
discriminating on the basis of race, color, national origin,
sex, age, or disability. (not all prohibited bases apply to all


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About Us
The original Landsborough Shire Council Chambers were designed in 1924 by renowned architect Walter Carey Voller and built from local timbers supplied by A.E. Round.
In 1988 using funding from the Bi-centenary, the old building was revamped and a new building of mud brick construction was added. The complex was reopened on Australia Day in 1988 by J.L. Beausang, the last chairman of Landsborough Shire and first mayor of Caloundra City.
At a Heritage Council meeting on the 25th June 1999, it was resolved to enter the "former Landsborough Shire Council Chambers" into the Queensland Heritage Register.
Landsborough & District Historical Society Inc.
Landsborough Museum is the business entity of the Historical Society, which formed in 1973.
"Our mission is to collect, research, conserve, interpret and exhibit the artifacts, memorabilia, documents, photographs and stories of indigenous and non-indigenous peoples whose heritage can be linked to that region, known in the year 2000, as Caloundra City."The Society has a management committee comprised of a President, Vice President, Secretary and Treasurer who ensure the efficient running of the Museum.
The museum has a large group of volunteers, each with their own specialites that also help with the day to day running of the museum. We would like to welcome more commited volunteers. We need cleaners in particular. Volunteers carry out a diverse range of activities including working in the library, helping with exhibitions, general cleaning and maintenance, computer data entry, admin and archival work. We are looking for committed volunteers who are happy to work in any area where they are needed. If you feel you can commit to being a dedicated volunteer, please contact the museum. We are also registered with Centrelink.


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Gators' Loucheiz Purifoy named SEC defensive player of week
OCT 07, 2013 11:51a ET
Purifoy, a Pensacola native, had the best game of his career, highlighted by returning his first career interception for a touchdown that gave Florida a lead that it never relinquished. He also recorded four tackles, including the first sack of his career, three pass breakups and a forced fumble against the Razorbacks. Purifoy was also key in assisting the Gator defense in notching two sacks against an Arkansas offense that was allowing just 0.6 sacks per game. He also returned two punts for 17 yards.
For his performance against Arkansas, Purifoy was also named the Walter Camp Defensive Player of the Week, a Paul Horning Award Honoree and a College Football Performance Award Defensive Performer of the Week.


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Winning Battles: Party Gauge
Your level of party affinity is indicated by the Party Gauge.
Your Party Gauge will fill up when a party member lands a critical hit or when Arts are utilized effectively.
Also, by calling out when you score critical hits and at other times, the Party Gauge can be greatly increased.
The affinity between every member of your party is displayed on a gauge at the top-left of the screen.


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5 Quite Brilliant!!MoggyBaby | 02/01/2010 | See all MoggyBaby's reviews (4)First off, I love this film. Saw it at the cinema & bought the dvd same day it was released. I've watched it more times than I care to count so this review is purely on the quality of upgrade to blu-ray. And that can only be described as superb!!Everything is just sharper and clearer. I already thought the picture was good by playing the 'normal' dvd on the blu ray machine but this takes it a step further. The clarity is just something else. It's the little things like the shine on the door of No.10 - you can see the reflections in it!!! I'd never noticed that before. The early scene with the large Christmas Tree lit up in the shopping centre is blinding! Seriously, you do a double-blink as it is like being in bright sunlight.The sound track is sharper and you do hear things - background noises in particular - that you won't have heard before. I spent a lot of the film wondering if bits had been added-in as there seemed to be so much I had previously missed. With this film being made only six years ago I didn't expect it to have much to upgrade but I was wrong. It is good.And finally, the main question - how does Hugh look doing that dance??? This was the ultimate test for this film in this format. All I can say is that a white shirt & black trousers never looked SO DARN GOOD!!!!!!!If, like me, you adore this film then you must treat yourself to the blu-ray edition. It really is worth it.
3 Good Romantic DramaRambo456 | 20/12/2009 | See all Rambo456's reviews (1259)Top 10 Reviewer Top 10 DVD Reviewer Top 100 Music Reviewer Number 1 Gadgets Reviewer Top 100 Clothing Reviewer Top 10 Toys Reviewer This movie is a whole mish mash of love story situations with a brilliant All Star cast.A movie that JUST about works. The storys are ok.My fave story was the Liam Neeson one with his son.Performance wise it was Bill Nighly as the aged Rocker all the way. Hilarious.The movie is a little on the long side.
5 Languages and VerdictJBondsan | 11/06/2012 | See all JBondsan's reviews (43)Blu-ray all zoneRatio of the feature film: 2.35:1Duration: 135 minutesLanguages of the feature film:- DTS Master Audio 5.1: English- DTS 5.1: French, German, Castilian Spanish, Italian, Latin Spanish- Dolby 2.0: Commentary with R. Curtis, H. Grant, B. Nighy and T. Sangster.Subtitles for all the videos:French, Quebec French, Italian, German, Castilian Spanish, Latin Spanish, Dutch and English for the hearing impaired.Verdict:Some perfect picture and sound.Plus, a fantastic music by Craig Armstrong.The Glasgow Theme is marvelous.Nothing to say that everything is perfect.
5 Love ActuallyShanks123 | 19/03/2013 | See all Shanks123's reviews (5)Great film to watch every christmas, good comedy parts throughout and the cast are great!


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DOWNLOAD: Public Enemy – Say It Like It Really Is
Posted in Hip Hop, Video | Tags: public enemy, youtube
Real shit!
why is leon from curb your enthusiasm uncle tomming all over this 2dopeboyz?
good song btw
I like how a mother-fucker like XV gets almost 200 comments on his shit in one day, but Public Enemy gets only two comments. Not to say XV sucks, but this is PE! Some people...
this shit got me,for real,one of the best posts / videos of the year
history is still in the makin; dudes
dope shit!!1
PE is the greatest rap group of all time period!
y was brother ali in the video? pictures i mean. and love is evol spell it backwards and u understand or w.e he said. didnt he copied from em or is it called borrowed lyrics?
man this video is dope as hell
nice... i def like this.....
Chuck D's voice is too loud and overlaps the beat. Otherwise than that, it's ill.
brother ali is in it because he tells shit like it really is.


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About a month ago i ask about a flat beer, Flyguy and a few others suggested using the carb drops in the bottles, well, its been 3 weeks and still flat, Im assuming the yeast was all worked out, if thats possible, i primed with .75 cups Muntons DME, and now I know that wasn't enough, but has anyone else had this problem using Wyeast 1028 London ? the fg was 1.020 on this IIPA. It tastes real good but its just a bit flat, It was bottled back in March, conditioned at 70 f. Should I expect any more carbonation after 3 weeks? thanks brewers.
The only time I've had bottles that wouldn't carbonate, my problem was it tasted sweet so I knew there was enough sugar to carbonate with. I dropped in about a dozen grains of dry yeast and recapped. It finally carbonated after another month or so. If you primed the beer with the DME at bottling time AND added carb tablets, you definitely have enough sugar in there to carb with, probably too much. You need to wake the yeast back up. Have you tried turning the bottles upside down for a few days and then right side up again? Or gently swirl the bottles to get the yeast cake back up into suspension. Also try storing them in about 75*F or so. Hope that works for ya.
Use this:http://hbd.org/cgi-bin/recipator/rec...ml?8674392#tag Works every time. It seems to usually tell me more than I would think, but my beers have ALWAYS benefitted since I started using it.
I've had beer take two months to fully carbonate. Yeah sure you might get some big bubbles and a thin layer of foam, but to get the carbonation that youre probably used to it takes a much longer conditioning time than most reciepes or instruction will let on.
The alchohol tolerence of 1028 is 10% by volume Have you reached this value? With an FG of 1.020, you would have needed an OG of 1.095 which is definitely in the range for an IIPA. -a.
have you tried inverting the bottles a few times to resuspend the yeast?
With a gravity in the range of 1.090, you're certainly getting close to the alcohol tolerance of the yeast, but this isn't like a switch where it will ferment at full speed below the tolerance, and immediately stop when the tolerance is reached. It's more like a slowing down as the tolerance is approached. As your yeast managed to reduce the gravity down to 1.020, I would find it hard to believe that it couldn't go that little bit further to carbonate. Did the carbonation improve at all since adding the carb drops? If it did, I would definitely wait some more (possibly another month or two). I frequently have beers that take much longer than three weeks to carbonate. If the carbonation hasn't improved at all since adding the carb drops, you may want to add some new yeast with a higher alcohol tolerance, or go to England for a few weeks to develop a taste for beers that are not over carbonated and over chilled. If you decide you do need to add yeast, I can't help because I've always found that time has worked. I've heard of other people having stuck fermentations with highly flocculating yeast, but I believe they were just impatient. In over 30 years, I've had lots of slow fermentations, but never one that was truly stuck. There is also no possibility that all the yeast had flocculated. Much of the yeast could settle, but there is still plenty left for the carbonation, although it could take a bit longer. Hope this helps. -a.
Thanks AJ, it did not carb any more after the drops, it has been several months now, and still very little carbonation, I only used the drops on a sixer to see if it would work, I have 5 more of the six left, Ill give them a few more weeks to see if they carb anymore, if not Ill drink them as is, I just cant figure why it didn't carb and it irritates the hell out me I have another 5 gallon batch that is the same way, a slightly different recipe it is a IIPA also, both using the 1028 London, I made a 2 quart starter for both batches, massive ferentation on both using the 1 inch blowoff tube, well thanks for the replies, and keep em coming if you have any suggestions


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Alec Bradley Supervisor Selection Epicure Reviews [view details]
Give us YOUR review!Showing 1 through 5 of 5 reviews
"Damn Good Cigar for the money."
Very Good medium strength cigar that is well constructed with pleasant earthy smoke. Was pleased and will continue to purchasew
Dan in Lawton Mi. October 13, 2013
"Great Sticks for the Price!"
These are a great smoke for the price and are a great solution for someone looking to pay less for quality smokes! A little hint, these are actually factory seconds of the Ale Bradley black market. So if you like what that cigar is about then these are a no brainer at 1/4 the cost! Had a few so far and no construction issues to speak of.
Frank in NYC, NY September 6, 2013
"Once Going These Sticks Good"
At first light they are a dry but after getting into the body these sticks are good. They burn well with a good ash. Nice tasting cigar.
Dan in California May 6, 2012
"Great smoke, great price!"
Took a leap of faith and ordered 20. I?m so glad I did! Stick has a slight barnyard aroma; perfect draw and burn. Fantastic mocha flavors, solid medium strength, not overpowering, but you definitely know this is a premium smoke. Can?t beat the price, this is now my go-to stick! Thanks Famous!
Tim S. in Atlanta, GA May 22, 2011
"Great Cigar-Great Value"
First time with this cigar. Was not sure what to expect. A great smoke with that is full bodied with an excellent draw
Pat in Illinois June 2, 2010


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Last night on Fox News (12/22/10), Karl Rove and Bill O'Reilly attempted to defend GOP opposition tothe James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act of 2010, whichwould providehealth care for 9/11 Ground Zero workers.
In his final broadcast of the year (12/16/10), Comedy Central's Jon Stewart devoted the entire show to lambasting the Republican opposition.Stewart's attention to the issue seems to have pushed other media outlets to pay attention to this issue. (With any luck, we'll remember this the next time there's a "debate" aboutpeople watchinga comedy show instead of "real" news.)
Rove and O'Reilly'sdefense of GOP intransigence is hardly worth recounting. What was notable was theirsuggestion that Jon Stewart suspiciously developed an interest in this story just last week:
ROVE: But look, where was Mr. Stewart earlier this year–
O'REILLY: He didn't know about it.
ROVE: –when they weren't doing voodoo diddly squat to move this through? Where was the president of the United States?
O'REILLY: Look, look, look–you know the answers to these questions. You know the answer to these questions. They're demagoguing the issue now.
ROVE: Absolutely.
O'REILLY: Because they've squeezed it into a corner where they want to pass it tomorrow.
This is, unsurprisingly, false. Stewart did a report on the health bill in August (8/4/10), when he blasted Congressional Republicans and Democrats for the failure to pass the bill–leading him to declare about the political process, "I give up." You can watch it here. And send it to Bill O'Reilly while you're at it (email@example.com).


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High pressure continues to be the dominant weather pattern over the region leading to mild, sunny and dry conditions surrounding the fog and cool, cloudy conditions below the fog. This pattern will persist into next week with only a few dry disturbances bringing a few more clouds to areas that have seen sunny skies the last few days. The first shortwave trough will move in Friday which could be enough to mix up the lower atmosphere enough to bring more sunshine to areas that haven't seen it in days; it will also act to bring increasing clouds to areas that have seen plenty of sun. Winds will pick up in the Cascades and we could see gusts up to 30mph, but unless those winds are able to move into the valleys we may not get so lucky with seeing that sun down below the fog.
Another disturbance will bring a repeat pattern midweek and once again could be enough to unsettle the fog and bring more sunshine to the valleys. If we're able to mix out the fog temperatures will climb back into the 40s for west side valleys, however, if the fog lingers temperatures will struggle to climb out of the 30s. For now I have left 40s in the forecast, but this may change as we head into the weekend and see how much clearing we were able to do. Next week will bring more clouds to the coast, east side and northern California and we could see our next chance for rain arrive next weekend. This system will arrive too late to end the driest year on record for many cities, but will help our drought conditions.
Thanks for logging on and have a great evening!
Meteorologist Megan Parry