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- Local Guide
Imagine that someone had invented a new wonder product to feed and immunize everyone on Earth.
Imagine also that it was readily available everywhere, needed no storage or delivery and even reduced the risk of cancer and obesity.
“The wonder product is human breast milk, available to all of us at birth, and sadly many babies are not getting it,” said Jenny Boroff, a registered nurse with Auglaize County’s Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program.
Boroff said they want to continue to get the word out about the benefits of breast milk, during the month of August — national breastfeeding awareness month.
“Breastfeeding is normal, natural, safe and promotes optimal health in infants,” Boroff said.
Not only does it lead to a 20 to 30 percent reduced risk of obesity later in life, but it also reduces the risk of sudden infant death syndrome, leads to fewer ear and respiratory infections, a reduced risk of developing diabetes, and an average increase of six points in IQ.
A mother’s benefits from breastfeeding also can last a lifetime. The longer they breastfeed, the lower their body mass index (BMI), blood pressure, triglycerides, waist circumference, and LDL cholesterol. A longer duration of breastfeeding also lowers a mother’s risk of developing type-2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome. The latest evidence shows that mothers who exclusively breastfeed get more sleep and have a lower risk of depression.
Boroff said in this time of economic crisis, it also is important to realize that breastfeeding saves money.
According to the Surgeon General’s call to action to support breastfeeding, if 90 percent of families followed the recommended guidelines to exclusively breastfeed their infants for six months, the United States would save $13 billion per year through reductions in medical expenses and other costs. Individual families are estimated to be able to save between $1,200 and $1,500 per year by following recommended breastfeeding practices.
According to the Center for Disease Control’s Breastfeeding Report Card in 2011, 66.8 percent of Ohio women initiate breastfeeding, ranking the state 40th in the nation. Only 8.6 percent of those women in Ohio who initiate breastfeeding are exclusively breastfeeding until the baby is 6-months-old, which is recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics to provide the optimum health benefits.
“We can do better,” Boroff said. “Mothers encounter many obstacles when attempting to breastfeed, including lack of support and instruction from health care professionals, hospitals and workplaces.
“Everyone can show support for breastfeeding moms,” she said.
Several months ago, Auglaize County’s WIC program added another resource to help its breastfeeding mothers.
Alicia Lensch, who has breastfed three of her own children, began working as a breastfeeding peer helper at the Auglaize County Health Department. In addition to her own experience, she also received training to provide breastfeeding education and basic support.
Lensch said some of her key areas of focus have been offering the support breastfeeding mothers need, helping them get a better start at the hospital, relaying some of her own experience with different situations, and assistance using breast pumps.
“We see high rates of initiating breastfeeding, but then we see those numbers drop,” Boroff said.
She said having someone also on the program who can relate to the mothers differently does help and they plan to provide more follow up to these mothers.
“Our main focus is education beforehand and continuing support after,” Lensch said. “Any chance I have to help a mom breast feet I want to do. Breastfeeding is hard, it’s round-the-clock and they need to know what to expect and the difficulties they may encounter after they go home from the hospital. If I can be that person helping them that I didn’t have it’s worth it to me.”
Another strong push for the department this year is getting businesses and schools to provide the type of facilities they need to for these breastfeeding moms and Health Department officials are asking businesses to place “breastfeeding welcome here” decals on their windows.
“Who prepares their food in a bathroom?” Boroff asked.
She said estimated costs for providing such a room for breastfeeding moms at a workplace could range between $145 for minimum accommodations to $1,055 for maximum accommodations.
“This year we really want to try to work on giving mothers a proper place to pump, not just a bathroom stall,” she said. “They need a special room, somewhere clean, other than a bathroom.”
Boroff said they are working to get such facilities designated at high schools and businesses in the county and have developed letters women in need of such facilities can present to their schools or employers.
In addition to proper facilities for pumping or breastfeeding, Boroff said they are reminding employers that they must provide reasonable break times for nursing mothers.
“We want the mothers to have the extra support they need wherever they are,” Lensch said. “Breastfeeding is hard work and it takes dedication.”
“We want to increase awareness, for breastfeeding to become the social norm, the routine way to feed a baby,” Boroff said. “Everyone can make breastfeeding easier, from families and communities to health care and employers.” | <urn:uuid:e801cdcd-d2e4-4c34-8f92-2f1ed9489a41> | CC-MAIN-2015-18 | http://www.wapakdailynews.com/content/national-awareness-breastfeeding-benefits-focus-august | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-18/segments/1429246657041.90/warc/CC-MAIN-20150417045737-00311-ip-10-235-10-82.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960564 | 1,135 | 2.828125 | 3 |
Message From The President
Even though historians have extensively documented Rosa Parks' pre-Montgomery bus boycott political activism, too many people still believe that her heroic refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus in 1955 was inspired as much by her tired feet as by her steely resolve to face down segregation.
What too many Americans don't understand about Mrs. Parks' act of civil disobedience is that she wasn't fighting for a seat on a bus; she was fighting for her rights as an American citizen. While growing up in the Jim Crow South, Mrs. Parks learned that her brown skin did not negate her privileges and protections as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
Mrs. Parks also understood that there is no greater privilege of citizenship than the right to vote. As secretary of the Montgomery branch of the NAACP, she organized a voter registration drive for black Alabamans in 1943. Unfortunately, her own voter registration efforts were twice thwarted by Alabama's Jim Crow laws. Her third try was successful and Mrs. Parks fully embraced the role as a voter and encouraged others to register and vote throughout her life.
Sadly, too many American citizens skip the polls on Election Day. Participation in Michigan's 2018 primary election broke previous records but only 27 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot. That hardly seems a cause for celebration.
In their scholarship application packages, the 2018 Rosa Parks Scholarship winners wrote poignant essays about social and political issues that shaped their youth. From ending sexual harassment to improving urban schools to challenging police brutality, our scholars said they are motivated to engender positive social change. But while social activism is important, electing people who reflect our values is the most impactful way to move the social justice needle. Many of our 2018 scholars will have their first opportunity to vote in a general election on Nov. 6. I hope they will honor Mrs. Parks' memory by showing up on Election Day.
Kim Trent received a scholarship from the Rosa Parks Scholarship Foundation in 1987 and now serves as president of the foundation's board of trustees. She is also a member of the Wayne State University Board of Governors. | <urn:uuid:e3634679-48f1-477d-9851-091b535fa3e4> | CC-MAIN-2021-21 | https://www.rosaparksscholarship.org/message-from-pres | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2021-21/segments/1620243988741.20/warc/CC-MAIN-20210506053729-20210506083729-00223.warc.gz | en | 0.975211 | 426 | 3 | 3 |
Indian confetti over the world
A 5th century cuneiform clay tablet, dating probably from the reign of Darius the Great) was found at Kish (near modern town of Al-Hillah, Babil province of modern Iraq). Kish, about 100km south of Baghdad, was one of the important cities in the Babylonian cluster – along with Babylon, Sippar, Seleucia and Borsippa.
Unlike the popular image, of ‘static’ Indians, we have some free-ranging Indians roaming the world. With elephants, expert horsemen – and a probable case of a Siwalik giraffid.
Kish was the site of another intriguing find. A bronze chariot rein ring, which probably seems related to the African giraffe or a species of deer from Iran. Called Sivathere of Kish, it has been object of many studies – an unknown hoofed mammal of the Middle East. Initially thought to be related to the Sivatherium – a large, short-necked giraffid, originally described for S. giganteus from the Siwalik Hills of India.
So, apart from the deep links in astronomy, there are other intriguing such confetti sprayed around Babylon – which the Americans have pounded with tons of explosions.
- What happened with that Sumerian ‘sivathere’ figurine after Colbert’s paper of 1936? Well, a lot. [Tetrapod Zoology] (scienceblogs.com)
- The History of Bricks: Mesopotamia (janestreetclayworks.wordpress.com) | <urn:uuid:d4422164-65d4-44ff-9af4-aa7991fc8074> | CC-MAIN-2014-49 | http://2ndlook.wordpress.com/2011/05/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2014-49/segments/1416931007797.72/warc/CC-MAIN-20141125155647-00232-ip-10-235-23-156.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.923141 | 341 | 3 | 3 |
The Big Bang
It was universal. One of the things I had noticed about all the systems which had been designed for scientists, or for people working on the mainframe, or for people using PCs in administration or something, is that they made assumptions…which limited availability. It was clear that this thing had to be universal. Every computer had to be able to understand HTML. Every computer had to be able to talk HTTP. You had to be able to make a link to anything. The moment you had a list, or a class of things — these are the things which the web was designed for and these are not — then you end up with an oil/water boundary, and the web itself would cease to be functional. If you can’t link to anything, then what’s the point?
It was designed to work on any computer. It’s what I didn’t put into the design. I didn’t put any constraints that you had to use. You didn’t have to use Microsoft Word. You didn’t have to use a Mac. You didn’t have to use a…mainframe….
An important thing is accessibility. We should try to make the web as much for people who may be listening to it as opposed to reading it, and so on. Certainly it should work for any culture. It works in any language. There are all these different layers that had to be independent of so many different things.
Berners-Lee launched the first website in 1991, and the nascent web began to grow exponentially in scientific and academic circles. But it wasn’t until 1993, when Marc Andreessen, a 22-year-old computer science student at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, co-authored a web browser called Mosaic that the Internet became widely accessible and began to subsume both the popular imagination and mainstream commerce. Andreessen soon moved to Silicon Valley to co-found Netscape, which launched its phenomenally popular Navigator browser. Microsoft followed with its own Internet Explorer browser, and the browser wars were on. For the news business and many others, this was the Big Bang. At AOL, management quickly realized that even if the walls of the garden weren’t tumbling down right away, the users were coming to expect — and demand — a simple path to the greater web.
The launch of Netscape changed everything. When Netscape launched, we knew, “Okay, this is giving software away for free. We know that model.” We were giving billions of dollars of software away for free. AOL was the most highly distributed piece of software in the history of the world because you would get those disks everywhere. We were putting in a browser, but now Netscape was out, and they were giving a really high-quality browsing experience away for free. That activated Microsoft, who immediately rushed into the market with IE, and then they came out with their online service, MSN.
Now, all of a sudden the industry was different. You had AOL. We were booming, and we had our taxonomy, software, and network. You had Netscape, which was about a thousand flowers blooming. And then you had Microsoft, which was building its online service and its content right into the operating system.
All of those were trying to recruit journalists, either to work for us or to partner with us. There was an unbelievable amount of confusion in the marketplace.
It became a real tough decision for partners, media companies, journalists. Whose side should they take? A lot of it became who would pay you the most money. Rights fees were created. I once had a $400 million budget to now write a check upfront. There was no longer revenue sharing. It was: “We’re going to write you a check, and you’ll be with us, and then we’ll charge.”
Now all of a sudden for AOL we had to change our model. We had to go from metered pricing to $19.95 all you can eat. I remember the world saying, “That’s it for AOL. You’re dead.” The exact opposite happened.
I think that we thought it would be the newspaper in live form. Not just putting up the newspaper, but it would be the newspaper in live form, and we would offer these other services that we would have, a retrievable service so that people could access past copies of the Mercury News, and that they could search for other kinds of information.
But then Netscape came along and we could go up on the Internet. We were the first customer of Netscape. It’s interesting when you look back on it now. People are always saying, “Well, these newspaper guys never saw this coming.” I used to say, “We are not going to be a buggy whip company. We are not going to miss this wave. There’s something here, and we’re going to be part of it. We’re not going to worry about making money for some period of time. We’re going to get on top of this thing.” But even though we spent all this money….
Of course, in 2009, four years before our interview with him, Tony Ridder had stood before a gathering of employees, reportedly with tears in his eyes, to announce the sale of his namesake company to McClatchy Co. for $4.5 billion, only a fraction of what Knight Ridder had been worth just a few years before, but considerably more than it would likely be worth today.
But we are getting ahead of our story. Around the same time that AOL and other services were opening up, at least a little, to the web, strategists in the news industry grew excited that the freedom to publish directly onto the web would lead to better business models. Kathy Yates was an executive at the Mercury News and later at Knight Ridder Digital, and she recalls the clear benefits presented by the web over the proprietary walled garden services.
I just didn’t see that there was much of a future in a limited, walled garden online approach. It was just too difficult. The penetration was too thin; there was nothing about it that said to me that it would ever be a successful enterprise. The staff knew I was fairly skeptical…. One day the chief marketing officer for Mercury Center called me into the boardroom and sat me down. He said, “I’ve got to show you something.” What he showed me was, it was a beta version of Mosaic. I just…I said, “Game over. That, I believe in.”
I think what really was so striking to me about the Internet was the removal of boundaries. The newspaper business, as I experienced it, was always full of boundaries. It was very limited in so many ways. The manufacturing process. The distribution process. The limitations on how you package the news and the advertising always seemed to be putting up constraints that we were bumping into, even though we were an extremely profitable business. I think at the time the Mercury News was number one in terms of classified lineage in the country. We were always vying back and forth with The Dallas Morning News, but I think at that point we were on top.
The Internet was just so gloriously, really free, of those constraints. That’s what convinced me: “OK, this is a game changer.” From that point on I really dedicated everything to it. I signed on to become one of the founders of Knight Ridder Digital…Tony was looking to see if the experiment could be extended throughout Knight Ridder as an entire company…. That’s really how I spent the remainder of my career with Knight Ridder.
In virtually every media company, early adopters emerged, and they jumped on the prospects of the Internet with enthusiasm. One was Steve Newhouse, part of the media conglomerate that carried his family’s name, and he helped to push the business to experiment with digital technology, inspired in large part by work he saw at the MIT Media Lab.
I first became aware in the early ’90s when there wasn’t an Internet yet. It was called “new media.” No one quite knew what that was, but everyone was afraid of what it could be and wanted to be more familiar with it. I was editor of the Jersey Journal in Jersey City, New Jersey, and in the third generation of a family business. And so because no one else in the business really cared or wanted to pursue new media, I elected myself.
I joined a consortium at MIT, “News In the Future,” which was a really pioneering effort by Nick Negroponte, who ran the Media Lab, to investigate the changing landscape and [was] remarkably accurate in its focus and prediction. I remember sitting with the grad students in the Media Lab and hearing a view of news that was digital, that was interactive, and was community based. I actually saw the Internet for the first time in the Media Lab. It was before Netscape. It was text-based. It looked like the early computer programs where you typed in equations and got an answer.
The leader of that lab was Nicholas Negroponte, who helped many established media executives get an early view of the coming digital revolution even before their companies could legally register Internet domains.
The Internet, or ARPANET, as it was called, and DARPANET, as it was called after that, wasn’t available to companies until the mid ’80s. In fact, I think it was ’87. It wasn’t legal for companies to use it. The reason I know that is that when we opened our doors for business at the Media Lab, which was October, 1985, we were fronting for companies to have email addresses because we, as an academic institution, could have them. It wasn’t quite laundering, but it allowed companies to have Internet access. We started…I believe in ’87…something called “News and the Future.”
Why did you do that? What did you see?
We did that because we saw the nature of news changing very quickly. We had something called “Television of Tomorrow” that predates it by about two or three years, but that was really the technology about high definition and delivering television over telephone lines. It was very tech oriented. The “News in the Future,” we thought, would be more content oriented. We basically went to media companies and said, “You better hedge against the future and fund us.” I believe that at our peak we must have had 50 or 60 [sponsor companies].”
We had every single one of those [big media] companies as a member of “News in the Future.” The only one that was a holdout that I don’t think was ever a part of it was The New York Times. I remember in 1981 or ’82 going down to The New York Times with Jerry Wiesner [president of MIT] to see [Times executive] Sydney Gruson. Sydney and Jerry have this story they’re chatting away about. Then Sydney Gruson looks at me and says, “Young man, what is the future of newspapers?” I said, “Sir, it’s to wrap dead fish.” Jerry Wiesner never forgave me for that comment. When we did our first electronic newspaper here at the Media Lab, that was really the first web application. They named it Fish Wrap, sort of in honor of that remark.
AOL founder Case remembered that in the pre-web days, even AOL was prohibited from exchanging data with the Internet because it was still not commercialized.
What’s interesting to me is that when we started in 1985, it was illegal to connect a commercial online service to the Internet. The Internet, I believe it was [until] 1991, was only for government use and university non-commercial use. Businesses could not operate on the Internet. A company like AOL could not connect to the Internet.
Our positioning in that early- to mid-1990s was AOL certainly got you access to the Internet and a whole lot more that was exclusive to AOL. That drove a lot of the growth in that 1990s period, when people were beginning to learn about the Internet. The World Wide Web was just beginning to emerge and come of age, and the way you could access that through AOL gave you a better Internet experience, plus some things that were only available if you were an AOL subscriber.
Even today, Ted Leonsis questions the conventional wisdom that the walled gardens failed because they were closed as compared to the web and the greater Internet.
We saw this other world emerging, and we were being sneered at. Remember? “You’re a walled garden. You live in the Walled Garden.” I laugh now because Apple’s the most valuable company in the world. They’re the ultimate walled garden.
And in spite of the burgeoning digerati’s condescension toward AOL as the “Internet on training wheels,” the online giant thrived in the early years when the web took the world by storm.
We started the company in 1985. We went public in 1992. It was seven years later, and we only had 200,000 customers after seven years. Seven years after that, when we were looking at, and did merge with, Time Warner, the number had gone to 20 million. But it was only the second decade when it really took off and everybody woke up to the idea of the Internet. Thankfully, at our peak, a majority of Internet usage in the U.S. flowed through the AOL systems.
Still some legacy publishers, such as Newhouse Communications, proceeded from Day One without help from the likes of AOL.
Over time, at the Media Lab, I became convinced that the Internet was the way of the future, [and we] decided to embrace it as our publishing platform. We never did a deal with CompuServe, or Prodigy, or AOL. At the same time [Nick steered us to] an unknown magazine called Wired, which had been founded in Amsterdam by Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe. We made an investment in Wired.
…I became the Advance representative to Wired and would go out there [to their office in San Francisco] every couple of months and sit with Louis and Jane, and they were really pioneering people. So in the early ʼ90s we decided to start Internet sites. It was really based on the first [media company] Internet site that ever existed, which was at Wired magazine. It was called “Hotwired.”
Steve Newhouse hired New York Daily News president Jim Willse as Advance Communications’ first new media executive, and he in turn, hired Jeff Jarvis, who began planning the site that would become NJ.com — one of the first major local or regional online news efforts — as part of their effort to navigate the digital currents running across the industry.
As a sense of how early we were, we were able to sign up URLs like NJ.com, Cleveland.com, Syracuse.com because no one was doing websites with those names. Now, if I had been really smart, I would have bought a thousand of the best URLs and made hundreds of millions of dollars. But so be it. We just bought city names.
On the national side, we tried to think of how we could apply what we were seeing at Hotwired to magazines, and we decided to start a food site and build a Hotwired-like site for food because we thought looking for recipes would be a good application, which it turned out to be. That’s when we started Epicurious.
We felt that we needed to give the new medium new brands and experiment with new things. Epicurious was both a site that combined content from the two food magazines at the time, Gourmet and Bon Appetit, with a searchable recipe database and all sorts of other enhancements…that made it to the Internet. Most importantly, we believed early on in interactivity, and we allowed our users to comment on recipes, so the recipes became annotated with the comments of people who actually used them, and that became very popular.
Certainly, the newspaper companies like Knight Ridder and Newhouse weren’t the only publishers taking an active interest in moving content online. At Time Inc., the largest magazine publisher in the country, interest in digitizing the titles actually arose from the journalism ranks. Walter Isaacson, soon joined by Paul Sagan from Time Warner’s cable division, worked with a small team to bring news from titles as diverse as Time, Fortune, People, and Sports Illustrated initially to the proprietary services and soon after to the web.
Walter, can you conjure for us your first time? When the light bulb went off over your head and you said, “Ah, this digital technology in journalism is going to really change the way this all works?
Yeah. It was on a New Year’s Eve , after we’d come back from a party, and Phil Elmer DeWitt had been pitching a story called “Cyberspace,” what’s happening online, digital media. I was back-of-the-book editor at Time, and late that night I went online to the Well, which was one of the early bulletin board systems that Phil had told me to go on. Totally dial-up. It was complicated because we didn’t even have dial-up modems. I had to borrow a dial-up modem. It was like 2,400 baud or whatever.
I noticed hundreds of people in these bulletin boards and sort of chat rooms. They weren’t live chat, but it was close, talking about New Year’s Eve and talking about the year, and [I was] thinking, “Whoa, there’s this whole cyber community.”
We ended up three or four weeks later using the people from Mondo 2000 — which was an early pre-Wired magazine…about the digital age — [to produce a cover for Time]. We even had hypertext, which was…the web had not flowered. There were no Mosaic browsers yet. But hypertext was still being used. And so we ran the story and some words were underlined, or in red, and they would point to things in the margin that would explain it.
After that we said, “Why don’t we put our own magazines online,” and I asked Phil. We started playing off AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy because this is before Mosaic had made the web very accessible. If you put it up with AOL or CompuServe it had to be their subscribers. They would get revenue by the fact that the longer somebody stayed online with them the more they would pay those companies, and we would get a cut of those revenues with approximately a million dollar guarantee [from AOL].
At that magazine conference in 1993 I remember being with Louis Rossetto, who had just launched Wired magazine [and we talked about this]. But then Louis and I talked a year or so later, and we said, “Why don’t we put it directly on the Internet?” as opposed to one of these online services that were walled gardens. We made those deals with AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe without much corporate knowledge or interference until it got to be about a million dollars of revenue a year, at which point they were paying attention. Then we had to pitch them, “Can we cut out these online services?” which wasn’t a good idea because the online services were giving us money, but it was an inevitable idea.
Every now and then we’d go up to Reg Brack, who was then president of Time Inc. He would say, “Well, who owns the Internet?” and things like that.
For an early adopter of digital technology, like Time Warner CEO Jerry Levin, the advent of the web seemed to offer a promising way to bring together a unified strategy for creating content, distributing it, and making money.
When you go back and look at the development of all this, you look at all the decisions that were made and all the coming together you described, of trying to juggle technological development with content development…Is where we are today pretty much where we would’ve ended up, inevitably, no matter what, or were there things…I’m not just talking about Time Warner, I’m talking about the whole landscape. Is there another path that, had it been taken, things would be profoundly different today? In other words, is the march of this technological disruption inevitable to all the business models, or were there other ways to have ridden the disruption that would have ended up in a profoundly different place?
I think we’re where we were meant to end up. The disruption was simply the notion of a network that has no central control that can deliver near infinite capacity. And everybody tries to figure out how to make money and what to deliver over that network. That’s where we’ve ended up. Everything pointed to that. No one owns it. I think it’s a beautiful thing.
There have been disruptive technologies in the past. Print, movies, radio, and TV. But they all accommodated each other. They didn’t kill each other. Then something happened with interactivity when we got to a public standard, or the web standard. It really started to not just make room at the table but really hurt the old distribution. Was this disaggregation or digitization? What was it that made it disruptive, as opposed to incremental?
Because it made the old form of distribution totally irrelevant. There was zero need. At least I can still go to a movie theater. There’s some socialization. Popcorn. Booze. But music, the fact that you had to buy music on a disk or listen to it on the radio…And now you can get any piece of music at all, anytime, anywhere. Why do I need anything else? This is why it’s slowly going to take the networks down. I can get online and get anything I want.
Same for journalism?
Pathfinder.com’s homepage, October 3, 1995. (Pathfinder Museum)
As a result of this early online experimentation at Time Warner, and with Levin’s support and encouragement, Isaacson and Sagan began working on two new media projects. One was a narrowband web service that pulled magazine content and other features together in a sort of digital newsstand they called Pathfinder. At one time it was one of the most visited sites on the web. Today it’s a single page that points from pathfinder.com to the homepages of the company’s magazine sites. The other sought to combine the broadband potential of the modern cable TV plant with direct connectivity to the public and now-commercialized Internet in a service that would come to be known as Roadrunner, named for the speedy cartoon character from the Warner Bros. stable.
It worked pretty well. We created something called Pathfinder in ’94. It was like some of the aggregators, like The Huffington Post, in a way. But it was Time magazine, Sports Illustrated, and People. It was all on a homepage. Once people got on the web, [though], they didn’t need people to package things for them. They’d do whatever they wanted.
That’s right. We arguably created the first portal. We looked at the ones that developed around search, which were really guides. We were wrong. We kept saying, “We could build a guide, too.” We looked at Yahoo and said, “We could do that, too.”
But even before Yahoo was a dream, there was some kid somewhere who started doing “my favorite websites.” It would be sports. It would be art museums or whatever. We said, “That’s how it’s going to work.” It’s going to be a directory service. That’s how you’ll find things on the web. You’ll go to a directory and find it. We did not think that kids at Stanford like Larry Page and Sergey Brin or Yahoo or whatever would create an ability to search the web well. There was a phrase back then that “content is king.” And we actually believed it.
Pathfinder was good for what it was, which was a portal. It was a place you landed on if you went right to it. We had always believed that what we were going to do was bring people into this portal. Then, when they got the content, they would subscribe to it. They would pay for it, just as you paid for any other service or magazine or subscription you had. We had an elaborate scheme for charging people, almost like The New York Times is doing now. You got a little bit for free, but then at a certain point a paywall hit.
But I remember vividly the day in mid-1994 or so when Bruce Judson (who worked on the business side of Pathfinder) came up with the concept of a banner ad. Yeah, Wired did it as well, but it was like the microchip being invented in two places at once.
It was literally one day apart.
It wasn’t the hardest concept in the world, which is, “Let’s put a banner ad on top,”…but it drove a lot of the whole shape of the business for a long time.
It really transformed everything. Immediately, Madison Avenue decided, “Oh my God, we’ve got to understand this. We have to hire a lot of young people. They would send us money. It was almost like you could look out of the Time Life Building to Madison Avenue and watch people walking with bags of money to dump it on our desk, or Bruce Judson’s desk, to buy banner ads because they all wanted to be in on this thing. What this does is, it taught us we shouldn’t charge for content. We should just get as many eyeballs as possible. That’s the way we’re going to make money. By aggregating eyeballs. | <urn:uuid:52037bb2-675b-4337-a999-8028dad2cbc8> | CC-MAIN-2018-17 | https://www.digitalriptide.org/chapter-3-the-big-bang/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-17/segments/1524125945855.61/warc/CC-MAIN-20180423070455-20180423090455-00153.warc.gz | en | 0.984278 | 5,560 | 2.53125 | 3 |
Could 3D Printing Make Your Next Surgery Safer?
WHY YOU SHOULD CARE
Because 3D printing just might save your life.
By Laura Chubb
OZY and GE are partnering to bring you an inside look into how additive manufacturing is changing the way things are made across industries and across the world.
Being a surgeon is stressful at the best of times. Every time America’s surgeons walk into an operating theater, they are taking someone’s life into their hands, literally. The smallest mistake could be fatal, and because every one of us is built a little bit differently, there are often unexpected surprises beneath the surface. When that happens, surgeons have to respond quickly to something they weren’t prepared for. And feeling unprepared in the middle of an operation isn’t a situation anyone would wish for.
According to Jimmie Beacham, chief engineer for advanced manufacturing at GE Healthcare, surprises during surgery can really slow things down.
“Surgeons sometimes have to repeatedly go to a workstation, look at the image on the screen and try to figure out what’s going on,” Beacham explains. In addition to adding hours that a patient has to spend on an operating table, these trips increase the odds of infection and can prolong recovery times.
Fortunately, there could be a solution — an unexpected one — to this dilemma: 3D printing. While the technology has attracted attention for its innovations across industries, from construction to aviation, health care is one of the areas where it’s making a big difference. Already, hospitals around the country are printing 3D models of patients’ organs, using data from ultrasounds to re-create, say, a heart or a lung so that it can be studied in all its unique complexity prior to surgery, allowing doctors to plan how to fix it before even picking up a scalpel.
In an industry where doctors often race the clock to save a patient, speed is as important as accuracy.
But for all the promise of 3D printed organ replicas, there has been one large hurdle: It can take weeks to crunch the data to create the replica, and some patients don’t have weeks to spare. That’s something Beacham wants to fix. He wants these models to be available “at the click of a button,” as he puts it. If he realizes his vision, it will transform surgery as we know it.
In an industry where doctors often race the clock to save a patient, speed is as important as accuracy. If hospitals can 3D print an organ model with one click, it means surgeons can respond faster and use the technology more frequently to treat more patients. Armed with an exact blueprint of the organs they need to operate on, doctors will also be able to refine both their planning and the surgery itself, while potentially simplifying otherwise complicated procedures, like separating conjoined twins. Plus, the more quickly surgery can be performed, the cheaper it can be made. Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham in the U.K. recently announced it was saving three to four hours and 20,000 pounds ($25,000) per surgery by printing replicas of patients’ organs on a new, in-house 3D printer.
In his Waukesha, Wisconsin, laboratory, Beacham and his team are figuring out how to quickly translate image files from CT scanners to speed up the printing process. The size of that task shouldn’t be underestimated: GE’s Revolution CT scanner generates and transmits a wad of data equivalent to 6,000 Netflix movies in one second. Beacham’s job is to find a way to convert all that information into a printable 3D image file instantaneously. You can read between the lines when he says he’s “pushing our teams across GE Healthcare” to engineer the solution. It’s a tough ask.
While the wilder possibilities of 3D printing continue to make headlines, health care represents the technology’s more subtle — though no less revolutionary — leaps and bounds. And while some stories have touted a future where organs themselves will be 3D printed, for now it’s mainly custom surgical tools and bespoke prosthetics, which are no less important to the people who rely on them.
As for Beacham, he admits to having another motivator for his need for speed: He’s afraid to be beaten to the punch.
”If we don’t figure it out,” he says bluntly, “someone else will.” The race is on.
- Laura Chubb, OZY Author Contact Laura Chubb | <urn:uuid:c3d223e3-eb18-49ae-99cf-a0f80cc8bbf5> | CC-MAIN-2021-04 | https://www.ozy.com/the-new-and-the-next/could-3d-printing-make-your-next-surgery-safer/77470/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2021-04/segments/1610704820894.84/warc/CC-MAIN-20210127024104-20210127054104-00143.warc.gz | en | 0.955522 | 964 | 3.09375 | 3 |
There are two temporomandibular joints, one on each side of the face, each one working in concert with the other. TMJ plays a pivotal role in the normal chewing process, and is essential for proper chewing. That and any disease of this joint compromises the ability to make normal mouth movements and chew food. Diseases and disorders of the TMJ are referred to as temporomandibular joint disorders.
- Difficulty opening/closing the mouth
- Mandible bone may be out of place and visible from the side of the face (deviation of the mandible bone)
- Pain when chewing food
- Vocalizing, whining while trying to eat
- Loss of appetite
- Clicking noise when opening and closing mouth
- Swelling or lump on side of face (misplaced mandible bone)
- Deformed mouth or face
- Visible pain when opening mouth
- Extreme loss of weight
- Injury or trauma causing fractures to the joint
- Stress in joint after carrying heavy objects by mouth
There are three types of TMJ:
- Traumatic (with or without fractures)
The treatment your veterinarian chooses will depend on what type of TMJ disorder your dog has. He may wait to see what the dentist has to say before any treatment is decided on just in case dental work needs to be done first. Some things the veterinarian may do in each type of disorder are:
Dislocation – In most cases, the veterinarian can manipulate the joint back into place and then insert a bite plate or just place a wrap on your dog’s muzzle to keep him from opening it. Your veterinarian will show you how to feed your dog with a feeding tube until the plate or wrap can be removed (which may only be 24 to 48 hours. If the joint does not stay in place after several tries, your veterinarian will suggest surgery to repair the joint. This may include removing a part of the jaw that is causing the problem or using wires to hold the position of the jaw.Traumatic (with fracture) – Depending on the extent of the damage, the veterinarian may be able to repair the jaw with manipulation under anesthesia. The fracture may be able to be stabilized if it is minor, but usually it is necessary for the veterinarian to surgically repair the fracture with wires or metal plates. Your dog will need to be kept in the hospital for one or two nights and then allowed to go home with cage rest and a feeding tube. It may take up to three months to heal.
Traumatic (without fracture) – When there is no fracture, the damage is usually not serious and the veterinarian can manipulate the joint back into place with your dog under anesthesia.
Inflammatory – IV fluids, anti-inflammatory medication, and steroids will be given to relieve the swelling and pain. Once the swelling goes down, you will be able to take your dog home with a prescription for anti-inflammatory medication.
Among the most common examinations and blood work, x-rays are a valuable tool in the diagnosis of TMJ disorders. This will allow your vet to better view the bones and joints in the face.
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can be used as well, and can give a better, more detailed view that standard X-ray cannot.
If your veterinarian has an MRI machine in the clinic, this may be the recommended image technique. If something more severe is suspected, such as infection or tumor, your veterinarian may also take a small sample from the muscle tissue of the jaw so that other diseases that can cause similar symptoms can either be confirmed or ruled out.
Treatment for TMJ disorders is two-fold and is aimed at eliminating or altering the underlying cause as well as treating the symptoms. In case of complete dislocation of the TMJ, your veterinarian will try to repair it by placing an object at a specific site close to the joint, and gently closing the mouth with a push in order to reduce the dislocation. If this method does not work well or the problem becomes chronic, surgery may be required to correct the defect. Pain killers will also be given to reduce the pain related these disorders. Muscle relaxing drugs can also be prescribed, if need be, to reduce the muscle tension created as a result of the TMJ disorder.
Living and Management
After surgery, your dog may feel sore and will need proper rest in a quiet place, away from other pets and active children. You might consider cage rest for a short time, until your pet can safely move about again without overexertion. Your veterinarian will also prescribe a short course of pain killers until your pet has fully recovered, along with a mild course of antibiotics, to prevent any bacteria from attacking your pet. Make sure that medications are given precisely as directed, at the proper dosage and frequency. Keep in mind that over dosage of pain medication is one of the most preventable causes for death in household animals.
This condition can be very painful, and regular pain relieving drugs may be required until the symptoms have resolved completely. Your veterinarian may also use a feeding tube to give your dog its required nutrients, especially if your dog is unable to take enough food through its mouth alone.
TMJ is common in humans as well. I know because I have been dealing with it for over 20 years now. I had no idea that dogs and cats could get this to…until now!! I think it pays to be careful how much weight your dog is lifting with his mouth and what kind of playtime activities he has. I found a lot of good information on this topic and compiled it into a short blog but if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact me!
I hope you enjoyed this post and the pictures of Maggie and Jake. I was trying to get them out of the car but they decided they wanted to have a look around and a sniff in the air first. LOL!
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How to Multitask and Effectively Plan a Project
All of life is a series of projects. A project is a complex task. It is often called a multitask job. This type of job requires the coordination of efforts of several people, each of whom is responsible for a part of the job, with every part of the job being necessary for successful completion. Your ability to handle these multitask jobs is a critical skill for success. All achievements of consequence are complex, and they involve the cooperation of many people.
The Key Management Skill
A study by Stanford University of the qualities that companies look for in promoting people into the position of chief executive officer concluded that the ability to put together a team to accomplish a task was the single most important identifiable quality of an executive who was destined for the fast track in his/her career. Your ability to put together teams to do multitask jobs, ability to complete complex projects, and visible qualities of leadership will determine the course of your career as much as any other factor. It will enable you to multiply yourself times the talents and efforts of others, and accomplish vastly more than you could do on your own.
A Learnable Skill
Project management is a learnable skill, like riding a bicycle. It can be divided into a series of steps, each of which you can master, one at a time. In managing any project, you begin by defining the ideal desired result of the project. What exactly are you trying to accomplish? What will the project look like if it is a complete success? Start by defining a successful completion of the project, the ideal desired result.
Start at the Beginning
Once you are clear about your desired result, you then start from the beginning. Determine what you are going to have to do to get from where you are to the completion of this project, on schedule and on budget. Determine a specific deadline or target to aim at. Make sure that it is realistic and achievable.
Assemble the Team
Bring together all the people whose contributions will be necessary for the success of this project. Sometimes you need to assemble a team before you can even decide upon the ideal result and the schedule. Remember that people are everything. Take ample time to think carefully about the people who are going to be the team members.
Share the Ownership
Instill ownership of the project in the team members by sharing the job with them. There is a direct relationship between how much a person feels a sense of ownership for the job and how committed he is to making the project a success. One of the key jobs of management and leadership is to instill this feeling of ownership in each member of the team, so that each person feels personally responsible for the accomplishment of the overall project. You accomplish this by discussing every detail of the project with the people who are expected to carry it out.
Develop a Shared Vision
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Set Schedules and Deadlines
Once you have a shared vision and shared plans, and everyone knows exactly what is to be done and what the ideal results will look like, the next step is for you to set a deadline for project completion based on the consensus of your team.
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I hope you enjoyed this post. Please leave a comment and share with your friends!
About Brian Tracy — Brian is recognized as the top sales training and personal success authority in the world today. He has authored more than 60 books and has produced more than 500 audio and video learning programs on sales, management, business success and personal development, including worldwide bestseller The Psychology of Achievement. Brian's goal is to help you achieve your personal and business goals faster and easier than you ever imagined. You can follow him on Google+, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Linkedin and Youtube. | <urn:uuid:cacb1e5b-de5b-4e33-9cea-c77c802c1824> | CC-MAIN-2015-40 | http://www.briantracy.com/blog/general/how-to-multitask-and-effectively-plan-a-project/?lid=title | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-40/segments/1443737940789.96/warc/CC-MAIN-20151001221900-00163-ip-10-137-6-227.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963602 | 1,072 | 2.640625 | 3 |
Geothermal exchange, aka geothermal heating and cooling, is spectacularly simple, at once enigmatically complex. Vermonters are capitalizing on this wonderful green technology known by some as cave man technology as pre-historic man escaped winter's harshness since the Paleolithic era in subterranean homes, making use of warmer temperatures below the surface from heat retained within the Earth since planet formation, radioactive decay of minerals, and absorbed solar energy.
If you've ever loved going into your basement in the heat of summer as it's so much cooler than the rest of the house, you've enjoyed naturally occurring geo-thermal air conditioning. 55 degree ground temperatures five or six feet down remain constant year round. In Sweden and Switzerland more than 75% of new homes are built with geothermal.
The Japanese know the merits of geothermal too. Across the archipelago volcanic mountain ranges are punctuated by natural hot springs. The common man head for the hills in droves, dipping into naturally heated waters from deep inside the earth, pulling relaxation and longevity. While we're missing the volcanic drama in Vermont, our water runs deep and is plentiful.
There are three types of home geothermal systems: closed loop, open loop and pond. Closed loops are most common and the only type allowed in some states, are horizontal (on level lots) or vertical and circulate the same water with environmentally friendly anti-freeze while open loop systems draw their water from a well, require substantial water, and expel used water after use. Pond systems have the coils laid at the bottom of six feet or deeper ponds.
Geothermal is heat transportation rather than heat creation, up to five times more efficient than traditional heating systems rated at 78-98% efficient, and more than twice as efficient cooling. It is greenhouse gas free, non-polluting and doesn't contribute to the acid rain that fossil fuel heating produces, using just modest electricity to run the compressor, fan and pump. Maintenance is minimal with occasional servicing and filter replacement.
A refrigerator extracts heat from the fridge, air conditioning contents. A heat pump works pulls heat from outside and compresses it to higher temperatures.
From waterfurnace.com, here's a concise explanation of what might otherwise leave you scratching your head:
"Geothermal Heat Pumps low-temperature heat to over 100°F and transferring it indoors involves a cycle of evaporation, compression, condensation and expansion. A refrigerant is used as the heat-transfer medium which circulates within the heat pump. The cycle starts as the cold, liquid refrigerant passes through a heat exchanger (evaporator) and absorbs heat from the low-temperature source (fluid from the ground loop). The refrigerant evaporates into a gas as heat is absorbed. The gaseous refrigerant then passes through a compressor where the refrigerant is pressurized, raising its temperature to more than 180°F. The hot gas then circulates through a refrigerant-to-air heat exchanger where heat is removed and pumped into the building at about 100°F. When it loses the heat, the refrigerant changes back to a liquid. The liquid is cooled as it passes through an expansion valve and begins the process again. To work as an air conditioner, the system's flow is reversed."
And here's a Georgia Power video sugaring down Geothermal:
Maple Sweet Real Estate specializes in advanced technologies and has this geothermally heated and cooled home listed for sale. To list your own home, arrange of showing of this home or any others, learn more about geothermal exchange, or contact Maple Sweet with any other real estate related inquiries,
Dual-fuel systems include geothermal as the main heating system and a standard boiler or furnace to lean on in extreme cold.
Cost-effective, environmentally conscientious, and sustainable, payback can come in just a few years, leaving dreaded and rapidly increasing oil and gas bills by the wayside. Fossil fuel liberation, this alternative energy source beckons.
Maple Sweet Real Estate specializes in advanced technologies and has this geothermal home listed for sale.
Connect to maplesweet.com, e-mail [email protected] or call toll-free 1-800-525-7965 for more info on geothermal heating and cooling, to set up a showing of this geothermal home or any other Vermont property, or to sell your home, condo, land or commercial property. | <urn:uuid:8940336e-9697-4d2b-ab5c-f6d1c981df09> | CC-MAIN-2019-43 | https://maplesweet.com/blog/category/geothermal-energy/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-43/segments/1570986677230.18/warc/CC-MAIN-20191017222820-20191018010320-00389.warc.gz | en | 0.918064 | 915 | 2.65625 | 3 |
HADATH EL-JEBBEH, Lebanon (AP) — Kneeling beneath Lebanon’s ancient cedars, Waheeb Humayed peers through a protective visor and waves a metal detector until he hears the tell-tale beep. He clips the grass, pushes a small prodder into the ground and gently sweeps the dirt away with a garden trowel, revealing another deadly mine.
Three decades after the civil war ended, deminers are still working to clear this mountainous northern region, famous for its centuries-old cedar trees, which are Lebanon’s national emblem. Humanity and Inclusion, an international demining organization, says it has removed hundreds of mines and other explosives since 2011.
“I feel very happy every time I discover a mine,” Humayed said after he safely removed the anti-personnel mine. “I just feel that I helped save the life of a human being or an animal.”
Lebanon’s lush cedar forests are a source of pride for this small Mediterranean country. The ancient tree, often dubbed “Cedars of God,” is emblazoned on the national flag, and forests across the north are prime tourist attractions.
Hadath El-Jebbeh, a village in the northern Becharre region, is home to one of the largest cedar forests in the country. But it sees few visitors because of mines left over from the 1975-1990 civil war, when the area was on the front lines between the Syrian army and the Lebanese Forces, a Christian militia.
As the deminers took a break under the cedar trees, a shepherd shouted from a distance that he saw something suspicious. The deminers told him to stay away from it, saying they would check it out in the coming days.
Despite the dangers, local shepherds still bring flocks of sheep and goats to graze nearby. Hikers have also wandered into the area, not knowing about the hidden mines. It might be sheer luck that there have been no reports of fatalities in the area in recent years.
Lebanon is littered with mines left over from decades of conflict. Israel left thousands of mines behind when it withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000 after an 18-year occupation. Israeli forces dropped cluster bombs, many of which failed to detonate, during the 2006 war with Hezbollah. Islamic militants used mines and explosives in northeastern Lebanon, near the Syrian border, in 2017.
Brig. Gen. Jihad Al Bechelany said deminers have cleared about 70% of the more than 54 square kilometers (20 square miles) of minefields, removing 12,520 mines last year alone.
“Most of the minefields here are unorganized and we don’t have maps that give us the exact numbers of mines,” said Al Bechelany, who heads the Lebanon Mine Action Center, part of the Lebanese army. Some 100,000 mines were left behind from the civil war, with another 360,000 deposited along the border with Israel, he said.
Mines have killed 918 people and wounded 2,886 in Lebanon since 1975, according to Al Bechelany. He said Lebanon had hoped to clear all the mines by 2020 but now expects the work to continue for another decade because of a lack of funding. It could take even longer if the country, which is grappling with an economic crisis, does not get an expected influx of $340 million for demining efforts.
Funding comes mostly from the United States, the European Union, Japan and local Lebanese institutions, according to David Ligneau, mine action program manager at Humanity and Inclusion. He called on everyone to step up funding and for all states, including Lebanon, to join treaties banning the use of mines.
On a single day, Associated Press reporters watched a team dispose of 10 mines in the forests of Hadath el-Jebbeh.
Explosive experts wired small detonators to each mine and called out that they would blow them up within five minutes. The countdown ended with a huge explosion, sending a mushroom cloud of dust into the air.
Lebanon still has a long way to go, particularly in the south, where mines and cluster bombs still kill and maim. Last month, cluster bombs left over from the 2006 war killed a man and a boy. The presence of mines prevents local communities from making use of large swaths of land, affecting everything from farming to tourism.
Standing beneath the giant cedars, Ligneau said he hoped his group’s efforts would grant the Lebanese people “free access to this beautiful forest.”
By BASSEM MROUE
Photo: This Sept. 18, 2019 photo, shows an aerial view of a cedar forest where Lebanese deminers from Humanity and Inclusion, a French-based international non-governmental organization, are working, in Hadath El-Jebbeh, north Lebanon. Three decades after Lebanon’s civil war ended, deminers are still working to clear this mountainous region in northern Lebanon famous for its forests of centuries-old cedar trees. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla) | <urn:uuid:82d6e3bc-35fa-4e0d-a117-cab870f7b861> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://www.egyptindependent.com/lebanese-clear-civil-war-era-mines-from-famed-cedar-forests/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882573197.34/warc/CC-MAIN-20220818124424-20220818154424-00183.warc.gz | en | 0.95014 | 1,069 | 2.921875 | 3 |
Blood Sample Mystery Produces Useful Tool for Hospitals
Researchers at the University of Virginia Health System have investigated a strange mystery involving blood samples by sending smartphones hurtling through the hospital’s pneumatic tube system. And in so doing, they have developed a tool of use to hospitals around the world.
The researchers conducted the tests after a small number of blood samples were found to be damaged after being delivered through the hospital’s pneumatic tube system. This was odd, as the tube system has been in use for many years without such a problem. (Similar systems are in use in hospitals around the world — and at banks, to many a child’s delight.) Something had clearly gone wrong.
Seeking to understand the source of the problem, the UVA team looked for a diagnostic tool. When they couldn’t find anything designed for the tube system, James H. Harrison Jr., MD, PhD, came up with a daring idea: What if they used a smartphone’s accelerometer to assess the forces acting on the blood samples during transit? There were apps for smartphones that record forces, so it seemed feasible. But could a smartphone withstand the kinds of forces that occur in a pneumatic tube system? There was just one way to find out.
Having recently upgraded their smartphones, Garrett R. Mullins, PhD, a clinical chemistry postdoctoral fellow, and David Bruns, MD, a professor of Pathology, brought in their old smartphones. Mullins strapped his old phone into one of the canisters used to transport blood samples through the tubes and sent it on its way. “I probably wasn’t as worried about it as I should have been,” he recalled.
The phone, however, emerged safely, carrying valuable data on the forces within the tube system. To visualize what happens to a blood sample during transit through the system, Mullins used the two smartphones, one to record a video and the other to illuminate the blood sample. Bruns jokingly says he was “absolutely appalled” at the prospect of his phone going into the tube system.
To Mullins’ good fortune, both phones arrived intact. The resulting video shows the blood sample rocketing along, encountering turbulence along the way. And the investigations gave the inquisitive investigators the data they needed to create a hypothesis about what was happening: Blood samples could be shipped without incident except through the longest route in the tube system. Their innovative approach had provided the answers they needed to ensure the integrity of blood samples.
Valuable Tool for Hospitals
Since their initial experiments, Mullins and Bruns have sent phones through the tubes dozens of times, and, amazingly, not once has a screen arrived broken. The worst damage has been some minor scratches. As such, they have created an unorthodox but easy and inexpensive way for hospitals to monitor their tube systems and ensure the safe arrival of blood samples.
Still, they recommend that their colleagues at other hospitals might want to use an old phone and not a new one, just in case.
The new technique has been described in the scientific journal Clinical Chemistry in a report written by Mullins, Harrison and Bruns.
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The William B. Rankine Generating Station
of the Canadian Niagara Power Company
Niagara Falls, Ontario. Commissioned 1905. Decommissioned 2005.
Exploring the Rankine Tailrace
The William B. Rankine Generating Station is the last intact example of the mammoth engineering projects that pioneered the industrial-scale production of electricity at Niagara Falls between 1893 and 1906. Built to the same basic form as that introduced in the Niagara Power Company's Adams station, the Rankine facility was maintained in an operational shape until decommissioning in 2005, and remains in excellent condition. As the rest of the region's hydroelectric heritage was demolished, gutted, or left to rot, we owe a great deal to Fortis Ontario the station's last operator prior to it reverting to Niagara Parks Commission control with the conclusion of the site's lease in 2009 for preserving not just the structure but its incredible internal mechanisms. Thanks to the work of Fortis, and Norman Ball, whose The Canadian Niagara Power Company Story was commissioned by the company to celebrate its hundredth anniversary, we also know an enormous amount about the station's history. It is now incumbent on the Niagara Parks Commission, government, and private investors to secure a future for Rankine before neglect and inertia send this fascinating place to the same fate as befell the Toronto Power Generating Station and the Ontario Generating Station.
Like the other early hydroelectric developments at Niagara, the Rankine station was built by private investors, in this case the Canadian Niagara Power Company. The company was part of a complicated web of industrial and land development ventures that included the Niagara Power Company and Cataract Construction Company on the American side, and shared many of the same directors and financial backers. As Norman Ball relates in his history, the station's eventual namesake, William Birch Rankine, featured prominently in many of these companies.
The Canadian Niagara Power Company had originally signed a contract with the Niagara Parks Commission in 1892 for monopoly rights to generate power within the Commission's land on the Ontario side of the Falls, but its failure to promptly begin construction (its investors, directors, and suppliers were all busy building the Niagara Power Company's stations on the New York side) and growing public discontent with the terms of the deal led the Ontario Legislature to cancel the CNPCo monopoly in 1899, and authorize the Parks Commission to negotiate with other parties interested in developing the Niagara River's hydroelectric potential. While CNPCo. was able to renegotiate its lease and ultimately move forward with its planned development, two other concerns the American-owned Ontario Power Company, and the Electrical Development Company (later called the Toronto Power Company), a Canadian/British-venture led by Sir Henry Pellatt quickly tied up similar deals.
A construction boom followed as all three ventures pushed ahead with their plans, and by 1906 three separate powerhouses were producing power at industrial scales on the Canadian side of the falls. However, by the mid-1920s, these other companies had been bought out by the new public power authority, the Hydroelectric Power Commission of Ontario (HEPCO), and only the Canadian Niagara Power Company remained with a private power lease at the Canadian Niagara Falls. In 1950, CNPCo., along with the Niagara Power Company, was bought by Niagara Mohawk, which held the monopoly on electrical distribution in the northern part of New York State. In 1996, Fortis bought 50% of CNPCo., and eventually purchased the rest of the company.
Into the Depths
Descending the Rankine wheelpit on foot is an unbelievable experience. The deep wheelpit stations at Niagara were in many ways like icebergs: while their above-ground powerhouses were large and majestic, their presence gave little hint to the vast cavernous space that had been opened up below them. These wheelpits, and the machinery they contain, are the critical component of the architecture of these power stations, and at Rankine this underground system has until recently been kept lit, maintained and preserved.
While most people lucky enough to have received a tour of the station will have likely seen the wheelpit via a quick elevator ride to the bottom, we had to do it the hard way, descending a long series of steeply angled ladder stairs between the main bearing decks and the intermediate platforms that surround each turbine shaft all the way down. Unlike in the wheelpit of the Toronto Power Generating Station a few hundred metres up the river, there are no stairs.
As you descend these ladders, you are suspended within the incredible line of ten-foot-diameter penstocks and tree-trunk-thick turbine shafts that once fed energy down and then back up this 150 foot deep gash that was torn from the shale bedrock with drills and explosives. 28 inches of brick may lie between the atmosphere of the pit and the rock that presses in against it, but the rock is all you feel down there, the rock and the moisture that wets each breath you take. Apparently the lights have now been turned off, a money-saving measure no doubt though it does little to make an observer feel good about the plant's future, but when we were there everything was still lit in warm incandescence, making the photographs on this page possible.
Against the Earth
To my knowledge, the Rankine G.S. was one of just four powerhouses, all at Niagara, that were ever built with such an enormously deep wheelpit (136 feet from generator to turbine, with another forty-some feet below that given over to structural supports and the tailrace tunnel), and the only intact example remaining: the two Adams stations on the New York side were demolished in 1961, while the Toronto Power Generating Station was allowed to decay after its decommissioning in 1973, and most of the equipment and fittings were scrapped from its forebay, powerhouse and thrust deck in 2006. In its depth, the deep wheelpit design shared by these stations had an inherent disadvantage over the compact systems favoured in more modern powerhouses. Over time the long drive shafts that stretched back up to the surface fell victim to the movement of the rock surrounding the pit, shifting slowly out of a true vertical alignment. To a certain extent, this movement could be compensated for by adjusting the large bearings that supported each drive shaft, but ultimately geology must win out.
At Rankine, Norman Ball tells us that this movement was discovered in 1902 while excavation of the wheelpit was still ongoing.1 Heavy cast iron struts were installed across the pit between the turbines of units 4 and 5, seated in castings that had been included in the wheelpit design after similar rock movement was detected at the Adams plant five years earlier. Movement continues to this dayin 2005 a crack formed in the wheelpit wall, requiring additional reinforcement work.
Turbines and Exciters
The turbines at Rankine are hard to wrap your head around, as the majority of each wheel case (where water actually spins the turbine's blades and drives the shaft that reaches back up to the alternators on the surface) is positioned below the floor of the turbine deck. Instead, most of what we see are century-old control equipment: the levers and gears that are connected to the flyball speed governors back on the surface and direct valves that control the flow of water into each turbine, manual valve control wheels, and devices to adjust the drive shaft alignment. Smaller water and oil lines run, bracketed, along the walls.
Five arched chambers open into the wheelpit along the east wall. These chambers were meant to hold exciters, small direct-current generators driven by their own small penstock lines that provide the electricity necessary to create electromagnetic fields in the alternators up in the powerhouse (through which conductive brushes are spun by the rotation of the turbines to generate far greater amounts of alternating current), and some of them still do, while others now sit (or perhaps always were) empty. In a few places, stairs and hatches provide access down to the rack deck, a dark space with a steel grille floor. The rack deck feels like a cellar, and is the final level above the draft chamber that water from the turbines flows out into on its way to the tailrace.
And then there's the tailrace. You can read about that in this separate article.
- 1. Norman R. Ball. 2006. The Canadian Niagara Power Company Story. Boston Mills Press, 61-62.
Michael Cook is available to speak to your organization about infrastructure history, lost creeks, current conditions, and opportunities for change in our management of and communication about urban watersheds, and to work with teams proposing or implementing such change. Get in touch. | <urn:uuid:766c685e-0c61-45fc-a200-f50e917b7843> | CC-MAIN-2015-06 | http://vanishingpoint.ca/rankine-generating-station | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-06/segments/1422121744242.57/warc/CC-MAIN-20150124174904-00127-ip-10-180-212-252.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960223 | 1,772 | 3.15625 | 3 |
The Role of Thought
Photo By: Jeremy Bishop
Commitment to the empowerment of people can directly express in a myriad of ways through various leadership roles. These roles are to be found in the home, in the community, in the business or corporate setting, and frankly in any environment in which one is called upon to make decisions and interact with others. Understanding the role thought plays in creating our experience of life is critical in laying the foundation for healthy leadership.
Since it is our thinking which determines how we view a situation, come to an evaluation, handle ourselves, respond to others, or make a decision, clarity about the source of these choices brings with it a respectful and open certainty. This quality subsequently inspires trust in others and lends credibility to the leader.
As human beings, basically, we think all the time. We have within us a storehouse of memory, an intellect which is in one form or another educated and experienced and has expertise. We also have Wisdom and common sense and intuition. We access all of this as and through thought.
We have thoughts about our thoughts. We have thoughts about other people’s thoughts. One of the keys to actualizing leadership and self-empowerment is to understand the role which thought plays, and how it literally creates our – and other’s – experience of reality. For purposes of clarification, thought has been delineated into two “modes,” and so a brief discussion of these modes is included here in this article.
There are two modes of thought common to every human being. One we can refer to as personal thought, or memory, and the other is a mode of thinking available to us from being present in the moment, or simply stated: Being. The distinction between the two modes of thought can be seen through defining them and understanding the particular attributes of each.
Understanding the role of thought enables people to better sustain hopefulness and a sense of humor in the face of personal and organizational pressures and changes. To cultivate a deeper understanding of the power of thought allows for ongoing expansion of creative thinking in problem solving, improving productivity, and inspiring intrinsic motivation. This capacity to sustain hopefulness is achieved through the maintenance of a lighthearted attitude in spite of circumstances.
Personal thought or memory describes a mode or way of thinking that is limited, as it is based in the past. Personal thought is entirely made up of memory. The use of memory is appropriate when accessed through being, or being present in the moment. Without memory most of our day-to-day tasks would have to be relearned each time there was a need for them. Imagine having to relearn how to use the radio every morning or relearn how to operate the car or balance the checkbook. Clearly, personal thought is a very useful and necessary tool, and memory is what allows us to navigate much of the logistical necessities of everyday living.
However, the intellect can become problematic when used solely as the way of thinking, as it is entirely process-oriented. This mode of thinking can allow for continuous repetition or re-organization of previously held ideas. It can also be limiting when an individual’s thinking is relegated to memory only, as there can be a lack of freshness and insight. Exhaustion and depletion can result due to the arduous nature of having to remember and retrieve the past for any purpose. There can be a sense of boredom because when thinking from memory alone, one is not in the present moment, but rather distracted with thinking based in the past. Your intellect is then racing faster than your life, resulting in the experience of boredom, so there is no experience of insight or creativity.
A heaviness, or lack of joy or presence, can occur when a person focuses from the intellect alone. As one reviews the past over and over, there is a tendency to worry. The thought of needing to make things happen can create a feeling of hopelessness and burden.
Memory can be judgmental, since it compares and contrasts one recollection to another; it can feel weighted with responsibility and importance, as it has no recognition of itself as thought. Therefore everything can appear to have evaluative meaning and can be personalized. Reaction and doing something can make sense to the personal thought mode.
The mode of Being describes a free-flowing mode of thought, a natural state of consciousness inherent within each individual that arises when one is present. It is the vantage point from which we have access to ever-present Quiet Mind, Wisdom, Creativity and Insight. This free-flowing mode of thinking allows for more and more insight into the nature of the role of thought, ever deepening one’s level of understanding thought. It is natural, effortless, and exceedingly practical, as it also delivers common sense input particular to any given situation at hand.
The free-flow thinking inherent in Being gives us the best possible thinking we have access to at any given time. Herein lies the source of lightheartedness and a sense of humor because, due to the inherent Wisdom and creativity of the thought mode of being present, one is able to trust one’s own ability to navigate any circumstance regardless of familiarity with the conditions. Since the attributes of common sense, insight, and well being infuse thinking while beinging present, one simply allows the appropriate thought and/or solution to occur. When not wrestling or arguing with one’s own reasoning processes, but allowing thought to occur as insight, the best way to advance is unrestricted – and is often coupled with the feeling of delight or lightheartedness experienced as gratitude.
Thus, the free flow thinking in being present is the most efficient thought mode to utilize, as it takes the least emotional toll due to its stress-free nature. It is nonjudgmental and impersonal in that it assigns no motive, but recognizes anything unlike itself as thought relegated to memory.
As stated above, thinking from being present allows for the use of memory in an appropriate way, because it allows us to make use of the things learned in the past from a mode of ease and effortlessness. Memory is necessary; without it we would have to relearn very common, everyday tasks. However, use of memory – or known data alone – keeps us boxed in; the best we can do is travel in circles with the illusion of change because, essentially, our experience of life can become a continual review of the past.
This easy and diffuse way of thinking, i.e., Being, is like a river that is always moving, always bringing fresh and refreshing ways in which to interact with our life experience. Because it does not judge, it does not personalize experience, which allows for compassion and understanding, even for those people and circumstances which appear harsh and demanding.
The psychological stance of being present in the moment, knows that anything other than health and well-being is born of personal thought and is therefore illusory. Personal thought is born of the past, and the past does not exist in the now.
Living from this effortless moment-to-moment way of perceiving allows for helpful and stress-free use of memory, resilience, and good humor. What arises is a tenderness towards oneself and one’s fellows that doubles as a buffer towards difficulties and misunderstandings.
One maintains one’s equilibrium and makes choices that are best for all concerned, staying open to an ever-continuing influx of fresh insights and feelings of ease. It becomes clear – obvious – that the direction of health is toward the Quiet Stillness of Wisdom, which meets every need orderly, harmoniously, and effortlessly.
Within this Quiet Stillness, this Silence, all adjustments take place. Being is directly connected to the Formless, the reverberation of Truth before personal thought. It is in the Silence, the nonverbal Knowing, where personal thought is transmuted into Wisdom, Health, and Joy.
As leaders, parents, teachers, managers, citizens, it behooves us to learn how to recognize the characteristics of our own memory, our stories about life experience, stories about ourselves, stories about others. As soon as we recognize we are operating from personal thought or memory, we are in free-flow thinking, and present, and pointed in the direction of health. This is due to the fact that it is the impersonal thinking of being present which recognizes personal thinking from the past. Personal thinking or memory cannot recognize itself. It has no outside vantage point from which to view itself.
How many people do we come in contact with throughout our experience? How many people are influenced by the inspired commitment to empowerment and health exemplified by one person’s leadership? There is an old saying, “Anyone can count the seeds in an apple, but who can count the apples in a seed?” Can we count the lives influenced from the one we inspired? First knowing that there are two modes of thought, then recognizing the difference, is all that is required to return to the natural and effortless state of Being, and one’s own inner buoyancy, health, and innate leadership characteristics.
Leadership born of understanding the role of thought taps into a foundation of inherent stability. As you choose to embrace your own leadership and align with these innate leadership characteristics, you will impact adults, children, organizations and communities with previously unrecognized hopefulness and possibility. Such recognition catalyzes the expression of one’s own inherent authenticity, aspiration and contribution, for the benefit of all concerned.
* Based on the Dissertation: Implications of the Health Realization Model Experienced as Transformational Humor for Individuals and Organizations Dissertation Manuscript by Laura Basha, Ph.D. | <urn:uuid:b17b0526-1a0a-4443-9850-1f259b3a5b7a> | CC-MAIN-2018-30 | https://www.whitebirdrising.com/the-role-of-thought/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-30/segments/1531676592309.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20180721032019-20180721052019-00524.warc.gz | en | 0.961537 | 1,980 | 2.921875 | 3 |
Speaker warns of climate risk
Most predictions of global warming and resulting sea-level rise are underestimates, the keynote speaker at the Hawaii Conservation Conference said yesterday.
Based on prehistoric records, when Earth averaged just 2 degrees Fahrenheit warmer on average than it is now, sea levels were 24 to 27 feet higher, said Thomas Goreau, president of the Global Coral Reef Alliance.
And that was before humans started burning fossil fuels, he told 800 people at the Hawai'i Convention Center yesterday. The annual meeting for conservation workers continues today and tomorrow with the theme "Sustainability: Mauka to Makai."
"We still get people denying the greenhouse effect, saying it's not real," Goreau said. "But it's a law of nature. If you increase the concentration of gas that absorbs radiation, the gas heats up."
That gas is our atmosphere, and the burning of fossil fuels is speeding up the process, he said.
"The only real question about carbon dioxide-induced climate change is how hot it will get and how fast," said Goreau, who has a doctorate in biogeochemistry.
Goreau said effects of global climate change will include:
» Increasing storm intensities.
» More extreme temperatures and weather, including heat waves, droughts and flooding.
» Changing wind and ocean currents.
Coral reefs are probably the most sensitive ecosystem on the planet, he said.
Changes of 2 degrees Fahrenheit or less, when sustained for a month, can cause coral to "bleach," or lose the symbiotic algae that give it color. If the higher temperature is short-lived, the coral could recover. If the water stays hot for too long, the coral itself will die, Goreau said.
Goreau estimates that "alarming increases in sea-surface temperatures" will eventually put all coral reefs at risk -- even if people stopped all fossil fuel use right away.
In the face of such a dire prediction, his nonprofit organization is sharing its technique for growing and maintaining coral that can survive temperature stress 16 to 50 times better than in nature.
Goreau's method involves growing live coral over man-made "Bio-Rock" -- calcium carbonate that accumulates on metal with a low-voltage electric current when placed in sea water. The electrified rock base enables coral grown on it to survive much larger fluctuations in temperature than normal, he said yesterday in a preview of his public talk tonight.
Though the process will not save all the world's reefs from death as sea temperatures rise, it could create oases of living reef, Goreau said.
"We've done this in 20 countries using solar panels or tidal energy to provide the electric charge," he said. "I call them coral arks or bio-reefs. I'm trying to keep corals alive despite global warming."
One project under construction is in the Philippine province of Negros Occidental. | <urn:uuid:b00b95fb-9c74-41bd-ac61-8f1dc0854076> | CC-MAIN-2014-42 | http://archives.starbulletin.com/2006/07/27/news/story11.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2014-42/segments/1414119662145.58/warc/CC-MAIN-20141024030102-00086-ip-10-16-133-185.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.932281 | 602 | 3.265625 | 3 |
By Ed Coghlan.
If you are a woman, you’re three times more likely to get a migraine than a man.
And researchers need to examine and address how the disease differs between women and men.
That’s the essence of a report from the Society for Women’s Research published in the August issue of the Journal of Women’s Health.
The Society for Women’s Health Research is a national nonprofit dedicated to promoting research on biological differences in disease and improving women’s health through science, policy, and education.
Women in their thirties are more likely to experience longer and more intense migraine attacks and report more migraine-associated symptoms and comorbid conditions at a time when many women are balancing work, family, and social obligations. Migraine costs the U.S. an estimated $78 billion per year, with women accounting for about 80 percent of direct medical and lost labor costs.
SWHR’s report summarizes current research on sex and gender differences in migraine based on a roundtable discussion hosted by SWHR with expert researchers, clinicians, and patients. The review outlines growing evidence that sex influences migraine risk, presentation, diagnosis, treatment, and management.
For example, sex hormones like estrogen play a large role in the development of migraine and are likely contributors to observed sex differences in the disease, but a better understanding of these differences and the mechanisms behind them will lead to more targeted, effective treatments.
In addition, women and men seek and receive treatment for migraine differently, with women more likely to consult a health care provider. This could be because women typically experience worse symptoms or because the feminization of the migraine makes men hesitant to seek help. Recognizing these gender differences can help overcome patient and provider bias in the diagnosis and treatment of migraine.
Despite the clear differences in migraine between women and men, research exploring these differences has been limited. “To move migraine research forward more quickly and to greatly improve the lives of patients, sex and gender differences in migraine need to be taken into account across the entire health care spectrum — by researchers, clinicians, patients, policymakers, and other health care decision-makers,” said Rebecca Nebel, PhD, SWHR’s director of scientific programs and senior author on the paper.
Until earlier this year, no treatments designed specifically to prevent migraine had come onto the market in more than 50 years. To promote advancement in migraine research and patient care, SWHR’s report identifies gaps in knowledge and prioritizes areas that warrant further attention in order to improve health outcomes for both women and men. Priority areas include:
· Broadening clinical studies, including incorporating sex differences in study design and analysis, and conducting longitudinal studies on hormones
· Increasing awareness of migraine to better identify and treat the disease
· Enhancing quality-of-life measures by improving assessment of disability and understanding of migraine’s impact on workplace productivity
· Destigmatizing migraine to increase rates of those seeking and continuing care
Follow on Twitter | <urn:uuid:1351ab78-c2d8-4183-9b7f-b663ef4ceb09> | CC-MAIN-2020-45 | http://nationalpainreport.com/report-lets-find-out-why-women-get-migraines-more-8837135.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2020-45/segments/1603107884322.44/warc/CC-MAIN-20201024164841-20201024194841-00207.warc.gz | en | 0.938415 | 624 | 2.75 | 3 |
A hash or digest can be thought of as the digital fingerprint of a piece of data. Hash is usually generated from any string of text in a fixed length by a one-way mathematical process. It is next to impossible to re-engineer the original text or data from the hash alone. Also, it is vast impossible that any different text strings share an identical hash.
Thus, a hash of a string is usually used to encrypt clear text yet to maintain the possibility to compare encrypted texts for identicalness or check if the original text has been modified in any way.
To hash a string or get the hash of a string in PHP, use sha1() instead of md5() which is inferior than sha1() with regards to security.
$hash = sha1('The deal is $120,000 in total.');
And $hash contains the sha1 hash of the string in the argument. Here’s a better read on how to hash your passwords. | <urn:uuid:f176ad72-765c-4cea-ae1c-c5457f5b68f8> | CC-MAIN-2021-04 | https://www.kavoir.com/2009/04/php-what-is-hash-hashing-a-string-generate-hash-of-strings.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2021-04/segments/1610703517559.41/warc/CC-MAIN-20210119011203-20210119041203-00127.warc.gz | en | 0.887831 | 203 | 3.28125 | 3 |
This chromatic catalogue of the natural world pairs individual colour swatches with examples from the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms to create a beautiful and comprehensive colour reference system to grace every bookshelf.
Marking the 200th anniversary of the publication of Syme’s expanded edition of Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours (1821), this lavish volume takes Syme’s field guide of 110 standard colours and – for the first time – fully illustrates it with nineteenth-century depictions of his referenced species. Expert text explains the uses and development of colour standards in relation to zoology, botany, minerology and anatomy, while specimens from contemporary collector’s cabinets (birds, butterflies, eggs, flowers and minerals) are matched to each colour swatch. Syme’s groundbreaking guide attempted to establish a universal colour reference system to help identify, classify and represent species from the natural world: this landmark publication completes his endeavour.
'Patrick Baty shares the beauty of our world through a rich and diverse palette'
'This new version of Syme’s book provides new examples for each hue the artist described but it also lays bare how endless is the project of classifying colour'
'Fascinating, lavishly illustrated … the essays by four leading experts are both informative and accessible … a very enjoyable read'
House & Garden | <urn:uuid:b0b65a41-24f2-4b1d-9fea-3dda29e9dc6f> | CC-MAIN-2022-27 | https://thamesandhudson.com/nature-s-palette-a-colour-reference-system-from-the-natural-world-9780500252468 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-27/segments/1656104672585.89/warc/CC-MAIN-20220706121103-20220706151103-00537.warc.gz | en | 0.849896 | 298 | 3.21875 | 3 |
Is sugar REALLY that bad?
Does sugar seem to make your kids act up, misbehave, or bounce off the walls? Guess what research says that the 'sugar high' is actually a myth.
How often have you heard another parent, or even yourself, say the words, "Oh, no, he can't have lollies. They make him hyper!" or "If she has a soda, she'll be bouncing off the walls." Birthday cake is frowned upon, biscuits are prohibited, and even juice is taboo. And if your child does partake of one of these forbidden treats, it's likely that you brace yourself for a day full of tantrums, naughtiness, and general misbehaviour, all the result of the proverbial "sugar high".
We've been interested in the relationship between nutrition and behaviour for many years, and, in recent decades, research has honed in on food additives and sugar in particular, and their suspected negative impact on children's behaviour. While some food additives have been found to have detrimental effects on children, it's sugar that often takes the blame, being labelled as the "bad guy". But does the humble sugar cube really deserve its fearsome reputation? Let's examine the scientific evidence behind the commonly held belief that sugar makes children "hyperactive".
GETTING SERIOUS ABOUT THE SWEET STUFF
Sugar, in its various forms, is present in many of the foods we eat on a regular basis, including bread, dairy foods, and even some toothpastes. For this reason, scientists have had to think carefully about precisely how to study sugar's effect on children's behaviour. They needed to be able to control and measure exactly the amount of sugar children were ingesting so that its possible impacts on behaviour could be observed and noted. In order for powerful conclusions to be drawn from studies on this topic, it is necessary to eliminate as many external variables as possible.
Therefore, studies on sugar and children's behaviour are often conducted in laboratory settings and are carefully planned. First, most of the studies described in this article involved at least two groups of children - those who were given sugar in some form, and those who were not (the "control group", who usually received an artificial sweetener). Second, children are randomly assigned to each group in order to eliminate the possibility of the groups being different in some way prior to the study's commencement. Third, and very importantly, the children and their parents - and sometimes even the experimenters themselves - are unaware as to whether the children they are observing are receiving the sugar or the artificial sweetener.
Sound complicated? Let's look at how some individual studies have made this work.
In a 1994 study, Dr Mark Wolraich and his colleagues at the Department of Pediatrics at Vanderbilt University in the US set out to test the theory that sucrose (common sugar) and aspartame (an artificial sweetener) produce hyperactivity and other behaviour problems in children. They took two groups of approximately 25 children each, one group seen by their parents as "normal" in behaviour and the other group described by their parents as "sensitive to sugar". The children and their families followed a different diet for each of three consecutive three-week periods:
• Weeks 1-3: High in sucrose, with no artificial sweeteners
• Weeks 4-6: Low in sucrose, with aspartame as a sweetener
• Weeks 7-9: Low in sucrose, with saccharin as a sweetener (this was the "control" condition or placebo - i.e. the absence of both sucrose and aspartame).
Also, all of the diets were essentially free of additives, preservatives, and artificial food colourings, and the exact amount of each substance the children consumed - either sucrose, aspartame, or saccharin - was measured daily. Then, using 39 behavioural and cognitive variables, the children were rated by researchers who didn't know whether the children they were observing were considered "normal" or "sensitive to sugar" (therefore, they were unbiased in their assessments).
Interestingly, researchers found that for the children described as "sugar-sensitive", there were no significant differences in their behaviour no matter which of the three diets they were eating. The authors of the study concluded, "Even when intake exceeds typical dietary levels, neither dietary sucrose nor aspartame affects children's behaviour or cognitive function."
Surprised? Despite the relatively small groups of children involved in this study, the same conclusion has been reached by dozens of other studies, each using slightly different experiments, both prior to and subsequent to this study.
In 1995, Wolraich and his colleagues set to work again. This time, they set out to conduct a meta-analysis - meaning, they wanted to pull together the results from numerous similar studies and try to draw a firm consensus. In total, 23 carefully selected studies were analysed, involving hundreds of children. The outcome was published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, a well-regarded and prestigious publication. Their conclusion? "Sugar does not affect the behaviour and cognitive performance of children."
By now, you might be intrigued, or even outraged by the implication that sugar doesn't actually turn your child into a terror capable of wreaking havoc on everything within a 3-metre radius after scarfing down a single chocolate bar.
Therefore, a small disclaimer: It's important to realise that these findings may not apply to all children. Wolraich and his colleagues did acknowledge that "a small effect of sugar or effects on subsets of children cannot be ruled out". Also, sugar may occasionally exacerbate an existing behaviour disorder, such as Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) or Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD).
SUGAR HIGH… OR NOT?
If we suppose that for the great majority of children, sugar itself does not cause them to be "hyper", what other reason could there be for the shrieking bundles of energy we see wildly aeroplaning around the backyard at children's birthday parties, seemingly high on cake, lollies, and fizzy drinks?
There are several possible causes for the so-called "sugar high". The most common explanation, and the one that makes the most sense, is that foods high in sugar are typically given to children in contexts which are rewarding, exciting, or celebratory - the fizzy drinks and lollies at birthday parties; the chocolates and candy canes at Christmas; or the ice cream cones on a day out with the grandparents. These stimulating environments can incite or exacerbate hyperactive behaviour in children, especially when they are participating in party games that involve running and shouting, or when parents unconsciously relax their normal behavioural expectations and boundaries for special occasions.
SEEING IS BELIEVING
Another possible explanation for the "sugar high" is that, sometimes, we see what we're expecting to see. In 1994, Dr Daniel Hoover and Dr Richard Milich of the University of Kentucky conducted an experiment with 35 five - to 7-year-old boys who were described by their mothers as "sugar sensitive". The children were randomly assigned to two study groups. In one group, the boys' mothers were told that their children had been given a large dose of sugar. In the other group, the mothers were told that their children had received an artificial sweetener. In reality, all of the children had been given the artificial sweetener.
Next, the mothers and their sons were videotaped interacting with each other, and each mother was later questioned about the interaction. Despite the fact that all of the children received the same artificial sweetener, the mothers who had been told that their sons were given sugar rated their children as significantly more hyperactive. Observations by independent observers suggested that the mothers from this group had behaved differently towards their children during the interaction in subtle ways, possibly cueing their child to behave differently also.
SO WHAT ABOUT SUGAR?
This article is not meant to be an exhaustive review of the research on sugar and children's behaviour. It does not deeply explore studies into the relationship between artificial sweetener and hyperactivity, or food additives and hyperactivity. Relationships between food and behaviour are complex, and these topics deserve further study. Children are complex, and their responses to foods vary widely. But, as concluded by Dr Marcel Kinsbourne in The New England Journal of Medicine, "Sugar clearly does not induce [disorder] where there was none before."
It's important to keep in mind that while sugar doesn't cause hyperactivity in children, that's not a free pass to let them eat as much sugar as they want. An overload of sugar makes children lethargic, grumpy, and irritable, and don't forget the dental repercussions of too much sugar in your child's diet, as well as sugar's relationship with debilitating medical conditions such as obesity and diabetes. So, while sugar can't be blamed for everything, it certainly has its place - safely at the top of the food pyramid as an "occasional" food.
Most parents would agree that attempting to modify children's behaviour by implementing entirely sugar-free diets can be difficult socially, and a burden to actually put in place. It's important for parents to carefully consider objective evidence before embarking on such diets, and think about placing a child on a temporary sugar-elimination diet and obtaining independent behavioural observations from individuals unaware of the change in diet in order to see if there is, in fact, a change. Hopefully, this article will challenge parents to delve deeper into the research behind the small talk at parties, and to not unnecessarily make sugar the "bad guy" when it comes to children's hyperactivity.
|Dr Melanie Woodfield is a child and adolescent clinical psychologist in Auckland.|
AS FEATURED IN ISSUE 1 OF OHbaby! MAGAZINE. CHECK OUT OTHER ARTICLES IN THIS ISSUE BELOW | <urn:uuid:cc08b41b-91ca-4a16-9696-53216065e337> | CC-MAIN-2022-05 | https://www.ohbaby.co.nz/under-5/feeding-under-fives/a-spoonful-of-sugar | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-05/segments/1642320301720.45/warc/CC-MAIN-20220120035934-20220120065934-00449.warc.gz | en | 0.97638 | 2,061 | 2.609375 | 3 |
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in a location-independent way so that it can be communicated or stored elsewhere.
For example, an object
representing a time, with attributes
for year, month, timezone, etc., could be serialised as the string
"2002-02-24T14:33:52-0800", or an XML
", or as a binary
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as a string of ASCII
digits) and marshalling
components into a single block of data, a serialisation algorithm
needs to follow pointers
to include objects referred to by the initial object. This is further complicated by the possible presence of cycles in the object graph.
It should be possible to store the serialised representation on disk, or transmit it across a network, and then restore it as an object (graph) that is the same as the original. | <urn:uuid:53ab579f-03c0-4c80-9252-82db8d69ab27> | CC-MAIN-2015-14 | http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/serialise | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-14/segments/1427131300799.9/warc/CC-MAIN-20150323172140-00218-ip-10-168-14-71.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.873066 | 196 | 2.734375 | 3 |
Major Beliefs of Jainism
Loka Purusha, The Cosmic Being
I adore so greatly the principles of the Jain religion, that I would like to be reborn in Jain community - George Bernard Shaw.
In the ancient world, the Jain tradition was known as the Sramana tradition.
The sramanas were ascetics, who led pure and austere lives, without possessions, wandering from place to place and subjecting themselves to rigorous austerities and self-discipline.
They focused on renouncing the causes of sin and suffering to achieve liberation from pain and the cycle of births and deaths.
Through the teachings of Parsvanatha and Mahavira, the last two of the 24 Thirthankaras, the tradition grew into an organized religion, attracting a sizeable following in various parts of the Indian subcontinent.
To those who are familiar with Hinduism, the beliefs and concepts of Jainism sound familiar, making one wonder whether there was any connection between the two in some remote past.
There is an argument that Jainism was a popular ascetic tradition of India with its roots in prehistoric times, whose beliefs regarding soul, nature of existence, liberation, austerities, time, karma and incarnation of souls found their way into Hinduism directly or indirectly and enriched it greatly with a strong spiritual and philosophical base.
In this article we will discuss some of the important concepts and core beliefs of Jainism, by knowing which we will gain a fair understanding of how it differs from Hinduism.
Three Tier Universe
Jains acknowledge a three tier universe, consisting of an upper, middle and the lower worlds.
The universe is eternal and indestructible. It has no creator and it is indestructible. From time to time some aspects of it however may undergo changes.
The upper world is known as siddhasila, inhabited by eternally free and pure souls, who remain permanently in a state of pure bliss and peace.
The middle world is inhabited by embodied beings such as humans, plants, animals and beings with inert bodies (inanimate objects), subject to the law of karma.
The lower world is inhabited by beings, passing through various stages of punishments for the sin they incurred upon earth. They return to our world of embodied souls when their punishment is complete.
Jains view the world in which we live to be full of misery and suffering and the souls that inhabit it are not free because they are attached to matter or substance and vulnerable to the inflow of karmic matter.
As the Akaranaga Sutra describes, the living world of ours is afflicted, miserable, difficult to instruct, and without discrimination. In this world full of pain, the individual beings suffer by their different acts.
Jiva and Ajiva
Jainism views the whole universe in terms of two eternal, independent, indestructible and coexisting components, Jiva and Ajiva, which are similar in some respects to the concept of Purusha and Prakriti of the Samkhya school. Jiva is interpreted differently as being, embodied soul and conscious soul. Ajiva is the lifeless inert matter having qualities (gunas) and atoms (paramanus). In a being Jiva is the soul and Ajiva the physical body. Jiva is the dynamic aspect and ajiva the passive aspect. Jiva is the subject and Ajiva the object. Jiva is the knower and the enjoyer, while Ajiva is the known and the enjoyed, perceived by the Jiva through the senses. The Jiva contains three types of consciousness: knowing, feeling and willing, while Ajiva being inert has no consciousness. For the embodied soul, Ajiva is the allurement, the trap. It comes in many shapes - love for the sense objects, attachment to possessions and material things, desire for sensual pleasures, identification with body and so on. For a Jiva, the Ajiva in which it is caught is a burden, a baggage, which reduces the brilliance of its consciousness and its ability to experience bliss, which is its true nature.
According to Jain tenets, karma is a kind of Ajiva or inert substance, made of fine particles of matter, invisible to the naked eye, but present every where in the universe. It is the binding force and the source of bondage and misery. As an embodied soul engages in various actions, the karmic matter flows into its body and clings to it like an impurity, according to the nature of its actions. The karmic substance is an impurity which leaves its imprint upon the soul and according to its deeds. As a result the soul loses its freedom as becomes bound to a vicious cycle of actions and consequences or causes and effects. Unlike the Atman of the Upanishads, the soul of Jainism has plasticity and dimension. It has the ability to expand or contract, according to the size and shape of the body in which it resides. In a womb it enters like a small seed. But as the body begins to grow it also expands correspondingly to fit into its shape and size. At the end of its current corporeal life, it contracts again into a seed and leaves the body to begin a new journey in another body according to its karma.
Jainism envisions a universe filled with innumerable eternal souls in varying degrees of perfection and purity. Soul is the basic unit of consciousness which makes all experience possible because it is capable of perception and experience both in its mundane state and its pure state. Based on their level of perfection three types of souls are recognized. The Nityasuddhas are eternally pure and perfect. They are impervious to the inflow of karmic substance. The Muktas are the liberated souls, who are freed from the cycle of births and deaths and the ordeals of embodiment. They live in a blissful and transcendental state, indifferent to what is going on in different worlds. As freed souls, living in a state of pure existence, they possess ananta jnana (infinite knowledge), ananta darsana (infinite perception), ananta virya (infinite power) and ananta sukha (infinite bliss). The thrid type of souls are baddhas also known as sopadhi jivas. They are the bound souls, who are imperfect, subject to the cycle of births and deaths and karma produced by their own actions. Not all souls have the potential to become free. To become free a soul needs to have bhavyatva, a special quality that has to be activated by its karma to set the process of its liberation in motion. Some souls either do not possess this quality or can never activate it by their karma. So them remain bound for ever.
Depending upon the number of senses they possess, the jivas are divided into five categories, those having one, two, three, four and five senses respectively. Plants have only one sense, the sense of touch. The mammals have all the five senses. In between there two are the jivas having two, three or four senses. Human beings, gods and higher beings possess an additional sixth sense, called manas or mind, which gives them the ability to think and act rationally. The number of senses is an important criteria in selecting right kind of food for consumption to practice the principle of ahimsa or non injury. Since it is not possible to consume food without indulging in some form of violence of injury to living beings, it is better to select plants which have only one sense. Eating food prepared by killing animals having two or more senses would lead to greater sin and adverse karma.
One of the distinguishing features of Jainism is its belief that souls exists both in animate and inanimate objects. The souls are found every where, in every conceivable object, not only in men and animals, but also in the plants, planets, stars, elements, oceans, rivers, wood, metal and even a dew or a rain drop. The Jain believe that there are planetary souls, elementals souls, ethereal souls and souls living beyond the reach of our senses in invisible and subtle matter. The condition of a soul depends upon the body it occupies. The consciousness of souls which reside in inanimate objects or elemental bodies remains in a latent state in contrast to souls living in more dynamic bodies. The condition of one soul per one body also does not apply in Jainism. Some times a multitude of souls may occupy one body as in case of some tuberous plants. Innumerable souls may also exist together as a loosely held cluster occupying vast stretches of space encompassing the whole world as one complex organism. They are called nigodas, which act like a vast store houses of souls. Suspended in the atmosphere, the nigodas keep filling the empty spaces automatically, whenever they are left vacant by the departing or liberated souls. Like the major air currents that crisscross our planet, the nigodasput great responsibility on us to act carefully lest we harm some souls unknowingly.
Dharma, Adharma, Space & Time
Ajiva dravya or the inert matter is of two types, rupa (with form) and arupa (without form). They are further divided into dharma, adharma, space, time and pudgala. Of them only pudgala is matter with form, which can be perceived through senses, and the rest are formless. Unlike in Hinduism and Buddhism, dharma, adharma, space and time are not some abstract concepts or processes, but objective aspects of the universe, grouped under the category of substances (dravyas) in order to distinguish them from the soul, which is not a substance. In Jainism dharma and adharma do not represent merit or demerit or right and wrong. They are the motivating or moving forces of the things in the universe. If space is what holds things like a container, dharma is what moves them and adharma is what brings them to rest within that container. All things, both animate and inanimate, occupy the space and are subject to movement (dharma) and rest (adharma). Space, movement and rest are the three permanent realities of the universe, within the field of our experience. All actions of a Jiva are induced by the movements and rest of its body, mind and senses, In other words, karma is induced by both dharma and adharma. Dharma is what makes the inflow and out flow of karmic substance possible and adharma is what makes it stick to the jiva or rest in it.
Kala is another aspect of Ajiva dravya. It is unilateral and without extension. It is a persistent continuation of successive movements, strung together from the past into the present as one endless continuum. Kala is both absolute and relative. The absolute time, kala, is without a beginning and without an end, indivisible and formless. The relative time, samaya, has a beginning and an end. It has a form and it is divisible into seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years and so on. Relative time caused by changes in the motion of things. It is also cyclical because it has an ebb and flow in which the condition of souls fluctuate according to a predictable pattern. As in Hinduism, in Jainism also time is perceived as a destroyer because eventually in death as in liberation the body of a jiva is temporarily destroyed.
Pudgala and The Atomic Theory
Pudgala is matter with form. It is what the bodies of jivas are made of, or what the earth and the planets are made of. It has certain perceivable qualities, shapes or forms and properties. It is what is perceived and experienced by the jivas through their senses. It is subject to modifications, but eternal. It embodies energy and prone to motion (parispanda) and evolution (parinama). Everything in the universe, except the souls is made out of pudgala. In its gross form it is grasped by the senses, but the senses cannot reach its subtle forms. The karmic matter is a subtle pudgala that becomes attached to the bodies of the souls because of their actions.
Pudgula is made up of infinitesimally small atoms or paramanus, which are eternal, cannot be created and indestructible. The atoms are responsible for the qualities and nature of pudgala. Each atom has some weight. The lighter atoms stay above and the weightier ones below. Each atom occupies a certain point in space. The atoms also possess certain qualities such as taste, color, smell and texture. Atoms of the gross matter are much larger in size and occupy greater area in space than atoms of the subtle matter. Things are produced by the combination of atoms of dissimilar nature, prone to mutual attraction. The movement of atoms in the space are caused by dharma and adharma, which we have discussed before. Atoms have a tendency to come together and form into aggregates (skandha) of different types. Aggregates constitute one aspect of pudgala, the other being atoms. Our material universe is in fact a giant aggregation of countless atoms (mahaskandha), subject to change and transience made possible by the aggregation and disintegration of atoms. The atoms are eternal. So is the universe. What undergoes change is the combination of atoms or the aggregates. Atoms are homogenous, but by developing certain qualities and grouping themselves into various combinations they manifest as numerous substances. Atoms have motion and can travel swiftly from one part of the universe to another at infinite speeds.
According to Jainism Karma is a kind of matter (pudgalika) which enters the body of a jiva according to the nature of its actions. The karmic matter is present in the whole universe and has a tendency to modify the future of a jiva by entering into it and creating effects of merits and demerits. The karmic substance remains in the jiva till it is cleansed through neutralizing actions. By indulging in various actions and interacting with the external world, each jiva keeps on attracting the karmic substance into itself which leads to the development of a karmic body (karmana sarira). This karmic body remains with the jiva through its various reincarnations till the soul is completely liberated. Every action performed by a jiva leaves upon it an impression and forms the basis for an action or event in its future. The karmic substance envelops the soul and camouflages its brilliance like a layer of black soot forming on the glass of a lamp. This happens in case of both mental and physical actions. Bhavakarma is the substance that enters a jiva through its mental actions and dravya karma through its physical actions.
On account of karma a jiva passes through five different types of karmic conditions. The first one is the Audayika state. It is the normal state in which karma does its regular work. The next one is Aupamasika state, in which karma is not removed but neutralized and prevented temporarily from producing its results. In the Ksaayika state, the jiva is able to remove its karma completely so that it will not produce any effects, resulting in its liberation. In the Ksayopamasika state, which is the next one, a jiva find itself in all the three preceding states, that is some karma is present in its normal state, some karma is neutralized temporarily and some karma is permanently removed. In the fifth state a jiva is completely immune to the effects of karma. This is the state of liberation. The Ksayika and Aupamasika states are found in the holy men while the Aupamasika state is normally found in pious and virtuous people who perform good deeds.
Liberation in Jainism actually means liberation of soul from matter including the karmic matter. For human beings it is freedom from cycle of births and deaths and the impurity of karma. Karma is what binds the soul (jiva) to the matter (ajiva). Jainism recognizes seven tattvas or principles namely jiva, ajiva, asrava, bandha, samvara, niraja and moksha. A jiva (soul) becomes free from ajiva (matter or material body) through various stages to reach the highest state of absolute liberation called moksha. Asrava is the flow of kamric substance into the body of jiva. Bandha is the bondage that binds the soul to the body, caused by wrong belief, non-renunciation, carelessness, passion and the vibration caused in the soul by the actions of the body, mind and senses. Samvara is that which prevents the inflow of karma completely. Niraja is that which neutralizes and eliminates all the previous sins and purifies the soul. Moksha is the state of complete liberation, to which soul can reach to experience its highest and purest state of blissful consciousness. Jains take the concept of liberation to its extreme when they ultimately subject their bodies to self destruction through fasting and other austerities to attain liberation. Suicide is an acknowledged short cut to liberation in Jainism. It is prescribed as an alternative to extreme asceticism when one is unable to overcome attachment and passions. A monk is also allowed to kill himself after twelve years of ascetic practices to attain nirvana.
Suggestions for Further Reading
- The Atomic Theory of Jainism
- History of Jainism
- Jainism - Philosophy and Doctrine
- Major Beliefs of Jainism
- Jain Literature and Canonical Texts
- Jainism Cosmology
- The Jains And Their Creed
- Jainism - Doctrine and History
- An Introduction to Jainism or Jain Dharma
- The Philosophy and Practice of Jainism
- Information Websites on Jainism
- Jainism and the Belief in God
- Jainism - Jivas, the Embodied Souls
- Jainism - Belief in Karma
- The Theory of Knowledge in Jainism
- History of Jainism after Mahavira
- Vardhamana Mahavira
- Jainism - Anekantavada or Nayavada
- An Outsider Perspective on Jainism
- Jainism - Sects and Subsects
- Syadavada or Saptabhangi
- The Tattvas of Jainism
- Jain Thirthankaras
- Ethics of Jainism - The Three Jewels
- Tirthahkaras Before Mahavira
- Essays On Dharma
- Esoteric Mystic Hinduism
- Introduction to Hinduism
- Hindu Way of Life
- Essays On Karma
- Hindu Rites and Rituals
- The Origin of The Sanskrit Language
- Symbolism in Hinduism
- Essays on The Upanishads
- Concepts of Hinduism
- Essays on Atman
- Hindu Festivals
- Spiritual Practice
- Right Living
- Yoga of Sorrow
- Mental Health
- Concepts of Buddhism
- General Essays
Attribution: The image files of Jain deity used in this essay is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license
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WHAT IS THE OMER PERIOD AND WHY DO WE COUNT IT?In Bible times, the Jews used to take a measure of barley, called an omer, to the Temple in Jerusalem as a sacrifice to God to say thank you for giving them a good harvest. This was done on the second day of Pesach. From the second day of Pesach until the festival of Shavuot, we count each day for seven weeks and each day in anceint times an omer of barley was brought to the Temple. On the 50th day, when all the 49 days of the Omer period are finished, it will be the festival of Shavuot. This period of time between 2nd Day Pesach and Shavuot became known asSefirat haOmer, the counting of the Omer, and is often called simply the Omer or the Omer period.
HOW DO WE MARK THE OMER PERIOD?We count the days of the Omer, beginning on the second day of Pesach during the Ma’ariv (evening) service. A passage from Vayikra (Leviticus) is read, followed by these words: “Blessed are You, Adonai our god, Ruler of the Universe, who has hallowed us with your commandments, and commanded us concerning the Counting of the Omer.” Third, we announce the number of weeks that have passed since the start of the count. For example, “Today is the twelfth day making one week and 5 days of the Omer.” Also, during the whole of the Omer Period, we do not:
- Cut our hair (or shave)
- Have weddings or parties
- Listen to music
Judaism 101: The Counting of the Omer
Torah Tots: S’firat haOmer | <urn:uuid:8ac08a7f-73f5-4e5c-a0d6-725ec292567a> | CC-MAIN-2021-17 | https://bje.org.au/knowledge-centre/explained-for-kids/omer-period/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2021-17/segments/1618038057142.4/warc/CC-MAIN-20210410134715-20210410164715-00190.warc.gz | en | 0.945006 | 395 | 3.71875 | 4 |
There is no single job that a chemist trains to do. Since chemistry is a basic science, the skill and knowledge gained with a degree opens up a variety of options. One option that has gained recent attention is forensic science.
The "geeky guy" in the white coat in the lab on television's CSI is a chemist who takes samples gathered in the field and uses chromatography, DNA analysis, and spectroscopy to answer questions.
A chemist might also be an atmospheric scientist, the creator of new drugs or products, the one who gathers or monitors samples during environmental clean up, or even a winemaker.
Chemists can also be teachers, specialists in art restoration, salespeople in technical industries, or even policy makers in government. Many physicians earned their first degrees in chemistry and the same is true for dentists and even lawyers who go on to work in patent law.
Of course the pharmaceutical industry employs many chemists, as do the mining, food, and oil industries. Mixing in business courses with a degree in chemistry can make the chemist well qualified in many areas of technical sales and management.
A degree in Chemistry will not limit your professional choices. | <urn:uuid:a5e33fbf-c82c-4aa2-9e87-717d7a3c59a9> | CC-MAIN-2015-11 | http://www.uidaho.edu/sci/chem/undergraduate/what-do-chemists-do | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-11/segments/1424936462700.28/warc/CC-MAIN-20150226074102-00094-ip-10-28-5-156.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961233 | 239 | 2.578125 | 3 |
Understanding the Global Challenge of Human Trafficking through the Trafficking in Persons Report
The Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP) is published annually by the U.S. Department of State and analyzes governments’ prosecution, protection, and prevention efforts in combating human trafficking. The full 2017 report can be downloaded here.
Each year, countries are rated according to the government’s effort and commitment to meet the minimum standards of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. Below is an explanation of the tier system and a list of tier placement for countries across the globe.
Countries whose governments fully meet the Trafficking Victims Protection Act’s (TVPA) minimum standards.
Countries whose governments do not fully meet the TVPA’s minimum standards, but are making significant efforts to meet those standards.
Countries whose governments do not fully meet the minimum standards and are not making significant efforts to do so.
Tier 2 Watch List
Countries whose governments do not fully meet the TVPA’s minimum standards, but are making significant efforts to meet those standards AND:
- The absolute number of victims of severe forms of trafficking is very significant or is significantly increasing;
- There is a failure to provide evidence of increasing efforts to combat severe forms of trafficking in persons from the previous year, including increased investigations, prosecutions, and convictions of trafficking crimes, increased assistance to victims, and decreasing evidence of complicity in severe forms of trafficking by government officials; or
- The determination that a country is making significant efforts to meet the minimum standards was based on commitments by the country to take additional future steps over the next year. | <urn:uuid:fa049d07-df91-46af-89dc-401e234593c7> | CC-MAIN-2018-47 | http://www.dreamon.org/tip-report | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-47/segments/1542039743007.0/warc/CC-MAIN-20181116091028-20181116112303-00021.warc.gz | en | 0.942027 | 332 | 2.59375 | 3 |
Welcome to Ellington Agricultural Center
Once a private estate, the 207 acre Ellington Agricultural Center is now headquarters for the Tennessee Department of Agriculture and other local, state, and federal agencies.
The estate known as Brentwood Hall was built by Rogers Caldwell, son of prominent Nashville banker James Caldwell. The younger Caldwell made his fortune—reported at one time at $650 million—and made his mark in Tennessee as a financial wizard during the 1920s. Caldwell, known at that time as “The J.P. Morgan of the South,” had a dream to restore the South, which was still reeling from the Civil War. He coined the phrase, “We bank on the South” for his venture, Caldwell and Co., which included the Bank of Tennessee.
Andrew Jackson, a Tennessean and the nation’s seventh president, was Caldwell’s hero. Caldwell used Jackson’s home, The Hermitage, as the model for his home at Brentwood Hall, dubbed Brentwood House. A primary difference between the two structures is that Brentwood House's oversized Williamsburg bricks, said to be imported from Virginia, were never painted white.
As inscriptions on the house attest, the building was completed in 1927. Caldwell’s interior designer collected from Europe the outstanding marble fireplaces, mantles, gilt mirrors and some of the fixtures which still grace the mansion.
Caldwell lost both his fortune, and eventually Brentwood Hall, when his Bank of Tennessee collapsed during the Great Depression. The state gained a judgment against the house for part of Caldwell’s debts, though he continued to live there until 1957. No need to mourn his fate; he was only 40 years old when the Great Depression hit, and he continued to play an important role in Nashville society and politics for nearly 40 more years. To be invited to one of Caldwell’s weekly luncheons at his comfortable Antebellum home in Franklin was a mark of one’s own importance to society or the political community.
Hanging in each of Caldwell’s homes was his adage, “While in this house please do not say anything unkind about anyone, bearing in mind that what you think of others is nothing like as important as what others might think of you.” Surely Caldwell himself would have nothing negative to say about the events of his life or the important role his home has come to play for the state.
Buford Ellington, a former commissioner of agriculture, was elected governor in 1958 and set up offices in the then-empty house to organize his administration. Following his inauguration, Ellington decided against selling the estate and began moving the state agricultural offices from their cramped downtown quarters to the mansion. William F. “Red” Moss, who followed Ellington as agriculture commissioner, moved his office into Brentwood House in 1960.
In 1961 the state legislature renamed the 207-acre estate Ellington Agricultural Center, making it the new headquarters for the Tennessee Department of Agriculture. Tennessee was the first state to place its agriculture department on an actual farm. Today, Ellington Agricultural Center is also home for the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, the University of Tennessee Extension Central Region office, and state offices for USDA-APHIS Veterinary Services and USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service.
Several of the original Brentwood Hall buildings have been restored and remodeled to serve new functions. Most of the restored buildings line a large green lawn shaped by the exercise track Caldwell built to train and race his famous Thoroughbreds. In 1930, Caldwell owned the premier racing mare of the season, Lady Broadcast, and the great stud, Hourless, though he himself never bet.
In 1970, Brentwood House was renamed the W.F. “Red” Moss Administration Building in honor of the longest tenured commissioner of agriculture. The 23-room mansion provides offices for the Tennessee Department of Agriculture’s commissioner, the deputy and assistant commissioners, budget, human resources, and public affairs services. The home’s Corinthian columns, double doors, and circular stairway in the entrance hallway are obvious replicas of the Hermitage. The wallpaper in the hallway—hand painted in the French History fashion of the 18th century—was imported from France.
Adjoining the administration building is the Moss Annex Building. The interior spaces were originally Caldwell’s servants’ quarters during the 1930s. “Aunt Willie” was responsible for washing and ironing Caldwell’s white pleated dress shirts. Both the washing and drying were done inside; no clothes were allowed to flap in the breeze outdoors near the mansion. The former servants' quarters adjoining the breezeway are now used as offices for public affairs.
Just across the drive from the Moss Annex Building, USDA-APHIS Veterinary Services have their offices in what was once a six-car garage. When the building was first being explored by department lab technicians, they discovered that Caldwell had operated a bottling plant in the basement, turning out a soft drink known as “Teaco-Cola.” The floor was knee-deep in Teaco-Cola bottle caps, and cases of the drink were still on the premises. The building was named for Matt Jennings, a former director for 33 years of the marketing division for the Tennessee Department of Agriculture.
The auditorium, a remodeled stable intended for Caldwell’s fine racehorses, is available for state functions and agricultural events. Thirty-two thoroughbreds occupied the stalls until 1957. The auditorium, which has a kitchen and large assembly area, was named for former agriculture commissioner and U.S. congressman Ed Jones in 1989.
Behind the mansion in a small, remodeled house is TDA’s accounting office. The building was originally used as a farm office for Caldwell’s various operation bosses to meet and conduct farm business.
Another of the large barns where Caldwell housed his horses is now home to the Tennessee Agricultural Museum, founded by Oscar L. Farris. Farris was a former Davidson County extension agent who began the collection in 1940. The museum, created by an act of the legislature in 1959, encourages interest and understanding of Tennessee’s rich, rural heritage by exhibiting a priceless collection that draws thousands of visitors from across the nation. Educational programs, festivals, and other special events offer hands-on activities and a glimpse of farm life both past and present. The Strasser Experience Center along with the Eagle Trail, heirloom vegetable garden, molasses mill, log cabins, herb garden and post-and-beam shed for large equipment provide additional points of interest and are supported, in part, by an active museum association. The museum also includes the nation's first Agricultural Hall of Fame, established by the legislature in 1937. Admission is free.
Several buildings remaining on the estate after Caldwell’s departure were too decayed for restoration. However, a group of log buildings traditionally occupied by tenants who worked Caldwell's farm were preserved. The log dwellings and a clapboard farmhouse were remodeled to host activities of the Agricultural Museum. The Safely Chapel and School was constructed on site in recent years using traditional methods.
On the southern side of the mansion is the building which served as a guest house for visitors of the Caldwell family. Now TDA’s general counsel office, the library was named for Lou Wallace, a much-loved gentleman who edited a department publication, "The Tennessee Market Bulletin,” for 25 years—from the time he was 75 until he died at the age of 102.
One of the first improvements to the center was an indoor exhibit and livestock hall suitable for sale and show events, and a 98-stall barn finished in California redwood. The area outside the building once included a livestock show ring and stadium seating.
The Division of Forestry is headquartered in this building, named for longtime plant industries director Howard L. Bruer, who oversaw the development of the center’s landscaping and the design of the building. The Bruer Building lies between the Accounting Office and the Lou Wallace Library along the path of the old racetrack. The Division of Forestry is responsible for enhancing and protecting forest health, sustainability and productivity on private and public forest lands.
The Edward S. Porter Building contains the Consumer and Industry Services (CIS) Division and the Division of Animal Health. Both provide a range of services to ensure product safety and quality, animal and plant health, and fairness in the marketplace. This building is named for a former commissioner, as is the L.H. “Cotton” Ivy Laboratory. The C.E. Kord Animal Health Diagnostic Laboratory, which was first established in 1960, is named for a former state veterinarian.
The Commodity Distribution section is responsible for the distribution of federal surplus commodities to the school lunch program and charitable institutions. The section is housed in a small brick building between the Holeman Building and the Ed Jones Auditorium.
The Business Development Division and Land and Water Stewardship section of the Department of Agriculture are in the Holeman Building, which lies between the Jennings Building and the Commodity Distribution Building. The building was named for Eugene H. Holeman, a director of the preceding Food and Drugs Division of TDA. USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service Tennessee field office and TDA’s Human Resources staff are also found here.
A tract of land on the Edmondson Pike side of the property was turned over to the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency. TWRA's headquarters and Region 2 office are located here. TWRA is responsible for the conservation, management and protection of fish and wildlife in the state for public benefit.
This site consists of different building foundation types commonly found in Tennessee, which are used by TDA’s Pesticide Section to train commercial applicators in safe and proper methods of termite treatment. The site is in front of the JLL Facility Manager’s office and adjacent to the UT Extension building on Marchant Drive.
The Central Region office of UT Extension is also located at Ellington Agricultural Center. The office serves Middle Tennessee in the areas of agriculture, family and consumer science, and 4-H. The building also houses the statewide UT Soil, Plant and Pest Center, which provides disease and pest identification, recommendations, and analytical services. The Extension building borders the southwestern edge of the property along Marchant Drive.
The large iris garden, located to the right inside the front entrance, is developed and tended by the Middle Tennessee Iris Society. The iris is the official flower of Tennessee and the garden is cultivated in its honor. | <urn:uuid:ea85b012-f2ec-4752-aa8c-a40715e968d9> | CC-MAIN-2023-14 | https://www.tn.gov/agriculture/eac/about-ellington-agricultural-center.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-14/segments/1679296943625.81/warc/CC-MAIN-20230321033306-20230321063306-00449.warc.gz | en | 0.970062 | 2,201 | 2.515625 | 3 |
- Historic Sites
“The Gray-Eyed Man of Destiny”
The daring epic of the filibusters reached a lurid climax when little William Walker captured the sovereign state of Nicaragua
December 1957 | Volume 9, Issue 1
Walker’s filibustering career had begun two years before—with a fiasco. In the autumn of 1853 he had descended with forty-odd followers on Lower California and proclaimed it an independent republic with himself as president. When reinforcements arrived he extended his sway on paper by a proclamation annexing the neighboring state of Sonora to his newly established nation ami the San Francisco newspaper Alta California aptly noted, “It would have been just as cheap and easy to have annexed the whole of Mexico at once, and would have saved the trouble of making future proclamations.” The whole affair was ridiculouns on ihe surface but not so funny to some of the people immediately in Walker’s way, for he had a deadly determination and never hesitated to execute anyone who obstructed his purpose. Chased out of Lower California, he managed to lead 33 surviving followers back to safety across the border below San Diego on May 8, 1854, which happened to be his thirtieth birthday.
But from this initial defeat Walker was to go on to become the grand master of the filibusters. One would imagine that the leader of such hard-bitten daredevils must have been a man of splendid physique and overwhelming personality. But Walker was nothing of the sort. He was about as innocuous looking as a man could be. Only about five feet, five inches in height, he weighed just over a hundred pounds. Mis hair and eyebrows were tow-white and his pale lace was covered with the freckles which usually go with such coloring. His expression was heavy and lie was taciturn to an extreme, but when lie spoke he gained attention with the first word uttered. His eyes were his striking features: all noticed their piercing gray coldness and he became known as “the gray-eyed man of destiny.”
Born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1824 of ScotchIrish ancestry, Walker had studied medicine in Europe but turned to the law in Nashville and New Orleans upon his return. Then lie became a journalist and moved to California, where he edited a newspaper in San Francisco, but later he practiced law again in Marysville until in October, 1853, he sailed with followers from Sun Francisco for his invasion of Lower California.
His first humiliating failure in that expedition taught Walker a lew lessons but in no way cured him of the filibustering lever. In 1855 he was off again, this time to Nicaragua. There, instead of making a rash and forthright landing, he gained entry as the leader of a band of soldier-colonists who were to serve under the banner of the Outs (who happened to be the Liberals) in the current revolution. His followers became citizens of the country by a simple declaration of intention and were promised grants of land when their newly adopted cause 1IVOn victory.
In Nicaragua Walker found a green and fertile land whose fragrant orange groves, sparkling lakes, and smoking volcanoes had so tarried away an early English monk that he had called it “Mahomet’s Paradise.” The little country had achieved a shaky independence alter the downfall of the Mexican emperor in iS^sj, but ever since had been kept in turmoil by civil warla re. Nicaragua had a special importance for Americans, in these years between the Gold Rush and the Golden Spike, because through it ran the favored route to California—a relatively comfortable passage from one ocean to the other by river and lake boat and a short stretch of road.
Walker’s first move was to gain control of this Transit route, which would give him his vital supply line for recruits and equipment from the United States. On a sunny June morning he assembled his little army outside ihe Legitimist (i.e., Conservative) stronghold of Rivas, which controlled the road section of the Transit route, ‘and about noon he led them on a reckless frontal charge into the town.
At the first shots, his native allies turned tail and left the fifty-odd Americans to fight ten times their numbers. The invaders met a steady and deadly fire as they charged toward the central plaza with wild yells and cheers (the usual head-on tactics of filibusters) and were soon forced to take shelter in several adobe houses where they were surrounded by the enemy. The Legitimists then set fire to the shelterin houses and an immediate retreat became imperative to save the survivors. The Americans sallied forth with cheers and shouts and, before the enemy could meet this unexpected offensive, pushed through the streets to the outskirts of the town. Several of the wounded were too seriously hurt to move, and these were immediately butchered by the Legitimists and their bodies burned. The enemy losses, however, were ten times those of the Americans, and thereafter no sober natives ever wanted to shoot it out at close range with the gringos. | <urn:uuid:978e9dc9-154d-4e0d-bdc3-04321bb21a55> | CC-MAIN-2015-22 | http://www.americanheritage.com/content/%E2%80%9C-gray-eyed-man-destiny%E2%80%9D?page=2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-22/segments/1432207929023.5/warc/CC-MAIN-20150521113209-00338-ip-10-180-206-219.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.98353 | 1,050 | 2.9375 | 3 |
Abstract: Leyk, D, Witzki, A, Sievert, A, Rohde, U, Moedl, A, Rüther, T, Löllgen, H, and Hackfort, D. Importance of sports during youth and exercise barriers in 20- to 29-year-old male nonathletes differently motivated for regular physical activities. J Strength Cond Res 26(7): S15–S22, 2012—The number of sedentary young adults has dramatically increased in past decades, and sedentary lifestyles are adopted at an increasingly earlier age. Little is known about barriers or predictors to (re)initiate regular physical activity in this group. The purpose of the study is to (a) identify subgroups in nonathletes differing in their amenability to physical exercise, (b) to analyze them for differences in barriers and intention to exercise, and (c) compare importance of sports during youth in nonathletes to trained peers. Using a health and fitness questionnaire 589 nonathletes were queried in the cross-sectional survey and compared with 270 trained peers. Athletic abstainers (A), lower (L), and higher (H) motivated nonathletes were separated based on previous engagement in sports. Of the nonathletes, 54.7% reported only 1 barrier to exercise. Although this feature was most prominent in H (71.5%), the other groups showed significantly more barriers and a broader distribution. Similar characteristics but minor differences were observed for perceived importance of sports during youth. The most significant differences between athletes and nonathletes emerged enquiring the attitude and activity of the parents. The majority of nonathletes (72.8%) indicate their intention to exercise in the future. Their intention differed significantly in H (88.1%), L (76.1%), and A (59.1%). However, there are good reasons to doubt that most of those intending nonathletes will actually become physically active. Even in the analyzed narrow age range of men different motivated groups of nonathletes were found. Because of the differences in receptiveness and approachability health promotion policies may not only consider the often recommended tailored interventions but also carefully designed incentive programs. | <urn:uuid:d1553090-3c48-4e58-8116-d371c5052f64> | CC-MAIN-2014-52 | http://journals.lww.com/nsca-jscr/Abstract/2012/07002/Importance_of_Sports_During_Youth_and_Exercise.3.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2014-52/segments/1418802775085.124/warc/CC-MAIN-20141217075255-00055-ip-10-231-17-201.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964089 | 447 | 2.546875 | 3 |
This British rifle, named after its maker, Ezekial Baker, was one of the most advanced weapons in the world at the time of the Battle of Waterloo. It was much more accurate than the guns used by most soldiers, but also harder and more expensive to make.
By the mid 1700s most Continental European armies incorporated bodies of troops armed with rifles instead of the usual muskets. A rifle differs from a musket in that the inside of its barrel is “rifled” with a spiral of grooves that makes the bullet spin when it is fired , giving it ballistic stability and making the shot capable of greater accuracy at longer ranges.
In 1809, as the British retreated toward La Corunna in Spain, Rifleman Thomas Plunkett shot the French General Colbert at a range greater then 300 metres, far longer than was possible with a musket. Plunkett was wounded in the head at Waterloo and died in 1851.
Soldiers armed with rifles were able to focus on specific targets, which tended to be enemy officers, cannon crew men and the horses used to move the cannon. The idea was that if all their officers were killed the ordinary soldiers would have nobody to tell them what to do and would probably run away. If all the gunners around a cannon were killed it could not be fired and if all the horses in the gun team were killed the cannon could not be moved.
There were a small number of British troops armed with rifles in the Seven Years War (1756 -1763) and the American Revolutionary War ( 1775 – 1783). Whilst they were very effective, it was not until the 25th August 1800 that the 95th Regiment (Rifles) was established. The riflemen were dressed in green uniforms (rather than red or blue) and their equipment was black leather rather than white leather dressed with pipeclay. This was designed to make them less easy to see on the battlefield. The green uniforms gave them the name “Grasshoppers” whilst the French called them “les coquins vertes” (the green rascals).
The Baker rifle was designed by the famous London gun maker, Ezekiel Baker. The rifles were available in two sizes; the same size as the Infantry musket and that of the Cavalry carbine. Their walnut stocks had little boxes with brass lids in their butts to hold tools and the greased leather patches that were wrapped around the bullets to make them grip the rifling.
Riflemen were also issued with a sword bayonet for close combat. The sword bayonet for a rifle was also longer than the bayonets used on muskets. These sword bayonets were not very robust and so riflemen rarely used them in close combat. Instead the soldiers tended to use them for odd jobs like cutting firewood.
Find it here
This object is in the collection of Royal Green Jackets – Rifles Museum | <urn:uuid:bc68fd10-9825-42d3-a35a-07efdc4520eb> | CC-MAIN-2017-34 | http://waterloo200.org/200-object/baker-rifle-sword-bayonet/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-34/segments/1502886110774.86/warc/CC-MAIN-20170822123737-20170822143737-00312.warc.gz | en | 0.986609 | 603 | 3.6875 | 4 |
Unfortunately, because of mis-education many believe the State is responsible for educating our children. This is not the same thing as the State being responsible for providing an option for education. Rather many presume that the State has the authority to force their version of education on parents and their children.
If your answer is that parents have the responsibility to provide education, then we can safely assume that we have the right to homeschool our own children, yes? Several industrialized nations where homeschooling is outlawed say no. And although most Americans would say we should have that right, they overwhelmingly demand oversight by the State to ensure this right is not abused.
Now we’re back to the question of responsibility. Is it the government’s role to make sure every child is learning the same things even if they aren’t in the public system? According to the Constitution, the government’s role is to protect our rights and liberties above all else.
But what if parents keep their kids home and don’t teach them anything that is taught in schools? I say who cares — if it’s the right and responsibility of the parents. It’s not as if the public system has proven to be perfect either. Far from it.
Isn’t that child abuse to unschool? Well, it goes both ways. Isn’t locking up children all day in a room, child abuse? Isn’t forcing them to learn an obsolete curriculum, child abuse? Isn’t forcing them to wear RFID tracking devices, abuse? And so on.
As we can see, it’s all a matter of perception. Fortunately, homeschooling is legal in all 50 states. Yet, since education is regulated by the states, requirements vary dramatically from state to state for homeschoolers. The difference ranges from complete freedom with no requirements to forced curriculum and achievement tests.
- States requiring no notice: No state requirement for parents to initiate any contact.
- States with low regulation: State requires parental notification only.
- States with moderate regulation: State requires parents to send notification, test scores, and/or professional evaluation of student progress.
- State with high regulation: State requires parents to send notification or achievement test scores and/or professional evaluation, plus other requirements (e.g. curriculum approval by the state, teacher qualification of parents, or home visits by state officials). (Source: HSLDA).
Here is a map of which states fall into each category:
States requiring no notice
States with low regulation
States with moderate regulation
State with high regulation
The 10 freest states for homeschooling are in green and listed below:
People homeschool their children for many different reasons and they should have the right to opt out of any standardized curriculum. Unfortunately this is not the case in most states. But for those who are interested in homeschooling with the ultimate freedom to unschool if they choose, the ten states above are your best locations.
Where do you homeschool and what has your experience been?
Read more articles by Eric Blair here | <urn:uuid:008d6538-30c1-4cc8-a6a4-f3b8df0abdff> | CC-MAIN-2016-22 | http://www.activistpost.com/2012/11/10-freest-states-for-homeschooling.html?showComment=1353883756234 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-22/segments/1464049275328.63/warc/CC-MAIN-20160524002115-00165-ip-10-185-217-139.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948577 | 638 | 2.53125 | 3 |
Nature Notes from Common Ground
Week of November 30, 2020
Common Ground High School Virtual Open House this Thursday, Dec 3!
Thinking about high school options for your child?
Come find out about Common Ground: a unique, college-preparatory high school with an environmental justice mission.
A Public Charter High School open to students from New Haven & all Connecticut towns
More than a school: An inclusive community of 225 students, dedicated to the environment and social justice
A challenging, interdisciplinary core curriculum that gets students ready for college and careers, leadership and life
Students find their paths through after-school programs, paid green jobs, dual enrollment, internships & unique courses
Located on 20-acre campus at the base of West Rock -- a farm, in a forest, in a city
To schedule a visit (virtual or in-person) contact Sharyn Lopez: [email protected]
To receive information on visiting virtually, please submit an application on our website: https://commongroundct.org/high-school/become-a-student/
Weekly Nature Note
We’ve been lucky enough to have a very curious (and hungry) chipmunk join some of our meeting circles lately. If we all sit very still, the chipmunk has even climbed over some of our boots in their search for food! This has us wondering what chipmunks do in the winter. We often see them scurry back into their holes, but what’s going on down there?
Chipmunks make extensive burrows where they spend the winter alone. While they can dig the tunnels themselves, they generally renovate old root channels or the abandoned burrows of other mammals. A burrow may have multiple entrance tunnels, but all but one will be plugged with leaves. Inside their burrows, there are a number of chambers where the chipmunks store the food they will need to survive the winter. Chipmunks don’t truly hibernate; instead, they enter a state of torpor in a chamber that contains a nest of leaves. They wake every few weeks to eat some of their cached food, sometimes even emerging aboveground when temperatures are particularly warm.
More here from one of our favorite New England naturalists, Mary Holland.
Nature activity of the week
These Urban Naturalist Activity Sheets from Childhood by Nature can help guide your next outdoor exploration! And despite their name, they'd be good for urban, suburban, and rural locations.
Hike of the Week
About this series
In this time of virtual learning and social distancing, we seek to support teachers and families in getting outside in safe and healthy ways. We hope this series provides content and activities to help your students or your family engage in nature-based learning, whether you are learning in person or virtually.
Some of the funding we rely on to keep Nature Notes free comes from the Robert F. Schumann Foundation and The Claire C. Bennitt Watershed Fund, established by the South Central CT Regional Water Authority. | <urn:uuid:ed35b156-5265-49ad-82de-a98a029cb34d> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://www.smore.com/3xd94-nature-notes-from-common-ground?embed=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100545.7/warc/CC-MAIN-20231205041842-20231205071842-00284.warc.gz | en | 0.913242 | 633 | 3.046875 | 3 |
|Date Added: July 6, 2011|
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|Tags: how to draw giraffes, draw for kids|
Description: When you go to the zoo one of the most anticipated animals to visit is the giraffe. These amazing looking animals are one of the world’s oddest creatures because of their long necks and graceful personalities and stature. This lesson is going to show you "how to draw a giraffe for kids", step by step. This is one of my favorite for kids lessons because of how cute and easy I made it to draw. There is a new style that I’m trying out to see how much brighter and cleaner the drawings will be. Giraffes are odd for another reason too, they have these big eyes and really long curled eyelashes that are almost perfect. I know women are envious of their lashes including myself. Well, there is nothing to it when it comes time to tackle this lesson on drawing a giraffe for kids. I hope you have fun with this submission, I will return with more exciting stuff for you to tackle. Adios people and be sure to stay tuned in to Dragoart.com! | <urn:uuid:8241b72b-e02b-477f-a898-0f1fb683930d> | CC-MAIN-2020-24 | https://dragoart.com/tut/how-to-draw-a-giraffe-for-kids-8628 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2020-24/segments/1590347413097.49/warc/CC-MAIN-20200531085047-20200531115047-00263.warc.gz | en | 0.95917 | 271 | 3.328125 | 3 |
Last Monday, the 7th day of Pesah, Beth Shalom member Chris Hall spoke during morning services about the relationship between science and religion, and one element that he presented is that they answer different questions. In my mind, there is no conflict between science and religion because while science might tell us how the world works, it does not attempt to answer, “Why?” That is for the theologians.
We might be tempted to dismiss the Torah’s story of Creation because it conflicts with the story that current scientific opinion tells us. But I think it is essential for us to consider what we learn from both. While astrophysicists have determined that the universe is about 14 billion years old, and that the after-effects of the Big Bang can still be measured to this day, we learn nothing from this about our responsibility for the world we have received. That we can learn from the book of Bereshit / Genesis. What is our relationship to the Earth, says Bereshit? Le’ovdah ulshomerah. “To till it and to tend it.” (Gen. 2:15)
Now granted, we haven’t read that parashah since October, so I am not going to dwell on it today. But something that does appear in Parashat Shemini is a list of things we are permitted to eat and not eat. And there is a lesson to be drawn from that as well.
But first, a little science.
Today, you may know, is not only Kylie’s bat mitzvah. It is also Earth Day, the annual, global awareness-raising event that brings people together around the world to remember the obligations of Genesis. To that end, I would just like to share a few items with you:
- 2016 was the hottest year on record, the third straight year in a row of record-setting temperatures since record-keeping began in the 1880s. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/science/earth-highest-temperature-record.html
- This past February, the average global temperature was 1.76 degrees Fahrenheit above the average for the 20th century. That may not sound like a lot, but in climatology terms, it’s huge. https://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2017/03/17/globe-second-warmest-winter-on-record/99303812/
- The great plume of plastics that continues to grow in the Pacific Ocean is now flowing northward into the Arctic Ocean. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/19/climate/arctic-plastics-pollution.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
I could cite numerous other such bits of data: how much oil we consume each day, how much food we throw away, how much carbon dioxide enters the atmosphere per hamburger eaten, and so forth. But what does it mean to us? How might we regard that information and take action? What might our Jewish tradition teach us about our responsibilities vis-a-vis Creation?
On this Earth Day, let us turn to kashrut, the principles of holy eating, for answers.
What does the word “kasher” (accent on the second syllable) mean? Fitting, appropriate. (“Kosher” is the Yiddish/Ashkenazi pronunciation.) The word does not appear in the Torah at all, but in rabbinic literature is used to denote anything that may be used for a holy purpose, not just food. What makes something kasher? That it is legally permissible under Jewish law to eat it or use it for ritual purposes.
In Parashat Shemini, we read a list of animals that are appropriate to eat. Some are identified by certain categories – the split-hoofed ruminants, like cows and deer and sheep – and some are named specifically, mostly the birds. The Torah does not tell us why these are allowed and not camels or shrimp or alligators. All we know, at least from the parashah, is that God does not want us to eat those other things, which are called “tamei” (impure) or “sheqetz” (literally, an abomination; this is the Hebrew origin of the Yiddish slur sheygetz / shiktza, and why one should never use these terms).
It is curious that the Torah provides no rationale. Did the authors want us not to ask why? Was the answer known to the ancients, and so obvious that it did not need to be stated? Perhaps this “why” is left dangling for us to discover ledor vador, in each generation according to what is relevant in its time.
Or maybe it is that the only reasoning we might be able to glean from this passage is that, well, some things are in and some things are out. That when God gave Creation to us, to till and to tend, that there were simply some natural limits to our behavior. That not all things are available to us. That while we are permitted to take advantage of some things, others are off limits. That we must leave some parts of Creation untilled and untended.
Perhaps, as Midrash Tanhuma (Parashat Shemini, #7) suggests, the goal of kashrut is to teach us mindful consumption:
“The mitzvot [of kashrut] were given solely in order to train people. For what does it matter to the Qadosh Barukh Hu / God about the ‘purity’ or ‘impurity’ of the animals we eat?”
Perhaps we might learn from this that the drawing of boundaries in the natural world should lead to our ethical behavior in other spheres: in our relationships with others, in our relationships with ourselves, in our relationships with the animal realm. Perhaps the drawing of lines in what we consume as individuals will lead us to draw lines in how we as a society consume our resources, to determine where our limits are as we continue to advance as a civilization.
Where are our lines?
How will we know when we have crossed them? When the Arctic ice is gone? When the giant, swirling heap of plastic currently in the Pacific Ocean has filled the Chesapeake Bay? When the bumblebees are gone?
I recall a curious incident in a rabbinical school theology class. Most of my classmates were not science people; they had degrees in literature, or history, or Judaic studies. I know you may find this hard to believe, but I was somewhat unusual in that I had two degrees in chemical engineering. I do not recall the apropos, but the subject of science vs. God came up, and I said that our understanding of God changes, but science does not. Several of my classmates jumped on this, saying, “But science does change.”
Actually, no. As with God, our understanding of science changes. As we move forward, we learn more about the world that we have been given, and so we adjust our understanding, our theories and formulas, to reflect the data that we collect. But science and God do not change. Their nature and secrets are revealed to us as human civilization matures. Just as God continues to be revealed to us, so does science.
The principles of physics and chemistry and thermodynamics and math that govern how our world works are immutable. And they will neither teach us about faith nor answer the hard questions that we face every day.
But our tradition teaches us to act. And act we must. We must till, we must tend, and we must draw lines. We do not have free reign to use and abuse Creation. With God-given power comes God-given responsibility.
My personal rabbi on the subject of our responsibility to Creation is the author Theodore Seuss Geisel, best known as Dr. Seuss. In what I consider to be his finest work, The Lorax, Dr. Seuss reminded us of our responsibility vis-a-vis the Earth. The Lorax, after failing to prevent the destruction of a piece of unspoiled land, a beautiful, holy gift of plants and animals and scenery, takes his leave from an altar labeled “Unless.”
We can make personal, individual choices to reduce our own energy footprint. We can use LED light bulbs and compost our kitchen scraps and recycle our plastic and even buy electric cars. We can draw many personal lines in our own behavior.
But unless we as a society make some collective decisions for change on a grand scale, nothing will change. Unless we draw some lines, we will continue to monitor and watch and take data that give us no answers.
The time to act is now.
Rabbi Seth Adelson
(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Shabbat morning, 4/22/17.) | <urn:uuid:ab61ced4-4658-48bf-9a52-67efe55b7652> | CC-MAIN-2018-17 | https://themodernrabbi.com/tag/lorax/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-17/segments/1524125945272.41/warc/CC-MAIN-20180421164646-20180421184646-00224.warc.gz | en | 0.95591 | 1,912 | 2.671875 | 3 |
|The British newspaper industry is looking up|
Back in the dear old Dark Ages when all was umbrous, the French used to borrow words from the Germans. Some of these words began with a W, which the French, being French, found hard to pronounce and changed them to a G.
But not all the French. The northern Frenchmen could say their Ws and so French would end up with two forms of the word, one beginning with G and the other with a W. And then we English would import both.
I don't know if you've ever wondered what the difference is between a guarantee and a warranty, but really there isn't one. It's the same word one via Southern French and one via the Northern.
Similarly, when medieval chaps wanted to challenge somebody they would throw down their gage as a challenge. This sense still survives in en-gage (for marriage is really a long duel) and mort-gage, which, as I explained in The Etymologicon is really a death-challenge. Or, to be more precise, a death-wager, because gage gave use wage and wager, which both involve putting down items of value.
And the third of these doubles is guard vs ward. Same words, pronounced differently. And the same thing goes for a warden and a guardian. Hence my long train of thought.
The Inky Fool delivering his lecture | <urn:uuid:f4fa83ca-ccb8-42ec-b852-2252508e6933> | CC-MAIN-2016-50 | http://blog.inkyfool.com/2014/09/guardians-wardens-and-gages.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-50/segments/1480698542712.49/warc/CC-MAIN-20161202170902-00254-ip-10-31-129-80.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976697 | 293 | 2.59375 | 3 |
There is an alarmingly high rate of young, childbearing women in the United States who are using illegal drugs during their pregnancy or consuming alcohol. A percentage of these users do stop once they find out they are expecting, either on their own by the help of a drug rehabilitation facility. Because of the ease of access and cost, methamphetamine abuse is high on the list of illicit drugs being used by these women. It has been long-known that it was detrimental to both the mother and fetus during any stage of the pregnancy, but now the studies are finding just exactly how methamphetamine addiction is hurting these expectant mothers and their babies.
A common problem among the most seemingly healthy of pregnant women is a condition called Preeclampsia. This is when the mother’s blood pressure is elevated to a level that concerns her medical provider and she may have an edema level above normal as well. Preeclampsia can cause a woman to have a stroke or even die during her pregnancy or in childbirth, but thanks to advances in medical technology, women with preeclampsia who receive medical care can carry their babies to term with very little complications. Methamphetamine can complicate a pregnancy in the same way that preeclampsia can, by elevating the blood pressure of the mother. If a mother seeks drug rehabilitation in the early stages of the pregnancy (preferably the first trimester) there is a good chance that the unborn child will be born healthy.
Another risk factor in pregnancy associated with methamphetamine addiction is premature labor. Women’s bodies naturally know the right time to give birth, a body with addiction does not sense that perfect time. In fact, though scientists are not 100% sure on what starts those initial contractions at about 40 week’s gestation, they know that when the body senses a problem, those wheels can start to turn early. More than half of the women in the United States who use meth regularly through their pregnancy will not make it to the full 40 weeks. Those who do will more than likely have an underweight newborn. The risk of cesarean section also increases from 23% to 29%.
Another 10% of women who fail to seek proper drug rehabilitation for methamphetamine addiction will suffer placental abruption. This is usually rare in healthy pregnancies and when it does occur, it is most always a partial abruption. It is when the placenta prematurely detaches from the uterine wall, before labor has begun. In a healthy birth, the placenta remains intact until post delivery, then usually detaches within 30 minutes. In a case of accidental abruption, the baby and mother may not survive without an emergency cesarean procedure.
For a baby now outside the womb that was accustomed to meth, withdrawal symptoms will start to set in. These babies often have a difficult time with feeding, making nursing a challenge. They can also have brain and lung development issues that will cause them to spend a great deal of time in a neo-natal intensive care unit. There are a few states that screen every newborn for drugs and alert the proper authorities if illicit drugs are found. Some states, like Texas only test if the primary care physician of the pregnant woman feels the need for it. With all the babies being born in larger, metropolitan cities like Dallas and Houston, it would be very costly to these hospitals to pay for these tests, as not everyone delivering has the means to pay for the services provided.
Methamphetamine addiction is dangerous. Some states have now made it a felony if a pregnant woman uses drugs during her expectant phase. Heel sticks in the hospital can confirm drug use for months, is it worth losing your child to foster care? If you are pregnant and need help, speak to your doctor and contact a drug rehabilitation center like Vista Taos in New Mexico. Be honest and open about your substance abuse problem and counselors will be open about any consequences you might face once the child is born. Both you and your child deserve better than to start your lives together with a methamphetamine addiction. | <urn:uuid:86e9d693-fcd5-4539-b139-28dd3f6b0d64> | CC-MAIN-2016-40 | http://www.vistataos.com/articles/methamphetamine-use-during-pregnancy/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-40/segments/1474738663142.93/warc/CC-MAIN-20160924173743-00200-ip-10-143-35-109.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963154 | 823 | 2.71875 | 3 |
Ah… the elusiveness of self-esteem. What do you picture when you think about it? Most people associate it with things like confidence, poise, self-respect, dignity. And yes, these are all essential components of self-esteem, but it is also much more than that.
In psychology, self-esteem describes a person’s overall sense of self-worth. The American Psychological Association says that self-esteem involves a person’s “view of his or her accomplishments, capabilities, values [and] perceived success in living up to them (…) The more positive the cumulative perception of these qualities and characteristics, the higher one’s self-esteem.”
So self-esteem is less about having a determined set of characteristics, like confidence and dignity, and more about how you perceive yourself as it relates to these and other traits. In other words, it is your overall opinion of yourself and how you feel about your abilities and limitations.
Like most things in life, self-esteem is an ever-evolving process that ebbs and flows as you move through life. That means that at some point or another, we are all likely to experience low self-esteem. Having low self-esteem doesn’t mean that you’ve failed as a person or that you’re not worthy of positive relationships. In today’s society, we frequently hear that if we don’t love ourselves, no one ever will, but the truth is that going through a challenging period doesn’t make you any less deserving of love.
Boosting self-esteem through inspiration
Although it’s completely normal to go through low periods from time to time, recurring poor self-esteem can negatively impact your mental health and overall wellness. According to BetterHelp, low self-esteem is linked to many mental health conditions, like anxiety, depression, eating disorders, substance abuse, and more.
Because increasingly low-self esteem can be devastating to your mental health, it’s important to address any disruptive thoughts and feelings of self-worthlessness as they arise. And sometimes, a great way to start seeing ourselves in a new light is by finding inspiration in other people’s stories. Check out these inspirational TED Talks for boosting self-esteem and save them for the next time you need a little pick-me-up.
1. The Power of Vulnerability by Brené Brown
Length: 20 minutes 50 seconds
Brené Brown is a professor, researcher, and storyteller who has spent decades studying vulnerability, courage, worthiness, and shame. Her TED Talk, “The Power of Vulnerability”, touches on what she has learned from her research on the importance of courage and vulnerability.
She said that in her years of research, she noticed that people who had the strongest sense of self-love are the people that believe they’re worthy of love and belonging. And she suggests that it all starts with vulnerability, which she calls the “birthplace of joy, of creativity, of belonging, of love.”
Favorite quote: “You are imperfect, you are wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging.”
2. The Skill of Self-Confidence by Dr. Ivan Joseph
Length: 13 minutes 20 seconds
Dr. Ivan Joseph is a leadership expert, soccer coach, and best-selling author whose TED Talk, “The Skill of Self-Confidence” has amassed nearly 25 million views. According to Dr. Joseph, self-confidence is a skill that you must learn, develop, and exercise — just like any other skill.
He gives great tips for exercising self-confidence and says that practice, repetition, and persistence are essential for cultivating any skill. He reinforces Malcolm Gladwell’s theory that in order to become an expert at anything, one must devote at least 10,000 hours to learning the skills.
Favorite quote: “We all have this negative self-talk that goes in our head (…) There are enough people that are telling us we can’t do it. That we’re not good enough. Why do we want to tell ourselves that? We know for a fact that thoughts influence actions (…) We need to get our self-affirmations (…) There needs to be quiet moments in your bedroom, when you’re brushing your teeth, that we need to reaffirm: ‘I am the captain of my ship and master of my fate.’”
3. The Space Between Self-Esteem and Self-Compassion by Kristin Neff
Length: 19 minutes 01 seconds
Dr. Kristin Neff is a professor of educational psychology and researcher specializing in the power of self-compassion. In her TED Talk “The Space Between Self-Esteem and Self-Compassion,” Dr. Neff argues that there is a fundamental difference between these two concepts: whereas self-esteem is closely linked to things like work performance and social acceptance, and therefore may ultimately lead to narcissism, self-compassion “is a way of relating to ourselves kindly, embracing ourselves as we are, flaws and all.”
Favorite quote: “Self-compassion offers the benefits of self-esteem without the pitfalls. It’s associated with strong mental health but it’s not associated with narcissism or constant social comparison or ego defensive aggression. It also provides a much more stable sense of self-worth than self-esteem does, because it’s there for you precisely when you fail. Just when self esteem deserts you, self-compassion steps in and gives you a sense of being valuable, not because you’ve reached some standard, or you’ve judged yourself positively, but because you are a human being worthy of love in that moment.”
Bonus: What Is Imposter Syndrome and How Can You Combat It?
Length: 4 minutes 03 seconds
Why is it that we’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop? You know what I’m talking about: that secret fear that’s always looming in the back of your head saying, “this is it — today is the day that everyone will finally realize that I’m a fraud.” What you, me, and nearly every other person in the world is feeling in those moments is called “imposter syndrome,” and it is something that more than 80% of us will experience at some point.
In this short animation, Elizabeth Cox narrates how even some of the most accomplished persons in human history, like Maya Angelou and Albert Newton, couldn’t escape the nagging sensation that somehow they hadn’t really earned their success. She explains that these feelings aren’t exclusive to highly skilled folks, either.
Apparently, every person is susceptible to something called “pluralistic ignorance,” a phenomenon where everyone doubts themselves privately but things that the rest of the people don’t, because no one really talks about it. The video argues that voicing your doubts and concerns and learning that other people you may look up to sometimes feel the same way, can help curtail imposter syndrome when it rears its ugly head.
Favorite quote: “We may never be able to banish these feelings entirely, but we can have open conversations about academic or professional challenges. With increasing awareness of how common these experiences are, perhaps we can feel freer to be frank about our feelings and build confidence in some simple truths: you have talent, you are capable, and you belong.” | <urn:uuid:54462e94-1391-4e9c-9af3-77f519d449f5> | CC-MAIN-2023-40 | https://www.the-pool.com/ted-talks-that-will-boost-your-self-esteem/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-40/segments/1695233510671.0/warc/CC-MAIN-20230930082033-20230930112033-00845.warc.gz | en | 0.956396 | 1,583 | 2.953125 | 3 |
Some of the topics discussed in personal development are organization, job hunting, creativity, emotional intelligence, and personal leadership skills. For more information, read this brilliant post from Teaching Guide.
Why personal development is important in our life?
It is important in our life because there’s need for personal growth. For more relevant and interesting information, read this wonderful post from Corporate Alchemists.
Personal Development 101: Top Tips For Beginners
Once deciding that you want to go with the self help process, it is important that you have the right direction to head down. This article will help you get started on a successful and rejuvenating journey with some goals to set and tips to help you on the way. Remember that you stay focused throughout the process.
A great self help tip is to try helping other people out for a change. There are a lot of benefits to helping other people. Helping people will make you feel better about yourself and those people will be likely to assist you if you’re ever in need of help.
If you have been feeling depressed and cannot seem to motivate yourself, just stop for a minute and think of all the positive things in your life. For instance, you may enjoy your job or you have a great pet. Once you focus on the positive areas of your life, you will start to feel better and be thankful for the many blessings you have.
Communicate With Other People As Part Of Personal Development
Don’t be afraid to share ideas with other people. Especially if you work in the creative industry, try sharing ideas with family, friends and your peers. The old days of keeping your ideas to yourself are over. If you keep jumping from idea to idea without feedback, then you can’t possibly know what is working and why.
When you’re trying to improve your life, write your goals down. Writing goals down makes them concrete. It also gives you something to visualize every day. Your goals should be clear, concise and contain a time frame. Doing this can make your goals a reality sooner, rather than later.
A great way to help one’s mood is to live in the here and now. The idea is similar to the idea in Eckhart Tolle’s “The Power of Now.” If you live in the present moment, you cannot ever possibly be in pain, because to know pain there has to be a past.
Write down a list of all of your most notable strengths and unique abilities, then select one or two and ask yourself how you can use that quality to improve some other person’s life. If you are a good listener, think of the different ways that you might help someone who might need a sympathetic ear. If you are a wonderful cook, surprise your co-workers with a home-baked treat for the whole office.
Strive For Constant Personal Development
A crucial component of personal development is education. Want that job you’ve always dreamed of? Chances are, you’re going to need an education to do so. Check out local colleges and Universities and decide which one is best tailored to the degree you are seeking at the price you are able to afford. Already have a degree? Consider checking out some higher education or Master’s programs!
When working on your personal development be sure to keep a positive attitude. It may seem hard as you are trying to improve things that you view as negative, but put a positive spin on it, as negativity will make it less likely that you will succeed in making the changes you want to make.
Improving wealth can be one step in personal development. This will enhance the quality of life that you are living. Everyone would love to be happy and have less stress, and while money can not solve your problems, it can ease any financial strain that you might be experiencing.
Now that you have the knowledge to head down a great path of self help, you shouldn’t waste any time on trying to make yourself a better person. Don’t let anything get you down and stay focused on what you have in mind for yourself. Set goals and stick to them!
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Also known as Buffalo Calf Woman, she survived the attacks by soldiers at Sand Creek in 1864 and the Washita River in 1868 and vowed vengeance against those who murdered her family and her people.
On a bitter cold November day on the southeast- ern plains of Colorado Territory, life as the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes had once known it changed forever. Sunrise on November 29, 1864, brought sounds of small-arms fire and cannon fire, billows of hazy smoke, screams and mass confusion to an awakening Indian village at Sand Creek. Soldiers—members of the 1st and 3rd Colorado Cavalry regiments under the command of ambitious Colonel John M. Chivington—seemed to be coming at the Indians from all directions.
An organized defense was slow to develop in the village, which included the 115 lodges of the Cheyenne leaders Black Kettle and White Antelope and the eight lodges of Arapaho leader Left Hand. Most traditional accounts say that the soldiers achieved total surprise, and that it took awhile for the few men in camp to gather what weapons they could find. Some recent accounts suggest that only partial surprise was achieved, and that the first casualty was actually a 1st Colorado cavalryman whose horse had bolted ahead. In any case, the elderly, the women and the children were soon running for their lives, and many of them fell during the bloody engagement. By 3 p.m. almost all the Indian survivors had fled, and Chivington’s men destroyed the lodges. At least 130 Indians died at Sand Creek, while about 15 soldiers were killed. The exact numbers are still disputed today.
As the sun set over the carnage, a 23-year-old Cheyenne woman named Mo-chi (“Buffalo Calf Woman”) emerged from the smoke and ashes. She was uninjured but stunned, and her body trembled as she walked among the less fortunate. The sight of her dead husband, Standing Bull, filled her with grief, but she pressed on through her tears. Finally, she found the body of her father. Her grief intensified and then turned to anger.
Mo-chi seized her dead father’s highly regarded Hawken rifle, a gift from a white man, and pledged revenge. It would not happen immediately. Her village was ruined and the soldiers, now in total control, were taking no Indian prisoners. Mo-chi and the other Sand Creek survivors found hiding places nearby, but they were only temporary.
After darkness fell, Mo-chi worked up the courage to leave her hiding place and begin her journey north, along the creek bed. As she departed, she heard the soldiers’ voices and laughter and smelled the smoke of the burning village. The cold winter night chilled her to the bone, and her nearly frozen feet trod gingerly over the crusted, dried snow. She came across other survivors, so at least she was not alone.
According to the Old Ones, in Cheyenne oral history, the survivors followed the creek north from the slaughter, approximately four miles, then headed northeast, some 40 miles, to the headwaters of the Smoky Hill River, known by our people as the Bunch of Trees River. They were welcomed into the camp of a group of Dog Soldiers, where they were fed, clothed and their various wounds tended to. The Dog Soldiers sent out Wolves [scouts] to search for others who might have been lost or wounded along the river trail. Mo-chi remembered it as the worst night of her life. —John L. Sipes, Mo-chi’s great-great-grandson
The survivors rested a few days before Dog Soldiers guided them to a large Sioux (or Lakota) camp on the Solomon River and from there to Cherry Creek, a tributary that flows into the South Fork of the Republican River. The Cherry Creek camp included the Sioux bands of Spotted Tail and Pawnee Killer, as well as several Northern Arapahos.
Meanwhile, anger over the massacre at Sand Creek spread like wildfire across the Plains, and the traditional war pipe was sent out by runners to all Indian camps. The Dog Soldiers and virtually all other Indian leaders in the area smoked the pipe and declared war. The devastation at Sand Creek was the driving force in uniting many bands of Plains Indians, including the Arkansas River and Dog Soldier bands, whose union ended decades of warring between the two. The chiefs held a council and concluded that war against the white man was the only way to avenge the honor of their dead and save their homeland.
The tradition of the war pipe, when necessary, was sent out in the spring, but after the slaughter at Sand Creek, the war pipe went out in the winter, December. To my knowledge, from the Old Ones, never before had the war pipe been sent in winter until Sand Creek. — John L. Sipes
When the war councils concluded, preparations for raids along the Platte River were made, including a massive raid on Julesburg in northeastern Colorado Territory. Revenge wasn’t the only motive. The survivors of Sand Creek had been left with nothing, and they needed food and blankets and other basic necessities.
After several small raids along the Platte River, Cheyenne, Sioux and Arapaho warriors joined together in force to hit Julesburg, where there was a stage station, store and warehouse. Camp Rankin was one mile to the west. The attacking force on January 7, 1865, included about 1,000 warriors, as well as many women, who were leading the extra horses that were needed to carry any stolen supplies back to their camp. Among these women was Mo-chi, who was always ready to help her people. She would prove herself worthy.
It was an incredible attack—thoughtfully planned and brilliantly executed. The warriors, led by the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers, rode to the sand bluffs south of the Platte River and hid. There, the warriors readied lances, shields, bows and arrows and a few firearms. At sunrise on the 7th, a separate group of warriors, led by Big Crow, quietly approached Camp Rankin (renamed Fort Sedgwick later that year) and rushed the guards outside the fort walls. The soldiers returned fire, and then the fort gates opened. A force of about 40 mounted soldiers under Captain Nicholas J. O’Brien pursued Big Crow’s party. The decoy worked perfectly. Soon, the Indian scouts sent the signal, and hidden warriors converged upon the fort and nearby sutler quarters. With many soldiers away in pursuit of Big Crow, these warriors had no trouble claiming their plunder—containers of flour, sugar and molasses; sacks of cornmeal; beans; sides of bacon; and canned goods. A short time later, the women, led by Mo-chi, arrived and began loading the goods onto the packhorses. Mo-chi and others also herded the horses stolen from the fort.
O’Brien and his soldiers followed Big Crow’s party for a while before realizing they were riding into a trap. A spirited fight ensued as the soldiers made their way back to the fort, at one point staging an ineffective counter-fight. The warriors suffered no casualties while killing about 15 soldiers and several civilians. Many of the warriors counted coup on a mortally wounded bugler. The Cheyenne Medicine Water took the bugler’s horse as his prize. When the two successful warrior parties rejoined, Medicine Water turned his prize horse loose with Mo-chi’s horse herd. It was their first meeting. From that time on, the two forged an inseparable bond, bound by sorrow and revenge, eventually entwined by love, family and the Cheyenne spirit of endurance.
During the Moon of the Strong Wind, the attack of Julesburg took place, according to oral history. The Old Ones taught young Medicine Water to respect his elders, to be peaceful with others and to learn to make arrows for possible war. Within the village were a few women warriors, like Mo-chi. They had their own way to prepare for battle. All the while keeping the lodge, having babies, paying attention to passing on the traditions. Mo-chi sang her own songs, painted her own war shield, made her own medicine, all taught to her by the Old Ones. —John L. Sipes
The attacks along the South Platte River continued, including another successful plundering of Julesburg on February 2, 1865. It proved to be a highly unsettling year, to say the least, for the white settlers and emigrants. Several ranches were raided, many were burned., The Cheyenne-led warriors, including Medicine Water and his partner Mo-chi, wreaked further havoc by raiding the overland stages and destroying some 70 miles of telegraph wire. The route to Denver was practically shut down. With no travel, communications or goods coming into the city, the citizens were isolated and hungry. Things did not get better fast. Eventually, the United States was ready to negotiate for peace.
The Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867 required the Cheyenne people to move to smaller reservations in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), where they would receive provisions from the federal government. Black Kettle, who survived the attack on his village at Sand Creek, was one of 14 Cheyenne chiefs to sign the treaty. He settled his people on their new southern reservation, on the banks of the Washita River, but never received the promised provisions. Other Cheyennes, particularly the young followers of Roman Nose, simply ignored the treaty and continued to create havoc in their old hunting grounds. General William Tecumseh Sherman, who commanded the Division of the Missouri, believed that these “hostiles” needed to be punished and forced onto the reservations. Roman Nose struck back furiously, and the result was a standoff that hindered travel and commerce across western Kansas.
The Old Ones say a member of the Dog Soldiers stepped up to the table at the Medicine Lodge Treaty, where he took his knife and stuck it through the treaty papers and into the table and left the knife there. The Old Ones said that was his signature and he walked off. —John L. Sipes
General Phil Sheridan joined in Sherman’s efforts on the Plains and directed Major George A. Forsyth to organ- ize a detachment of 50 frontiersmen to seek out and punish the Cheyennes who were raiding in Kansas. In mid-September 1868, Forsyth’s force marched up the Arikaree Fork of the Republican River (near present-day Wray, Colo.). On the 17th, after Indians drove off some of his horses, Forsyth took up a defensive position on an island to try to hold off at least 500 Cheyenne and Sioux warriors led by Chief Tall Bull and Roman Nose. Bowstring Warrior Society member Medicine Water and his brothers Iron Shirt and Man on Cloud were part of the Cheyenne contingent. Roman Nose was killed in one of the Indians’ unsuccessful frontal charges. Forsyth was wounded at least three times, while his second-in-command, Lieutenant Frederick Beecher, was mortally wounded. According to Cheyenne oral tradition, when Medicine Water took part in the charges, he had Mo-chi by his side.
No doubt Roman Nose’s death had been a blow to the Indian side, and the fight (which became known as the Battle of Beecher’s Island) continued for five more days. Also killed were White Horse, Dry Throat, White Bear and Old Lodge Skin. By September 21, many of the Indians had gone away, but enough remained to keep the starving soldiers under siege. Several scouts had managed to get off the island and seek help, and on September 25, reinforcements arrived, in the form of buffalo soldiers from Company H, 10th Cavalry. Forsyth’s small force saw half a dozen men killed and perhaps three times that number wounded. The Indians lost 30 men and had about 60 wounded.
Medicine Water and Mo-chi, who by this time were wed in the Cheyenne way (their union produced three girls), were not seriously hurt in the fight. But the battle had accomplished nothing, and the death of Roman Nose was a personal tragedy, since that formidable warrior was related by marriage to Medicine Water. In the days that followed, Medicine Water and Mo-chi rode together as warriors and continued to fight for their way of life, but things remained fairly peaceful in their lodge until two months later.
At dawn on a frigid snowy day, November 27, 1868, Lt. Col. George A. Custer and 700 men of the 7th Cavalry attacked Chief Kettle’s village on the Washita River. Black Kettle had talked peace recently with Colonel W.B. Hazen at Fort Cobb, and he had not posted any wolves (scouts) to guard the village, even though two warriors, Iron Shirt and Man on Club, had warned of troop movement in the area. At least many of the warriors, including Medicine Water and his wife, had kept their war horses tied up closeby in case of emergency.
Mo-chi was horrified as she watched her village attacked, reliving the same unbelievable circumstances of Sand Creek, just four years earlier and almost to the day. Custer’s attack on the 50-lodge village was swift, and the troops cut down many of the Indians as they fled their tepees. How many Indians were killed is uncertain (about 100, according to Custer; only half that according to the Cheyennes), but Chiefs Black Kettle and Little Rock were both killed, as were many Indian women and children. The freezing river banks were littered with dead bodies. Soldiers’ casualties would have been light had not Major Joel Elliot gone off with 18 men to chase some Indians. None of his small force returned. During the battle, the Cheyennes may have killed a couple of white captives. Custer burned the tepees and shot 800 ponies in the head; then he left the area, because there were other Indian camps downriver that posed a threat to him.
Medicine Water and Mo-chi struggled with their children (whether all three girls had been born by that time is uncertain) through the horrifying attack. At one point, a bullet struck their oldest child, Measure Woman, who was under 5 years old, in the hip. Mo-chi was able to get Measure Woman and the others out of further danger with the help of a family friend, Red Bird. The young warrior held vigil as best he could at the river, protecting and aiding Mo-chi and Measure Woman as they crossed to the other side. Red Bird, with his war horse at his side, kept firing at the soldiers, until return fire finally brought him down. Seeing Red Bird fall, Medicine Water turned his own horse toward the river and shot Red Bird’s horse, a Cheyenne custom so that a man and his favorite mount could be together in the spirit world.
Custer captured 53 women and children in the fight, but Mochi and her children got safely away. Members of Red Bird’s family returned to the site after the troops departed and wrapped his body in a sacred robe before giving him a warrior’s burial on a wooden scaffold. Chief Black Kettle had not managed to survive both the attack at Sand Creek in 1864 and the one on the Washita, but Mo-chi had. Her invisible scars, however, had deepened. She wanted vengeance more than ever. Although she had accompanied her husband into battle before, she now saw herself as truly a Cheyenne warrior.
“This day, I vow revenge for the murder of my family and my people,” Mo-chi said, according to Cheyenne oral history. “This day, I declare war on veho—white man. This day I become a warrior, and a warrior I will be forever.” She knew of no other way…but to fight back, the Old Ones said. — John L. Sipes
Mo-chi continued to ride by her husband’s side in the aftermath of the Battle of the Washita. Medicine Water had become chief of the Bowstrings and, like his wife, had vowed to avenge the slaughter of their people. Medicine Water continually engaged the buffalo-hide hunters in battle to protect his homeland and the few remaining buffalo herds scattered about the high Plains. He knew that without the buffalo, the Cheyennes faced starvation in the coming winters.
Medicine Water found plenty of support for his cause. After smoking the war pipe with Quanah Parker’s Quahade (sometimes seen as Kwahadi) band of Comanches, along with some Kiowa bands, Medicine Water and his Bowstring warriors waged war against the buffalo hide hunters. Things came to a head in the Texas Panhandle at Adobe Walls, on the South Canadian River in what would become Hutchinson County, Texas. The crumbling adobe buildings served as headquarters for the buffalo hunters. On June 27, 1874, some 300 warriors—Quanah’s Comanches, Kiowas and Southern Cheyennes—assaulted Adobe Walls. Medicine Water and Mo-chi were part of the Cheyenne contingent. Among the 28 men and one woman defending the post were a young Bat Masterson, who would go on to become one of the most famous lawmen and gamblers in the Wild West, and Billy Dixon, who used a .50-caliber Sharps to kill an Indian at long range during the siege. A wounded Quanah and the other attackers eventually withdrew, but the Battle of Adobe Walls led to more fighting in the Red River War.
On September 11, 1874, Medicine Water and his warriors—including Mo-chi and his brothers Iron Shirt and Man On Cloud— encountered a white family camping just northwest of the Smoky Hill River on Kansas land the Cheyennes considered their own by treaty. It was there that the couple took perhaps their most personal revenge for wrongs done their people at Sand Creek and the Washita. John and Lydia German, emigrants headed from Georgia to Colorado Territory, were traveling with their seven children. After one of the warriors shot John in the back, Mo-chi finished him off with a hatchet blow to the head. Lydia was next to die, apparently tomahawked by another warrior. Next, the Cheyennes killed three of the German children; keeping four of the sisters as captives. Soldiers searched for the missing girls and recovered two of them in November. The older two—17- year-old Catherine and 12- year-old Sophia—were returned to the white world in March when a large group of Cheyennes surrendered, including Mo-chi and Medicine Water. The fighting couple and many of their tribesmen faced the possibility of starvation and realized that resisitng the relentess soldiers was futile.
The Old Ones say Medicine Water realized it was for the betterment of the family survival to surrender, rather than face another massacre and he knew the soldiers would not hesitate to murder his entire family. —John L. Sipes
Before surrendering, Medicine Water, Mo-chi and several other warriors made sure that Stone Forehead (also known as Stone Calf), the Keeper of the Sacred Arrows (the center of the Cheyenne culture), was safely relocated to the Smoky Hill River in Kansas. The surrender took place on March 5, 1875, at the Darlington Agency in Indian Territory. Afterward, the soldiers escorted the prisoners, including the elderly and children, to their quarters. However, Medicine Water and Mo-chi were placed in leg irons and led to the guardhouse. Military reports sent to Fort Leavenworth stated, “Medicine Water was in irons and put in the guard house and the war should be over.” And young Sophia German had identified Mo-Chi as “the woman who chopped my mother’s head open with an axe!” Catherine German revealed that she had been raped often and that Mo-chi had “seemed delighted to see us tortured or frightened.” No doubt Mo-chi and Medicine Water viewed their actions as being no different than the cruelty performed by soldiers at Sand Creek and Washita.
Medicine Water, Mo-chi and 30 other Indian prisoners were charged with a variety of crimes, including murder, kidnapping and illegal detention. Without trial or tribunal, they were loaded into rail cars and taken to St. Augustine, Fla., a six-week journey in chains and shackles. Mo-chi was the only female prisoner. They were held at Florida’s Fort Marion prison for three years and then were returned, in 1878, to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, before eventually being sent back to Darlington.
The Old Ones, including my great-uncle Pete Bird Chief Jr., said that Medicine Water had permanent scars on his ankles from the irons. The Old Ones would listen to Medicine Water’s stories of Fort Marion. He would point to the scars and say, “This is what the government did to us to get control of our land, buffalo, ways of life as people and…our freedom as Cheyennes.” —John L. Sipes
Returning to their homeland after their imprisonment was another cultural shock for the couple. The Indian Territory reservation was a hard adjustment; their traditional way of life had been lost. What’s more, Mo-chi was ill, having contracted tuberculosis while in prison. She died in 1881 at age 41. She was laid to rest along the Washita River with all honors of a Cheyenne Indian warrior woman. Even though he had lost his soul mate, Medicine Water lived another 45 years. He found work with the government, hauling supplies between Caldwell, Kan., and Darlington. He remained true to his people, serving with the Native American Church and working to better educate the tribal youth. In 1891 he received a land allotment near Watonga, Oklahoma Territory, where he lived into old age. When Medicine Water died in 1926, at age 90, he was buried with all the honors of a head war chief of the Cheyenne Bowstring Warrior Society.
It is said that death and the will to fight runs strong in lives such as Mo-chi and Medicine Water. The Old Ones have taught us that to endure the hardships of surviving, while maintaining the love and courage to stand beside each other in overwhelming odds, was tremendous. In the end, it was the love and dedication to their people, their family and their Cheyenne way of life. —John L. Sipes
It is through oral history that the Cheyenne people of modern times have been able to stay in touch with the survival spirit of their ancestors.
Linda Wommack, from Littleton, Colo., is the author of several books on Colorado history. John L. Sipes, from Norman, Okla., is tribal historian for the Cheyenne Nation. He provided the oral history of his great-great-grandparents, Mo-chi and Medicine Water. Suggested for further reading: The Cheyenne and Arapaho Ordeal: Reservation and Agency Life in the Indian Territory, 1875- 1907 and The Southern Cheyennes, both by Donald J. Berthrong; The Fighting Cheyennes, by George Bird Grinnell; and The Sand Creek Massacre, by Stan Hoig.
Originally published in the April 2008 issue of Wild West. To subscribe, click here. | <urn:uuid:dc1867ad-6c5b-4605-9116-e5e6bb44ccba> | CC-MAIN-2019-47 | https://www.historynet.com/mo-chi-first-female-cheyenne-warrior.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-47/segments/1573496672313.95/warc/CC-MAIN-20191123005913-20191123034913-00365.warc.gz | en | 0.982893 | 4,882 | 3.5625 | 4 |
The Spanish general Miguel Primo de Rivera y Orbaneja (1870-1930) ruled Spain as a dictator from 1923 to 1930.
Miguel Primo de Rivera y Orbaneja
Miguel Primo de Rivera was born in Cadiz on Jan. 8, 1870, of a middle-class family that later became landowners in the Andalusian town of Jerez. He entered the General Military Academy in Toledo in 1884 and first saw service in Africa in 1893, where he won the Cross of San Fernando. Two years later he went to Cuba as an aide to Gen. Martinez de Campos. When his uncle, Gen. Fernando Primo de Rivera, was named captain general of the Philippines in 1897, Miguel went to Manila as an aide. A major in 1898, he was prevented by the collapse of Spanish military power from becoming a lieutenant general until 1919, the interim being filled with campaigns in Morocco, a stormy military governorship of Cadiz (1915), and service as an observer at the western front during World War I.
Public notice did not come Primo's way until 1922, when, as captain general of Barcelona, he attempted to reestablish law and order at just the moment that antiwar sentiment and social unrest were pointing toward revolution. Almost by chance Primo was selected as the chief figure in the military coup d'etat that on Sept. 12, 1923, overthrew parliamentary government (possibly with the aid of King Alfonso XIII) and imposed a military dictatorship. Overnight Primo became the most important political figure in Spain.
Primo has been described as a "glorified café politician" who, though he had made no preparation for rule, nevertheless aspired to political greatness. Order was restored by suspending constitutional guarantees, dissolving the Parliament, and imposing martial law. A new party, the Patriotic Union, became Primo's political vehicle and the only legal party in the country. Aside from the King's support of it, however, it had been put together so fast that it never developed great strength. Only because Primo was able to concentrate resources and to rally the army and defeat Abd el-Krim and the Moroccans did the new regime gain some respite from political dissension. The ending of the Moroccan War in December 1925 became Primo's one solid triumph.
Internal problems, surprisingly, continued to mount. Liberals rejected Primo's local government reforms and anticentralism, and radicals, despite the addition of a Socialist, Largo Cabellero, to his Cabinet, did not feel that the regime was moving fast enough in making social reforms. University students and intellectuals, fearing that Primo was another Benito Mussolini, led the opposition from 1925 on, and one of Spain's most distinguished intellectuals, Miguel de Unamuno, went into exile. Primo in fact was far from being a Fascist like Mussolini; if anything he had a paternalistic view of the state that unfortunately was out of step with the growing ideological sensitivities of the Spaniards.
By 1928, as the revolt of the cadets at the Academy of Segovia showed, even the army was dissatisfied with Primo, mainly because law and order were breaking down. The next 2 years witnessed one act of rebellion after the other, but King Alfonso XIII delayed replacing Primo because the monarchy had used the regime to hide its involvement in a series of disastrous political and military setbacks just prior to the dictatorship. Finally, however, Primo had no other recourse than to resign on Jan. 28, 1930, when he left for exile in Paris. He died in Paris on March 16, 1930.
Primo's son, José Antonio, frequently defended his father during the next few years of growing political bitterness, and many aspects of his father's paternalism could be found in José Antonio Primo de Rivera's much more overtly fascist philosophy. José Antonio founded the Falange party and became the martyr of the nationalist movement.
Further Reading on Miguel Primo de Rivera y Orbaneja
Dillwyn F. Ratcliff, Prelude to Franco: Political Aspects of the Dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera (1957), covers Primo de Rivera's regime. Good accounts of his career are in Gerald Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth: An Account of the Social and Political Background of the Civil War (1943; 2d ed. 1950), and Raymond Carr, Spain, 1808-1939 (1966). There is also extensive material on Primo de Rivera in Charles Petrie, King Alfonso XIII and His Age (1963). | <urn:uuid:920ff77b-c3bd-41d5-b177-b0e282695792> | CC-MAIN-2021-21 | https://biography.yourdictionary.com/miguel-primo-de-rivera-y-orbaneja | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2021-21/segments/1620243991648.40/warc/CC-MAIN-20210514060536-20210514090536-00040.warc.gz | en | 0.973793 | 943 | 2.9375 | 3 |
Think you know your kids well enough to tell if they're lying to you or not? New research from Brock University says that's probably not the case. The study discovered that parents are less able to spot fibbing children than complete strangers. In the study, parents were able to spot the lies of offspring just under 10% of the time, compared to eagle-eyed strangers who sussed out four out of 10 fibs.
A common belief is that parents are able to accurately spot when a child is lying because they have more knowledge about a child's behaviour, but the researchers say that a parent is no more likely to be able to detect their own children's lies than any other parent or adult without kids. Basically, the odds of anyone detecting a lie are about 50/50.
For the experiment, 72 parents were asked to rate video recordings of their children (aged 8-16) either lying or telling the truth. Childless participants and other sets of parents with no children in the experiment were also shown the videos.
The researchers found parents had a strong truth bias of their own children – typically believing they were telling the truth. Despite being able to spot truthful statements nine times out of 10, parents could only identify lies 8% of the time.
Angela Evans, Associate Professor in Brock's Department of Psychology says:
"They want to believe that their child isn't going to cheat on a test and, if they did, that they would tell the truth about having cheated. This means that when children lie to their parents, they are able to get away with it."
Evans says parents might not be able to pick up on lies because of previously perceived honest experiences with their children, making them less suspicious of false statements.
She adds that the lesson parents should take away from the research is the importance of developing a trusting relationship with their kids from a young age. Evans says:
"Developing open communication early is important so children are willing to share the information with us, rather than trying to catch them telling lies."
Can parents detect 8- to 16-year-olds' lies? Parental biases, confidence and accuracy was recently published by the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.
The NetDoctor newsletter delivers the latest healthy living news straight to your inbox. Make sure you never miss out by signing up here... | <urn:uuid:972ed2ba-63f6-4007-a856-47c45dedfce0> | CC-MAIN-2017-26 | http://www.netdoctor.co.uk/parenting/news/a26366/spotting-the-signs-of-lying-children/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-26/segments/1498128320263.78/warc/CC-MAIN-20170624133941-20170624153941-00341.warc.gz | en | 0.979382 | 475 | 3 | 3 |
This is the first in a series of guides that will look at digital circuits: what they are, how they work, and how we can make use of them.
We'll start with the basics and build up to more and more powerful circuits, all based on what we've covered in earlier parts of the series. The plan is to end up with a simple 8 bit processor designed, built, and functioning.
As we go, in true maker fashion, we'll build what we need to help in our exploration. Schematics, build videos, parts lists, and where to find everything will be provided so I hope you will follow along and find out what really goes on in that little black chip on your Arduino, Feather, Trinket, or whatever board you use. It's fun and exciting, and it's the building blocks that all of computing is built on. At least until the not too distant future.*
That's where we're headed, but we'll start simply. With numbers.
* Quantum Computing
Key image Designed by Freepik and used with permission. | <urn:uuid:d4bfe95d-e776-4421-b03d-b5a9c026b048> | CC-MAIN-2019-09 | https://learn.adafruit.com/binary-boolean-and-logic | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-09/segments/1550247484689.3/warc/CC-MAIN-20190218053920-20190218075920-00451.warc.gz | en | 0.961022 | 221 | 3.375 | 3 |
How Safe are Trampolines for Children?
By William T. Chirico Jr., OrthoCarolina
The warm breezes of the summer months beckon children to play outdoors, burn off energy and get some fresh air. And in our modern era of video games, tablets and mobile devices, any alluring outdoor plaything that grabs kids’ attention will typically get parent votes, too.
But then your children see the neighbors’ kids jumping on their new trampoline, and come running to ask you if they can jump too. Sometimes the group on the trampoline is more than just one or two in number, and suddenly you envision a horde of ten kids screaming with delight, bouncing in close proximity. The what ifs race through your mind as your anxiety levels start to spike. As a parent, how do you respond?
As a physical therapist I never want to discourage children from getting exercise or that feeling of freedom and fun that comes from the joy of jumping on a trampoline. So here’s the low down about the injuries that typically happen and how to best avoid them.
It’s probably not a surprise to hear that most trampoline injuries happen as the result of children colliding with one another, tripping on the trampoline springs or frames, falling off the trampoline or attempting stunts that go awry. Most injuries happen to the leg or foot, followed by the arm or hand, and then the head/face/neck/shoulder/trunk area.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) is a governmental organization tasked with protecting consumers and families from dangerous products and working to ensure the safety of consumer products. They are considered the gold standard when it comes to checking product safety, especially by brand. The CPSC also sets consumer use guidelines for products like trampolines.
Here are some suggested safety guidelines for children using trampolines, and you can find the CPSC’s full set of trampoline recommendations on their website.
- Use a trampoline net enclosure to prevent falls.
- Ensure that trampoline padding covers all frames, hooks and springs.
- Strictly prohibit children younger than six from jumping on trampolines over 20” tall.
- Do not buy or use a ladder for your trampoline in order to prevent children under six from accessing ladders.
- Closely supervise children at all times.
Obviously, part of the fun of jumping on a trampoline for kids is playing with their friends. And while in an ideal world the safest way to jump is one [child] on, one off at a time, we as parents know that’s not realistic. When children jump together try to make sure the children on the trampoline are similar ages in age and size. To accomplish this, consider having the children take turns or jump in shifts with another fun activity planned for those waiting for their turn on the trampoline.
An alternative to consider to backyard trampoline jumping is indoor trampoline parks, which can be found in many cities and offer a somewhat safer option to expel energy while still having fun. Indoor trampoline parks can put kids at risk just like outdoor trampolines would, but actually tend to have relatively low injury rates overall. According to Forbes.com these facilities actually have less frequent injuries than more common forms of kid recreation like baseball, soccer and football.
Most outdoor activities involve human bodies in motion, so any outdoor activity can be dangerous under certain conditions. Trampolines can provide fun and exercise for our children as long as we follow proper safety guidelines. Take the time as a parent to be knowledgeable on trampoline precautions, making sure you are familiar with the specific brand or product in use. Educate your kids on how to properly and safely participate in the activity. Have fun jumping!
William T. Chirico Jr., DPT, Cert MDT, Cert DN is a physical therapist with OrthoCarolina Monroe.
This blog was produced in partnership with Charlotte Parent. Click here for the original post and other parenting resources. | <urn:uuid:5930d039-0f7a-4fe8-ae07-f05dea608aca> | CC-MAIN-2023-14 | https://www.pedsurgical.com/safe-trampolines-children/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-14/segments/1679296945372.38/warc/CC-MAIN-20230325191930-20230325221930-00209.warc.gz | en | 0.93057 | 866 | 2.59375 | 3 |
If your eyes are red you may have ‘conjunctivitis’ - inflammation of the thin membrane covering the front of the eye and the lining of the eyelids.
The main symptoms of conjunctivitis are red watery eyes, inflamed inner eyelids, blurred vision, an uncomfortable, scratchy feeling and, sometimes, a sticky or watery substance that can make your eyelashes stick together. This might make it difficult to open the eyes when you wake up, and your vision may distort slightly when you blink.
There are three types of conjunctivitis you may contract, as part of an illness such as colds, measles or influenza or for no apparent reason.
Infectious conjunctivitis may be caused by bacteria or by a virus. It can occur in one eye, but often spreads to both as it may be very contagious. If you wear contact lenses you must seek advice because the lenses may have become contaminated. You should not wear contact lenses as they will irritate the condition, and should wash your hands frequently to prevent re-infection. It is also a good idea for other members of the family to use separate towels whilst you have the infection. If your new-born baby has conjunctivitis it requires urgent medical attention.
In most cases, your tears will cure a mild infection on their own, but if not then you will require treatment, which will depend on the cause of the disease.
Allergic and chemical conjunctivitis
Allergic conjunctivitis is caused by an allergy to dust or pollen, cosmetics, animals or fabrics.
Exposure to intense light from welding equipment can lead to a marked conjunctivitis known as arc eye or welder’s flash.
Chemical conjunctivitis may occur after exposure to irritants such as air pollution, noxious fumes and chlorine in swimming pools.
If the cause of the allergy is known, then it is best to avoid the irritant, and avoid wearing contact lenses, which will add to the irritation.
If the symptoms persist, prescription or over-the-counter eye drops may relieve discomfort.
As conjunctivitis can develop into a more serious condition that could harm your vision you should make an appointment to see your optometrist promptly for diagnosis and treatment.
|Types of Contact Lenses|
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|The Right Frame|
|1 Hour Glazing|
|The Eye Examination|
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|Common Eye Conditions|
|Age Related Macular Degeneration (AMD)|
|Eye Health For Diabetics|
|What is Presbyopia|
|Are you a danger on the roads|
|Red Eye or Conjunctivitis|
|Flashes and Floaters|
|Screening - OCT|
|MySight - Your Account| | <urn:uuid:0c3c065e-58e4-4932-bf62-9cdb56086d0b> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://www.c4sightcare.com/page48.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882572077.62/warc/CC-MAIN-20220814204141-20220814234141-00544.warc.gz | en | 0.894243 | 736 | 3.40625 | 3 |
In June 2011, the USDA issued a new shape to their food guide, calling the USDA food plate "My Plate." The new plate-shaped food guide replaces their old food guide pyramid.
I have to say that this design is much more user friendly. I've been using the mental picture of a plate to help guide people on what to eat for years because it just makes sense. While it might be hard to figure out how each of your meals measures up to a pyramid, and plate is simple. Aim for half a plate of vegetables, one quarter of a plate of whole grains, and one quarter beans or legumes.
The USDA food plate gets much applause from me on the new shape. And, happily, there are a few other changes that I really appreciate, and which I think are leading people in the right direction nutritionally.
1. Fruits and vegetables combined make up half the plate.
YES. I feel like everyone has always known that fruits and vegetables are incredibly healthy and important in a balanced diet. Of course, that doesn't mean people always eat them, but they do know they should. What's nice about the USDA My Plate suggestion is that it demonstrates how much of the plate should actually be filled with fruits and vegetables.
It's not just a piece or two of broccoli. It's not a dollop of mashed potatoes. And it's not a tiny green salad. It's half your plate. In fact, it should be a heavy section of vegetables on your plate.
I also like that the USDA food plate suggests that you "vary your veggies." There's nothing healthier than eating a wide variety of vegetables every single day. I've long heard that you should eat from all the colors of the rainbow every day to make sure you get all the nutrients along the food spectrum. Check out this page that has a list of fruits and vegetables.
If this new food guide were to really bump it up a notch, they'd have the vegetable section take up half the plate and replace the "dairy" circle with a plate of fruit. That's the real dessert we should be focusing on.
Grains take up a quarter of the plate.
I agree with this section as well, with one small addendum... Eat whole grains as much as possible and avoid processed grains.
Unfortunately, the USDA My Plate cops out by suggesting that we "make at least half your grains whole." Why can't they just tell us to eat all whole grains? I have to assume they know there's absolutely no nutritional value in un-whole grains, and that they think a) it would be impossible to convince people to give up white bread, cookies, pastries, and cakes so it's not worth saying not to eat them or b) they're afraid of offending the industries that produce enriched white grains.
"Protein" takes up the remaining quarter of the plate.
In my opinion, this is happy news. No longer are people being taught to eat meat and fish as protein sources. There is no specific guidance on what constitutes protein, and the suggestion is to "go lean with protein." Perhaps America's love affair with protein is over and we are going to be guided down to a more reasonable and scientifically-based level of daily protein intake. Let's hope.
What's great is that it's hard to go leaner with your protein selection than with beans. Each variety of beans and legumes has a different nutritional benefit, so I highly recommend switching them up and trying as many different types as you can. For a guide to the different types of legumes and beans check out this page on our site.
The major drawback is the glass of "dairy" that remains touching the plate. I'd rather have that nowhere near the plate, perhaps with a "use with extreme caution" sign, or a "avoid." However, I know that it's extremely difficult to ignore the lobbying money of the Dairy Council. Rather than launch into a huge discussion right now on why dairy products are unhealthy, I am going to simply ignore that glass and applaud a much more stable, functional food guide.
However, when you click around on the USDA food plate site (http://www.choosemyplate.gov/foodgroups/index.html) for info on the different categories, the dairy section says this, "Get your calcium-rich foods."
It's only a matter of time before it becomes common knowledge that vegan calcium is abundantly available in plant foods and that while dairy products do have a lot of calcium, the body has trouble assimilating animal protein and animal-based calcium into useable nutrients. Once the body begins to struggle getting calcium that way, it will instead steal calcium from your bones to satisfy its needs.
for a complete breakdown of the negative consequences of eating dairy products.
As a short summary below the food plate, the USDA food plate suggests that we balance our calories by enjoying our food but eating less and avoiding oversized portions. They also say to increase our fruit and vegetable intake, make at least half our grains whole, and to switch to fat-free or low-fat milk. And lastly, they recommend choosing soup, bread, and frozen meals with lower sodium numbers and drinking water instead of sugary drinks. | <urn:uuid:b8ab548c-a805-4729-86f9-9bfba3f7ca58> | CC-MAIN-2016-40 | http://www.vegan-nutritionista.com/USDA-food-plate.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-40/segments/1474738663247.66/warc/CC-MAIN-20160924173743-00113-ip-10-143-35-109.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967665 | 1,077 | 2.734375 | 3 |
American Imperialism And Colonialism In Asia: A Case Study Of Arab States
Imperialism was concerned as encyclopedia of social sciences. It a policy to increasing organization and maintaining a huge empire in the world and ruled beyond the boundaries. The imperialism is divided into two kinds, economic imperialism and cultural imperialism, in imperialism the one nation is dominated on the other nation. It is divided in three, results, “they added to the security of the colonizing state by assuring it of raw material in war and peace”. While colonialism is economic, intellectual and physical control of small community with in nation. The imperialism is divided into six motives, “Economic gain, National prestige, the white man’s burden, National defense, Surplus population”, Furthermore, the gun powdered and printing and banking helped to build ships, roads, fortification and in navigation, the main pillar of imperialism, the European powers dominated in all over the world. The industrial revolution brought change in the world. In new imperialism the dominant states got victory by using military force and negotiation, using gold gum cracks or gun powder fraud. Demoralized by economic penetration, established regions from friends outside states, sells, perches, plebiscites. Furthermore, the industrialization produced surplus values, capitalist. It divided sea voyage, in reaction greedy, patriotism, nationalism, jingoism, militarism, chauvinism, Christianity, humanities, adventure and faction to eat every day new. The American “imperialism was divided into three parts. Continental expansion. Overseas expansion. Intervention. Continental expansion”. Dag Tuastad, “he opines that American new imperialism in the Middle East goes as the violence in the Arabs. He calls modern American representation of Arab violence new barbarism”. | <urn:uuid:519f8130-5838-401a-8935-7c0896be4af4> | CC-MAIN-2022-49 | https://sersc.org/journals/index.php/IJDRBC/article/view/35211 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-49/segments/1669446711077.50/warc/CC-MAIN-20221206092907-20221206122907-00465.warc.gz | en | 0.913345 | 368 | 3.171875 | 3 |
Soil and surface water contamination by used lubricating oil is a common occurrence in most developing countries. This has been shown to have harmful effects on the environment and human beings at large. Bioremediation can be an alternative green technology for remediation of such hydrocarbon-contaminated soil. Bioremediation of soil contaminated with 5% and 15% (w/w) used lubricating oil and amended with 10% brewery spent grain (BSG), banana skin (BS), and spent mushroom compost (SMC) was studied for a period of 84 days, under laboratory condition. At the end of 84 days, the highest percentage of oil biodegradation (92%) was recorded in soil contaminated with 5% used lubricating oil and amended with BSG, while only 55% of oil biodegradation was recorded in soil contaminated with 15% used lubricating oil and amended with BSG. Results of first-order kinetic model to determine the rate of biodegradation of used lubricating oil revealed that soil amended with BSG recorded the highest rate of oil biodegradation (0.4361 day−1) in 5% oil pollution, while BS amended soil recorded the highest rate of oil biodegradation (0.0556 day−1) in 15% oil pollution. The results of this study demonstrated the potential of BSG as a good substrate for enhanced remediation of hydrocarbon contaminated soil at low pollution concentration. | <urn:uuid:f74b95a3-65de-4e49-96fb-b8f54f9df99a> | CC-MAIN-2014-15 | http://pubmedcentralcanada.ca/pmcc/articles/PMC3388317/?report=abstract | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2014-15/segments/1397609538022.19/warc/CC-MAIN-20140416005218-00202-ip-10-147-4-33.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965569 | 291 | 2.859375 | 3 |
Demineralised water has many uses but requires special tanks to store it safely since it can be very aggressive towards metal containers. Here we look at exactly what it is, where it is used and how to store it safely.
Demineralised water (also known as Demin or demi) is water that has its minerals removed. It may still contain organic impurities like bacteria and viruses, and further treatment may be needed to remove them if necessary. But here is a list of metals that are removed:
This results in very soft water that has a very low conductivity – less than 2mS/m.
Demineralised Water Tanks
The Demin water is also very quick to pick up minerals wherever it can – so it is very aggressive towards metal containers and pipes.
Enduramaxx tanks are made from the highest-grade plastic material, so they are ideal for storing demineralised water. Our tanks are rotationally moulded so there are no seams or joints. They are tough and long-lasting and can withstand prolonged outdoor or indoor use. | <urn:uuid:d3a47b30-bdfd-43bd-af47-6e2d0edfa1f0> | CC-MAIN-2021-17 | https://enduramaxx.co.uk/tanks/enduramaxx-water-tanks/demineralised-water-tanks/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2021-17/segments/1618038917413.71/warc/CC-MAIN-20210419204416-20210419234416-00325.warc.gz | en | 0.953984 | 223 | 2.875 | 3 |
These "novelty detector neurons" quickly stop firing if a sound or sound pattern is repeated, but will briefly resume firing whenever some aspect of the sound changes, according to Ellen Covey, one of the authors of the study and a psychology professor at the University of Washington. The neurons can detect changes in the pitch, loudness or duration of a single sound and can even detect changes in the pattern of a complex series of sounds, she said.
Covey and her colleagues, Dr. Manuel Malmierca of the University of Salamanca and doctoral student David Perez-Gonzalez, who is currently a visiting scientist in the UW psychology department, report their findings in the early December issue of the European Journal of Neuroscience.
The neurons are located under the cortex in a part of the brain called the inferior colliculus. Covey said the research implies that these cells can "remember a frequently occurring pattern and perform relatively sophisticated cognitive tasks such as discriminating a novel pattern from a frequently occurring one."
She said that, contrary to popular belief, the new findings suggest that some cognitive processes for sorting and identifying sounds occur very early in the auditory pathway, and that novelty detector neurons could be involved in directing attention to unexpected sounds, possibly evoking rapid reflex responses.
Novelty detector neurons seem to act as gatekeepers, preventing information about unimportant sounds from reaching the cortex, thus allowing people to ignore sounds that do not require attention.
"It is probably a good thing to have this ability because it allows us to tune out background noises like the humming of a car's motor while we are driving or the regular tick-to
Contact: Joel Schwarz
University of Washington | <urn:uuid:27444385-a3f9-4a84-a6ec-586ce7d9bfbb> | CC-MAIN-2016-36 | http://news.bio-medicine.org/medicine-news-3/Specialized-neurons-allow-the-brain-to-focus-on-novel-sounds-7308-1/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-36/segments/1471982292887.6/warc/CC-MAIN-20160823195812-00223-ip-10-153-172-175.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931873 | 341 | 3.453125 | 3 |
By Drs Kay Judge and Maxine Barish-Wreden
Two interesting studies have come up over the past month on heart attacks. Scientists have found a temporary condition that can quadruple your chance of having a heart attack. Scientists have found that job stress leads to more heart attacks, but there is a treatment that can reduce job stress-related heart attacks by 50%.
Curious? The first study involved almost 4,000 patients, and was conducted at Harvard, with results published in the ‘American Journal of Cardiology’. The surprising condition that could lead to a quadrupling of heart attacks was anger. The researchers collected data from patients who were part of a study between 1989 and 1996 to determine what brought on their heart attacks.
A total of 1,484 participants reported having outbursts of anger in the previous year, 110 of whom had those episodes within two hours of the onset of their heart attacks. The researchers found that with each increment of anger intensity, the risk of heart attack in the next two hours rose.
That risk was 1.7 times greater after feeling “moderately angry, so hassled it shows in your voice”; and 2.3 times greater after feeling “very tense, body tense, clenching fists or teeth” and 4.5 times greater after feeling “enraged! lost control, throwing objects, hurting yourself or others.”
Why does anger increase heart attacks? Anger induces a fight-or-flight response in the body, releasing chemicals epinephrine and norepinephrine that raise blood pressure, raise our heart rate, constrict blood vessels and promote stickiness in platelets. All these are not good for the cardiovascular system and can lead to a heart attack.
The second study looked at job stress and heart attacks, and found that the magical cure with a 50% success in reducing heart attacks from job stress was a healthy lifestyle. The study was published in the ‘Canadian Medical Association Journal’. In this study, researchers studied 102,000 men and women, ages 17 to 70, in the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Sweden and Finland. Over 10 years, the rate of coronary artery disease was 18.4 per 1,000 for people with job stress and 14.7 per 1,000 for those without job stress
The lifestyles measured were smoking, alcohol consumption, exercise, inactivity and obesity. Those with a healthy lifestyle had no risk factors, while people with a moderately unhealthy lifestyle had one risk factor. Two or more risk factors was an unhealthy lifestyle.
What is fascinating is the extraordinary impact of lifestyle on the reduction of heart-attack risk with job stress: When lifestyle and work were factored together, the heart disease rate was 31.2 per 1,000 for people with job stress and an unhealthy lifestyle and decreased to 15 per 1,000 for those with job stress and a healthy lifestyle.
Take-home points? Anger is dangerous for the heart, and escalating expressions of anger — far from being cathartic — appear to hurt the body. And if you are at risk for heart disease and have job stress, you can decrease that risk by changing your lifestyle.
Both of these studies help quantify the benefits of a holistic approach to your health — in addition to seeing your doctor, do focus on mind/ body/spirit wellness. — The Sacramento Bee/MCT | <urn:uuid:f2094b76-f602-4fae-8dff-eb3bdb8cbb5a> | CC-MAIN-2014-52 | http://www.gulf-times.com/health/234/details/354476/work-stress-increases-the-risk-of-heart-attack | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2014-52/segments/1418802767453.104/warc/CC-MAIN-20141217075247-00145-ip-10-231-17-201.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962609 | 694 | 2.71875 | 3 |
Ireland has two similar but different schedules of public holidays. The Republic of Ireland has 9 official holidays each year while Northern Ireland has 10.
New Year's Day (January 1st)*:
Many Irish celebrate New Year's night in their favourite Pub. Only in some of the bigger towns are fireworks used for the New Year's celebrations.
New Years day marks the end of the long Christmas/New Year break with most people returning to work the next day.
In some parts of the south of Ireland there is a custom called the "New Year's Swim". In the morning of the New Year many people dive into the cold sea, but only for a few minutes. This event is generally covered in great detail by the local newspapers and by TV...
St. Patrick's Day (March 17th)*:
While the public holiday is March 17th, The St. Patrick's Day festivities take place from March 15 until March 18 (4 day period) and it is Ireland's biggest annual festival. It is a celebration of the Irish patron Saint and you can find street theatre, fireworks, international carnival, bands and Irish music. For more information visit the website http://www.stpatricksday.ie/cms/home.htm
When St. Patrick's Day takes place on a Saturday or Sunday, the Public holiday is observed on the following Monday.
Easter Monday (date varies each year: 2016: March 28th, 2017: April 17th )
The day after Easter Sunday is observed as a public holiday every year in Ireland. Most businesses are closed on this day and all schools are closed for the entire week. This makes this a busy time for vacations in Ireland.
Some businesses also close in observance of Good Friday although this is not an official public holiday
Bank Holidays (First Monday in May, June & August and last Monday in October):
On Bank Holidays, most businesses and all banks are closed. The Bank Holiday was originally initiated in the United States; In 1933 President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared a bank holiday to help stop the money panic in the nation because the depositors had been withdrawing their funds with such speed that many banks ran out of money to pay over the counter.
The Bank holiday now serves as a day off for workers and many Irish people plan their annual leave around these days.
Christmas Day (December 25th)*:
Like in many other countries, Christmas is one of the most important holidays.
Christmas day itself is mainly celebrated quietly with family, however many people take leave between Christmas and New Year and celebrate for the entire week.
St. Stephen's Day (December 26th)*:
The day after Christmas, St. Stephen's day (known as "Boxing day" in the UK) is also a public holiday. The traditional ancient practice of carol singing, "Wren Boys", is re-enacted, when groups of children dress up and call to the doors of the houses in the neighbourhood singing "the wren"
Many Irish towns also have some individual festivals besides their public holidays . Our Event Calender has details of these festivals. Generally, these festivals are about Irish music, dance, horses, dogs, theater, sport, boats, races, food and beer! So be sure to enjoy our festivals & learn more about Irish culture on your Vacation in Ireland!
Northern Ireland observes some of the same holidays. This is the full list:
New Year's Day(January 1st)*
St. Patrick's Day (March 17th)*
Good Friday (2016: March 25th, 2017: April 14th)
Easter Monday (2016: March 28th, 2017: April 17th)
May Bank Holiday (First Monday in May)
Spring Bank Holiday (Last Monday in May)
Battle of the Boyne (July 12th)*
Summer Bank Holiday (Last Monday in August)
Christmas Day (December 25th)*
Boxing Day (December 26th)*
*where holidays marked with * fall on a weekend, the holiday will be observed on the following Monday or next business day
Our website has over 2000 pages of content to help you plan your dream ireland vacation, whether its more information about Ireland, our Ireland vacation packages , escorted coach tours of ireland or activity vacations , feel free to browse our website or alternatively contact one of our Ireland based Guides who can provide you with a free vacation quote to Ireland. | <urn:uuid:e7afe8ca-d5ec-466a-b43a-1f176a09ac61> | CC-MAIN-2017-39 | http://www.discoveringireland.com/public-holidays/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-39/segments/1505818691476.47/warc/CC-MAIN-20170925111643-20170925131643-00582.warc.gz | en | 0.965391 | 905 | 2.984375 | 3 |
For the last twenty-five years I have been publicly maintaining that Johann Bessler really did invent what used to be known as a Perpetual Motion machine. Before I even wrote my Bessler biography, ‘Perpetual Motion; An Ancient Mystery Solved?’, I had already satisfied myself that he was genuine by studying the available evidence. Because the events took place more than 300 years ago this evidence took the form of a huge number of documents, some by Bessler, others by witnesses, newspaper reports and letters.
But surely such machines are impossible? Scientists, teachers, historians have all ruled out any chance that perpetual motion machines might be possible. Yes they have, but there are two things to bear in mind. The definition of what constitutes a perpetual motion (PM) machine has altered since 1847 and even given today’s version there are ways to avoid its implications .... and complementary to this is the apparently conflicting evidence that they ARE possible.
I’m not going to discuss the definitions of PM because it’s been covered numerous times both here and on the Besslerwheel forum, but I think it’s worth taking another look at the strong circumstantial evidence.
We should examine the reasons why and how Bessler provided the specific evidence which was designed to prove that his machine was genuine. Several demonstrations were suggested by the famous scientist and polymath, Gottfried Leibniz, a man of equal intellect to Sir Isaac Newton, his contemporary. Leibniz had considerable knowledge in the field of mechanics and designed a built his mechanical calculator, plus his interests included mathematics, logic, mining religion and history to mention just a few. He had been able to study the machine on two occasions and even though he was unable to state categorically that it was a perpetual motion machine, he was convinced that it was a remarkable invention and too valuable to be ignored. There are many letters from Leibniz to some of his correspondents discussing the wheel and how it might have worked.
The first piece of evidence which on its own could be argued as being definitively and unarguably positive, was the insistence by Karl the Landgrave of Hesse that he be permitted to examine the interior of Bessler’s machine before allowing him to demonstrate it at his castle Weissenstein in front of expert witnesses. Karl was a highly respected ruler and amateur scientist and a correspondent of Leibniz. He acted as honest broker negotiating between the warring nations of Europe which required absolute probity. But he was also known as a ‘curious gentleman’ which in those days described members of such organisations as the Royal Society who maintained an interest in studying the latest findings in the new subjects in science, and in Karl’s case sponsoring research. He had no interest or need to be involved in anything of a dubious nature.
The other pieces of evidence can be summed up as follows. The final machine or ‘wheel’ as it was called, could turn in either direction, requiring a gentle push in one or other direction from which gentle push it accelerated to its top speed. This should have ruled out any suggestion that it was wound up.
The wheel was demonstrated spinning on one set of bearings, it was then stopped and moved to a second set of bearings a few feet away where it was then given a push in either direction, accelerating again to its top speed. This was designed to allow examiners to check for connections between the axle bearings and the pillars which supported the device. The bearings were left open and it was clear that there was nothing of a suspicious nature present.
The same wheel was attached to a rope passing over a pulley and from thence down several feet to the castle courtyard. It lifted a chest of stones weighing 70 pounds from the courtyard up to the roof, and was then rotated in the opposite direction to lower the chest again.
The wheel was attached to an Archimedes screw to pump water which it demonstrated in action.
Finally Karl the Landgrave ordered Bessler to start his machine spinning. The door to the room was locked and sealed with the Landgrave’s seal and a guard ordered to stand watch outside the door. The wheel ran for a total of 54 days with one stop to inspect that it was still working with no undue wear and tear and restarted. The room had been examined both before and after the demonstration, to check that there were no secret connection to any adjoining rooms. Nothing suspicious was found.
The other recommendation from Leibniz was to arrange for official demonstrations and examinations to be carried out by experts, ministers, professors, and the nobility, and get them to sign a certificate describing what they witnessed. They were encouraged to try to discover any signs of fraud or deception but none were ever discovered.
It is hard to know what else Bessler could have done to prove his machine was genuine. I know that people have suggested some ways the inventor could have cheated, but each of them require the complicit assistance of Karl, or some other person, but frankly such suggestions are clutching at straws.
NB For those who are unfamiliar with the legend of Johann Bessler’s perpetual motion machine, see my previous blog. | <urn:uuid:0827df4c-956d-4eaa-a974-d20a1c51d4c2> | CC-MAIN-2022-21 | https://johncollinsnews.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-evidence-supporting-johann-besslers.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-21/segments/1652662509990.19/warc/CC-MAIN-20220516041337-20220516071337-00109.warc.gz | en | 0.984951 | 1,067 | 2.9375 | 3 |
Emperor Gum-moth (Opodiphthera eucalypti) - Wiki
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
[Photo] A female Emperor Gum Moth. Photo by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fir0002
The Emperor Gum Moth (Opodiphthera eucalypti) is a species of moth native to Australia, and can be easily found in all the states except for Western Australia, South Australia and Tasmania. They are also found as an introduced species in the North Island of New Zealand. This species was formerly placed in the genus Antheraea.
The eggs are laid on a leaf either singly or several in a row. They are pale cream in color and are approx 2mm in length. The eggs are usually laid on native eucalyptus trees but are sometimes found on introduced species such as the peppercorn, silver birch, liquid amber and apricot trees. They hatch between 7-10 days after being laid.
The caterpillar of the Emperor Gum Moth in its last stage before pupationCaterpillars can usually be found on young adult leaves between October and March (the Australian Spring and Summer). When the caterpillars hatch they are black with short hairs on top of little nodes on their bodies called tubercles. The hairs are not poisonous and will not sting. As the caterpillars mature they change color each time the shed their skin (which totals to 5 stages in the caterpillars appearance). The fully grown caterpillars are usually found on the highest branches of the host tree where the leaves are the youngest and easiest to digest. By the final stage before pupation the caterpillars have developed striking coloration, having a yellow/cream stripe down their bright green/blue body and nodes of red and blue. Despite this they are still surprisingly hard to spot. The caterpillar stage in the Emperor Gum Moths life cycle can last for many weeks, depending on the temperature and weather conditions.
When the caterpillar is fully mature it spins a dark brown silken cocoon on a branch which usually has a leaf to protect it with. When spinning is complete, the caterpillar sheds its final skin and takes the form of its pupal life stage. Within a day of spinning completion, the cocoon sets to a hard waterproof shell with a rough exterior and a smooth interior wall. Air holes can be seen along the side of the cocoon indicating that the cocoon is probably otherwise airtight. The moth usually emerges from the cocoon the following year (in Spring or early Summer) but depending on weather conditions can stay in the cocoon from anywhere between 2 and 5 years. One case has even been recorded of a moth emerging out of the cocoon after 10 years.
When the metamorphosis is complete, the adult moth regurgitates a fluid to soften the tough cocoon and then cuts a hole using sharp hooks on the base of each forewing. The effort to release itself from the cocoon is vital for its wings to expand and dry after emerging. Pupae cut from the cocoon will hatch, but the moths' wings will never expand.
The Emperor Gum Moth does not feed after it emerges from the cocoon, relying solely on the energy they stored as caterpillars. Their adult life span is limited to a couple weeks in which they mate, lay eggs and die. The moths, like the caterpillars, are very striking in appearance. The Emperor Gum Moth is a very large moth, having a wingspan of 120mm-150mm. Females are generally smaller than males. The furless wings and body are multi colored, but are in overall tones of pale reddish/brown. The wings are decorated with four prominent ‘eyes’ and various other markings in a symmetrical formation. The antennae of the males are feathery, while the females' are thinner and with fewer hairs.
This insect was the first used in the successful development of continuous insect cell cultures. Dr. Thomas D. C. Grace, a researcher with CSIRO developed four cell lines from the ovaries of this insect and reported on them in the journal Nature in 1962. This was a significant breakthrough since efforts to grow insect cells in culture had been attempted for decades previously. Modifications of the medium used in these efforts, Grace's insect medium, is still in use today for growing many of the insect cell lines that have since been developed (approximately 600 distinct cell lines from more than 125 insect species).
|The text in this page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article shown in above URL. It is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.| | <urn:uuid:0792b04e-7e7c-4cdd-b764-de1df4bf44c3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://animal.memozee.com/view.php?tid=3&did=25519 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707188217/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122628-00072-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952377 | 984 | 3.234375 | 3 |
EVANSVILLE, IN (WFIE) - With each winter comes a reminder to stay safe when you heat your home.
Vectren recommends having your furnace looked at by a professional and make sure fireplaces are properly ventilated.
Check the batteries in smoke and carbon monoxide detectors.
It's also important to take the proper precautions if you use space heaters.
According to the National Fire Protection Association, electric and kerosene heaters cause the most home fires during December, January and February.
To help prevent fires and carbon monoxide poisoning from space heaters, the NFPA has these tips:
- Install and use appliances according to the manufacturer's instructions
- Consider using space heaters with automatic shut-off capabilities
- Never use unvented gas or kerosene heaters in closed spaces, especially sleeping areas
- Don't use gas appliances such as an oven, range or clothes dryer to heat the home
- Leave a window cracked about an inch for ventilation and fresh air. Ventilation is important to keep fuel-burning space heaters from consuming too much oxygen in the house
- Do not leave a space heater on when you are not in the room or when you go to sleep and keep small children away from the unit at all times
- Electric space heaters should be checked for signs of fraying or splitting wires or overheating. Likewise, electric space heaters frequently cause fires by overloading electrical outlets
- Keep space heaters away from combustible materials/products.
- When selecting a space heater, look for one that has been tested and certified by a nationally recognized testing laboratory. These heaters have been determined to meet specific safety standards, and manufacturers are required to provide important use and care information to the consumer | <urn:uuid:81a07c26-c55b-44a8-94ff-6d282d3fadeb> | CC-MAIN-2018-51 | http://www.14news.com/story/27400210/winter-heating-safety-reminders/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-51/segments/1544376825916.52/warc/CC-MAIN-20181214140721-20181214162221-00603.warc.gz | en | 0.928438 | 361 | 2.78125 | 3 |
Tiger travel in Pench National Park takes wildlife enthusiasts to the setting of the BBC’s popular ‘Tiger: Spy in the Jungle’ 2008 television series. This wildlife reserve is home to a prime habitat in the Satpura Hills, in the Seoni and Chhindwara districts of Madhya Pradesh in India. Previous to the series, this park was little-known by visitors to the country, although it lies in the region of India that inspired Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Including Pench National Park on the itinerary of a Tiger travel tour increases the possibility of multiple sightings in a range of habitats, as well as the opportunity to see more of India’s natural beauty and wildlife.
History of Pench National Park
The area this reserve is located in has an illustrious history in India. Its natural wealth and richness earned it a description in the Ain-i-Akbari (or the “Constitution of Akbar”), a 16th century document written by the Emperor Akbar’s vizier, Abu’l-Fazl ibn Mubarak, recording the administration of Akbar’s empire. It belongs to a much larger text, the Akbarnama (or the “Book of Akbar”). Searching for the majestic Tiger, travelling through such a historically beautiful region is an immense privilege.
In the late 19th century, Rudyard Kipling wrote his famous book The Jungle Book, inspired by the region encompassing this reserve. The park is also known as Mowgli Land in memory of Kipling’s stories. More recently, in 2008, the BBC brought the park to the public’s attention with the aforementioned television series, which showed the story of a Tiger family living in the park, using innovative, less intrusive filming techniques such as a camera held on the tusk of an elephant.
Visiting Pench National Park
Pench National Park protects 758 square kilometres of the animal’s habitat, with 299 square kilometres of core park area and the rest comprising a buffer zone. The undulating landscape creates a range of habitats within the park, including Teak forest and other magnificent tree species such as Saja, Bija and Lendia. The white Kulu trees stand out among the green. Grasses and low-lying plants break open the forests.
The primary reason to visit Pench for Tiger travel is, of course, the opportunity to see the magnificent animal in a stunning natural setting. The park is well populated with them, giving wildlife enthusiasts the high possibility of a sighting. Other species often sighted in the park include Chital, Sambhar, Nilgai, Wild Boar and Asiatic Jackal. The density of herbivores in Pench National Park is particularly notable, giving visitors plenty to see as they explore the park. Flora enthusiasts will be treated to a beautiful array of species, as over 1,200 species of plants have been recorded in the park area, including some rare and endangered species. | <urn:uuid:abfccf3e-90e9-4543-a0f9-749a98ec475c> | CC-MAIN-2014-23 | http://scordit.com/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2014-23/segments/1405997894689.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20140722025814-00061-ip-10-33-131-23.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939028 | 632 | 2.84375 | 3 |
Firefighters in Australia are battling two blazes that could become a "megafire" following the hottest September on record.
Typically bush fires peak in December, which is the start of summer in the southern hemisphere.
Editor's Note: ObamaCare Is Here. Are You Prepared?
BBC News reported
the fire commissioner said Monday two fires near Lithgow could possibly merge into one "megafire."
"Modelling indicates that there's every likelihood under the forecast weather conditions that these two fires, particularly up in the back end of the mountains will merge at some point," NSW Rural Fire Services Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons said at a news briefing.
About 800 personnel from interstate fire departments are expected to arrive Tuesday to assist in fighting the blazes.
A forecast of high winds and soaring temperatures for the next several days increased the fire danger for Australia's most populous state, The Associated Press reported.
Out-of-control fires hit the Blue Mountains region, west of Sydney, the hardest. The bush fires have killed one man and left hundreds of people homeless, including a firefighter who was on duty.
"I'd been standing watching other people's houses burn and the emotion from that was bad enough,” Tim Boxwell, 24, told BBC's Newshour. “To be hit with your own house being lost was a shock as well," he said.
The Associated Press reported that the Defense Department was investigating whether there was any connection between a fire that started in Lithgow Wednesday and the use of military exercises with explosives at a nearby training range on the same day.
"Defense is investigating if the two events are linked," the department said in a statement on Saturday.
In February 2009, wildfires left 173 people dead and destroyed more than 2,000 homes in Victoria state.
Editor's Note: Do You Support Obamacare? Vote in Urgent National Poll
Sun Bathers, Reptiles Emerge in Alaska Heat as Wildfires Spread
Colorado Wildfires Devour Homes, Force Thousands To Flee
© 2014 Newsmax. All rights reserved. | <urn:uuid:5b06337f-98c4-49d9-ba28-5d639c4be697> | CC-MAIN-2014-52 | http://www.newsmax.com/TheWire/megafire-australia-merge-two/2013/10/21/id/532209/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2014-52/segments/1418802769596.116/warc/CC-MAIN-20141217075249-00021-ip-10-231-17-201.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962414 | 425 | 2.59375 | 3 |
|Jumlah||Nama Barang||Berat (kg)||Total|
|0||0,00 Kg||Rp 0,00|
|keranjang anda kosong|
|Di lihat||11400 kali|
|Harga||Rp (hubungi cs)|
The tenor drum is one of the many drums used by American marching bands. Although now most commonly found in parades and on football fields during halftime shows, this instrument has been used since the mid-19th century by a variety of composers. It is a lower-pitched variant of the snare drum, another marching band staple. On the field, the tenor drum is easily recognized, as it is carried in mounted sets of three to six drums. This setup allows the musician to pay multiple drums simultaneously, adding to the richness of the percussion.
Tenor drums are played with a wide variety of implements, all of them a form of mallet or drumstick. The heads of these beaters may be made of a variety of materials, including wood, plastic, nylon, felt, rubber or fleece. The drumheads of tenor drums are usually as taut as possible, creating a relatively high-pitched sound that is very effective in outdoor situations.
as mentioned, tenor drums are carried and played in sets. The name of a set usually refers to the number of drums it has; a “quad,” for example, is composed of four drums. Each drum in a set is of a different diameter and thus produces a different pitch of sound. Both the loudness and the variety of the tenor drum make it a valuable addition to marching bands. A band may have as many as six tenor drum players, each of whom can carry as many as six drums for a grand total of thirty-six instruments. Tenor drums are usually used to accent snare drums, but they also add melodic percussion.
A set of four tenor drums will typically be arranged so that the lowest drum is on the player’s far left, the second lowest is on his far right, the second highest is on his middle left and the highest is on his middle right. When a tenor drum is played, it is struck near the edge of the head. Such a technique allows the drum to project optimum resonance and tone. As for the technique that governs switching from one drum to the next, there are two primary systems. The more common involves allowing the drumsticks to move across the drums in a straight line. This style reduces the amount of space the player must travel through, thereby quickening his execution. The other system dictates that the player follows an “arc” from one drum to the next. The arc system was more common in the earlier days of the tenor drum and is rarely used now.
The use of tenor drums in marching bands may probably be attributed to their traditional use in military drum corps. In these situations, the instruments re used for timekeeping as well as musical purposes. In a military drum corps, three types of tenor drum are used: the flourishing tenor, which is characterized by the player’s dramatic drumstick movements; the alto tenor, which is played in tandem with the bass drum; and the rhythm tenor, which is used to accent the snare drum part.
Source : Victor Epand | <urn:uuid:b4058db9-109f-4f5e-9e83-ab8746aeb8d5> | CC-MAIN-2020-50 | https://rebana.net/featured-articles/marching-bands/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2020-50/segments/1606141191692.20/warc/CC-MAIN-20201127103102-20201127133102-00049.warc.gz | en | 0.977369 | 706 | 2.78125 | 3 |
1. The problem statement, all variables and given/known data A 32 cm diameter conducting sphere is charged to 500 V relative to V=0 and r = infinity. (a) What is the surface charge density sigma? (b) At what distance will the potential due to the sphere be only 10 V? 2. Relevant equations 3. The attempt at a solution I know that to find the surface charge density I have to find charge/area. (Sigma = q/A) Finding the area just means finding the surface area of the sphere right? 4(pi)((0.16m)^2) Is the charge 500 V? It seems like charge should be expressed in coulombs. I'm not really sure how to get the charge of the sphere. Then to find the distance at which the potential is only 10 V Do I use V= (1/4(pi)(eo)* sigma/r? where r is that distance and V = 10V? | <urn:uuid:c7fa25e7-a9a4-46a7-aba8-2a1e47eea764> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/conducting-sphere-problem.184403/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560282202.61/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095122-00543-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942968 | 204 | 3.140625 | 3 |
A team of bioengineers has announced it's one step closer to
creating a four-organ human replica for experimentation.
Much of the work currently being done to engineer human organs
through 3D printing and various other techniques is not carried out
with the aim of delivering a fully-fledged implantable transplant
candidate. Of course that's the ultimate aim, but for now these tiny replicas -- sometimes only half a millimetre in size for
the sake of cost -- are being developed to test drugs.
A multi-institutional team is attempting to engineer a connected
human liver, heart, lung and kidney for this purpose through a
five-year $19 million (£11 million) project known as Advanced
Tissue-engineered Human Ectypal Network Analyser (Athena -- there's
a backronym if ever we heard one). And it's just engineered a 3D
human liver that will respond to toxic chemicals in the same way
the real thing might, according to a press release published at esciencenews.com. The drug tested was acetaminophen, commonly
found in painkillers and harmful to the liver in high doses.
"The original impetus for this research comes from the problems
we are having in developing new drugs," said John Wikswo, director
of the Vanderbilt Institute for Integrative Biosystems Research and
Education, who made the announcement at the Society of Toxicology
meeting in Phoenix this week. "A number of promising new drugs that
looked good in conventional cell culture and animal trials have
failed when they were tested in humans, many due to toxic effects.
That represents more than $1 billion in effort down the drain." The
hope is, that rather than testing "first in line" cells, testing on
a functioning organ replica will deliver more accurate results.
This has the potential for huge cost savings, but could of course
potentially get the right drugs, to the right people, much
The project is a huge feat, with experts in the different organs
called in from institutes in Berlin, California and Harvard, a team
developing hardware to test it and another engineering the blood
surrogate that will sustain the tiny organs. It was the Berlin
team, based at Charité Universitätsmedizin, which has now
engineered the four-layer, 3D liver measuring one tenth of a
"We have picked a scale that is between microhuman and
millihuman," commented Rashi Iyer of the Los Alamos National
Laboratory, who is coordinating Athena. "I think the success that
we are having with our liver device means that we have hit the
Vital to keeping costs down, the team managed to create a mini
perfusion system to sustain the organ, costing 40 times less that
the original system, as well as an ion mobility-mass spectrometer
that is used to track cell activity at a molecular level as they
react to the drugs -- in this case, the acetaminophen.
Wikswo did not say how long the cells could be sustained for in
experiments, but the hope is it will be able to reach one month
eventually. A liver replicated by a team at US biotechnology firm
Organovo, by comparison, managed to keep its 3D replica alive for
just five days, but still had plans to sell the tissue this
year following further development. | <urn:uuid:290df671-796f-499d-956d-1ab9f24f757d> | CC-MAIN-2015-48 | http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-03/27/building-a-liver | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-48/segments/1448398456289.53/warc/CC-MAIN-20151124205416-00268-ip-10-71-132-137.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95208 | 723 | 2.953125 | 3 |
We have been learning about World War II and the effect of war on peoples lives. We learnt what people did to protect themselves during the air raids. We now know about black outs, putting tape on the windows and the shelters that people went to when the air raid siren sounded. Some people sort safety in the underground tunnels, some had a Morrison shelter in their homes and some built Anderson shelters in the garden. One of our homework assignments was to make a model of a war time shelter. These are some of our excellent efforts. | <urn:uuid:114d3113-242d-4cd4-a519-349e0433c241> | CC-MAIN-2021-17 | https://www.st-pauls-warton.lancs.sch.uk/history/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2021-17/segments/1618038879305.68/warc/CC-MAIN-20210419080654-20210419110654-00541.warc.gz | en | 0.974625 | 107 | 3.03125 | 3 |
How did evolution generate the extraordinary diversity of vertebrates on land? Zero species are known prior to ~380 million years ago, and more than 30,000 are present today. An expansionist model suggests this was achieved by large and unbounded increases, leading to substantially greater diversity in the present than at any time in the geological past. This model contrasts starkly with empirical support for constrained diversification in marine animals, suggesting different macroevolutionary processes on land and in the sea. We quantify patterns of vertebrate standing diversity on land during the Mesozoic–early Paleogene interval, applying sample-standardization to a global fossil dataset containing 27,260 occurrences of 4,898 non-marine tetrapod species. Our results show a highly stable pattern of Mesozoic tetrapod diversity at regional and local levels, underpinned by a weakly positive, but near-zero, long-term net diversification rate over 190 million years. Species diversity of non-flying terrestrial tetrapods less than doubled over this interval, despite the origins of exceptionally diverse extant groups within mammals, squamates, amphibians, and dinosaurs. Therefore, although speciose groups of modern tetrapods have Mesozoic origins, rates of Mesozoic diversification inferred from the fossil record are slow compared to those inferred from molecular phylogenies. If high speciation rates did occur in the Mesozoic, then they seem to have been balanced by extinctions among older clades. An apparent 4-fold expansion of species richness after the Cretaceous/Paleogene (K/Pg) boundary deserves further examination in light of potential taxonomic biases, but is consistent with the hypothesis that global environmental disturbances such as mass extinction events can rapidly adjust limits to diversity by restructuring ecosystems, and suggests that the gradualistic evolutionary diversification of tetrapods was punctuated by brief but dramatic episodes of radiation.
Vertebrates invaded the land more than 360 million years ago. Since then, they diversified to more than 30,000 tetrapod species today, including birds, mammals, squamates, and amphibians. The fossil record provides our best window onto diversification across such long spans of time, but is unevenly sampled. Previous studies counted observed families of fossil tetrapods and supported an expansionist model, entailing large and unbounded diversity increases through time. We applied methods that correct for differences in sampling through time and space to a comprehensive species-level database of Mesozoic to early Cenozoic fossil tetrapods. We find strong evidence that tetrapod diversity increased during the Mesozoic, but that the long-term net rate of diversification was low; species richness only doubled or tripled over 190 million years. This is enigmatic because today’s high biodiversity could not have been realised at such a slow rate. Diversification rates must have been much higher during other intervals, or rapid diversification might have been concentrated during brief episodes such as the earliest Cenozoic. Patterns of diversification on geological timescales and their relationships to hypothesised drivers such as ecological opportunity and environmental volatility must receive renewed scrutiny if we are to understand how land vertebrates and other animals attained the high biodiversity seen today.
Citation: Benson RBJ, Butler RJ, Alroy J, Mannion PD, Carrano MT, Lloyd GT (2016) Near-Stasis in the Long-Term Diversification of Mesozoic Tetrapods. PLoS Biol 14(1): e1002359. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1002359
Academic Editor: Anthony D. Barnosky, University of California, Berkeley, UNITED STATES
Received: September 4, 2015; Accepted: December 15, 2015; Published: January 25, 2016
This is an open access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication.
Data Availability: Our data and analytical scripts are available at DRYAD (http://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.9fr76).
Funding: RJB received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme 2014–2018 under grant agreement 637483 (ERC Starting Grant: TERRA). PDM is supported by an Imperial College London Junior Research Fellowship and Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship (ECF-2014- 398 662). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Abbreviations: K/Pg, Cretaceous/Paleogene; Ma, mega-annum; Myr, million years; SQS, shareholder quorum subsampling
Tetrapods, the limbed vertebrates, include mammals, amphibians, and reptiles (including birds), and today comprise more than 30,000 species. Alongside plants and insects, they are key components of the non-marine biota and play a diverse range of ecological roles. Patterns of tetrapod diversification from their Late Devonian origin to the present day are therefore central to understanding the evolution of terrestrial ecosystems.
Almost all extant tetrapod species belong to just a few hyper-diverse groups, including neoavian birds, placental mammals, frogs, and squamates (e.g., ). Although both fossils and molecular clock analyses indicate Mesozoic origins for these hyper-diverse groups [2–7], there is significant controversy over the timing of major increases in their species diversity. This controversy is embodied by disagreements about the divergence times of Placentalia and Neoaves, the clades that include most extant mammal and bird species. For example, fossils suggest that placental mammals were either absent, or so rare as to be undiscovered, prior to the end of the Cretaceous , and phylogenomic studies of birds indicate that deep neoavian divergences were concentrated in the earliest part of the Cenozoic . This evidence contradicts most other molecular clock estimates, which imply substantial origination of higher taxa within Placentalia and substantial species diversification within Neoaves before the Cenozoic. Nevertheless, the timings of deep divergences within extant tetrapod clades have generally been interpreted as supporting an “expansionist” mode of diversification, under which unbounded and essentially exponential diversification led to significant, near-continuous increases in species richness on land, especially since the late Mesozoic [2,10,11].
Patterns of fossil tetrapod diversity have also been interpreted as evidence of expansionist diversification on land [2,10–14]. This contrasts with strong evidence for constrained diversification in the fossil records of shallow marine animals [15–19], planktonic Foraminifera [20,21], North American mammals , and mammalian subgroups [23–25]. These groups have rich, densely sampled fossil records that demonstrate the existence of diversity-dependent controls of diversity patterns. Under diversity dependence, speciation rates, extinction rates, or both vary with standing diversity such that net diversification rates approach zero or become negative when diversity is high [15,26–28]. This has the general effect of “flattening” diversity curves and generating long intervals of near-static diversity, but need not imply a permanently fixed upper limit to species richness (e.g., ). The population- and community-level processes causing diversity dependence on macroevolutionary scales are not well understood. However, it is possible that the availability of ecological opportunity regulates species richness within local communities via agonistic interspecies interactions such as competition over finite resources, thereby influencing global patterns of diversification through time [15,17,29].
The question of whether expansionist [2,30] or more constrained [15,16,18,31] patterns of diversification characterise the evolution of life on Earth is among the most contentious macroevolutionary questions [10,28,29,32,33]. Its answer has substantial implications for the origins and future of the enormous scope of extant biodiversity (estimated at 2–8 million species ), and for assessing whether equilibrial processes inferred from the study of island biogeography are applicable to global spatial scales and geological time spans [26–28,32]. Animal diversity on land is especially high, comprising 75%–95% of multicellular species on Earth [35,36], and evolved in significantly less time than did the lower diversity of marine animals . This observation has been used to justify an “emerging consensus” that species diversification on land was essentially exponential, irrespective of the evidence for constrained diversification in the marine realm [10,11].
The expansionist paradigm implies that ecological constraints on diversification rates are either non-existent or unimportant in determining patterns of global diversification on geological timescales [2,32]. This could be possible if competitive ecological interactions among species are rare, or if their effects are typically weakened by evolved responses such as niche partitioning (e.g., [29,37]). Under an expansionist model, per-lineage net diversification rates in major clades of terrestrial animals have been positive and high on long timescales, commensurate with the attainment of high biodiversity in the present (although other patterns, such as mass extinction events and adaptive radiations, may be evident on shorter timescales) [2,13]. This model implies that substantial relative increases in species richness should occur during time intervals spanning hundreds of millions of years. Nevertheless, patterns of diversity across all tetrapods on land and their implications for macroevolutionary dynamics at larger scales have not been rigorously characterised on geological timescales, so this prediction has not been explicitly tested.
So far, the fossil evidence for strongly expansionist diversification on land is based on iterations of a 30-year-old compendium of the geological ranges of non-marine tetrapod families [12,38]. This range-based, family-level approach has three shortcomings. Firstly, although range-based approaches have some utility in filling the unsampled gaps within fossil taxon ranges, counts of range-based data do not address core biases affecting fossil diversity counts, such as uneven sampling of specimens, environments, or geographic space through geological time, or the “Pull of the Recent” and related effects [19,39–41]. Range-based approaches are also prone to edge effects (; an issue that also applies to phylogenetic diversity estimates ). Secondly, the composition of taxonomic families is determined by an inconsistent set of subjective criteria including phenotypic distinctiveness, species diversity, and phylogenetic monophyly (e.g., ). We do not know the “perceptual algorithms” governing the delimitation of named clades such as families, or how their application varies among geological intervals or across the Tree of Life. However, we do know that they can profoundly bias studies of diversification . Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the processes of evolutionary diversification act directly only on individual evolving lineages and so are most adequately represented at species level.
We analysed non-marine (terrestrial plus freshwater) diversity patterns across Tetrapoda, applying sample standardization approaches [18,46] to species occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database (http://paleobiodb.org), accessed via Fossilworks (http://fossilworks.org) on 22 January 2015. These data result from a concerted effort to document the Mesozoic–early Paleogene (Ypresian) tetrapod fossil record, led by the authors of this paper, and representing an estimated 6,520 h of work by more than 70 contributors . Flying taxa with Lagerstätten-dominated records (birds, bats, pterosaurs) that provide little robust information on species richness were excluded from our analyses, the implications of which are discussed below (see Materials and Methods and Results and Discussion).
Results and Discussion
Analytical Results: Observed Diversity Counts
“Face-value” observed counts of genera and species occurring globally within time bins approximating 9 million years (Myr) (S1 Table; S1 Appendix) provide little support for exponential diversity increases during the Mesozoic. These counts resemble previously reported global tetrapod family counts [12,38] in several details, including the occurrence of Paleogene diversity levels that are several times greater than those of most Mesozoic intervals (Fig 1). Furthermore, within the Mesozoic, direct counts of families, genera, and species are all highest in the final two stages, the Campanian and Maastrichtian (Fig 1). Nevertheless, counts of genera and species show different long-term patterns than counts of families.
(A) Families (from ), (B) genera, and (C) species. Dashed lines are general linear models predicting taxon counts from geological age in mega-annum (Ma) for the entire Mesozoic, modelling taxon counts as a Poisson distribution and using a ln() link function (coefficients in Table 1). The data displayed in this figure can be accessed at http://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.9fr76 .
General linear models assuming a negative binomial error distribution and ln() link function were used to predict global family counts from geological age across the entire Mesozoic. We found a statistically significant, negative slope that is robust to the exclusion of influential data points (Table 1), indicating a long-term trend of increasing family counts through time. By contrast, statistically significant trends in genus and species counts are only supported if the first Triassic time bin (Tr1; S1 Table), an influential data point with high leverage, is excluded (Table 1). Furthermore, the significance of this increase is largely due to the occurrence of high taxon counts in the final two time bins of the Cretaceous (K7 and K8), and the slope becomes marginally non-significant when these time bins are also excluded (Table 1). Notably, Late Triassic and latest Jurassic taxon counts also exceed those of most Cretaceous time bins. These observations indicate either that substantial species and genus diversification occurred only in the latest Mesozoic or that oversampling of latest Mesozoic terrestrial faunas has inflated face-value diversity counts for the Campanian and Maastrichtian. The latter possibility is more consistent with our further analytical results, described below. The observation that counts of lower-level taxa do not show a robust trend of Mesozoic increase (Fig 1B and 1C; Table 1) refutes the proposition that species counts should reveal the hypothesised underlying exponential nature of diversification more prominently than do studies at higher taxonomic levels [30,49,50].
Pooled regional face-value genus and species counts (Fig 2) also show no evidence for a Mesozoic trend of increase. General linear models predicting these counts using geological age across the Mesozoic have non-significant slopes (Table 2). Taxon counts for the first time bin (Tr1) in Asia and Africa, and for the last two time bins (K7, K8; S1 Table) in North America are identified as influential data points with high leverage. Significant negative slopes are obtained only when the influential Tr1 data points are excluded from the analysis on their own, and not when all influential data points are excluded together (Table 2). The absence of a trend of increasing regional taxon counts through the Mesozoic is consistent with the observation that most continental regions lack any Late Cretaceous increase (Fig 2), with the exception of North America, where Campanian and Maastrichtian deposits are disproportionately well sampled, with approximately six to eight times as many collections as are known from the most intensively sampled time intervals in regions outside of North America, or two to three times as many collections as the most highly sampled other North American intervals (Fig 2C).
(A) Genera, (B) species, (C) collections yielding non-marine tetrapod fossils. Dashed lines in A and B are general linear models predicting taxon counts from geological age for the entire Mesozoic, modelling taxon counts as a Poisson distribution and using a ln() link function (coefficients in Table 2). The data displayed in this figure can be accessed at http://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.9fr76 .
Analytical Results: Subsampled Diversity and Paleogeographic Bias.
Uneven fossil record sampling may substantially bias directly counted diversity patterns. To address this, we applied equal-coverage or shareholder quorum subsampling (SQS) to standardise sampling among time bins. Most subsampling approaches, including SQS, require that geographic spread is held approximately constant to allow meaningful comparison of regional gamma diversities (e.g., ). However, both directly counted and subsampled patterns of “global” richness are biased by differences in paleogeographic sample spread, estimated as the length of the minimum spanning tree uniting the paleocoordinates of non-marine tetrapod-bearing localities for each interval (Fig 3). This bias is evidenced by strong, statistically significant, positive correlations, a pattern that is similar to geographic bias in the marine invertebrate and Miocene North American mammal fossil records and which explains 72% of the variance in global subsampled species counts (Fig 3D) and 62% of the variance in directly observed species counts (Fig 3C).
Using (A) genus counts, (B) subsampled genera, (C) species counts, and (D) subsampled species. Paleogeographic spreads are the minimum spanning tree lengths in km. Subsampled values were obtained using a quorum of 0.4. Correlation coefficients and p-values from Pearson’s correlation tests are reported in the top-left of each panel. Abbreviated interval names are given in full in S1 Table. The data displayed in this figure can be accessed at http://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.9fr76 .
The minimum spanning trees for global fossil localities circumscribe planetary spatial scales from 9,500 km to 68,800 km, with a range that is comparable to the circumference of the Earth (~40,075 km). At this scale, the correlation between paleogeographic sample spread and diversity could result from either or both of two possibilities: (1) A direct bias model, in which the correlation is due to variation in the number of distinct global regions for which data are available in each time bin (assuming that each region existed even during intervals in which it is unsampled). (2) A “common cause” model, in which processes such as sea level changes, orogeny, and rifting determine the absolute sizes of individual regions, thereby determining both paleogeographic sample spread and species richness via species-area effects (e.g., ). Both models assume that a species-area relationship exists (i.e., that available land area constrains species diversity). They differ in that the direct bias model assumes that differences in the area sampled for each interval result from bias, whereas the common cause model assumes that they result from actual changes in the ancient Earth system.
We tested between these alternatives by examining the correlations and partial correlations between taxonomic richness measures and three measures of the geographic distribution of localities: (1) counts of geographically “long” branches of our minimum spanning trees, representing the number of distinct global regions sampled; (2) counts of geographically “short” branches of our minimum spanning trees, representing the addition of fossil localities to regions that have already been sampled; and (3) the summed lengths of geographically “short” branches of our minimum spanning trees, representing the geographic spread of localities within local regions. There is no clear distinction between “short” and “long” branches in our minimum spanning trees. However, histograms of the frequency distributions of branch lengths in the intervals with the greatest total geographic spread suggest that a frequency transition occurs somewhere between 100 and 1,000 km (S1 Fig), so we performed analyses at several “threshold” branch lengths between these values, and up to 2,000 km. In general, counts of long branches are strongly and significantly correlated with both of our “short branch” measures (Table 3), indicating that intervals with more sampled regions also have greater total local sampling.
All three of our geographic distribution measures are strongly and significantly correlated with face-value counts of both genera and species over the full range of thresholds examined (Table 3). Counts of long branches retain strong and significant relationships with taxon counts when conditioned on counts of short branches, but they have a non-significant relationship with taxon counts when conditioned on the summed lengths of short branches at thresholds of 500 and 1,000 km. Counts of long branches have strong and significant or near significant (p = 0.054; subsampled species | threshold = 1,000 km) correlations with subsampled species and genus diversity estimates (Table 3), and retain substantial power to explain subsampled diversity estimates (R2 > 0.45 [species]; R2 > 0.35 [genera]) when conditioned on both of our of short branch measures. The variance explained by partial correlation for long branch counts is greater than that for short branch measures when conditioned on counts of long branches in almost all cases, with exceptions only at a threshold of 1,000 km (Table 3).
The results described above suggest that both directly counted and subsampled diversity measures are at least partly explained by the number of distinct global regions sampled. This indicates that sampling bias determines global richness patterns in the tetrapod fossil record. In fact, these “global” patterns result from a heterogeneous assemblage of regional patterns, and the presence of sample spread bias seriously undermines the use of global fossil occurrence data as an adequate summary of standing diversity through time. Therefore, we report subsampling results for contiguous continental regions defined in S2 Table (S1 Appendix), and not for the entire planet taken as a whole.
No individual region is represented sufficiently well to provide a continuous time series of subsampled diversity. However, variation in paleogeographic sample spread and paleolatitude among regions and through time could bias a pooled regional analysis. To investigate this, we compared regional subsampled diversities to regional minimum spanning tree lengths and paleolatitudinal centroids (median paleolatitudes of collections) across the Mesozoic, using general linear models with a Gaussian error distribution and ln() link function (Fig 4; Table 1). In univariate comparisons, subsampled diversity has significant positive relationships with geographic spread, but not with absolute paleolatitude, and a significant negative relationship with geological time (Table 4), indicating higher subsampled diversity estimates in younger time bins. Comparisons of the AICc-weights of regression models including combinations of time, geographic spread and paleolatitude as explanatory variables indicate that a univariate model explaining regional subsampled diversities using only geographic spread (AICc-weight = 0.50) is more likely than one using geological time (= 0.12), and substantially more likely than one using paleolatitude (= 0.02). The second best model (AICc-weight = 0.18), is one in which time is included as an explanatory variable together with geographic spread in a multiple regression. In this model, the slope of geological time is reduced to approximately half of its value in a univariate model (Table 4: from -0.00335 to -0.00148) and is non-significant, whereas the slope of geographic spread is reduced by less, and becomes marginally non-significant (Table 4: from 0.0000489 to 0.0000356). The slope of paleolatitude is non-significant in all models (Table 4).
(A) Regional subsampled species diversity versus paleogeographic spread. (B) Regional subsampled species diversity versus paleolatitudinal centroid (positivised value). (C) Regional paleogeographic spreads versus geological age (Ma). (D) Regional paleolatitudinal centroids versus geological age (Ma). Paleogeographic spreads are the minimum spanning tree lengths in km. Subsampled values were obtained using a quorum of 0.4. Correlation coefficients and p-values from Pearson’s correlation tests are reported in the top-left panels A and B. Abbreviated interval names are given in full in S1 Table. The data displayed in this figure can be accessed at http://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.9fr76 .
The correlation of subsampled diversity with within-region geographic sample spread could be explained in one of two possible ways, as discussed above for “global” diversity. The first is that variation in paleogeographic spread among regions and intervals systematically biases our subsampled diversity estimates, artifactually enhancing the trend towards increasing subsampled diversity through time, and increasing the scatter of subsampled diversities. The second is that the correlation between paleogeographic spread and subsampled regional diversity results from a common-cause process, in which a third variable such as continental flooding drives both genuine biodiversity and changes in regional sample spreads, as is well-documented in shallow marine biotas (e.g., ). We cannot presently distinguish between these two hypotheses, so we discuss results for the relationship between time and subsampled diversity estimates under both models.
Analytical Results: Subsampled Diversity Patterns
Regional subsampling results indicate a protracted interval of only limited increases in standing diversity spanning the entire Mesozoic (Fig 5A). Similar subsampled diversity estimates were obtained for widely separated time intervals such as the Maastrichtian (72.1–66 mega-annum [Ma]) and Kimmeridgian–Tithonian (157–145 Ma) of Europe, and the Kimmeridgian–Tithonian and Norian (228–208 Ma) of North America (Fig 5A and 5E–5G). The sporadic availability of data that is rich enough for rigorous diversity estimates makes it difficult to infer short-term patterns of change in standing diversity, although Cretaceous values seem generally higher than those of the Triassic and Jurassic. Nevertheless, we are able to estimate the resultant long-term net diversification rate using general linear models (Table 4), acknowledging that this represents a simplification of potentially more complex short-term patterns.
(A) Subsampled species diversity within continental regions for a quorum of 0.4. The dashed line in A is the general linear model predicting subsampled regional diversity from geological age for the entire Mesozoic, modelling taxon counts as a Gaussian distribution and using a ln() link function (coefficients in Table 4). (B–D) Subsampled diversities for mammals (B), herps (C; non-mammalian, non-dinosaurian tetrapods), and dinosaurs (D). (E–G) Subsampling curves for (E) the Triassic–Early Jurassic of North America, Asia, and South Africa, (F) the Jurassic–Cretaceous of North America and Europe, and (G) the Cretaceous–Palaeogene of North America. The vertical, dashed grey lines in E–G indicate the target quorum of 0.4. An asterisk is placed in the same location of plots E–G to aid comparison. The data displayed in this figure can be accessed at http://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.9fr76 .
The general linear model using geological time to explain subsampled diversity, pooled across geographic regions for the entire Mesozoic, demonstrates only a very weak, but significant slope (Fig 5A; Table 4; p = 0.02), indicating a trivial net diversification rate of 0.00335 ln(species)/Myr (±2 standard errors yields 0.00089–0.00581 ln(species)/Myr). This implies an expected increase in species richness of 0.637 ln(species), or 89% over c.190 Myr (±2 standard errors yields 18%–202%; and when within-region geographic spread is considered to be a bias the net diversification rate is reduced to 0.00148 ln(species)/Myr, predicting a diversity increase of 32%; Table 4). This expected value is equivalent to less than one net speciation per lineage, and comparable to three standard deviations of the regression residuals (s.d. = 0.28). Therefore, short-term diversity fluctuations and statistical counting error have a similar magnitude to our estimate of the long-term expansion of diversity through the Mesozoic. The failure of short-term and inter-regional diversity variations to sum to a greater long-term change would be direct evidence of diversity dependence if we could demonstrate that the proportion of these short-term variations attributable to counting error was low [22,57].
Our estimated long-term diversification rate of 0.00335 ln(species)/Myr is particularly striking in context of the increase in tetrapod diversity that must have occurred during the c.130 million years prior to our study interval, from the Late Devonian origin of tetrapods to the early Mesozoic, which entailed substantially more than a doubling of diversity (e.g., [38,58,59]). This can be demonstrated by approximation, assuming that Late Permian diversity was comparable to Early Triassic diversity, which is estimated from the general linear model of subsampled diversity on time as 2.62 ln(subsampled species). The transition from ln(1) to ln(2.62) over 130 million years implies a Paleozoic long-term net diversification rate of 0.0202 ln(species)/Myr, which would generate more than a 40-fold increase in diversity over 190 Myr of Mesozoic time. This estimate is conservative: it could only increase if Late Permian diversity was higher than that of the Early Triassic, as is possible due to the occurrence of the Permian/Triassic boundary mass extinction event (e.g., ). The overall pattern therefore seems to be one of substantial reductions in the long-term net diversification rate of tetrapods during the Paleozoic and Mesozoic, representing the first 87% of their evolutionary history.
Furthermore, equation A25 of reference (see Materials and Methods: Raup Equation) gives the expected diversity of a clade after a specified time under specified birth and death rates, conditioned on the observation that the clade survived until that time had elapsed. We assumed that the tetrapod crown group originated 100 Myr earlier in the Late Carboniferous, and then specified a net diversification rate of 0.00335 ln(species)/Myr (conservatively assuming the higher diversification rate implied by a direct bias model), and per-lineage death rates of 0.10, 0.15, 0.20, 0.25, and 0.30 ln(extinctions)/Myr (centred on values estimated for Cenozoic North American mammals ). This gives expected Early Triassic regional diversities of 13.3, 19.2, 25.2, 31.1, and 37.0 species. We do not know the actual (rather than observed or subsampled) regional diversities of any studied intervals. However, these expected values of Late Palaeozoic regional diversity obtained under the estimated Mesozoic net diversification rate are lower than the face-value regional species counts of Tr1 in Asia (121 species), Africa (96 species), and Europe (41 species), and of Tr2 in South America (34 species). The diversity counts for these relatively well-sampled regions are not corrected for the possible existence of multiple chronofaunas that could cause counts to exceed the standing diversity at any single time horizon, and they immediately follow the Permian/Triassic extinction event rather than representing Late Permian diversity.
An abrupt and substantial increase in regional subsampled diversity is apparent in the earliest Paleogene, following the end-Cretaceous mass extinction 66 Mya (Fig 5A). This increment cannot be explained by bias due to paleogeographic sample spread, which does not change over the boundary (Fig 4C). It results entirely from an increase in mammalian species diversity (Fig 5B) [62,63], which is disproportionately large compared to the loss of dinosaur diversity (Fig 5D). The diversity of non-dinosaurian, non-mammalian tetrapods (“herps”; Fig 5C) does not change substantially over the Cretaceous/Paleogene (K/Pg) boundary on the temporal resolution of our study, although a major, short-term K/Pg turnover certainly occurred among herps, including squamates . Nevertheless, our subsampling results tentatively suggest a doubling of herp diversity around the Jurassic/Cretaceous boundary (Fig 5; S1 Fig; S1 Appendix), consistent with patterns of subsampled fossil turtle diversity .
One possibility is that a taxonomic restructuring of terrestrial ecosystems at the K/Pg boundary rapidly established a new dinosaurian/mammalian diversity equilibrium that substantially exceeded the Mesozoic baseline. Such rapid equilibration could only be possible under strong diversity-dependence of diversification rates (e.g., [28,46]). However, mammals, which have increased proportional representation in Cenozoic ecosystems, possess complex teeth, allowing more precise taxonomic identifications from highly fragmentary material than can be diagnosed in fossils of the other highly diverse extant clades (lissamphibians, squamates, and birds), and potentially also Mesozoic dinosaurs. The relatively greater ability to diagnose mammalian species based on fragmentary fossil remains compared to non-mammalian tetrapods is evident in our results: the ratio of mammalian species to species of lissamphibians plus squamates on Earth today is about 1:3, but our subsampled diversity estimates from fossil data yield a ratio of >5:1 in the Paleocene. This suggests that an increase in the proportion of mammalian species within the total terrestrial tetrapod fauna should result in an increase in apparent species diversity in the fossil record, even in the absence of any change in actual tetrapod diversity. It is therefore possible that this apparent Paleocene increase in diversity at least partly reflects a change in the nature of terrestrial vertebrate taxonomy, and is not necessarily a genuine evolutionary phenomenon.
Alpha Diversity Patterns
Patterns of tetrapod alpha diversity, measured as counts of taxa found within individual fossil localities, are consistent with slow Mesozoic diversification among non-flying tetrapods. Specimens that are taxonomically determinate at the species level are present in 4,357 Mesozoic localities. Of these, just a handful of localities yield substantially greater species counts than most others, including the Late Triassic Placerias Quarry of North America (e.g., ), Late Jurassic Como Bluff Quarry 9 of North America (e.g., ) and Guimarota Mine of Portugal , and the Late Cretaceous Lull 2 Quarry and Bushy Tailed Blowout of North America (Fig 6A). The rare and sporadic occurrence of maximally-diverse fossil localities presents a challenge concerning our ability to resolve patterns of local diversity in the fossil record. Nevertheless, the diversities of these maximally diverse localities increases approximately 3-fold through the Mesozoic, or 2-fold if specifically indeterminate occurrences, which can represent the occurrences of distinct clades and are therefore relevant to diversity counts, are included (Fig 6B). These values are comparable to the diversity increase estimated from regional subsampled diversities.
(A) Alpha diversity excluding records that are indeterminate at the species level. (B) Alpha diversity including records that are indeterminate at the species level. (C) Per-interval global locality counts (black). (D) Per-interval global bulk sampled locality counts. In all panels, localities that have not been bulk sampled for microvertebrate remains are shown in grey and localities that have been bulk sampled are shown in red. The data displayed in this figure can be accessed at http://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.9fr76 .
It is notable that the maximal within-locality counts generally occur within those intervals containing the greatest numbers of localities such as the Norian (Triassic 4), Kimmeridgian–Tithonian (Jurassic 6), Campanian and Maastrichtian (Cretaceous 7 and 8), suggesting that the intensity of fossil collection activities plays a role in determining the apparent diversity of local communities sampled in the fossil record. Notably, almost all the localities exhibiting high species richness have been intensively bulk sampled for microvertebrate remains—the highest maximal species richness occurs in the latest Cretaceous (Campanian and Maastrichtian) North American localities, which have been intensively bulk sampled (Fig 6D). At present, within-locality taxon counts do not suggest any increase in diversity during the early Cenozoic.
The results of our alpha diversity analyses should be treated as “first pass” estimates that should be investigated in more detail by future studies, because (1) we did not apply subsampling methods, (2) we did not consider potential environmental or paleogeographical differences between these localities that might affect diversity counts, (3) we did not study the specimens known from these localities to determine the minimum taxon count based on unreported or undiagnosed material, and (4) we did not quantify biases resulting from the likely increased ability of taxonomists to identify fragmentary specimens belonging to extant clades—a bias that could cause relative underestimation of alpha diversity in the Triassic, preceding the origins of most tetrapod crown groups.
Near-Stasis in Mesozoic Tetrapod Diversification
The Mesozoic–early Cenozoic has previously been regarded as an episode of unbounded diversification, culminating in substantially increased tetrapod diversity on land [2,10–13]. In contrast to this paradigm, our analyses indicate less than a doubling of tetrapod diversity through the Mesozoic, and imply a near-zero long-term net diversification rate. Substantial increases in regional tetrapod diversity were absent from the entire Mesozoic, both for directly counted and subsampled fossil species (Figs 1C and 5). Furthermore, a possible dramatic expansion of tetrapod diversity occurred in the early Paleogene. Our conclusions are strongest if differences in paleogeographic sample spread among regions and intervals are considered to be a bias, in which case Mesozoic regional tetrapod diversity is estimated as being almost static on long time scales (Table 4). Furthermore, first-pass maximal alpha diversity estimates also indicate slow diversification rates (Fig 6), demonstrating that similar patterns occur at local and regional geographic scales. This is consistent with, though not conclusive for, the hypothesis that ecological constraints within local communities could slow diversity increases and thereby regulate diversity at larger scales [28,70]. Our results do not exclude the possibility that an increase in the number of distinct biogeographic regions due to continental fragmentation during the Cretaceous resulted in a greater increase in global diversity than that seen in regional diversities.
Our estimated long-term net diversification rates of 0.00335 or 0.00148 ln(species)/Myr are 1–2 orders of magnitude less than those reported from studies of extant tetrapods (e.g., [1,6]). This difference is unlikely to be explained by underestimation of absolute biodiversity resulting from the incompleteness of the fossil record: estimated diversification rates rely only on accurate inference of relative, not absolute, changes in diversity through time; although we cannot altogether rule out any contribution of fossil record biases (e.g., the possibility that preservational biases could mask an increase in the diversity of small-bodied taxa). Regardless of fossil record biases, a difference between net diversification rates estimated from fossils and those from extant taxa might be expected, because even the richest phylogenies of living taxa lack information on the contributions of entirely extinct clades to diversity dynamics [23,71,72]. Specifically, the contributions of extinct clades and stem groups to total extinction rates cannot easily be estimated from extant-only datasets, and the proportion of entirely extinct clades is likely to increase systematically further back in time from the present. This should cause over-estimation of net diversification rates within inclusive and ancient clades such as Tetrapoda based on the study of living taxa alone. The discrepancy between Mesozoic diversification rates inferred from fossils and diversification rates inferred from living tetrapod phylogenies could also be explained if Cenozoic diversification rates (which are the primary object of inference from living tetrapod phylogenies) substantially exceeded those of the Mesozoic.
Another explanation is plausible if tetrapod subclades show waxing/waning dynamics, as documented in invertebrate genera and mammalian families [23,73,74]. If the dynamics of subclades were asynchronous, whether this were due to diversity dependent interactions [25,75,76], variable environmental tolerances , or stochasticity, then the large diversity increases resulting from the waxing phases leading to speciose modern groups could be balanced on long timescales by the waning dynamics of groups that are extinct or depauperate today. This must have occurred in Cenozoic mammals, which show static and diversity-dependent diversification on large scales , which apparently results from a zero-sum game among smaller clades that individually exhibit waxing/waning dynamics [23,25].
Near-stasis in Mesozoic tetrapod diversification could be explained by any of three prominent hypotheses: (1) diversity-dependence of diversification rates, or “equilibrial” models, under which speciation and extinction rates become balanced at equilibrial diversity [15,26,27]; (2) the possibility of relatively stable long-term environments during the Mesozoic, which could lead to nearly static diversity under Vrba’s Turnover Pulse hypothesis ; or (3) a “damped exponential” model, in which unconstrained diversification is held in check by frequent, stochastic downwards perturbations [2,37,50]. Determining which of these alternatives, if any, provides a good explanation of the pattern requires further work, and we discuss each of them below.
The concept of diversity-dependence has been influential in the development of paleontological studies of diversification [15–17] and received significant recent attention from evolutionary biologists studying extant groups [21,28,32]. Recently, diversity dependence has been statistically demonstrated among those vertebrate and non-vertebrate groups that have sufficiently rich fossil records [15–25]. We note that “equilibrial” diversity is attained when the balance of speciation and extinction rates results in an approximately zero net diversification rate, as seen in our analyses. This need not imply that ecosystems are absolutely “saturated,” with all their niches filled. Slow increases in diversity equilibria are possible under a “damped increase” or similar diversity-dependent models in which ecological constraints impose limits to diversity that are increased by the evolutionary discovery of new niche spaces .
In the absence of a complete interval-to-interval data series allowing reliable estimation of short-term diversity changes, we cannot directly demonstrate diversity-dependence of tetrapod diversification rates on land using correlation tests (e.g., [16,17,20]) or other methods [22,25]. Nevertheless, rapid recovery of regional diversities following the Cretaceous/Palaeogene extinction event is predicted by diversity-dependence, and observed in our results. Furthermore, strong correlations with physically limiting variables such as palaeogeographic area can be seen as evidence of diversity-dependence because they demonstrate that standing diversity equilibriates rapidly to the availability of environmental resources [28,46]. Indeed, land area, one example of a potentially limiting environmental resource, is a key variable in MacArthur and Wilson’s equilibrial model of island biogeography , which is the foundation of diversity-dependent models in paleobiology and evolution [15,27]. The correlations documented here (Table 4) demonstrate scaling of diversity with geographic area, whether the geographic area spanned by fossil localities results from geographic sampling bias or from actual changes in land mass area.
We also document that a substantial decrease in long-term net diversification rates occurred through the Paleozoic–Mesozoic. Under diversity-dependence, this could be explained by the low initial diversity of Paleozoic tetrapods (presumably a single species), which would result in high net diversification rates compared to those of Mesozoic tetrapods. Decelerating diversification rates can also occur under alternative models . Of these, environment-driven bursts of diversification postulated under Vrba’s Turnover Pulse hypothesis are one alternative that is relevant to fossil record studies (i.e., it is not an analytical artefact of analysing phylogenies containing only extant taxa), and long time scales (i.e., it does not invoke short-term limits to speciation such as delayed post-speciation range expansion due to physiological conservatism or reproductive interference ).
Environment-driven bursts of speciation.
The Turnover Pulse Hypothesis, originally formulated to describe diversification among Neogene mammals in Africa during glacial/interglacial cycles , proposes that global climatic forcing influences patterns of diversification. Specifically, the appearance and removal of environmental barriers to species distributions via climate change is a prerequisite of turnover: lineages generally exhibit phenotypic stasis in the absence of turnover (i.e., a punctuated equilibrial mode occurs), and environmental oscillations past a threshold amplitude are therefore necessary to drive evolutionary innovation and diversification . This model could explain the variation in long-term net diversification rates documented here in the absence of diversity-dependent interactions among clades, if Mesozoic climates and environments were relatively stable compared to those of the Paleozoic and K/Pg boundary.
Although Mesozoic climates are often inferred to have been relatively stable, the Mesozoic was not free from climatic variation, and witnessed apparently extreme climatic events such as the early Turonian thermal maximum around 93 Mya, as well as subsequent global cooling towards the end of the Cretaceous (~75–66 Mya) . A key question, however, is how the timescale and amplitude of Mesozoic climate oscillations [80,81] compares to those occurring during the glacial/interglacial cycles of icehouse regimes, such as that of the late Palaeozoic (mid Carboniferous–early Late Permian; e.g., ), and during abrupt environmental deterioration at the end of the Cretaceous (e.g., ). The association between climatic variation and net diversification requires thorough investigation to address the question of whether Mesozoic climatic stability is a plausible explanation of slow net diversification rates.
“Damped exponential” model.
The damped exponential model was quantitatively formulated to describe clades whose diversification rates depended not only on within-clade standing diversity but also on the diversities of ecologically similar clades [75,76]. This represents a form of diversity dependence similar to that modelled recently in caniform mammals by reference . Nevertheless, the most frequent and recent model referred to as “damped exponential” is one in which fundamentally expansionist diversification, lacking diversity-dependence, is held in check by stochastic downward perturbations caused by frequent mass extinctions [2,37,50]. The predictions of this model, and its fit to real data, are not well constrained because it has not been subjected to significant quantitative examination. Nevertheless, it could result in small or negative long-term diversification rates across large clades, even if some individual subclades show high positive diversification rates on shorter timescales. The near-zero long-term net diversification rates recovered here during the Mesozoic indicate highly balanced speciation and extinction rates. Unlike the diversity-dependent and environment-driven models, the “damped exponential” model does not invoke any terms that specifically act to regulate diversification rates around zero. Therefore, under the “damped exponential” model, near-zero net diversification rates would be coincidental rather than expected, unless the model was modified in such a way that the timings or magnitudes of downward perturbations were diversity dependent.
Punctuated diversification on land.
The pattern of long-term stability and post-extinction radiation reported here in fossil tetrapods, if it is not an artefact of taxonomic practice, is similar to those observed in subsampled diversity curves for marine invertebrates , richness counts for vascular plant species in regional paleofloras [84,85], and possibly also counts of global insect families . These patterns, which are consistent with multiphase equilibrial models [27,29] and with the Turnover Pulse Hypothesis , suggest that substantial short-term increases in organismal diversity are infrequent and episodic at large taxonomic scales, despite their frequent occurrence at smaller taxonomic scales. There is nothing inconsistent or untoward about changes in equilibrial diversity levels through time under diversity dependence or “equilibrial models” (contra ; e.g., ). In fact, they are a central prediction of the ecological limits hypothesis, and can be explained by either the occurrence of environmental changes or the evolution of key innovations that influence ecosystem resource capacities (reviewed by ). For example, the Cretaceous origins of angiosperms with leaf venation features that increased photosynthetic capacities relative to gymnosperms coincides with a substantial increase in the alpha diversities of regional paleofloras [84,85,87,88]. Indeed, the mid-Cretaceous diversification of angiosperms has also been proposed to have enabled the radiations of the most diverse extant tetrapod clades (e.g., [2,3,5]).
If key innovations of the kind that substantially elevate standing diversity were sufficiently frequent, then this might allow a diversification pattern that is qualitatively “expansionist,” in which case, the rate of origination of key innovations would limit the expansion of biodiversity . This proposition has been framed by an expectation that key innovations evolve frequently and that they substantially increase global species diversity . Our results provide no evidence of this, suggesting instead that key innovations only occurred infrequently among Mesozoic tetrapods, or that most key innovations resulted only in minor relative increases in diversity that result only in a low long-term net rate of diversification. It is also possible that “slow fuse” lag times exist between the origins of major evolutionary innovations and the subsequent triggers (e.g., subsequent innovations or environmental triggers such as mass extinction events) that lead to exceptional diversification .
Flying tetrapods are not known prior to the Late Triassic but constitute a substantial portion of extant tetrapod diversity (~10,000 bird species and ~1,000 bat species). As such, it is intuitive to suggest that powered flight and invasion of the air is an exceptional key innovation. However, the lack of adequate information on patterns of bird, bat, or pterosaur richness makes it difficult to address key questions such as the timing and magnitude of increases in the diversity of flying taxa, especially among pterosaurs and flying stem-group birds, which could have been highly speciose by the Cretaceous [90,91]. Much of the diversity of extant flying groups results from Cenozoic rather than Mesozoic diversification; bats made their first fossil appearance only in the final time bin of our study interval, and phylogenomic studies suggest that most of the diversification of crown-group birds occurred during the Cenozoic .
Although the fossil record remains relatively silent on the standing diversities of birds and, also, amphibians , our study does include adequate data on other speciose modern groups: mammals and squamates. Despite the origins of diverse modern higher taxa, the standing diversity of non-flying Mesozoic tetrapods was relatively static, exhibiting a near-zero net long-term diversification rate that is not commensurate with the high living species diversities of these groups. Long-term patterns of tetrapod diversity seem to have been episodic, with long, stable intervals punctuated by major increases occurring under extreme environmental perturbations and the possible influence of exceptional, but highly rare, key innovations. This pattern contrasts with the apparently higher frequency of rapid radiations at lower taxonomic levels, and is not consistent with the expansionist paradigm of unbounded and essentially exponential diversification [2,10–14].
Macroevolutionary processes unfolding on geological timescales of hundreds of millions of years are responsible for the enormous biodiversity of living species. Diversification rates inferred on these timescales are slow compared to those inferred from molecular phylogenies of hyper-speciose living groups, and there is clearly a need to test the hypothesised evolutionary processes that might explain this discrepancy. A stronger understanding of these processes requires further interrogation of living and fossil datasets.
Materials and Methods
Mesozoic–Ypresian tetrapods were downloaded from the Paleobiology Database (http://paleobiodb.org), accessed via Fossilworks (http://fossilworks.org) on 22 January 2015. These data represent an estimated 6,520 hours of work, of which 88% was done, or authorised by, the first five authors of the present manuscript. The major contributors, in order of effort, are M. T. Carrano, J. Alroy, R. J. Butler, P. D. Mannion, R. B. J. Benson, A. M. Rees, W. Kiessling, M. E. Clapham, F. T. Fursich, M. Aberhan, and M. D. Uhen .
Our work included extensive checking of the completeness of the data, which we believe is essentially an accurate documentation of the literature on Mesozoic–Ypresian tetrapod taxonomy and occurrences. The data were processed by removing ootaxa, ichnotaxa, and marine taxa using a list of the names of genera, families, and higher taxa. Together, the remaining data comprise 27,260 global tetrapod occurrences of 4,898 species in 3,323 genera, spanning almost 205 million years. All data are available at DRYAD (http://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.9fr76) .
Equal-coverage, or shareholder quorum subsampling (SQS), tracks coverage of each subsampling pool represented by the species that have been drawn, thereby subsampling more intensively when underlying richness is higher [18,46]. The substantial advantage of SQS over other subsampling methods, such as classical rarefaction, is that it is robust to the tendency of those methods to flatten out diversity curves. A total of 10,000 subsampling trials were run in each iteration.
“Coverage” is the sum of the proportional frequencies of the species sampled (i.e., if one species constitutes 23% of occurrences within an interval, then it contributes a proportional frequency of 0.23 when it is sampled during subsampling draws), and coverage of observed data is modified to estimate the coverage of the real taxon distribution for each sample pool. This is achieved by multiplying coverage of the observed data by Good’s u: the proportion of occurrences representing non-singleton taxa [18,46], which is a measure of sample completeness. Each interval can therefore only be subsampled to a maximum quorum level equal to Good’s u for that interval, meaning fewer intervals/regions can be subsampled at higher quorum levels. For example, Fig 5G shows that the Carnian of North American has a relatively low proportion of non-singleton occurrences (<0.5) and could only be subsampled to a maximum quorum of 0.4, whereas the Maastrichtian of North America has been more completely sampled, and could be subsampled to a maximum quorum of 0.7. Results based on a minimum quorum level of 0.4 are shown in Fig 5A–5D, and other empirical analyses suggest that this level is sufficient to recover relative patterns of standing diversity . Indeed, similar results were obtained using different quorum levels (Fig 5E–5G) and for genera (S1 Fig).
Singleton taxa were defined based on occurrences within collections rather than publications ( contra [18,46]). Entire fossil collections, containing lists of species occurrences, were drawn. Previously, exclusion of either the most common taxon or the most diverse collection from each subsampling pool was proposed as a solution to Lagerstätten effects [18,46]. Instead of doing this, we excluded the three groups with Lagerstätten-dominated records: birds, bats, and pterosaurs [93–95]. The fossil records of these groups are dominated by a different taphonomic regime than those of other tetrapod groups, and do not provide sufficient information for meaningful subsampled diversity estimation. Furthermore, the well-known Early Cretaceous Jehol Biota Lagerstätten of China has thus far yielded a high reported proportion of singleton occurrences, and therefore did not achieve a sufficient quorum to be included in our analyses.
Because poorly studied spatiotemporal regions could appear well sampled for stochastic reasons, returning spuriously low subsampled diversity estimates, time bins with fewer than 20 publications were excluded from our analyses. Publications, rather than occurrences, were used as a criterion to ensure that a minimum level of taxonomic scrutiny had been applied to the fossils within each spatiotemporal region. Whenever a collection corresponding to a new publication was drawn, subsequent collections were drawn from that publication only until all or three collections from that publication had been sampled .
General Linear Models
We used general linear models to estimate the coefficients of relationships between richness measures (face-value taxon counts and subsampled diversity estimates; both globally and regionally) and candidate controlling variables such as time, geographic spread and regional paleolatitudinal centroids. Models were fit using the glm() function of the stats package of R version 3.1.0 for Gaussian error models and the glm.nb() function of the MASS package version 7.3.33 . A negative binomial distribution was used for comparisons of face-value count data, which are over-dispersed, integer-valued, and bounded at zero. Gaussian distributions were used for subsampled diversity estimates, which are continuous-valued and do not approach zero. Because diversity is generated by the process of lineage diversification, with higher absolute total rates when more lineages are present, ln() link functions were used in all analyses. The appropriateness of these distributions was confirmed by inspection of diagnostic plots using the glm.diag.plots() function of the boot package version 1.3–16 , and by comparing their AICc values to those of other distributions. The explanatory power of each model was estimated in comparison to an intercept-only null model using the generalised coefficient of determination .
Equation A25 of reference is m’t = (λe(λ-μ)t—μ) / (λ—μ), where λ is the speciation rate per lineage million years, μ is the extinction rate per lineage million years, t is the time in million years from some arbitrary starting point, and m’t is the expected paraclade diversity at time t, conditioned on the fact that the paraclade survives at least until time t.
Correlation of “Global” Diversity with Geographic Sample Spread
We calculated minimum spanning tree lengths for each of our time bins for comparison with counted and subsampled genus and species diversities, as shown in Fig 3. A custom script in R version 3.0.2 implemented the following protocol: (1) A matrix of great circle distances between pairs of fossil locality paleocoordinates was constructed for each interval. (2) This was transformed to a 3xN table containing distances between pairs of localities in rows as “locality 1,” “locality 2,” and “distance.” (3) The columns of the table were ordered from shortest to longest distance. (4) The shortest distance was added to a running total, and the locality name of locality 2 was replaced with the name of locality 1 in all instances in the table. (5) Step 4 was repeated until all locality names were equal. Log10-transformed richness measures were compared to measures of geographic spread using correlation tests and not general linear models because our objective was to determine the significance and strengths of relationships among variables, not to determine coefficients .
S1 Appendix. Additional methods and results.
Justification of the continental regions used and subsampled genus diversity.
S1 Fig. Histograms of global minimum spanning tree branch lengths (in km) for the ten intervals with the longest minimum spanning trees.
S2 Fig. Subsampled genus diversity within continental regions for a quorum of 0.4.
(A) Results for all tetrapods; the dashed line is the general linear model predicting subsampled regional genus diversity from geological age for the entire Mesozoic, modelling taxon counts as a Gaussian distribution and using a ln() link function (slope = -0.003; standard error of slope = 0.0015; p = 0.064; intercept = 3.03). (B–D) Results for mammals (B), non-mammalian, non-dinosaurian tetrapods (“herps”) (C), and dinosaurs (D). The data displayed in this figure can be accessed at http://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.9fr76 .
S1 Table. Composite 9 Myr time bins used in the present study.
Pg2 ends at 48.6 Ma. Occurrences were assigned to a time bin only if their stratigraphic age uncertainty was entirely contained within that bin.
S2 Table. Countries included in our contiguous continental regions.
Our data are reposited in the Paleobiology Database, and we thank all contributors of data for making this research possible. This is Paleobiology Database official publication number 245. Silhouettes in Fig 5 are from http://phylopic.org and are available under CC licenses. We thank Daniel Rabosky, Michael Benton, Matthew Clapham, Daniele Silvestro, and Juan Cantalapiedra for comments that improved the manuscript.
Conceived and designed the experiments: RBJB JA RJB PDM GTL. Analyzed the data: RBJB. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: MTC JA RJB PDM RBJB. Wrote the paper: RBJB RJB PDM JA MTC GTL.
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- 100. Ives AR. For testing the significance of regression coefficients, go ahead and log-transform count data. Methods Ecol Evol. 2015;6: 828–835. doi: 10.1111/2041-210x.12386 | <urn:uuid:bce30f97-7c68-4478-bd6f-cbeedf79a17f> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002359 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396875.58/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00010-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.869569 | 19,199 | 4 | 4 |
A generation ago, educators worried about a looming “digital divide”: that students with access to computers and online education would be primed for success in the digital world, while those lacking such access would be left out. This gave rise to the effort to make computers available in every classroom, and to make Internet access widely available across the United States.
Today we face what might be called a “global divide”: the divide between those who will have access to a global education and will be primed for success in the “flat” world, and those who will continue to be educated under the last century’s models. The Department of Education has an essential role in ensuring that this divide is breached—that we will educate all of our students for the global age.
Secretary Duncan’s 2010 speech at the Council on Foreign Relations demonstrated that he understands this quite clearly. He wove together three insights that are essential to the international education agenda: first, that the global context is characterized by the twin trends of “increased international competition” and “increased international cooperation”; second, that these trends help inform the administration’s drive to transform education in America (which he referred to as “our generation’s ‘moonshot’”); and third, that “our ability to compete and collaborate on the world stage” requires that, as part of education reform, we “increase the foreign language fluency and cultural awareness of all our students” (emphasis added).
Unfortunately, one looks in vain in the Education Department’s 2013 budget for any hint that making American college education truly global is part of its agenda – this despite the very welcome development, reflected in the budget, that the department has recognized its responsibility for higher education and has jumped into the ring with plans to institute a form of “Race to the Top” for higher education. The disconnect here is that it is simply impossible to achieve Secretary Duncan’s vision, or President Obama’s stated objective in his “Blueprint for Keeping College Affordable and Within Reach for All Americans” that college will produce “a workforce prepared for the jobs of the 21st century,” without embedding international education in the strategy.
That vision is transformational. To achieve it will require breaking free of traditional programmatic thinking, because it cannot be accomplished under current programs. It will require the mainstreaming of global and cross-cultural learning on all campuses across the higher education spectrum; making study abroad the norm, rather than the exception; and ensuring that foreign language instruction actually produces graduates who can effectively communicate in a foreign language.
The good news is that there is a model for advancing that vision, and it is ready for the administration to take off the shelf and plug into its higher education agenda and policies. Even better, the model is grounded in the goals the administration articulates in its proposed $55-million “First in the World” competition, which focuses on college completion rates, learning outcomes, and education productivity, with a particular emphasis on minority and low-income students.
The international-education corollary of that agenda is the Senator Paul Simon Study Abroad Act, which would establish a modest program of challenge grants to incentivize colleges and universities to make study abroad an integral part of higher education. The Simon Act creates a model for promoting educational innovation and reform leading toward the internationalization of higher education—a model which predates, but looks a lot like, the “Race to the Top” model that Secretary Duncan created. Data increasingly suggest that study abroad improves college completion rates, learning outcomes, and education productivity. The Simon model, as articulated in legislation previously introduced by Senator Dick Durbin, would require innovation and cost control, and would by definition make study abroad available to minority-serving institutions and low-income students. The Simon model was developed to accomplish virtually all of the buzz words in the “First in the World” description.
The reality is that American higher education cannot be first in the world and prepare students for the 21st century unless the education it provides is international education. In today’s world, a country cannot succeed in global competitiveness in the absence of a citizenry equipped with global skills and knowledge. The administration understands this. Addressing this need would not be difficult to do, and the Simon model would get us a long way toward doing it. The money is in the president’s budget. If this administration doesn’t do it, who will? | <urn:uuid:5e1f311f-0f61-4866-b3a2-eaf6a798a164> | CC-MAIN-2015-32 | http://blog.nafsa.org/2012/03/08/president-obamas-race-to-the-top/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-32/segments/1438042986451.45/warc/CC-MAIN-20150728002306-00317-ip-10-236-191-2.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951562 | 939 | 2.53125 | 3 |
Winchester Castle | Wolvesey Castle | Westgate
Royal Hampshire County Hospital | Winchester Cathedral
There is little visibly remaining today of Winchester Castle, except the Great Hall which houses the famous Round Table, and the remains of Henry III's Round Tower's foundations and sally ports.
Early History - The Roman Site
Winchester Castle has its origins in Roman times. The Romans invaded Britain in 43 AD, under the Emperor Claudius, and one of the first Roman settlements was at Winchester. In approximately 75 AD the Romans enclosed Winchester, known as Venta Belgarum1, with a defensive ditch on the north, west and south sides, diverting the River Itchen to defend the east. This enclosed a roughly square-shaped area, except on the western side, where halfway down the western wall's south side the wall projects out to enclose an area of high ground. Winchester's ditch and bank later were strengthened by a stone wall built in around 180 - 200 AD to further protect it2. This wall and the Roman town's outline would last well into the early medieval period.
This additional area or salient in the walls' south-west corner is 200 feet wide and 800 feet long. Evidence of a Roman tessellated floor has been uncovered and there are theories that this was the site of a theatre or that it was used by the Roman military.
In early Saxon times Winchester's population was small. There is a debate about the presence of a royal palace in the early 7th Century. The first chapel was later developed into the Old Minster, Winchester's first cathedral, in 642 AD. Within two centuries Winchester became the capital of Wessex and, later, all of England - only London, Lincoln and York were more populous. In 757 AD Hampshire became the first county to be named in a document. The Vikings first raided Winchester in 860 AD, after which Winchester's defences were strengthened, making Winchester the largest defended Burh (or fortified town) in England.
King Alfred the Great and many other English kings lived in a Royal Palace built in the centre of Winchester and were buried at Winchester Cathedral3. The Royal Mint and treasury were housed in Winchester. The Saxon New Minster, built in 900 AD, was at the time the largest church in Europe. When King Cnut, king of England, Norway, Sweden and Denmark, died in 1035, it was at Winchester, his capital, that he had chosen to be buried.
Early Norman Castle
In November 1066 the forces of King William The Bastard4 entered Winchester, having defeated Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Hastings in October, 1066. William seized the Royal Palace and ordered the construction of a castle on Winchester's south-west salient and in 1067 the castle was given to William's closest military advisor, William FitzOsbern, who was also given control of the Isle of Wight.
The castle used the Roman town walls to the south, west and north and a new ditch and wall was built to cut the castle off from the rest of Winchester on the East. The castle area was just over four acres in area and was initially defended by a motte and a wooden tower on its north side, complete with a timber palisade. Fifty houses were demolished on the site of the salient and ten houses were demolished outside the city walls to allow for a wider ditch. The castle, on Winchester's high ground, dominated the town around it, and the Royal Treasury remained in Winchester. King William, however, lived in the Royal Palace in the centre of Winchester (which he had doubled in size) rather than in the castle.
In 1069, Archbishop Stigand5 was accused of being involved in a rebellion against William and in 1070 was imprisoned in the castle.
At Easter, 1072, King William, his wife, the papal legate and the archbishops of York and Canterbury held a council in Winchester Castle's royal chapel, now beneath the Great Hall, to decide an issue of primacy between the archbishops. Winchester was considered to be neutral territory in the dispute.
After the death of William Rufus in the nearby New Forest in 1100, Henry I Stagfoot (1100 - 1135) raced to Winchester Castle to secure the kingship as well as the royal treasure. He set about improving Winchester Castle, as well as Winchester Cathedral6, shipping fine stone over from Binstead on the Isle of Wight. A stone keep, comparable in size to the one still standing at Portchester Castle, was built on the motte on the north of the castle site, near Winchester's West Gate.
Winchester Castle was now one of the most important royal buildings in England. As well as the treasury7, the Domesday Book and the exchequer were kept in the castle. As a result, by 1110 Winchester's population was second in England only to London, with Norwich the third and York the fourth largest cities in the kingdom.
Henry I died in 1135, and William Pont de l'Arche, sheriff of Hampshire and Berkshire, Custodian of Winchester Castle and the treasury, surrendered the castle and royal treasure to King Stephen. This was the first act in Winchester in the period known as the Anarchy, a period of Civil War between the forces of King Stephen and Empress8Matilda, also known as Maud9. The Anarchy lasted for nineteen years between 1135 – 1154.
Empress Matilda was the legitimate heir to the throne, following the deaths of her only legitimate brothers Prince William and Prince Richard in 1120 in the White Ship disaster. There were several reasons why the English Barons supported Stephen and not Empress Matilda's claim to the throne. Firstly, at the time no Queen had ever ruled England. The second reason was because of her second husband, Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou. The Anglo-French War of 1123 - 113510 was still a recent memory, having ended on Henry I's death in 1135. Empress Matilda also had been raised in a German court and was a stranger to the Normans she wished to govern.
The Siege Of Matilda
During the Anarchy, Henry de Blois11 at first wholeheartedly supported his brother Stephen's claim to the throne. However, on 2 February, 1141, the forces of Empress Matilda at the Battle of Lincoln captured King Stephen. As the war seemed over, Henry de Blois may have feared for his life and he surrendered Winchester Castle to Matilda on 2 March, 1141. He also surrendered the crown and treasure of Winchester and Winchester Palace, located in the centre of Winchester. As papal legate he was even prepared to consecrate Matilda as queen.
However, Henry de Blois and Empress Matilda did not remain at peace for long. Empress Matilda alienated her allies through acts of haughtiness. Henry de Blois prepared his castle in Winchester, Wolvesey Castle, for a siege. On 31 July, 1141 the forces of Henry de Blois (based at Wolvesey Castle) were besieged by the forces of Empress Matilda. These were led by Empress Matilda's uncle, King David I of Scotland, who had been promised Huntingdon, Northumbria and Cumberland in exchange for his support of Empress Matilda, although the division that attacked Wolvesey Castle was commanded by Empress Matilda's bastard brother Robert, Earl of Gloucester. Empress Matilda herself came to Winchester Castle to oversee the siege.
Forces loyal to Stephen under Stephen's wife Queen Matilda soon came to Wolvesey Castle's rescue. They relieved Wolvesey Castle and in turn besieged Winchester Castle. For seven weeks the forces of Empress Matilda (based at Winchester Castle on Winchester's west border) battled those of Queen Matilda, based in Wolvesey Castle on Winchester's east border - and the city of Winchester bore the brunt. The Royal Palace at Winchester was completely destroyed, the north of the city was burnt to the ground and forty churches in Winchester were destroyed.
The Rout Of Winchester
Empress Matilda's forces' supplies, especially of water, ran low. After a battle at Wherwell Abbey (six miles north of Winchester) in which Empress Matilda's forces had been defeated, Richard, Earl of Gloucester, felt it was vital to retreat.
During the retreat, Queen Matilda's army saw their opportunity and attacked. Although Empress Matilda escaped and arrived safely at Gloucester, much of her army was destroyed and Earl Robert of Gloucester had been forced to surrender.
After the Rout of Winchester, Empress Matilda exchanged Stephen for her brother Earl Robert of Gloucester. Stephen regained his throne and the Anarchy continued until the signing of the Treaty of Winchester on the 6 December, 1153. This stipulated that Stephen would rule England until his death, after which Empress Matilda's son, Henry Plantagenet, would be crowned king (as opposed to Stephen's son William, Earl of Surrey.
There is a charming local legend in Winchester about the siege of Winchester Castle. It states that Empress Matilda, unable to escape from the besieged castle, spread a rumour that she had died and escaped from Winchester Castle in her own lead-lined coffin, pretending to be dead. Charles Ball's A Historical Account of Winchester from 1818 states:
'At length the imperialists, straitened for provisions, and particularly so for a supply of water, were driven to extremity; but careless of their own fate, their anxiety seems to have had the safety of Matilda for its principal object; in consequence, by one of those extraordinary expedients which could originate only in desperation, a stratagem was conceived and executed, which aided by the romantic and almost supernatural fortitude of the Empress, fully answered the most sanguine hopes of her adherents. A report was industriously circulated, that Matilda had died in the castle; and, after a suitable time had elapsed, during which a truce had been obtained from the enemy, she was enclosed like a corpse, in a sheet of lead, and in that state, accompanied by some of her most distinguished friends properly disguised, carried upon a horse litter through the besieging army. At a proper distance she was freed from her dismal envelope, and ultimately succeeded in effecting her escape to a place of safety.'
Sadly, none of this actually happened.
The Anarchy's Aftermath
On King Stephen's death in 1154, Henry Plantagenet was crowned King Henry II (1154 - 1189). The Anarchy had taken a heavy toll on Winchester - the Royal Palace was destroyed, the Royal Castle was in ruins and the population dropped from over 11,000 before the Anarchy to fewer than 8,000. Winchester would no longer hold its central position in English politics that it had come to enjoy, and the city took time to recover.
However, Winchester Castle remained an important Royal Residence. Since the destruction of the Royal Palace during the Anarchy, Winchester Castle would come to adopt the role of a major Royal Residence as well as Royal Castle. Henry II rebuilt the castle wall in 1169 - 1171 and strengthened the castle in 1173 - 1174 during Prince Henry's rebellion against his father. Winchester Castle had the sixth most money spent on it of any castle during Henry II's reign, although mainly as a residence rather than for defence. Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry II's wife, was imprisoned in the castle, and the current Eleanor's Garden is named after her12. Richard I (1189 - 1199) similarly spent more money only on four Royal castles in his reign13 and came to Winchester for his coronation, staying in Winchester Castle. Winchester Castle was frequently stayed in by King John, a king who during his reign never spent more than a month in the same place (1199 - 1216).
King John's heir, Henry, was born in Winchester Castle in October, 1206, and baptised in Winchester Cathedral. In 1216, after John's rejection of the Magna Carta, Prince Louis (son of King Philip II of France), besieged Winchester Castle and captured it after two weeks. However, after John's death in early 1217, forces loyal to the newly crowned Henry III (1216 - 1172) besieged Winchester Castle with siege engines and, after a fortnight, recaptured the castle. Henry III promptly began organising the repair and strengthening of his birthplace, replacing the square tower keep at the castle's northern corner with a strong round tower equipped with secret sally ports to allow defenders to attack besiegers. The foundations and lower courses of the round tower still exist. The smaller square towers on the castle's walls were replaced and remodelled as stronger round or D-shaped towers. He also greatly modified the gatehouse, which led into the castle from outside Winchester's walls.
Henry III made further changes too, in what would become the height of Winchester Castle's history. The King's and Queen's chambers were heavily renovated. When Henry became king, the castle contained three chapels – the Chapel of St Judoc, St Thomas The Martyr and St Catherine. This, obviously, was insufficient. In 1228 the large Chapel of St Mary was built north of the Great Hall. In 1237 the chapel of St Judoc was reconstructed and given an upper storey and in 1250 a new small chapel for the king was constructed. Winchester Castle was one of the king's favourite residences, and he spent 18 Christmases in Winchester Castle during his reign. In 1222 he replaced the earlier Great Hall with the one that still stands today, the finest secular building from his reign still in existence.
The Great Hall
Winchester Castle's Great Hall, the only building from the castle to survive intact, was built between 1222 and 1235. It is 111 feet long, 55 feet wide and contains two rows of four columns. Dominating the room is the immense Round Table on the West wall, looking a little like a dartboard beneath three stained glass windows. Originally, the west end of the hall had a dais where the King and Queen could sit, elevated above the level of those below.
Since the reign of Henry III, the Great Hall has been used as a court. Sir Walter Raleigh was condemned to death here in 1603 for attempting to overthrow James I, although he was later reprieved. Captain Burleigh was condemned here for his attempt to rescue Charles I from Carisbrooke Castle in 1648. In 1846, Lieutenant Pym was acquitted from one of the last Duel Trials in England and even as recently as the early 1970s members of the IRA were tried within the medieval hall.
A new court of law was built next to the Great Hall's East side in 1974, which sadly looks ghastly. Two arches link the Great Hall's east wall to the Judges Gallery of the Law Court. These arches are behind two gates made in 1981 to commemorate the wedding of Prince Charles to Diana Spencer. The East Wall also lists the names of Hampshire's Members of Parliament. The west side of the hall has a door that leads to the Grand Jury building, first built in 1773, which now houses a visitors' centre and exhibition gallery. Hampshire County Council acquired this building in 1889 and adjoining buildings in the area near the barracks soon after.
The Great Hall also contains a large statue of Queen Victoria near the Round Table, This was unveiled on 17 May, 1887 for Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, and was presented to the County of Hampshire. It was sculpted by Sir Alfred Gilbert RA, most famous for sculpting Eros in Piccadilly Circus. The statue originally stood outside the Great Hall in Castle Yard but was moved inside the Great Hall in 1910.
Next to the Great Hall is the small Queen Eleanor's Garden, named after Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife of Henry II, Queen Eleanor of Provence, wife of Henry III and her daughter-in-law Queen Eleanor of Castile, wife of Edward I. The garden was opened by Her Majesty The Queen Mother on 8 July, 1986 to commemorate 900 years since the Domesday Book.
The Round Table
The Round Table on the Great Hall's West Wall is the symbol of the Great Hall and Winchester as a whole. The table is 18 feet in diameter, weighs 1.2 tons (1,219 kg) and was made from 121 pieces of oak from seven oak trees. Originally supported by 12 legs and one central pillar, it has been hung on the wall of the Great Hall since 1348. The table is believed to date from the reign of either Henry III (1216 - 1272) or more likely Edward I (1272 - 1307). Dendrochronology suggests that the trees were cut down around 1236 - 1257 and radio-carbon tests have suggested a date of around 1235 - 1319. Edward I is known to have had a profound interest in King Arthur. He constructed a Round Table building at Windsor Castle and began an Order of the Round Table in 1344, an organisation later eclipsed by the Order of the Garter which he founded in 1348. In Winchester in April, 1290, he held an Arthurian-themed celebration in honour of his children's arranged marriages, and it is likely that the table was made for this event.
The current painting on the table dates from 1789, when the design underneath was repainted. It is believed that the table was unpainted until the reign of Henry VIII, who visited Winchester in 1516 and ordered the repair of the Great Hall 'and the Round Table there', explaining the Tudor Rose in the centre of the table. Henry VIII was so proud of the Round Table he took Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to Winchester to see the table in 1522. From at least 1540 - 1873 the table hung on the Great Hall's East Wall. Since then it has hung on the West Wall, where it remains today.
The Castle's Decline
Henry III's defensive works were to prove their worth when Winchester Castle was besieged in 1265 by opposition forces led by Simon de Monfort the younger, who had successfully captured the city of Winchester.
Under Edward I (1272 - 1307) the castle was at first well maintained. It is believed that it was Edward I who ordered the construction of the Round Table, although it is possible that his father was responsible. At Easter, 1302, a fire broke out in the royal apartments when the king and Queen Margaret were sleeping there. They managed to escape with their lives, but the royal apartments burned and were never repaired. Whenever royal visitors stayed in Winchester (with one exception when Edward III met Parliament in Winchester in 1330) it was always in Wolvesey Castle rather than Winchester Castle. In 1402, Henry IV and Joan of Navarre stayed at the Castle before their wedding.
Winchester Castle was subsequently used as a royal gaol - among its prisoners was the bishop of St Andrews in 1306. It was also the centre of royal justice in Hampshire - in 1330, the Earl of Kent was executed at Winchester Castle. However, Parliament met at Winchester 25 times between 1079 and 1449.
In the reign of Elizabeth I, the city of Winchester was granted Winchester Castle. The Great Hall was used as a courtroom and the rest of the castle was used as a gaol and house of correction. In the early 17th Century the castle had a number of private owners - until 1638, when the Sir William Waller, MP for Andover, was granted the castle. The Great Hall was sold to Hampshire's Justices of the Peace although he retained ownership of the rest of the castle.
The Civil War
In 1642, when the Civil War erupted, Sir William Waller joined the Parliamentary army as a colonel of a horse regiment, working his way up to becoming a Sergeant Major General. In December, 1642, while he was away, Winchester Castle was captured by Royalist troops who later surrendered when the castle gate was threatened. In 1643, Royalists under Sir William Ogle again captured the castle, which was fortified and provisioned. The castle withstood a siege in March, 1644. On 28 September, 1645, Oliver Cromwell entered Winchester. The city surrendered but the castle held out for a week-long siege, this time against heavy cannon and mortars which destroyed the outer walls. On 6 October, 1645, Sir William Ogle surrendered and Sir William Waller was able to return to his home.
Although Winchester Castle was owned by one of his most loyal and able men, Oliver Cromwell ordered its demolition in 1649. In 1651 the towers and walls were demolished, and in 1656 Sir William Waller sold the few remains of the castle of Winchester to the city of Winchester for £255.
The Palace Project
The Monarchy was restored in 1660 and in September, 1682 King Charles II (1660 - 1685) visited Winchester for the first time, when he was made a freeman. Charles fell in love with Winchester, and was determined to build a hunting seat, park and 'a noble Palace, sufficient like Windsor, for a summer resident of the whole Court.' The city of Winchester offered the site of Winchester Castle to the King, and in October, 1682 the Royal Architect Sir Christopher Wren14 visited and surveyed the site and drew up plans. In March, 1683 work on the palace began.
Winchester Palace was Sir Christopher Wren's first palace design. He demolished all the remaining traces of Henry III's medieval castle except the Great Hall in early 1683 and designed an elegant three-winged building around a central courtyard, with an open view down a great terrace which, descending through 77 steps and 342 acres, would lead east to Winchester Cathedral at the bottom of the slope. The plans for this palace, to be called the King's House, are simply stunning.
Charles II, knowing that he was approaching the end of his life and wanting to see his palace completed before his death, said, 'If it be possible to be done in one year, I will have it so, for a year is a great deal in my life'.
Sadly it was not to be. When Charles II died in February, 1685 the palace - though built and roofed - was little more than an incomplete shell. James II (1685 - 1688) abandoned the project and William III and Mary II preferred to stay at a modified Hampton Court Palace and Kensington Palace, both of which were designed by Sir Christopher Wren.
The Palace Prison
The unfinished remains of the palace were neglected and abandoned in the decades that followed until it was finally used as a prison for prisoners of war. In 1758 - 1763 it was used to house 5,000 French soldiers during the Seven Years War (1756 - 1763). In 1779 - 1784 it housed over 6,500 French and Spanish soldiers during the American War of Independence. In 1792 - 1796 it housed 700 refugee clergy who had fled from a France in the grip of Revolution.
In 1793, when war with France began again, it was decided to use the palace as barracks; troops housed there would be close to the ports of Southampton and Portsmouth, where they could speedily embark on ships. The Barracks Department gained ownership of the palace in 1796. By 1807, Winchester Barrack, as it was known, was one of the largest in the country, housing 3,000 infantrymen. In 1809 - 1811, another storey was constructed to allow the building to house a further 1,700 men. Other military buildings were built on the site. In 1858, the King's House became the home of the Rifle Brigade and 60th Rifles, the King's Royal Rifle Corps15, although the King's House itself was destroyed by fire in December, 1894. After this fire, the King's House was demolished, although some of the stonework was reused in the new barracks. In 1951 this became the Green Jackets Depot and in 1962 these barracks were modernised and renamed the Peninsula Barracks, after the service that the Rifles performed during the Peninsula War (1808 - 1814). In 1985, the army left the Winchester barracks in favour of a new depot north of Winchester. Hampshire County Council now owns much of the site that was once the medieval castle. Many of the former barracks blocks now house Army museums, such as the Royal Hampshire Regiment Museum, the Gurkha Museum, the King's Royal Hussars Museum, the Light Infantry Museum, the Royal Green Jackets Museum and the Museum of the Adjutant General's Corps.
The Great Hall of Winchester Castle is still open to the public, and is famous for housing the legendary Round Table.
Other historic sites in the area include:
- Calshot Castle, Hampshire
- Portchester Castle, Hampshire
- Southampton Castle
- Carisbrooke Castle, Isle of Wight
- Osborne House, Isle of Wight
- The Pepper Pot, Isle of Wight
- Yarmouth Castle, Isle of Wight | <urn:uuid:6947b574-3393-4db2-a25d-477e59e9246c> | CC-MAIN-2020-10 | http://pliny.h2g2.com/edited_entry/A82870617 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2020-10/segments/1581875145910.53/warc/CC-MAIN-20200224071540-20200224101540-00531.warc.gz | en | 0.978428 | 5,159 | 3.609375 | 4 |
Unlocking the Archive: A new way to use and re-use digital information
Most visitors to the Jewish Women's Archive use a wide range of materials from many different features on the site. How could we make it possible, JWA educational staff wondered, for users to pull these disparate images and objects together into new frameworks and contexts that would be most meaningful to them?
The Unlocking the Archive project is our answer. In the summer of 2009, the Jewish Women’s Archive partnered with Linnovate to design a new set of open source tools to create, share, and display presentations on the web using objects and media on the Jewish Women’s Archive website, and also to add customized text slides or to upload new objects.
Unlike existing software such as Microsoft Powerpoint, this application is open source (using a file format called "OAI-ORE"), ensuring that the presentations created with it can be viewed and explored with any Web browsing software. Because images and multimedia objects will be “pointed to,” rather than copied and stored locally, users will avoid the huge files and the frustrations involved in using products such as Powerpoint to display and annotate high quality audio or video properly. This means that these presentations can be accessed easily from any computer with an internet connection.
The Unlocking the Archive tool will be introduced to the public in 2011. The tool will be integrated into select lessons in the “Living the Legacy” curriculum through presentations curated by the Jewish Women's Archive as well as suggestions for ways to use this tool with students. The tool will thus provide a way for educators and students to engage with sources at jwa.org, thinking imaginatively about uses for and meanings of the Archive's material as they create their own presentations.
As we develop our implementation further, it is easy to envision a future version of the Jewish Women's Archive website where every multi-media object includes a button that asks, "Add this to a presentation?" Potential uses range from slideshows to accompany a lecture, to collaborative student assignments, to family history projects drawing on materials from JWA collections such as Katrina's Jewish Voices or Weaving Women's Words, alongside personal images or audio/video clips.
The Jewish Women's Archive is offering the core code for free, as open source software from Drupal.org, to encourage others to develop further uses of this tool. Over the next few months, we will be adding application notes and demonstrations to help people imagine not just how they will use this tool with materials from the Jewish Women's Archive, but how to install it on other websites, for other uses, still unimagined.
Future versions of this toolset will include the ability to import slideshows created elsewhere, and to link to online resources on other websites without uploading them to our site.
The Unlocking the Archive project was partially funded by the Revson Foundation.
"Unlocking the Archive" was developed using open source technology, and the key pieces of the project were made available for free downloading from the Drupal.org website in August 2009. You can read more about the specific modules and how they fit together from the Linnovate presentation proposed for Drupal Paris 2009: Semantic Media Syndication, powered by Drupal, Flex and OAI-ORE, by Zohar Stolar.
How to cite this page
Jewish Women's Archive. "Unlocking the Archive: A new way to use and re-use digital information." (Viewed on August 27, 2016) <http://jwa.org/aboutjwa/programs/unlock>. | <urn:uuid:34a82325-b54a-4e04-a124-abae0dfde19b> | CC-MAIN-2016-36 | http://jwa.org/aboutjwa/programs/unlock | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-36/segments/1471982297973.29/warc/CC-MAIN-20160823195817-00076-ip-10-153-172-175.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.92575 | 736 | 3.046875 | 3 |
Table of Content
It’s that time of the year again. Lahore is yet again facing the nasty and hazy smog. The thick pollutant smog covers the skies of Lahore resulting in an obstructed view whenever you drive or walk on the road. It one way or another disrupts the life and terribly halts the quality of life as citizens. We start seeing a rise in ailments because of this smog and people getting exposed to chronic infections.
Lahore which is Pakistan’s second largest city and home to more than 10 million people, experiences sudden high levels of pollution and poor air quality every year. The air pollutants which are a combination of urban air pollution and calm wind penetrate in the atmosphere and destroy the air quality. Lahore has recently been listed amongst the top 10 worst cities for smog.
Here’s a detailed account on smog, its crisis in Pakistan, how it ruins your health and what you should do to stay safe.
Smog Crisis in Pakistan:
Pakistan stands third in the list of countries which have a large number of pollution-related deaths. As per statistics,
- Around 135,000 Pakistanis die every year all due to smog or air pollution.
- The country also loses 5.88 percent of its GDP to the smog annually, which is $47.8 billion. Poor air quality causes severe health issues including lung and heart diseases and respiratory failures.
According to a report by the World Health Organization (WHO), there are 60,000 deaths in Pakistan caused by the weeks of smog in November. Studies have found that smog reduces life expectancy by 60 months and leads to almost 135,000 deaths every year, making it the leading cause of sickness in the country. Even, air quality in Pakistan exceeds safe limits in all major cities, with Lahore 9x worse than national guidelines.
What Is Smog?
As the name suggests, smog is putting together with the words ‘smoke’ and ‘fog’. Its a harmful mixture of fog, dust and air pollutants such as nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, etc. These combine with sunlight to form a dense layer of ground-level ozone. Ozone if present high in the atmosphere is good, but when nearer to the ground, it can cause devastating health effects.
How Smog Affects Your Health:
Smog leads to a variety of health problems. Those who get affected the most are children, infants, the elderly, those with cardiac and respiratory problems like asthma, emphysema, chronic bronchitis, etc., those who stay outdoors for long periods of time, and people with unusual susceptibility to ozone. It reduces life expectancy by 60 months and leads to almost 135,000 deaths every year in Pakistan, making it one of the leading cause of sickness and death in the country.
Smog can also cause minor issues like eye and throat irritation, headaches, etc. However an exposure for a longer period of time, smog can have a much worse effect on your body. As a counter to any of the health hazards caused by smog can book an appointment with the best pulmonologist in Lahore or any other city of Pakistan via marham.pk and get proper treatment.
Here’s a look at how smog ruins your health:
- Inhalation of smog over a long span of time can inflame your breathing passages, just like cigarette smoking.
- It causes inflamed lungs, and inflamed lungs secrete interleukin-6 which causes blood clots in people cardiac and respiratory disorders, which can lead to heart attacks or strokes.
- Smog decreases your lungs’ working capacity, which leads to shortness of breath, chest pain, wheezing, coughing, discomfort in deep-breathing.
- It dries out the protective membranes of your nose and throat.
- It can jeopardize your body’s ability to resist infection, hence, increasing your susceptibility to illness e.g, it can lead to asthma attacks if you are already a patient.
- Production of important elements like Vitamin D gets greatly reduced because of smog.
- Smog can also cause lung cancer.
- Leads to major accidents due to the low-visibility it causes on road
How Can You Protect Yourself From Smog:
The best way to protect yourself from smog is to avoid it by staying indoors. However, since you have to face in inevitably, here’s what you can do to protect yourself from smog
- Use face masks with pollutant filters
- Keep yourself hydrated with waters and juices to cleanse harmful pollutants from your system.
- Get air purifiers and use them
- Avoid being in congested areas
- Avoid exercising outdoors
- Drive slow and be extra careful when experiencing smog.
- Keep asthma pumps and oxygen tanks always with if you are a patient of such respiratory disorders.
Smog has now become a ritual for every winter season in Pakistan and conclusive measures must be taken for the safety and protection of citizens. However, it is necessary that we are aware of how dangerous this smog is and what we need to do about it. It’s important that we know how to protect ourselves and the situation must be fought out by the authorities. In such conditions, Marham has made access to pulmonologists very easy for you. You can book an appointment with the best pulmonologist in Karachi or any other city of Pakistan via marham.pk.
Few Most Popular Pulmonologists:
Latest posts by Fahad Salman (see all)
- 6 Biggest Myths Regarding Coronavirus We All Need To Stop Believing - March 17, 2020
- Here’s How You Can Get Yourself Tested For Coronavirus In Pakistan - March 13, 2020
- Coronavirus Outbreak: Should We Panic Or Prepare? - March 6, 2020 | <urn:uuid:18894ba2-b007-4757-8772-ed350254f43e> | CC-MAIN-2021-25 | https://www.marham.pk/healthblog/smog-ruins-your-health-heres-how-you-can-stay-safe/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2021-25/segments/1623487613380.12/warc/CC-MAIN-20210614170602-20210614200602-00326.warc.gz | en | 0.933528 | 1,234 | 2.921875 | 3 |
“One developing bit of technology that promises to be a massive game-changer for the tech industry and for society as a whole,” writes Jamshed Avari (@), “is cognitive computing. Already one of today’s darling buzzwords, cognitive computing is the vehicle through which companies are promising to usher in a whole new era of personal technology.” Analysts at Allied Market Research add, “[The] cognitive computing technology era is ready to dominate major sectors.” Cognitive computing burst onto to the scene when IBM’s Watson defeated human champions on the television game show Jeopardy!. The public quickly realized that something new had arrived; but, the viewing audience wasn’t sure what to call it. To differentiate Watson’s technology from other computing platforms, IBM called it cognitive computing. That term is now widely accepted to define a range of intelligent computing systems. Rick Delgado (@) defines cognitive computing this way:
“In the simplest sense possible, cognitive computing is the creation of self-learning systems that use data mining, pattern recognition and natural language processing (NLP) to mirror the way the human brain works. The purpose of cognitive computing is to create computing systems that can solve complicated problems without constant human oversight.”
James Kobielus (@), Senior Program Director of Product Marketing and Big Data Analytics at IBM, defines cognitive computing in a slightly different manner. He writes:
“Cognitive computing is the ability of automated systems to handle the conscious, critical, logical, attentive, reasoning modes of thought. Cognitive computing platforms, such as IBM Watson, are at the very heart of the big-data analytics revolution.”
Watson basically uses a brute force approach to cognitive analytics. It analyzes massive amounts of data and provides a “best guess” answer (IBM calls it a “confidence-weighted response”) based on what it finds. That’s how Watson won Jeopardy! This brute force approach is often called deep learning. At Enterra Solutions®, we take a different approach to cognitive computing. We promote the Enterra Enterprise Cognitive System™ (ECS) as a system that can Sense, Think, Act, and Learn®. The ECS also uses various techniques to overcome the challenges associated with most deep learning systems. Like deep learning systems, the ECS gets smarter over time and self-tunes by automatically detecting correct and incorrect decision patterns; but, the ECS also bridges the gap between a pure mathematical technique and semantic understanding. The ECS has the ability to do math, but also understands and reasons about what was discovered. Marrying advanced mathematics with a semantic understanding is critical — we call this “Cognitive Reasoning.” The Enterra ECS cognitive computing approach — one that utilizes the best (and multiple) solvers based on the challenge to be solved and has the ability to interpret those results semantically — is a superior approach for many of the challenges to which deep learning is now being applied. The attached infographic, prepared by Wipro, stresses the fact that cognitive computing systems sense, learn, infer, and interact.
Delgado believes that interaction is one of the most important components of cognitive computing. “Cognitive computing will bring a high level of fluidity to analytics,” he writes. “Thanks to improvements in NLP, it’s becoming easier and easier to communicate with our machines. Staff who aren’t as familiar with data language or data processing, which are normally essential for proper analytical functions, could still interact with programs and platforms the way humans interact with each other. Meaning, by providing simple commands and using normal language, platforms built with AI technology could translate regular speech and requests into data queries, and then provide responses in the same manner they were received. With this kind of functionality, it would be much easier for anyone to work in the data field.” Interaction is certainly an essential component of cognitive computing; but, cognitive computing systems can also act autonomously to make routine business decisions so that human decision-makers are freed to concentrate on more pressing activities. David Siegel, co-chair of Two Sigma, believes that cognitive computing systems should be doing much more of the decision-making in the world. “In a world awash with digital information,” he writes, “algorithms are better than people at analysing complex interactions. What they lack in creativity, they more than make up for in consistency and speed.” He continues:
“In fields as wide ranging as medical diagnosis, meteorology and finance, dozens of studies have found that algorithms at least match — and usually surpass — subjective human analysis. Researchers have devised algorithms that estimate the likelihood of events such as a particular convict lapsing back into crime after being released from custody, or a particular business start-up going bust. When they pitted the predictive powers of these programs against human observers, they found that the humans did worse. And that, presumably, was on a good day. Aside from their systematic failings, people get sick, tired, distracted and bored. We get emotional. We can retain and recall a limited amount of information under the very best of circumstances. Most of these quirks we cherish, but in a growing number of domains we no longer need to tolerate the limitations they entail. Nor do we have much to gain from doing so. Yet we seem determined to persevere, tending to forgive ‘human error’ while demanding infallibility from algorithms. … The sooner we learn to place our faith in algorithms to perform the tasks at which they demonstrably excel, the better off we humans will be.”
In a letter to the editor of the Financial Times, David Hosea (@), Founder and CEO of PredictiCare, agreed with Siegel about the benefits of algorithmic decision-making; but, like Delgado, he stresses that man/machine interaction is necessary to make cognitive computing a trusted colleague. “Algorithmic software must be able to interact intelligently with the human professional before it will be respected as a trustworthy adviser instead of a ‘black box’, he writes. “These systems must work in intellectual partnership with their users, not as a substitute. Algorithmic ‘infallibility’ is not sufficient to engender expert practitioner adoption — after all, they’re only human.” One of the benefits of Enterra’s approach is that it is not a “black box” system. It explains to users in plain language why it provided its analytic insights. This approach is exactly what Hosea recommends. Avari concludes, “The possibilities are endless — AI that’s more Star Trek than Siri is only the beginning. Significant progress has already been made, and now the industry seems ready to take one a massive leaps. … Cognitive computing is real and is about to become very mainstream. As with all technology, it’s what we make of it that will define our future.”
Jamshed Avari, “Cognitive Computing Isn’t Just a Buzzword, It’s the Next Big Thing in Technology,” NDTV Gadgets, 12 May 2015.
“Cognitive Computing Technology Era Is Ready To Dominate Major Sectors,” Allied Market Research, 16 June 2015.
Rick Delgado, “Cognitive Computing: Solving the Big Data Problem?” KDnuggets, 17 June 2015.
James Kobielus, “Cognitive computing? Dump the word ‘artificial’ from ‘artificial intelligence’ in discussing truly intelligent systems (part 1),” LinkedIn, 2 June 2015.
David Siegel, “Human error is unforgivable when we shun infallible algorithms,” Financial Times, 4 June 2015.
Devin Hosea, “Interacting with humans on human terms,” Financial Times, 8 June 2015. | <urn:uuid:8b5d72ba-3845-4e5b-ad04-afb7fe9f16a2> | CC-MAIN-2021-17 | https://enterrasolutions.com/blog/cognitive-computing-the-next-big-thing-is-already-here/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2021-17/segments/1618038067870.12/warc/CC-MAIN-20210412144351-20210412174351-00561.warc.gz | en | 0.939821 | 1,647 | 2.515625 | 3 |
Climate Change and Traditional Knowledge (FRENCH)
Apr 21, 2020 - 12:00 PM-13:00 PM (Eastern)
Grades 7-12, French, Science, Social Studies, Environmental Stewardship, ASPNet Schools
Through the understanding and integration of Traditional Knowledge, this conference will examine the complex nature of climate change and explore practical steps and movements youth can be involved in to make a difference.
This conference will be focusing on SDG's: #4 Quality Education and #13 Climate Action.
*ASPNet Schools will be given priority registration* | <urn:uuid:01437dcf-7779-48e1-8cca-8c61c155f19d> | CC-MAIN-2022-05 | https://encounters.tigweb.org/event/37675 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-05/segments/1642320300722.91/warc/CC-MAIN-20220118032342-20220118062342-00354.warc.gz | en | 0.845878 | 119 | 2.796875 | 3 |
Debt poses a growing threat to the financial security of many Americans — and not just college graduates with exorbitant student loans. Recent studies by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College (CRR) and the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) reveal an alarming trend: The percentage of older Americans with debt is at its highest level in almost 30 years, and the amount and types of debt are on the rise.
Debt Profile of Older Americans
In the 20-year period from 1998 to 2019, debt increased steadily for families with household heads age 55 and older; in recent years, however, the increase has largely been driven by families with household heads age 75 and older. From 2010 to 2019, the percentage of this older group who carried debt rose from 38.5% to 51.4%, the highest level since 1992. By contrast, the percentage of younger age groups carrying debt either rose slightly or held steady during that period.
Mortgages comprise the largest proportion of debt carried by older Americans, representing 80% of the total burden. According to EBRI, the median housing debt held by those age 75 and older jumped from $61,000 in 2010 to $82,000 in 2019. The CRR study reported that baby boomers tend to have bigger debt loads than older generations, largely because of pricey home purchases financed by small down payments.
Consequently, economic factors that affect the housing market — such as changes in interest rates, home prices, and tax changes related to mortgages — may have a significant impact on the financial situations of both current and future retirees.
Credit-card debt is the largest form of nonhousing debt among older Americans. In 2019, the incidence of those age 75 and older reporting credit-card debt reached 28%, its highest level ever. The median amount owed rose from $2,100 in 2010 to $2,700 in 2019.
Medical debt is also a problem and often the result of an unexpected emergency. In the CRR study, 21% of baby boomers reported having medical debt, with a median balance of $1,200. Among those coping with a chronic illness, one in six said they carry debt due to the high cost of prescription medications.
Finally and perhaps most surprisingly, student loan obligations are the fastest-growing kind of debt held by older adults. Sadly, it appears that older folks are generally not borrowing to pursue their own academic or professional enrichment, but instead to help children and grandchildren pay for college.
How Debt Might Affect Retirement
Both the CRR and EBRI studies warn that increasing debt levels may be unsustainable for current and future retirees. For example, because the stress endured by those who carry high debt loads often results in negative health consequences, which then result in even more financial need, the effect can be a perpetual downward spiral. Another potential impact is that individuals may find themselves postponing retirement simply to stay current on their debt payments. Yet another is the risk that both workers and retirees may be forced to tap their retirement savings accounts earlier than anticipated to cope with a debt-related crisis.
If you are retired or nearing retirement, one step you can take is to evaluate your debt-to-income and debt-to-assets ratios, with the goal of reducing them over time. If you still have many years ahead of you until retirement, consider making debt reduction as high a priority as building your retirement nest egg.
Sources: Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, 2020; Employee Benefit Research Institute, 2020
Tim Bartholomew is an Investment Representative with Greene Investment Services located at the Bank of Greene County. Please call 518-943-2600 ext. 2153 with your comments or questions.
Investment and insurance products and services are offered through INFINEX INVESTMENTS, INC. Member FINRA/SIPC. Greene Investment Services is a trade name of the Bank of Greene County. Infinex and the Bank of Greene County are not affiliated. Products and services made available through Infinex are not insured by the FDIC or any other agency of the United States and are not deposits or obligations of nor guaranteed or insured by any bank or bank affiliate. These products are subject to investment risk, including the possible loss of value. Prepared by Broadridge Advisor Solutions Copyright 2021. | <urn:uuid:536c916d-17f7-455a-8c12-39227e78f09b> | CC-MAIN-2021-43 | https://www.thebankofgreenecounty.com/tips/dont-let-debt-derail-your-retirement/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2021-43/segments/1634323585380.70/warc/CC-MAIN-20211021005314-20211021035314-00214.warc.gz | en | 0.963784 | 875 | 2.53125 | 3 |
Margarito’s Forest / El Bosque de Don Margarito
Written by Andy Carter and illustrated by Allison HavensHard Ball Press, 2016. ISBN: 978-0997979701
This true story, set in a remote village in the mountains of central Guatemala, helps explain one Maya family’s understanding of living in harmony with nature.
Margarito’s forest was inspired by Don Margarito and his lifelong commitment to the ecology of his community. After a young Esteban complains of having to carry a seedling tree to his grandmother’s house, he is told the extraordinary story of Don Margarito’s adventures learning about the varied benefits of his country’s woodland plants and trees. Don Margarito planted trees throughout his life despite the ridicule he faced from some villagers. Readers find out how his forest proved beneficial to the community, including being the perfect hiding place that saved his family during an attack on his village. Unfortunately, Don Margarito perished in that war, but his daughter, Maria Guadalupe, continues to tend to his forest to this day. At the story’s conclusion, readers find Don Margarito’s great-grandson, Esteban, honoring his great-grandfather and his forest.
The unique illustrations combine artwork from a professional illustrator and the children of an elementary school where the story is set. This bilingual English/Spanish story includes photographs; captions in the indigenous Mayan language spoken in Margarito’s village, Saq Ja’; and an explanation of Maya numbers.
The author also provides ten study questions for teachers, librarians, and parents.
El Bosque de Don Margarito
Written by Andy Carter and illustrated by Allison Havens | <urn:uuid:a0e50176-ca3e-442a-bdd4-49fb689aa4f6> | CC-MAIN-2022-21 | https://www.margaritosforest.com/books | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-21/segments/1652662578939.73/warc/CC-MAIN-20220525023952-20220525053952-00347.warc.gz | en | 0.957021 | 392 | 3.125 | 3 |
Paleontology and geology
Most of Arizona was under a shallow sea during the Devonian Period, although land plants found in some areas indicate that lowland terrestrial conditions were also present. The shallow seas were home to a variety of typical Paleozoic animals. Armored fish (placoderms) hunted the waters above the sea floor. Corals, brachiopods, gastropods, and bryozoans lived on the Devonian sea floor. | <urn:uuid:d469a458-9765-431c-be66-129a41d6d064> | CC-MAIN-2018-09 | http://paleoportal.org/index.php?globalnav=time_space§ionnav=state&name=Arizona&period_id=13 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-09/segments/1518891813803.28/warc/CC-MAIN-20180221202619-20180221222619-00739.warc.gz | en | 0.979988 | 95 | 3.40625 | 3 |
What the hell good is Brown V. Board of Education if nobody wants it?
–Bill Cosby, Address at the NAACP’ on the 50th Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education
Fifty-five years after the Brown decision, blacks and Latinos in American schools are more segregated than they have been in more than four decades.
Schools remain highly unequal, sometimes in terms of dollars and very frequently in terms of teachers, curriculum, peer groups, connections with colleges and jobs, and other key aspects of schooling.
–Gary Orfield, Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society
One regularly hears people speak as if we have in fact achieved the goals of the Brown decision. We have not.
America’s schools remain stubbornly segregated and unequal as Gary Orfield documents in Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge. By the standard of integrated and equal education, we have been moving backward, further away from the Promised Land of racial equality.
Given the miraculous success of Barack Obama winning the presidency, some people believe that America has finally overcome racial discrimination. But Obama’s achievement is only the removal of one obstacle on the path to equality. There are still many more, including institutionalized inferior education.
Obtaining equal and integrated education for black students may be the most difficult challenge in the struggle for black civil rights. Equal educational opportunity was one of the first goals of the Civil Rights Movement. Many believed that the Brown decision would cause America to provide integrated and equal education for blacks. This did not happen. The majority of black students remain in segregated and unequal schools.
The figure below shows that nearly three quarters of black students attend majority nonwhite schools. Thirty-nine percent attend schools that are 90 or more percent nonwhite.
Source:Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge, p. 26.
Majority nonwhite schools tend to be of lower quality than majority white schools. For example, an analysis of teacher quality from Illinois below shows that even with recent improvements, majority nonwhite schools had much lower teacher quality (ITAC) ratings than majority white schools. The solid black line is the average score for majority white schools. The other lines indicate increasing percentages of nonwhite students as one moves further below the line for majority-white schools. Today, as in the past, the best American schools go to white students, the worst to black students. | <urn:uuid:81ec5a6f-a7fd-4eeb-9512-8e8bfcb793b0> | CC-MAIN-2023-23 | https://www.thorainstitute.com/2009/02/americas-schools-still-separate-still.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-23/segments/1685224646257.46/warc/CC-MAIN-20230531022541-20230531052541-00559.warc.gz | en | 0.955448 | 499 | 3.46875 | 3 |
Game Development with Unity
Authors: Michelle Menard
Published on: Jan 19, 2011
Price (New): $22.00 US
Product DescriptionGAME DEVELOPMENT WITH UNITY shows you how to use the Unity game engine, a multiplatform engine and editor in one, to build games that can be played on just about any platform available, from the web to the Wii and even on smartphones. Unity's simple interface, friendly development environment, and wide-ranging support of all popular gaming platforms make it perfect for new developers or those looking to create games with an easy, efficient, and inexpensive game engine. Throughout the book you'll learn all the important interface commands, how to set up and organize your project, and all the basics of getting a 3D game up and running, from character importation to scripting to audio. Basic game and level design theory are taught in tandem with specific skills so you can build your game development skill set. The book is divided into five parts, with each chapter within a part covering a single concept, and new concepts are taught using step-by-step tutorials and questions, as well as through a comprehensive game project built throughout the book. GAME DEVELOPMENT WITH UNITY covers everything from building game assets, to adding interactivity, to polishing your finished game and publishing it, and provides you with all the information you need to create your own games using Unity.\n\n
- Covers all the key features of the Unity game engine and editor.
- New skills and concepts are taught using step-by-step tutorials, questions, and projects.
- The accompanying CD-ROM includes all the game assets, HTML resource files, the finished game built throughout the book, and any additional resources needed to complete the exercises in the book. | <urn:uuid:e6898e9f-115a-47b4-adcf-7b73b9393687> | CC-MAIN-2015-48 | http://www.idevgames.com/books/79 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-48/segments/1448398471436.90/warc/CC-MAIN-20151124205431-00274-ip-10-71-132-137.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931866 | 366 | 2.71875 | 3 |
Cranial capacity and intelligence - what's the connection?
Most people don't like to be told they have a big head, but some scientists might actually consider that a compliment. Humans have much large skulls than apes and since humans are much more intelligent there's been a long-standing belief that skull size indicates level of intelligence. That's why evolutionists tend to interpret larger ape skulls as advanced apes and smaller human skulls as sub human.
But this evolutionary story has multiple problems. Neandertals were supposedly primitive, often portrayed as sub-human, but their skulls are actually bigger than ours. Also the winner of the 1921 Nobel Prize for literature had a tiny skull, 25% less than today's average volume.
The reality is, skull size is a poor intelligence indicator. After all, the average skull size of men is greater than that of women, but there is no consistence difference in intelligence. | <urn:uuid:22dc9c3e-84d9-4b29-8848-69c9d870d00c> | CC-MAIN-2020-45 | https://creation.com/media-center/youtube/cranial-capacity-and-intelligence-whats-the-connection | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2020-45/segments/1603107891228.40/warc/CC-MAIN-20201026115814-20201026145814-00130.warc.gz | en | 0.973734 | 185 | 3.09375 | 3 |
[UNDP] Social and Environmental Standards
Social and environmental sustainability are cornerstones of human development and poverty reduction. UNDP’s Strategic Plan1 and policy framework articulate the organization’s strategic commitment to promoting sustainable development in all of its development cooperation activities.
UNDP’s Social and Environmental Standards (SES) underpin UNDP’s commitment to mainstream social and environmental sustainability in its Programmes and Projects to support sustainable development. The SES strengthen UNDP’s e orts to attain socially and environmentally bene cial development outcomes and present an integrated framework for achieving a consistent level of quality in UNDP’s programming.
The SES require that all UNDP Programmes and Projects enhance positive social and environmental opportunities and bene ts as well as ensure that adverse social and environmental risks and impacts are avoided, minimized, mitigated and man- aged. The SES do not de ne the substantive development outcomes and results orientation of UNDP’s programming, as this is elaborated in UNDP’s Strategic Plan and in relevant Programme and Project documents.
Through application of the SES, UNDP enhances the consistency, transparency and accountability of its decision-making and actions, improves performance, and strengthens achievement of positive development outcomes. The SES assist UNDP sta and Implementing Partners to manage social and environmental risks and im- pacts of UNDP Programmes and Projects.
The SES are UNDP policy and apply to UNDP Programmes and Projects – including global, regional, national or locally implemented Projects – recognizing that applicable requirements vary with the level of the Programme’s and/or Project’s potential social and environmental risks.
UNDP’s Social and Environmental Standards are comprised of several elements: the Overarching Policy and Principles, Project-Level Standards, and the Policy Delivery Process.
Click here to download full document. | <urn:uuid:e1570dd2-496d-43b2-b887-f31dcc53b284> | CC-MAIN-2023-14 | https://aippnet.org/undp-social-and-environmental-standards/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-14/segments/1679296949678.39/warc/CC-MAIN-20230331175950-20230331205950-00426.warc.gz | en | 0.895922 | 387 | 2.6875 | 3 |
Japan’s three major causes of death for years have been cancer, heart disease, and hypertension (cerebrovascular disease). However, Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare revealed that in 2011, pneumonia had supplanted hypertension as the third leading cause of death in the country. Pneumonia had previously occupied the fourth position since 1975.
Of the leading causes of death, cancer covers 28.5%, heart disease covers 15.5%, and pneumonia 9.9%. At more advanced ages, the risks of both cancer and pneumonia rise significantly. The MHLW attributes the rise in pneumonia related death to Japan’s long lifespans and general aging trend. On a more positive note, the MHLW concluded that the popularity of low-salt diets and changes to the healthcare system to cover treatment for strokes and other hypertension-related conditions has led to the precipitous decrease in cerebrovascular related death. | <urn:uuid:daf8584d-8bf0-410d-8cce-7122e58a9e40> | CC-MAIN-2021-10 | https://www.pacificbridgemedical.com/news-brief/japan-pneumonia-becomes-leading-cause-of-death/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2021-10/segments/1614178376467.86/warc/CC-MAIN-20210307105633-20210307135633-00078.warc.gz | en | 0.949265 | 194 | 3.03125 | 3 |
Corruption is not just money stuffed in an envelope!
#IACD2021 #NoToCorruption Today, we celebrate International Anti-Corruption Day! Why is it so important for human rights in Thailand? And what is actually the link between corruption and human rights? Read on to find out! 👇🏼
🚨 Corruption in Thailand is a problem. According to Transparency International, in 2020, Thailand scored only 36/100 on its Corruption Perception Index and ranked 104th out of 180 assessed countries. But corruption is not just handing of envelopes stuffed with money. It has many different forms and we know now that it most affects the the most marginalized groups in every society!
❓ What are some of the issues in Thailand where corruption causes human rights violations?
👉🏼 Indigenous peoples in Thailand struggle to access citizenship - and corruption is one of the reasons! Officials often ask them for bribes during their ID application process and they even face subrogation of their IDs!
👉🏼 Local and indigenous communities are often targets of manipulation by the Thai authorities and companies. For example, communities are forced or cheated to provide consent with development projects or administrative measures that have a negative effect on their lives. The result? Loss of livelihoods, forced evictions, poverty.
👉🏼 Violation of the right to access information creates a culture of secrecy and a fertile ground for corruption - this can be a lack of public information on development projects, new legislation or state budget.
#WeAreManushyan ♾️ Equal Human Beings
✊🏼 At Manushya Foundation, we believe we have to move from a culture of secrecy to a culture of transparency - only then will be our human rights upheld!
What are the greatest challenges to accessing information in Thailand? And how does corruption impact marginalized communities? Stay tuned for more content on our website & social media!
We are soon kicking off a campaign to denounce corruption & the effects it has on human rights. Make sure to subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date!
What's your experience with corruption in Thailand? Let us know in the comments! 👇🏼 | <urn:uuid:dc5e7a03-bca9-4ad1-81b7-cfc37363fbe8> | CC-MAIN-2023-40 | https://www.manushyafoundation.org/post/corruption-is-not-just-money-stuffed-in-an-envelope | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-40/segments/1695233509023.57/warc/CC-MAIN-20230925151539-20230925181539-00713.warc.gz | en | 0.941275 | 451 | 2.609375 | 3 |
Stands for "Advanced Technology Attachment." It is a type of disk drive that integrates the drive controller directly on the drive itself. Computers can use ATA hard drives without a specific controller to support the drive. The motherboard must still support an ATA connection, but a separate card (such as a SCSI card for a SCSI hard drive) is not needed. Some different types of ATA standards include ATA-1, ATA-2 (a.k.a. Fast ATA), ATA-3, Ultra ATA (33 MBps maximum transfer rate), ATA/66 (66 MBps), and ATA/100 (100 MBps).
The term IDE, or "Integrated Drive Electronics," is also used to refer to ATA drives. Sometimes (to add extra confusion to people buying hard drives), ATA drives are labeled as "IDE/ATA." Technically, ATA uses IDE technology, but the important thing to know is that they refer to the same thing. | <urn:uuid:5d9b69dd-d5c6-4be7-8e00-aaa5d782ffea> | CC-MAIN-2015-14 | http://pc.net/glossary/definition/ata | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-14/segments/1427131292683.3/warc/CC-MAIN-20150323172132-00291-ip-10-168-14-71.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945026 | 208 | 2.75 | 3 |
However, relatively high concentrations are required for these antifreeze molecules to be effective.
Robert Ben and his group in the Department of Chemistry have been studying natural antifreeze molecules found in organisms like fish and insects that live in cold environments.
Key Words: fruit fly traps, antifreeze, propylene glycol, Anastrepha
Ethylene glycol based automotive antifreeze is frequently used as a capture liquid in insect trapping programs using flight-intercept, pitfalls or pan-traps because of the preservative and evaporative advantages.
Glucose may act like a natural antifreeze to lower the freezing point of water.
Research on freeze-proof animals already suggests different cells and tissues require different kinds of biological antifreeze.
Researchers discovered these so-called antifreeze proteins in the 1960s (SN: 4/19/97, p.
In the September-October BIOCONJUGATE CHEMISTRY, Ben and his colleagues report a new method for chemically synthesizing molecules that resemble sugar-containing antifreeze proteins called antifreeze glycoproteins.
Unlike conventional antifreezes, such as the ethylene glycol commonly used in cars, the proteins create a phenomenon called thermal hysteresis: They lower the freezing point of water below 0 [degrees] C without changing the temperature at which ice melts as it is heated.
In cold climates, cars often need an infusion of antifreeze to survive the winter.
The antifreezes don't lower the temperature at which ice melts -- only the temperature at which ice rapidly crystallizes -- so there are a few degrees between the melting point and freezing point of such an antifreeze solution.
The antifreezes also changed the crystals in more complicated ways.
The addition of these antifreeze
proteins lowers the blood's freezing point to a temperature below the freezing point of seawater. | <urn:uuid:33d7351a-ba86-4e5d-beca-6c40677aade5> | CC-MAIN-2018-22 | https://www.freethesaurus.com/antifreezes | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-22/segments/1526794865023.41/warc/CC-MAIN-20180523004548-20180523024548-00325.warc.gz | en | 0.905317 | 410 | 3.5625 | 4 |
The Pap smear is a screening test for cervical cancer. Nowadays, most women having a Pap test done are actually getting two different tests: A traditional Pap, in which cells collected from the cervix are sent to the lab to be examined under a microscope, and also an HPV test, which determines whether DNA from the HPV virus is present in the sample submitted.
The Pap smear is a pretty crude screening test, with many false positives (abnormal results in normal women) and also many false negatives (normal results in women with cervical disease). As such, many of the women who are asked to return for evaluation of an abnormal Pap test are found to be perfectly OK. Sometimes these false positive Paps can be explained by a recent vaginal infection, or trauma to the cervix due to douching, tampons, or intercourse; sometimes the false positives just represent an inherent limitation of the test.
Testing for HPV is used to help triage abnormal Paps. The Human Papillomavirus causes virtually all cases of cervical cancer and pre-cancer, and DNA from the virus can be found in the cervical and vaginal secretions of almost all women with these conditions. Thus, an abnormal Pap with a positive HPV test is more likely to represent a true disease process than an abnormal Pap with a negative HPV test.
HPV is a very common virus: About one quarter of women going through college will be exposed to HPV during their college years. In most cases, your body will effectively fight the HPV virus, and the expected result for most women with a positive HPV test is that their test will eventually turn negative. It is impossible to prove that the HPV is completely cleared in such cases—and not just present in a low-level dormant state—but having many consecutive negative tests over several years suggests that the virus may actually be cleared from your system altogether. Many women will have at least one positive HPV test at some point in their lives; a smaller number will be persistently positive; among those persistently positive, a few will require treatment for precancerous conditions.
HPV is a very common virus. About one quarter of women going through college will be exposed to HPV during their college years.
Since we introduced HPV testing in our practice in 2005, we have had conversations with patients about positive HPV results virtually every day—that’s how common the virus is. Interestingly, we have yet to see a case of invasive cervical cancer among the thousands of patients in our practice who undergo screening at recommended intervals. The few cases of cervical cancer we do see all seem to fit the same pattern: A patient new to our practice, who is discovered to have cervical cancer after not seeing a gynecologist for many years. Cervical cancer is largely a disease of neglect, and is largely preventable by routine periodic screening with Pap and HPV testing.
Follow-up of an abnormal Pap usually requires colposcopy, an office procedure which allows us to examine the cervix closely for signs of disease. Colposcopy is performed by inserting a speculum (the same instrument we use to collect the Pap smear), swabbing the cervix with vinegar, and examining the cervix with a special pair of binoculars. Because precancerous and cancerous lesions turn white or exhibit other changes when swabbed with vinegar, lesions can be seen using colposcopy. If an abnormal-appearing area is seen, a biopsy may be done; this feels like a pinch in a place you’ve never been pinched. Biopsies are sent to the laboratory to be examined under a microscope.
We often find that women with mildly abnormal Pap results have a cervix which looks total normal at colposcopy; typically we ask such women to return after 4-6 months to repeat their testing so that we can be sure that they’re OK. The same protocol applies if an abnormal-looking area is seen, but the biopsy results are normal.
If the biopsy demonstrates an abnormality, treatment will depend on the severity of the problem. Normal cervical cells do not turn cancerous overnight: Cells on the cervix appear to go through a long pre-cancerous phase called cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN), or dysplasia. It takes several years for cells to go from normal, to low-grade dysplasia (CIN 1), to high-grade dysplasia (CIN 2 and 3), and then to cancer. Whereas high-grade dysplasia almost always requires treatment, many cases of low-grade dysplasia will resolve without treatment, particularly in younger women. Thus, many women with low-grade dysplasia can be closely followed—as long as they are reliable with follow-up.
Cervical Intraepithelial Neoplasia, or Dysplasia
When pre-cancerous conditions of the cervix require treatment, a minor procedure can either remove or destroy the area in question. Treatments such as cryotherapy and laser ablation of the cervix have historically been popular: These procedures employ either a wand with a frozen tip (in the case of cryotherapy) or a special handpiece (in the case of laser ablation) to destroy the abnormal area by freezing or vaporization, respectively. Nowadays, treatment for pre-cancerous conditions of the cervix usually consists of a loop electrical excision procedure, or LEEP. In this procedure, an electrified wire loop is used to shave the face of the cervix where the abnormal cells reside. This outpatient procedure takes just 5-10 minutes to perform, with patients going home shortly after the procedure. Recovery is not painful, and women can generally return to work the next day. The LEEP procedure is more likely to permanently cure dysplasia than either cryotherapy or laser ablation; an added advantage of the LEEP procedure is that it produces a specimen which can be examined by a pathologist, leaving no doubt regarding the extent of disease. Since cryotherapy and laser ablation destroy the area, no specimen can be examined.
The LEEP Procedure. A wire loop is used to excise an abnormal area on the cervix. A ball electrode is then used to control bleeding.
While persistent HPV infection is not unusual, dysplasia is generally curable. Women with abnormal Pap results, positive HPV tests, or known cervical dysplasia must be followed closely, no matter what. If you have been diagnosed with these conditions, your care cannot take a back seat to your work schedule, your budget, or your health insurance coverage. If you have had a lapse in your care, we will welcome you back with no judgment: Our primary concern is to be sure you are safe. New patients who would like to discuss their past results and treatment should try to obtain copies of their past Pap, HPV, and pathology results for us to review.
May We Help You?
Would you like to find out more about our treatments and services? Are you looking for a second opinion on a diagnosis or treatment recommendation you received at another practice? The experienced team at The Woman’s Health Pavilion is happy to help. Just let us know how and when you’d like to hear from us. | <urn:uuid:cf983594-5a80-4d7f-984c-0d65433d341c> | CC-MAIN-2019-18 | https://www.ilovemygyn.com/conditions/abnormal-paphpv/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-18/segments/1555578531462.21/warc/CC-MAIN-20190421120136-20190421142136-00258.warc.gz | en | 0.953659 | 1,477 | 3.09375 | 3 |
||This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. (June 2013)|
In mathematics, particularly in dynamical systems theory, an Arnold tongue of a finite-parameter family of circle maps, named after Vladimir Arnold, is a region in the space of parameters where the map has locally-constant rational rotation number. In other words, it is a level set of a rotation number with nonempty interior.
Standard circle map
Arnold tongues were first investigated for a family of dynamical systems on the circle first defined by Andrey Kolmogorov. Kolmogorov proposed this family as a simplified model for driven mechanical rotors (specifically, a free-spinning wheel weakly coupled by a spring to a motor). These circle map equations also describe a simplified model of the phase-locked loop in electronics. The map exhibits certain regions of its parameters where it is locked to the driving frequency (phase-locking or mode-locking in the language of electronic circuits). Among other applications, the circle map has been used to study the dynamical behaviour of a beating heart.
The circle map is given by iterating the map
where is to be interpreted as polar angle such that its value lies between 0 and 1.
It has two parameters, the coupling strength K and the driving phase Ω. As a model for phase-locked loops, Ω may be interpreted as a driving frequency. For K = 0 and Ω irrational, the map reduces to an irrational rotation.
For small to intermediate values of K (that is, in the range of K = 0 to about K = 1), and certain values of Ω, the map exhibits a phenomenon called mode locking or phase locking. In a phase-locked region, the values advance essentially as a rational multiple of n, although they may do so chaotically on the small scale.
The limiting behavior in the mode-locked regions is given by the rotation number
which is also sometimes referred to as the map winding number.
The phase-locked regions, or Arnold tongues, are illustrated in yellow in the figure above. Each such V-shaped region touches down to a rational value in the limit of . The values of (K,Ω) in one of these regions will all result in a motion such that the rotation number . For example, all values of (K,Ω) in the large V-shaped region in the bottom-center of the figure correspond to a rotation number of . One reason the term "locking" is used is that the individual values can be perturbed by rather large random disturbances (up to the width of the tongue, for a given value of K), without disturbing the limiting rotation number. That is, the sequence stays "locked on" to the signal, despite the addition of significant noise to the series . This ability to "lock on" in the presence of noise is central to the utility of the phase-locked loop electronic circuit.
There is a mode-locked region for every rational number . It is sometimes said that the circle map maps the rationals, a set of measure zero at K = 0, to a set of non-zero measure for . The largest tongues, ordered by size, occur at the Farey fractions. Fixing K and taking a cross-section through this image, so that ω is plotted as a function of Ω, gives the "Devil's staircase", a shape that is generically similar to the Cantor function.
The circle map also exhibits subharmonic routes to chaos, that is, period doubling of the form 3,6,12,24,....
Chirikov standard map
The Chirikov standard map is related to the circle map, having similar recurrence relations, which may be written as
with both iterates taken modulo 1. In essence, the standard map introduces a momentum which is allowed to dynamically vary, rather than being forced fixed, as it is in the circle map. The standard map is studied in physics by means of the kicked rotor Hamiltonian.
- Weisstein, Eric W., "Circle Map", MathWorld.
- Philip L. Boyland : Bifurcations of circle maps: Arnol'd tongues, bistability and rotation intervals Comm. Math. Phys. Volume 106, Number 3 (1986), 353-381.
- Robert Gilmore and Marc Lefranc, The Topology of Chaos, Alice in Stretch and Squeezeland, (2002) Wiley Interscience ISBN 0-471-40816-6 (Provides a brief review of basic facts in section 2.12).
- Leon Glass, Michael R. Guevara, Alvin Shrier, Rafael Perez, "Bifurcation and Chaos in a Periodically Stimulated Cardiac Oscillator", Physica 7D (1983) pp 89–101. Bound as Order in Chaos, Proceedings of the International Conference on Order and Chaos held at the Center for Nonlinear Studies, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545,USA 24–28 May 1982, Eds. David Campbell, Harvey Rose; North-Holland Amsterdam ISBN 0-444-86727-9. (Performs a detailed analysis of heart cardiac rhythms in the context of the circle map.)
- Mark McGuinness and Young Hong, Arnold tongues in human cardiorespiratory system, Chaos, March 2004, 14, 1.
- Circle map with interactive Java applet | <urn:uuid:326fc3ff-6f66-4de3-ad68-3410f8e0ece5> | CC-MAIN-2014-42 | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_locking | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2014-42/segments/1413507444657.46/warc/CC-MAIN-20141017005724-00326-ip-10-16-133-185.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.879405 | 1,137 | 2.5625 | 3 |
WELCOME TO ANOTHER YEAR OF WONDERFUL
Art At Your Fingertips is proud to present Elements of Art projects this year! Back to Basics focuses on the seven Elements of Art. We are looking forward to seeing the great works of art our students create.
Textures in Art with Antoni Gaudí
Create a textured 3-D piece inspired by the architecture of Antoni Gaudí.
AT HOME SUPPLIES
Air dry clay or salt dough (recipe to follow)
Mosaic tiles (rounded not sharp glass)
Cardboard carton board
Watercolor or acrylic paints
Brushes for glue and paint
Assorted items to create texture: rocks, beads, brushes, combs, roller, etc.
Lesson Plan – Lesson Plan is not intended for student. This is a guide to assist teacher, docent and/or parent.
Artist Sample – This is a sample of the completed project. It does not need to be printed but can be shown to students.
Video Link – Instructional video.
Distance Learning Tips – Suggestions to help make this experience enjoyable for all.
Elements of Art – Resource sheet with vocabulary used by artists. | <urn:uuid:b50d75b7-473f-4222-8436-573fa04213cd> | CC-MAIN-2022-27 | https://pvartcenter.org/antoni-gaudi/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-27/segments/1656103033925.2/warc/CC-MAIN-20220625004242-20220625034242-00258.warc.gz | en | 0.85386 | 291 | 3.390625 | 3 |
Why does Mars have a longer year than Earth?
4 Answers | Add Yours
The Martian Year can be expressed either in Earth Days (It takes 686.9726 Earth days for Mars to complete an orbit of the Sun.) But the Martian Day is different also, about 24 (Earth) hours and forty (Earth) minutes, so a Martian Year is 668.5921 Mars Days.
Mars is between 206 and 249 million km from the Sun, travelling at approximately 24.077 km/sec. Earth is slightly faster (with respect to the Sun), by comparison, at 29.77 km/sec, and it has far less distance to travel around the sun (between 146 and 152 million km).
You are really a zeromaster, totally zero.
Hey! Don't cry. I was just kidding!!
Mars have a longer year because it has to go more distance to complete one revolution that is one year.
Bie!!! Meet you soon...........
The Earth and Mars are both planets that orbit round our Star, The Sun. This means they travel round the sun in a circle.
A Year is the time a planet takes to go round the Sun ONCE.
The Earth is nearer to the Sun than Mars. So if you imagine the circle that the Earth makes as it travels round the sun, it is smaller than the circle that Mars makes because Mars is further away from the sun.
Imagine you drive round and round the Indianapolis circuit (which is not quite a circle but pretend it is). Now imagine, at the same time, your friend drives round a smaller circle track on the field INSIDE the real Indianapolis track. His lap times will be much quicker than yours because his lap is much shorter.
Same with Mars and Earth. Mars has a much longer lap than Earth's lap. Mars has further to travel on his big circle. So it takes longer to complete. Almost twice as long.
A Martian Year is 1.88 Earth Years.
Earth takes 365 1/4 days to go round the sun which is one revolution.
And Mars take 1.88 Earth years to complete one revolution.
It is bacause the planet Mars has to travel more distance as compared to the planet Earth to complete one revolution.
The mars is more far to the sun as compared to the Earth. So, it takes much time to complete one revolution.
Join to answer this question
Join a community of thousands of dedicated teachers and students.Join eNotes | <urn:uuid:d25b31b3-02e0-4626-919b-bd2b14e9f66d> | CC-MAIN-2015-11 | http://www.enotes.com/homework-help/why-does-mars-have-longer-year-than-earth-52191 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-11/segments/1424936463485.78/warc/CC-MAIN-20150226074103-00288-ip-10-28-5-156.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942682 | 513 | 3.46875 | 3 |
What is skeletal dysplasia?
A skeletal dysplasia is a problem with the way that bones grow and develop. There are over 200 types of skeletal dysplasia, affecting 1 in 4,000 births .
The most common types of skeletal dysplasia areachondroplasia, achondrogenesis,thanatophoric dysplasia, and osteogenesis imperfecta.
Symptoms of skeletal dysplasia include:
- short arms and legs
- short fingers
- a disproportionately large head
- limited mobility at the elbows
- short neck
- overall short stature
Each type of skeletal dysplasia is characterised by a different set of abnormalities.
Prognosis of the condition
In some cases, skeletal dysplasia causes very abnormal bone growth. This stops the chest and lungs from properly developing, and babies with this condition cannot survive. This condition is known as lethal skeletal dysplasia and it occurs in about 1 in every 10,000 births .
Non-lethal skeletal dysplasia is a term that applies to babies who survive birth and the immediate aftermath. Among those with non-lethal skeletal dysplasia, achondroplasia is the most common diagnosis, and is often referred to as dwarfism.
How is skeletal dysplasia diagnosed?
Some types of skeletal dysplasia are noticed at around 20 weeks into pregnancy during an ultrasound scan, but other types might not be evident until early infancy. Even when skeletal dysplasia is noticed during pregnancy, it may be difficult to diagnose the exact type until after birth.
If skeletal dysplasia is detected during pregnancy, the doctor may consider further scans, such as a CT scan, in consultation with radiologists and obstetricians.
If you have a young child and you have only just started to notice problems with their growth, diagnosis may involve:
- a growth specialist nurse taking measurements
- tests such as X-rays or blood test
- an assessment of any other medical conditions your child has experienced.
What are the causes of skeletal dysplasia?
Skeletal dysplasia is generally a genetic condition, involving a gene mutation. Most children with skeletal dysplasia do not have parents with the condition.
Treatments for skeletal dysplasia
Skeletal dysplasia can cause a wide range of developmental problems. As a result, the team involved in your child’s care is likely to be diverse, and can include:
Treatment can include:
- surgery to correct the spine, widen the spinal canal, correct the direction in which bones are growing, or lengthen limbs
- inserting a shunt to drain excess fluid from the brain
- physiotherapy to strengthen muscles and increase the range of your child’s movement
- occupational therapy to recommend assistive equipment and provide advice on alternative ways to accomplish day-to-day tasks
- counselling and psychological support | <urn:uuid:15d92067-5e08-4772-9acb-660a33c2b464> | CC-MAIN-2021-49 | https://www.topdoctors.co.uk/medical-dictionary/skeletal-dysplasia | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2021-49/segments/1637964358786.67/warc/CC-MAIN-20211129164711-20211129194711-00078.warc.gz | en | 0.94532 | 600 | 3.734375 | 4 |
Computer scientists from the University of St Andrews have developed a smartphone app that uses the device's front-facing camera to recognise what kind of surface it's sitting on.
The app is called SpeCam, and links up with an existing database of materials. When it detects a particular surface, it can trigger a specific action. The researchers suggest that you could trigger it to play jazz when placed on the sofa, or dance music if on a coffee table.
Its actions aren't limited to music. If your phone rings and you place it face-down on your laptop, it could send a message reading "sorry, I'm in a meeting", but if you put it in your pocket instead it could send a different message - perhaps suggesting that the caller contacts a colleague.
It works by using the device's screen as a multi-spectral light source, and the front-facing camera to then capture the reflection of the material that it has been placed on. After cycling the screen through different colors, the material can be detected. You can see it in action here:
"This is an example of what we call Discreet Computing or discreet interaction, where subtle and inconspicuous user actions can result in entirely new forms of interaction," said Lead researcher Professor Aaron Quigley, Chair of Human Computer Interaction at St Andrews.
"By training and hence recognising materials all the surfaces around us become a canvas for our imagination."
Hui Yeo, who contributed to the research, added: "The goal is to explore novel forms of interaction for one-handed use which can leverage what people already do with devices, without adding new hardware to the device." | <urn:uuid:7d6155e5-ea77-4b19-aa8c-eca2d03ce74b> | CC-MAIN-2017-39 | http://www.techradar.com/news/this-smartphone-app-plays-smooth-jazz-when-you-put-it-on-the-sofa | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-39/segments/1505818687447.54/warc/CC-MAIN-20170920194628-20170920214628-00300.warc.gz | en | 0.941579 | 337 | 3.125 | 3 |
Greetings fellow mindful travelers,
This month’s topic is a tricky one to write about because it goes against what we are often taught – that we should strive to be in control of as many things as we can. Nevertheless, I will share what I have found to be true based on my experience and the experience of those I’ve learned from.
First, a definition from dictionary.com
Control: to exercise restraint or direction over; dominate; command.
It is human nature to want to be in control – of our lives, of the future, of our relationships, of our success, of how we feel. How much time and energy do we spend every day, every week, every year trying to control these things?
If you have a human mind like most of us, probably a lot.
OK, now consider this:
Does trying to control these things work? Are we actually with 100% reliability able to control our future? How things turn out in every situation? What other people think of us?
These are challenging questions. I honestly don’t think there is a right or wrong answer. But they are important things to consider.
OK here’s another question.
What do we have control over?
The weather? Where we were born? Who our parents were/are? How much money and resources they had? Our genetics? How about, our thoughts? Body sensations? Emotions? Can we control those?
Again, I don’t believe there is necessarily a right or wrong here.
However, as you think about these questions, it might become clear that we have less control over things than we might want to believe we do…at least, at first.
Here’s an experiment: try really hard to not think about a Pink Elephant. Don’t think about a Pink Elephant. Don’t do it! Whatever you do, don’t think about a Pink Elephant!
Did it work? Could you control your thoughts?
What I’ve found is that control often doesn’t work – at least not in the way we want it to.
But the alternative is scary. To give up control. Scary! So we cling to a sense of control in any way we can. Which is cool, I do it too.
But there is good news. I don’t believe we are helpless victims. Quite the opposite.
Consider this: Can you control your Actions? What about the Choices that you make? How much freedom do you have in this regard?
Probably more than you give yourself credit for.
Here’s another experiment: Pick some object nearby and tell yourself that you Cannot Pick up that object. If it’s a book, keep telling yourself “I cannot pick up that book, I cannot pick up that book.” Keep saying it to yourself. Over and over and over.
Now, pick up the book.
Did you take action? Even though you were telling yourself that you can’t? Now that’s power!
Here’s the cool thing about Mindfulness – when we realize all the things that we can’t control and stop trying to control them, we can focus on what does matter and what we can control – our actions and choices. When you focus there, you really can step into your power.
I remember when I was a kid, I was terrified of roller coasters. Terrified! I would avoid them and listen to the stories my friends would tell me about how much fun they were. And feel even worse because I missed out.
But one day, I made the choice to give it a shot. I remember being just as scared, but on this day I decided I too wanted to have fun. So I made the choice…and took action…and went to the amusement park with my friends…and got on the roller coaster… and I Loved it!
I road that roller coaster over and over and over again. We made silly faces in the camera and screamed until our lungs hurt.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but looking back, it was a powerful demonstration of the power of choosing my actions, despite my emotions and thoughts telling me to run the other direction.
You see, at first I tried to control my feelings of fear by avoiding going to the amusement park, but it didn’t really work, I still felt bad and afraid. When I instead focused on controlling my actions, I made a real choice – to take a ride.
There is a nice general rule about controlling inner experience: The more you try to control your painful thoughts, feelings, and sensations, the more you have them.
Perhaps trying to control some external things in our lives, such as other people or exactly how our life turns out, can also lead to more pain and suffering.
So for this month, come back to yourself, focus there, and regain your power. To me, the only thing that makes sense is to choose to act on your values, the rest of life you can let go of trying to control.
But don’t take my word for it. I encourage you to take a look at your own experience and see what is true for you. What does your experience show about control?
I hope this has been helpful and as always, send me an email and let me know what you think.
Until next time,
Ellis Edmunds, Psy.D.
If you, or someone you know, is struggling with anxiety and could use the support of a professional, it would be an honor to be of service. I offer Individual Therapy and Mindfulness Groups in Oakland, California. | <urn:uuid:d165204e-c89b-44ef-8654-8e83d6d1e429> | CC-MAIN-2017-51 | http://drellisedmunds.com/2017/05/11/trying-control-emotions-work/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-51/segments/1512948523222.39/warc/CC-MAIN-20171213123757-20171213143757-00517.warc.gz | en | 0.968159 | 1,188 | 2.515625 | 3 |
These Clean Eating Rules Could Actually Sabotage Your Weight Loss Efforts
For many people, clean eating serves as a springboard to launch healthier eating habits. But while eating clean could promote weight loss, some strategies might not prove as effective as you’re imagining. It’s important to learn which suggestions to follow, which to ignore, and how to make clean eating more manageable and effective for you personally.
What is clean eating?
According to the magazine Clean Eating, eating clean should involve eliminating processed and fast foods, buying organic produce, eating more often, and scrutinizing food labels. The “clean” label typically includes eating foods with as few ingredients as possible, avoiding cooking methods like frying, and choosing locally grown and raised food.
While these are all reasonable healthy eating practices, some clean eating rules might not be the best to follow if you’re specifically trying to lose weight.
Eating mostly raw foods
Many people who eat mostly raw food do tend to lose weight — but depriving yourself of nutrition and calories for too long could actually lead to weight gain if you overeat to compensate. It’s also healthier to eat many foods cooked than choosing to eat them raw. Live Science outlines the many misconceptions surrounding raw food diets, like the belief that enzymes and nutrients get destroyed when you cook foods (they don’t!).
Raw food isn’t bad for you — but it’s best to have a mix of both.
Eating 6 times a day
The clean eating diet recommends you eat five to six small meals per day. It fails to specify how small a small meal is, though — and gives off the impression that calories and portion size don’t matter. The truth is, you can still gain weight eating healthy food — portion size does matter, says Harvard’s Obesity Prevention Source. The problem isn’t always the food — it’s often how much of it you’re shoveling onto your plate. Yes, there is such thing as too much quinoa (sorry!).
Shunning all processed food, always, forever
Processed food, for the most part, is bad. But depriving yourself of foods you crave can lead to overeating — and that will not help you lose weight. Women’s Health recommends choosing healthy foods first — and maybe indulging in something smaller if you’re still hungry after that. A little junk food probably won’t turn your scale against you if you limit your portions. Some processed foods are actually good for you — reach for those before that salty bag of potato chips.
Cutting out dairy products
Some clean eating enthusiasts say going raw is best when it comes to dairy. Some say you shouldn’t have dairy at all. However, Livestrong.com says keeping dairy in your diet could help you burn fat, build muscle, and maintain a healthy weight. Dairy products like milk and cheese do contain saturated fat, but they’re also high in protein. Especially if you want to trim meat out of your diet as part of your clean eating routine, eggs and cheese can replace a lot of the protein you’ll otherwise miss out on.
Saying no to sugar
Experts agree: Sugar is killing you, especially if you’re getting it from candy and drinks. But it’s not possible to cut all sugar out of your diet, like many people assume when they hear how dangerous too much sugar can be. When it comes to weight loss, trying to cut out sugar could tempt you to replace junk food with healthier foods that are still high in carbs. Fruits, vegetables, and unrefined whole grains contain sugar — but eating them alongside protein-packed foods and healthy fats will help set your weight loss into motion.
How to make clean eating work for you
There isn’t one formal set of rules that define one way to follow a clean eating diet. You pretty much have the freedom to pick and choose the guidelines that will help you specifically reach your weight loss goals. If you have a weakness for processed food, make that your clean eating focus. If you already only eat minimal amounts of processed foods, but want to eat more fresh vegetables, you can keep that one serving of ice cream on your dessert plate and pile on more clean veggies at dinner.
Clean eating should be about adopting positive habits that make you feel good. If you don’t want to stick to a strict set of rules that make eating feel like a chore, don’t. | <urn:uuid:c1228efe-e2fb-4193-9155-19fc49762557> | CC-MAIN-2019-43 | https://www.cheatsheet.com/health-fitness/clean-eating-rules-could-actually-sabotage-weight-loss-efforts.html/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-43/segments/1570987836295.98/warc/CC-MAIN-20191023201520-20191023225020-00369.warc.gz | en | 0.960127 | 938 | 2.984375 | 3 |
We have crossed over into 2020, that's two thousand and twenty years since time was counted based on the estimate of when Jesus Christ was born.
The years prior to the (estimated) birth of Christ became labeled as B.C. - "Before Christ". What did not happen is that when Jesus was born, Julius Caesar declared that the calendar be changed and now we start counting from that year forward in A.D. numbers. A.D. (btw) does not mean "After Death" as many believe, it means Anno Domino, Latin for 'Year of our Lord".
Around 525 AD, Dionysius Exiguus devised a calendar system based on his estimates of the date of Christ's birth to replace the older dating system based on the Roman Emperor. This system was popularized and made official under Charlemagne.
Dionysius Exiguus' estimates are widely known to be faulty today, but his numbering system stuck before anyone did a harder check of his math. With that said, the year 1 AD aligns with the 28th year of Augustus Caesar's reign, the 32nd year of Roman rule in Egypt over the Ptolemies, the 6th year of the rule of Emperor Ngai in China, and the Roman historian Livy is about 60 years old. So how many years are there dated "BC?
All of them prior to 1 AD and along with all the change this year I hope we see the change in our faulty calendar system to bring us back into harmony with the natural order of the cycles on Earth.
The 13 Month Calendar or the Equal Month Calendar is a solar calendar proposal for calendar reform designed by Moses B. Cotsworth, who presented it in 1902, divides the solar year into 13 equal Months of 28 days each which if implemented would keep us more aligned with natural time instead of being totally out of sync with nature and the natural cycles of life on earth, including the 28-day natural cycle for women.
This NYE as I prepared to play at the Mansion in Ubud again, I was contemplating what are we actually celebrating? Two thousand years of Patriarchal domination which has got us into the mess we are in now. Our not so, Ancient BC cultures all worshipped the Goddess and the Mother Earth, the Trees, the land that provided them food, and the water which gives life.
Since then we entered the Industrialized era and world population reaching its first Billion in the 1800s and we are now sitting at 7.8 billion and growing rapidly.
I ponder these questions A LOT and think about the well-being of the Earth every day.
I'm here in Kuala Lumpur for a visa-run and today walking the city streets with all the giant air-conditioned strip malls with every kind of food under the sun and every neon-brand under the corporate-sun spreading their tasteless mono-culture tentacles into every crevice of society.
Christmas Trees everywhere in the sweltering heat, which have about as much to do with Christ's Birth as the faulty calendar's New Year celebration - Nothing.
The alignment of Planets and Stars is how the Ancestors marked the passing of time. Celebrations actually used to have meaning and so much of today's culture has ZERO meaning to the proverbial questions;
WHY ARE YOU HERE ON EARTH?
WHAT IS YOUR PURPOSE FOR EXISTING?
WHAT ARE YOU GRATEFUL FOR AND HOW CAN YOU GIVE BACK FOR THE FUTURE GENERATIONS?
I know the answer is not to make more money and have the latest iPhone!
There is nothing wrong with that but I feel our consumer culture has lost the deeper meaning to life and acquiring more "things" will never make us happy, but they will ensure the end of the Earth if we don't stop our overconsumption and widespread cultural domination to teach other less consuming cultures to adopt the Western model.
This will mean we will need at least 10 planets just to deal with our waste let alone our demand on Earth's vital Resources like fresh drinking water!
None the less, time is marching right along and this next spiral around the Sun is going to be a doozie- Why you ask?
Well, we will have 6 eclipses this year- the first lunar eclipse will occur on January 10–11, indicating MEGA CHANGE and on Jan 12th Saturn and Pluto will align and be conjunct for a lot of the year.
Mars goes retrograde in Aires for 3 months. These are huge planetary cycles that haven't happened for a long time! I hope you got a bunker for Christmas, because we just may need it. These alignments are revolutionary material and it is pivotal to the direction we Earthlings will take.
This year it is imperative more than ever before to be brutally honest with yourself as well as cultivating compassion, strength, resilience, and vulnerability.
We are living in the times of Prophesy and we MUST wake up.
This is the year we are going to need all the courage and strength we can possibly muster up to control our many addictions and distractions so we can RISE up and play our part as the old comes crumbling down and the new paradigm is birthing into reality.
As all the Ancient prophesies say, we shall reap what we have sown, so sow the seeds of LOVE in your own personal, and Community Gardens.
Today I received hundreds of emails for collective prayers to pray for rain to fall in Australia to douse the raging bushfires which are threatening life in Oz for many creatures and homes are being lost people are being evacuated and the smoke is choking people making it hard to breathe.
I remember when I first went to Australia I was so blown away by the pristine wild nature, you could still drink straight from the streams. Having been born in Canada where it was water everywhere but you wouldn't dare to drink a drop of it I spent many years as an activist Down-Under and felt like Chicken Little most of the time jumping up and down trying to make the people aware of what was coming if they kept heading down the destructive model of western civilization, and protect their country and resources only to feel like I was speaking on deaf ears.
What I realized the difference between Canada and Australia was only Colonial Invasion happened in Canada some 500 years prior to Australias 200 years and with an even more fragile and delicate ecosystem, I knew they could not afford to make the same mistakes as North America.
Australia really needed looking after - Australia never went through the ice age so there are ancient plants and animals not found anywhere else on Earth and it has a very small amount of fertile topsoil.
The introduction of hoofed animals has had a devastating impact on the natural environment and finite resources. But with the usual corruption, large meat-eating population, greed, the cultural genocide of the Indigenous people who managed to live sustainably in that environment for some 60,000 or maybe more years. I felt hopeless witnessing Australia go down the same road of destruction to not only catch up but surpass the environmental nightmare the rest of the world is facing.
Both my sons were born in Australia and we still think of it as "home" and seeing the fires and the state of the Government's lack of action is devastating.
Living for a huge chapter of my life there and we were always protesting something almost every week. What many Australians do not realize is that the center of Australia harbors one of the world's largest US underground military bases in the world. "Pine Gap". Without it, they could not send missiles into the Middle East.
they also harbor the world's largest Uranium mines and have signed secret treaties with the One World Order under the free trade agreement, that if they export Uranium then they must also take the spent Uranium back.
Australia has the LARGEST URANIUM DUMP IN THE WORLD!
That shit is so hot and dangerous and totally lethal.
My dear friend and filmmaker David Bradbury, made the documentary a long time ago called "Blowing in the Wind", to try to wake the masses up to about what was happening in Australia. What people do not realize also is how many tonnes of freshwater is used to keep nuclear power plants cool and in a country like Australia, the uranium should never have been disturbed.
The Indigenous people knew it was there and women, especially pregnant women were not allowed to go near where there was uranium under the ground- they knew it caused birth defects or death!.
So don't you think it is high time we seek, and find and ask the First Nations People everywhere how to bring their wisdom together with today's technology to bring the Earth and Her resources back into balance?
Because As those protesting youth above state: "THERE IS NO PLANET B" and there really is no place for Greed anymore in politics which affects ALL life on Earth. | <urn:uuid:5b876e04-2b11-4614-9c52-7bf966024f2a> | CC-MAIN-2021-04 | https://www.inmyelements.com/post/there-is-no-planet-b | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2021-04/segments/1610703515235.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20210118185230-20210118215230-00609.warc.gz | en | 0.965566 | 1,823 | 2.515625 | 3 |
David Killingray, a professor at the University of London and an expert on the so-called Burma Boys, talks about the role of African troops in Burma, why young Africans joined the British forces, and whether returning soldiers affected growing nationalism in the then British colonies during the post-war period.
"There was a shortage of manpower. This decision was taken in 1942, following the rather good performance of African troops, particularly in the Horn of Africa fighting the Italians. And also being used as labour in North Africa.
West African troops were trained in carrying stores and supplies, ammunition by head in forested areas. And therefore you had this carrier potential which would be very useful to deploy in the steep valley slopes that were wooded in Burma."
Watch the full documentary here.
Source: Al Jazeera | <urn:uuid:ccd9273f-52cb-476c-a426-ec94f997c1c4> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/aljazeeracorrespondent/2011/08/2011830161535668198.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403825.35/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00150-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976898 | 162 | 3.296875 | 3 |
Ready-to-go renewable energy projects can provide emissions reduction, jobs and economic growth. These are investable projects, with 90% of total investment available from the private sector. With the right policy levers, areas in most need of jobs and growth can be winners in the green recovery.
Renewable energy presents governments with a “no regrets” path to economic recovery, delivering emissions reduction, jobs and economic growth.1 Moreover, by pulling on key policy levers, countries can unlock private sector investment contributing over 90% of the total investment opportunity or US$2t.
In the research commissioned by the European Climate Foundation (ECF), the EY energy team has analyzed the investible pipeline of energy and resources opportunities across 47 key economies capable of supporting green recovery plans. Working with a wide range of sources, including the EY proprietary Renewable Energy Country Attractiveness Index (RECAI) database, and consulting investors, developers, think-tanks and industry experts, projects in four renewable energy sub-sectors – offshore wind, inshore wind, solar and hydro – have been identified. The research focuses on projects that are shovel-ready or capable of launch in the near term.
Mapping the potential impact of identifiable projects in 47 economies that together comprise around 88% of global GDP isn’t a prediction of renewables deployment, but it describes what could be achieved if concerted action is taken now. International co-operation and private-public sector collaboration can together ignite a global green recovery. It can also regenerate depressed communities hit by legacy industries in developed economies and help developing economies build essential infrastructure and clean energy generation for the future.
What does a green recovery mean for climate change?
Deploying the visible pipeline of investable projects over a period of three years would more than double the current rate of global renewables deployment, providing 1 terawatt (TW) of renewable generation capacity. In some countries, the visible project pipeline alone is enough to realize existing nationally determined contribution (NDC) targets under the Paris Agreement. For the 47 countries included in the study, the visible project pipeline will deliver 22% of the UNFCCC NDC (the Paris Agreement) emissions reduction target for 2030.
Beyond direct emissions abatement, decarbonizing the power sector through renewable energy lays the foundation for reducing emissions in the rest of the economy through electrification. Deployment of good-to-go projects would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2.5 giga tonnes of CO2 equivalent (GtCO2e) annually, helping to close 9% of the global emissions reduction target for 2030 set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to limit global warming below 1.5°C. This highlights both the opportunity presented by the visible project pipeline and the scale of additional action required to meet IPCC’s global targets.
What does a green recovery mean for jobs?
The visible project pipeline could create up to 10 million jobs, both counting jobs local to the projects, and jobs in the supply chain. Within countries, renewable energy can be particularly effective as a tool for creating employment opportunities outside of urban economic centers, especially when deliberate effort is put into strengthening local supply chains. One example of the impact this can have is in the Humber region of the UK. Established as a cluster for offshore wind power to reverse a long period of economic decline, the region is now home to six operational offshore windfarms (including the world’s largest – Hornsea One), and is a central plank in providing the UK government’s commitment of 40GW offshore energy capacity by 2030. The deployment has led to a 60% drop in local unemployment claimants.
It is sometimes argued that green energy jobs are focused on highly educated science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) graduates, but this is not borne out by analysis. In reality, lower skilled jobs are created through construction, installation and manufacturing, while there are new skilled employment opportunities in, for example, engineering and project management.
Moreover, deployment of off-grid and behind-the-meter projects can greatly exceed the visible pipeline. In Vietnam, rooftop solar capacity installed from 2019-2020 exceeded the visible four-year solar PV pipeline in 2018 by almost 100%. Installations in rooftop solar PV capacity in Vietnam have increased by 2,435% since the beginning of 2019, driven largely by a feed-in-tariff scheme. In December 2020, the feed-in-tariff scheme concluded leading to an increase in installed solar rooftop capacity by 6.7GW in that month alone.
Renewable energy investment does more than create jobs: it creates employment opportunities in some of the regions of the world where the need is greatest and where the alternatives are lacking.
What does a green recovery mean for economic growth?
As has been well-documented,1 GDP across the world declined in 2020 due to the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The total investment opportunity could mitigate or reverse a substantial proportion of the over US$2.2t in economic losses due to the COVID-19 pandemic across the countries included in the study and lay the foundation for sustainable economic growth driven by abundant, low-cost, renewable energy. The pipeline of shovel-ready projects could provide an injection of more than US$1.9t into the global economy over a three-year period, accounting for some 85% of the GDP lost in 2020.2 Furthermore, by deploying the pipeline, we estimate a permanent recurring GDP contribution of £60b resulting from operation of the assets.
While the size of the opportunity varies country to country, the median size of the investment pipeline is equivalent to 28% of that economy’s 2020 GDP loss due to the COVID-19 pandemic.3
The existing pipeline of investable projects can enable a green recovery to begin immediately, and the reliance on the public purse is minimal. Recent examples of successful renewables policy show that with the right policy frameworks in place, between 90% and 99% of the required investment for accelerated renewables deployment can be provided by the private sector.4 The visible pipeline also includes several transformational infrastructure projects that can have a country- or region-wide impact in enabling and accelerating further investment.
In the global north,5 the economic regeneration opportunity can also help lift “rust belt” communities hit by declines in legacy industries out of depression, while in the global south, the economic opportunity accelerates development and growth in clean energy and builds important infrastructure, laying the foundations for sustainable development.
Six actions to unlock the green energy pipeline
- Governments should consider establishing challenging national targets with clear accountability and commitment that could deliver confidence to investors and the private sector.
- Governments and regulatory bodies should consider creating a clear pro-renewables regulatory environment that may provide a supportive market framework.
- Domestic financial institutions should evaluate making capital available to a wide range of developers, including small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
- International financial institutions may provide access to funding directly or via loans at attractive rates to developers, including SMEs.
- Land allocation and permitting should be freed up to be simple, fast and low-cost, so that suitable land for renewable energy projects may be deployed.
- Transmission infrastructure that provides broad national and cross-border interconnection that supports supply-demand balance, liberalized regulation enabling private providers to connect to the grid, expanding the network.
In the research commissioned by the European Climate Foundation (ECF), the EY energy team has analyzed the investible pipeline of energy and resources opportunities across 47 key economies capable of supporting green recovery plans. The research suggests that renewable energy presents governments with a “no-regrets” path to economic recovery, that could provide a step change in emissions reduction, 10 million jobs and some US$1.9t in economic growth. Moreover, by pulling on key policy levers, countries can unlock private sector investment contributing over 90% of the total investment opportunity, catalyzing growth with minimal input from public resources.
- EY-Parthenon research, June 2021
- Source: Oxford Economics, June 2021
- Source: Oxford Economics, EY-Parthenon analysis, June 2021
- Source: EY-Parthenon analysis, June 2021
- Source: EY-Parthenon analysis, June 2021
- The group of countries that are in Europe, North America, and the developed parts of Asia | <urn:uuid:f99dd9f7-0095-4fa7-bef1-43b501b789fd> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://greenfiscalpolicy.org/reports/a-clean-covid-19-pandemic-recovery-the-global-opportunity-ey-parthenon/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100779.51/warc/CC-MAIN-20231208212357-20231209002357-00294.warc.gz | en | 0.916508 | 1,729 | 2.59375 | 3 |
INFERTILITY GENERAL OVERVIEW
Infertility is a common condition and current estimates suggest that one in eight couples may have difficulty conceiving. Infertility is identified when a couple has been having unprotected intercourse (i.e. without any form of birth control) for 12 or more months, and pregnancy has not developed.
To understand evaluation for fertility, it helps to begin with a review of the reproductive process. On the female side, eggs are developed in the ovary. In normal circumstances, a woman ovulates once a month at mid cycle.
On the male side, sperm are constantly being made in the testis. Sperm, once made in the testis, travel through a series of tubes called the epididymis and vas deferens, to mix with fluid from the seminal vesicle and prostate to make the semen, which is released at ejaculation.
For fertilization to take place, sperm must make the journey from the vaginal area through the uterus (womb) and fallopian tube to fertilize the egg as it is released from the ovary. The egg, once fertilized, then travels through the tube to the uterus, where it implants in the uterus to begin pregnancy.
There are a variety of reasons that the reproductive process may not work. Current estimates suggest there may be a male factor in 20% of cases, and a male component contributing to a couple factor in another 20-40% of cases.
There are some general measures a couple can pursue to increase the chance for pregnancy. A woman can watch her cycle to determine when she ovulates with the use of temperature monitoring or an ovulation predictor kit (available over-the-counter in drug stores). The couple should have intercourse every day or every other day around the time of ovulation (but not more often, which may deplete the sperm count).
When pregnancy is not occurring, then urologic evaluation of the male begins with the medical history, during which questions are asked about sexual function to confirm that erection and ejaculation are working as intended. Physical exam is carried out to assess testicular size and consistency, to evaluate the presence of the epididymis and vas deferens, and to determine if varicocele (a dilated or varicose vein in back of the testicle) may be present.
The cornerstone of evaluation is the semen analysis. Semen is collected by ejaculation into a specimen cup. The sample is then examined within a select time period, usually within 30 minutes. Typically, the semen analysis needs to be done by a lab with particular expertise in the evaluation process, and cannot be routinely done by a general lab. The semen analysis is analyzed for a variety of factors, the main three of which are the sperm count (the number of sperm), the sperm motility (the percent of active sperm), and sperm morphology (the number of “normal” or mature sperm). (There are always some “abnormal” or immature sperm in every ejaculate.)
Other initial studies may be done to evaluate for a male factor contributing to infertility. On occasion, levels of hormones associated with sexual function in the reproductive process – testosterone, prolactin, luteinizing hormone (LH), and follicle stimulating hormone (FSH) – may be checked. Additionally, there are new genetic tests which may be checked in the scenario of very low sperm counts. In some cases, a scrotal ultrasound may be done to confirm if varicocele may be present, or to exclude the presence of an abnormality within the testicle if there is a concern raised by the physical exam.
When abnormalities on semen analysis are identified, there are some underlying issues that can be addressed by a urologist. If infection is present, that can be treated with an antibiotic. If a varicocele is present and it is interfering with semen quality (causing a “stress pattern” characterized by decreased count, low motility, and a decreased number of normal forms), then surgical repair of the varicocele may provide benefit. If there is obstruction of the tubes (which may occur if there has been prior surgery, such as vasectomy), surgical repair may help.
There are some general measures men can follow to improve semen quality. They should avoid substances that interfere with sperm production, which can include marijuana or alcohol in excess amounts. Increased temperature around the testis may interfere with sperm production, which leads to the generally recognized admonition to avoid hot tubs, and perhaps wear boxers instead of briefs.
Oftentimes during evaluation, it is noted that there is impaired semen quality, but there is not an underlying urologic issue to be fixed. In those circumstances, there may be impaired production of sperm that is occurring at the cellular level within the testis. With that recognition, efforts have been made for years to find medications that might boost or improve sperm quality and production, but the search remains elusive. Of anecdotal interest, the supplement Proxeed (available at proxeed.com) may provide benefit for some.
Even though there may not be remedies to improve sperm quality and count, current practice provides the opportunity for pregnancy through assisted reproduction. A full discussion of the details of assisted reproduction is beyond the scope of this newsletter, but to put forth the concept in general, if oversimplified terms, is the idea that if a single sperm is available it can be used to fertilize a single egg, which then can be implanted in the uterus. Sperm can be surgically retrieved from the testis and epididymis (see ICSI newsletter) for this process. Couples are best served by undergoing evaluation by physicians with particular expertise in assisted reproduction.
In summary, when a couple begins evaluation for fertility, the male partner may undergo evaluation by a urologist, who can begin the initial process to determine if there is an underlying urologic issue which may be addressed, or to help the assisted reproductive physician with techniques available (ICSI) to harvest sperm when needed. | <urn:uuid:b809c859-b899-47c8-a100-55dca6b2cea2> | CC-MAIN-2019-09 | https://www.urologygroupvirginia.com/services/fertility-center/infertility-general-overview/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-09/segments/1550247481428.19/warc/CC-MAIN-20190217010854-20190217032854-00011.warc.gz | en | 0.944349 | 1,235 | 3.453125 | 3 |
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A brief description of how Internet Radio works broadcasts music online including a description of how you can set up an internet radio. From HowStuffWorks.com.
The Internet was the result of some visionary thinking by people in the early 1960s who saw great potential value in allowing computers to share information on research and development in scientific ...
A brief fascinating description of how Internet Odors might create smells from your computer; virtual reality at work. From HowStuffWorks.com.
A comprehensive page on the history of the internet, from its beginnings to the world wide web, the dotcom bubble and more.
Make spacey things, do spacey things on this NASA kids' site.
A brief description of how Internet Infrastructure works, covering domain name servers, network access points and backbones. From HowStuffWorks.com.
20 essential things to know about science and the way it works.
Clips from the BBC Horizon documentary on Richard Feynman titled The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.
These pages takes a fascinating look inside the world of computers and the internet. There is good use of colour and the site makes good use of flash to explain computers, microprocessors, the ...
A brief description of how Internet Cookies work and the internetprivacy issues they raise. An example of a cookie at work is also given. From HowStuffWorks.com.
Showing 11 - 20 of 99 | <urn:uuid:d48b799d-b695-4625-86df-1e27e361e293> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.physics.org/explore-results-all.asp?currentpage=2&Linktype=0&age=0&knowledge=0&q=internet+of+things | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560281421.33/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095121-00357-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.85657 | 394 | 2.671875 | 3 |
It is seen that 75% of e-waste are stored due to uncertainty of how to manage it. These electronic junks lie unattended in houses, industries, offices, warehouses etc. which are finally disposed off at landfills. This necessitates implementable our e-waste management and handling solutions and services.
Why E-Waste Management Is Important
Electronic Items like Computers, mobile devices, televisions, sound systems, chargers and electrical appliances are all recyclable, yet they can also be the most dangerous materials dumped inside a landfill and affect environment badly, according to the Pollution Control Board. When improperly Electronic waste disposed of, the heavy metals, plastics and glass in e-waste can pollute the air or seep into waterways. Electronic waste Management and Recycling can significantly decrease the demand for mining heavy metals and reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from manufacturing new materials.
E-waste Management Process
Our e-waste management for corporates & industries begin at the point of Electronic waste generation. This can be done by Electronic waste minimization techniques and by sustainable product design. Our E-waste arrangement for corporate and industries involves:
- Inventory management
- Dismantling and segregation
- Recycling and recovery
- Final disposition
Inventory management: We offer a detailed inventory of Electronic waste management. Inventory reports include brand name, model, year and serial number of each piece of equipment recycled for our client’s records and referenced in our Certificate of Recycling.
Reuse: At Spas Recycling we give extension of the end of life of equipment or component parts to be used for the same purpose for which they were originally manufactured for, this may or may not include a change in ownership of the equipment. This process aims to promote optimal use of available resources.
Dismantling and segregation: This involves careful manual separation of the parts and components of a piece of equipment in disuse. This activity be carried out in our recycling facility that specialize in reconditioning.
Recycling and recovery: Our process involves the recovery of devices, components and material. The dismantling is done manual or semi-manual. The recovery of materials is part of our e-waste recycling process, especially for metal recovery, which is done in our specialized metal recovery facilities.
Refurbishment: At Spas Recycling we re-utilise of Electronic waste Materials and refurbish as good as new . It includes changes in hardware and software.
Final disposition: In Our Electronic waste Management process the final disposal of Electronic waste or materials, non-recoverable materials can be disposed of in controlled landfills (dumps) authorised by pollution control board.
After implementing above various steps that will help in managing e-waste. Spas Recycling’s as a leading Electronic waste management company also help industries & corporates with the aid of the following:
- As a corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiative
- Proper utilization of storage area for collection of e-waste
- Buy back offers, where our company pay for the Electronic waste
- Partnership models with manufacturers
- Data destruction at the industries & corporates premises
Spas Recycling Pvt Ltd a top among E-waste management Companies in India offers safe and reliable management of e-waste. | <urn:uuid:bc38efaa-7f2f-4a03-91d4-098bf9cad0c0> | CC-MAIN-2020-40 | https://www.spasrecycling.com/e-waste-management/?amp=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2020-40/segments/1600400198652.6/warc/CC-MAIN-20200920192131-20200920222131-00712.warc.gz | en | 0.905273 | 693 | 2.515625 | 3 |
The human body has its own mechanism of regulating its temperature and in normal status, it is often at 36°C. In normalcy, this temperature is constant even if the weather condition changes. There are various reasons that can lead to a rise in body temperature especially when the body lacks the ability to cool down on its own.
Furthermore, extreme temperature whether cold or hot can lead to severe damage of the internal body organs and this can negatively impact the normal functioning. There are times when your body temperature may rise and this condition is referred to as heat stress.
Causes of body heat
Before learning the best ways how to reduce body heat, it is important to know where it comes from and the most common symptoms. Actually, a rise in body heat should be given the seriousness it deserves because this could be a sign of viral or bacterial infection or other medical conditions such as neurological and thyroid production disorders.
Another cause is excessive exposure to the sun rays and dehydration especially in summer. Other contributing factors to excess body heat include the taking of caffeine, excessive alcohol, spicy foods, nuts, meats, foods with high protein and neuro-stimulatory drugs such as cocaine. People who wear tight-fitting synthetic clothes are prone to body heat because these types of clothing trap a lot of moisture and if they are tight, then there will be no flow of air in an easy manner.
If you spend your time in extremely hot and humid weather especially in direct sunlight, doing an extensive workout without proper hydration could increase your body temperature. The increase in body heat is because of intense physical exercises, active muscles and the blood circulation activities end up creating a lot of heat.
A thyroid disorder known as hyperthyroidism is a cause of a rise in body temperature. This is because it causes the body to produce too much thyroid hormone. There are also drugs that can cause high body temperature and a good example would be antibiotics, and antihistamines. If you don’t hydrate your body properly, it will lack the ability to sweat and this is the best way your body is able to emit heat and maintain the normal body temperature. If you suffer from an inflammatory infection you are also prone to getting a fever.
How to reduce body temperature
Taking the required precaution to control body stress is very important because failure to do this, you may suffer from dehydration and this can lead to heat stroke and this could be fatal. Now that you know the importance of staying hydrated, the information below is meant to help you lower your body heat as quickly as possible in the most effective ways possible:
1. Sitali breath
This is a yoga breathing technique that is known to have a cooling effect on your body and mind. It will also help you to relax and cool down both physically and mentally. To achieve the best out of this, get a comfortable sitting position, stick your tongue out and roll the outer edges together or just pucker purse your lips, inhale through your mouth in a slow motion and then exhale through your nose. Repeat the same procedure for about 5 minutes and you will be impressed by the results.
2. Appropriate dressing
If you know you are going to have contact with direct sunlight, then it would be nice to have a hat with a wide brim, sunglasses, a parasol or even an umbrella. Yes, you got it right, an umbrella is not used during rainy seasons only, you can use it to protect yourself from direct sunlight as well. Clothes that are able to emit heat faster include clothing in natural fabrics like cotton, linen or silk.
If you want to reduce internal body heat, you can wear semi-synthetics such as rayon and modal. There are other fabrics that are being developed by scientists with an aim of keeping your body cool. An example of such is thermal regulation fabrics. However, the products made with these fabrics are mostly designed for sports and outdoor activities.
3. Using cool water
This is actually one of the simplest ways to reduce body heat immediately and helps your body to recover rapidly. It has the ability to reduce body temperature and protect you from any possible side effects that may be caused by high temperatures.
Immediately you detect a rise in body temperature, drink a glass of cool water and continue to do so after every 15 minutes. This will ensure that your body is not dehydrated since this can worsen your body heat condition.
Another alternative would be adding some ice cubes to the foot tub and immersing your feet in that foot tub full of cool water for about 15 minutes. Do not hesitate to have a cool bath because that will also reduce heat in body naturally.
Watermelon has a high water content and this is good to reduce body heat naturally. If your body is having harmful toxins that are contributing to body heat, the watermelon has a solution for you because it is also a detoxifier and so it will help remove all the harmful toxins in your body. There are different ways of consuming your melon and the best way entirely depends on you.
You can consume it in the form of slices and mix it with cold milk and sugar to come up with a sweet refreshing beverage. Another way to consume it is to mix some cubes of watermelon with muskmelon and cucumber, drizzle some olive oil with balsamic vinegar and mix them together to come up with a healthy salad.
This is a good way to treat body heat especially to women suffering from hot flashes and men with a high metabolism. Buttermilk can also provide the human body with the required vitamins and minerals because it is probiotic. These vitamins and minerals are mostly lost during workouts or if you have excessive sweating. You can take a glass of buttermilk every morning with your normal daily breakfast to enable your body to stay cool throughout the day.
This is one plant that has a great cooling effect and it can soothe and reduce human body heat in the right way. To get the best out of mint, you can have a cool bath of mint by adding this essential oil to the cool water. You will definitely like the results because it has been proven to reduce body heat effectively. Alternatively, you can choose to drink a cool mint tea for 3 to 4 times a day. Take it when you feel an increase in body temperature, after a hard working day or use it to soothe your head for that cooling effect. It works well for both men and women.
7. Sugar cane juice
Although sugarcane juice can increase the energy level in the human body, it also has a cooling effect on the body as well. It is a very simple method of acquiring a stable body temperature, especially during hot summer days because you just need to consume one cup of sugar cane juice every such day.
8. Poppy seed
Poppy seeds are also referred to as opium and they have a great cooling effect since they have the ability to reduce body temperature in a natural way. For maximum utilization, crash the poppy seeds and mix one teaspoon with a small amount of sugar. Make sure you consume this mixture on a daily basis especially during the hot summer days for a great body cooling effect. You can also eat a small amount of poppy seeds just before you go to bed. However, it is very important to note that large amounts of poppy seeds are not good for your health and these seeds are not suitable for children either.
9. Aloe Vera
This is also another great home remedy and it is very effective for treating body heat. Since it is a versatile plant, it has the ability to cool and soothe the body and in return maintains the normal body temperature. The best way to use aloe vera to treat body temperature would be extracting the gel of a fresh aloe vera leaf and rub it over your body. After about 20 minutes, take a cool bath. You can repeat this routine a few times in a day or any time you desire to cool off your body.
Another method of using aloe vera is by making a homemade aloe vera juice. It is made by mixing 2 tablespoons of the gel of aloe vera with some water. Consume it but do not exceed 2 tablespoons of this gel a day.
This is yet another home remedy that is worth trying. Peppermint has a soothing and cooling effect and that is why it is a good remedy for reducing the body heat. The first method of using peppermint would be simmering a proper amount of peppermint leaves in a pot of boiling water for about 15 minutes. Strain out the leaves and leave the water to cool down. Add this amazing mixture to your bathtub that already contains cool water. Soak yourself there for about 20 minutes. You can also add peppermint to your cool bath water and you will get the same cooling effect.
The other method is taking a teaspoon of either fresh or dried peppermint leaves and add it in a cup of hot water. Wait for some time and strain it, after which you will add some raw honey and stir. Put the mixture in the fridge and you can now take it several times throughout the day to get that cooling effect you desire. This method can also help relieve headaches and nausea.
The bottom line
The above remedies are quite effective and they are meant to reduce heat in our body and give you a sweet cool feeling. However, if you have tried these methods and you are not getting positive results, you should consider seeking medical advice. It is actually very important if you have a medical condition, your age is 65 years or above, you are pregnant or nursing a baby or if you have observed a young child or a baby suffering from this condition. Remember heat stress can turn into heat exhaustion or heat stroke if not given the necessary treatment. It would be advisable to seek medical attention if you or your loved ones have extreme heat discomforts that are not going away easily. | <urn:uuid:9a53aa29-c2cc-4995-af9f-d8ee3fcaba4e> | CC-MAIN-2019-09 | https://www.yourfireshoes.com/how-to-reduce-body-heat/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-09/segments/1550247479101.30/warc/CC-MAIN-20190215183319-20190215205319-00362.warc.gz | en | 0.952807 | 2,015 | 3.65625 | 4 |
Two important measurements that describe wheel’s proper position are offset and backspacing. Offset measures the distance between the wheel’s mounting surface and centerline, while backspacing measures the distance between the wheel’s mounting surface and innermost lip. These measurements help determine which wheels are compatible with which vehicles, so you will need to be aware of them if you decide to install aftermarket wheels.
To properly understand wheel offset, you must first know the basic characteristics of a wheel assembly. The offset describes the wheel’s ideal position, so that it can freely rotate without rubbing against the fender or the brakes.
Technicians determine a wheel’s offset by measuring the distance between its centerline and the mounting surface. Millimeters are used as the standard unit to describe offset, which can be positive, zero, or negative.
- Zero offset means that the wheel’s mounting surface lines up with the centerline
- Positive offset refers to a mounting surface extending past the centerline and closer to the face of the wheel
- Negative offset describes a mounting surface situated closer to the back of the wheel
Every vehicle has a specific offset. Modern front wheel drive vehicles usually have positive offset, while older or customized vehicles may have a negative offset. Most wheels have their correct offset data embossed on the mounting surface or on a spoke. Check out the diagrams below for a visual illustration of each offset type.
The mounting surface extends past the wheel’s centerline, closer to the face of the wheel. Many factory rims have this offset type.
The mounting surface is centered within the rim, aligned with the wheel’s centerline.
The mounting surface sits before the wheel’s centerline, closer to the back of the wheel and the car’s suspension system.
Backspacing is an older system of measurement to determine how deep the mounting pad is located in the wheel. Correct backspacing allows enough room for the suspension, brake, and steering systems to operate without interference from the wheel. Positive offset creates more backspace, while negative offset reduces backspace.
The example shown here is 6 inches wide with a 3 inch backspacing. This would be the equivalent to a zero offset wheels since the mounting surface aligns with the centerline of the wheel.
Technicians determine the correct backspacing by measuring the distance between the wheel’s mounting surface and the innermost point they want the wheel to extend into. Like offset, each wheel’s proper backspacing depends on the vehicle’s size and design. The knowledgeable technicians at Discount Tire will be able to properly determine your vehicle’s correct offset and backspacing. Based on these measurements, our employees can assist you in choosing wheels that both fit your vehicle and your aesthetic preferences.
If you have any questions or require any assistance, stop by any of our Discount Tire locations and we'll get you taken care of! | <urn:uuid:673d1cf0-5e00-4fff-b696-15a720bca5a7> | CC-MAIN-2020-10 | https://www.discounttire.com/learn/offset-backspace | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2020-10/segments/1581875143635.54/warc/CC-MAIN-20200218055414-20200218085414-00316.warc.gz | en | 0.899451 | 610 | 3.765625 | 4 |
A nurse anaesthetist is an advanced level practising registered nurses who assist patients in dealing with pain before and during surgical operations, for injuries and during childbirth using epidural.
They also provide emergency services such as airway management, they work in a high-stress environment as most of their patients are in severe pain.
Over two-thirds of United, States hospitals have nurse anaesthetists as the major source of anaesthesia within their facilities.
According to the American Association of Nurse Anesthetists (AANA), nurses first gave anaesthesia to wounded soldiers during the Civil War.
Hence, if you have ever thought about becoming an anaesthetist and you want to know about the degree, you need to have. And what an Anesthetist career and job outlook are like or what your salary will be when you gain your certification.
This article will give you a full guide on how to become a nurse anaesthetist and an overview of what education you need in order to become a nurse anaesthetist. See the table of contents below.
Who is a Nurse Anesthetist?
A certified registered nurse anaesthetist (CRNA) is an advanced level practising nurse who is certified in anaesthesia.
According to the American Association of Nurse Anesthetists (AANA), nurses first gave anaesthesia to wounded soldiers during the Civil War. Today, nurse anaesthetists work in a variety of settings such as.
- Hospitals (operating room & obstetric care)
- Dental offices
- Pain management centers
- Public Health centers
- Outpatient surgery centers
- Plastic surgery centers
According to the AANA, when anaesthesia is administered by a certified nurse anaesthetist, it is considered the nursing practice. If administered by an anesthesiologist, it is considered practising medicine.
However, anesthesia is administered the same way by both professionals.
The difference between certified registered nurse anesthetists and anesthesiologists is that CRNAs are graduate degree-level nurses, and anesthesiologists are medical doctors.
In many states, CRNAs can practice without physician supervision.
What is a Nurse Anesthesia?
Anaesthesia is a state of controlled, temporary loss of sensation or awareness that is induced for medical purposes.
It may include analgesia, paralysis, amnesia, or unconsciousness. A patient under the effects of anaesthetic drugs is referred to as being anaesthetized.
What Does a Nurse Anesthetist Do?
Nurse anaesthetists play an important role in the delivery of anaesthesia. Medications used for anaesthesia can be risky.
CRNAs must use their nursing skills and knowledge of the medications to maintain patient safety and achieve the desired effect of the drug. Specific duties may include:
Nurse Anesthetist Employment Outlook & Salary
Nurse anaesthetists have had a long, robust history that has developed into a highly respected and in-demand career.
They are commonly the only anaesthesia provides in less populated communities, which leads to higher access to care and therefore, improved patient outcomes.
Certified registered nurse anaesthetists are one of the highest-paid advanced-practice nurses. According to PayScale, their salary can range from $96,175 to 184,547.
The median salary is about $139,838 per year. The top-paying states for CRNAs are Montana, Wyoming, California, Oregon, and Nevada.
Salary depends on the state and city of residence, organization of employment and the number of years of experience.
Other factors that can affect salary are city and state of residence, years of experience, and the organization of employment
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the projected employment of CRNAs is expected to grow 19% by 2024, which is a faster-than-average growth.
Currently, the states with the highest level of employment for CRNAs are Texas, Ohio, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Florida.
For a more detailed understanding, check out this breakdown of a nurse anaesthetist salary.
How To Become A Nurse Anesthetist
1st Step: Earn a Bachelor’s Degree
To become a CRNA, aspiring nurse anesthetists must first earn a Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN). They may have to finish two years of prerequisites before applying to a bachelors-level nursing program.
Some students become nurses through a diploma or associate’s degree programs and gain some experience before completing an RN-to-BSN program.
Coursework topics include basic nursing skills, health assessment fundamentals, human anatomy, biology, psychology, pharmacology, and pathophysiology.
Students complete clinical rotations in major health departments, like women’s health, pediatrics, mental health, and surgery.
Nurse anesthetist programs often require applicants to have maintained an overall GPA and science GPA of 3.0 or better.
2nd Step: Get State Licensure
All states require nurses to pass the National Council Licensing Exam for Registered Nurses (NCLEX-RN) and get licensure before being allowed to practice.
Individual states might have additional requirements. One’s RN license must be in good standing to apply for a nurse anesthesia program.
3rd Step: Get Experience
Nurse anaesthesia master’s degree programs require applicants to have a minimum of one year of professional, hands-on experience in critical care nursing. RNs can gain experience by working in an intensive care unit, cardiac care unit, or surgical intensive care unit.
Applicants must earn Critical Care Registered Nurse certification. Many nurse anesthesia master’s degree programs suggest that applicants earn certification in this specialty area.
Having this certification proves that nurses are knowledgeable and competent in critical care. Eligibility requirements include a valid RN license and at least 1,750 hours of direct critical care within the past two years.
Job shadow a nurse anesthetist. Nurse anesthesia programs stress that it’s important to have a genuine interest in an anesthesia career.
Programs suggest that prospective students shadow CRNAs before applying.
4th Step: Earn a Master’s Degree
A master’s degree program in nurse anesthesia requires a minimum of 27 months of full-time attendance.
Students learn to operate anaesthesia equipment and manage surgical and emergency situations that require anaesthesia.
Course topics commonly include anesthesia pharmacology, anesthesia pathophysiology, anesthesia biochemistry, geriatric anesthesia, obstetric anesthesia, and pain management.
Students complete many supervised clinical experiences involving diverse anaesthesia situations, from eye surgery to plastic surgery and open-heart surgery.
5th Step: Become a CRNA
Attaining the CRNA credential is necessary to practice. Individuals with master’s degrees in nurse anaesthesia from accredited schools and unrestricted RN licenses are eligible to take the National Certification Exam, which is administered by the National Board of Certification & Recertification for Nurse Anesthetists. Some states also require CRNAs to get speciality licensure status.
The aspirants must maintain credentials. Nurse anaesthetists must keep their RN licenses valid, which requires periodic completion of professional development. Individual states set regulations.
Every two years, they must complete 40 hours of approved continuing education and submit documentation of valid licensure and employment history to maintain the CRNA designation.
6th Step: Gain Experience
A CRNA is an advanced RN position but a further advancement is an option for enterprising CRNAs.
With leadership acumen and formal business education, CRNAs may move into managerial or high-level administrative positions within hospitals or medical facilities.
Alternatively, more academic-focused CRNAs may wish to get a doctorate and conduct research or be part of a research team.
All nurse anaesthetists must complete an accredited program which takes 24-36 months. While these students graduate with a minimum of a master’s degree, 16 of the 113 programs across the U.S. award a doctoral degree. All nurse anaesthesia programs have courses such as Anesthesia pharmacology
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the employment of all advanced-practice nurses — like nurse anaesthetists, nurse midwives, and nurse practitioners — is expected to grow a whopping 31% by the year 2024. That’s good news for RNs who intend to further their nursing careers by becoming a CRNA.
Therefore, in these opt-out states, CRNAs can legally practice without physician supervision. As advanced practice registered nurses, CRNAs practise with high autonomy and professional respect
Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist
Instead of pursuing a career as an anesthesiologist which requires eight additional years of school and residency following a bachelor’s degree, an RN might elect the advanced practice CRNA career path. … Mean annual wages for anesthesiologists were $232,830.
A nurse anaesthetist, more correctly called a certified registered nurse anaesthetist, is an RN, not a physician. Although some CRNAs hold a doctorate, they are not medical doctors. … Any nurse who wants to become a medical doctor must go to medical school.
In conclusion, if you have ever thought about becoming an anaesthetist and you want to know about the degree you need to have.
Also, what an Anesthetist career and job outlook are like or what your salary will be when you gain your certification.
This article will give you a full guide on how to become a school anaesthetist.
We Also Recommend.
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#Nurse #Anesthetist #Schools #Programs #Cost | <urn:uuid:21d129e9-2b00-4627-9ba3-20452094eb51> | CC-MAIN-2023-40 | https://scholarshipsnational.com/nurse-anesthetist/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-40/segments/1695233505362.29/warc/CC-MAIN-20230921073711-20230921103711-00552.warc.gz | en | 0.942401 | 2,090 | 3.09375 | 3 |
Database is any collection of data organized for storage in a computer memory and designed for easy access by authorized users.
The function of database is organized for storage any collection of data.
The kind of data form in database is the form of text, numbers, and encoded graphics.
Online database is database available to anyone who could link up to them by computer
The required for home user to do online database is a computer terminal, a telephone, and a modem.
2. Relational Database.
Relational database is a type of database or database management system that stores information in tables-rows and columns of data-and conducts searches by using data in specified column of one table to find additional data in another table.
Record is collections of information about separate of a items.
Field is particular attributes of a record.
database management system is a collection of programs that enables users to create and maintain a database.
4. Data Processing.
Data processing is the analysis and organization of data by the repeated use of one or more computer programs.
Transaction processing is used to access and update the databases when users need to immediately view or add information.
[Mukhlish muchad Fuadi: 3rd Semester 2007] | <urn:uuid:f987f2fb-ade9-4871-b7b6-11c45feb69bc> | CC-MAIN-2022-21 | https://muchad.com/database-and-data-processing/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-21/segments/1652662543797.61/warc/CC-MAIN-20220522032543-20220522062543-00645.warc.gz | en | 0.847111 | 265 | 3.40625 | 3 |
Engaging the Disengaged
Schools can do plenty to keep students engaged in learning, says Charlotte Danielson, of the Educational Testing Service. Students who are deeply engaged in learning are not simply spending time on task, she says, but are intellectually involved with curriculum topics and mentally involved in what she calls minds-on learning. Making that happen, not surprisingly, starts with the teacher.
In the Beginning
Preschoolers come in small packages, but almost everything to do with universal prekindergarten—projected costs, numbers of eligible kids, and claims about long-term results—is super-sized. Some politicians and early childhood advocates might like to provide prekindergarten programs for all of the nation's 8.3 million 3- and 4-year-olds. But current budget deficits appear to be dampening state governors' and legislators' enthusiasm for universal preschool.
Stressed Out in the Classroom
Stress seems to be a way of life for teachers. Many teachers describe themselves as overwhelmed. They admit to feeling anxious and apprehensive—especially about meeting the mounting needs of troubled students, doing justice to an all-consuming curriculum, and getting kids ready for a relentless series of tests. What causes teachers to feel stress? The source can be a personal problem, an inability to live up to lofty ideals, or difficult working conditions.
The Creative Classroom
What does a creative classroom look like? You might expect to see a profusion of student artwork, brightly decorated bulletin boards, and projects in various stages of completion. But teachers who've received the American Teacher Award (ATA), sponsored by the Walt Disney Corp., say a stimulating visual environment is just part of the picture. Much more important is a classroom's mental environment—a climate where kids and teachers are free to study and explore important curriculum topics with rigor but without restraint.
Dying for a Drink
Predicting adolescent alcohol abuse is an inexact science, but new research studies show what works in preventing early drinking—and what doesn't work. Many intervention programs aimed at reducing or eliminating adolescent alcohol use focus on a single factor, such as peer pressure, instead of the complex array of factors that contribute to early drinking. School-based and community-based intervention programs should take into account students' risk factors at various ages and stages of development.
Angry at the World
Aggression, the experts say, is a learned behavior. If that's the case, school-age kids are learning a lot about hitting, kicking, and other aggressive behaviors. In fact, many students are learning to push their aggression to the limits, displaying traits that are increasingly dangerous—and that have dire consequences for the safety of students and teachers alike.
Can You Hear Me Now?
Hearing loss takes a toll on learning. Hearing-impaired children are likely to display delayed speech and language skills and social adjustment problems, all of which contribute to poor overall achievement. Children with severe or profound hearing loss are easy to spot, but those with moderate or minimal hearing problems sometimes go undetected. As a result, many students with minor hearing problems experience a slow but steady decline in academic achievement.
Teaching about Religion
School leaders need to provide guidance and support to teachers who cover curriculum topics related to religion—and they need to be certain that, when it comes to teaching about religion, the district abides by the letter of the law. Where schools sometimes go wrong is ignoring that little word about. Provide top-notch training for teachers before expecting them to teach about religion.
Prescription for Learning
The National Association of School Nurses' (NASN) definition of school nursing says school nursing is a specialized practice that advances the well-being, academic success, and life-long achievement of students. In fact, most of what school nurses do enables kids to return to their classrooms and continue learning. That link to learning is a major reason school leaders should be more informed about school nurses and the important role they play in overall student achievement.
Show What You Know
Teachers seldom use standardized test scores to improve classroom teaching and learning, but those who use performance assessments throughout each curriculum unit can gauge students' progress and are more likely to raise student achievement. That can't happen unless teachers know where each student stands in terms of progress, and uses that information to decide whether to reteach lessons, try different instructional strategies, or give students extra time and more guided practice to learn and learn well.
Too Soon to Test
It's a rite of passage: Parents start calling in September to ask about preparing their 4- and 5-year-olds for kindergarten screening in the spring. Kindergarten screenings aren't always what they seem—or what they should be. Many schools are replacing developmental screening with readiness screening. Especially troubling is the fact that the most commonly used standardized screening instruments are not psychometrically sound and do not accurately predict students' success in the early grades. | <urn:uuid:d50c2923-feff-45e6-95c1-c0569a33e3bc> | CC-MAIN-2014-52 | http://www.asbj.com/TopicsArchive/ResearchArchive/Research2003 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2014-52/segments/1418802772265.125/warc/CC-MAIN-20141217075252-00159-ip-10-231-17-201.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949026 | 1,012 | 3.25 | 3 |
The Village represents one of three different town "plans" used in Bethabara between 1753 and the 1790s.
The Reconstructed 1754 Village
The village is a reconstruction of buildings erected in 1754 and 1755 by the first eleven Moravians who arrived on the Wachovia tract. Completed in 1996, the reconstruction includes a cow house, a sleeping hall, a combined storage house, shed and lodging for strangers, a washhouse, an oven and various fences. A replica of the 1752 Hans Wagner cabin, the only structure on the property when the Moravians arrived in 1753, was completed in 1991. Documentation on the 1754 Village comes from entries in the diaries and reports contained in the Records of the Moravians and from two historic drawings from 1754 and 1756.
Dwelling House/Cow House
“In the afternoon a place for a small dwelling house was staked off near the spring.”
In early January 1754, the Brothers began construction on a “dwelling house” to house the frequent visitors and patients of the doctor. The dwelling house was converted into a cow house by July 1754.
“We began to build a new sleeping room.”
On February 5, 1754, the Brothers began work on what would be a 50’ by 13’ sleeping hall. The sleeping hall was used until a two-story Single Brothers House was ready for occupation in June 1755.
Store House, Shed and Lodging for Strangers:
“By evening our lodging place for strangers was finished. It is built of wide rails laid up like logs, and has a small fireplace, so that in case of need we can lodge two sick guests.”
On February 8, 1754, the Brothers began construction on a small “cabin for strangers” with a fireplace and enough room for two sick guests. In July 1754, another section, connected by a dirt-floored “dog trot” roofed hall, was added and used as a storehouse.
“This afternoon we had a time of fellowship together, and because it was more pleasant outside the house, we went out into our wash house for a while – it is open and has shade.”
A 9’ by 9’ structure was built in the spring months of 1754 for washing clothes. It had no windows or doors, but did have a 6-foot opening that faced west.
“We began to build a bake-oven, so that we might again have bread, of which we have had little lately.”
After arriving in Bethabara on Saturday, November 17, 1753, and resting on Sunday, the Brothers began on Monday the construction of a bake oven measuring approximately 10’ in diameter. Because they had no bricks, the Moravians built it out of the materials at hand: mud, dried grass, rocks and wood.
The Wagner Cabin
Hans Wagner, a miller, trapper and hunter, who was on the land at the time it was purchased by the Moravians, built the 15 x 20 foot cabin in 1752. It was a rough, hand-hewn-log structure with but one room, a dirt floor, an interior campfire and a roof with a smoke hole rather than a chimney. It served as the only shelter for the Moravians for their first weeks in Bethabara. | <urn:uuid:eed588f4-431a-42e9-a426-7f577d479a60> | CC-MAIN-2015-35 | http://www.cityofws.org/departments/recreation-parks/historic-bethabara/historic-area/1754-village | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440644068098.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827025428-00226-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974519 | 721 | 2.734375 | 3 |
100% Uptime SLA, 24/7/365 Live Support & Fast Cloud Servers
The last section of your domain name, the part located after the last dot, is a top-level domain. As it is placed at the top, it is often referred to as a domain suffix.
You should recognise that a domain name is split into three levels before going further: the subdomain on the front or left side, the second-level domain or mark in the centre, and the top-level domain on the back or right side of the domain name.
A Completely Eligible Domain Name is a domain name with a second, top-level domain. Let us break down an example domain name, sub.example.com, to make it simpler.
sub – is the subdomain
example – is the mid-level domain
.com – is the top-level domain
"All of these levels of the domain are distinguished by a" dot. The top-level domain, as you can see, is .com, which indicates that the site is a commercial site.
Aspects of domain names, especially TLDs, are coordinated by the Assigned Names and Numbers Internet Corporation or ICANN.
Similar to what the website is affiliated with, ICANN manages all forms of top-level domains. Since a website's top-level domain must stick to it, through its TLD, we can see what a website is about.
knowing what a TLD is, is very important for you, so you can select the most suitable one for your website.
Based on the intent of the website, owner and geographical location, ICANN classifies TLD into four key categories, namely:
The gTLD is the most widespread domain that allows registration for all users. Examples of this type of top-level domain are the most familiar:
.com – for commercial sites
.org – for organizations
.net – for networks
.xyz – for general use
.name – for individuals
.biz – for businesses
.info – for information platforms
There are gTLDs, however, that are limited to those users: they're called top-level supported domains.
The sTLD is a type of top-level generic domain that private organisations manage. Any guidelines should be followed by users who choose to register their site with this domain. Some of the examples of sTLD are:
.gov – for U.S governmental sites
.edu – for educational institutions
.int – for treaty-related purpose international organizations
.mil – for the U.S. military
.mobi – for mobile product and service websites
.jobs – for legal companies or organizations
.tel – for internet communication service websites
.post – for postal service sites
.asia – for the Asia-Pacific region based websites
The TLD country code states the ISO code of the place or jurisdiction. A two-letter code reflecting the name of such areas is the ISO code. Popular examples of a TLD of this type are:
.es – Spain
.ru – Russia
.us – United States
.ca – Canada
.nl – Netherlands
.de – Germany
.fr – France
.in – India
.ch – Switzerland
.jp – Japan
.cn – China
.br – Brazil
.id – Indonesia
ARPA is the one and only top-level infrastructure domain available. It stands for Parameter Field Address and Routing. It is for the IETF or Internet Engineering Task Force reserved by IANA. It is, therefore, only used to address problems with technological infrastructure.
The complete list of TLDs is available on the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) website, apart from examples of the top-level domains listed above.
Since top-level domains are classified based on what the website is affiliated with, without even seeing the content of the website, it can be used to classify the intent, owner, or geographical location of the website.
For example, the .edu top-level domain means that the website is used or operated by educational institutions for educational purposes.
One thing that should be noticed is that the same name, but distinct top-level domains might be used by many websites. It can also be seen that "example.com" and "example.edu" are not the same.
Now, you should be conscious that, even though they share the same second-level domain name, "WordPress.org" is clearly different from "WordPress.com." | <urn:uuid:1cd03646-4ec9-48e8-b098-52644ddf2073> | CC-MAIN-2020-45 | https://www.wpowl.co.uk/wiki/top-level-domain/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2020-45/segments/1603107877420.17/warc/CC-MAIN-20201021180646-20201021210646-00604.warc.gz | en | 0.90028 | 945 | 2.96875 | 3 |
Let’s face it: computers are here to stay. Chances are, you have at least two types of computers near you right now, whether they’re tablets, smartphones, desktops or laptops. And since you’ll always be around computers, wouldn’t it be nice to know a little bit about computer maintenance?
There’s a distinct possibility that sometime soon you will face a computer problem. When this happens, you can either call someone to fix it or fix it yourself. By fixing it yourself, you can save a lot of money, so why not learn how to? There are plenty of resources online that can help you with computer maintenance from small issues to large ones. Here’s a few that you may want to look into.
Learn How to Yourself
You may be surprised to know that there are tons of free websites that will teach you basic computer maintenance from the comfort of your own home.
One of the most respected universities in the United States — MIT — offers two free online classes that can help you get started with computer maintenance. The first class is an introduction to circuits and electronics so you can become familiar with the basic fundamentals of both subjects. The other class is an introduction to electrical engineering and computer science. Both of these courses are free to take, although you will need to buy some basic supplies and tools, like these that you can find at RS.
If you want simpler courses, there are other schools and universities all around the country that provide computer lessons. Just do a quick internet search and see if one’s right for you.
If you already know a little about basic electronics, then there’s a good chance that you can follow along with maintenance instructions from websites that specialize in computer troubleshooting.
Websites like PC Gamer, Lifehacker and PC Magazine can all show you the basics of many computer problems and how to fix them. When it comes to troubleshooting a computer, however, there’s a chance that it could be either a software or a hardware issue, so these websites will help you find what’s at the root of the problem and how to fix them.
There are plenty of do-it-yourself videos on YouTube and other video services as well, so you can usually find all you need with a quick search.
Tinker Around Yourself
If you really want hands-on training but don’t want to enroll in a class, you can always do it the old fashioned way: buy an old computer and a book and sit down to tinker with the machine.
There are hundreds of books that you can buy to follow along with which will show you how to take a computer apart and put it back together. As always, make sure you take the proper precautions before opening a computer because you could shock yourself if you aren’t careful.
If you want to learn how to fix a computer, these are great options. | <urn:uuid:6cf1f6c0-7999-459a-b747-97872aacaae5> | CC-MAIN-2019-47 | https://sixfeetunderblog.com/blog/2017/06/21/yes-you-can-teach-yourself-simple-computer-repair-and-maintenance-skills/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-47/segments/1573496670156.86/warc/CC-MAIN-20191119144618-20191119172618-00018.warc.gz | en | 0.947504 | 607 | 2.78125 | 3 |
Jan 07 2022
Are monorails good for the environment?
By tesla fan
Exploring the Benefits of Monorails for the EnvironmentMonorails are a unique form of transportation that can offer numerous environmental benefits. Monorails are powered by electricity, making them a clean and efficient form of transportation that can reduce air pollution and reduce the amount of CO2 emissions released into the atmosphere. Additionally, monorails are powered by renewable energy sources such as solar and wind, further reducing their carbon footprint. Monorails are also quieter than other forms of transportation, helping to reduce noise pollution in urban areas.
Furthermore, monorails are incredibly efficient when it comes to energy consumption. Monorail systems are designed to use minimal power to move passengers from one destination to another, helping to reduce energy consumption and costs. As a result, monorails can help cities and towns save money on energy costs while still providing a reliable form of transportation.
Finally, monorails are a great way to reduce traffic congestion in urban areas. Monorails are often elevated above ground, allowing them to bypass congested roads and highways. This can help to reduce the amount of vehicles on the road, reducing air pollution and overall traffic congestion.
Overall, monorails can provide numerous environmental benefits. From reducing air pollution and CO2 emissions to reducing noise and traffic congestion, monorails are an efficient and environmentally friendly form of transportation that can help cities and towns become more sustainable.
Evaluating the Impact of Monorails on the EnvironmentMonorails have long been touted as a greener alternative to other forms of public transport, such as buses and trains. While they do have some environmental benefits, there are also potential drawbacks. To properly evaluate the impact of monorails on the environment, it is important to consider both the positives and negatives.
One of the main advantages of monorails is their energy efficiency. Monorails are usually powered by electricity, which is a renewable and clean source of energy. This means that monorails can reduce the need for fossil fuels, thus reducing air pollution and carbon emissions. Furthermore, monorails are also smaller and lighter than traditional trains, which can further reduce their energy usage.
On the other hand, monorails can also have some negative environmental impacts. For example, monorails can be noisy, as they often run on elevated tracks. This can be disruptive to nearby wildlife and can lead to an increase in noise pollution. Additionally, the construction of monorail systems can require a lot of energy and resources, which can have a negative impact on the environment.
Overall, the environmental impacts of monorails are largely dependent on how they are used and maintained. If monorails are properly managed and maintained, they can be an effective and efficient way of reducing air pollution and carbon emissions. However, if they are not properly managed, they can have a negative impact on the environment. In any case, it is important to properly evaluate the potential impacts of monorails before implementing them in any area.
Leave a CommentYou must be logged in to comment. | <urn:uuid:e9533952-9820-4b3c-bf42-c5407d36e3ad> | CC-MAIN-2023-14 | https://myfreeenergygenerator.net/are-monorails-good-for-the-environment | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-14/segments/1679296943747.51/warc/CC-MAIN-20230321225117-20230322015117-00680.warc.gz | en | 0.953114 | 638 | 3.21875 | 3 |
Depleted uranium technical brief
Depleted uranium (DU) is a byproduct of the process used to enrich natural uranium for use in nuclear reactors and in nuclear weapons. Natural uranium is composed of three isotopes; 234U, 235U, and 238U (see Table 1) . The enrichment process concentrates both the 235U and the 234U isotopes in the product material, resulting in a waste product or byproduct depleted in both 235U and 234U. The resultant DU retains a smaller percentage of 235U and 234U, and a slightly greater percentage of 238U (99.8% by mass instead of 99.3%). Because of the shorter half-life of 234U and 235U compared to 238U, the radioactivity associated with DU is approximately 40% less than that of natural uranium. | <urn:uuid:df3a3e6f-d684-4785-9c1b-869e9620a2b0> | CC-MAIN-2018-05 | https://www.environmental-expert.com/articles/depleted-uranium-technical-brief-32361 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-05/segments/1516084887692.13/warc/CC-MAIN-20180119010338-20180119030338-00426.warc.gz | en | 0.888341 | 166 | 3.921875 | 4 |
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