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Metrics derived from pedigrees are key to investigating several major issues in evolutionary biology, including the quantitative genetic architecture of traits, inbreeding depression, and the evolution of cooperation and inbreeding avoidance. There is merit in studying these issues in natural populations experiencing spatially and temporally variable environmental conditions, since these analyses may yield different results from laboratory studies and allow us to understand population responses to rapid environmental change. Partial pedigrees are now available for several natural populations which are the subject of long-term individual-based studies, and analyses using these pedigrees are leading to important insights. Accurate pedigree construction supported by molecular genetic data is now feasible across a wide range of taxa, and even where only imprecise pedigrees are available it is possible to estimate the consequences of imprecision for the questions of interest. In outbred diploid populations, the pedigree approach is superior to analyses based on marker-based pairwise estimators of coancestry.
The past few years have seen a dramatic increase in the use of multigenerational pedigrees of natural populations in evolutionary biology studies. In this review I outline the origins and benefits of this trend, summarize the available approaches for recovering pedigrees, discuss the consequences of imperfect information and show why recovered pedigrees are superior to proposed alternative approaches.
A pedigree is one of the simplest concepts in biology and probably one of the best understood biological concepts among non-scientists; after all, we each have a family tree, as do our pets and our farm animals. For more than a century, geneticists have recognized the value of pedigrees for studying the inheritance of polymorphisms, inbreeding depression and quantitative genetic variation. It has taken a great deal longer for wild pedigrees to be used—why?
Pedigree analysis within studies of individuals living in the wild has only been made possible by a series of developments. First, the intensive study of breeding success and other traits for all individuals of a species living in a particular area in the wild over several years, although initiated as early as 1936 (Richdale 1957), only became fashionable in the 1980s as ecologists recognized the value of individual life-history data for understanding population processes, and behavioural ecologists sought to measure the results of behavioural strategies in the currency of reproductive success (Clutton-Brock 1988). In many cases, measuring the reproductive success of individuals amounts to recording parentage, meaning pedigrees can be constructed. The first uses of pedigrees for socially monogamous birds ('social pedigrees') to investigate inbreeding (Bulmer 1973) and quantitative genetic variation (Boag & Grant 1978) followed soon after.
A second major contribution to modern wild pedigree analysis was made by the discovery of abundant, highly variable neutral genetic markers. The first breakthrough was multilocus DNA fingerprinting with minisatellites (Jeffreys et al. 1985a,b), which was rapidly applied to wild populations to assign parentage (Burke & Bruford 1987; Wetton et al. 1987). The second breakthrough was DNA profiling using microsatellites (Litt & Luty 1989; Tautz 1989; Weber & May 1989), which soon superceded DNA fingerprinting for wild population studies. When combined with appropriate statistical analysis (see §3 below), these techniques enable us to confirm suspected pedigree links, or infer parentage or sibship among groups of individuals, with far greater accuracy than is possible from behavioural data alone. Within virtually every social system observed in the field, a great variety of actual mating systems has been revealed. In socially monogamous birds, extra-pair paternity EPP rates range up to 55% across species and vary between populations within species (reviewed by Griffith et al. 2002). Among cooperative breeders, the dominant male in a meerkat (Suricata suricatta) group fathers, 60–80% of the offspring born in the group (Griffin et al. 2003) while in the superb fairy-wren (Malurus cyaneus) all group males together sire just 24% of offspring in the local nest (Mulder et al. 1994). In haplodiploid social hymenoptera, worker relatedness ranges from the often-predicted 0.75 right down to ˜0, depending on the number of queens and their number of mates (Avise 2004). Among polygynous breeders, harbour seals (Phoca vitulina) show remarkably low variance in male mating success (Coltman et al. 1998), while red deer (Cervus elaphus) show higher variance in mating success than behavioural data suggest (Pemberton et al. 1992). Soay sheep (Ovis aries) are so promiscuous that 74% of twins have different fathers (Pemberton et al. 1999).
A third cause of the recent increase in wild pedigree analyses is the increasing sophistication of statistical methods with which to conduct downstream analyses. For example, Keller (1998) was the first to conduct a comprehensive analysis of inbreeding depression in life-history components in a large wild pedigree (the social pedigree of Mandarte Island song sparrows, Melospiza melodia) including the estimation of lethal equivalents. In quantitative genetics, the application of the animal model with restricted maximum likelihood from animal breeding, which can deal with unbalanced, incomplete data and make efficient use of all the information available, is very recent (Kruuk et al. 2000; Milner et al. 2000; Kruuk 2004).
Finally, there is a growing realization that the evolutionary genetics of wild populations may not be well represented by laboratory population studies. Most obviously, wild populations have different histories of inbreeding and selection than laboratory populations. Possibly more important is the effect of temporal and spatial heterogeneity in environmental conditions. The demonstration that heritability (Wilson et al. 2006) and inbreeding depression (Keller et al. 2002) can vary systematically with temporal environmental change even within the same study population gives strong support to the view that many evolutionary genetic topics need to be addressed in the wild.
Pedigrees of free-living populations allow us to estimate the coefficient of coancestry between two individuals x and y (fxy or Θxy, also called the coefficient of kinship or coefficient of consanguinity) which is the probability that two alleles (at the same locus) drawn at random (one from each individual) are identical by descent (Lynch & Walsh 1998). In turn, this allows us to estimate the coefficient of relatedness between two individuals (rxy) as 2fxy and the inbreeding coefficient of an individual (f) as the coefficient of coancestry of its parents. When constructing pedigrees of wild populations, researchers have to make the initial assumption that founders and immigrants are unrelated and non-inbred. Under these circumstances, in a diploid species, the coefficient of coancestry is 0.25 between a parent and offspring, their coefficient of relatedness is 0.5 and the offspring of a parent–offspring mating has an inbreeding coefficient of 0.25.
Between them, the coancestry, relatedness and inbreeding coefficients allow many questions across evolutionary genetics to be addressed. When estimating quantitative genetics parameters such as the heritability of a trait or the genetic correlation between two traits, 2fxy is the metric used to describe the genetic relationship between individuals (Lynch & Walsh 1998). Quantitative genetic analysis in natural populations is currently focused on two great questions: how to explain the maintenance of quantitative genetic variation even in traits that are under directional selection (Coltman et al. 2001; Foerster et al. 2007), and how to explain how natural populations respond to selection, including the frequent observation of stasis instead of predicted change (Merilä et al. 2001; Kruuk et al. 2002b, 2003; Wilson et al. 2006, 2007). In both cases, there appear to be several explanations with empirical support and it will take further research in multiple study systems to elucidate general patterns. Nor are these purely academic issues; they are extraordinarily relevant to understanding how natural populations will cope with climate change.
The coefficient of relatedness, 2fxy is also a key parameter in the kin selection theory for the evolution of cooperative behaviour (Hamilton 1964). Its use in natural populations has greatly illuminated our understanding of cooperation. Interestingly, one of the general effects of being able to estimate relatedness has been to emphasize alternative, direct benefit mechanisms which probably serve to maintain cooperative societies (Clutton-Brock 2002; Griffin & West 2002, 2003).
The coefficient of inbreeding is required for estimating inbreeding depression. Inbreeding depression is a near-universal feature of diploid organisms, but precise estimates of its magnitude based on pedigrees of individuals living in the wild are still uncommon (Keller & Waller 2002; Kruuk et al. 2002a). As a result, at present we are relatively ignorant of the extent and causes of observed variation in inbreeding depression between populations, how inbreeding depression varies across the lifespan, whether it is common for inbreeding depression to interact with environmental conditions (see Keller et al. 2002; Marr et al. 2006), and to what extent it contributes to change in population size (Keller & Waller 2002). Again, these issues are highly relevant to the future survival of threatened populations in the face of environmental change. The extent to which organisms avoid inbreeding is also of substantial evolutionary interest in its own right. Inbreeding avoidance appears to have driven the evolution of outcrossing mechanisms in plants and may have driven the evolution of sex-biased dispersal in vertebrates (Handley & Perrin 2007), but the extent to which animals also actively avoid incest through mate choice is unclear. Incest avoidance is clearly present in some cooperative breeders (Cockburn et al. 2003; Koenig & Haydock 2004), however in other social systems, choosing the correct null model to compare with observed behaviour is difficult (Pärt 1996). So far, two studies of non-social passerines using pedigree coancestry and realistic null models have found little evidence for a behavioural inbreeding avoidance strategy (Keller & Arcese 1998; Hansson et al. 2007).
Pedigrees are formed from the accumulation of parent–offspring or sib–sib links. Field observations are the key starting point for pedigree construction, since they often supply hypotheses for genealogy, and if the hypotheses are correct, they make genetic analysis more powerful. For example, knowing the identity and having genotype information for a mother greatly increases the power of paternity analysis. In many birds and mammals, multiple offspring, likely to be sibs, are reared in the same place, a nest or burrow, where they can be marked and sampled. In many birds, parental care is indicative of parentage, though should not be assumed without some molecular analysis (see above). In most mammals, pregnancy and lactation provide excellent maternal information. In some species, additional information can be obtained through modest intervention; in their study of side-blotched lizards (Uta stansburiana), Sinervo and co-authors bring gravid females into the laboratory briefly for the egg-laying period, hatch the eggs in captivity, and then sample and release the offspring at the mother's capture site, giving perfect maternal information with minimal influence on reproductive success (Sinervo & Zamudio 2001). At the very least, field observations of marked individuals are useful in determining which candidate parents were in the study area during the mating and parturition periods.
For inference of family relationships, microsatellites have been the marker of choice for several years (Parker et al. 1998; Jones & Ardren 2003). No other marker type combines the following desirable features: single locus information, codominance, high variability due to many alleles at low frequency, potential for high throughput through automation and short DNA fragments amenable to analysis of forensic samples obtained from wild populations. Identifying microsatellite markers for novel species is through de novo discovery or by taking advantage of their cross-species utility (Barbará et al. 2007). In recent years, centrally funded facilities and commercial companies specializing in finding microsatellites have arisen, so that obtaining loci for parentage analysis is now often a matter of time and money. However, it would be wrong not mention some difficulties. In some taxa, microsatellites are hard to find or insufficiently polymorphic for the task at hand. Genotyping is error-prone, mutations occur and an appreciable proportion of loci has segregating null alleles (Dakin & Avise 2004), all of which can cause false parentage exclusion. A technical issue affecting long-term studies is that microsatellite allele sizes change, and not necessarily in a consistent fashion, between detection platforms (J. M. Pemberton 1999, personal observation).
In future, single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) may be commonly used in pedigree reconstruction in natural populations. Although individually much less informative than microsatellites, they exist in large numbers and scoring is potentially less error-prone than with microsatellites. As a result, discriminatory power for both identifying individuals and parents is potentially very high (Anderson & Garza 2006). Panels of SNPs have now been developed for farm animals and humans and studies confirm their usefulness compared with standard microsatellite panels (e.g. Phillips et al. 2007; Rohrer et al. 2007); the development of SNP panels for well-established long-term natural study populations seems probable in the near future.
Parentage analysis using genetic markers requires careful statistical analysis. There is a substantial literature, an array of freeware computer programs and a recent review on the subject (Jones & Ardren 2003). In brief, the simplest approach is to use exclusion with associated exclusion probabilities, calculated from allele frequencies, to provide statistical support. However, few studies of natural populations use an exclusionary approach, since candidate sampling is almost never complete, marker panels are not always powerful enough to exclude all but one candidate and genotyping error can easily cause false exclusion of a true parent. Instead, most workers adopt a likelihood approach, which makes better use of candidate genotype information as well as using allele frequencies. Specifically, among those candidates not excluded at a locus, an individual that is homozygous for a required allele is twice as likely to be the true parent as an individual that is heterozygous for the required allele. The nine freeware programs comprehensively reviewed and tabulated by Jones & Arden (2003) take different approaches to dealing with the range of complexities encountered in wild populations such as the existence of large numbers of candidates (of one, both or even unknown sexes), some or all of which may not be sampled or even enumerated; mutations, genotyping errors and null alleles; insufficiently informative marker data; relatives among the candidates; and the assessment of statistical confidence.
There have been some advances in parentage analysis outwith and since the Jones & Ardren (2003) review of parentage inference methods. The authors omitted mention of the first full probability, Bayesian, approach to parentage analysis in the absence of any parental information (Emery et al. 2001) which is presented as the program Parentage, available at www.mas.ncl.ac.uk/~nijw/. Duchesne et al. (2005) present Pasos, available at www.bio.ulaval.ca/louisbernatchez/, an open-system (i.e. allows for unsampled candidates) stable mate for their previous program, Papa. A useful feature of Pasos is that it explicitly estimates the number of unsampled candidates. Cervus (Marshall et al. 1998) has proved one of the most popular programs, but Kalinowski et al. (2007) point out an error in the way its likelihood equations accounted for genotyping error. This has been corrected in Cervus v. 3.0, which can now also conduct simultaneous analysis of maternity and paternity and is available from a new website www.fieldgenetics.com.
An interesting recent advance concerns the direct incorporation of field information into parentage analysis. In principle, it makes efficient use of the data, and reduces certain biases, to incorporate information about candidates, for example, spatial proximity, into the same analysis as the genetic marker information. Hadfield et al. (2006) took this approach in the case of the Seychelles warbler (Acrocephalus sechellensis), in which microsatellite variation is low, helpers at the nest of both sexes, which are relatives of the dominant pair, are potential parents and there are extra-territory fertilizations. This Bayesian approach (available as MasterBayes at http://www.R-project.org) found several different extra-group paternity assignments compared with previous methods. In the future, using developments of this approach, it will be possible to estimate quantitative genetic parameters or inbreeding depression at the same time as the pedigree (Hadfield et al. 2006).
The development of such a diversity of parentage inference programs is a reflection of the diversity of problems encountered during parentage analysis in natural populations. However, by far the most common problems in parentage analysis are that candidate parents are poorly sampled and the amount of marker information available is marginal for confident resolution of parentage links, even when the true parents are sampled (Marshall et al. 1998; Jones & Ardren 2003), suggesting that we should never skimp on sampling effort, the number of loci screened and the accuracy with which the loci are screened.
Another approach to partial pedigree construction using genotype data is to recover full and half sibships from samples of individuals. Here, methods have developed rapidly over the last few years (Blouin 2003). Butler et al. (2004) tested four algorithms for full sibship reconstruction ranging from an exclusionary approach through methods using MCMC to maximize the likelihood of partitions between sibships, and showed that they varied in accuracy depending on the structure of the data in terms of family size, and that all were sensitive to genotyping error. The approach of reconstructing sibships using MCMC laid out by Thomas & Hill (2002) has been developed further, particularly to deal with genotyping error, by Wang (2004) and is available as the program Colony from www.zoo.cam.ac.uk/ioz/software.htm. Although some downstream analyses can be carried out with sibship data, they do not of themselves allow, for example, the analysis of inbreeding depression, and the challenge now is to combine sibship inference with parentage analysis to construct more complete pedigrees. One possible approach was demonstrated in a study of bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis) in which candidate sires were only partially sampled. Coltman et al. (2005) genotyped offspring without identifiable sires at 32 loci and used Colony to infer 38 half sib clusters among 167 offspring. This information substantially increased the number of pedigree links available for quantitative genetic analysis.
With enough polymorphic markers, it should be possible to reconstruct a pedigree of a sample of individuals without the need for any field information. Methods using simulated annealing algorithms have already been proposed and tested by Almudevar (2003) and Fernandez & Toro (2006) and this field seems likely to expand greatly as marker information increases for natural populations. However, from the perspective of downstream analyses, ecological information about individuals will nearly always be useful. For example, information on year of birth often explains trait variation and is usefully fitted as an additional effect in quantitative genetic analyses.
Pedigrees for wild populations vary in depth, accuracy, size, completeness and structure, and a fast-growing literature describes the effect of this variation on the results obtained from evolutionary genetic analyses. This is useful both from the perspective of those planning to try and recover pedigrees for wild populations and for those analysing pedigrees for which there is no prospect of retrospective pedigree improvement, because the individuals have died or dispersed without sampling.
Coancestry and relatedness are greatest between members of the same or adjacent generations (e.g. parent–offspring), and the inbreeding coefficient of an individual is greatest when close relatives mate. This is good news for studies of wild populations, for it means that it is not necessary to have great depth of pedigree, in terms of generations, to capture most of the variance in these parameters. This point was made very clear by Balloux et al. (2004) who investigated the correlation between f calculated over generations 2, 3,…,10 and f calculated over 50 generations in simulated populations covering four example vertebrate breeding systems and population structures. Within just five generations, 90% of the variance in 50-generation f is captured, regardless of population detail, and some simulated structures reached this figure far sooner (figure 1).
The accuracy of pedigree links is a major concern for all studies. In general, errors might be expected to result in downward-biased and less precise estimates of heritability (Kruuk 2004) and this has indeed been observed, for example, in Darwin's finches (Geospiza fortis) using parent–offspring regression (Keller et al. 2001). However, Charmantier & Réale (2005) examined the effect of extra-pair paternities in simulated and real pedigrees of a socially monogamous bird species and showed that, provided the number of families studied is sufficient, animal model heritability estimates are surprisingly robust to EPP rates up to 20%. This finding is also good news for those using molecular parentage analysis with marginal power (see above). Nevertheless, for small sample sizes or highly heritable traits, heritability and other quantitative genetic parameters will be downward biased as the accuracy of pedigree links declines, and systematic patterns in pedigree errors, such as misassignment of paternity to spatially closest males, could cause environmental covariance to be misinterpreted as genetic covariance.
Similarly, estimates of inbreeding depression will be imprecise when pedigree links are inaccurate. Inbreeding coefficients calculated from the social pedigree suggest that Mandarte Island song sparrows experience substantial inbreeding depression in several traits (Keller et al. 1994; Keller 1998). A microsatellite analysis of four cohorts of chicks showed that due to EPPs, 28% of paternal links in the social pedigree are wrong (O'Connor et al. 2006). Using this information, Marr et al. (Amy B. Marr, Louis C. Dallaire and Lukas F. Keller 2007, personal communication) estimated inbreeding depression in the population with increasing proportions of paternity error (28%, the existing social pedigree, to 100%) and then extrapolated to a predicted inbreeding depression if there was no paternity error. For two of the traits studied, inbreeding depression was predicted to be significantly higher when pedigree errors were zero, suggesting that estimates of inbreeding depression emerging from this study to date are conservative.
More subtle issues surround the actual pattern of pedigree links in time and space. Polygynous species yield pedigrees which are good for estimating maternal and shared environment effects, since paternal half sibs have different mothers who may range in habitats of different qualities (Kruuk & Hadfield 2007). Long-lived and/or iteroparous species lend themselves to studies of ontogenetic effects and genetic×environment interactions (Wilson et al. 2005, 2006, 2007). Adding newly collected trait data for recent cohorts to a large pedigree of a short generation time bird (great tit, Parus major) and a smaller pedigree of a more iteroparous long-lived bird (mute swan, Cygnus olor) had contrasting effects (Quinn et al. 2006). In general, quantitative genetic parameters were estimated with greater precision in the great tit pedigree, presumably because sample sizes were greater and first and second degree relatives with measured traits were more likely to occur in adjacent sampling years.
A general difficulty is that owing to the variety of pedigrees and genetic architectures observed, it is hard to determine how powerful a pedigree is for measuring specific parameters and the extent to which errors or gaps in pedigree links will affect results. To address this issue for quantitative genetic studies, Morrissey et al. (2007) suggest a framework in which an empirically acquired pedigree and a user-supplied quantitative genetic architecture for traits can both be manipulated (e.g. wrong pedigree links can be created), and then used in animal models, to discover just how robust results obtained with real trait data are likely to be. A computer package, Pedantics, is available at http://wildevolution.biology.ed.ac.uk/awilson/pedantics.html for this purpose.
The existence of extensive microsatellite genotype data for free-living populations, often combined with information about traits, including behaviour, for the individuals involved, has led to alternative non-pedigree-based approaches to parameter estimation in studies of quantitative genetics, inbreeding and cooperation. These approaches use genotype data as a proxy for the coancestry and inbreeding coefficients outlined above and have great attraction since they avoid the laborious process of parentage analysis and the time required for generations to pass.
Conceptually, the sharing of marker alleles between two individuals, after taking account of population allele frequencies, yields an estimate of coancestry. Many different marker-based estimators of pairwise coancestry have been derived over recent years including method-of-moments estimators, maximum-likelihood estimators, two-gene estimators, four-gene estimators and different approaches to allele frequency correction (Queller & Goodnight 1989; Ritland 1996a; Van de Casteele et al. 2001; Thomas 2005; Oliehoek et al. 2006).
Pairwise coancestry estimators based on marker data have been widely used in the behavioural ecology literature in studies of cooperation. Less commonly, they have been used to investigate inbreeding avoidance behaviour (e.g. Reusch et al. 2001). Furthermore, it is in principal possible to use them (with phenotypic data) to infer quantitative genetic parameters without the need to resolve pedigrees (Ritland 1996b, 2000). Heritability estimates using this method were predicted from the start to be highly dependent on the variance in relatedness, and indeed it turns out that heritabilities calculated for outbred vertebrates are erratically different from animal model estimates applied to pedigree data for the same sample (Thomas et al. 2002; Wilson et al. 2003; Coltman 2005; Garant & Kruuk 2005; Frentiu 2008). Furthermore, in the context of quantitative genetics and inbreeding depression, the lack of information on precise ancestry is a great disadvantage, for it prevents study of additional and often important sources of variance such as maternal effects.
Closer inspection of pairwise marker-based coancestry estimators has shown that at least for outbred vertebrates, they are rather imprecise. Mean and variance in coancestry in real study populations is far lower than has typically been assumed for testing the average performance of coancestry estimators (e.g. compare Van de Casteele et al. (2001) with Csilléry et al. (2006); figure 2), and the low precision with which just a few loci can capture this variance merely adds to the difficulties. Pairwise, marker-based coancestry estimators should therefore be used with care in evolutionary studies: they are at their best when applied in scenarios with high variance in pedigree relatedness (e.g. within some haplodiploid hymenopteran colonies or selected samples of individuals likely to show high variance in coancestry). In all other scenarios, including tests of cooperative behaviour, it is questionable how powerful tests using pairwise relatedness really are.
Inbred individuals should be more homozygous than outbred individuals after correcting for population allele frequencies, and again a variety of marker-based estimators of individual inbreeding coefficients have been proposed (Hill et al. 1995; Ritland 1996a; Coulson et al. 1998; Coltman et al. 1999; Amos et al. 2001). Despite a probable publication bias, there is a certain consistency to findings of a positive correlation between standardized heterozygosity and fitness in natural populations (Coltman & Slate 2003).
The idea that heterozygosity or inbreeding coefficient estimated from a few marker loci has precision for measuring inbreeding depression in normally outbred diploids has recently been eroded from several directions. The observed correlation between pedigree inbreeding coefficients and marker-based estimates of inbreeding is often low despite good data (Markert et al. 2004; Slate et al. 2004; Overall et al. 2005; Rodriguez-Ramilo et al. 2007) and this is largely because the mean and variance of inbreeding coefficients are both low in those natural populations so far studied (Slate et al. 2004). Similar conclusions were reached by a simulation study (Balloux et al. 2004). As for coancestry, so for inbreeding coefficients: marker-based estimators of inbreeding are at their most useful when inbreeding and variance of inbreeding is high, as for example in selfing plants.
An alternative explanation for heterozygosity–fitness correlations is therefore required. Many individual-based studies which have published such correlations work with small, introduced or expanding populations in which linkage disequilibrium may extend over large distances (Hansson et al. 2001; Hansson 2004). Also, sometimes the correlation is driven by a subset of markers (Slate & Pemberton 2002). One suggestion is therefore that the correlations are due to associative overdominance, that is, alleles at fitness loci which are in linkage disequilibrium with the screened microsatellites, an idea also known as the 'local effects hypothesis' (Hansson & Westerberg 2002).
In conclusion, it is theoretically possible to estimate levels of coancestry and inbreeding from marker data. In practice, this approach is imprecise in several wild populations of outbred organisms studied so far. Greater precision is obtained by using marker data to determine parentage and sibships, yielding a pedigree from which coefficients of coancestry can be calculated and with which fixed effects and a range of variance components can be appropriately assessed.
Wild pedigrees form a crucial part of a rich seam of data from individual-based projects, analyses of which are likely to stretch for years into the future. There is a correct pedigree for every individual in a population and it is well worth striving to ascertain that pedigree since the information allows better downstream analysis in every way. The main way to resolve pedigrees well is to sample individuals as completely as possible and to use a sufficiently informative panel of markers. Where retrospective social pedigrees cannot be corrected through molecular genetics, or populations are just too large for detailed molecular genetic analysis of all individuals to be practical, the tools are now available to allow estimation of bias and imprecision using pedigree error rates obtained from testing a sample of individuals.
The majority of wild pedigrees analysed to date are for small birds or large mammals, reflecting the relative ease with which individuals can be studied in these groups. In the future, it is to be hoped that the ingenuity of fieldworkers and the power of molecular genetics can greatly expand the taxonomic range of studies to enable exploration of patterns of quantitative genetic variation and inbreeding depression across a wider range of life histories and breeding systems than currently available.
Only some rather general applications of wild pedigrees have been outlined above, but there are more potential topics for investigation in the future. Given enough markers, wild pedigrees can be used to construct linkage maps for study pedigrees, which can then be used to map polymorphisms and quantitative trait loci (addressed elsewhere in this volume (Slate 2008)) and analyse the rate of decay of linkage disequilibrium with genetic distance. No authors have yet investigated dominance variance in a pedigree for a natural population and it is not yet clear whether any wild pedigree structures lend themselves to such analysis. Much further investigation into the effects of imperfect pedigree information can be expected, including the assumptions that founders and immigrants are outbred and unrelated.
Thanks to two referees, both the editors and Tristan Marshall for their comments on the MS.
One contribution of 18 to a Special Issue 'Evolutionary dynamics of wild populations'.
PubMed Central Canada is a service of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) working in partnership with the National Research Council's national science library in cooperation with the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the U.S. National Library of Medicine(NCBI/NLM). It includes content provided to the PubMed Central International archive by participating publishers.


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Charles O. Anderson and Dianne McIntyre
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Sat, Apr 26 at 8pm; Sun, Apr 27 at 2pm
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Location: New York Live Arts Theater
Charles O. Anderson will present the NYC premiere of Restless Natives, immediately following the work's world premiere as part of the 2014 Fusebox Festival in Austin, TX. Infused with a stunning sound score and original texts by poet Ursula Rucker, this work is inspired by James Baldwin's seminal work Another Country.
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Ongoing throughout the festival
Letter From A Region of My Mind Mural
Ongoing throughout the festival
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Over 88 pages from the November 1962 New Yorker magazine where Baldwin's piece "Letter from a Region of My Mind" (the basis for what was to become his great book The Fire Next Time) first appeared will be reproduced in its entirety and mounted at Live Arts. The text is flanked by advertisements from the era, incongruously depicting luxury goods.
Concluding Conversation: Lebowitz & Tóibín
April 27 at 6pm
Concluding Conversation: Lebowitz & Tóibín
Sunday, April 27 at 6pm
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Writer, sardonic provocateur, and New Jersey émigré Fran Lebowitz (Metropolitan Life, Social Studies, etc.) and award-winning Irish novelist and essayist, Columbia Professor Colm Tóibín (The Master; The Testament of Mary; New Ways to Kill Your Mother, among many others) discuss Baldwin's legacy and his remarkable and enduring impact on their own lives and vantages.


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Choosing and maintaining a salt water chlorinator electrode
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Keep your chlorinator electrode in good working order for longer by following these simple pointers:
- Always switch off your chlorinator when back-washing the filter.
- Do not use chemicals containing copper sulphate, copper, iron or any other metal ingredients as they coat the electrode and impair performance.
- Do not add salt to the weir; add it directly to the pool.
- Ensure that PH levels remain within an acceptable range.
- If you use a standard (not self-cleaning) electrode, make sure you check it and remove any deposits, weekly during summer and every two weeks during winter.
Standard electrode or self-cleaning
With a standard chlorinator electrode, calcium deposits form on the surface of the negative electrode over time. If these deposits are not removed regularly, the calcium will bridge the gap between the positive and negative electrode and cause damage. For this reason, it is essential to check a standard electrode every two weeks and remove any calcium deposits. But with a self-cleaning chlorinator electrode, reverse polarity causes calcium deposits to drop off, eliminating major build up. Although you should still check a self-cleaning electrode every few months, it will require considerably less maintenance and cleaning. Why not discover which electrode will suit you best and how to make your chlorinator electrode last even longer.


text:
SOG Topo Meridian Knife M46
sog topo meridian knives
sog topo meridian knife m46
other SOG Knives that may interest you
Tool Logic Outdoor Companion Blue MT-02
SOG Seal Revolver Knife FX-21
SOG Vulcan Mini Tanto Knife VL-04
Tool Logic Magnetic Light ML2-T
Tool Logic SL Pro 1 Black Knife SLPB1
click on image to enlarge
Technical Specs:
Blade Length: 3.25 inches
Overall Length: 7.25 inches
Weight: 4.5 oz
Blade Material: AUS 8
Handle Material: Zytel w/ Aluminum Liners
UPC Code:
Valid SOG part number: M46
This item has been discontinued. Please choose from our other
SOG Knives
SOG Topo Meridian Knife M46
The SOG Topo Meridian knife, model M46, has an ambidextrous format where the user can open the assisted blade with either hand by pushing the thumb studs. The Zytel handle of the Topo Meridian has the SOG name cut out, leaving a really cool looking, wavy design. The unswept, curved blade is great for operations that involve slicing rather than chopping.
Own a
SOG Topo Meridian Knife M46
? Tell us how you like it! Got a question? Ask! Somebody will answer!
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Copyright ©2017 Hymel Products, LLC
Phone: 800.458.1606 (sales)


text:
Upgrade or installation issues
Posted by Bet Angel - General support (A) on 03 June 2015 09:07 AM
If you have an older version of Bet Angel installed or if you are simply upgrading to a new release, there is occasionally an issue where the upgrade crashes or does nothing i.e. spinning circle, mouse cursor and then nothing. This can be a corrupt installation or registry error and the best solution is to remove the old version first.
This will solve most issues. If not then please create a support ticket so we can investigate for you.
* Please be aware any custome icons or shortcuts will require removing as they will produce an error when you try to use them with a newer version
Comments (0)


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French election results: When will we have a result? What time is the winner announced?
MARINE Le Pen, Emmanuel Macron, Francois Fillon and Jean-Luc Mélenchon will go head-to-head in Sunday's French election, but when will we know the result?
France will go to the polls on Sunday April 23 to elect a new president.
An unpredictable and unconventional campaign has left four candidates vying for the presidency: the far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen, the anti-establishment ex-banker Emmanuel Macron, scandal-hit former Prime Minister Francois Fillon and communist firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
The latest French polls have all four candidates within just four points of each other, meaning that any of them could progress to the second and final round of voting in two weeks time.
When will we know the French election result?
In previous years, French television channels have given the first exit polls at 8pm local time (7pm BST).
Voting stations have traditionally closed at 6pm, giving counters in 250 designated stations two hours to come up with an initial result.
However this year voting will remain open until 7pm, meaning that the polls could be delayed.
If a candidate wins more than 50 per cent of the first vote, they will automatically become President and the second round will be called off.
No candidate has ever managed to achieve this, and it is unlikely to happen this year.
If there is no outright majority, the top two candidates will go head-to head in a run-off on Sunday May 7.
Again, exit polls will be released at 8pm local time (7pm BST) but might be delayed because of poll stations staying open for later.
Marine Le Pen is the far-right, anti-EU candidate
Jean-Luc Mélenchon has stormed ahead in recent weeks and is now a real contender
The second round is expected to give a clear result, so partial results will be considered more accurate.
In 2012 the losing candidate Nicolas Sarkozy conceded defeat shortly after the exit polls were released.
French law prohibits exit polls from being released before 8pm, but the result were leaked on social media using codenames.
Foreign press not subject to the law also published polls before the black-out was over.
Francois Fillon was initially the frontrunner but has seen his chances wane
Emmanuel Macron is the current frontrunner
Who will win the French election? Latest poll
Mr Macron is leading the latest poll from PrésiTrack OpinionWay / ORPI pour Les Echos et Radio Classique.
The former Finance Minister is on 23 per cent support, one point ahead of Ms Le Pen who is on 22 per cent.
Mr Fillon is in third place on 20 per cent, with Mr Mélenchon on 19 per cent.


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One thing I've learned in my time as a mom, is that kids make messes. I don't know about you, but I HATE cleaning up the same mess over and over and over again. Since my tots are the reason for most messes, I try to make them clean up as much as possible. Here are some of my kids favorite Clean Up Games:
1. Sing the Clean Up Song – Have a special song that you sing or listen to when it's time to clean up. Ours is well known and goes like this: Clean Up Clean Up Everybody Everywhere, Clean Up Clean Up Everybody Do Your Share.
2. Have a Race – I literally race Big E around my living room, each of us picking up a toy along the way and then racing to put it where it belongs. You can also have a race to see who can get the most toys in the least amount of time.
3. Gobble it Up – With toys like blocks, where there's lots of pieces, I take a bag or pillowcase, hold it open and pretend it's a mouth that likes to gobble things up.
Little g and Big E love to drop the toys in, then pull their hand away quickly before the gobbler gets them too.
4. Singing Plinko – Similar to Gobble it Up, Singing Plinko is where you sing one note to a song for each toy dropped into the toy box. If the tots want to hear Twinkle Twinkle Little Star without stopping after each word, they have to hurry and put more things away.
5. Bubble Machine – For little g's first birthday I bought her a bubble machine and soon discovered that when left unchecked it left a wet soapy area on my kitchen floor. I decided to use that to my advantage and now put the bubble machine on whenever I mop the floor. Bubbles are soap, right?
6. Dust Buster – This is not a game per se, but you'd be surprised with how much time Big E can spend vacuuming the floor with the handheld vac. He loves machines anyway, and loves to do things by himself so he'll often look extra messes to vacuum himself. We've also turned the dustpan, broom, toilet brush and vacuum attachments into toys to help us clean.
7. Find the Magic Toy – Sometimes I will have Big E search the room for the one magic toy that will make me sing a silly song. Conveniently the toy is one of the last ones picked up.
8. Hot and Cold – If Big E walks closer to the item I'm thinking of, I tell him he's getting hotter and hotter until finally when he picks it up. Conversely, if he walks away from it, he gets colder and colder. He loves finding the secret toy, and I love that he'll put it away before we play the next round.
9. Have Toys Help – Big E loves construction machines, so if I can find a way for his dump truck or excavator to help put socks in his drawer or toys in his toy box, I do it. Along with this, squirt guns make great watering cans and bathtub rinsers. You'd be surprised how useful some toys can be.
10. I Spy – Almost any tot knows the phrase, "I spy with my little eye…" It's easy to play this game to choose items that need to be put away. For example: I spy with my little eye something that is blue, has wheels and drives around a track (a car).
11. Basketball – Get a laundry hamper or the toy box and plop it in the middle of the messy room. Then walk to each toy and throw it into the hamper without moving your feet.
12. A Minute to Win It – In this game each family member must pick up and put away as many items as they can in one minute. We actually use a countdown timer from Scattergories or Catch Phrase because it makes a great countdown sound.
It should also be mentioned that positive reinforcement goes a long way. Nothing makes Big E help out faster than me telling little g, "You're such a good helper!"
So try out some of these clean up games for kids, and please let me know if you have any more. And thanks to the moms in my life who taught me some of these games in the first place.


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Anniston, Alabama Divorce Lawyers
Alyssa L Enzor
Oxford, AL Divorce Attorney.
(256) 770-7232University of Alabama - TuscaloosaUniversity of Alabama - Tuscaloosa and Union UniversityAlabamaCalhoun-Cleburne County Bar Association and Calhoun County Chamber of Commerce
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(256) 847-3777Birmingham School of Law and Thomas Goode Jones School of Law, Faulkner UniversityJacksonville State University and Gadsden State Community CollegeAlabama
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Anniston, AL Divorce Attorney.
Kyle D Pierce
Gadsden, AL Divorce Attorney.
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Sam D. Bone
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Birmingham, AL Divorce Attorney.
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(866) 831-5292Cumberland School of Law, Samford UniversityUniversity of Alabama - TuscaloosaAlabamaAlabama State Bar, National College of DUI Defense...
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Birmingham, AL Divorce Attorney.
(866) 975-8472Birmingham School of Law(AL) and Birmingham School of LawAlabamaAvvo.com, Top Immigration Attorney and Who's WhoAlabama State Bar, D.C. Court of Appeals...
Patrick K Yeatts Esq.
Birmingham, AL Divorce Attorney.
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Clyde Edward Riley
Birmingham, AL Divorce Attorney.
(205) 212-5577University of Alabama School of LawCumberland, Samford University(AL) and University of Alabama - TuscaloosaAlabamaLead CounselAlabama State Bar
Mrs. Jennifer Gale Rose
Birmingham, AL Divorce Attorney.
(205) 323-1124Birmingham School of LawJacksonville State UniversityAlabamaAlabama State Bar and Alabama Bar Association
The LII Lawyer Directory contains lawyers who have claimed their profiles and are actively seeking clients. Find more Anniston, Alabama Divorce Lawyers in the Justia Legal Services and Lawyers Directory which includes profiles of more than one million lawyers licensed to practice in the United States, in addition to profiles of legal aid, pro bono and legal service organizations.


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MOVIE SYNOPSIS [ General Audiences ] Film with great direction of Simon G. Mueller. This movie was presented in 2015, with original production from USA. You can watch Of Sound Mind online on TV cable or theaters with original audio in English at different dates. This film premiered in theaters in 2015.
Rating: 5 by 10 users./
Runtime: 90 minutes
Andrew Fitzsimons, Michael Jefferson, Jessica Duclos, Elad Ziv, Rob Barriales, Victoria Casella, Simon G. Mueller, Nicholas Michael Holmes, Clemens Michael Smola, Naci Baybura, Tudor Chiriac, Eduardo Alcivar Gonzalez and Michelle DeWyngaert.
Thriller, Romantic.
90-minute film (full movie) directed by Simon G. Mueller.
The original audio of Of Sound Mind has dialogues in Dolby Digital, it was produced in USA.
It premiered in cinemas or television in 2015.
Screenplay written by Simon G. Mueller, Senad Halilbasic, Boman Modine, Sebastian Rieger and Brett Patelsky.
Till Neumann.
Rei Soto, Eduardo Alcivar Gonzalez, Mustafa M. Bhuiya, Nicholas Michael Holmes, Rob Barriales, Brett Patelsky and Simon G. Mueller.
Composed by Thomas Farnon.
Without commercial breaks, the full movie Of Sound Mind has a duration of 90 minutes; the official trailer can be watched in streaming on the Internet. You can watch this full movie free in EnglishDolby Digital in movie TV channels, renting the DVD or with VoD services (Video On Demand player, Hulu) and PPV (Pay Per View, Netflix).
See the page of this full movie, Of Sound Mind in FULLTV Movies.


text:
THE re-opening of a crucial bridge badly damaged in last winter's floods has been delayed.
North Yorkshire County Council has been forced to admit repairs to Tadcaster Bridge will not be completed by the end of December as originally planned.
The completion date has now been put back to January with the delay blamed on higher than normal water levels triggered by Network Rail work further downstream.
Coun Chris Metcalfe, North Yorkshire County Council member for Tadcaster, said: "We are extremely frustrated by this development.
"Our contractors have been pulling out all the stops to get this very complex, painstaking job completed within the year.
"Our main goal is to get Tadcaster back on its feet after the terrible flooding and collapse of the bridge last Christmas.
"But we are determined to push on and make every effort to get this job finished as soon as we possibly can."
The county council said work had been carried out round the clock seven days a week to complete the repairs as soon as possible.
However the high river levels, caused by damming carried out by Network Rail downstream at Ulleskelf has meant 20 days have been lost.
The delay to the timetable was agreed after contractors met on Wednesday.
Coun Don Mackenzie, North Yorkshire's executive member for highways, said: "We are working flat out to complete this bridge for the residents of Tadcaster and despite this setback the works have now reached a stage where they are less susceptible to rising river levels. We have had to revise our timetable for completion as a result of this latest development. Of course, we will now be contending with more adverse winter weather but we will press on to finish earlier in January if we possibly can."
A Network Rail spokesperson said: "We can confirm we are carrying out vital bridge work at Ulleskelf as part of our Railway Upgrade Plan, and agreed the terms of our work with the Environment Agency prior to accessing the river. We have worked to the agreed plan for several weeks and yesterday (Wednesday), for the first time, we were advised that there may be an impact on the water level in Tadcaster. After speaking with the Environment Agency today, we have agreed to remove our worksite from the river to allow water levels to drop and essential work to take place at Tadcaster this weekend before we return to Ulleskelf to finish our own bridge repairs. We will continue to work with the Environment Agency and Selby District Council on this issue."


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A Lightweight Algorithm for Traffic Filtering Over Sliding Windows
The problem of testing whether a packet belongs to a set of filtered addresses has been traditionally addressed using Bloom filters. They have a small memory footprint and require few memory accesses per query and insertion, while presenting a small probability of false positive. The problem of automatic eviction of filtered addresses after a pre-configured time window is more challenging, since it requires tracking insertion times for later removal. This has been achieved in the literature by replacing the Bloom filter's vector of bits for a vector of timestamps. This approach precisely expires old items from the filter, but has a large memory footprint.
Provided by: Università degli Studi di Napoli "Parthenope" Topic: Mobility Date Added: May 2012 Format: PDF


text:
how a hairdo can help homelessness
Now to a touch of humanity in a tough world. Homelessness is usually associated with men, that's because they are the ones who tend to live openly on the streets. Homeless women on the other hand tend to be invisible, and many would remain that way if not for the help of an organisation called Catherine House and it can be as simple as a new hairdo
Source: 7.30 South Australia | Duration: 6min 9sec
Topics: people, human-interest, adelaide-5000, australia, sa


text: Well, no more Pandora Internet Radio for me until after the election. I fire up the computer and open Pandora to listen to some music while doing the Monday honey-do list. About 3 songs into it, I hear a commercial for Obama from some guy in the auto industry and how Obama wasn't going to "let us down". In the last hour, I have heard the same commercial 4 times on two different channels. If I wanted election commercials (from either side), I would listen to terrestrial radio. Yes, I have Sirius radio, but it is in the car.


text:
By ALI CUDBY
Today you might be thinking about Black Friday, Small Business Saturday and the holiday rush. It's also important that you're thinking about your goals for 2015.
In my most recent monthly webinar I walked through a quick and easy method to plan your financial goals for the year ahead. It's a little different from the usual ways of doing things, and also fun and very effective. Here's the overview…
They key to planning for success is to begin with the end in mind. In other words, start with an understanding of the outcomes you want to achieve in the year ahead.
ASK YOURSELF: How much money do I want to make in 2015?
From there, take your goal and break it … Read more


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WeddingTrans/Special Day LimosDuluth, GA 30096
(404) 992-4881
We specialize in vintage Bentleys and Rolls Royces to add that special touch to your special day. We also Stretch Limos and Limo Buses to help transport our guests.
(404) 992-4881
We specialize in vintage Bentleys and Rolls Royces to add that special touch to your special day. We also Stretch Limos and Limo Buses to help transport our guests.
(404) 551-5441
Shuttle Bus Services of the United States is a bus rental provider that has a range of buses readily available for various events. The party bus rentals are perfect for weddings and receptions. Our airport shuttle service can be scheduled to be waiting for you so you don't have to waste any time after your plane lands. The business's services are available all over the USA and you can receive a rate quote by telephone or live chat on our site.
(770) 366-2346
Special Occasions like Wedding, Anniversary, Birthday, Bachelor(ette) Party, Graduation, Prom, Sporting Events, Night on the Town, School Dance, Concerts.
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Passengers are treated to a luxurious ride by their own personal chauffeur. We can take you to your event in a number of premium transport vehicles, including:
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(678) 407-1136


text:
SharePoint Knowledge Base
10 SharePoint Hacks You cannot live without (VIDEO)
Don't you just love it when you learn new things that make your life in SharePoint easier? In this webinar video, you will learn cool SharePoint tips and tricks that will save you time and make you look like a star! Whether you are new to SharePoint or have been using it for a while, you will say "I wish I knew… keep reading >
Most Popular Tags
Learn how to come up, create and set up metadata as well as company-wide taxonomy
Best Practices
A mix of best practices related to implementation and configuration of SharePoint
Everything related to security and permissions of SharePoint
User Adoption
Tips and tricks to improve SharePoint and Office 365 user adoption
Need SharePoint Help?
Hourly consulting, training and configuration services are availableLearn More


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Chiropractor Lexington Ky Back Pain
Chiropractic care is more than just making the pain It is about taking care of your body to improve your quality of life.
November 6, 2013 (Newswire.com) - Chiropractor care in Lexington KY obtained fame because many of patients don't get relief with other way of medical treatment. A women's life become to a screeching halt and could hardly eat or drink even she can't sleep properly and about 15 pounds of weight she lost in last 2 weeks. But her doctors could not find out or diagnose the problem or disease she is suffering from. She wanted a proper cure not only bandage finally she goes to chiropractor and with one adjustment of neck her symptoms of pain disappeared. She continues to see her chiropractor regularly to maintain her health.
According to American chiropractic association 22 million people that are about approximately 8 percent of population visit to a chiropractor on routine basis to overcome their neck and back problems. At first stage chiropractors provide primary care. Chiropractic is widely recognized and it is one of the safest drug-free therapies available. In many ways both this medical and chiropractic complement each other. Some people argue that chiropractic cure can cause irreparable damage. They also write on billboards that chiropractic can kill or permanently disable you.
But it proved wrong. The link between neck adjustment and stroke has been discussed for years. After many research and studies it is now conclude that patients are no more likely to suffer a stroke that follow chiropractic treatment .Patients who have previously undiagnosed tear in the artery often says about neck pain, headache so they seek treatment and go to chiropractic treatment. Every day activities can also cause pain in neck or back such as turning your head when driving or doing some other work can cause artery dissection. This means that chiropractors are not injuring otherwise healthy patients so this is the safest option for people.
Each and every patient is treated carefully and complete treatment is done by physicians. They consult with every patient and customize a complete treatment plan to cure patient and to give him relief.. Many of the patients are suffering from back pain need a proper treatment. Usually back pain is treated easily with chiropractic care. And the method of treatment depends upon the condition and symptoms of pain.
Patients who had intense pain problem when get chiropractic care by physician of Lexington KY get relief from their pain.The physicians of Lexington KY provides friendly environment and they are completely committed to help people. They work tirelessly to that better effect. They practice specializes providing state of the art chiropractic care.
Categories: Exercise and Physical Fitness
Tags: back pain, lexington ky, neck pain


text:
Reflections on the Revolution in France Paperback
by Edmund Burke
John Pocock's edition of Burke's Reflections is two classics in one: Burke's Reflections and Pocock's reflections on Burke and the eighteenth century.
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 288 pages
- Publisher: Hackett Publishing Co, Inc
- Publication Date: 15/09/1987
- Category: European history
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- Paperback from £4.85
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- EPUB from £2.99
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Showing 1 - 1 of 1 reviews.
Review by stillatim
How decayed is contemporary political discourse? So decayed that libertarians and small market conservatives consider Burke to be their forebear, and Marx to be the forebear of Democrats. I imagine that Marx and Burke would much rather have a beer with each other than with any of their lilliputian, soi-disant followers.

So, just to be clear. Burke claims that a society functions best when it has a completely stable set of institutions as its base: civil society, landed property, and a state/church marriage. Only if these persist will liberty give us worthwhile projects, rather than muck; only if they persist is capitalism and financial speculation anything other than a casino in which the rich get richer and the poor get shafted.

These institutions necessarily require what today we think of as 'government intervention.' The poor should be cared for; the benefits of social life should accrue to all, and not just the rich; the profits of the wealthy should be re-invested in productive enterprise and not frittered away on luxury or the aforementioned casino.

Burke is no more compatible with contemporary, so-called 'conservatism' than Marx is. They both saw the dangers of unrestrained capitalism. They both saw the dangers of 'utopian' revolutionary planning (although neither conservatives nor Marxist read those bits of Marx, for obvious reasons). Admittedly, Burke was a sycophantic, power-hungry hack; and Marx went from being a lunatic pamphleteer to an impressive but ineffectual research academic. Neither of them are role-models. But at least they were willing and able to think - actually *think* - about politics, rather than just spouting party line drivel.

All that aside, Burke's analysis of the French Revolution's violence is tendentious, sometimes slipping over into yellow journalism rather than convincing critique. He's not always wrong, but he is always hyper-polemical, and that's never very constructive. His praise of English political institutions is far more interesting, as is his defense of landed property, although it's hard to distinguish the philosophical claims (need for stability in society) from the class-based ideology (stability is produced by Whig aristocrats). And his rhetoric with regard to the dangers of democracy (and, therefore, the libertarianism of the contemporary right) needs to be taken on board by anyone who cares that we're about to destroy our economic, social and environmental heritage: "The will of the many and their interest must very often differ, and great will be the difference when they make an evil choice… government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom. Among these wants is to be reckoned the want, out of civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon their passions." "The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please; we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations which may be soon turned into complaints… liberty, when men act in bodies, is power."

The solution for the problems of democracy is not, alas, more democracy, as nice as it would be to think so.

Also, the introduction to this Hackett edition is great, although Pocock doesn't really *show* that Burke wasn't in a rage against a proto-bourgeoisie. He does state it over and over again, but it doesn't seem important enough a point to make, considering that Burke most certainly was in a rage against some people an awful lot like the bourgeoisie of the later nineteenth century.
Also by Edmund Burke | View all


text: HMH AssessmentsNeuropsychologicalDean-Woodcock Dean-Woodcock Neuropsychological Battery Request More Info Shop Now Authors: Raymond Dean, Richard W. Woodcock, 2003 Type: Neuropsychological assessment Purpose: A comprehensive assessment of sensory-motor functioning Restriction Level: High; Examiner Qualifications Ages: 4:0 to Adult (including geriatric populations) Times: 40-45 minutes Available Scores: W, W Diff, impairment labels This test includes certain manipulatives with small parts that may present a choking hazard for children under the age of eight. Do not allow the child to place any manipulative in their mouth. A trained adult examiner must always closely supervise the administration of the test and use of manipulatives by children. Overview The Dean-Woodcock Neuropsychological Battery (DW) is a comprehensive assessment of sensory-motor functioning that includes a structured interview, sensory-motor battery, and emotional status exam. DW expands the psychologist's range of assessment and provides standardized procedures and normative information in comparison to other typically unstandardized measures. DW offers different levels of interpretation to support a wide range of professionals—from school psychologists with little or no background in neuropsychology to neuropsychologists and neurologists with extensive background in brain-behavior relationships. DW may be used in either a fixed, flexible, or process approach to assessment and may be administered in schools, hospitals, mental health settings, or private practice. The Dean-Woodcock Neuropsychological Battery, partnered with assessments of cognitive abilities and achievement such as the Woodcock-Johnson III, provides a comprehensive neuropsychological system meeting the needs of neuropsychologists, neurologists, and school psychologists in a variety of mental health settings. Benefits Administration Benefits Benefits Measures of simple and complex sensory and motor functioning to provide more specific diagnostic capabilities Interpretation methods at both the functional level and the neuropsychological/neurological levels appealing to a wide range of professionals Valuable measures of important sensory-motor functions frequently assessed in geriatric populations Measures of both cortical and subcortical motor functions for a more comprehensive assessment of neuropsychological function An interpretive connection with the Woodcock-Johnson®III Tests of Cognitive Abilities and Tests of Achievement Instructions in both English and Spanish Administration Administration Time and Ages DW is compact, portable, and efficient – with administration time approximately 40-45 minutes. It is appropriate for ages 4:0 to adult, including the geriatric population and may be administered in schools, hospitals, mental health settings, or private practice. Subtests The Dean-Woodcock Neuropsychological Battery is comprised of three parts—Structured Interview, Emotional Status Exam, and Sensory-Motor Battery. During the Structure Interview, clinicians ask questions to determine an individual's medical and family background. The Emotional Status Exam includes psychiatric signs and symptoms—covering most major disorders found in the DSM-IV —as well as clinical impressions. The Sensory-Motor Battery consists of 18 subtests as outlined below: Sensory-Motor Battery Subtests Sensory Tests Subtest Sensory Tests Lateral Preference Scale Near Point Visual Acuity Visual Confrontation Naming Pictures of Objects Auditory Perception Tactile Examination Palm Writing Object Identification Finger Identification Simultaneous Localization (Hands Only and Hand/Cheek) Motor Tests (Subcortical) Gait and Station Romberg Test Coordination Test (Finger to Nose and Hand/Thigh) Motor Tests (Cortical) Construction Test (Cross and Clock) Mime Movements Left-Right Movements Finger Tapping Expressive Speech Grip Strength Standardization Although most of the selected tests in DW have a long history of use in neuropsychology, many of the tests were characterized by the lack of standardization in the administration and scoring procedures. DW incorporates modern psychometrics and standardization procedures with standardized measures of sensory and motor functioning. Normative data for DW was collected from over 1,000 individuals, randomly selected within a stratified design to control for the following variables: sex, race, Latino/Hispanic, age, hand preference, and education. The normative sample is representative of the U.S. population according to the 2000 U.S. Census. DW is unique in that it was developed for use with both English and Spanish individuals. Special efforts were made to provide unbiased measures of an individual's sensory and motor functioning. Shop Program Components View All Program Components * The Dean-Woodcock Neuropsychological Battery (DW) Complete Kit Kits Ages 4-19 | Neuropsychological, Clinical & Special Needs 923660 456.60 - + Add to Cart * The Dean-Woodcock Neuropsychological Battery (DW) Emotional Status Forms, Package of 25 Administration Materials Ages 4-19 | Neuropsychological, Clinical & Special Needs 923687 89.90 - + Add to Cart * The Dean-Woodcock Neuropsychological Battery (DW) Interview Forms, Packge of 25 Administration Materials Ages 4-19 | Neuropsychological, Clinical & Special Needs 923689 62.05 - + Add to Cart * The Dean-Woodcock Neuropsychological Battery (DW) Test Records, Package of 25 Administration Materials Ages 4-19 | Clinical & Special Needs, Neuropsychological 923691 76.00 - + Add to Cart * The Dean-Woodcock Neuropsychological Battery (DW) Complete Kit with Scoring Software Kits Neuropsychological, Clinical & Special Needs 1047573 838.35 - + Add to Cart


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Bid to win this mint condition vintage runway couture fabulous 9 strand necklace designed in a gold tone base with gold tone beads; clear lucite beads; and binding rhinestone rhondells. The neckalce measures 19" long and is as wide as 2". Thank you for all of the well wishes from our weekly clients; YES our model is pregnant and its a girl! :) The items listed this week were all pulled for a Vogue shoot in Europe that maybe featured in issues of American or International Vogue. *IF* they do appear the winner will recieve a signed copy of Vogue from me personally (of course you will recieve your piece of jewelry right after the auction is paid for but i will keep your address to mail you the magazine ) I work with socialite women in Manhattan that usually only wear there pieces to events once and then I get to purchase there treasures ! Form of Payment -- Paypal Payment is due within 3 days of auction end INTERNATIONAL BUYERS: WE LOVE YOU! BUT WE WILL ONLY SHIP VIA EXPRESS MAIL FOR A FLAT RATE OF 35.00 (THAT IS THE EXACT COST FOR US ) WE COMBINE SHIPPING SO THERE IS NO CHARGE FOR EACH ADDITIONAL PIECE ***PLEASE UNDERSTAND THAT THERE HAS BEEN A SYSTEM SHIPPING CHANGE THAT PROHIBITS US FROM SHIPPING INTERNATIONALLY EXPRESS TO RUSSIA AND A FEW OTHER COUNTRIES; IF THAT IS THE CASE WE WILL SEND IT INTERNATIONAL PRIOIRTY MAIL WITH TRACKING* ... read more


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"Our results suggest that it is postmodernism, not science, that is the bête noir of religiosity. One reason may be that the key ideas of postmodernism are newer than the key scientific ideas that challenge religion. For example, religions have had 150 years to develop resistance or tolerance for the late 19th century idea of evolution, but much less time to develop resistance or tolerance for the key ideas of postmodernism, which gained great strength over the course of the 20th century."
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
The Bête Noire of Religiosity
5 comments:
- Joel said...
This is interesting, especially because from my experience the most, how should I say, fervent christian churches in America are INCREDIBLY post modern. Non-demoninationalism? Church advertisements on billboards? Tweeting sermons? Picking a Church that's "right for you"? Personal relationship with God? Interpreting the bible yourself? None of this would have been considered without the huge influence of postmodern thought.
Maybe it's not postmodernism as a whole, but just the part about more access to information.
Then again, I could be all wrong.
- Tuesday, August 4, 2009 at 12:45:00 PM EDT
Thought you would enjoy reading that article, Cindy. I found it quite fascinating and scary, too. Guess I need a definition of post-modernism to comment further thougn.
- Tuesday, August 4, 2009 at 3:30:00 PM EDT
I had to look up post-modernism/ modernist in Wikipedia before I responded, to make sure that I correctly understood its meaning and implications. What the study actually showed was that "College students who major in the social sciences and humanities are likely to become less religious". The researchers made the leap to their statement about postmodernism. But that leap is sound. And social science and humanities students today would be most likely studying post-modernism thoughts, theories, the like. And definitely they would be learning critical thinking and deconstructivism. Which are the biggest (to me) factors in assessing that leap. I'm not sure, however, contrary to Joel, that most fervent Christian churches actually use critical thinking methods or deconstructivism, i.e. that they are "incredibly post modern". In fact, I think that they don't and are not. Perhaps Joel is confusing post-modernism thinking and the use of current technology produced under the influence of post-modernism. Not exactly the same thing.
- Tuesday, August 4, 2009 at 4:34:00 PM EDT
- Steve Caldwell said...
Rev. Cyn,
Related to this study is the "Salem hypothesis":
"It was proposed by a fellow named Bruce Salem who noticed that, in arguments with creationists, if the fellow on the other side claimed to have personal scientific authority, it almost always turned out to be because he had an engineering degree. The hypothesis predicted situations astonishingly well — in the bubbling ferment of talk.origins, there were always new creationists popping up, pompously declaiming that they were scientists and they knew that evolution was false, and subsequent discussion would reveal that yes, indeed, they were the proud recipient of an engineering degree.
... Of course, it doesn't say that engineers are all creationists: it says that creationists with advanced degrees are often engineers, a completely different thing altogether."
The Wikipedia article goes on to state that a disproportionate share of engineers seems to have a mindset that inclines them to entertain the quintessential right-wing features of "monism" (why argue when there is one best solution) – and of "simplism" (if only people were rational, remedies would be simple). The article also notes that engineers are the most religious of all academics.
- Tuesday, August 4, 2009 at 8:33:00 PM EDT
I just have to comment that the scepticism and deconstructive analysis that exemplify post-modernism are merely extensions of modernism. Therefore I have to maintain that there is no such thing as post-modernism.
- Monday, August 10, 2009 at 4:28:00 PM EDT


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Alone in the Classroom Hardback
In a small prairie school in 1929, Connie Flood helps a backward student, Michael Graves, learn how to read.
Observing them and darkening their lives is the principal, Parley Burns, whose strange behaviour culminates in an attack so disturbing its repercussions continue to the present day.
Connie's niece, Anne, tells the story. Impelled by curiosity about her dynamic, adventurous aunt and her more conventional mother, she revisits Connie's past and her mother's broken childhood.
In the process she unravels the enigma of Parley Burns and the mysterious, and unrelated, deaths of two young girls.
- Format: Hardback
- Pages: 288 pages
- Publisher: Quercus Publishing
- Publication Date: 30/08/2012
- Category: Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)
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Showing 1 - 1 of 1 reviews.
Review by TimBazzett
It's not all that often anymore that I want, more than anything else, to start a review with "I LOVED this book!" or my other stock response, "Holy CRAP, this man/woman can write!" Well, consider both responses rendered for Elizabeth Hay's ALONE IN THE CLASSROOM. Because this is simply an outstandingly beautiful and profoundly satisfying book.A multi-generational story spanning most of the twentieth century, Hay's story of the Flood and Soper families contains none of the tedium or stock sensationalism that often characterizes so many of the so-called 'sweeping family sagas' that I usually run screaming from, but women seem to love - think Danielle Steele or Belva Plain, for example. Nope. Hay's people are real, believable, utterly human. The narrator is Anne Flood, but the heroine, at least for the first half or more of the book is her aunt, Connie Flood, a strong and independent character who Anne has admired her whole life. And there is a 'villain' in Ian 'Parley' Burns, who is certainly evil, but also tortured, thwarted and pathetic. There are strong admirable male characters too, in Sid Goodwin and Michael Graves. But they too have their all-too-human flaws, as does the narrator Anne.The story turns on a couple of violent crimes, separated by many years, and Parley Burns figures into both. Both Connie and Anne are intricately caught up in the histories of Burns and, later, the attractive and artistically talented dyslexic, Michael Graves. Connie, a schoolteacher turned journalist, and Anne, a schoolteacher and writer, form a strange triagle with Michael, a plot which forms the heart of the novel. But this is also a story about personal histories and confusing and tragic family relationships, particularly the ones between mothers and daughters. Here's a sample -"Connie indulged Michael the way mothers indulge their sons, so I've come to believe. The mothers can't help it. And the reverse is true. Daughters quicken a mother's critical faculties. None of this is deliberate or thought out - it's on the level of the physical. And so sons bask. And daughters fume. And women brood. And men move on. And yet they don't move on either."Hay is also expert in evoking a feeling one can remember from childhood, like this one about the importance of the Sunday funnies -"Newspapers of old smelled damp, inky, pungent. We would lie on the floor when we were kids, our noses inches above the paper, and devour the comic strips that were so glamorous in those days, the women and the men bewitching, all chiselled cheekbones and thick hair, full lips and swelling breasts. The damp wonder of sex and romance, and the excitement of the world out there awaiting us - it was all transmitted directly into our noses through newsprint and ink."YES, Elizabeth! I remember it too - sprawled on our living room floor checking out the latest installments of "Li'l Abner", "Rex Morgan, M.D.", "Terry and the Pirates", "Steve Canyon", and so many other now nearly forgotten comic strips. I dont' want to sound sexist, but ALONE IN THE CLASSROOM is a book only a woman could have written. Men, I think, simply lack the sensibility needed to write this way. The erotic tensions and undercurrents of fear and sexual vulnerability are almost palpable, yet as delicately nuanced as a Japanese watercolor. This is simply fine writing. I tried, nearly in vain, to think of anything else I've read that might compare to this book. The only one I could think of was, coincidentally, another Canadian novel, Anne-Marie MacDonald's THE WAY THE CROW FLIES, an enormous tome I enjoyed tremendously some years back. So yeah. Holy crap, even. I loved this book. My advice? READ it!


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He Will Reign Forever and Ever
By Crossmap , dailyqt.crossmap.com |
The views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect the editorial opinion of The Christian Post or its editors.
"The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign for ever and ever." (Revelation 11:15)


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Reinventing Sino-US relations propel economic ties to the next orbit
By Michael Spence
China and the US are in the grip of major structural changes that both dread will end the Halcyon era when China produced low-cost goods and the US bought them. Many fear that if these changes lead to direct competition between the two countries, only one side can win.
That fear is understandable, but the premise is mistaken. Both sides can, and should, gain from forging a new relationship that reflects evolving structural realities: China's growth and size relative to the US; rapid technological change, which automates processes and displaces jobs; and the evolution of global supply chains, driven by developing countries' rising incomes. But first they must acknowledge that the old pattern of mutually-beneficial interdependence really has run its course, and that a new model is needed.
The old model served both sides well for three decades. China's growth was driven by labour-intensive exports made more competitive by transfers of technology and knowledge from the US and other Western countries. This, and massive Chinese public and private investment (enabled by high - and recently excessive - savings), underpinned rising incomes for millions of Chinese.
The US consumer, meanwhile, benefited from declining relative prices of manufactured goods in the tradable side of the economy. So, US employment shifted to higher-value-added activities, in turn supporting higher incomes in America, too.
MNCs operated increasingly efficient and complex global supply chains, which could be reconfigured as the shifting pattern of comparative advantage dictated. Global supply chains ran largely from east to west, reflecting the composition and location of demand in the tradable part of the global economy.
But all of this is starting to change. The benefits are shifting from cost to growth. Supply chains are now running in both directions, and are being combined in novel ways. Chinese demand is not only growing, but, as incomes rise, its compositionis shifting to more sophisticated goods and services.
Thus, China's role is changing: once the West's low-cost supplier, it is now becoming a major customer for Western products. This represents a major opportunity for advanced economies to rebalance their growth and employment, provided that they are positioned to compete for the appropriate parts of evolving supply chains.
Rising Chinese incomes also imply structural change for China, as continued growth presupposes a shift to higher-value activities. Technology and knowledge will still be important, but China must begin generating new technologies, in addition to absorbing Western tools and skills.
In order to meet the challenges of structural change, the goal for US policy should be to expand the scope of its tradable sector, with a focus on employment. Reorienting US policy toward external demand across a broader array of sectors, in turn, requires attention to two critical areas: education and investment.
High-quality education and more effective skills development are crucial to generating new employment opportunities for the middle class, while investment can rectify America's disconnection - particularly that of its medium-size businesses - from global supply chains. The trading companies and infrastructure that smaller, more open economies have created in order to connect to global markets are underdeveloped in the US.
To be sure, success in these areas will not come overnight. But nor is the status quo a permanent condition; it can be improved with investment and supportive policy. Moreover, the US would benefit in the short term from relatively simple measures, such as removing barriers to inward foreign direct investment, particularly from China.
On the Chinese side, policy prescriptions are not the issue. The importance of evolving a different growth pattern is already understood, and has been enshrined in China's 12th Five-Year Plan. Its successful implementation will require strengthening incentives to innovate, deepening the technology base, investing more in human capital, developing the financial sector and applying competition policy equally to domestic, foreign and state-owned enterprises.
Given the requirements on both sides, how to ensure a productive and mutually-beneficial relationship between the US and China is a relatively straightforward matter. China still needs access to advanced-country markets and technology, but the emphasis is shifting to homegrown knowledge, skills and innovation. The US, still an innovation powerhouse, can help, but requires access to the growing Chinese market and a level playing field once there. The same is true of financial-sector development.
In the US, a determined effort to restore fiscal balance and establish a sustainable growth pattern - that is, one not based on excessive domestic consumption - is crucial to long-term economic health. Such rebalancing implies sustained reduction of the current-account deficit by expanding exports, rather than merely curtailing imports. Chinese demand will help, all the more so as its economy grows in size and sophistication. So, expanding linkages with China now is an investment in the future with a rising return, rather than a quick-fix.
(The author is professor of economics at New York University's Stern School of Business)
© Project Syndicate, 2012