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Croton, Codiaeum variegatum, is a common houseplant grown for its striking foliage. It is one of six species of broadleaf evergreen perennials, shrubs, and small trees in this genus in the euphorbia family (Euphorbiaceae) which are native to tropical Asia and the western Pacific region (not to be confused with Croton, another genus of more than 700 species in the same family, in which it was formerly incorrectly classified as Croton variegatum). This evergreen shrub or small tree varies widely in leaf color and pattern and numerous cultivars have been developed. It is a tender perennial, hardy only in zones 11-12. In subtropical and tropical climates they are frequently used as landscape shrubs for dramatic hedges, bold focal points in gardens, or potted specimens around buildings.
In its native habitat, croton is a branching, bushy shrub that grows up to 10 feet tall but those offered as houseplants are usually much smaller than the wild plant. The large, thick, leathery leaves are 2 to 12 inches long and quite variable. The shiny, alternate leaves may be linear to oval, have a smooth or lobed margin (sometimes deeply cut to the midrib), and some are wavy or twisted into a spiral. The foliage color ranges from green variegated with white, pink, orange, red, yellow, or purple in various combinations that may change as the leaves age. Markings may follow along the major veins or may be blotches on any part of the leaf blade in regular or random patterns. Sports, or shoots that are completely different in appearance from the parent plant, are not uncommon. As with most plants in the Euphorbiaceae, the milky sap that bleeds from cut stems may cause contact dermatitis in susceptible individuals.
When grown as a houseplant it rarely flowers. When growing in the ground in frost-free climates in spring it produces insignificant flowers in long axillary racemes. The white male flowers with five small petals and 20-30 stamens that give a starburst-like effect are produced on separate inflorescences than the yellowish, petal-less female flowers.
Pollinated female flowers are followed by fruits which are a small tripartite capsule about a third of an inch in diameter containing three small seeds.
Croton is typically offered as an indoor plant but can also be used outdoors as a seasonal accent plant in containers or plantings of annuals or mixed ornamentals. If growing in containers, indoors or out, think about choosing a pot color that accents the color of the foliage, either echoing one of the leaf colors or something that contrasts with the dominant color. Try combining croton with other tropical plants grown as annuals that have flowers in colors that repeat the color(s) of the leaves, such as orange-flowering lantana, yellow golden shrimp plant, or red pentas. Or choose something with purple flowers, such as angelonia or mealycup sage, to contrast with a croton cultivar with orange and red foliage.
Croton does best in fertile, well-drained, moist soil. They need bright, indirect light when grown indoors. Outdoors they thrive in partial shade, and in cool climates can tolerate full sun if kept moist (and are acclimated first when moved from inside). Higher light produces more vibrant color in the leaves and a more compact plant. The colorful leaves may revert to shades of green in insufficient light, while too much direct sun makes the leaves gray and dull looking. These plants have moderate water needs and should be watered only when the top half-inch to an inch of soil dries out. Reduce watering in the winter. Plants will drop leaves if they are too wet or too dry for extended periods. As a tropical plant, it does best with moderate to high humidity and warm temperatures.
Croton does best at temperatures between 60 and 85ºF, often suffering leaf drop if temperatures remain below 50ºF. Protect them from drafts and severe fluctuations in temperature. Changing environments too quickly can shock the plants and cause leaf drop. Fertilize once or twice during the growing season or more frequently if you want faster growth. Repot when the plant outgrows the container, moving up to a pot only 1-2 inches larger. Plants can be pruned hard in early spring before new growth begins to stimulate branching and new growth if they get leggy. Croton has few pest problems other than the usual insects that commonly infest houseplants (mealybugs, spider mites, scales).
Container-grown plants can be moved outdoors for the growing season once temperatures are consistently above 50ºF, gradually acclimating them to the different light levels outside and moving them back inside in the fall before temperatures drop below 50ºF (colder temperatures can cause leaf loss). Plants used as seasonal plants planted in the ground can be lifted and potted in the fall.
This plant is easily propagated by air layering in spring or by taking softwood cuttings in summer. Although it can be grown from seed, the offspring won’t resemble the parent, so asexual propagation is the only way to maintain specific cultivars.
There are several hundred cultivars of this popular foliage plant, selected and bred to offer a wide diversity of leaf shapes and colors, plant sizes and improved tolerance of low light interior conditions (although the names are often not indicated when offered for sale), including:
- ‘Andreanum’ has broadly oval yellow leaves with gold veins and margins.
- ‘Eleanor Roosevelt’ has long, slender leaves of medium green dotted with golden yellow spots, changing with age to dark red. ‘Franklin Roosevelt’ is similar, but splashed yellow, orange and pink.
‘Evening Embers’ has unusual metallic blue-black leaves highlighted in red and green.
- ‘Gold Dust’ has bright green rounded oval leaves spotted with golden-yellow.
- ‘Gold Star’ is similar to ‘Gold Dust’ with yellow spots splashed across the bright green leaves, but with much narrower leaves.
- ‘Magnificent’ has green and yellow variegated oval-pointed leaves spattered in brilliant shades of red, orange, pink and sometimes bronze or purple.
- ‘Majesticum’ has pendulous branches and linear leaves with yellow midrib veins that mature from deep green to red.
‘Mammy’ (or ‘Mammie’) has elongate, twisted, multi-colored leaves tending towards greens and purples with bits of red.
- ‘Oakleaf’ has multicolored leaves with indentations resembling those of an oak leaf in greens to bronzes with red, orange, or yellow veining.
- ‘Petra’ is one of the most common croton varieties available with variously colored bold yellow, pink and orange to red markings along the veins of the dark green pointed-oval leaves that creates an almost lacy appearance when viewed from a distance.
‘Mrs. Iceton’ or ‘Red Iceton’ has pointed-tipped oval leaves that start out a bright, warm yellow and change into pink and red as they age.
- ‘Spirale’ has narrow red and green leaves that twist in a spiral.
- ‘Thai String’ has multicolored, very narrow leaves.
- ‘Zanzibar’ has long, slender, grassy-looking leaves in shades of purple, red, orange, and gold.
– Susan Mahr, University of Wisconsin – Madison |
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If you’ve ever had a squash or pumpkin plant with one or more runners that suddenly wilt and then die, it was mostly likely infested by squash vine borer. This is an insect that spends it immature, or larval stage, tunneling inside the stems of squash plants. Gardeners often don’t realize anything is wrong until the whole plant starts wilting, and by then, it’s generally too late to save the plant.
Squash vine borer (Melittia cucurbitae) is a native sesiid (clear-winged) moth that occurs throughout North America east of the Rocky Mountains, from Canada to South America. It attacks both wild and cultivated cucurbits. It cannot complete its development except in summer squash, winter squash, or pumpkins and is rarely found in cucumbers or melons. Its feeding affects plant vigor and yield and large infestations will kill plants.
The adult squash vine borer is a day-flying moth, with a distinctive superficial appearance more like a wasp than a moth. It has a thick, dark grey or dull orange abdomen marked with black dots and hairy hind legs with orange markings, with the wings folded back over the body when at rest. The front wings are a metallic greenish-black but the hind wings are clear (lack scales) with dark veins – which only become visible when they fly. They are ¾-to 1-inch long with 1-to 1½-inch wingspan. The moths tend to fly slowly in zig-zags around plants, resting on leaves in the evening. Moths are active for about one month.
Females lay up to 250 small flattened, oval, and dull-red to brown eggs individually, rather than in groups, on the base of plants, leaf stalks, and vines which are almost impossible to spot. After the eggs hatch in 7-15 days, the larvae, or caterpillars, immediately tunnel into the stems or base of the plant to feed.
Each larva has a cream colored, wrinkled body and brown head. They generally occur in the base of the plant but later in the season they may be found throughout the plant and even in the fruit. Their feeding within the vines destroys the vascular tissues of the plant, preventing water movement and nutrient transfer, which leads to the characteristic wilting. Borer damage weakens plants providing the opportunity for secondary infection. In home plantings, infested vines are often completely girdled and usually become rotten and die.
The larvae feed internally for 2-4 weeks, growing up to one inch in length, then leave the stem to burrow into the soil. As they feed, they push their sawdust-like fecal matter (frass) out of holes in the side of the stem near the wilting point. This is what most people notice first and the best evidence of infestation by this insect pest. If the stem is cut open, one or more larvae will be inside.
Squash vine borer overwinters as either a full-grown larva or as a brown pupa, hidden an inch or two down in the soil enclosed in a tough, dirt-covered, dark silken cocoon about 3/4 inch long. In the spring, overwintering larvae pupate and the adults emerge in June and July,
about the time squash plants begin to produce vines. Moth flight continues through mid-August. In Wisconsin there is only one generation each year but in southern parts of its range there are two generations per year.
Squash vine borer will attack many different types of squash but there are differences in susceptibility. Hollow stemmed cucurbits, such as pumpkin, and very susceptible while solid stemmed ones are less so.
For example, the winter squash ‘Hubbard’ is very susceptible while ‘Butternut’ is somewhat resistant. If you have consistently had a problem with squash vine borer, it may be best to avoid growing the more susceptible types for a few years in an attempt to reduce pest populations (unless all your neighbors are growing zucchini, in which case this strategy will not work).
In the home garden, some cultural or physical controls can help manage this pest.
- Cover the base of the plant with some sort of barrier. Aluminum foil, pieces of nylon pantyhose, strips of floating row cover, and other materials are often suggested but are difficult to position and keep in place and rarely completely cover the area so moths can still lay eggs on the plants.
- Wiping the stems with a damp cloth periodically (every 3-5 days) theoretically will remove the eggs before they hatch. Or inspect the stems and bases visually and destroy any eggs seen.
- Catch and destroy moths when they are resting on the upper side of leaf bases (usually in the early morning or around dusk).
- Plants should be inspected for early signs of larval feeding. At the first sight of frass, homeowners can carefully slit the vine lengthwise near the damaged area and remove the larvae. These stems should be immediately covered with soil. This will help, but it is difficult to find and remove all larvae. Or a stiff wire, needle, or toothpick can be used to try to kill the borer without slitting the vine, but it is hard to know that the larva(e) were actually stabbed.
- For vining (not bush) varieties, try burying a few nodes along each vine so the plant will root at these nodes and less the impact of the pest if it does infest the base of the vine.
- Heavy fertilization to promote rapid growth may help offset injury, especially when used in conjunction with other cultural controls.
Plants can be covered with floating row cover but only where squash didn’t grow the previous year. If squash vine borer pupae are in the soil underneath it, this technique will not be effective. Another complication with this approach is that the flowers will need to be pollinated by hand in order to set fruit. Later in the season when the adults are no longer flying (generally mid-August) covers can be removed for open pollination.
- Sanitation will reduce populations. Vines should be removed from the garden after harvest is complete and shredded and composted so any remaining larvae cannot complete their development and overwinter. Since the insect passes the winter in the ground, crop rotation should be practiced for larger plantings (this won’t make any difference on the small scale of a home garden).
- Turn the soil in the fall to expose the cocoons and then again the following spring to try to kill the insects in the soil.
If practical, use succession planting, putting in new plants every 2-3 weeks, and harvest fruits until the plants succumb to the borers, then remove them. If you also want to reduce the pest population, destroy the oldest plants after the stems are infested (and presumably after some harvest of fruit) but before the larvae leave the stems to pupate (usually about a week before the leaves would start to wilt from the damage). Cut off the lower portion of the plant and destroy the larvae in it by drowning in a bucket of water, putting into a plastic bag to “cook” in the sun for a few weeks, or any other method that will kill any larvae inside. The rest of the plant can be put in the compost. This staggering planting will also allow some plantings to escape heaviest egg-laying pressure.
There are parasitic wasps which attack the eggs but these are not common enough to provide effective control. Some predators may attack the eggs, larvae, or pupae, but do not cause significant mortality.
Insecticide treatments are aimed at killing the newly hatched larvae before they tunnel into the vines. The insecticide has to cover the vines, so sprays need to penetrate the canopy. In a small garden with just a few plants applications are best directed at the base of the plant, crowns, and runners rather than on the leaves (and definitely avoid treating the flowers as insecticides will kill pollinators). Some insecticides will also kill the adults. Day degree calculations can be used to predict when adult moths will begin flying to determine when protection of the plants will be necessary. Adult emergence occurs at about 1000 DD (base 50), so plants need to be protected before then. As a general rule moths begin flying in early summer. Additional treatments will need to be made on a regular basis or any time the material has likely been removed (such as after a rainstorm or overhead watering).
– Susan Mahr, University of Wisconsin – Madison |
How to Read Literature Like a Professor (2003, rev. 2014)
Literature lives by a set of codes that convey meaning: when characters take journeys or eat together or walk out in rain or snow, those things suggest meanings beyond their literal message on the page. These codes developed over many centuries of storytelling, and writers learn them from years of reading and writing. You’ve learned them, too, with every story, every poem, every movie you’ve ever read or watched; you just haven’t realized it. Using humor and a light tone, this book takes readers through many of these codes and suggests ways of gleaning a fuller understanding of literary works. A New York Times bestseller with over a million copies in print, it has become a favorite of English classrooms and independent readers alike.
How to Read Literature Like a Professor – For Kids (2013)
A version of the big book for middle-grade readers, this one presents concepts and examples appropriate for grades 5-8, with examples drawn from classic and contemporary stories that appeal to young readers from ancient Greece to Narnia and Middle Earth and on to Hogwarts. Treating late-elementary and middle-school learners with respect, it shows how thinking about big ideas can also be a lot of fun.
While limiting itself to a mere twenty-five books—novels, poetry, nonfiction—it traces characteristic patterns of American thought from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin to Walden to The Great Gatsby to Song of Solomon. Many of the standard names—Hemingway, Steinbeck, Twain, Hawthorne, Kerouac—make appearances, but there are also one or two surprises, and even a feline in a striped hat. Written with characteristic humor and wit, the book takes a slightly irreverent look at the way writers help shape the story of the country.
How to Read Novels Like a Professor (2008)
So aren’t all novels literature? Yes, but not all literature is novels, which have their own special rules by which they convey meaning. Looking at structural elements—first pages, chapter structure, point of view, voice, and tone—the book examines how novelists and readers conspire to make long-form fiction the world’s favorite literary genre. With Foster’s customary cockeyed approach, it even provides a set of tongue-in-cheek “rules” for reading novels. |
How to Use EXISTS, UNIQUE, DISTINCT, and OVERLAPS in SQL Statements
Within the WHERE clause lies many possibilities for modifying your SQL statement. Among these possibilities are the EXISTS, UNIQUE, DISTINCT, and OVERLAPS predicates. Here are some examples of how to use these in your SQL statements.
You can use the EXISTS predicate in conjunction with a subquery to determine whether the subquery returns any rows. If the subquery returns at least one row, that result satisfies the EXISTS condition, and the outer query executes. Consider the following example:
SELECT FirstName, LastName FROM CUSTOMER WHERE EXISTS (SELECT DISTINCT CustomerID FROM SALES WHERE SALES.CustomerID = CUSTOMER.CustomerID);
Here the SALES table contains all of your company’s sales transactions. The table includes the CustomerID of the customer who makes each purchase, as well as other pertinent information. The CUSTOMER table contains each customer’s first and last names, but no information about specific transactions.
The subquery in the preceding example returns a row for every customer who has made at least one purchase. The outer query returns the first and last names of the customers who made the purchases that the SALES table records.
EXISTS is equivalent to a comparison of COUNT with zero, as the following query shows:
SELECT FirstName, LastName FROM CUSTOMER WHERE 0 <> (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM SALES WHERE SALES.CustomerID = CUSTOMER.CustomerID);
For every row in the SALES table that contains a CustomerID that’s equal to a CustomerID in the CUSTOMER table, this statement displays the FirstName and LastName columns in the CUSTOMER table. For every sale in the SALES table, therefore, the statement displays the name of the customer who made the purchase.
As you do with the EXISTS predicate, you use the UNIQUE predicate with a subquery. Although the EXISTS predicate evaluates to True only if the subquery returns at least one row, the UNIQUE predicate evaluates to True only if no two rows returned by the subquery are identical. In other words, the UNIQUE predicate evaluates to True only if all the rows that its subquery returns are unique.
Consider the following example:
SELECT FirstName, LastName FROM CUSTOMER WHERE UNIQUE (SELECT CustomerID FROM SALES WHERE SALES.CustomerID = CUSTOMER.CustomerID);
This statement retrieves the names of all new customers for whom the SALES table records only one sale. Because a null value is an unknown value, two null values aren’t considered equal to each other; when the UNIQUE keyword is applied to a result table that contains only two null rows, the UNIQUE predicate evaluates to True.
The DISTINCT predicate is similar to the UNIQUE predicate, except in the way it treats nulls. If all the values in a result table are UNIQUE, then they’re also DISTINCT from each other.
However, unlike the result for the UNIQUE predicate, if the DISTINCT keyword is applied to a result table that contains only two null rows, the DISTINCT predicate evaluates to False. Two null values are not considered distinct from each other, while at the same time they are considered to be unique.
This strange situation seems contradictory, but there’s a reason for it. In some situations, you may want to treat two null values as different from each other — in which case, use the UNIQUE predicate. When you want to treat the two nulls as if they’re the same, use the DISTINCT predicate.
You use the OVERLAPS predicate to determine whether two time intervals overlap each other. This predicate is useful for avoiding scheduling conflicts. If the two intervals overlap, the predicate returns a True value. If they don’t overlap, the predicate returns a False value.
You can specify an interval in two ways: either as a start time and an end time or as a start time and a duration. Here are some examples:
(TIME '2:55:00', INTERVAL '1' HOUR) OVERLAPS (TIME '3:30:00', INTERVAL '2' HOUR)
This first example returns a True because 3:30 is less than one hour after 2:55.
(TIME '9:00:00', TIME '9:30:00') OVERLAPS (TIME '9:29:00', TIME '9:31:00')
This example returns a True because you have a one-minute overlap between the two intervals.
(TIME '9:00:00', TIME '10:00:00') OVERLAPS (TIME '10:15:00', INTERVAL '3' HOUR)
This example returns a False because the two intervals don’t overlap.
(TIME '9:00:00', TIME '9:30:00') OVERLAPS (TIME '9:30:00', TIME '9:35:00')
This example returns a False because even though the two intervals are contiguous, they don’t overlap. |
The following is a statement from the Association for Public Transportation (APT) on funding for high speed passenger transportation:
To secure a stable future for high speed passenger rail, it will be necessary to develop a predictable funding source for this travel. APT is in favor of creating a High Speed Passenger Transportation (HSPT) fund by means of Congressional legislation. America is falling behind its global competitors in providing high speed transportation alternatives to its citizens. This bill would address needs in both air travel as well as high speed rail (HSR). Air travel and HSR are linked together because these modes are both competitive and complementary, just as automobile travel and public transit are both competitive and complementary.
The gist of this bill, which could be offered as either an amendment to the next Surface Transportation Bill, or as standalone legislation, would be to put a user fee of 6 percent on airline tickets, charter flights, air freight revenues, Amtrak tickets, and future HSR tickets to fund a High Speed Passenger Transportation (HSPT) fund. Proceeds, based on 2010 data, would be $8 billion annually. Twenty percent ($1.6 billion) would be used to deploy NextGen Air Traffic Control, 20 percent ($1.6 billion) to increase average speeds of intercity rail (e.g. Amtrak et al), where possible, to 70 mph so it can better feed HSR backbones, and 60 percent ($4.8 billion) for the design and construction of HSR. These user fee proceeds should increase over time as the economy recovers and transportation revenues strengthen.
Benefits and Projected Results:
- Next Generation Air Traffic Control (NextGen ATC): The existing air traffic control system is 50 years old, obsolete, and unable to handle current traffic in high volume markets such as greater New York City. Congestion in this market ripples in both directions, delaying flights from the west (Mid-west, California) and the east (Europe). The cost for this new system has ballooned from $10 billion to $40 billion and future funding for this project is not assured.
- Higher Speed Rail (Amtrak and other Intercity Rail with an average speed of 60 to 70 mph or greater). Higher Speed Rail (HrSR) is important as a feeder to HSR. At an average speed of 60 to 70 mph, HrSR which still requires subsidization, would require less of a subsidy since it is far more competitive with both automobiles and buses. Many of these HrSR lines, also called emerging HSR, can become true HSR service in the future, as demand, conditions, and financing warrant.
- High Speed Rail (HSR): HSR construction is key component of this bill. Lack of funding is holding back HSR deployment. This fund will rectify that problem. Assuming an initial $4.8 billion annual revenue stream for HSR, allocate $3 billion for bond interest payments (the $3 billion will float $100 billion bond offering at 3 percent coupon rate), and remaining $1.8 billion for the government to take actions to minimize the risk of private developers. These actions include buying rights of way, purchasing land around HSR stations for transit oriented development (TOD), making progress payments to private sector contractors who are constructing system. Future HSR fare revenues will be used to pay off debt and fund more HSR lines.
It is important to realize that neither the federal government nor private industry have the wherewithal to construct HSR alone. The total cost of development along the 11 key corridors designated by the FRA (Federal Railroad Administration) will be in the vicinity of $500 billion to three quarters of a trillion dollars, or $25 to $30 billion a year for 25 plus years. With this fund, the government and private sector can work together in Private-Public-Partnerships (P3’s). With the additional revenue streams from the commercial and residential TOD construction, along with the anticipated rail fares, HSR will make money, covering not only operating and maintenance costs, but also capital costs. The added benefit is that the HSPT Fund is a user fee and will not require allocations from general federal tax revenues.
The benefits accruing from the HSPT Fund are numerous. America benefits because there is now another way to transport the additional 100 million inhabitants that will be here by 2050. Airlines benefit because they will have a new ATC system that will make their operations more efficient. And since many Americans will chose to travel by rail between key city pairs 200 to 600 miles apart, airlines will be able to concentrate on more profitable, longer haul flights. Americans benefit because they will have a viable, cost-effective, time-competitive alternative to airline travel. No more long lines at airports or intrusive TSA searches. Even travelers who cannot use HSR benefit because there will be less congestion at airports, and better on time performance when they have to fly.
Proposed HSPT Act V4.0 |
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Dr. Math FAQ:
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Selected answers to common questions:
Volume of a tank.
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Flights across the North Atlantic could get a lot bumpier in the future if the climate changes as scientists expect.
Planes are already encountering stronger winds, and could now face more turbulence, according to research led from Reading University, UK.
The study, published in Nature Climate Change, suggests that by mid-century passengers will be bounced around more frequently and more strongly.
The zone in the North Atlantic affected by turbulence could also increase.
Reading’s Dr Paul Williams said comfort was not the only consideration; there were financial consequences of bumpier airspace as well.
“It’s certainly plausible that if flights get diverted more to fly around turbulence rather than through it then the amount of fuel that needs to be burnt will increase,” he told BBC News.
“Fuel costs money, which airlines have to pay, and ultimately it could of course be passengers buying their tickets who see the prices go up.” |
The Federal Reserve. or The Federal Reserve System, is the central bank of the United States that was founded in 1913 by the U.S. Congress in order to establish central financial control. The Federal Reserve is responsible for a lot of functions, so some may become confused about its role and ask the question “what does the Federal Reserve do?” The main objectives of the Federal Reserve System were established along with its founding in 1913. They are: maximizing employment, stabilizing prices and moderating long-term interest rates. Those are achieved by open-market operations, placing the discount rate, and establishing reserve requirements for financial institutions. Decisions and prognoses of the Federal Reserve are crucial for world’s economy because most economic operations are dependent on the U.S. dollar, which falls under the Federal Reserve’s control. |
What Determines (Or Changes) Exchange Rates
You may know today’s dollar–euro exchange rate. But it will be something else next year. How do you predict what the exchange rate will be? Which factors are helpful in predicting the change in exchange rates?
Which exchange rate model to use?
You have two alternative ways of looking at exchange rate determination. First, you can apply a microeconomic approach to exchange rate determination and assume that currencies are exchanged just like oranges.
The question as to how many oranges do you need to buy one apple is fundamentally similar to the one as to how many dollars do you need to buy one euro. In the demand–supply model, the demand and supply curves shift for various reasons, some that relate to international trade and others that relate to international investment.
Second, you can focus only on international investment. In this case, you can think of yourself as an investor deciding between dollar- and euro-denominated securities (of similar maturity and risk). How do you decide between these securities?
The answer involves two factors: real interest rates associated with these securities and the expected change in the exchange rate. Keep in mind that monetary policies of two countries affect the real returns in this model, as well as your expectations regarding the future exchange rate.
Therefore, you need to keep a close eye on monetary policies of both countries, form your expectations regarding the real returns and the future exchange rate, sell one of the currencies, buy the other currency, and buy securities denominated in the latter currency. The currency you’re buying appreciates in the current (spot) foreign exchange market.
Are there any exchange rate prediction rules to live by?
Yes, certain generally accepted factors lead to predictable changes in the exchange rates. Two main factors are nominal interest rates and inflation rates. Higher inflation rates generally lead to higher nominal interest rates. If you ask why inflation rates increase, the major culprit, in this case, is an expansionary monetary policy, implied by higher growth in nominal money supply accompanied by declines in central banks’ key interest rates.
Therefore, all three factors (monetary policy, inflation rates, and nominal interest rates) are related and have a predictable effect on exchange rates. Most empirical evidence implies that expansionary monetary policies resulting in higher inflation rates and higher nominal interest rates lead to the depreciation of a currency.
In terms of real variables (variables that are adjusted for inflation), higher real interest rates and growth rates of real GDP (gross domestic product, or output of a country) lead to the appreciation of a currency. |
When we are using RGB color space,we can differentiate between the red,blue and green color. But when comes to detecting yellow color, this code will detect yellow color in RGB color space.
I hopw this would help.
Usha this code doesnt get u the yellow color.
I used basic color theory...
first we r working on RGB color space.
second i took the complement of the current image.. this brings u to the CMY color space.
the third plane of this color space gives u yellow color.
Now y i did the subtraction is cos if u see i subtracted current frame by its gray color then that maximizes the color in that plane.. |
Feeding and energetics of
Pacific macrourid fishes
Jeff Drazen, Ph.D.
Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
September 20, 2002
12:00 Noon - Pacific Forum
Macrourids (also known as rattails or grenadiers) are very common and
abundant deep-sea fishes. Over 300 species are entirely deep living,
inhabiting depths from 200 to 6000 meters throughout the world’s oceans.
The majority of species are benthopelagic, swimming in the water column
just over the sea floor. Many species are large (~0.5 to 1 meter) and
considering their abundance, macrourids are important apex predators in
the deep-sea environment. Despite their potentially important role, almost
nothing is known of their feeding ecology beyond the basic diet
composition of several species. Their diversity and widespread occurrence
also make them good subjects for examining energetic strategies in the
food-poor deep sea.
The talk will discuss the diet of several species of macrourids and
their role as scavengers in the deep sea. Temporal patterns in feeding and
energetics and an energetic model used to calculate feeding rates and
investigate energetic adaptations will also be presented.
Next: Submarine groundwater
discharge and its effect on the methane cycle |
Native Species, Invaders, and Parasites: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Environment Canada scientists have discovered that populations of Round Goby (Neogobius melanostomus) recently introduced in the St. Lawrence River were considerably less parasitized than two indigenous fish species, whereas the Round Goby is highly infected with parasites in its native range. Such parasite-escape could have translated into a temporary increase in the competitive ability of this invasive species, contributing to its successful establishment.
Results suggest that this potential advantage over native species may be of relatively short duration. Within 15 years, the parasite abundance and richness in Round Gobies in Lake St. Clair has more than doubled. The number of parasite species per fish has also increased, now matching levels of those typical of fish indigenous to the St. Lawrence-Great Lakes watershed. Results suggest that the goby may be integrating itself more fully into the Great Lakes food web over time.
Source: Gendron AD (514-283-9995, [email protected]), Marcogliese DJ (514-283-6499, [email protected]), Thomas M. 2011. Invasive species are less parasitized than native competitors, but for how long? The case of the round goby in the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Basin. Biol Invasions 10.1007/s10530-011-0083-y
- Date modified: |
Taking your children to India gives them the opportunity to explore a far off land with a culture and lifestyle that is very different than what most American children are used to. Although a vacation in India is an adventure that your children won't soon forget, it is important that you prepare your family for your trip to help things run smoothly and avoid any illnesses or accidents.
Prepare your travel plan. Book your flight and hotel accommodations and create an outline of your trip itinerary. Include a day or two for your children to recuperate from the flight and time change upon your arrival in India if possible.
Get your passports and visas. Contact the nearest Indian Embassy or Consulate to obtain visas for your family and visit a local passport acceptance facility to have passports made for everyone in your party because all travelers to India must have both documents before entering the country.
Visit your family doctor to ensure that you and your children are up to date on all vaccinations. Receive vaccinations against diseases such as hepatitis A, typhoid and rabies in addition to your routine vaccinations, notes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's website. Request a prescription for an antimalarial drug and ensure that you have a enough of your family's other prescription medications to last the duration of your trip.
Pack a small medical kit. Include sunscreen, insect repellent, an over-the counter anti-diarrhea medication, hand sanitizer or antibacterial wipes and any prescription or over-the-counter medications that your family uses. Add a thermometer, fever reducer and band-aids to the kit to help treat minor illnesses and injuries.
Introduce new foods slowly. Limit your children's intake of spicy Indian foods, especially when you first arrive in the country, and use caution when selecting restaurants. Stick to upscale restaurants, such as those found in your hotel, and remain aware of how your family's food is prepared, especially precut fruits and meat products, notes the Frommer's travel website.
Avoid the water to help prevent illness. Drink only bottled water and use it to brush your teeth and clean any scrapes that your child might get. Avoid drinks and ice that have been made with local water and remove water from all cups and utensils with a clean rag before using them or letting your children use them. Remind your kids not to open their mouths while in the shower or to drink water from a sink or drinking fountain.
Stay alert. Avoid letting your child pet or feed any of the animals they see while in India and watch for locals who want to take a picture of your children in exchange for a small toy or candy treat.
Leaf Group is a USA TODAY content partner providing general travel information. Its content is produced independently of USA TODAY.
- Jupiterimages/Photos.com/Getty Images |
The Biology of CRISPR-Cas Immunity
Sequence-directed genetic interference pathways control gene expression and preserve genome integrity in all kingdoms of life. In many bacteria and most archaea, clustered, regularly interspaced, short palindromic repeats (CRISPRs) specify a recently discovered genetic interference pathway that protects cells from viruses (phages) and conjugative plasmids. Within CRISPR sequences, the repeats are separated by short spacer sequences that match phage or plasmid genomes and specify the targets of interference. Spacer sequences are transcribed into CRISPR RNAs (crRNAs) — small RNAs that, through base-pairing interactions with the target sequence, guide Cas nucleases to the invasive nucleic acid. Upon infection, CRISPR arrays can acquire new repeat-spacer units that match the infecting phage or plasmid. Therefore CRISPR-Cas systems provide adaptive and inheritable immunity to the bacterial cell. The spacer content of CRISPR arrays reflects the many different invaders encountered by the host and can be expanded rapidly in response to new ones. Accordingly, CRISPR loci constitute a “genetic memory” that ensures the rejection of new, returning and ever-present invading DNA molecules.
We use Staphylococcus epidermidis and Streptococcus pyogenes as model systems for studying CRISPR immunity. The clinical isolate S. epidermidis RP62a harbors a CRISPR spacer that matches the nickase gene (nes) present in nearly all staphylococcal conjugative plasmids carrying antibiotic resistance genes and prevents their spread. Using this system, Dr. Marraffini revealed that the CRISPR-Cas machinery targets DNA, rather than RNA, directly. Work in the Marraffini lab also demonstrated that the S. pyogenes crRNA-guided Cas9 DNA nuclease constitutes a formidable tool for genetic engineering.
The lab’s current research employs molecular genetic and biochemical approaches to analyze the genesis and function of CRISPR-Cas systems. We ultimately hope to answer fundamental questions about how CRISPR-Cas systems destroy their targets, how the genetic memory is generated, and how CRISPR-Cas immunity affects the evolution of bacteria and archaea, particularly of bacterial pathogens. By performing detailed analyses of the underlying molecular mechanisms of CRISPR immunity, we hope to facilitate the manipulation of this natural pathway for the development of new technologies. |
In a previous article, MasteringElectronicsDesign.com:How to Derive the RMS Value of A Trapezoidal Waveform – Part 1, I showed how to derive the RMS value of a trapezoidal signal with a flat plateau and different rise/fall time values. In some applications, the trapezoidal signal plateau is not flat, but rather a ramp, as shown in Figure 1. A typical example is a DC-DC converter, where the transformer winding current might look like the signal in Figure 1. Of course, in the DC-DC converter example, the amplitude is current and not voltage. No matter, the calculations are the same.
This waveform is still considered a trapezoidal waveform. Let’s calculate its RMS value.
The signal is linear between 0 and t1. Its expression as a function of time can be easily derived by first writing down the slope of the signal. Its slope is (V2-V1)/t1. Also, at origin, the signal value is V1. Therefore, by using simple algebra, the signal function is at follows:
For simplicity, let’s denote the slope with k = (V2-V1)/t1.
A periodic signal RMS definition is
and here is how to calculate the integral.
Now let’s replace k with dV/t1, where dV is the difference V2-V1.
Therefore the RMS value of the trapezoidal signal in Figure 1 is |
As we head into 2021, the matric class of 2020 will be eagerly awaiting their final exam results. While many teens will celebrate this new phase in their life, some could feel alone and isolated if they failed or didn’t do as well as they hoped.
According to the South African Depression and Anxiety Group (SADAG), almost one in ten teen deaths in South Africa are caused by suicide. One of the triggers could be exam disappointment.
“Matric is like running an obstacle course and matrics are pushed to their mental, physical and emotional capacities. If they don’t have the right coping skills and support systems, they are more at risk of experiencing mental health challenges,” says Clinical Psychologist Candice Combrinck.
Parents can offer comfort and reassurance to matriculants and that it’s normal to feel disappointment, worry, anger and sadness about their results, says Combrinck.
Teen suicide warning signs
- Depression: Feeling hopeless, losing interest in doing anything and withdrawing from friends and family.
- Talking or joking about suicide: Talking about dying or threatening to kill themselves.
- Preparing for death: Many teens planning suicide will give things away or say goodbye.
- Self-criticism: Saying things like “I can’t do any- thing right.”
- Risk-taking behaviour: Doing risky, dangerous things like having unprotected sex or taking drugs.
- Excessive feelings of guilt, self-blame, failure.
- Suddenly feeling better: If someone you know has been very depressed, haven’t been for treatment and suddenly seem back to normal, it might mean they have set a date for their suicide.
Tips for Teens
Depression can make you feel exhausted, worthless, helpless and hopeless. If you are suffering from depression, try to:
- Understand depression so that you know what you are dealing with.
- Do things to keep your mind busy and things that make you feel better, like exercise.
- Set realistic goals.
- Break large tasks into smaller ones and do what you can.
- Try to be with other people and confide in someone you trust.
- Keep a diary or journal. It’s a great way to get your feelings out.
- Let your family and friends help you.
If you are feeling suicidal:
- Tell someone immediately or call the SADAG Suicide Crisis Helpline.
- Make sure you are not alone.
- Don’t use alcohol or drugs.
- Ask family and friends to lock knives, ropes, pills and guns away.
- Keep pictures of your favourite people with you.
The Department of Basic Education's Second Chance Matric Support Programme gives you the opportunity to achieve or improve a matric qualification.
Contact the toll-free SADAG Suicide Crisis Helpline at 0800 567 567. |
Saturday, April 02, 2011
There are two species of gorillas, mountain and lowland, and they seem to have diverged around 80,000 years ago. The lowlanders split into fairly well defined subspecies, eastern and western. However, these authors report there is a "zone of introgression between eastern gorillas and migrants from the west," meaning that they are hybridizing. The point, without getting too deep into taxonomic waters that I'm really not qualified to wade into, is that gene flow works in all sorts of directions, and gorillas turn out to be a very complex group. It's a good lesson when puzzling out relationships of any creatures. |
A new standard is being developed that addresses growing backhaul bandwidth concerns. Let's hope it gets done quickly.
A lot of excitement is brewing in the electronics industry about the so-called Internet of Things and the huge market opportunity it represents: 50 billion devices connected by 2020, according to some estimates. But add that traffic to the dramatic rise in wireless networking and entertainment streaming, and you have a problem. The backhaul infrastructure is going to clog unless something is done, quickly.
The potential for a clogged network is no surprise to some. Last year's "IEEE Ethernet Bandwidth Assessment Report" spelled things out clearly. The report expects a 100-fold increase in network traffic by 2020, requiring networks to support up to 10 Tbit/s. The report concludes that the network will need 400G link speeds (or their equivalent in parallelism) as early as 2015.
With the need thus clearly spelled out, the IEEE has begun the first steps toward creating a 400G Ethernet standard. A 400G study group was formed in April this year and has already had its first meeting. The next is set to occur in July. The meeting materials from the first study group gathering are now online.
Clearly there is a great deal of work to do in defining a new standard, not the least of which is determining the underlying architecture. Will the link use ten 40G lanes in parallel? How about four 100G lanes? What makes the most sense in terms of implementation cost and complexity?
One of the arguments made in the presentation, "Scalable 400GbE Architecture" by Ali Ghiasi of Broadcom, is that adopting the approach of sharing the 400G PMD (physical medium dependent) sub layer with 100G Ethernet links could help speed deployment of the technology. The approach is similar to one taken in leveraging 10G Ethernet to implement 40G.
Ghiasi estimated that there has been a four-year lag in the ramp-up of 40G and 100G port shipments. A similar lag in 100G to 400G shipments would push the volume deployment of equipment out beyond 2020 -- much later than the Bandwidth Assessment report estimates it will be needed. Following the 4x100G approach could speed the process, Ghiasi stated.
There are alternative suggestions on the table. One possibility is to use a 4x25G structure for installing 100G ports, and then use a 16x25G structure, technically feasible today, for 400G. Or perhaps an 8x50G. The 10x40G approach seemed to be favored by the attendees.
Whatever approach finally gets settled on, it seems essential that the choice be made with a strong bias toward what is within the grasp of today's technology (no breakthroughs required). The need to increase capacity rapidly is beginning to become pressing, and the industry needs a clear standard on which to build. 400G Ethernet needs to be on the fast track.
For the moment, anyway, it seems to be. In the pre-meeting materials for the July gathering is a strawman Project Authorization Request (PAR) for development of a 400G Ethernet standard: IEEE 802.3bs. Completion and approval of the PAR are the next steps needed in the run towards 400G.
What are your thoughts about 400G Ethernet? |
Maya were an American Indian People who developed a magnificent civilization in Central America and south Mexico. The Maya civilization reached its period of development about A. D. 250 and continued to flourish for over 600 years. The Maya produced remarkable architecture, painting, pottery, and sculpture. They made great advancements in astronomy and mathematics and developed and accurate yearly calender. They were one of the first peoples in the Western Hemisphere to develop and advanced form of writing. The Maya lived in an area of about 120,000 square miles (311,000 square kilometers).
Today, the territory of the Maya is divided among Mexico and several Central American countries. It consists of the Mexican states of Campeche, Yucatan, and Quintana Roo and part of the states of Tabasco and Chiapas. It also includes Belize, most of Quatemala, and parts of El Salvador and of Honduras. The heart of the Maya civilization was in the tropical rain forest of the lowlands of northern Quatemala. Many of the major Maya Cities, such as Piedras Negras, Tikal, and uaxactun, developed in this area. The Maya homeland, called Mesoamerica, span fine countries: Mexico, Quatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador.
There are now indications that the people we call the Maya had migrated from North America to the highlands of Guatemala perhaps as long ago as 2600 B. C. , living an agriculuture village-based life. The cultural of these Preclassic Maya owes much to the earlier civilization of the Olmec, which flourished ca 1200 B. C. By the time Maya civilization had reached its peak the classic period (A. D. 200-900) the Maya were spread across an almost continuous territory of roughly 311,000 square kilometers (120,000 square miles).
The tropical rain forest of the lowlands, stretching from northern Honduras, through the Peten region of Guatemala and into Belize and chiapas, which became the heart of classic Maya civilization included cities such as Copan, Yaxchilan, Tikal, and Palenque. The Guatemala highlands and the Pacific Coast, where Aztecs influenced In the early classic period caused some differences in cultural development from the Central or lowlands, Maya. The northern Yucatan peninsula, where sites include Habna, Chichen Itza and Uxmal, is characterized by scrub vegetation, thin soil, and little surface water a |
Alternate name: Lawndaisy
Family: Asteraceae, Aster view all from this family
Description Exotic herbaceous perennial; sometimes evergreen; spreads by rhizome, may form large colonies.
Habit: low, mat-forming to prostrate; upright leafless stems.
Height: 1-4 in (2-10 cm) tall, rarely to 8 in (20 cm).
Leaf: small, oval, 1-2 in (2-5 cm) long, in basal rosette.
Flower: flowerhead 1-1.5 in (2-3 cm) wide; rays narrow, rounded or pointed, white (often tipped red); around a yellow disc; flowering spring to summer.
Habitat Meadows, lawns, disturbed sites, waste places, roadsides; moist sites.
Range Native to Europe; naturalized in the northern part of North America to 1600 ft (500 m); on the west coast, from Alaska to California, east to Utah, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota; in the northeast, from Newfoundland to North Carolina, west to Ontario, Minnesota, Illinois, Kentucky and Tennessee; also cultivated as an ornamental.
Discussion Also known as: common daisy, European daisy, lawn daisy. This plant is considered weedy or invasive in some locations; it recovers quickly from mowing. It is thought that the name "daisy" is a corruption of "day's eye", because the whole head closes at night and opens in the morning. Daisy is also a common girl's name and is a nickname for girls named Margaret, after the French name for the oxeye daisy, "marguerite". |
1 Answer | Add Yours
If a function is concave upwards then it's second derivative is positive.
We'll determine the 1st derivative:
f'(x) = arctanx + 1/(1+x^2) - 2x/(1+x^2)
f'(x) = arctanx – x/(1+x^2)
We'll determine the 2nd derivative
f"(x)= 1/(1+x^2) – (1+x^2-2x^2)/(1+x^2)^2
f"(x) = (1+x^2+x^2-1)/(1+x^2)^2
We'll combine like terms inside brackets:
f"(x)=2x^2/(1+x^2) >= 0
Since the second derivative is always positive , for any real value of x, then the function is concave upwards.
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To assess whether or not families and children were supported in their neighborhoods, parents were asked whether they agreed with the following statements:
- People in the neighborhood help each other out.
- We watch out for each other’s children.
- There are people I can count on in the neighborhood.
- If my child were outside playing and got hurt or scared, there are adults nearby whom I trust to help my child.
Families were considered to live in supportive neighborhoods if they answered "definitely agree" or "somewhat agree" to each of the four statements. Overall, parents of 83.2 percent of children reported that they live in supportive neighborhoods. This percentage was slightly higher (85.1 percent) in both small and large rural areas.
The discrepancy between urban and rural communities is greatest among children in lower-income households. Among rural children with household incomes below the Federal poverty level (FPL), approximately three-quarters lived in supportive neighborhoods, compared to 69.4 percent of urban children of the same income level. Among children with household incomes of 400 percent of the FPL or more, however, at least 91 percent lived in supportive neighborhoods regardless of location. |
Photo: Philipp Mandler
Tesla has published a patent for the global headlamp as part of the further development of its products. This will allow the production of headlamps that will meet the requirements of different countries and will reduce the cost of producing different types of headlamps.
Headlamps, such as headlights on a front of a vehicle, are a major tool for improving the safety for those inside and outside the vehicle. Light from the vehicle’s headlamps allows for illumination of the world to enhance visibility for persons within the vehicle. In addition, the light allows the vehicle to be identified by people outside of it when it is moving. Thus, headlights have a dual purpose, which means they must be effective in various situations. For example, vehicle headlights can emit asymmetrical light to illuminate moving vehicles and pedestrians, greatly minimizing oncoming traffic glare.
In different countries or geographic regions, different regulatory bodies or standards development organizations determine the rules and requirements for vehicle headlights. Because of these differences in jurisdictions, global automotive companies produce different headlights that are jurisdiction specific, adding to cost and complexity of manufacturing.
Tesla filed for a "Global headlamp" patent on July 28, 2021, which was published on February 3, 2022. The patent describes an invention that allows headlights to be "universal" and customizable, allowing the company to produce headlights to a uniform standard and customize them to meet the requirements of different jurisdictions.
For example, in one embodiment, a computer-implemented method performed by a headlamp controller included in the vehicle is presented. The headlamp controller may be configured to control a headlamp of the vehicle by a method that includes: obtaining configuration information indicative of a jurisdiction associated with the vehicle; accessing headlamp state information comprising a plurality of headlamp states; determining a current headlamp state of the plurality of headlamp states based on the configuration information; and causing outputting, via a pixelated light source in the headlamp, of a propagation based on the current headlamp state, the propagation representing a particular beam pattern which is compliant with the jurisdiction.
In another embodiment, an automotive light distribution system is provided that meets the requirements of many jurisdictions. The system may include: a memory storing headlamp state information for a plurality of jurisdictions and a selection of a current jurisdiction; a controller that reads the selected current jurisdiction and the headlamp state information associated with the selected jurisdiction; and a plurality of emissive elements configured to output propagations that are compliant with the selected jurisdiction based on the headlamp state information.
© 2022, Eva Fox | Tesmanian. All rights reserved.
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About the Author
Eva Fox joined Tesmanian in 2019 to cover breaking news as an automotive journalist. The main topics that she covers are clean energy and electric vehicles. As a journalist, Eva is specialized in Tesla and topics related to the work and development of the company. |
Investigating the microbes that help tackle pollution
Published: 24 Aug 2015
During a ten-week study trip through Mongolia, China and India, Dr. Brenda Parker took a closer look into bioremediation: the use of microorganisms or plants for the removal of contaminants in the environment.
Supported by a Fellowship from the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, Dr. Parker visited contaminated sites, examining dynamics of long-term pollution problems and scrutinizing the barriers preventing lab-work from being implemented in the field.
“A huge amount of research time is devoted to discovering bacteria or plants capable of degrading or sequestering pollutants, yet very little of this is applied in practice, which is enormously frustrating,” she says.
Brenda unveiled several key findings. When examining obstacles to pollution clean-up, funding was never cited as a barrier. “In all of the locations I visited, and surprisingly especially amongst NGOs, the opinion was that there is no shortage of money available for remediation. The main obstacle is often the polluters themselves. Paying for clean-up is admission of responsibility, and this is something industry is keen to avoid.”
In Kanpur, a city sullied with pollution due to tannery processes, the government has allocated substantial sums of money to clean up the River Ganga. However, a failure to enforce waste treatment, inadequate infrastructure and poor choice of technology have all undermined clean-up efforts leading to environmental destruction.
“In Kanpur the tanneries, which represent an important livelihood in the region, are portrayed as the villains of the piece. However the full story reveals a catalogue of failures. A biological waste treatment facility was built on the assumption that there would be removal of chromium before the effluent reached the plant. When this wasn’t done, the microorganisms couldn’t cope with the toxicity of the waste. Instead of returning clean water to the irrigation system, the cycle of contamination is perpetuated as wastewater containing tannery chemicals is supplied to farmers to water their crops.”
A lack of will feeds a black hole of data, according to Dr. Parker, further impeding clean-up efforts. Through the efforts of Ma Jun’s Institute for Public and Environmental Affairs and Pure Earth to produce inventories of information on polluted sites this is beginning to change. However, in China it can be difficult to prove the problem is there in the first place.
“Environmental testing has to be carried out by government-approved laboratories to be considered valid. Many of the people I spoke to claim that the official labs will refuse to analyse samples if they suspect controversy. This underlines the need to devise accessible sensors or testing kits that are respected by authorities so that citizens are empowered to report when pollution is unacceptable. However the political will to mobilise a response is essential.”
Pollution threat to health underestimated
Dr. Parker argues that while much attention is given to the carbon footprint of products, the pollution footprint is often more chronic. Pollution has been shown to pose a major threat to human health, yet receives much less funding and media attention than other public health topics.
“Public health campaigns deal with diseases that can be treated with measurable results. Long-term exposure to pollution is much more complex and harder to tackle, which is why many corporate social responsibility programs are reluctant to be involved. The roots of this problem are often embedded in the more profound issues of cost-cutting and corruption when it comes to environmental regulations.”
Dr. Parker hopes to develop a framework for translational research in her area. This might involve assembling multi-disciplinary teams to consider user-centred solutions, or engaging with practitioners in the field who are aware of the socio-economic issues around contaminated land and water. She is currently working in collaboration with students at the Bartlett at UCL, who are combining her work on algal bioremediation with 3D printing technologies. These are small steps towards removing the high capital costs of remediation technologies by using open-source models of production.
Read Dr Parker's report
Notes for Editors:
- Dr. Brenda Parker is a lecturer in the Department of Biochemical Engineering at University College London.
- Dr. Parker was awarded the Travelling Fellowship from the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust for a ten-week trip through Mongolia, China and India. Her focus was on contamination in water or soil relating to manufacturing activities and mining. Photographs available on request.
- During the trip, Dr. Parker liaised with a number of interest groups: environmental NGOs such as the Pure Earth (formerly Blacksmith Institute); industry representatives; governmental departments; environmental engineering companies and political activists.
Contact Dr Brenda Parker: [email protected] / 0207 679 9789 |
The notion of soft power is associated with the work of Harvard political scientist, Joseph Nye and was defined by him simply as ‘the ability to attract people to our side without coercion’. The phrase was first used by Nye in an article published in 1990 in the US journal, Foreign Policy and expanded in his 2004 book Soft Power. Despite Nye’s focus being primarily on the United States, and the vagueness associated with the concept of soft power, the phrase has acquired global currency and is routinely used in policy and academic literature, as well as in elite journalism. The capacity of nations to make themselves attractive in a globalizing marketplace of ideas has become an important aspect of contemporary international relations, as has been the goal of communicating a favourable image of a country or countering negative portrayals in an era of digital global flows.
As the world’s fastest growing large economy and with a pluralist polity, India is increasingly viewed as a global economic and political power. Since 2013, India has been the world’s third largest economy behind China and the United States on the basis of purchasing-power parity, while, in overall GDP terms, its $2.6 trillion economy has become the sixth largest, surpassing France in 2018. Nevertheless, the country is still home to the world’s largest number of people living in extreme poverty.
Parallel to its rising economic power are the growing global awareness and appreciation of India’s soft power – its extensive and globalized diaspora, mass media, celebratory religiosity (Yoga and Ayurveda) and popular culture. India’s soft power has a civilizational dimension to it, the Indic civilization, dating back more than 5000 years, being one of the major cultural formations in the world, with wide-ranging influences from religion and philosophy, arts and architecture to language, literature, trade and travel. India is the point of origin of four of the world’s religions – Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism – and, as the place where every major faith, with the exception of Shintoism and Confucianism, has coexisted for millennia, India offers a unique and syncretized religious discourse.
The dissemination of Hindu and Buddhist ideas across Asia is well documented: it is no coincidence that the official airline of Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country, is named Garuda, the Sanskrit name for the Hindu God Vishnu’s flying creature. The Indian contribution to Islamic thought (and via that to European) on mathematics, astronomy, and other physical and metaphysical sciences is widely recognized.
India’s soft power in historical terms was directed not towards the West but to Asia. India’s cultural influence across East and Southeast Asia during the early centuries of the Christian era was spread through the dispersion of Hinduism and Buddhism and thus the millennia-old relationship between India and the rest of Asia has a strong cultural and communication dimension. Buddhism was at the heart of this interaction, with the widest dissemination of ideas emanating from what constitutes India today, and remains a powerful link between the Indic and the Chinese civilizations. Narratives on Buddha’s life and teachings are still a cultural referent in much of Asia, while traces of Indic languages, cuisine, dance, and other art forms survive in parts of Southeast Asia, notably in Indonesia.
Two of the world’s other great religions – Christianity and Islam – also have long associations with India. Some of the earliest Christian communities were established in India: St. Thomas is supposed to be buried in Chennai and one of the world’s oldest mosques is also located in India – in Kerala, where Jewish communities have lived for millennia. Adding to this legacy is India’s long and continuing encounter with European modernity and its contribution to a distinctive worldview epitomized by leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, the apostle of non-violence and tolerance – whose thoughts influenced such leaders as Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. This rare combination of a civilization which has strong Hindu-Buddhist foundations, centuries of Islamic influence, and integration with Western institutions and ideas, gives India cultural resources to deal with the diverse, globalized and complex realities of the twenty-first century.
In Prime Minister Modi’s ‘faith-based’ diplomacy, promoting Buddhism is particularly pronounced. Emphasizing the millennium-old cultural and communication links with other Asian nations, especially China, the Indian government has propounded the idea of ‘sanskritievamsabhyata’ (culture and civilization) as a core principle for promoting India’s image globally. It is not without symbolic significance that the first foreign visit Modi made after being elected Prime Minister in 2014 was to Buddhist Bhutan. Since then, in his official visits to Asian nations such as Nepal, Japan, China, Mongolia and South Korea, he has repeatedly invoked Buddhism. With its focus on peace and non-violence, Buddhism is seen as a useful soft power tool for India, which has traditionally been a peace-loving nation. Another aspect of Modi’s faith-based diplomacy is the promotion of yoga as part of soft-power projection, in which his government has been active, as evidenced by the adoption of International Yoga Day by the United Nations on June 21.
With its history as the only major democracy that did not blindly follow the West during the Cold War years, pursuing an autonomous foreign policy, India also has the potential now to take up a more significant leadership role. Despite growing economic and strategic relations with Washington, it maintains close ties with other major and emerging powers. India’s presence at the Group of 77 developing nations and at the G-20 leading economies of the world has been effective in articulating a Southern perspective on global affairs. India is also a key member of the BRICS grouping of countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as well as the Commonwealth. As the 2017 annual report of India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) noted: ‘India’s diplomatic approach and engagement with the wider world is reflective of its confidence as a rising power capable of shaping the global discourses in the emerging multi-polar world’, a sentiment also reflected in a 2017 documentary, India Boundless – A Place in the Heart of the World, produced for the Public Diplomacy Division of the MEA.
How effective are India’s soft power initiatives? The intangible nature of soft power makes it hard, if not impossible, to measure. Has India’s civilizational communication with Asia given New Delhi a greater voice in the continent’s geopolitics? One major problem India faces is that it has not successfully communicated its soft power resources apart from its popular cinema. Indian news and current affairs continue to be largely domestically oriented and therefore absent in the global news arena.
As a result, the capacity to communicate India’s cultural attributes – classical or con-temporary – to a globalized audience is largely underdeveloped. Of the countries with ambitions for a global role, India is the only one whose national broadcaster (Doordarshan) is not available in the major capitals of the world. Although international news channels are still dominated by Anglo-American broadcasters, most major non-English speaking countries have entered the arena to ensure their views on the world are heard via their English-language 24/7 news networks, such as China (CGTN), Russia (RT), Qatar (Al Jazeera English), Iran (Press TV) and Turkey (TRT-News). However, the Indian viewpoint is notably missing in the global news sphere, at a time when news media are a key instrument of public diplomacy.
While India’s English-language private news networks, such as NDTV 24×7, CNN-News 18, India Today Television, Times Now and WION (World Is One News) are available globally, they have rarely ventured out of their diasporic constituencies. For a nation with a developed model of journalism and one of the world’s largest English-language news markets, it is ironical that Indian journalism is losing interest in the wider world at a time when Indian industry is increasingly globalizing and international engagement with India is growing across the globe. Despite its penchant for managing media messages and Modi’s personal reputation as a formidable communicator, his government has done little to address this shortcoming in India’s external communication strategy.
(Prof. DayaKishanThussu is currently Disney Chair in Global Media and Distinguished Faculty Visiting Professor at Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University, Beijing. For many years he was Professor of International Communication at the University of Westminster in London. Among his many publications is Communicating India’s Soft Power: Buddha to Bollywood (Sage/India, 2016).)
(This article is carried in the print edition of March-April 2019 issue of India Foundation Journal.) |
VIENNA — The tsunami that followed Japan's strongest recorded earthquake exposed nuclear-safety flaws even as an emergency response worker was killed and at least 17 were injured trying to contain radiation from damaged reactors.
Electrical generators intended to run cooling systems in case of an emergency failed at three reactors at Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant after the March 11 earthquake and ensuing tsunami. The plant has six reactors, three of which were closed for maintenance when the earthquake struck.
"All systems were working well after the earthquake, but the tsunami destroyed the emergency electrical generators, and an overheating situation has developed," said Robert Kelley, a Vienna-based nuclear engineer who worked in nuclear emergency response during his 30-year career with the Department of Energy. "It appears the redundancy wasn't actually redundant, and that led to the failure."
While the reactor vessels — the metal constructs that house the uranium fuel — withstood the stress of the earthquake and subsequent explosions inside the buildings that house them, Japanese regulators overlooked the magnitude of the tsunami that would follow a 9.0-magnitude quake off the coast.
Japanese authorities designed backup electrical generators to withstand waves 6.3 meters high, below the 7-meter surge that knocked out power at the plant, disabling vital cooling systems, Ian Hore-Lacy, a spokesman for the London-based World Nuclear Association, said in a telephone interview.
"Everybody learns from a tragedy like this," Hore-Lacy said. His association is an advocate for the nuclear energy industry.
Nuclear reactors have layers of safety features designed to prevent radiation from reaching the atmosphere. Uranium fuel rods are sealed with zirconium alloy. Steel ingots are formed to contain the radioactive fuel inside of seam-free containment vessels immune to rupture. A pressure-resistant, airtight containment vessel is built around the reactor.
These "nuclear reactors have multiple safety measures," International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Yukiya Amano said in Vienna. "The nuclear core is contained inside the vessels that is made of solid steel and then that reactor vessel is contained in another primary containment vessel. These vessels withheld."
Because of the reactor design, Amano dismissed the possibility that Japan's nuclear incident could lead to a radiation release on the scale of Ukraine's Chernobyl disaster in 1986. The Chernobyl reactor's heat was modified with graphite rather than water, resulting in a high concentration of radioactive dust when the fuel began to melt.
Radiation dose rates of 400 millisieverts per hour were detected Tuesday at the Japanese site, the IAEA said. That contrasts with readings of 40 microsieverts two miles from the plant Monday. There are 1,000 microsieverts in a millisievert. Normal background radiation is 0.3 microsieverts per hour.
Japan's reactor vessel absorbed 50 percent more pressure than it was designed to withstand, according to a Japanese report to the IAEA in Vienna on March 11.
While most modern nuclear reactor vessels are built to withstand the kind of strong earthquakes that occur once every 1,000 years, the infrastructure surrounding the reactor's radioactive core may still be susceptible to tsunamis, according to the World Nuclear Association.
"Even for a nuclear plant situated very close to sea level, the robust sealed containment structure around the reactor itself would prevent any damage to the nuclear part from a tsunami, though other parts of the plant might be damaged," the association said on its website, citing Japanese regulatory documents.
With assistance from Simeon Bennett in Singapore. |
Any time you report estimates of parameters in a statistical analysis, it’s important to include their confidence intervals.
How confident are you that you can explain what they mean? Even those of us who have a solid understand of confidence intervals get tripped up by the wording.
The Wording for Describing Confidence Intervals
Let’s look at an example.
The average person’s IQ is 100. A new miracle drug was tested on an experimental group. It was found to improve the average IQ 10 points, from 100 to 110. The 95 percent confidence interval of the experimental group’s mean was 105 to 115 points.
Which if any of the following are true:
1. If you conducted the same experiment 100 times, the mean for each sample would fall within the range of this confidence interval, 105 to 115, 95 times.
2. The lower confidence level for 5 of the samples would be less than 105.
3. If you conducted the experiment 100 times, 95 times the confidence interval would contain the population’s true mean.
4. 95% of the observations of the population fall within the 105 to 115 confidence interval.
5. There is a 95% probability that the 105 to 115 confidence interval contains the population’s true mean.
A Visual Description Really Helps
Not sure? To help you visualize what a confidence interval is, let’s generate a random population of 10,000 observations. The population’s mean is 110 with a standard deviation of 25.
Next, we will randomly draw a sample of 100 observations from this population. Below, you see the mean, standard deviation and confidence interval of the sample’s mean.
So far, so good. In reality, we seldom draw more than one sample from a population when conducting a study. To help us visualize how confidence intervals change as the sample changes we will randomly draw 99 more samples. This lets us graph each sample’s mean and confidence interval.
The horizontal red line at 110 is the population mean. The red dots represent each sample’s mean.
What can we observe from this graph?
1. The lower and upper confidence limits are seldom if ever the same.
2. Some confidence intervals have a narrower range than others.
Keep in mind that all samples came from the same population.
Comparing the Wording the the Visual
Let’s look now at the multiple choices to the quiz, starting with the first choice.
Does the mean of each sample fall within any one sample’s confidence interval 95 out of 100 times?
Well, that would depend upon which sample we chose. If we chose a sample whose mean is near 110 that might be true. But ff our sample was similar to one from either edge of the graph it would not be true. The problem is, we never know where our sample is in relation to other possible samples.
Response 1 is incorrect.
With regards to response 2, we can see that the lower confidence level is below 105 for a substantial number of samples.
So response 2 is incorrect.
How about response 4, 95% of the population falls within the confidence interval? Well, it was given that the population mean was 110 and the standard deviation was 25. As a result, 95% of the observation of the population are between 60 and 160.
Therefore, response 4 cannot be true.
Response 3 is correct. Approximately 95 out of 100 of the confidence intervals contain the population mean. The graph shows 91 out of 100 contain the true mean. If a different seed had been used to draw the samples, the results could have been more than 95 out of 100 confidence intervals containing the true mean. But on average, 95 out of 100 confidence intervals will contain the true mean.
Response #5 was shown to be correct when this blog post was originally posted. One of our readers felt that it was incorrect and included a link to this article: https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-015-0947-8 . We appreciate our readers’ input.
A very important point to remember, expect a sample’s 95% confidence interval to not contain the population mean 5% of the time.Jeff Meyer is a statistical consultant with The Analysis Factor, a stats mentor for Statistically Speaking membership, and a workshop instructor. Read more about Jeff here. |
Definition of Breast bone
Breast bone: Familiar name for the sternum, the long flat bone in the middle of the front of the chest.
The sternum consists of three portions: the manubrium (the upper segment of the sternum, a flattened, roughly triangular bone), the corpus or body of the sternum, and the xiphoid process (the little tail of the sternum than points down). These three portions of the sternum arise as separate bones and may fuse partially or completely with one another.
The sternum articulates (makes contact) with the cartilages of the first seven ribs and the clavicles (the collar bones) to form the middle portion of the anterior front wall of the thorax.
Last Editorial Review: 8/28/2013
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Encounter With Tiber is a work of Speculative Fiction that revolves around the discovery of Humanoid Aliens in the system of Alpha Centauri. While it was Speculatative Science when it was made, and indeed has a bibliography and is co-authored by Buzz Aldrin, it has run afoul of Zeerust. The dates are all off, but it still makes sense if one can add a decade or two to dates. The book has three plotlines, with each one getting a large, separate portion of the book.
The book opens in the "present day" aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour. The space shuttle goes down, causing NASA to start thinking differently about space travel. Space "X" is started 10 years early, people start using disposable parts in space stations, and a new telescope is sent en-route to the moon. The scope is just in time to pick up an alien transmission from Tiber, containing the landing location of the Encyclopedia. Cue the space race!
The story also follows the plotline of alien colonists from Tiber who leave from their alien homeworld to visit a nearby planet that looks habitable. They hop on their spaceship and start the long trip over, with what best described as aa sitcom-like social situation. The group enters earth orbit in 3000 BC, sees the primitive human life, and starts a debate whether the stone age beings of the species *homo sapiens* are animals or humans.
The third plotline is aboard the first interstellar spacecraft with humans aboard. The people aboard have a trip time in the years, so they entertain themselves by writing up the histories which make up the other plotlines.
Encounter With Tiber provides examples of
- Bizarre Alien Biology; Tiberians are actually two subspecies, but they both have a lot of similarities. Instead of a single 4-chambered heart, they have lots of smaller hearts and lungs that connect to a blood mixer. They do, however, have something like kidneys and a brain.
- Inertial Dampening: A hard-science version, with the Tiberian crew floating in immersion tanks during periods of high acceleration to mitigate the physiological strain.
- No Biochemical Barriers; Averted. The Tiberians proteins are different from earthly life forms, enough so that they do not get any earthly illness, but similar enough that they can gain nutrition from earth food. However, a major problem they face when they eat that food is protein buildup from what they cant proscess.
- Shown Their Work; The book features co-authorship from Buzz Aldrin, one of the first two men on the moon, and has a multi-page bibliography
- Techno Babble; Averted. If the characters are babbling scientific words, its because they're reading the relevant Other Wiki page. |
U.S. President William Henry Harrison made history on this day in 170 years ago. How? He became the first president to die while in office.
William Henry Harrison was known for his battles against the Shawnee chief Tecumseh, especially for 1811’s Battle of Tippecanoe. Harrison was elected to be the ninth U.S. president in 1840, and was 68 years old on inauguration day.
That day, 4 March 1841, was a cold and rainy one, but that didn’t stop “Ol’ Tippecanoe” from orating for more than an hour and a half. He got a bad cold. Now, you don’t catch cold from standing in the rain, you catch cold from little tiny unseen bugs. Still, it’s considered common knowledge that Harrison got a cold and then pneumonia, then died a month into his presidency because he speechified too long out in the pouring rain.
Remember, Harrison was 68 years old. His predecessor, President Van Buren, had moved out of the White House a day early, so that the Harrison family would be all moved in by the day of the inauguration. The day before he was inaugurated, William Henry Harrison moved 16 people — kids, cousins, in-laws — into his new residence. They say the first thing he did in his new home was lie down and complain of a headache.
After he was sworn in as president, William Henry Harrison got sick. Then he got sicker. By the end of March the doctors were treating him by bleeding and cupping and calling his illness pneumonia, almost as if they knew what they were doing. On Sunday, April 4th, President Harrison died. Among his last words were “I am ill, very ill, much more than they think me.”
I say this to my family every time I get even the slightest bit queasy, and I get about as much help as President Harrison did. |
The Rise of the Heretical Papacy
As the power of the “Holy Roman Emperors” of the West declined in the ninth century, so the power of the Popes increased. Beginning with Nicholas I, they began to claim a quasi-imperial rule over the whole Church, East and West. And this combination of the roles of emperor and priest began increasingly to resemble the “imperator-plus-pontifex maximus” role of the pagan Roman emperors: the heresy of Papism was born.
However, for the first eight centuries, every attempt to combine the roles of king and priest in a single person was decisively rejected by the Popes. Thus when, in 796, Eadbert Praen, an English priest, assumed the crown of the sub-kingdom of Kent for himself, he was immediately rejected by the Archbishop of Canterbury and anathematised by Pope Leo III, who wrote that such a priest-king was like Julian the Apostate. (18) But gradually, and with increasing self-assertion, the Popes themselves claimed a kingly power and role.
One of the reasons for this was that after the Western Empire had collapsed after 476 and split up into a number if independent kingdoms, the Church remained united, making her by far the most prominent survival of Christian Romanity in the West. Even the most powerful of the western kings did not command a territory greater than that of a Roman provincial governor, whereas the Pope was not only the undisputed leader of the whole of Western Christendom but also the senior hierarch in the whole of the Church, Eastern and Western. However, as long as the Popes remained both Orthodox in faith and loyal subjects of the Eastern Emperor in politics, – that is, until Pope Stephen`s political break with Byzantium in 756, – the lack of a political power in the West commensurate with the ecclesiastical power of the Popes was not a pressing necessity; for everyone accepted that in the political sphere the Eastern Emperor was the sole Basileus of the whole of Christendom, and the western kings were his sons or satraps; while in the ecclesiastical sphere there as no single head under Christ, the body being overseen by its “five senses”, the five patriarchates, of which Rome was simply the primus inter pares.
But problems arose when Rome broke its last political links with the Eastern Empire and sought a new protector in the Frankish empire of Pepin and Charlemagne. This caused changes in the political ideology of the Franks, on the one hand, who came to see themselves as the real Roman Empire, more Roman and more Orthodox than the Empire of the East; and on the other hand, in the ecclesiology of the Popes, who came to see themselves as the only Church of this renewed Roman Empire, having ultimate jurisdiction over all the Churches in the world. Frankish caesaropapism soon collapsed; but Roman papocaesarism continued to grow until it claimed supreme authority in both Church and State…
In fact, there is a strong argument to be made for the thesis that the ultimate gainer from Charlemagne `s coronation in 600 was not the new emperor, but the Pope, Judith Herrin writes: “Of the three powers involved in the coronation event of 800, the Roman pontiff emerges as the clear winner in the triangular contest over imperial authority. By seizing the initiative and crowning Charles in his own way, Pope Leo claimed the superior authority to anoint an imperial ruler of the West, which established an important precedent… Later Charles would insist on crowning his own son Louis as emperor, without papal intervention. He thus designated his successor and, in due course, Louis inherited his father`s authority. But the notion that a western ruler could not be a real emperor without a papal coronation and acclamation in ancient Rome grew out of the ceremonial devised by Leo III in 800”. (19)
So the foundations were laid for the growth of papal powers in the political as well as the ecclesiastical spheres, which growth was especially evident as Carolingian power declined later in the ninth century.
The significant figure here is Pope Nicholas I, whose first task was to establish his supremacy over the Church in the West. However, an Orthodox ecclesiology still prevailed at the metropolitan and lower levels. Thus the archbishops of Treves and Cologne replied to an unjust sentence by Nicholas as follows: “Without a council, without canonical inquiry, without accuser, without witnesses, without convicting us by arguments or authorities, without our consent, in the absence of the metropolitans and of our suffragan bishops, you have chosen to condemn us, of your own caprice, with tyrannical fury. But we do not accept your accursed sentence, so repugnant to a father`s or a brother`s love; we despise it as mere insulting language; we expel you yourself from our communion, since you commune with the excommunicate; we are satisfied with the communion of the whole Church and with the society of our brethren whom you despise and of whom you make yourself unworthy by your pride and arrogance. You condemn yourself when you condemn those who do not observe the apostolic precepts which you yourself are the first to violate, annulling as far as in you lies the Divine laws and the sacred canons, and not following in the footsteps of the Popes your predecessors…” (20)
Nicholas did not confine himself to unjustly deposing western bishops: he also deposed St. Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople, whose speedy promotion to the rank of patriarch from the lay state he considered uncanonical (although many holy patriarchs, and the famous St. Ambrose of Milan, had risen to the episcopate as quickly). All this was in accordance with his theory, first put forward in 865, that the pope had authority “over all the earth, that is, over every other Church”, “the see of Peter has received the total power of government over all the sheep of Christ”. The Emperor Michael III was furious, but Nicholas replied: “The day of king-priests and emperor-pontiffs is past, Christianity has separated the two functions, and Christian emperors have need of the Pope in view of the life eternal, whereas popes have no need of emperors except as regards temporal things.” (21)
This would suggest that Nicholas supported the Orthodox teaching on the separation of the secular and ecclesiastical powers. However, while it was useful for him to preach the Orthodox doctrine in order to limit the power of the emperor, he accepted few, if any, limitations on his own power. He even hinted that the Byzantine emperors might not be legitimates of the Romans, which would imply that the only legitimate emperor was the Frankish one, or, if the forged `Donation of Constantine` was to be believed, the pope himself!
Thus he said that it was ridiculous for Michael to call himself Roman emperor, since he did not speak Latin. (22)
Then he demanded from the Emperor the return of his territories in the Greek-speaking south of Italy for no other reason than that they had once, centuries before, come within the jurisdiction of the Roman patriarchate: “Give us back the patrimony of Calabria and that of Sicily and all the property of our Church, where of it held possession, and which it was accustomed to manage by its own attorneys; for it is unreasonable that an ecclesiastical possession, destined for the light and service of the Church of God, should be taken from us by an earthly power.”
Finally, he sent missionaries to Bulgaria, which was deep within the traditionally Byzantine sphere. To add injury to insult, these missionaries preached the heresy of the `Filioque` to the newly converted Bulgarians. For this reason, a Council convened at Constantinople in 867 presided over by St. Photius, and at which the archbishops of Treves, Cologne and Ravenna were present, excommunicated and anathematized Nicholas.
Two years later, however, a palace revolution enabled another “anti-Photian” council to be convened, at which the Council of 867 was annulled. Papists have often counted this anti-Photian council as the Eighth Ecumenical – not least, one suspects, because the new Pope, Hadrian II, demanded that all its participants recognized him as “Sovereign Pontiff and Universal Pope”. But a much better claim to ecumenicity can be made for the Great Council convened at Constantinople in 879-80, which four hundred Eastern bishops and the legates of Pope John VIII attended. This Council annulled, under the papal legates` signature, the acts of the ant-Photian council. It also made two very important decisions. First, it decreed that there was no papal jurisdiction in the East, although the papal primacy was recognized. And secondly, it reaffirmed the original text of the Nicene Creed without the `Filioque` and explicitly condemned all additions to it. So a Roman Pope formally recognized that he had no jurisdiction in the Eastern Church and that the `Filioque` was a heresy!
THE GROWTH OF FEUDALISM
Thus was the Papist heresy – for the time being. However, the serpent of Papism lay bruised, not completely scotched; and a more permanent triumph could be hoped for only if a healthy antidote against its poison could be built up within the West. This depended, above all, on the strength of the other pillar of Christian society in the West – the sacred power of the anointed kings.
Such an antidote existed, as we shall see, in England, where the powerful monarchy ruling most of the country arose in the person of King Alfred the Great. On most of the continent, however, the monarchy was deeply involved in the phenomenon that had a profoundly negative impact on both political and ecclesiastical life – feudalism.
The word “feudalism” comes from the Latin `feuda`, translated as “fief”, which means a piece of land held in exchange for service to a lord. Feudalism, in the sense of the widespread division of the land into fiefs, is a common phenomenon in many lands in time of invasion or social decline. But the term was invented to describe the particular socio-political organization of Western Europe in the later Middle Ages. It arose as a defensive reaction to the Viking invasions of the ninth century, and the breakdown in central authority which they caused. The breakdown was worse in West Francia, modern France, where royal authority almost disappeared. One result was serfdom: the lands which had belonged to the crown, the royal “fisc”, were given to local landowners, both ecclesiastical and lay, and the peasants who had cultivated the land, deprived of any protection from the crown, threw themselves on the mercy of the landowners, bartering their and their children`s labour in return for protection. The second was feudalism proper: the freemen became vassals of lords, swearing to fight the lord`s battles in exchange for protection. A vassal was a knight – that is, he owned arms and a horse and was able to fight. Since this required money, he very likely owned land – either inherited, “allodial” land, or a “benefice” or “fief” granted temporarily, in the vassal`s lifetime only. A vassal might himself have vassals. Thus many of the king`s counts, or local officials, were at the same time both feudal lords and vassals of the king.
Feudalism ate into the king`s power in two ways: first, the king`s peasants hardly counted as his subjects any more since their real masters were now their landowners; and secondly, the king`s vassals tended to leave his service for that of the most powerful local feudal lord. The king did not always resist this process, but rather reinforced it, since he saw that the feudal lord was the only guarantee of law and order in the countryside. Thus in the capitulary of Meersen in 847 the Frankish King Charles the Bald ordered all free men to choose a lord, and likewise forbade them to leave their lord without just reason – which effectively made the bond of vassalage permanent in all normal cases. Again, in a capitulary issued at Thionville, he gave official recognition to the vassal`s oath, which thereby replaced the oath of allegiance as the main glue holding society together. Finally, in the capitulary of Kiersy in 877, Charles sanctioned hereditary succession to counties and other fiefs, which meant that county administration became hereditary and passed out of the king`s control. (23)
As a defensive system to preserve a minimum of order in a time of foreign invasion, feudalism undoubtedly had merits. But it was much inferior not only to Byzantine-style autocracy, but also to the forms of Western European monarchy that preceded it. It represented a regression from monarchy to a much cruder and more primitive form of social organization.
According to Ivan Solonevich, feudalism could be defined as “the splintering of state sovereignty among a mass of small, but in principle sovereign owners of property”. Contrary to Marx, it had nothing to do with `productive relations` and was far from being an advance on previous forms of social organization. “It is sufficient to remember the huge cultural and unusually high level of Roman `production`. Feudal Europe, poor, dirty and illiterate, by no means represented `a more progressive form of productive relations` – in spite of Hegel, it was sheer regression. Feudalism does not originate in productive relations. It originates in the thirst for power beyond all dependence on production and distribution. Feudalism is, so to speak, `the democratisation of power` – it transfer to all those who at the given moment in the given place have sufficient physical strength to defend their baronial rights – `Faustrecht`… Feudalism sometimes presupposes a juridical basis of power, but never a moral one.
“The feudal lord does not rule `in the name` of the nation, the people, the peasants, or whoever else there might be. He rules only and exclusively in his own interests, which have been strengthened by such-and-such battles or parchments. For the feudal lord the monarch is not the bearer of definite moral ideals or even of the practical interests of the people or nation, but only `the first among equals`, who has had the luck to be stronger than the rest…
“The thirst for power is, a property common to all humanity, and therefore the tendency to the development of feudalism will be to a greater or lesser degree characteristic of all countries and all peoples of the world… But if we discard trivialities, then we must say that Rome, for example, had no knowledge at all of feudal relations. There were landowners and there were senators, there were proconsuls and there emperors, but there were no barons. The sovereign power `of the people and senate of Rome`, engraved on the Roman eagles, remained the single indivisible source of all power – even the power of the Roman emperors. The civil wars of Rome bore no relation to the feudal wars of medieval Europe. Nor did Ancient Greece with its purely capitalist relations know feudalism. Yes, Greece was split up into a series of sovereign states, but, though tiny, these were nevertheless states – monarchies and republics, in principle having equal rights in relation to each other and by no means in relations of feudal submission or co-submission.” (24)
One of the worst aspects of feudalism was the fact that the Church, too, was bound up in the feudal nexus, with churchmen having lay lords higher than themselves and vassals lower than themselves, which resulted, as Aristides Papadakis, writes, in “the unrestrained secularization of the western clergy. By the 900s most churchmen – both high and low – had lost nearly all their independence and sense of corporate identity, as their functions everywhere became identified with those belonging to lay vassals. Quite simply, as rulers came to regard all ecclesiastical organization under their effective control as a facet of the secular system, conventions governing one sphere were adjusted to fit the other. As a result, bishops and abbots were not exempt from the secular obligations and responsibilities attached to feudal tenure. As feudal dependents they, too, had to attend court, give advise and when required, supply their lay superiors with military service… Characteristically, promotion to an Episcopal see or a rich abbey was often the reward of previous dutiful service in the royal household. It is worth adding that ecclesiastical tenants were also preferred for many posts because their lands and their jurisdictions were not governed by inheritance [celibate priests had no (legal) children]. Whereas the heirs of a lay vassal holding of the king by hereditary right could occasionally create legal difficulties or forment rebellion, an heirless but enfoeffed celibate cleric was incapable of doing so this was probably a decisive reason why so many high ecclesiastics, time and again, became essential associates in royal government everywhere.” (25)
The control exercised by feudal lords over clerical appointments was symbolised by the ceremony of “lay investiture”, whereby the lord endowed the cleric with a ring, signifying the cleric`s entry into feudal tenure of a church or lands. Such a ceremony was distinct from ecclesiastical ordination. But in practice the powers inherent in lay investiture determined who should be ordained (and for how much).
“The hastily ordained and `invested` clerk was often altogether unworthy (if not also incompetent and untrained) of the priestly calling. Church assemblies and individual churchmen, it is true, routinely complained. All the same, neither the power of the laymen to appoint and invest clergy, nor the encroachment and spoliation of Church property, was ever discontinued. As a matter of fact, lay nominations to vacant sees became so frequent that they were no longer regarded as a radical departure from canonical tradition. The abuse was recognized as a perfectly acceptable practice. In 921 the archbishop of Cologne was thus solemnly admonished by the Pope himself for attempting to block a royal appointment at Liege. Pope John X`s letter informing the archbishop that no Episcopal candidate was to be consecrated in any diocese without royal authorization still survives. As far as Pope John was concerned, the right of the feudal power to interfere at the highest level in the internal affairs of the Church was `ancient usage`. Ecclesial autonomy, to say nothing of ecclesial political and economic freedom, was apparently of little consequence. Canon law evidently had long given way to the feudal system…” (26)
THE ENGLISH MONARCHY
By the middle of the eleventh century the whole of Western Europe was caught up in the feudal nexus. The only major exception to the rule was England. “In the intricate web of vassalage,” writes J.M. Roberts, “a king might have less control over his own vassals than they over theirs. The great lord, whether lay magnate or local bishop, must always have loomed larger and more important in the life of the ordinary man than the remote and probably never-seen king or prince. In the tenth and eleventh centuries there are everywhere examples of kings obviously under great pressure from great men. The country where this seemed to present least trouble was Anglo-Saxon England…” (27)
England before the Viking invasions, which began in 793, was divided into seven independent kingdoms. Each had its own bishops, but all, from the time of St. Theodore the Greek, archbishop of Canterbury (+691), recognized the authority of the archbishop of Canterbury. In 786, however, Prince Egfrith, son of King Offa of Mercia, was anointed even before he had ascended the throne of his father, and from the time of this, the first royal anointing in Anglo-Saxon history, the Wessex dynasty gradually came to dominate political life in England. In the late ninth century, under Alfred the Great, it led the recovery against the Viking invaders, and Alfred`s successors succeeded in uniting most of Britain in a single Orthodox kingdom until the Norman-papist invasion of 1066-70. In a real sense, therefore, the anointing of Egfrith may be said to have been the critical event that led to the creation of one nation and one State.
King Alfred came to the throne of Wessex when English civilisation was in, the process of being wiped out by the pagan Danes. Almost single-handedly, he defeated the Danes and laid the foundations for their conversion and integration into his All-English kingdom. But not content with that, he undertook the organisation and education of the badly shattered Church, beginning by sending all his bishops a copy of his own translation of the `Pastoral Care` by Pope Gregory the Great – the Roman connection again! Indeed, re-establishing links with both Rome and the Eastern Orthodox Church was a priority with Alfred. He corresponded with the Patriarch of Jerusalem and sent alms to the monks of India.
The stability of Alfred`s dynasty and kingdom by comparison with the sub-Carolingian kingdoms on the continent was partly owing to the fact that, like the Roman missionaries in the early seventh century, this Romanising monarch found a `tabula rasa` and was able to rebuild on relatively uncluttered, but firm foundations. In particular, the tensions between the monarchy and the local aristocracies which so weakened the West Frankish kingdom, hardly existed in England after 878 and surfaced again in a serious was only in 1052. There are several indications that the English kingdom modelled itself on Byzantium. Thus King Athelstan gave himself the Byzantine titles `basileus` and `curagulus`. (28) Again, in 955, King Edred called himself “King of the Anglo-saxons and Emperor of the whole of Britain”. And a little later King Edgar is also called `basileus et imperator`.
In the tenth century, England reached the peak of her glory as an Orthodox kingdom, based on a monastic revival supported by a powerful king, Edgar, and a holy archbishop, Dunstan, working in close harmony. Ryan Lavelle writes. “A document from around 973, the `Regularis Concordia`,… was intended as a rulebook and liturgical guide for English monks and nuns, but it was also a bold statement of the relationship between God, the king and a Christian people. The king and queen were seen as protectors of monks and nuns in the temporal world, while, in return, the souls of the West Saxon royal family were protected with prayers by the same monks and nuns. The positions of the king and queen were therefore inextricably linked with the survival of Christianity in the kingdom. This was part of a process of legitimising royal power to an extent that was hitherto unparalleled in Anglo-Saxon England. The king had become part of the ecclesiastical order in a coronation meaning of Christ`s name, `Christus`, meant `the anointed [king]`, and the inauguration of Edgar used an `ordo` (an order of service) that put Edgar on a similar level – directly anointed by God. the monastic reform movement gave this a new impetus, to such an extent that King Edgar could go through such a royal inauguration for a second time.” (29)
Edgar`s first anointing had taken place in 960 or 961, when he became King of England. For many years he was not allowed to wear his crown in penance for a sin he had committed. But in 973, the penance came to an end, and at the age of thirty (perhaps significantly, the canonical age for Episcopal ordination in the West) he was anointed again, this time as `Emperor of Britain” in the ancient Roman city of Bath (again significantly, for Edgar was emphasising the imperial, Roman theme). In the same year, again emphasising the imperial theme, he was rowed on the River Dee by six or eight sub-kings, include five Welsh and Scottish rulers and one ruler of the Western Isles. (30) “This was a move,” writes Lavelle, “that recalled the actions of his great-uncle Athelstan, the successful ruler of Britain, but it was also an English parallel to the tenth-century coronation of the Holy Roman Emperor, Otto of Germany, in which the stem-dukes had undertaken the task of feeding the emperor.” (31)
Edgar`s ascription to himself of the trappings of `Romanitas` was not without some foundation. The economy was strong, the tax and legal systems were sophisticated, the coinage was secure (with an impressive system of monetary renewal whereby all coins issued from the royal mints had to be returned and reissued every five years). England was now a firmly Orthodox, multi-national state composed of three Christian peoples, Anglo-Saxons, Celts and Danes, (32) living in mutual amity. She was at peace at home and respected abroad, spreading her influence in a beneficial way outwards through missions to the Norwegians and Swedes. (33)
Edgar married twice, the first marriage producing a son, Edward, and the second another son, Ethelred. When he died in 975 (his relics were discovered to be incorrupt in 1052),Ethelred`s partisans, especially his mother, argued that Ethelred should be made king in preference to his elder half-brother Edward, on the grounds that Edgar had not been anointed when he begat Edward in 959 or 960, and that his first wife, Edward`s mother, had never been anointed, so that the throne should pass to the younger son, Ethelred, who had been born “in the purple” when both his parents were anointed sovereigns. The conflict was settled when the archbishop of Canterbury, St. Dunstan, seized the initiative and anointed St. Edward. In this way, through her stewardship of the sacrament of royal anointing, the Church came to play the decisive role in deciding the question of succession. (34)
The religious nature of Anglo-Saxon kingship is seen in the fact that the king was seen as the “warden of the holy temple”.(35) Crimes against the Church or her servants were seen as crimes against the king, and were duly punished by him. It was seen as his duty to look after the Church and enforce her laws with secular penalties. “For a Christian king is Christ`s deputy among Christian people”, as King Aethelred`s laws put it. Both he and the archbishop were “the Lord`s Anointed” – the archbishop so that he might minister the sacraments of salvation, and the king so that, as Bede wrote in his commentary on Acts, “he might by conquering all our enemies bring us to the immortal Kingdom.
The king was sometimes compared to God the father and the bishop – to Christ (he is often called “Christ” in Anglo-Saxon legislation). The king was the shepherd and father of his people and would have to answer for their well-being at the Last Judgement. Regicide and usurpation were the greatest of crimes; for, as Abbot Aelfric wrote in a Palm Sunday sermon, “no man may make himself a king, for the people have the option to choose him for king who is agreeable to them, but after that he has been hallowed as king, he has power over his people, and they may not shake his yoke from their necks.” And so, as Archbishop Wulstan of York wrote in his `Institutes of Christian Polity,` “through what shall peace and support come to God`s servants and to God`s poor, save through Christ, and through a Christian king?” (36)
The relationship between Church and State in England was one of “symphony” in the Byzantine sense, not of caesaropapism; for the kings, as well as being in general exceptionally pious, did nothing without consulting their bishops and other members of the `witan` or assembly – who were not afraid to disagree with the king , or remind him of his obligations. (37) Thus, writes Barlow, “a true theocratic government was created, yet one, despite the common charge of confusion [between spiritual and political functions] against the Anglo-Saxon Church, remarkably free of confusion in theory. The duality of the two spheres was emphatically proclaimed. There were God`s rights and the king`s rights, Christ laws and the laws of the world. There was an independent ecclesiastical jurisdiction under the control of the bishop, but there was also the helping hand of the secular power which the church had invoked and which it could use at its discretion. (38)
ROME AND THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE
Turning to Rome now: the first half of the tenth century was probably the period of the deepest degradation in the eternal city`s pre-schism history – the so-called “pornocracy” of Marozia, an evil woman who with her mother Theodora made, unmade, lived with and begat a series of popes. However, in 932 Marozia`s second son Alberic, marquis of Spoleto, imprisoned his mother, took over the government of Rome and gave it a short period of peace and relative respectability. But in 955 Alberic died and his son Octavian became Pope John XII at the age of sixteen.
“Even for the pope of that period,” writes Peter De Rosa, “he was so bad that the citizens were out for his blood. He had invented sins, they said, not known since the beginning of the world, including sleeping with his mother. He ran a harem in the Lateran Palace. He gambled with pilgrims` offerings. He kept a stud of two thousand horses which he fed on almonds and figs steeped in wine. He rewarded the companions of his nights of love with golden chalices from St. Peter`s. he did nothing for the most profitable tourist trade of the day, namely, pilgrimages. Women in particular were warned not to enter St. John Lateran if they prized their honour; the pope was always on the prowl. In front of the high altar of the mother church of Christendom, he even toasted the Devil…” (39)
Retribution was coming, however. Berengar, king of Lombardy in northern Italy, advanced on Rome, and the pope in desperation appealed to Berengar`s feudal lord, Otto of Germany. This was Otto`s opportunity to seize that imperial crown, which would give him complete dominance over his rivals. He marched into Italy, drove out Berangar and was crowned Emperor by John on 2nd February, 962. However, when Otto demanded that the inhabitants of the Papal States should swear an oath of allegiance to him, Otto, and not to the pope, thereby treating the Papal states as one of his dependencies, the Pope took fright, transferred his support to Berangar and called on both the Hungarians and the Byzantines to help drive Otto out of Italy. But Otto saw this as treachery on the part of the pope; he summoned a synod in Rome, deposed John, and placed Leo VIII in his place. Then he inserted a clause into his agreement with Leo whereby in future no pope was to be consecrated without taking an oath of loyalty to the Emperor.
Although Otto was crowned in Rome, he did not call himself “Emperor of the Romans”, but preferred simply “emperor”. This was probably because he did not wish to enter into a competition with the Byzantine emperor.
It may also have been because he had little admiration for Old Rome, just as Old Rome had little time for him. (40) Thus He instructed his sword-bearer to stand behind him as he kneeled at the tomb of the Apostle. “For I know,” he said, “only too well what my ancestors have experienced from these faithless Romans.” (41)
Otto gained the Byzantines` recognition of his imperial title, and persuaded them to send Princess Theophanou, the niece of Emperor John Tzimiskes, to be the bride of his son, Otto II. The marriage was celebrated in Rome in 972. Theophanou then introduced another Byzantine, John Philagathos, as godfather of her son, Otto III; he later became head of the royal finances and finally – Pope (or antipope) John XV. This led to a sharp increase in Byzantine influence in the western empire, (42) and the temporary eclipse of the new papist theory of Church-State relations. Thus in an ivory bas-relief Christ is shown crowning Otto II and Theophanou – a Byzantine tenth-century motif expressing the traditionally Byzantine concept of Church-State symphony. (43)
In 991 PrincessTheophanou died and the young Otto III became Emperor under the regency of his grandmother. He “dreamed of reuninting the two empires [0f East and West] into one, one day, so as to restore universal peace – a new imperial peace comparable to that of Augustus, a Roman Empire which would embrace once more the `orbis terrarium` before the end of the world that was announced for the year 1000.” (44) to signify that the `Renovation imperii Romani` (originally a Carolingian idea) had truly begun, he moved his court from Aachen to Rome, and began negotiations with the Byzantine Emperor for the hand of a daughter or niece of the `basileus` which union would enable him to unite the two empires in a peaceful, traditional manner.
The plan for union with Byzantium was foiled. But Otto sought the advice of holy hermits, (45) and Byzantine influence continued to spread outwards from the court. And when Gerbert of Aurillac became the first Frankish Pope in 999 and took the name Sylvester II, he revived memories, in those brought up on the forged `Donation of Constantine`, of the symphonic relationship between St. Constantine and Pope Sylvestor I. (46) However, Sylvestor loved the true symphony, not the forged variety: in 1001 he inspired Otto to issue an act demonstrating that the `Donation of Constantine` was a forgery. (47) Moreover, this very unpapist Pope did not believe that he was above the judgement of his fellow-bishops. Thus Pope Marcellinus offered incense to Jupiter [in 303], did all the other bishops have to do likewise? If the bishop of Rome himself sins against his brother or refuses to heed the repeated warnings of the Church, he, the bishop of Rome himself, must according to the commandments of God be treated as a pagan and a publican; for the greater the dignity, the greater the fall. If he declares us unworthy of his communion because none of us will join him against the Gospel, he will not be able to separate us from the communion of Christ.” (48)
This must count as a formal adjuration of the papist heresy that had held the papacy in thrall for over two thousand years. Unfortunately, Sylvestor was not imitated by his successors. But the courage of his right confession deserves appreciation.
This forty-year Ottonian period in the history of the papacy has been viewed in sharply contrasting ways. According to Voltaire in his `Essay on history and customs` (chapter 36), and some later writers, “the imprudence of Pope John XII in having called the Germans to Rome was the source of all the calamities to which Rome and Italy were subject down the centuries…” (49) However, an unprejudiced view that ties to avoid stereotypes must accept that the intervention of the German monarchy in Roman affairs – until at least the death of Otto III in 1002 – was not wholly unbeneficial. Someone had to put a stop to the scandalous degeneration of the first see of Christendom. And if the Ottonian emperors did not finally succeed in cleansing the Augean stables, it was hardly their fault alone.
The rivalries between the Roman aristocratic families – which were only partly influenced by the desire to keep Rome free from foreigners, – appears to have made the city virtually ungovernable in this period. The Ottonians at least seem to have had good intensions, and the partnership of the German-Greek Otto III and the Frankish Sylvestor II looked on the point of restoring a true unity between the Old and the New Romes. Indeed, for a short period it even looked as if Byzantinism might triumph in the West… “But the Romans,” writes Chamberlin, “rose against (Otto), drove him and his pope out of the city, and reverted to murderous anarchy. He died outside the city in January 1002, not quite twenty-two years of age. Sylvestor survived his brilliant but erratic protégé by barely sixteen months. His epitaph summed up the sorrow that afflicted all thoughtful men at the ending of a splendid vision: `The world, on the brink of triumph, in peace now departed, grew contorted in grief and the reeling Church forgot her rest.` the failure of Otto III and Sylvestor marked the effective end of the medieval dream of a single state in which an emperor ruled over the bodies of all Christian men, and a pope over their souls.” (50)
Thus by the year 1000 there was little trace of papism in the west: it was the Byzantine ideal of “sympohony” Church-State relations that had triumphed in the west`s most powerful monarchies.
However, Otto III died in 1002 and Pope Sylvestor in 1003. After that the “symphony” between Church and State at the highest level of western society began to break up. Like a spinning top that, as it begins to slow down, at the same time begins to lurch more and more sharply from one side to the other, so the balance of power shifted first to the Emperor and then to the Pope.
In the first half of the eleventh century, it was the German Emperors who held the upper hand, as the Papacy descended into one of its periodic bouts of decadence. “Suddenly,” as Aristides Papadakis puts it, “the papacy was turned into a sort of imperial `Eigenkirche` or vicarage of the German crown. The pope was to be the instrument and even the pawn of the Germans, as opposed to the Romans.” (51)
At the same time the heresy of the `Filioque` reared its head again. In 1009 Pope Sergius IV reintroduced it into the Roman Symbol of faith, (52) upon which the Great Church of Constantinople promptly removed his name from the diptychs. In 1014, the heretical innovations was recited again, at the coronation of Emperor Henry II. Some date the beginning of the Great Schism to this period, although it was another forty years before the formal lack of communion between East and West was cemented by the anathemas of 1054.
In 1046 Emperor Henry III acted decisively to stop the chaos into which the Roman papacy had descended, as rival families of Roman aristocrats, the throne of St. Peter. At the Council of Sutri Henry forced the resignation of Pope Gregory VI and the deposition of Popes Sylvestor III and Benedict IX. Then he proceeded to nominate four German Popes in succession: Clement II, Damasus II, Leo IX and Victor II. However, in 1056 Henry died while his son was still a child; and it was at this point that German caesaropapism began to fall. It was struck down by one of the greatest “spiritual” despots in history, Pope Gregory VII, better known as Hildebrand…
THE PAPAL REFORM MOVEMENT
One of the Emperor Henry`s appointees, pope Leo IX, had been bishop of Toul in Lorraine, an area that had come under the influence of a network of monasteries under the leadership of the great Burgundian abbey of Cluny. The Cluniac monasteries were “stavropegial” foundations independent of the control of any feudal lord. As such, they had assumed the leadership of a powerful reform movement directed against the corruptions introduced into the Church by the feudal system, and had had considerable success in this respect. (53) They stressed papal authority, clerical celibacy and ecclesiastical centralisation.
Leo IX now introduced the principles of the Cluniac movement into the government of the Church at the highest level – but with results, in the reign of his reign, Gregory VII (Hildebrand), that went far beyond the original purposes of the movement, and which were finally to tear the whole of the West away from New Rome and the Byzantine commonwealth of nations… “From the outset”, writes Papadakis, “the new pope was determined to make the papacy an instrument of spiritual and moral rejuvenation both in Rome itself and throughout Europe. To this end Pope Leo journeyed to central and south Italy, but also to France and Germany, crossing the Alps three times. Nearly four and a half years of his five year pontificate were in fact spent on trips outside Rome. The numerous regional reforming synods held during these lengthy sojourns often had as their target the traffic in ecclesiastical offices and unchaste clergy. Their object above all was to rid the Church of these abused by restoring canonical discipline. The need to reassert both the validity and binding power of canon law for all clergy was repeatedly emphasized. In addition to the decrees against simony and sexual laxity promulgated by these local synods, however, simoniacal and concubinary clergy were examined and, when required, suspended, deposed and, even excommunicated. The object, in short, was to punish the offenders as well. Even if the synods were not always successful, no one was in doubt that Leo IX and his team of like-minded assistants were serious. The immediate impact of this flurry of activity was often extraordinary…
“Overall, the progress of the new papal program was not all smooth sailing. Widespread protest, often accompanied by violent protests, was to continue for decades. Yet, all in all, by the end of the century the popular defenders of simony, of clerical marriage, and of the evils of the proprietary church had by and large vanished. The champions of reform at any rate proved more unyielding than their often more numerous adversaries. This was particularly evident in the skilful drive of the reformers to make celibacy an absolute prerequisite to ordination. This part of the Gregorian platform was reinforced by the monastic ideal, since many of the reformers were actually monks and had already embraced a continent life. some, like the ascetic Peter Damian, cardinal-bishop of Ostia, were even eager to treat the problem as heresy and not as a matter of discipline. But the reformers were perhaps also uncompromising on this issue because they were convinced that compulsory clerical continence could advance the process of de-laicization – another more general item of their platform. A monasticized priesthood, quite simply, was viewed by reformers everywhere as a crucial corrective to clerical involvement in the world. If successful, the strategy, it was hoped, would provide the clergy with that sense of solidarity and corporate identify needed to distinguish them from the laity. In all essential respects, as one scholar has put it, the reforming initiatives of the popes were `an attempt by men trained in the monastic discipline to remodel Church and society according to monastic ideals… to train churchmen to rethink themselves as a distinct `order` with a life-style totally different from that of laymen.` Behind the campaign for celibacy, in sum, aside from the moral and canonical issues involved, was the desire to set all churchmen apart from and above the laity; the need to create a spiritual elite by the separation of the priest from the ordinary layman was an urgent priority. Doubtless, in the end, the Gregorian priesthood did achieve a certain `libertas` and even a sense of community, but only at the expense of a sharp opposition between itself and the rest of society.
“By contrast, in the Christian East, as in primitive Christianity, a wholly celibrate priesthood never became the norm…” (54)
It often happens in history that one important historical process going in one direction masks the presence of another going in precisely the opposite direction. We see the same contradiction in this, the final chapter of Western Orthodox history. The process of ecclesiastical reformation initiated by Pope Leo IX in 1049, which aimed at the liberation of the Church from secular control, was – generally speaking, and with the exception of the element of clerical celibacy – a laudable and necessary programme. But the increasing distance it placed between the clergy and the laity was fraught with danger. In particular, it threatened to undermine the traditional place in Christian society of `the anointed kings`, who occupied a kind of intermediate position between the clergy and the laity. And in the hands of to ambitious clerics who entered the service of the papacy at about this time, Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida and Archdeacon Hildebrand (the future Pope Gregory VII), it threatened simply to replace the caesaropapist variety of feudalism with a papocaesarist variety – that is, the subjection of the clergy to lay lords with the subjection of the laity, and even the kings, to clerical lords – or rather, to just one clerical lord, the Pope.
The problem was that by now Church and State were so deeply entangled with each other than nobody, on either side of the controversy, could conceive of a return to the traditional system of the symphony of powers, which allowed for the relative independence of both powers within a single Christian society. Thus the Church wished to be liberated from “lay investiture”. But she did not want to be deprived of the lands, vassals and, therefore, political power which came with investiture. Indeed, the last act in the life of Pope Leo IX himself was his marching into battle at the head of a papal army in 1053 in order to secure his feudal domains in Benevento, which had been granted to him by his kinsman, Emperor Henry III.
Contemporary western society was shocked by that; for, worldly and entangled in secular affairs as bishops had become, it was still felt that war was not an activity suited to a churchman. But that shock was as nothing to the trauma caused in the 1070s and 1080s by Hildebrand`s creative interpretation of the basic feudal relationship: all Christians, he said, were “the soldiers of Christ” and “the vassals of St. Peter”, i.e. of the Pope, and the Pope had the right to call on all the laity to break their feudal oaths and take up arms against their lords, in obedience to himself, their ultimate feudal suzerain, who would repay them, not with lands or physical security, but with the absolution of sins and everlasting life! Thus freedom from lay control, on the one hand, but control over the laity, and greater secular power, on the other: that was the programme – both contradictory and hypocritical – of the “reformed” papacy.
But before understanding this assault on the West, the papacy needed to secure its rear in the East. This was achieved by picking a quarrel with the Eastern Church (55) and sending Cardinal Humbert to Constantinople to anathematize it in 1054. Pope Leo IX was actually dead when the exchange of anathemas took place, but that he was a truly papist pope is proved by his words: “If anywhere in the universe any people proudly disagrees with the Roman Church, it can no longer be called or considered to be a Church – it is already an assemblage of heretics, a conventicler of schismatics, a synagogue of Satan” (56) In reply to this Patriarch Michael (Cerularius) of Constantinople said: “O you who are Orthodox, flee the Catholic and Holy Church of God!”
For it was in this proud exaltation of the opinion of one Church, the Roman – or rather, of one man in one local Church – above the Universal Church that the whole tragedy of the further development of Western civilisation lay…
The now definitely secular character of the papacy was demonstrated at the inauguration of Pope Nicholas II, when a quasi-royal coronation was introduced as part of the rite. Then, in 1059, he decreed that the Popes should be elected by the cardinal-bishops alone, without the participation of the people. “The role of the Roman clergy and people,” writes Canning, “was reduced to one of mere assent to the choice. The historical participation of the emperor was by-passed with the formula `saving the honour and reverence due to our beloved son Henry [IV] who is for the present regarded as king and who, it is hoped, is going to be emperor with God`s grace, in as much as we have now conceded this to him and to his successors who shall personally obtain this right from the apostolic see`. (57)
Sixty years before, Otto III had bombastically claimed that he had “ordained and created” the Pope. (58) Now the wheel had come round full circle: the emperors were emperors only by virtue of receiving this right from the Pope. |
An History of Redlining
I was cleaning out the directories on my hard drive and I came across a draft of a paper that I had jointly worked on with Phil Mann at the University of Miami back in the late 80's. I thought that the part of it that dealt with the history of red-lining in Miami might be of interest to the rest of you.
|see also Nationwide Insurance|
The origins of the term "redlining" in Dade County Florida can be traced to the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), a federal New Deal agency of the 1930's. HOLC developed an elaborate appraisal and rating system for different neighborhoods in cities across the country. These neighborhood appraisals were plotted on "residential security maps". These maps were used for years afterwards as a tool for deny loans to residents of Dade County's black communities.
Type "A" neighborhoods, outlined in blue on the map, were those more affluent areas that were considered to be the most desirable for lending purposes. Type "B", outlined in yellow, although slightly less affluent than type "A", were also considered to be desirable for lending purposes. Type "C" neighborhoods, outlined in green, were generally sparsely populated fringe areas that were typically bordering on all black neighborhoods. All of the black and low income neighborhoods were characterized as Type "D" and were considered to be the worst for lending. Type "D" neighborhoods were outlined in red on the map (the origin of the term "redlining").
Although HOLC was a federal agency, its appraisal determinations were made by local mortgage brokers, bankers, and real estate men. In Miami, these businessmen reflected the general outlook of the downtown civic leadership which at that time was actively working to relocate blacks living near downtown into the sparsely populated area to the northwest.
HOLC "security maps" were available to local bankers (who, after all, had an important role in drawing them up) and were used in evaluating mortgage applications. The result was that bank loans were not available to type "D" communities. As a result, these communities were consigned to physical decay and intensified racial segregation. While some government subsidized loans were made in these areas, local financial institutions, using the security map classification system, strengthened their earlier discriminatory loan practices.
The effect of this "redlining" was to hasten the physical decline of the city and escalate the process of residential segregation. Miami has one of the highest rates of racial segregation of any major city and this has been one of the major contributing causes to the riots of the 1980's. |
After Nuclear Disaster, Japanese Scientists Try to Engineer Radiation-Resistant Rice
Vast tracts of rice crops in northeast Japan would be destroyed in the upcoming harvest season after being contaminated with radioactivity from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, which was crippled by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.
The farmlands within the 18-mile no-go zone around the nuclear plant will not even be harvested as high levels of radioactivity can pose a health hazard for farmers.
Though the Japan Government has admitted that it will take decades to decontaminate areas from radioactivity within the exclusion zone, Fukushima Agricultural Technology Centre scientists hope a new strain of caesium-resistant rice will enable local farmers to return to the affected land.
Researchers are testing varieties of rice, which is indigenous to India, Bangladesh and parts of South America to determine whether any of them have a natural resistance to absorb caesium from the soil.
They aim to create a rice breed that can withstand the effects of prolonged exposure to radioactivity and yet remain safe for human consumption, the Telegraph reports.
Japan's Agricultural Ministry has earlier studied the impact of radioactivity from nuclear weapons tests on crops, including rice, but researchers said this is the first time such tests have been carried out on rice planted in paddies exposed to high levels of radioactivity.
Radioactivity has been detected in North-east Japan and Tokyo's water supplies, leaf vegetables grown in the affected areas and fish and marine products. |
Our take: Scientists are unable to make precise guesses of how long it will take for Voyager 1 to move out of the solar system as they found that the magnetic field has increased. Eryn Brown, journalist of the Los Angeles Times reports on the scientists' findings:
"Voyager 1, the spacecraft famous for beaming back striking photos of Jupiter, Saturn and their moons more than 30 years ago, has made still another surprising discovery: the existence of an unexpected zone at the very edge of the solar system.
It had been thought that the NASA probe was already passing through the outermost section of the solar system on its way toward the heliopause the boundary where the solar wind ends and interstellar space begins. For that reason, the existence of yet another district at our cosmic neighborhood's edge was completely unexpected, said Stamatios Krimigis, a solar physicist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., and leader of the team that operates Voyager's low-energy charged particle instrument." |
PDFs are just unavoidable and they come from everywhere.
Processing these PDF documents in a document-intensive workflow to extract relevant data is always time-consuming, repetitive, expensive, and tedious for workers.
While copy-pasting may be sufficient for a small number of documents, however, processing a large volume of documents requires advanced technology such as OCR and document AI.
Where do we use traditional OCR?
Traditional OCR technology extracts data in a line-by-line or word-by-word manner, without comprehending the overall context of the document. This approach can be effective for simple processes where only a limited amount of structured information, such as email addresses or phone numbers, needs to be captured. By using regular expressions or Regex, we can create static rules to identify specific formats of data or detect identifiers within the document that indicate the relevant data point. It is crucial to establish a clear relationship between the identifier and the corresponding data point, which can be achieved through the use of Regex. Additionally, Regex can be utilized for classifying documents on a small scale where the number of document types is static and well-defined.
Where do we use Document AI?
Document AI is an innovative technology that surpasses the capabilities of OCR and regex. By utilizing machine learning algorithms, Document AI can understand the context and layout of a wide range of documents, allowing it to extract meaningful information in a manner that closely resembles human understanding. Unlike traditional OCR and regex, which rely solely on pattern recognition, Document AI leverages advanced machine learning techniques to interpret the content of a document and extract information in a more nuanced and sophisticated way. By doing so, Document AI is very useful and the only solution for automating document-intensive processes that involve the processing of large volumes of documents.
Document AI, OCR and Regex
In certain real-life applications that involve the processing of complex documents, it may be beneficial to use all three technologies together in order to achieve optimal accuracy and efficiency. However, for such applications, it is strongly recommended to seek the expertise of Document AI professionals who possess in-depth knowledge and experience with all three technologies. By combining their expertise, businesses can optimize their document processing workflows, resulting in improved accuracy, efficiency, and productivity.
Moreover, Document AI is capable of processing a wide variety of document types, ranging from invoices and receipts to tax forms and legal contracts. Its advanced machine learning algorithms enable it to interpret the context and layout of documents, which allows for more accurate and precise data extraction. By automating the process of document processing, Document AI can significantly reduce manual errors, minimize costs, and accelerate business processes, making it an indispensable tool for organizations across a broad range of industries.
Document data extraction: how to improve accuracy in document AI
The adoption of document data extraction is on the rise as a method for automating processes that involve dealing with large volumes of documents. According to various research the Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 29.7% from 2022 to 2030 and anticipated to reach USD 11.6 billion by 2030.
There are many companies who are offering document AI tool to extract relevant information from unstructured, scanned documents such as invoices, PDFs, receipts, tax documents, etc. Intelgic, Docsumo, Nanonates are few of them. Each of these companies has their own pre-trained AI models for popular and widely used use cases in document AI such as invoice.
However when it comes to increasing accuracy of these AI models, these pre-trained and ready models may not provide very high accuracy. In these scenarios, it is suggested that train the AI model with your own documents (each document type) |
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Hansberry challenges the stereotype that is associated with her subject matter in a couple of ways. The first way is that she shows the Younger family as challenged by the issues of class and gender, as much as race. Normally, the stereotype would suggest that race is the only dominant issue. Hansberry presents such a fleshed out portrait of the family because she examines how different social conditions converge in order to define the family's identity. Another way in which the family resists being stereotyped lies in their confronting issues and finding success from them. Hansberry does not show a family that capitulates to the conditions around them or fragments in the face of challenge and adversity. Walter does discover what constitutes truth and true values and while there will be struggle, the ending indicates that the family will face it together. This avoids the stereotype that shows a family of color withering under the pressure, capitulating to what is as opposed to what can be. Finally, Hansberry avoids the stereotype because she enables her characters to be complex and possess dimensions to them. Each character in the drama is complex, each member of the family unique. This prevents falling into any stereotype because the intricacy of the characters precludes any real prediction or judgement as to what will happen to form.
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The reproductive data along with some ecological observations of Gerbillus dasyurus are reported based on field studies and investigations in captivity. The findings indicate that the favorable habitat of G. dasyurus is rocky areas with sparse vegetated soil and that the reproduction period extends from January to September. According to the reproductive data, the average weight at birth is 2.22 g., litter size ranges from 3 to 9, with an average of 5.66, a female gives three litters during a reproduction period. The eyes and ears also open at 16 days, weaning takes place at 32 days, and they become free at 41 days.
Gerbillus dasyurus, reproduction biology, ecology, Turkey
ÇOLAK, ERCÜMENT; SÖZEN, MUSTAFA; YİĞİT, NURİ; and ÖZKURT, ŞAKİR (1999) "Observations on the Reproductive Biology of Gerbillus dasyurus (Wagner, 1842) (Mammalia: Rodentia) in Turkey," Turkish Journal of Zoology: Vol. 23: No. 3, Article 5. Available at: https://journals.tubitak.gov.tr/zoology/vol23/iss3/5 |
Methotrexate is used in cancer chemotherapy as well as for treating inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis.
Potassium citrate and other forms of citrate (e.g., calcium citrate, magnesium citrate) may be used to prevent kidney stones. These agents work by making the urine less acidic.
It may be advisable to avoid these citrate compounds during methotrexate therapy except under medical supervision.
St. John's wort (Hypericum perforatum) is primarily used to treat mild to moderate depression.
The herb dong quai (Angelica sinensis) is often recommended for menstrual disorders such as dysmenorrhea, PMS, and irregular menstruation.
Methotrexate has been reported to cause increased sensitivity to the sun, amplifying the risk of sunburn or skin rash. Because St. John's wort and dong quai may also cause this problem, taking these herbal supplements during methotrexate therapy might add to this risk.
It may be a good idea to wear a sunscreen or protective clothing during sun exposure if you take one of these herbs while using methotrexate.
The herb white willow (Salix alba) , also known as willow bark, is used to treat pain and fever. White willow contains a substance that is converted by the body into a salicylate similar to aspirin.
Folate (also known as folic acid) is a B vitamin that plays an important role in many vital aspects of health, including preventing neural tube birth defects and possibly reducing the risk of heart disease. Because inadequate intake of folate is widespread, if you are taking any medication that depletes or impairs folate even slightly, you may need supplementation.
Methotrexate is called a "folate antagonist" because it prevents the body from converting folate to its active form. In fact, this inactivation of folate plays a role in methotrexate's therapeutic effects. This leads to an interesting Catch-22: methotrexate use can lead to folate deficiency, but taking extra folate could theoretically prevent methotrexate from working properly.
Note: Folate supplements have only been found safe as supportive treatment in the specific conditions noted above. It is not known, for example, whether folate supplements are safe for use by individuals taking methotrexate for cancer treatment.
- Reviewer: EBSCO CAM Review Board
- Review Date: 12/2015 -
- Update Date: 12/15/2015 - |
NORDHOEK, South Africa – Sitting at his laptop computer, Louis Liebenberg compares two maps of the same area: While the first is plotted thickly with yellow dots, the yellow areas on the second map are far sparser.
These dots represent sightings of lowland gorillas recorded by trackers both before and after an outbreak of the Ebola virus in the Lossi Sanctuary in the Republic of Congo. Using CyberTracker, a software program that allows conservationists to record their observations in the field on handheld computers linked to global positioning system, or GPS, units, the trackers were able to gather data that revealed in detail the decimation of the local gorilla population.
Initially skeptical, scientists later confirmed their findings that the virus is killing gorillas and other animals, and published an article that appeared recently in the journal Science.
"It's quite a stunning example of what fairly regular collection of data by game guards doing patrols can tell us," Liebenberg said.
To Liebenberg – the South African founder of CyberTracker Conservation – these findings not only illustrate the device's ability to enhance scientists' monitoring and interpretation of changes in ecosystems, but they also support the idea that illiterate trackers are just as capable of doing science as researchers with Ph.D.s.
The CyberTracker is just one of many high-tech gadgets available to conservationists, who increasingly turn to tools such as DNA analysis and satellite imagery to gain a more detailed understanding of nature.
Liebenberg came up with the idea of the CyberTracker while hunting with the indigenous Bushmen trackers of the Kalahari Desert. Fascinated with tracking since childhood, Liebenberg, an author and scientist, developed the theory that the ancient hunter-gatherer practice represents nothing less than the origins of science.
Tracking an animal requires a process of making observations and testing hypotheses that is akin to scientific reasoning, he explained.
Once necessary for survival, however, it is now a dying art. Today, Liebenberg said, he knows of only about six older Bushmen who remain subsistence hunters. Most youngsters now attend school, unlike their illiterate elders, but seldom learn the skills and encyclopedic knowledge necessary for tracking.
If a way could be found to put the Bushmen's ancient knowledge to use for conservation purposes, he realized, both nature and the struggling Bushman communities would benefit. In 1996, Liebenberg and computer scientist Lindsay Steventon released the first CyberTracker model, with the aim of turning tracking into a modern profession.
That year, trackers Karel Benadie and James Minye used the CyberTracker to study the endangered black rhino in the Karoo National Park in South Africa, gathering data on the animals' eating patterns and vulnerability to poaching. In 1999, Liebenberg, Steventon and the two illiterate trackers published the findings in the academic journal Pachyderm.
"By including trackers as part of our scientific monitoring of our environment, you can effectively expand science itself," Liebenberg said.
But it isn't only indigenous trackers who are using the CyberTracker. Students and recreational bird-watchers use it as well. Researchers have used it on Arctic expeditions, as well as to study wolves in Idaho, river pollution in Tanzania and the extremely rare Sumatran rhino in Borneo.
The software can be customized, and is available for free from the CyberTracker website. Nearly 400 different projects in 30 countries use the technology, Liebenberg said.
The program consists of multiple layers of detailed pictorial menus on which researchers record their observations. They select icons to represent the plants and animals they observe, and to describe their characteristics and behaviors. The GPS records the time and location of each observation.
Expert trackers often can identify an individual animal, or at least determine its age and gender, as well as the state of its health and its level of stress, just by looking at its footprints.
With each tracker recording as many as 300 observations per day, the device allows for huge amounts of data to be collected and analyzed on maps and in databases almost immediately.
"This is where new patterns emerge: correlations between different species, landscape features and other factors that could not have been discovered any other way," said Jason Knight, a lead instructor at the Wilderness Awareness School in Duvall, Washington.
But Cristina Eisenberg, a wolf biologist working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said she has stopped using the device because it tends to crash unexpectedly.
"I lost a whole day's worth of data, after having bushwhacked up miles and miles of rough terrain tracking elk and wolves," she said. "I was not pleased."
Several projects using the CyberTracker in southern African conservation areas also have been halted, partly due to prejudice against illiterate trackers and a lack of enthusiasm among park management officials, Liebenberg said.
Nevertheless, he wants to develop the CyberTracker into a system for monitoring environmental changes and sharing information around the world.
"At the moment, there are not enough scientists out there gathering information," Liebenberg said. "If you have trackers on the ground working with scientists, in theory you could monitor the entire global ecosystem this way." |
“There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven—”Ecclesiastes 3:1 NASB
Timing is of the utmost importance in our lives. Solomon, the son of King David, outlines examples in Ecclesiastes using parallelism and juxtaposing two contrasting ideas in each line.
What does that look like? Let’s examine verses 2-8:
A time to give birth and a time to die; A time to plant and a time to uproot what is planted. A time to kill and a time to heal; A time to tear down and a time to build up. A time to weep and a time to laugh; A time to mourn and a time to dance. A time to throw stones and a time to gather stones; A time to embrace and a time to shun embracing. A time to search and a time to give up as lost; A time to keep and a time to throw away. A time to tear apart and a time to sew together; A time to be silent and a time to speak. A time to love and a time to hate; A time for war and a time for peace.
Solomon’s beautiful poetry captures the very essence of life. No matter the year, month, or day, one of more of these lines will apply to each time.
What are we to learn from Solomon’s wisdom? The beauty of these truths is encouraging as we sojourn through life. We may have times of pain, but there are also times of joy. Times of destruction but times of rebuilding. Times of despair but times of hope.
Whatever painful time you may be experiencing right now, be encouraged. Its anthesis — its opposite– will also come. Remember how Habakkuk cried out to God for justice from the Chaldeans who were destroying Judah?
Then the Lord answered me and said,Habakkuk 2:2-8 NASB
‘Record the vision
And inscribe it on tablets,
That the one who reads it may run.
For the vision is yet for the appointed time;
It hastens toward the goal and it will not fail.
Though it tarries, wait for it;
For it will certainly come, it will not delay.‘
Take heart in the knowledge that God is in control of everything. His justice and truth will ultimately conquer the evil in our world. But the key is God’s timing, a crucial point which generally escapes our understanding.
Let’s learn from Solomon’s wisdom. Life may be full of vanities, but our toil in the Lord is never in vain.
I know that there is nothing better for them than to rejoice and to do good in one’s lifetime; moreover, that every man who eats and drinks sees good in all his labor—it is the gift of God.Ecclesiastes 3:12-13 NASB
Which of these lines in Ecclesiastes relates to your life today?
The Byrds recorded the lyrics to the song, Turn, Turn, Turn in 1965. It’s a beautiful song that records the words in verses 2-8. Do you remember it?
A Time for Everything by Karen Jurgens copyright 2022 All Rights Reserved. |
Multi-University Project to Study 'Dark Energy' Receives $8 Million from National Science Foundation
20 October 2010
A project to discover the nature of dark energy, a mysterious force causing the expansion of the universe to speed up, has received an $8 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
The funds will be split among The University of Texas at Austin ($3.6 million), Texas A&M University ($3.9 million) and Penn State University ($.5 million), to support their respective roles in the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment, or HETDEX. The project will be carried out at The University of Texas at Austin’s McDonald Observatory in west Texas.
“HETDEX is one of our gems within the university,” said William Powers Jr., president of The University of Texas at Austin. “It’s one of the projects being done here today that will still be talked about in a hundred years, the way we now read about discoveries by Newton and Einstein. This NSF grant is strong confirmation of the project’s importance and our commitment to it.”
Both of Texas' flagship universities will play a major role in the project.
“Collaborating on such an important project with our colleagues at The University of Texas at Austin and Penn State University speaks directly to the important role that flagship, tier-one research institutions have in unlocking the mysteries of the universe and developing new knowledge,” said R. Bowen Loftin, president of Texas A&M. “With this grant, we are able to pull together many of the top minds in astronomy and physics for a project that will have a significant, historical impact.”
One form of dark energy was described by Albert Einstein in 1917 in his theory of general relativity, but no one took the idea seriously until 1998. That year, two groups, one of which was co-founded by Texas A&M astronomer Nicholas Suntzeff, made precise measurements of the expansion rate of the universe showing that it was expanding faster than in the past — a total surprise, akin to throwing a ball into the air and realizing it is speeding up as it flies into the sky, rather than slowing down and returning. Scientists have dubbed the unknown cause “dark energy.” Because dark energy makes up 70 percent of the mass and energy of the universe, understanding its nature has been called the number one problem in physics today.
“Removing our ignorance about 70 percent of the universe’s make-up is a challenge that McDonald Observatory is delighted to assume,” said McDonald Observatory Director David Lambert.
HETDEX will upgrade the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET), one of the world’s largest, to use a specially designed instrument, which over three years will make one of the largest maps of the universe to date.
The HETDEX survey will pinpoint the positions of one million star-forming galaxies between 10 billion and 11 billion light-years away.
This enormous map will measure accurately how the universe expands over time. Because acceleration in this expansion is because of dark energy, HETDEX will determine whether or not dark energy is a constant through time — a key element in understanding precisely what it is.
“I am delighted that the HET, and in particular the HETDEX team, has been recognized by the National Science Foundation as one of the leaders in addressing one of the most fundamental scientific questions of our time,” said Daniel Larson, chair of the HET Board of Directors and dean of Penn State’s Eberly College of Science.
The NSF funds will be administered over the next five years.
"The HETDEX project is a critical part of the coordinated, multi-agency response to the 2006 report from the Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory Committee's Dark Energy Task Force, which recommended a multi-pronged approach to the enigma known as dark energy," said Dr. Nigel Sharp, Astronomy Program officer at the National Science Foundation. "NSF's Division of Astronomical Sciences is pleased to support the project, which will have broad impact and value well beyond the focus of dark energy."
“There are two areas the NSF money is going for,” said project scientist Karl Gebhardt of The University of Texas at Austin. “To build the VIRUS spectrograph, which is the heart of the project, and also for the science — analyzing the data, theoretical work, post-docs and graduate students.”
The VIRUS instrument will be assembled and aligned at Texas A&M University. This novel instrument comprises 150 copies of a single spectrograph, an instrument that gathers light from distant galaxies and splits it into its individual wavelengths, known as a spectrum. A spectrum reveals an object’s chemical composition, its temperature and the speed it is moving toward or away from us.
The replication of this single unit makes it possible to build VIRUS faster and cheaper than a single giant spectrograph with the same capabilities. The power of VIRUS is that it simultaneously captures spectra from 33,000 points on the sky simultaneously, using fiber optics developed for the telecommunications industry to transfer the light from the telescope to the huge replicated array of spectrographs.
“VIRUS is unique,” said HETDEX principal investigator Gary Hill of The University of Texas at Austin. “It captures spectra from everything that falls on its fibers so we can survey a large area of sky very quickly. The powerful combination of the HET and VIRUS creates a unique survey facility that will allow us a new window on dark energy, and will also open up the study of dark matter and the formation of the Milky Way.”
Darren DePoy, professor of physics and astronomy and holder of the Rachal-Mitchell-Heep Endowed Professorship in Physics at Texas A&M, said because VIRUS allows spectroscopic observations of a large number of objects simultaneously, it is well suited to measuring the subtle effects that dark energy has on the structure of the universe. The power of the new instrument also will enable a broad range of other astronomy projects.
“We are fortunate at Texas A&M to have both the high-quality lab space and excellent students and staff capable of building such instrumentation,” said DePoy, a member of Texas A&M’s George P. and Cynthia Woods Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy. “Our team includes undergraduate and graduate students from several science and engineering departments and research scientists and engineers in the instrumentation group. All of us are excited to be part of such a groundbreaking project.”
The assembly and testing of the VIRUS instrument will be completed by DePoy, Jennifer Marshall and fellow researchers within Texas A&M’s Charles R. ‘62 and Judith G. Munnerlyn Astronomical Laboratory, which is directed by DePoy.
“The production-line style of constructing 150 spectrographs will be a challenge," said Marshall, lecturer and research scientist in the Texas A&M Department of Physics and Astronomy, "because astronomers generally only build a single instrument for a particular scientific project. We look forward to the challenge and to the scientific results that the instrument will enable.”
In addition to their contribution to the science goals, Penn State’s role in the preparation for the HETDEX project is contributing to the planning of the observations and the commissioning of VIRUS.
“The HETDEX observations, in addition to revealing key information about the expansion history of the universe, will also provide important insights into the formation of galaxies,” said Robin Ciardullo, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State and a member of the HETDEX science team. “We will be obtaining information from a time before our sun was born. We believe that many of the objects HETDEX detects will someday evolve into galaxies similar to the Milky Way, so the experiment will also be providing a glimpse into our galaxy’s infancy.”
German partners in the HETDEX project include Universitäts-Sternwarte München, Astrophysikaliches Institut Potsdam and Max-Planck-Institut für extraterrestriche Physik. Each is contributing to hardware, software, or science preparation for the project.
Now six years in, “the project is on track,” Gebhardt said. Work includes building a new top end for the Hobby-Eberly Telescope. Called the Harold C. Simmons Dark Energy Optical System, it includes four mirrors and other optics. This work is being carried out in Austin at the University of Texas’ Center for Electromechanics and is to be completed by the end of the year.
The top end of the telescope will be taken apart to be upgraded beginning next May. The new top end will be delivered to McDonald Observatory late next summer. After installation and commissioning, the HETDEX survey will begin in January 2012, and reach routine operations by that spring. The survey will take three years, ending in June 2014. Once completed, the survey data will be released to the public.
The World Stage
The quest to understand the nature of dark energy has caught the imagination of astronomers around the world, and many projects have been undertaken to probe its mysteries. HETDEX is a front-runner in this effort, being nearly fully funded and set to probe an epoch of cosmic history no other project will tackle.
Members of the HETDEX team are involved with two other major dark energy projects. Texas A&M is part of the Dark Energy Survey led by Fermilab, and Penn State is involved with the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey that will be carried out as part of the ongoing Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
Through both HETDEX and these other connections, the State of Texas will play a major role in forthcoming breakthroughs expected about dark energy, Gebhardt said.
The NSF funding will support the project’s education and outreach. Plans include upgrading the project’s extensive Web site, a new bilingual, family-focused exhibit called “The Dark Energy Experiment: Illuminating the Universe” for McDonald Observatory’s Frank N. Bash Visitors Center (a popular tourist destination that receives about 55,000 visitors annually), and the creation of science and math activities for use in elementary and secondary schools.
HETDEX is nearly completely funded. Most of its funding has been provided by the donations of individuals and foundations. That money has funded the necessary upgrades to the telescope, enlarging its field of view. Less than 10 percent of the funds remain to be raised.
Established in 1932, The University of Texas at Austin McDonald Observatory near Fort Davis, Texas, hosts multiple telescopes undertaking a wide range of astronomical research under the darkest night skies of any professional observatory in the continental United States. The Hobby-Eberly Telescope at McDonald is a joint project of The University of Texas at Austin, Penn State University, Stanford University, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and Georg-August-Universität Göttingen.
— END —
Rebecca Johnson (McDonald Observatory/UT-Austin): 512-475-6763
Shana Hutchins (College of Science/Texas A&M): 979-862-1237
Barbara Kennedy (Eberly College of Science/Penn State): 814-863-4682
Dr. Gary Hill, HETDEX and VIRUS Principal Investigator
Chief Astronomer, McDonald Observatory
The University of Texas at Austin
Dr. Karl Gebhardt, HETDEX Project Scientist
Herman and Joan Suit Professor of Astrophysics
The University of Texas at Austin
Dr. Darren DePoy
Rachal-Mitchell-Heep Endowed Professor in Physics
Texas A&M University
Dr. Jennifer Marshall
Munnerlyn Astronomical Laboratory
Texas A&M University
Dr. Robin Ciardullo
Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics
Penn State University |
Pluto and its satellite Charon regularly occulted or transited each other's disks from 1985 through 1990. The light curves resulting from these events (collectively called ``mutual events'') have been used to determine albedo maps of Pluto's sub-Charon hemisphere. We now use a data set of four light curves that were obtained in both B and V Johnson filters to construct a two-color map of Pluto's surface. We are able to resolve the central part of Pluto's sub-Charon hemisphere. We find that the dark albedo feature that forms a band below Pluto's equator is comprised of several distinct color units. We detect ratios of V-filter/B-filter normal reflectances ranging from ~1.15 to ~1.39 on Pluto's sub-Charon hemisphere. |
Sharon Draper's Tears of a Tiger was first published in 1994 and remains a popular work because of its focus on relevant teen issues—drinking and driving, parent-child conflict, depression, and academic struggles. Listed as one of the top 100 books for young adults for the millennium, the novel also won the prestigious Coretta Scott King Award (1995) and the ALA Best Book Award for Young Adults (1995).
While Draper's realistic characters and gripping plot will certainly appeal to most young-adult readers, her choice to write each chapter in a different style elevates her work beyond that of a typical teen-angst novel. Draper switches from newspaper excerpts to letters to dialogue to class assignments to phone calls, making it possible to view the aftermath of the tragic crash from a variety of complex perspectives. Thematically, Draper explores and undermines stereotypical views of the African-American teen. One of Andy's teachers has low expectations and cannot believe that Andy could do so well on a test. Even Andy tries to live up to what he thinks an African-American male in high school should be: an athlete who jokes around in class and does not care about his grades. Throughout the novel, Draper provides positive examples of African-Americans who are successful and admirable—Andy's psychologist and many of Andy's friends—to show Andy that he can expect more from himself.
While Tears of a Tiger is the first book that Draper wrote and published in her Hazelwood High trilogy, it is not the first chronologically. After the success of Tears, Draper went back in time with Forged by Fire, the second novel of her trilogy, to tell Gerald's story. The third novel, Darkness Before Dawn, answers questions that Draper's readers had about the future of B.J., Tyrone, Keisha, and Rhonda. |
Any of 10–12 species (genus Squatina, family Squatinidae) of sharks having a flattened head and body, with winglike pectoral and pelvic fins that make them resemble rays. The tail bears two dorsal fins, and behind each eye is a prominent spiracle. Monkfish grow up to 6.25 ft (2.5 m) long. They inhabit tropical and warm temperate waters of continental shelves worldwide. The angelfish, or angel shark (S. squatina), is often caught for food in European waters. The term monkfish is also used for the unrelated food species of the genus Lophius, bottom-dwelling goosefish with enormous mouths and fishing rod lures extending from their heads. |
Aussie Cubesats launched towards International Space Station
19 April 2017
Three satellites developed by Australian universities were launched today to the International Space Station as part of a global atmospheric research project.
Teams from the universities of Adelaide, Sydney, and New South Wales are participating in the QB50 project, which will see a network of Cubesats from more than 20 countries be deployed from the International Space Station.
The satellites will be used to conduct scientific research in the largely unexplored thermosphere, around 400 kilometres above the Earth. The international project is coordinated by Belgium’s von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics.
I’m delighted that Australia is participating in this exciting project, demonstrating our world-class capability in building and testing CubeSat technologies.
Modern science is a global endeavour, and Australia derives great benefit from cooperating with our scientific partners around the world.
Projects like QB50 will inspire the next generation of young engineers and researchers to be engaged in and enriched by the opportunities in science.
The Australian Government regulates Australian involvement in satellite launches through the Space Activities Act 1998. The three Australian satellites were granted Overseas Launch Certificates under the Act, confirming that the planned launch meets safety and other requirements.
The launch to the International Space Station took place today on an Atlas V launch vehicle from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, United States.
Media Contact: Minister Sinodinos' office 02 6277 7070 |
Potassium argon dating is useful for determining the age of
Potassium-Argon Dating Potassium-Argon dating is the only viable technique for dating very old archaeological potassium argon dating is useful for determining the age of. Geologists have used this method to date rocks as much as 4 billion years old. It is based on the fact that some of the radioactive isotope of Potassium, Potassium K ,decays to the gas Argon as Argon Ar By comparing the proportion of K to Ar in a sample of volcanic rock, and knowing the decay rate of K, the date that the rock formed can be determined.
How Does potawsium Reaction Work? Potassium K is one of the most abundant elements in the Earth's crust 2. Potassim out of every 10, Potassium atoms is radioactive Potassium K These each have 19 protons and 21 neutrons in their nucleus. If one of these protons is hit by a beta particle, it can be converted into a neutron. With 18 protons and 22 neutrons, the atom has become Argon Aran inert gas.
For every K atoms that decay, 11 become Ar How is the Atomic Clock Set? When rocks are heated to the melting point, any Ar contained in them is released into the atmosphere. When the rock recrystallizes it becomes impermeable to gasses again. As the K in the tje decays into Ar, the gas is trapped in the rock.
The Decay Profile In this simulation, a unit of molten rock cools and crystallizes. The ratio of K to Ar is plotted. Note that time is expressed in millions of years on this graph, as opposed to thousands of years in the C graph. Click on the "Show Movie" button below to view this animation. How are Samples Processed? Clicking on the "Show Movie" button below will bring up an animation that illustrates how a K-Ar sample is processed and the calculations involved in arriving at a date.
This is actually a mini-simulator, in that it potassium argon dating is useful for determining the age of a different sample each time and generates different dates. Limitations on K-Ar Dating The Potassium-Argon dating method is an invaluable tool for those archaeologists and paleoanthropologists studying the earliest evidence for human evolution. As with any dating technique, there detedmining some significant limitations. Potassium Argon Dating Obsidian Hydration Dating Other Isotopic Dating Techniques |
Seven plants of the field and vine, with which the Land of Israel
is blessed, are elaborated upon in the Book of Deuteronomy (8:8):
“A land of wheat and barley, and vines and fig trees, and pomegranates;
a land of olive oil and honey.” Ripened yields of the seven species were
brought to the Temple in Jerusalem. These crops and fruits
frequently served ancient Jewish art as decorative motifs in
synagogues and on everyday objects, such as coins, seals, rings,
lamps, jewelry, glass vessels, and more.
The Land of Israel has always been known for its vineyards
and their products. The vine symbolized the fertility
of the land, and the people of Israel were likened to
a vine planted by God. The vine, the cluster, the leaves,
and the tendrils were frequent patterns of decoration.
Grapes symbolized happiness and eternal life, and they
decorated Maccabean coins, Bar-Kochba coins, and oil
lamps. The ornamentation was meant to recall the Holy
Temple, in which Herod affixed a vine of gold to the
entrance to the Holy of Holies. The vine pattern decorates
ancient synagogues, coffins, and other objects.
Bronze oil lamp handle in the shape of a vine leaf
Mishnaic (Late Roman) period
The fruit of the pomegranate, juicy and full of seeds,
was a common symbol of human, animal, and vegetable
fertility. Accordingly ritual items, such as jars, pendants,
scepters, and votive objects were designed in the shape
of the pomegranate. Ornaments in the shape of this fruit
decorated the hems of the garments of the High Priest.
Copper pomegranates decorated Yachin and Boaz - the
columns that were placed in the Temple's façade.
Vessel shaped like a pomegranate
Late Israelite (Iron) period
In Jewish sources, the fig represents a life of tranquility and quiet: “And every
man sat under his vine and under his fig tree and was
not afraid” (Micah 4:4). In the Bible, many allegories
and images connect the fig with the people of Israel;
its fruit is one of the fruits representing the yield of the land.
Following Jewish tradition, which identifies
the tree of knowledge as the fig tree, the fig is also
related to the Torah.
Limestone fragment depicting fig leaves,
from the synagogue at Capharnaum, 4th-6th Centuries CE
The evergreen olive, which is strongly connected with
the Land of Israel, its original home, was a metaphor for
beauty, fertility, and strength, as well as a symbol
of peace and hope, wisdom and happiness. The olive is
mentioned many times in Jewish sources; it was the prime
export of the Land of Israel and throughout the generations,
its fruit and oil served the residents of the land in
many different ways.
Decorated shard depicting
olive branch (upper row)
a vine branch (middle row)
and a pomegranate branch (lower row)
Mishnaic (Late Roman) Period
Dates, among the most ancient fruit trees in the Land of Israel,
had a central function in the economic life of the inhabitants
of the region. The branches of the date symbolize the
abundant yield of the land, as well as the wandering of the Israelites in the desert, by virtue of the fact that
the "lulav" (palm frond) is one of the four species servicing
the holiday of Sukkot (Tabernacles). Braid-like engravings
of date tree branches were among the wall decorations
in the Temple of Solomon. The date was the inspiration
for the design of column capitals in the Late Israelite
(Iron) period; known as the "‘palmate capital," this design
decorated palaces and public structures.
in the shape of a date, 2nd-3rd Centuries CE
Wheat and Barley
In ancient times, grain constituted a principal component
of the human diet. This fact, in addition to the phenomenon
of the sprouting of dry grain seeds in the ground, made
it a symbol of agricultural plenty and rebirth. Decorations
in the form of stalks of grain were frequent in Jewish
art in the period of the Jewish wars against Rome, as they expressed hope and national rebirth.
Gnostic black slate gem,
depicting a figure reaping barley,
Talmudic (Byzantine) Period |
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. -- How many? How strong? And how long?
That's what three National Weather Service teams are trying to find out today about Monday's tornadoes in Alabama as they study damage they left behind.
The teams are out in the field today trying to determine how many tornadoes touched down, how strong they were as measured by the Enhanced Fujita Scale, and how long were their paths.
"One thing we've noticed is a lot of recycling was going on," said Kevin Laws, meteorologist in Birmingham's National Weather Service office. "That's where one touches down goes back up and another one comes down (from the same storm)."
That is contrasted with the April 27 outbreak where there were many long-track tornadoes, and the same tornado stayed on the ground for many miles.
Weather service survey crews on Monday identified two tornadoes in Tuscaloosa County of EF3 and EF2 strength, tornadoes that produce moderate to heavy damage. Surveyors also determined that a tornado of EF3 strength, with winds of 136 mph to 165 mph, was responsible for the extensive damage in the Center Point and Clay areas of north Jefferson County.
Today surveyors are looking at three areas of tornado damage: 1) a path from Tuscaloosa to Jefferson counties; 2) a path spanning Perry, Coosa, Chilton and Tallapoosa counties; 3) a path from Autauga to Elmore counties. |
Brief SummaryRead full entry
BiologyBongos typically live in small family groups of up to eight females, their young, and a dominant male (5), although larger 'nursery' groups often aggregate after the calving period and mixed-sex groups of up to 50 have been observed (8). Surplus males are usually solitary, although they may be accompanied by a younger bull (8). Most active at dawn and dusk (8), these shy, reclusive animals forage within the bushes and shrubs of the forest during the day, and only come out to the salt licks during the night (3). The diet includes a range of grasses, herbs, leaves, flowers, twigs, thistles and cereals (3). Individuals use their long, prehensile tongue for grasping leaves and pulling up roots and grasses, while their broad horns are used for pulling and breaking high branches (3) (5). Females typically give birth to a single calf after a nine month gestation period (5) (8). For a short period after birth calves are left alone, lying still in a sheltered spot to avoid detection by predators, with the mother periodically returning to nurse the calf (2). Young are weaned at six months, and become sexually mature at around 20 months of age (2) (7). |
For eco-conscious individuals, the bathroom is normally the place where we can unintentionally waste the most water. From leaky faucets to outdated toilets that use gallons of water per flush, there are plenty of fixtures in the space that drain H2O. However, there are also plenty of ways to conserve the important resource.
First and foremost, you have to occasionally check your faucets, showers, and other plumbing to ensure that they're in tiptop shape and are not leaking.
Next, you have to change your habits! Turn off the faucet when you're brushing your teeth or shaving. You might also want to limit your shower to five to ten minutes.
Finally, replace your bathroom accessories and fixtures with eco-friendly options. Besides installing water aerators on your showerheads and faucets, opt for fixtures that uses less water than their older counterparts. There are plenty of options these days for toilets that use less than 2 gallons of water. There are even models that have dual flush capabilities, allowing you to control the amount of H2O that you use. |
A student went on a rampage at a community college in Texas earlier this week, stabbing 14 people, many in the face and neck, authorities said. The attack was followed by immediate calls by elected officials across the nation for tougher knife control.
In your dreams. There were no calls for knife control, of course. The wounding of more than a dozen people by a knife-wielding perpetrator is not likely to prompt an outcry for tougher restrictions on the purchase, ownership or use of that sort of weapon.
This most recent example of violence inflicted by a weapon and directed at multiple victims on school property occurred Tuesday morning on the campus of the Lone Star Community College in Cypress, near Houston.
The suspect, a 20-year-old student at the school, was taken into police custody within minutes of the attack. He used a razor utility knife to carry out his attack, and apparently chose his victims at random, authorities said.
But – and no surprise here -- the misuse of that knife by an apparently disturbed young man will not put knife control on the national agenda. However, as lawmakers discuss gun control, perhaps thinking about the mass stabbing in Texas can speak to that ongoing debate.
Just this week, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle seem to have come to a tentative agreement on requiring more extensive background checks on those purchasing guns. The idea is that such checks will keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people, and thus prevent tragedies such as the Sandy Hook massacre.
Obviously, the mass stabbing in Texas pales in comparison with the slaughter in Connecticut. No one was killed on the Lone Star campus. In the hands of a criminal or mentally unbalanced person, a gun is ordinarily much more deadly than a knife.
Interestingly, a shooting at another campus in the Lone Star Community College system three months ago was less deadly than this week’s knife attack. Only two people were wounded in the earlier attack.
But this week’s multiple-victim crime in Texas does underscore a point made by those skeptical that increased gun control will make future Sandy Hooks less likely. To quote their pithy slogan, guns (or knives) don’t kill people; people kill or injure people.
Will stricter laws help? The evidence is mixed. As the crimes at both the Lone Star campus and Sandy Hook Elementary illustrate, a determined suspect usually has little trouble getting his hands on a knife or a gun. Many of the recent mass shootings, including Sandy Hook, took place in officially “gun free” zones.
The suspect in Sandy Hook used firearms that were legally owned by his mother. Similarly, I suspect that the knife used in Texas was purchased legally.
But now, to be fair to those wanting tougher gun control laws, all is not well with legal gun ownership in the nation. Some gun owners – obviously not all, but a small number of gun owners – have proved careless about making sure that their weapons do not accidentally fall into the wrong hands.
Unfortunately, the tragic death of a 6-year-old boy in Toms River this week illustrates this problem. As reported in Wednesday’s Star-Ledger, that young boy was accidentally shot dead during a game of “pretend” gunplay after his 4-year-old neighbor got his hands on a .22-caliber rifle.
How often do similar accidents occur? There were 680 accidental shooting deaths across the nation in 2008, the last year for which statistics are available, according to a web site that monitors gun accidents. The same year saw more than 15,500 accidental shooting injuries.
On average, about five children are killed or injured every day across the nation as a result of handguns, the web site adds. “The primary cause of youth-involved shooting rests with the fact that children find loaded handguns in the home – and natural curiosity leads them down the road to disaster,” the web site adds.
Obviously, most gun owners act in responsible ways, carefully securing their weapons. Tough laws helping to ensure gun safety among law-abiding citizens are certainly legitimate.
But many of the proposed laws aimed at reducing the illegal use of weapons may simply not work. As both the lesser violence in Texas and greater violence in Connecticut illustrate, most of those who use guns (or knives) to commit crimes have easy access to those tools.
In Chicago, for example, some 80 percent of gun violence is carried out by gang members. Stricter background checks are not likely to change the illegal behavior of gang members. Still, proposing tougher gun control laws appeals to the desire of some people to “do something, anything,” even if those laws have little or no effect on curbing gun violence.
To quote President Obama (albeit in another context) how about a balanced approach? Perhaps we could deal more thoughtfully with the mentally ill. Perhaps it is time to toughen penalties for gun-related murder.
And what about dealing with some root causes of gun violence? What about the violence in some video games and popular movies? That mayhem can’t be helpful to impressionable young minds. Maybe we should demand that Hollywood stop glamorizing violence.
Nah – that would be taking on some sacred cows. We can’t have that, you know. |
We all want our data to be stored safely and to be available at all times without any delay and loss. At the same time the data should not be controlled by a person or by a group of people and most importantly should be safe from geo-political disasters, natural disasters, cyber attacks and many more. Hence Uniris Geolocation Patches are designed to obtain an overall balance from the perspective of an individual or a group to the perspective of the entire P2P network. To understand the need you need to understand the problems faced by current blockchains with respect to geo-location
1. Partially Centralized Storage: For example, many blockchains solutions have sharded pool of miners in a few parts of the world which are easily prone to geo-political risks, disasters risk, cyber attacks and many more.
2. Partially Centralized Mining: For example, 70% of Bitcoin Miners are in China and if they plan to take over the Bitcoin network they could easily do so with the 51% attack.
3. Finally the most important problem, an inability to balance & optimize data in the P2P network.
Geolocation Patches are an efficient and heuristic way of solving the above problems. The Patches are represented with a Patch-ID and are calculated by Geographical Coordinates (calculated from Public IP) and Network Coordinates (calculated from the latencies/RTT between nodes) of the nodes to provide an overview of where the nodes are located. Once the distribution of nodes in the P2P network is known then it can easily tackle any risk or attack. With this method the network is able to survive for centuries.
To solve the Network Coordinates, Uniris Team after studying the distribution of stars in the galaxy which is very similar to the distribution of nodes in the P2P network has provided a Heuristic Algorithm based on the Centre of Mass of the nodes and pioneered an unbreakable, immune, optimized geo-locally secured P2P network.
“KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE STARS AND FEET ON THE GROUND”
The Network Coordinate Heuristic Algorithm:
Below is a step by step procedure of solving the Heuristic Algorithm
- Calculating RTT: Each node in the P2P network interacts with other node and for each interaction the RTT (Round Trip Time) is calculated and the minimum RTT is taken into consideration.
- Nodes’s Centre of Mass: Similar to the centre of mass and 3D distribution of stars in the galaxy, the corresponding centre of mass and 2D distribution of nodes in the P2P network are calculated and are then distributed in the 2D plane.
(Note: For an in-depth Mathematical calculation refer the YellowPaper)
- Patch-ID for each Node: Each node is assigned with a Patch-ID for fast calculations. With this, the Uniris P2P network becomes immune to failure by natural & geo-political disasters, cyber attacks, etc.
Network Coordinates are used in Patch ID Calculations and Patches are used inside mining and storage heuristic algorithms to ensure perfect geographical replication (data availability/security) and also to optimize network requests. During the validation/replication process, the download will be performed from the nearest nodes (from network point of view), thus avoiding transfers that will cross the planet even though the data is already on a nearby node. Thereby optimizing the time and energy consumed by the P2P network for a high TPS and further preparing the network for any kind of risks or attacks like massive natural disasters, geo-political attacks, cyber attacks etc.
The Heuristic Algorithm is Built for the Future:
In the future there will definitely be nodes in space (yes, in space!) and this algorithm is even compatible to that by introducing a 3rd Coordinate to Nodes. Thereby optimizing data even for the nodes in space. Hence ensuring the ability to survive for centuries. |
República Federativa do Brasil
Location on Map
|Years Hosted Olympics||2016 Summer|
|Years Attended Olympics|| Summer: 1920-24, 1932-2016|
|Medals 2012 Summer||3 gold, 5 silver, 9 bronze|
|Medals 2014 Winter||none|
|Total Olympic Medals|
|National Olympic Committee|
|Comitê Olímpico Brasileiro|
Brazil first participated at the Olympic Games in 1920, and has sent athletes to compete in every Summer Olympic Games since then, except for the 1928 Games. Brazil has also participated in the Winter Olympic Games since 1992, though to this date no Brazilian athlete has won a medal in winter sports.
Brazilian athletes have won a total of 91 medals, with volleyball, sailing and judo as the top medal-producing sports. 1996 and 2008 were the years with the most medals, with 15, and 2004 had the most golds with 5. Furthermore, a Brazilian athlete has been awarded the Pierre de Coubertin medal.
The National Olympic Committee for Brazil is the Comitê Olímpico Brasileiro, which was created in 1914 and recognized in 1935. Brazil won the rights to host the 2016 Summer Olympics in the city of Rio de Janeiro.
- See also: All-time Olympic Games medal count
Medals by Summer GamesEdit
|1928 Amsterdam||did not participate|
|1932 Los Angeles||0||0||0||0|
|1968 Mexico City||0||1||2||3|
|1984 Los Angeles||1||5||2||8|
Medals by summer sportEdit |
The City of Richmond and UC Berkeley are working on a Climate Action Plan. But before anything is finalized, they want feedback from members of the community.
The plans examine greenhouse gas emissions in the city, and proposes ways to reduce them.
Last year Richmond resolved to confront climate change and pollution, and as part of that process, it’s creating this Climate Action Plan. A new law, signed by Governor Jerry Brown last year, directs money from California’s emissions market to “disadvantaged communities.” In theory, the CAP could make Richmond more eligible for this money.
For the full story from Niema Jordan, visit Richmond Confidential. |
What is orthodontics?
Who is an orthodontist?
An orthodontist is a dental specialist who has received two to three years of additional training and experience. Your orthodontist specializes in straightening teeth, correcting misaligned jaw structure and can improve the quality of your smile.
What’s the best age to visit the orthodontist?
How can I take care of my teeth if I’m wearing braces or a retainer?
- ALWAYS remember to brush your teeth after every meal and floss at least once a day.
- Make sure to use toothpaste that contains fluoride and ask your orthodontist or family dentist if you need a fluoride rinse. This will help prevent cavities!
- If you take out your retainer to eat, make sure you brush your teeth, floss, and remember to keep it safe in its container so that it does not get lost or broken
- During your treatment, try to avoid foods with a lot of sugar (sugar increases the amount of bacteria that grows in your mouth, causing more plaque and possibly cavities).
- Avoid sticky and chewy foods (caramel, chewing gum, gummy bears), hard foods (hard candy, nuts, ice cubes) or any foods that could possibly get stuck in your braces (corn on the cob, bagels, ribs, taffy, etc.).
- Be sure to schedule your routine checkups with your family dentist. It is recommended that you continue to visit the dentist every three to six months.
What are braces?
- Clear braces
- Ceramic braces
- Lingual braces
- Invisible braces
- Traditional metal braces
If I get braces, how long do I have to wear them?
The amount of time spent in braces will vary depending on the individual patient, because every smile responds differently to treatment. Treatment times can take anywhere between six and thirty months, but most standard treatments take about twenty-four months.
Do braces hurt?
Do I need to brush my teeth more often if I have braces?
With braces, you should brush your teeth at least three times a day to keep your teeth, gums, and mouth healthy and clean. Brushing regularly will help remove any food that may be caught between the braces. You should also floss daily to get in between your braces where your brush cannot reach. Dr. V can show you how to properly brush and floss once your braces are placed.
If I have braces, do I still need dental checkups every three to six months?
Will my braces interfere with my school activities like sports? playing an instrument, or singing?
Playing an instrument or a contact sport may require some adjustment when you first get your braces, but wearing braces will not stop you from participating in any of your school activities. If you play a contact sport, it is recommended that you wear a mouth guard to protect your braces or appliance. |
USAGov’s Guide to Displaying the American Flag
Every Fourth of July all across the country, people show their love for America by displaying flags along streets, hanging them from porches, and proudly carrying them in the town parade. Old Glory is everywhere. But did you know there are official rules on properly displaying the U.S. flag? This guide from USAGov, based on the Federal Flag Code (PDF, Download Adobe Reader), can help you show respect for the flag as you celebrate this Fourth of July:
When: You can display the flag outside from sunrise to sunset. If you want to fly it after dark, it will need to be lit. Don’t fly the flag during inclement weather, unless it’s an all-weather flag.
On the porch: The union of the flag--the blue section with white stars--should be placed at the peak of the staff unless the flag is at half-staff. When the flag is suspended from a rope on a pole extending from a house, the flag should be hoisted out, union first, from the building.
On the wall or the window: When the flag is displayed on a flat surface like a wall, the union should be at the top left.
On the street: The flag should be suspended vertically with the union to the north in an east and west street or to the east in a north and south street. The flag should never touch anything beneath it, so make sure it’s hoisted at the proper height.
At the office: Suspend the flag vertically with the union to the observer’s left upon entering. If the building has more than one main entrance, the flag should be suspended vertically near the center of the corridor or lobby with the union to the north when entrances are to the east and west, or to the east when entrances are to the north and south. If there are entrances in more than two directions, the union should be to the east.
On a vehicle: The staff should be fixed firmly on the right side of the vehicle. Do not drape the flag over the hood, top, sides, or back of a vehicle or a boat.
Half-staff: During periods of mourning, it is common to see the flag flying at half-staff. Only presidents can proclaim such periods for a national remembrance (PDF, Download Adobe Reader). Governors can also declare mourning periods at a local level. In some cases, heads of federal agencies can order the flag flown at half-staff on grounds under their supervision. Traditionally, states and local governments follow the president’s proclamation during a period of national mourning.
Take care of your flag. Many dry cleaners will clean U.S. flags for free during the months of June and July. Store your flag in a well-ventilated area. If it gets wet, make sure it’s completely dry before storing it. If the flag is damaged or worn out, it should be burned and disposed of with dignity. Learn more about the flag, its history, protocol, and ways to pay your respects, including the proper way to fold it.
This Independence Day, show your patriotism by proudly displaying the old Red, White and Blue while celebrating the nation’s 240th birthday. |
Meet the Seine River: it’s 776km long, the second largest river in France, it starts at Source-Seine just North of Dijon, and ends at the English Channel. It runs through Paris and is crossed by 30+ bridges within the city.
Throughout history, it also happened to be common place for ash scattering (e.g. Joan of Arc), a dumping ground for murder or accident victims, and a popular destination for those wanting to commit suicide… especially during periods of hardship and starvation like the French Revolution where frozen bodies were regularly collected from the doorways in Paris, as well as from the Seine. – Source
And, even more notoriously, the murky waters of the Seine were often used by officials to drown criminals, priests, protesters, and rebels (some as recently as 1961). Only Nantes and the Loire River is considered worse for government assisted drownings.
Before the introduction of locks and reservoirs to tightly control the flow of water through the city, the river was lower but still dangerous and acted as a harbinger of death when it flooded and ruthlessly took people with it. Even today the river floods and the city reacts by moving precious works of art to higher ground; some of which (rather ironically) incorporates the Seine in the scenery.
What does all of this mean? It means that Paris’s liquid heart has seen a lot of death. In French, la noyée de la Seine means the drowned of the Seine and those to whom it applies, exited the river and re-entered the world as a gruesome spectacle.
Paris’ Île de la Cité Morgue and Les Macchabées
The Île de la Cité is a naturally occurring island in the middle of the river. It was from here that medieval Paris grew and spread out as a city. It currently is home to the Notre Dame Cathedral and the Crypte Archéologique.
Behind Notre Dame and at the edge of the island, was the location of the city’s second morgue. So many people drowned in the Seine that this morgue was added to the Quai de l’Archevêché in 1804 to handle the massive number of unidentified bodies that literally floated up to or were pulled out of the water near the building (between 1790 and 1801 the documented number was 410).
If you’re feeling particularly ambitious and want to practice your French, you can sift through public mortuary records at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Or you could read Death in Paris: The Records of the Basse-GeˆOle De LA Seine, October 1795-September 1801, which details the meticulous records of two morgue assistants, Boule and Daudefrom, over a 6-year period.
In 1868, in Haussmann’s Paris, an improved viewing / public exhibition space for viewing bodies opened at this morgue. In the improved building, the noyée de la Seine where processed, placed naked onto marble tables, their belongings hung on nearby pegs, and their bodies displayed visibly to the public. Locals called them Les Macchabées and would plan their day around viewings.
The Morgue receives corpses, not recognized, which have been taken away from the river, or found within the jurisdiction of the prefecture of police, with which it is connected (2nd division, 4th office). It is open to the public from morning to night: but bodies are received there at any hour of the day or night. They remain exposed there three days, unless claimed sooner.
The Morgue received, in 1864, 376 bodies (58 women, 318 men). – Source
Parisians from this period certainly didn’t have a problem with death and locals began to frequent the morgue daily. The act of viewing the naked bodies through the morgue’s windows was so popular that the building became one of the city’s top tourist attractions… more popular than the Eiffel Tower (when it was completed in 1889), the Zoo, and the Louvre. Line-ups were long on weekends as people waited impatiently for their chance to view the victims that came out of the Seine.
But soon, the act of identifying bodies became second to the macabre desire to see the dead displayed like some sort of shop window display. The most popular victims (children, beheadings, executions) were displayed for much longer than the 3-days in order to draw crowds.
In March 1907 the morgue was closed for moral reasons. The practicality of putting victims out for display had long ended with the advent of photography. Coroners could simply take photos of the victims and post them on the door for people to identify. It was finally time for people to respect the dead.
L’Inconnue de la Seine
One of the more famous of the bodies *allegedly* pulled out of the Seine has been given many names: la vierge Inconnue, la belle Italienne, and more commonly, l’Inconnue de la Seine. In Paris she is known as la femme la plus embrassée au monde, the most kissed girl in the world, for reasons I will explain in a bit.
In Parisian folk history, sometime in the 1880s a young woman (approximately 16-years old) was pulled out of the Seine and brought to the morgue. The coroner could find no evidence of violence or foul play so her death was ruled a suicide.
However, her face was so peaceful, beautiful, and intriguing that the people who worked at the morgue wanted to preserve her likeness. The common way to do this was to create a death mask.
From here, her preserved-in-plaster face “went viral” and quickly became the inspiration for romantic stories throughout Europe. La belle Italienne quickly became the face that inspired an entire generation of women to strive to look like her; it’s even said that “the German look” from the turn of the century came from l’Inconnue de la Seine. Copies of the death mask became a fashionable fixture on walls around the city and in Parisian homes. Stories, art, books, and poems were all created in honour of this unknown young woman.
But there’s a twist. I used the word “alleged” above because no one has been able to find any record of a beautiful, young, Mona-Lisa-like girl being pulled out of the Seine. However, documents and research do show that a cast identical to that of l’Inconnue came from a young girl who died of tuberculosis in 1875.
All this said, does her face look familiar?
It should if you’ve ever done a CPR course. The mold used to cast the face of l’Inconnue de la Seine was used by Asmund S. Laerdal to create the first Resusci Anne doll in 1960. And, even though lifesaving technologies and techniques have evolved over the decades, the face of Resusci Anne has not and every time a person does “mouth-to-mouth” they are reinforcing the French nickname for l’Inconnue: la femme la plus embrassée au monde. |
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Juan Gris was an artist who took everyday objects and produced modern, uplifting still life paintings from them. He was a unique voice within the Cubist movement, offering a more grounded influence on some of the more revolutionary-minded.
There were several items that appear again and again through out the Cubist period, with many different members of the group making use of them at some point. Newspapers are seen regularly and Gris liked to present these "as were", whilst others would shred them or alter them in other ways.
Common Cubist Themes
Other elements that you might find on a breakfast table are also too be found here, such as bottles, bowls, fruit and cutlery. Beyond the breakfast theme, musical instruments can also be found in a number of Cubist paintings, most frequently guitars. Juan Gris himself made use of different types of guitars in a large number of still life works, whilst Picasso actually produced abstract versions of them out of cardboard during his time working with other mediums.
Beyond these domestic scenes, the artist would then take on some landscape paintings, many portraits of friends, family and colleagues as well as also some scenes of entertainment from his busy social life. One intriguing aspect of the Cubist movement is that Juan Gris was the only member of this group that genuinely unsettled its figurehead, Pablo Picasso, through the quality of his work. For the naturally confident Picasso to feel threatened by another is particularly rare, and underlines the qualities that he saw in his colleague's work.
Partnership with Braque and Picasso
Whilst the two worked together alongside Georges Braque in the early days of the Cubist movement, it was becoming clear that French art was moving on from what had gone before and a number of astute collectors started to pin their hopes on this particular group of creative young men. The likes of Daniel Henry Kahnweiler would take a punt on large collections of these artist's work which would arrive in bulk, in a disorganised assortment of sketches and paintings. Picasso was certainly the main focus at this point but others were also being recognised because of their connection to the Cubist movement.
The members of the Cubist movement would seek to avoid the traditional routes for promoting one's career and instead relied on their private collectors to open up other avenues of promotion. They were connected to a number of other galleries that were willing to feature their work and this method seemed to be very much in line with their desire to offer the art world something new. Kahnweiler was particularly useful in providing contacts to promote their careers, but he also held a clear financial interest in doing so, because it was raise the prices of many of the items that he had already purchased.
Promotion of Cubism Internationally
The likes of Picasso and Braque would also then start to promote cubist paintings abroad for the first time as the group moved from strength to strength by around the early 1910s. The earliest official cubist shows at this point were actually arranged by Metzinger and Gleizes, with the main three names still somewhat on the fringes, stylistically.
Juan Gris was an exceptionally versatile artist, who even produced costumes for the Ballet Russes at one point in his career. Whilst his sculptures and skills as a draughtsman are also both well respected, it is his paintings within the modern art movement of Cubism that will always receive the most focus. Having studied several particularly rigid academic subjects as a student, Gris wanted to push this type of education away and go for a more flexible direction in his working life.
It was his early ability in drawing that got him admitted into art schools and from there he could spread his interest into other avenues of artistic expression. It would then be his friendships and collaborations with other artists that would complete his journey towards achieving the impressive and varied oeuvre that you find listed in this section. |
The study of English offers the student development of writing skills as well as an appreciation of literature. The discipline of reading and writing about the human experience is a vital foundation for all learning.
Since English composition courses are designed to help the student write the kind of
papers commonly required in college courses, the student's first course in composition should be taken during the first semester of college work and the second course during the second semester. For course descriptions, choose Courses from our menu at left.
Career opportunities, most of which require a bachelor's degree, include copywriter, editor, journalist, proofreader, public relations worker, researcher, and technical writer.
English courses are offered to meet a variety of student needs and requirements. The courses are designed to accept students at various skill levels and enable them to gain the writing skills necessary to achieve their goals.
Students should take their first course in composition during the first semester (15 units) of college work since composition courses teach students to write the kind of papers commonly required in college courses. |
Patrick Fresne reviews God’s Executioner, by Michael O Siochru – an account of the devastating English Parliamentarian Conquest of Ireland in 1649-1653.
God’s Executioner, Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland, 1649-1653, Faber & Faber, 2008.
Reviewer: Patrick Fresne
The poet Sean O Conaill left no doubts as to the scale of the warfare in mid 17th century Ireland when he described the conflagration as ‘The War that finished Ireland.’
The conflict, more commonly known as the Confederate or Cromwellian wars, has not attracted a great deal of attention by historians in the past century: perhaps the Battle of the Boyne and the Williamite wars has become seen as a more symbolic conflict for the era.
But as O Conaill recognised over three centuries ago, Cromwell’s invasion was a pivotal moment of Irish history. Micheal O Siochru’s book is thus a much-called-for examination of these crucial years of Irish history.
There is little question that O Siochru has produced a strong work. In recent memory, a number of books have been devoted to Cromwell’s time in Ireland, perhaps the last to gain the same level of prominence was Tom Reilly’s controversial Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy. In many respects, O Siochru’s work is a refutation of these more sympathetic accounts of Cromwell’s Irish Campaign, but his arguments are both strong and at times refreshing.
Micheal O Siochru’s book is a much-called-for examination of these crucial years and it is a strong work
I feel that the only recent major work on this topic that can be compared with O Siochru’s in terms of scale and quality is Scott-Wheelers Cromwell in Ireland.
It is interesting to note the differences between these two writers: Scott-Wheeler, with his background in the US army, did not view the guerrillas known as Tories as being much of a hindrance to the Cromwellians in their advance across Ireland, but O Siochru presents a convincing case that these partisans were on occasion a serious strategic threat to the Parliamentarian invaders.
Notably, Scott-Wheeler & O Siochru do agree on one crucial point. Traditional Irish and British historians of the period have seen the Cromwellian invasion as a one sided conquest, with the conquest of the Parliamentarian regime being the inevitable outcome. O Siochru, like Scott-Wheeler, disputes this view, arguing that the failure of the Irish forces was principally due to the ineptitude of their senior leadership, and that there was nothing inevitable about the eventual Cromwellian triumph.
Historians have seen the invasion as a one-sided conquest. O Siochru argues there was nothing inevitable about the Cromwellian triumph
O Siochru has made an effort to tackle some inaccuracies that have crept into the works of less than rigorous historians. He points out for example, that the Catholic Sack of Magdeburg in the Thirty Years War does not explain Cromwell’s massacre at Drogheda, an argument presented by the Reformation historian Diarmaid MacCulloch in a recent work.
Outside of Ireland, there is still a considerable degree of ignorance about events in Ireland in this period, and it is satisfying to see O Siochru challenge the sort of inaccuracies that inevitably result.
I had a few some minor gripes with O Siochru’s work. He is marginally more sympathetic than most historians towards Heber MacMahon, the Bishop of Clogher who led the Irish Ulster army to defeat at Scariffhollis.
O Siochru blames the defeat in part on Ormond’s failure to support the Bishop sufficiently, but even this little sympathy is perhaps misplaced. It was inappropriate for MacMahon to accept command of the Ulster army; even in 1650, a Bishop leading an army looked outdated, and his position served to antagonise unnecessarily the few remaining Protestant Royalists.
The failure of the senior Irish leadership to tackle the Cromwellian invasion was in many respects a result of this kind of elitist abuse of power.
Another small complaint is that O Siochru is sometimes vague when discussing military actions (Scott-Wheeler is stronger in this regard than O Siochru) But the complaints above are largely exercises in nit-picking.
There have been some complaints that the title of the book sounds somewhat sensationalist, even misleading, though the flip side of the coin is that outside Ireland the book has attracted more attention than would have otherwise have been the case.
To be honest, from memory this is the first book on early-modern Irish history that I have seen sitting on the shelves of mainstream bookshops in Sydney, so the marketing of the book has been very effective. There is a dearth of quality books on Irish history here in general so if clever marketing is successful in promoting works on Irish history abroad then I won’t complain.
One final point that should be made is that, as suggested earlier, O Siochru’s style is closer to the ‘nationalist’ narrative of Irish history than has been fashionable in the past couple of decades. While the language used at times could perhaps be more cautious, O’Siochru’s arguments are solid.
O Siochru’s style is closer to the nationalist narrative than has been fashionable in recent decades; but his arguments are solid
Historians of a revisionist bent have shed a great deal of ink in recent years, sifting through evidence page by page in an attempt to clear Cromwell of charges of atrocity at Drogheda and elsewhere, but O Siochru makes the point that the revisionists basically miss the forest for the trees.
Taken together, the evidence is suggestive that in all probability something awful did happen at Drogheda in the September of 1649, and it is hard to dispute his logic here.
Overall, O Siochru has produced an energetic and memorable work. Although works on Cromwell in Ireland pop up every now and then, in general there is shortage of modern works on this period. We can only hope that O Siochru’s work provokes a few more writers to look at this period in future, and hopefully some of these will be on the less well known aspects of these years.
Patrick Freyne is a resident of Sydney, Australia, and a graduate of the University of Sydney, where he studied Medieval History and English Literature. |
SCOTUS’ decision to overturn Roe v. Wade means that a woman’s right to an abortion is no longer protected as a constitutional right. It could also mean less access to necessary reproductive treatments to grow her family.
Sounds counterintuitive. But the Roe ruling gives states the green light to implement trigger laws around abortion. That might also call into question, and limit, how in vitro fertilization is carried out. (Reminder: IVF is already hard to access for many people.) It all comes down to whether embryos created in the IVF process are now entitled to rights of personhood. And how they’ll be treated under state laws.
Let us explain, with the help of OB-GYN Dr. Natalie Crawford, reproductive endocrinologist and co-founder of Fora Fertility in Austin, Texas.
Note: The info in this guide applies to all people seeking fertility treatments, but we sometimes use the word “woman.”
Remind me: How does IVF work?
In a nutshell… A woman gets hormones to help her ovulate more than the typical one egg per cycle. Those eggs get extracted, mixed with sperm, and fertilized in a lab. (FYI: “in vitro” means “in glass.”) The goal is to create embryos that can then be tested for abnormalities. After that, one (or more) of the embryos can either be transferred into the uterus or frozen for use later.
IVF is the most common form of assisted reproductive technology. Think: about 2% of babies in the US are born via IVF annually. It’s an option for people who want biological kids, but might be single, or queer, or could be dealing with things like infertility, a history of genetic diseases, recurrent pregnancy loss, and/or medical treatment that interferes with their ability to carry a baby.
“There are so many reasons why people need IVF that many of us aren't even aware of,” Dr. Crawford said.
How could abortion bans interfere with the IVF process?
Reminder: Roe actually preceded IVF. Quick timeline: SCOTUS issued a decision on Roe v. Wade in 1973 and the first IVF baby in the world was born in 1978. IVF only became more than an “experimental” practice in the US in the 2010s. So IVF is pretty new territory, in general.
The main concern with restrictive state abortion bans and IVF, according to Dr. Crawford and others: The bans might throw the legal status of every embryo into question.
Let’s back up. First off: IVF is expensive, time-consuming, exhausting, and often painful. So making several embryos — and only going through that involved IVF “cycle” once — is best case scenario. Patients and doctors hope to access multiple embryos, because it gives them the best chance at a healthy baby.
More embryos mean more chances at dodging potential hurdles to a successful pregnancy from IVF. Some examples: an embryo might test positive for fetal abnormalities, it might not “take” for whatever reason, or an embryo might transfer successfully but result in a miscarriage. If hopeful parents go through their embryo stash without getting pregnant — and want to try again — they’ll have to undergo the cycle of hormone treatment and egg extraction all over.
Note: People who end up having successful pregnancies can face tough questions about what to do with leftover embryos. Some might donate them to science for research or to other families. Some embryos are discarded.
That’s where things get tricky with the overturning of Roe. In states where abortion is (or will be) illegal at fertilization, disposing or freezing unused embryos might be considered illegal.
Dr. Crawford is worried that in these states, health care providers will be required to transfer every created embryo into the body. And that, she said, is “extremely unsafe.” It could mean being required to transfer embryos without genetically testing them, and/or transferring multiples — something that fertility doctors have long avoided, she said.
If disposing becomes illegal, Dr. Crawford said she would hesitate to give women hormones that could help them produce several healthy embryos. And that could mean patients repeating the extraction and transfer process again and again as a result. That’s more time and money, and in some cases – more heartache. Remember: IVF already costs upwards of $15K to $25K a cycle, Dr. Crawford said. And she anticipates that additional IVF rounds would make it even more expensive, exclusive, and stigmatized. At least that’s what happened in Italy almost two decades ago. When the country experimented with assigning embryos something like personhood rights — while banning surrogacy, freezing embryos, and pre-implantation genetic testing. In the years that followed, studies suggested that IVF success rates dropped. Gradually, the main points of the Italian law were overturned.
This possible scenario, of limiting egg transfers and fertilization, is one Dr. Crawford said she dreads. “That's a world most of us, as fertility doctors, are really nervous about,” she said.
Which states might limit access to IVF post-Roe?
The short answer: TBD. But in general, it could be the states that ban abortion starting at “fertilization” (see: Oklahoma). Or states that have introduced abortion bans that explicitly treat fetuses as people. There are four in addition to Oklahoma, according to the Guttmacher Institute: Iowa, South Carolina, Vermont, and West Virginia. Dr. Crawford worries that other states — like Texas, where she practices — could also enact stricter abortion bans post-Roe.
“It makes my patients nervous,” she said. “People who are already investing their time, money, and emotional and physical energy are now asking at every appointment, ‘Is it safe to do IVF?’”
Does it make sense to move embryos to states with less-restrictive abortion bans?
Dr. Crawford’s patients are asking her “at every appointment” about the possibility of transferring their embryos out-of-state. But she’s not ready to advise going that route.
One reason, according to Dr. Crawford: Moving embryos isn’t without risk. Because different clinics might have different methods for freezing and thawing embryos. So an embryo transferred from one clinic might not have the same survival rate in another clinic.
“I'm fearful that [moving embryos] might lead to, downstream, more negative impacts,” she said.
What can IVF patients — or people considering IVF in the future — do right now?
Dr. Crawford’s first recommendation: Don’t make any rash decisions.
“You should be staying tuned,” she said. “But I swear to you, fertility clinics are watching [abortion legislation] like crazy.” And they’ll inform patients if further action should be taken, she added.
Another piece of advice: “Use your voice,” Dr. Crawford said. Maybe by contacting your local representative and explaining “why you’re afraid.”
She said that if more people express how abortion bans could inadvertently impact IVF, lawmakers might be more likely to rework the wording of their bills.
“I don't believe many of the politicians…are trying to outlaw IVF,” she said. “There is an opportunity to educate and advocate and work together in a political arena.”
Dr. Crawford never envisioned entering this advocacy space. But she’s here now. Along with several other fertility physicians, Dr. Crawford is starting a nonprofit for education and advocacy called Doctors For Fertility. She says the group also plans to launch a political action committee to “help make sure that candidates understand why IVF and fertility care are important.”
As abortion legislation takes shape in our post-Roe world, it’s understandable to be concerned about its impact on IVF, which is crucial for many people who want to grow their families. But for now, it’s unclear whether — or how — abortion bans could affect the production of embryos for fertility treatment. So before you make any quick decisions, keep in touch with your local fertility clinic and pay attention to your state abortion laws. And if you feel comfortable: Speak up.
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- 07/11 - European E. coli Outbreak from Eating Bean Sprouts
- 12/15/10 - Current Safety Issues For Fresh Produce
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- 2007 - Ozone Technology: Fact Sheet for Food Processors
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- 2003 - Who Should Be Involved in Food Recall Planning and Execution?
- 2002 - Understanding the Recall Concept in the Food Industry
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Did you know that our children are, by definition, fraternal triplets? It’s true, even though there’s a 4-year age difference between Bee and Cakes, and a 7-year age difference between Bee and DJ. How is this possible?
First, a little genetics lesson…
Identical triplets are formed when one egg is fertilized by one sperm. After fertilization the egg divides, and then one half divides again, creating three genetically identical babies (though recent research indicates that they may not be as identical as once believed). However, fraternal triplets occur when 3 eggs are present in the womb at the same time, and are fertilized by three different sperm, creating three genetically different babies. This is why each child looks unique.
When we went through our cycle of in vitro fertilization in February, 2002, the doctor retrieved more than 30 eggs, and each one was fertilized with one of my husband’s sperm. 12 fertilized normally, and at that point we had, erm…let’s see…10 babies would be decaplets, but 12? I guess I would call that a bumper crop. Or a litter. (Actually, Aimee pointed out that 12 would be dodecaplets, because a 12-sided figure is a dodecagon. She’s so smart!)
Anyway, we didn’t transfer all 12 of the embryos into my uterus, for reasons I’m sure I need not explain. Here’s how we ended up with fraternal triplets of different ages:
February, 2002 – 1 fresh embryo is transferred. We become pregnant with Bee. The remaining embryos are cultured and monitored, and 7 are deemed viable for cryogenic freezing. Bee has 7 frozen siblings.
October, 2002 – Bee is born
April, 2005 – 3 frozen embryos are transferred. No pregnancy.
March, 2006 – 3 more embryos are transferred. We become pregnant with Cakes.
November, 2006 – Cakes is born
April, 2009 – We have only one frozen embryo left, and if still viable when thawed (a very big if) we are given a mere 15% chance of pregnancy.
May, 2009 – Our last frozen embryo is thawed and is viable. It’s transferred (see Go Little Embryo, Go!), and miraculously, we become pregnant with DJ. See, we don’t just call him Super Baby because of his size!
February, 2010 – DJ is born, and we have our fraternal triplets. They were all fertilized at the same time, and in the same place (it was a petri dish, but still), but through the miracle of reproductive science, they weren’t born at the same time, or in the same place!
They are fraternal, but when you look at this picture of Bee at age 12 weeks,
This is Cakes at 12 weeks.
My husband just loves to shock people with this story. At first they always think he’s joking, but when he’s finished, they exclaim “That’s amazing!” It kind of boggles the mind, doesn’t it?
I’ve never told you this before, but there was a time when my husband and I considered not transferring that last frozen embryo. After Cakes was born, we sincerely believed that our family was complete. We just couldn’t see ourselves with more than two children. It wasn’t in our plan, so the question of what to do with that last embryo loomed over us. We thought about possibly donating it to another couple, and of course the clinic gave us the option of donating it for research (no), or simply discarding it. It’s astonishing, but thousands of embryos leftover from IVF procedures are discarded every year. We never even considered that option, because we just knew that we couldn’t do it. We have pictures of our children as embryos, and as far as we were concerned, that last little embryo was a child. How could we throw it away like a piece of trash?
We finally reached a decision that we thought was right. We would transfer the embryo, but we would have an unmedicated cycle, without the advantage of hormone supplementation to build an optimum uterine environment. We decided to just leave it up to God. If it was meant to be, it would happen.
To be perfectly honest, we decided this for selfish reasons. We weren’t positive that we wanted another baby, and I didn’t want to put my body through the hell of yet another cycle. The discomfort from the estrogen patches, the pain of the daily shots – it was hard for me to face that again. But as time went on, I became more and more uncomfortable with the idea of the unmedicated cycle. I realized that my worries and fears were the result of a lack of faith and trust in God. I felt that I had a responsibility to that embryo, and I was dishonoring God by not giving it the very best chance I possibly could. My own discomfort and uncertainty…well, they seemed like trivial things. Small sacrifices for the sake of a life.
So I went ahead with the drugs. I did it all again, hoping, but never really believing that I would get pregnant. Of course, by that time I really, really wanted another baby, and the thought that the cycle might fail was difficult to bear. But our merciful, gracious God rewarded us with this precious baby boy, a blessing far greater than we ever expected.
For 7 long years he was in a freezer, just waiting for a chance. A chance at life. He wasn’t in our plan, but he was in God’s plan, and if there’s anything I’ve learned in my 36 years on this earth, it’s that God’s plans are always, always better than mine.
I thank the good Lord every day for that nudge, for the little voice telling me that I needed to give our last tiny embryo a fighting chance. Because the truth is, I thought my family could be complete without DJ. I never knew how much I needed him until he was here.[print-me/] |
X-Ray Exam: Ankle
What's an X-Ray?
An X-ray is a safe and painless test that uses a small amount of radiation to make an image of bones, organs, and other parts of the body.
The X-ray image is black and white. Dense body parts, such as bones, block the passage of the X-ray beam through the body. These look white on the X-ray image. Softer body tissues, such as the skin and muscles, allow the X-ray beams to pass through them. They look darker on the image.
X-rays are commonly done in doctors’ offices, radiology departments, imaging centers, and dentists’ offices.
What's an Ankle X-Ray?
In an ankle X-ray, an X-ray machine sends a beam of radiation through the ankle joint. The joint is made up of the ends of the leg bones (tibia and fibula) and a small bone between the heel and the lower leg (talus bone).
An X-ray technician will take pictures of the ankle:
- from the front (anteroposterior view, or AP)
- from the side (lateral view, or lat)
- at an angle (internal oblique or mortise view)
Ankle X-rays usually are done while a child is lying down. They should stay still for 2–3 seconds while each X-ray is taken so the images are clear. If an image is blurred, the X-ray technician might take another one.
Why Are Ankle X-Rays Done?
An ankle X-ray can help doctors find the cause of pain, tenderness, and swelling, or deformity of the ankle joint. It can show broken bones or a dislocated joint. After a broken bone has been set, an X-ray can show if the bones are aligned and if they have healed properly.
An X-ray can help doctors plan surgery, when needed, and check the results after it. It also can help to detect cysts, tumors, later stage infections, fluid in the joint, and other diseases in the ankle bones.
Depending on the X-ray results, a follow-up radiology test like a CAT scan or MRI might be needed.
The doctor also might order a stress X-ray to check how tightly the ligaments are holding the ankle together. To do this, the doctor or technician stretches the ankle joint while the X-ray is taken to see if the pressure moves the bones apart.
What if I Have Questions?
If you have questions about the ankle X-ray or what the results mean, talk to your doctor.
Note: All information is for educational purposes only. For specific medical advice, diagnoses, and treatment, consult your doctor.
© 1995- The Nemours Foundation. KidsHealth® is a registered trademark of The Nemours Foundation. All rights reserved.
Images sourced by The Nemours Foundation and Getty Images. |
Year 2 Victorian Day - November 2018
On Monday 26th November, the Year 2 children finished their History Detectives Topic by having a Victorian Day. Everyone came to school dressed as a Victorian child and we even had a Queen Victoria! We visited each classroom and experienced a Victorian school, wash day and made Victorian toys. The teachers in the school were very strict and a child had to wear the dunce hat. During wash day we cleaned material and used the dolly stick, washboard and mangle. It was hard work! In the Victorian Toy Room we made a cup and ball and a thaumatrope. What a fantastic day we had! |
The blood that flows into our heads is obviously important for it provides nutrients and oxygen to that most energetically demanding of organs – the brain. But for neuroscientists, blood flow in the brain has a special significance; many have used it to measure brain activity using a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI.
This scanning technology has become a common feature of modern neuroscience studies, where it’s used to follow firing neurons and to identify parts of the brain that are active during common mental tasks. Its use rests on the assumption that the flow of blood (“haemodynamics” to those in the know) is a decent enough stand-in for the firing of neurons – the latter creates a shortage of nutrients and oxygen that is corrected by the former.
But Yevgeniy Sirotin and Aniruddha Das from Columbia University have found that this assumption might not be entirely valid. They used a new technique to independently measure and compare nerve activity and blood flow in the brains of live monkeys. Sure enough, they found a blood flow pattern that reliably matched the activity of the animals’ neurons.
But they also spotted something that no one has seen before – a second haemodynamic signal, of equal strength to the first, that didn’t correspond to any local brain activity. This second signal was not a sign of parts of the brain that are active, but those that may need to be active in the near future. It seems that if the brain expects a task in the future, it can anticipate which of its regions will be needed and flush them with blood in preparation.
Sirotin and Das worked with two rhesus monkeys that had transparent windows in their skulls just over their visual cortex, a part of the brain involved in processing images. With a camera pointed through this pane, the duo could literally watched the blood pumping through the monkeys’ brains. Using two different wavelengths of light – one red and one green – they could work out how much blood was flowing through a specific blood vessel, and how much oxygen it carried. And with tiny electrodes, they could simultaneously record the electrical signals from nearby neurons.
The monkeys were oblivious to all this fuss – they were out to get a sip of juice. To do that, they had been trained to look at a small spot on a computer screen – when it shone in one colour, the monkeys had to focus their attention on it and when it switched to a second colour, they had to relax their eyes. They sat through a continuous series of these trials and soon picked up the recurring fixate-and-relax pattern.
It was during this task that Sirotin and Das noticed the strange second signal, so they tried to isolate it. They put their monkeys through the same exercise, but this time in almost total darkness. The tiny dot they had to look at was very faint and as it swapped between the “fixate” and “relax” colours, it would have looked like a “single, twinkling star in an otherwise black sky”.
In this nigh-pitch blackness, the monkeys’ nerves were silent. But their haemodynamic signals spoke volumes – they were still rising and falling in a steady rhythm even though there wasn’t any nerve activity in the same area. The monkeys’ pupils dilated in time with this signal, their arteries narrowed and widened, and their heart rate kept pace too. Their nerves? Nothing, save a steady background hum.
What was behind this mystery signal? It certainly kept the same timing as the alternating dot and sceptics might point out that there was some light, albeit very little. But different parts of the visual cortex respond to different parts of a monkey’s field of view. And with the dot appearing only in the centre of their vision, Sirotin and Das could point their cameras at an area that they knew wouldn’t respond to it. And indeed, the local nerves showed no sign of activity above their background levels.
Perhaps the signal was the result of some internal cycle? Unlikely – when Sirontin and Das changed the timing of the flickering dot, they found that the signal followed suit. As the length of each trial increased from six seconds to thirty, so the rhythm of the signal stretched to match it.
It’s tempting to think that the signal represented the monkey’s shifting attention, with every peak signifying blood flowing to the area during fixation and every trough corresponding to relaxation. But the signal’s timing said otherwise – it showed that blood was starting to flow into the area before the start of each trial period, while the monkey was meant to be relaxing its gaze.
This new signal seemed to be pre-empting the monkey’s actions. To confirm that, Sirontin and Das changed the timing of the trials after 10-20 cycles, when the monkeys had got into a rhythm. The animals quickly noticed the new pace and immediately picked it up. But the strange second signal was slower – it took a couple of rounds to adjust to the new tempo. It was still “anticipating” the previous timing, even though the animal itself had moved on.
Based on all of these observations, Sirontin and Das suggest that some higher part of the brain anticipates the demands of other regions and sends advance supplies of fresh blood to fuel the neural activity that it foresees. The exact mechanism still needs to be discovered.
For now, the study has an immediate and serious impact on the way that neuroscientists interpret the results of fMRI scans. It’s a technique that is already facing a fair amount of controversy, from its technical limitations, to the way its results are analysed, to its popular facade as a mind-reading technology. These new results will surely only inflame the debate further.
Interpretations of fMRI experiments hinge on the idea that haemodynamic signals can predict the activity of neurons in specific parts of the brain. This new study shows that this is true to an extent. But it also reveals the existence of another group of signals that is just as strong and has absolutely nothing to do with local neurons.
Recent reports have suggested that the link between blood flow and neural activity is far from straightforward, but even allowing for that Sirontin and Das’s results are something else. They’re sure to cause a hefty amount of neural activity in the brains of the world’s neuroscientists.
On a tangential and amusing note: The authors made me chuckle. When I googled Sirontin, the fourth link is this amusing video. And the paper makes it seem that Das is a member of every research department at Columbia (and some outside of it).
Reference: Yevgeniy B. Sirotin, Aniruddha Das (2009). Anticipatory haemodynamic signals in sensory cortex not predicted by local neuronal activity Nature, 457 (7228), 475-479 DOI: 10.1038/nature07664
More fMRI studies:
- Computer predicts brain activity associated with different objects
- The machine that identifies images from brain activity alone
- Why do people overbid in auctions?
- Unconscious brain activity shapes our decisions
- ‘Talking face’ simulations in the brain help us work out what’s being said |
NCERT Solutions for Class 10 Sanskrit – Shemushi Part 2, question, and answers, Sanskrit Hindi translation of lessons for CBSE 2023-24. As per the new rationalised textbooks published by NCERT, there are only 10 chapters in class 10 syllabus for academic session 2023-24.
Chapter 1. Shuchiparyavaranam
Chapter 2. Buddhibalavatee Sada
Chapter 3. Shishulaanaam
Chapter 4. Jananee Tulayavatsala
Chapter 5. Subhaashitaani
Chapter 6. Sauhaardam Praakrteh Shobha
Chapter 7. Vichitrah Saakshee
Chapter 8. Sooktah
Chapter 9. Bhookampvibhishika
Chapter 10. Anyoktah
Class 10 Sanskrit NCERT Solutions
The translation of the text from Sanskrit to Hindi was made in a simple and accessible language. If 10th grade students want to make Sanskrit their profession, then carefully read all three 10th grade books on Sanskrit. All NCERT solutions are available for free at Tiwari Academy and no login or password is required to access them.
Solutions in Sanskrit for Class 10 and translation of the lesson into Hindi
The NCERT Class 10 exam is generally held annually in April. To prepare for the Sanskrit exam, students can get the CBSE Class 10 textbook Shemushi question answers for Session 2023-24 for free. Tiwari Academy’s website and app contains grade 10 Sanskrit solutions, detailed information about it, and makes it easy to complete practice tasks and prepare for exams. NCERT Sanskrit Chapter wise Solutions Class 10 Sanskrit helps students to prepare exam questions and get used to the Sanskrit language. Here you can get the latest version of NCERT Sanskrit textbook Solutions for class 10 free of cost.
Sanskrit Grade 10 Solutions and answers to additional questions
Students can get answers to the Sanskrit lessons for class 10 here. To make it easier and more convenient for you, NCERT Class 10 Sanskrit Solutions are available in both online and offline formats. With Sanskrit Solutions, students can easily complete their homework and prepare for their annual exams. The online Sanskrit framework for grade 10 is presented here in chapter form so that every student can easily access it. Translations of all lessons have also been provided in Hindi so that with these translations the student can understand each sentence well.
NCERT Sanskrit Class 10 Solutions for CBSE and other State Councils.
Sanskrit Solutions Class 10 is suitable for reading CBSE, UP Board and other state boards. If you have any questions regarding UP Board Book Class 10th Sanskrit Solution PDF, please let us know and we will get back to you as soon as possible. A simple solution for the 10th Sanskrit Shemushi was designed and modified by our expert in the field. Students can also get help here for Hindi translation and word meanings of all the lessons mentioned in it. Here we provide in detail all 10 chapters of answers to NCERT Class 10 Sanskrit questions and other questions. You can also get NCERT Sanskrit Class 10 books here.
NCERT Solutions for CBSE Class 10 Sanskrit Exam
This is an excellent resource for students studying for the NCERT Sanskrit Grade 10 exam. In this NCERT Sanskrit Grade 10 Book Part 2, all Sanskrit chapters are provided with a Hindi translation. We recommend checking out the Tiwari Academy NCERT Sanskrit Class 10 Solutions for great learning material. Practicing these study materials will help you a lot not only in your school exams but also in your board exams. All NCERT Sanskrit Grade 10 chapters presented here are based on the latest syllabus and guidelines of the Central Board of Secondary Education – CBSE.
How to Score good 100% marks in Class 10 Sanskrit
In Class 10 Sanskrit NCERT textbook, there are total 10 chapters. Earlier there were 12 chapters but now two of its chapters deleted from syllabus. So, only 10 chapters are there in course for 2023-24 exams. First of all, read the chapter, knowing the meaning in Hindi of each word or sentence. Class 10th has its significant importance in student’s life in the India Education system. If you are among one of the top tear students aiming to score 100% in Sanskrit. Follow the steps here, we are going to tell some of the best suggestions to prepare class Sanskrit language efficiently.
- Step 1: Read the chapter with word meaning and Hindi translation.
- Step 2: Focus on Class 10 Sanskrit Grammar and Workbook.
- Step 3: Use Sanskrit in daily life Conversation.
- Step 4: Learn with Self-Testing and Writing.
- Step 5: Do regular practice and work hard to achieve goal.
Step 1: Read the chapter with word meaning and Hindi translation.
Step 2: Focus on Class 10 Sanskrit Grammar and Workbook.
Step 3: Use Sanskrit in daily life Conversation.
Step 4: Learn with Self-Testing and Writing.
Step 5: Do regular practice and work hard to achieve goal.
How useful are NCERT Class 10 Sanskrit Solutions in the exam?
With Sanskrit NCERT Solutions Class 10 precision, it is suitable for all learners to learn. In real life, even though Sanskrit, information can be transmitted faster without compromising quality. The terminology is also the source of Sanskrit for various modern languages. With this in mind, the education system has made Sanskrit a subject in the curriculum that students should take seriously. With NCERT Class 10 Sanskrit Solutions, students can easily understand all the lessons.
How to get high marks in the 10th standard Sanskrit Board exam?
To get good grades in Sanskrit, it is very important to understand the deep meaning of the questions and practice regularly. NCERT Solutions for Class 10 Sanskrit is a guide to help you prepare for your exam and get high marks. Chapters are explained in such a way that students can quickly understand the answers to all questions. Most of the Sanskrit questions in the exam are often taken directly from the NCERT Sanskrit textbook, so when preparing for the exam, you need to enlist the help of these solutions and easily get the highest marks.
How easy is it to learn NCERT Sanskrit in 10th grade?
Each student should make sure that studying Sanskrit as a major subject in the 10th grade should not be a burden, but should give him comfort and pleasure. You can also find the Hindi translation of each lesson, along with solutions for all chapters, in the NCERT Book Class 10 Solutions. Our subject matter experts have done extensive research to provide these NCERT Book Class 10 Sanskrit Shemushi Part 2 Solutions. You can download NCERT Sanskrit Class 10 PDF Solutions chapter by chapter from the available links. For maximum marks and a deeper understanding of the subject, carefully practice Shemushi Sanskrit Part 2 of the NCERT Book Solution Questions. |
Curiosity about the world around us often leads to a fascination with the wonders of the animal kingdom. While we know that animals exhibit various behaviors and thought processes, have you ever wondered whether they dream like humans do? Venturing into the realm of animal consciousness, science has uncovered intriguing patterns and neural processes behind animals’ slumber. From mammals to reptiles, dreams experienced by different species reveal a fascinating parallel with our own nighttime adventures.
Animal Consciousness & Dreams
One fascinating aspect of animal consciousness is the ability to dream, which has been observed and studied in various species. While not as well understood as human dreaming, research has begun to reveal some interesting similarities and differences between the dream patterns of animals and humans.
For instance, studies involving dogs have shown that they exhibit similar brain wave patterns during sleep as humans doing the same thing. Meanwhile, evidence suggests that cats dream too, and often about their hunting instincts as they re-enact their predatory behaviors during sleep.
In a remarkable study conducted on rodents, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology monitored the brain activity of rats as they navigated a maze. They discovered that when the rats slept, their brain activity mirrored the same patterns observed while they were awake and navigating the maze. This finding suggests that rats not only dream but, much like humans, use their dreams to replay and consolidate their experiences, thus reinforcing memory.
Birds too have been found to exhibit dream patterns in their sleep. Zebra finches, for example, are known to practice their songs during sleep, with their brain activity mimicking the same patterns that occur while they sing during their waking hours. This suggests that these songbirds utilize sleep and dreaming for learning and solidifying their singing skills. Similarly, studies on the sleep patterns of reptiles, such as the bearded dragon, have revealed the presence of REM (Rapid Eye Movement) and Non-REM sleep stages, suggesting the possibility of dream experiences in these creatures.
Marine mammals, such as whales and dolphins, present a unique case for animal dreaming. Since they must rise to the surface for air periodically, these mammals sleep by keeping only one half of their brain awake at a time. This is called unihemispheric sleep, and while it enables them to continue breathing and remain alert to potential threats, it raises questions about their capacity to experience dreams the way other animals and humans do.
Exploring the nature of dreaming and consciousness in animals is an intriguing subject that continues to captivate researchers worldwide. Our current understanding of various species’ potential dream experiences offers a glimpse into this fascinating realm, yet there is still much to be discovered. Central to these studies is the question of what purpose, if any, these dreams might serve in the lives of animals and how they relate to our understanding of the diverse array of consciousness found across the animal kingdom.
Neuroscience of Animal Dreams
When researching animal dreams, scientists have observed both similarities and differences in the brain structures and processes involved in dreaming compared to humans. In both cases, the key brain regions involved in dreaming include the thalamus, hippocampus, and amygdala. These structures play essential roles in dreaming by regulating emotions, consolidating memories, and transmitting sensory information. Although the exact function and purpose of dreaming in animals remain subjects of ongoing research, it is believed that, much like humans, animals may dream as a means of processing and storing daily experiences.
One aspect of studying animal dreams is understanding the various stages of sleep that animals experience and how these stages compare to human sleep. Most animals, like humans, undergo two primary sleep stages: rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep. During NREM sleep, the body is in a state of rest and regeneration, while the mind is less active. In contrast, REM sleep is characterized by heightened brain activity, similar to what is observed during wakefulness. This stage of sleep is typically when dreaming occurs in both humans and animals, as the brain processes information and consolidates memories from the day’s events.
The analysis of animal dreams also includes the examination of sleep patterns and the frequency of REM and NREM sleep in various animal species. While the duration, and alternation of REM and NREM sleep vary significantly across different species, some patterns have been observed. For instance, predators often have longer REM sleep durations than prey animals, possibly to consolidate their learning of hunting strategies and navigation skills. Moreover, animals with a higher degree of encephalization, such as primates and dolphins, tend to have more complex and vivid dreaming experiences due to their advanced cognitive abilities.
Research on animal dreams has also uncovered surprising findings that showcase the versatility of sleep in the animal kingdom. Studies have found that some birds and aquatic mammals show the ability to engage in unihemispheric sleep, a unique pattern where one hemisphere of the brain remains awake while the other is in REM sleep. This adaptation allows these animals to continue monitoring their environment for potential threats or navigate while still getting the benefits of sleep and dreaming.
The neuroscience of animal dreams is a captivating field of study that offers valuable insights into the shared neurobiological processes behind sleep and dreaming across various species. Investigating this area helps us comprehend the role of dreams in animal behavior and cognitive functions, shedding light on the evolutionary history of dreaming in all living organisms, including humans. By delving into the dreaming experiences of animals, we pave the way to a better understanding of consciousness and the mind’s exceptional abilities during sleep.
Function and Purpose of Animal Dreams
A vital function of dreaming shared among animals and humans is memory consolidation. Animals, like humans, undergo various activities and sensations throughout the day, and dreaming enables their brains to sift through these experiences, categorize, and store memories. As a result, animals learn and adapt to their surroundings. Notably, researchers have detected significant hippocampal activation during animal dreams, a region of the brain closely associated with memory consolidation. For instance, studies on rats navigating mazes during daytime observed that these animals tend to retrace their maze routes in their dreams, indicating that this process assists in solidifying their experiences into long-term memories.
Another important function of animal dreams is problem-solving. Dreaming may allow an animal to simulate different scenarios and potential outcomes related to their daily challenges or survival needs. For instance, dreaming about various ways to escape predators, or how to efficiently forage food, may enhance an animal’s cognitive flexibility and decision-making in the waking state. This could give the animal an adaptive edge, helping it survive and thrive in its unique ecological niche. In a sense, dreaming might grant animals a “safe space” to test and refine their strategies without the physical risks involved in real-life situations.Emotional processing and regulation could also be significant purposes of animal dreams in some species. Animals, like humans, experience various emotions, including fear, anger, happiness, and even grief. Dreaming might allow animals to modulate these emotions, thereby promoting psychological well-being. Similar to humans, animals also experience REM sleep, during which time they exhibit increased brain activity and more vivid dreams. This dream state might enable them to process emotionally charged experiences and recover from traumatic events. In this way, dreaming could facilitate an animal’s emotional resilience in the face of adversity.In addition to serving internal cognitive and emotional functions, animal dreams might also play an essential role in social bonding and communication. Certain social animals, such as primates, dolphins, and elephants, may use dreams as a way to rehearse and strengthen their bonds with other members of their social group. This could foster a more cohesive and cooperative social structure, benefiting the survival and reproductive success of the entire group. Future research might shed light on the intricate connections between an animal’s social life and its dream content, offering valuable insights into the evolutionary significance of dreaming.Finally, predator avoidance strategies might play an essential role in animal dreams. By simulating encounters with predators and practicing escape routes during their dreams, animals can potentially be better prepared to face real-life threats. This could be especially crucial for prey species, where a successful evasion from a dangerous encounter could mean the difference between life and death. By allowing animals to rehearse these critical survival skills during their dreams, they may be more equipped to respond swiftly and effectively in waking situations, increasing their chances of survival and overall fitness in their environment.
Types of Dreams in Different Animals
Various mammals experience a wide range of dreams varying in content and complexity. For instance, dogs are believed to dream about their day-to-day activities, such as playing and chasing, as well as emotionally-charged experiences like bonding with their owners. Some research even indicates that dogs can experience nightmares, exhibiting fearful responses during sleep. Similarly, cats are thought to dream about their daily lives, with hunting, playing, and grooming as common themes. In addition, marine mammals like dolphins are believed to enter into a state of unihemispheric sleep, wherein only one half of their brain sleeps at a time. This unique sleeping pattern affords them the ability to maintain basic functions such as swimming and surfacing for air, while potentially experiencing dreams simultaneously.
Birds, like mammals, also exhibit signs of dreaming. Research has shown that certain bird species, especially songbirds and parrots, engage in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which is associated with dreaming in humans. During this stage of sleep, birds experience bursts of brain activity that mimic the patterns observed when they are awake and singing. These findings suggest that birds are replaying their learned songs and possibly honing their vocal skills while they dream.
Reptiles and amphibians also appear to experience some form of dreaming. Anecdotal evidence and scientific research indicate that certain reptiles, such as lizards and snakes, can enter into REM sleep, where muscle paralysis and rapid eye movement can be observed. Although the exact content and purpose of dreams in these animals remain unclear, it is thought that they could involve replaying events from their waking lives, such as hunting prey or exploring their environment.
Even more fascinating are the dreams of octopuses, which are known to undergo dramatic color changes during their sleep. Researchers believe these color shifts may be indicative of dreaming, as they resemble the patterns displayed when an octopus is awake and reacting to its environment. This could imply that octopuses revisit their daily experiences, such as hunting for food or escaping predators, while they sleep.
Historically, humans have been fascinated by the concept of dreaming and the possibility of animals experiencing dreams as well. In various cultures, such as Australian Aboriginals, Native American tribes, and ancient Egyptians, animal dreams have played significant roles in mythology, folklore, and spiritual beliefs. These cultures held the belief that animals possess the power of dreaming and may reveal valuable lessons about life through this shared experience.
Human Interpretations of Animal Dreams
In recent times, scientists have begun to study dreams in animals, including insects and invertebrates. Research has suggested that honeybees may be capable of dreaming due to the neural activation patterns they exhibit, similar to those found during REM sleep in mammals. The possible themes of these dreams are yet to be determined, but they could involve navigation and foraging for food. As more studies are conducted, we continue to broaden our understanding of the complex and fascinating world of animal dreams, offering unique and intriguing insights into the lives and experiences of various species.
Another crucial aspect of human interpretations of animal dreams includes storytelling and fables. Many cultures use animals as central characters in their tales and impart essential moral lessons through these stories. For instance, Aesop’s Fables, a collection of tales dating back to ancient Greece, uses various animals as allegorical tools to teach children (and adults) moral lessons. These stories often involve animals having encounters or experiences that mimic human-like attributes, including dreams, thoughts, and emotions. Many Indigenous cultures have also passed down stories and legends featuring animals that held significant value in their communities, reflecting the understanding that animals are complex beings with their own emotional and mental lives.
In more recent history, the scientific study of animal dreams has gained momentum. Early research on this subject began with Pavlov, who first noticed the similarities of rapid eye movements and muscle twitches in sleeping dogs. Modern researchers have since studied various animals like rodents, monkeys, and even birds, to explore the occurrence and nature of dreaming in nonhuman species. Scientists have found that animals do indeed dream and that the main difference between human and animal dreams is the content. While humans dream about abstract concepts, animals dream about their day-to-day experiences, such as searching for food, playing, or interacting with other animals.
While the scientific study of animal dreams provides valuable insights into their mental and emotional lives, ethical debates have emerged about how these studies should be conducted. Some researchers argue that animal dreams should not be interrupted, as this might cause undue stress to the subjects. Others express concerns about invasive techniques such as monitoring brain activity during sleep that may involve implanting electrodes or exposing animals to unnatural conditions to study their dreams.
Overall, the human fascination with animal dreams has only grown over time, as people continue to explore these complex experiences through cultural myths, stories, and scientific research. As our understanding of animal dreams expands, we must also consider the ethical implications of such studies to ensure we treat these nonhuman dreamers with the respect and consideration they deserve. The interplay between human interpretations of animal dreams and the study of their neurological and behavioral implications highlights the complexity of the animal dreaming experience and its potential significance in the broader context of understanding the minds of all sentient beings.
Ultimately, the study of animal dreams provides a captivating glimpse into the complexity of the minds that inhabit our world. As we strive to gain a deeper understanding of these fascinating creatures, our interpretations of their dreams inspire curiosity and ethical reflection. As we uncover connections and similar patterns, we are reminded of the importance of our connection with nature and our responsibility to preserve the ecosystems that support the diverse array of dreams and lives. |
Rice is a grass seed that grows in moist areas. It is the most important crop for human nutrition in the world, rice being the staple food for much of the world, Africa, India, and Asia.
Rice was probably first cultivated in Burma over 7,000 years ago. There are now more than 40,000 varieties of rice and it is grown on every continent except Antarctica. In many cultures, the word for “rice” is synonymous with their word for food or a meal.
Rice is a member of the grass family that grows six feet or more in height. For most species, you want to plant your rice in a damp, poorly drained spot that gets full sun during the warmest months of the year. Look for a spot in full sun where standing water remains for several days after a rain. If there’s no spot like that available to you, build a raised bed with a layer of clay in the bottom. Mix your garden soil with lots of organic matter.
Your rice will need 180 days of warm weather to mature with at least 40 continuous 70 degrees Fahrenheit days with nights no cooler than 60 degrees.
It will take about 1.5 ounces of seed to plant a 100 square foot area. Soak the seeds for 24 hours before planting them. If your growing season is short you can start your seeds indoors and transplant them outside. Seeds need constant temperatures of 75 degrees to sprout. Wait until your seedlings are at least 6 inches tall before transplanting them. Give the bed a good soaking so that it’s good and muddy before tucking your seedlings into it.
Plant your rice in rows and make sure you keep the area weed-free. Keep the soil moist. You do not need to keep it flooded but it should be good and wet. You may wish to put down a thick layer of mulch once your rice gets going to keep the soil moist and discourage weeds.
You can also grow rice in buckets on a sunny enclosed porch.
Harvesting & Storage
In three or four months the rice heads will be tall and full of grains. When they begin to “nod” reduce the amount of water you give your rice so that it can start to ripen. In about two weeks, the heads will start to turn the golden color of ripe grain. Cut these off and put them in the oven at 180 degrees Fahrenheit for about an hour and then let them cool. Once they’ve cooled rub the heads to release the grains from the hulls. Separate the grains from the loose bits of hull and you are ready to cook your rice!
Dry rice grains should be stored in a cool, dry place, preferably in glass jars to prevent insect infestation.
Rice can be used in spells for blessing, money, prosperity, fertility, protection, rain, wealth, security and to find treasure.
For money and wealth spells, rice is often dyed green or gold or mixed with gold glitter.
For fertility, red rice may be used.
Rice naturally occurs in a variety of colors that you can work into your spells.
An old superstition claims that certain evil spirits are obsessive counters and a container of grain near the door will cause any that try to enter the house to be distracted so much by counting the individual grains that they will forget to enter. Try keeping a jar of rice near your door to distract evil spirits while bringing blessings of prosperity to your home!
The tradition of throwing rice at newly married couples is meant to impart blessings of fertility, abundance and prosperity and it is the first food a new bride in India will offer her husband.
White rice is very easily digested and gentle on the stomach. It is good for people who are having trouble keeping their food down, especially if it is sweetened and seasoned with a little cinnamon or ginger.
There are many types of rice and cooking times vary with each. Rice should be rinsed before cooking to remove any dust or chemicals from processing and packaging. Then it should be soaked for a half-hour to release the life energy within. Rice is then boiled or steamed to its desired tenderness or stickiness.
Rice is good in soups or as a base for many meals. It is wonderful topped with meat or vegetable-based sauce or mixed with a variety of meats, vegetables or legumes. It also makes a lovely sweet porridge that is used as offerings to nature and agricultural spirits in parts of Asia. Rice pudding is a treat enjoyed all over the world.
Rice can be ground into flour and used to make all manner of baked goods.
Types of Rice
Long Grain Rice- The grains of this rice remain firm and separate when they are cooked. This is the most expensive to grow and process.
Short Grain Rice – This rice is the most popular in the US as it grows better here than the other types. It has a shorter growing season and is inexpensive to process.
Short Grain Rice- This rice sticks together when cooked and is used for sushi and rice balls. It is very popular in Japan, Korea and Taiwan.
Rice straw can be twisted into rope or used for weaving mats.
Rice hulls can be used to make paper. |
| Copernicia (koh-pehr-nee-SEE-ah) |
Mongomery Botanical Centre, Florida. Photo by Dr. John Dransfield, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew/Palmweb.
Habitat and DistributionCopernicia baileyana is native to dry savannahs and woodland areas, of
A solitary palm, 10 to 20 metres tall, with stems 40 (to 60) centimetres in diameter, and are sometimes swollen. The fruit is black, 1.8 to 2.3 centimetres long, and 1.8 to 2 cm in diameter. Solitary, large, fan-leafed palm, stiff, deeply segmented leaves. Whitish smooth trunk to 2 feet thick, and leaves bright green. Overall height to 45 feet with up to 20 foot spread. These fans are glossy, or almost wax like. Editing by edric.
In its native range Copernicia baileyana, grows in poor soil and under dry conditions. Prefers alkaline to neutral soils. Growth rate slow to moderate. Can tolerate cold snaps into high 20s. Some salt tolerance. Can tolerate short term flooding. Normally considered a slow grower, it responds exceptionally well to fertilization and moist well drained soil. Light: Likes bright, sunny conditions but will tolerate partial shade. Bailey palm does best in full sun. Moisture: Bailey palm is highly tolerant of drought, but thrives in moist soil with good drainage. Hardiness: USDA Zones 9B - 10. Adult Bailey palms are considered cold hardy down to about 24-26ºF (-3.3 - -4.4ºC), but foliage damage may occur at these temperatures. Propagation: By seeds which germinate in from 4 to 12 weeks.
Comments and Curiosities
Uses: The leaves are used for weaving hats, baskets, and other items. They are also used for thatch.
A truly magnificent and stunning palm from central and eastern Cuba, where it grows in savanna and dry woodland at low elevations. It forms a very thick and sturdy, smooth, slightly ventricose, whitish gray trunk that can reach about 20 m (67 ft.) tall. It supports a dense crown of numerous very rigid, stiffly ascending leaves with a perfectly circular outline. It is best suited for the tropics or warm subtropics. Seeds are reasonably easy to germinate but young plants are slow growing and take many years to start forming a trunk. (RPS.com)
- Glossary of Palm Terms
- MODERN BOTANICAL LATIN
- "Just To Be Clear"
Phonetic spelling of Latin names by edric.
Special thanks to Geoff Stein, (Palmbob) for his hundreds of photos.
Special thanks to Palmweb.org, Dr. John Dransfield, Dr. Bill Baker & team, for their volumes of information and photos.
Glossary of Palm Terms; Based on the glossary in Dransfield, J., N.W. Uhl, C.B. Asmussen-Lange, W.J. Baker, M.M. Harley & C.E. Lewis. 2008. Genera Palmarum - Evolution and Classification of the Palms. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. All images copyright of the artists and photographers (see images for credits).
Many Special Thanks to Ed Vaile for his long hours of tireless editing and numerous contributions. |
A horse's hocks are put under
a lot of strain
Definition: Bone spavin is the development of arthritic or degenerative changes - creating bony growth - within the three relatively immobile lower joints of a horse's hock.
It is a common cause of lameness in the hind leg of a horse - although usually worse in one hind leg, both are normally affected.
A Bone spavin has a gradual onset and can affect any type of horse or pony during its adult life.
Its incidence seems to bear little relation to the amount or type of work that a horse or pony does.
The three joints in the horse's hock that are affected are the articulation of the cannon bone with the hock joint and with the bones within the lower part of the hock joint itself.
The type of changes that can occur are cartilage degeneration, bone destruction and changes within the joint capsules around the bones of these equine joints.
The degree to which these changes occur varies dramatically from horse to horse. Some will have large destructive lesions that affect all three lower joints of the hock, whilst others have small spurs of bone that form along the joint edges.
The rate of progression of these changes can also vary.
Some horses will suffer rapid degeneration in their joints whilst in others the condition will remain static after the initial onset of arthritic changes are detected.
X-Rays usually reveal the type of bone spavin that a horse is suffering from, and an equine veterinary surgeon will be able to advise on the prognosis for a particular horse
Changes to the lower hock joint caused by bone spavins are mostly irreversible. But it is possible to manage the condition and slow the progression of the disease, give pain relief, and as a result control the lameness.
The common veterinary treatment involves allowing the horse to carry on working under the influence of equine anti-inflammatory pain killing drugs such as phenylbutazone (bute) - provided that the pain relief drugs are effective and the horse is not in pain or lame.
The horse's workload may have to be reduced for this method to succeed, and the horse or pony may not be able to continue in his chosen career - but most horses respond very well to this treatment of bone spavin and can certainly become sound enough to enjoy rides out across the countryside.
Another method of treatment involves the intra-articular injection of corticosteroids or hyaluronic acid into the affected joints.
Another options are usually surgical -involving fusion of the affected joints - this is known as surgical arthrodesis - which aims to stabilise and as a result remove inflammation and pain form the joints. This involves drilling out the joint surfaces to destroy the cartilage that covers them which stimulates the underlying bone to fuse together as one solid area of bone.
A good farrier can greatly assist the management and care of a horse suffering with bone spavin.
Shoes that are most useful for horses with bone spavins include shoes that help breakover - with a rolled or square toe, or with wedge pads. Some farriers will use horseshoes with heel support - for example egg bar shoes.
Bone Spavin lameness in the Horse's Hock - causes, definition, remedies and treatment |
- The nature of the two countries' relationships with China. Nicaragua has a long history of close ties with China, dating back to the Cold War era. India, on the other hand, has had a more complex relationship with China, marked by both cooperation and competition.
- The economic and strategic importance of the two countries to China. Nicaragua is a relatively small and poor country, but it is located in a strategically important region, Central America. India, on the other hand, is a much larger and more economically powerful country, but it is also located further away from China.
- The creditworthiness of the two countries. India has a higher credit rating than Nicaragua, but it is still considered a developing country with a relatively high level of debt. Nicaragua, on the other hand, is considered a high-risk borrower.
Thursday, October 12, 2023
Nicaragua spent US$260 million to purchase 1,000 buses from China in order to improve urban traffic congestion. Surprisingly, however, this cooperation triggered dissatisfaction in India. #Nicaragua
Nicaragua is one of the largest countries in Central America, with magnificent natural scenery and rich natural resources. However, the economic and transportation environment like many other countries in Central America, Africa, and Asia has always been a challenge for the country.
Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, which is a political, cultural, and economic center, it faces serious traffic congestion problems every day. According to statistics, only about 30% of citizens can commute to get off work on time, and the remaining 70% suffer from traffic congestion. At the same time, there are only about 200 buses available for residents across the country, and most of them are school buses that have been phased out in the United States.
This was not long ago when Nicaragua spent US$260 million to purchase 1,000 buses from China in order to improve urban traffic congestion. Surprisingly, however, this cooperation triggered dissatisfaction in India. Previously, India had placed an order with the Chinese company BYD for 500 electric buses, but the cooperation failed due to India's credit problems. So, why does China choose to cooperate with Nicaragua but is unwilling to cooperate with India?
Whether China trusts Nicaragua more than India is a complex question with no easy answer but trade and business be it between two individuals, groups, or countries dictated by some fundamentals that no party would be able to avoid. There are a number of factors that could be considered, including the following:
It is important to note that there is no evidence to suggest that China trusts Nicaragua more than India simply because it has agreed to sell Nicaragua 1,000 buses. In fact, China has also sold a large number of buses to India in recent years.
It is also important to note that India's creditworthiness is not necessarily a major concern for China. China is already India's largest creditor, and it has continued to lend money to India even as India's debt levels have risen.
It is more likely that China's decision to sell buses to Nicaragua is motivated by a combination of strategic and economic factors. Nicaragua is a close ally of China, and it is located in a region of strategic importance. China is also eager to expand its economic footprint in Central America, and the sale of buses is a way to do that.
As for the question raised by the Insider Project about whether India's creditworthiness is not stable, by citing its deals both with France and the United Kingdom, there is some evidence to suggest that this may be the case. India's debt-to-GDP ratio has been rising in recent years, and its foreign exchange reserves have been declining. However, India's economy is still growing, and its government has taken steps to address its debt concerns.
Overall, it is difficult to say definitively whether China trusts Nicaragua more than India. There are a number of factors that could be considered, and China's decision to sell buses to Nicaragua is likely motivated by a combination of strategic and economic factors.
Campaign on behalf of Kashmir International Front (KIF) for the re-unification and independent of Kashmir. Keeping in view the multi nationality, multi ethnic and diverse aspiration/history, in terms of a democratic and federal solution. We, there fore propose The United States of Kashmir as it was before 14th August 1947. |
Organochlorine pesticides are a diverse group of synthetic chemicals that persist in the
environment and tend to bioaccumulate. Most of these chemicals have been banned
from use in the U.S. Assessment of exposure to persistent organochlorine
pesticides in a representative sample of the U.S. population is needed to
determine current prevalence and level of exposure and the potential for human
health effects from exposure to these chemicals.
Examined participants aged 12 years and older from a one-third subsample were eligible.
Description of Laboratory Methodology
Eight organochlorine pesticides and metabolites were measured in serum through the
use of automated liquid/liquid extraction and subsequent sample clean-up. Final
determination of target analytes was performed by isotope dilution gas
chromatography high-resolution mass spectrometry GC/IDHRMS. The analytical
method is described in Jones et al, 2012, which is a modification of the method
described by Sjodin et al., 2004 and Barr et al., 2003.
Refer to the Laboratory Methods Files section for a
detailed description of the laboratory methods used.
There were no changes to the lab method, lab equipment,
or lab site for this component in the NHANES 2007-2008 cycle. However, the samples were measured in a
pooled fashion for 2007-2008 rather than individual measurements.
Laboratory Method Files
PCBs and Persistent Pesticides
Laboratory Quality Assurance and Monitoring
Serum samples were processed, stored and shipped to the
Division of Laboratory Sciences, National Center for Environmental Health,
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA for analysis.
Detailed instructions on specimen collection and
processing are discussed in the NHANES Laboratory Procedure Manual (LPM).
Vials are stored under appropriate frozen (-30oC) conditions
until they were shipped to the National Center for Environmental Health for
The NHANES quality
assurance and quality control (QA/QC) protocols meet the 1988 Clinical
Laboratory Improvement Act mandates. Detailed QA/QC instructions are discussed
in the NHANES LPM.
Mobile Examination Centers (MECs)
Laboratory team performance is monitored using several
techniques. NCHS and contract consultants use a structured competency
assessment evaluation during visits to evaluate both the quality of the
laboratory work and the quality-control procedures. Each laboratory staff member
is observed for equipment operation, specimen collection and preparation;
testing procedures and constructive feedback are given to each staff member.
Formal retraining sessions are conducted annually to ensure that required skill
levels were maintained.
NHANES uses several methods to monitor the quality of the
analyses performed by the contract laboratories. In the MEC, these methods
include performing blind split samples collected during “dry run” sessions. In
addition, contract laboratories randomly perform repeat testing on 2% of all
NCHS developed and distributed a quality control protocol
for all CDC and contract laboratories, which outlined the use of Westgard rules
et al. 1981)
when running NHANES specimens. Progress reports containing any problems
encountered during shipping or receipt of specimens, summary statistics for
each control pool, QC graphs, instrument calibration, reagents, and any special
considerations are submitted to NCHS quarterly. The reports are reviewed for trends
or shifts in the data. The laboratories are required to explain any identified
areas of concern.
All QC procedures recommended by the manufacturers were
followed. Reported results for all assays meet the Division of Laboratory
Sciences’ quality control and quality assurance performance criteria for
accuracy and precision, similar to the Westgard rules (Caudill, et al. 2008).
Data Processing and Editing
The data were reviewed. Incomplete data or improbable
values were sent to the performing laboratory for confirmation.
Refer to the 2007-2008 Laboratory Data Overview
for general information on NHANES laboratory data.
Please refer to the NHANES Analytic Guidelines and the on-line NHANES Tutorial for details on the
use of sample weights and analytic issues.
pooled-sample weight created for this file released in July 2013 did not
accurately take into account the new sample design for this NHANES survey cycle
and it was not correctly stratified to the U.S. population total. This new file
contains the corrected sample weight (WTSMSMPA). The corrected sample weight
was created so that analyses using race and Hispanic origin would be comparable
to the three groups used in NHANES 2005-2006 (non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic
black and Mexican-American). Therefore, analyses of the data for ”Total
Hispanics” is not appropriate. No changes or corrections were made to the lab
analyte data in this new release. Any analyses of the data using the old public
use data file should be repeated using the corrected sample weight on this new
PBDEs and PBB-153
were measured in a one third subsample of persons 12 years and over, and
samples were pooled in groups of 8 samples per pool within 32 demographic
groups. The analysis of NHANES 2007-2008 pooled-sample data must be conducted
with the basic demographic variables provided in this data file. This
pooled-sample data file cannot be linked to other NHANES 2007-2008 data.
Because each sample person does not have an equal probability of
selection, sample weighting is needed to produce correct population estimates
of means, percentiles, and other descriptive statistics.
weights required to produce estimates from these data are included in this data
file. The analysis of pooled-samples from survey data is a relatively new
field of study, and there is currently no established method to produce
variance estimates for these pooled results. These data cannot be
analyzed using software designed for complex surveys because design features
are not available.
Methods used to Create Pooled Results
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provides an ongoing assessment
of the US population's exposure to environmental chemicals by using
biomonitoring in conjunction with CDC's National Health and Nutrition
Examination Survey (NHANES). Characterizing the distributions of concentrations
of environmental compounds or their metabolites in the US population is a
primary objective of CDC's biomonitoring program. Historically, this
characterization has been based on individual measurements of these compounds
in body fluid or tissue from representative samples of the population. Pooling
samples allows for larger sample volumes, which can result in lower limits of
detection and reduces the number of measurements and costs. In NHANES 2007-2008,
a weighted pooled-sample design was implemented to facilitate pooling samples
before making analytical measurements. Table 1 lists the IUPAC
(International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) names, common
abbreviation, and NHANES variable name for the analytes included in this
prepared from serum collected from a random one-third subset of the NHANES
2007–2008 participants aged 12 years and older. Samples were pooled based on
gender, race and Hispanic origin, and age. To implement the pooled-sample
design, each participant sample was identified as belonging to one of 32
demographic groups based on race and Hispanic origin (non-Hispanic white: NHW,
non-Hispanic black: NHB, Mexican American: MA,: not non-Hispanic black,
non-Hispanic white or Mexican-American: OTHER), gender (Male, Female), and age
group (12-19, 20-39, 40-59, and 60+ years of age and older The number of pools
created for each of the 32 demographic groups varied depending on the total
number of individual samples available in a demographic group. The one-third
subset of NHANES 2007-2008 represents 2282 individual samples, but because the
pooled-sample design requires that all samples be of sufficient volume and that
there be the same number of samples in each pool, only 2070 samples were
available to create 264 pools with 8 samples per pool. See more details on pool sample formation and
exceptions in Table 2. The variable SAMPLEID denotes the identification number for each pool and ranges from 1 through 260. Please refer to the
Pooled-Sample Technical Support file (POOLTF_E) for detailed information on
individual participants included in each pool.
In order to
incorporate sample weighting into the pooled-sample design it was necessary to
use a different volume of material from each sample contributing to a pool. The
volume chosen for each sample in a pool was based on the ratio of its sampling
weight to the sum of the sampling weights of all samples in the pool. To
physically accomplish the pooling in the laboratory required that the ratio of
the largest to the smallest sampling weight of samples in the same pool be no
larger than about 4 or 5. The individual samples were sorted/stratified by
sampling weight within each of the 32 demographic groups and pools were formed
using samples with sampling weights adjacent to one another in the sorted list.
The number of samples in the one-third subset, number of samples available, the
number of these samples that were usable, and the number of pools formed in
each demographic group are presented in Table 2. Once the pools were created,
summed sampling weights were further adjusted to account for the unused
samples. These adjusted summed sampling weights are represented by the variable
In the dataset,
the whole weight detection limit (ng/g serum) is a variable and dependent on
the available sample size, however, the variation in sample size was low. Three
variables are provided for each of these analytes. The variable name ending in “LC” (ex.,
LBDBHCLC) indicates whether the result was below the limit of detection: the
value “0” means that the result was at or above the limit of detection, “1”
indicates that the result was below the limit of detection. The variable ending in “LA” (ex., LBCBHCLA)
is the lipid adjusted detection limits in ng/g lipid, because the
lipid levels are measured in individual pools/specimens. The third variable prefixed LBC (ex., LBCBHC)
provides the analytic result for that analyte.
analytes with analytic results below the lower limit of detection (ex., LBDBHCLC= 1), an imputed fill
value was placed in the analyte results field. This value is the lower limit of
detection divided by the square root of 2 (LLOD/sqrt). The lower limit of
detection (LLOD in ng/g serum and ng/g lipid) for PST:
Table 1. NHANES Variable
name, common abbreviation and International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry
(IUPAC) name for each analyte reported. Maximum limit of detection (MLOD) expressed
as ng/serum and ng/g lipid).
||Max LOD (ng/g serum)
||Max LOD (ng/g lipid)
Table 2. Number of subjects per demographic group in the
NHANES 2007–2008 one-third subsample, number of individual serum samples
available, number of usable samples, and number of pools formed from usable
Methodological issues for analysis
There are a few pooled-sample methodological publications which address issues related to the following topics (See References.)
- Variance estimation and bias correction when pooling samples from log-normally distributed populations (Caudill, 2010a; Caudill, 2010b; Caudill et al., 2007);
- Models that incorporate measurement error when analyzing pooled-samples from normally or log-normally distributed populations (Caudill, 2010a);
- Incorporation of sample weighting into a pooled-sample design (Caudill, 2012; Caudill, 2010a);
- Estimation of standard errors and confidence limits for point estimates from pooled-samples (Caudill, 2012; Caudill, 2010a). |
HCG, human chronic gonadotropin, is a hormone found in the early stages of pregnancy. The hormone appears in large doses in the first three months of pregnancy. HCG helps the production of estrogen, progesterone, and other important hormones. Another use for HCG is to help increase fertility.
A British doctor named Albert Simmions started HCG as a weight loss treatment in 1954. He came up with the idea to use HCG as a weight loss supplement after watching malnourished women give birth to healthy babies. He theorized it was because of the HCG. It allowed the baby access to the stored fat in the women’s body. Dr. Simmions later wrote a book about his findings titled ” Pounds And Inches: A New Approach To Obesity.”
How HCG Helps You Lose Weight
HCG helps the body metabolize the stored fat. Subcutaneous fat stores in the body to be used only when you really need it . Subcutaneous fat accounts for around 90 percent of the fat in the body. HCG sends a message to the brain telling the body to use this type of fat. View website with hcg diet drops reviews.
The HCG Diet Process
A person consumes HCG as HCG drops, injections or tablets. HCG drops or pills are taken daily. Injects are taken every other week. Along with taking the HCG drops the person also follows a special diet. The diet starts with a loading phase where the person starts taking the HCG. For the next two days, they eat high fat and high-calorie foods. The next phase is called the weight loss phase. In this phase, the person starts a strict 500 calorie diet. During this phase, many people only eat two meals a day. The last phase is called the maintenance phase. In this phase, the person stops taking HCG. They increase their calories but avoid sugar or starchy foods for the next three weeks. The phases repeat as necessary.
During each meal, the person should eat lean protein, a fruit, vegetable, and a slice of bread. It is encouraged to drink plenty of water, but coffee and tea are allowed. Foods to avoid include sugars, oils, and butter.
Exercise is not needed when taking the HCG diet. The body is only given 500 calories a day. It takes time to break down the stored fat into energy. There is not enough energy to maintain the body during a strenuous workout. The energy used in working out will cause the body to become malnourished.
Side Effects Of HCG
Headaches are a side effect that many people feel when they first start taking HCG. One cause of headaches is dehydration. It is very important to drink a lot of water when taking this diet. Constipation is also normal when starting this diet since the person is switching to a low-fat way of eating. If constipation persists, the person can take magnesium citrate. Fatigue is also a common side effect. The person may need to take more HCG drops to burn more fat for energy. They can also take vitamin B12. |
Broug Ateliers: Islamic Geometric Design [ Learn : Lesson 1 ]
Learn how to design one of the most common geometric designs in Islamic art and architecture. All you need is a pencil, a piece of paper and a compass and a ruler.
Geometric Designs by kids (art project) – New Hope Academy
Geometric designs, drawn by the First Grade Friendship Club at New Hope Academy, a private school in Maryland.
Layered Graph Drawing – Donald Bren School of Information
The pattern used for this drawing can be generalized to show that, for any n, the graph K n can be drawn in at most ceiling(n/4) layers [Eppstein et al, JGAA 2000]. |
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SWOT analysis is a guideline to understanding the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats relevant to your school. It helps you see:
- Which areas need developing?
- Which areas are thriving?
- Which areas are stagnant?
- And which areas could ruin everything?
To understand your school’s competitive advantage and minimize instability, we’re going to teach you how to do a SWOT analysis of your school.
Strengths: What’s going right for the school
It’s easier to write down overall strengths, then narrow to the specifics. To prevent thought-block, consider if these strengths are relevant to your school.
- An abundance of co-curricular activities.
- Highly-trained teachers/professors.
- Strong funding/financial backing.
- High graduation percentages.
- Great location for families.
You need to know existing strengths to keep them as strengths. And plan how to enhance them to see more benefits.
Once you feel it’s complete, we move onto the “W” in SWOT analysis: weaknesses.
Weaknesses: What’s holding the school back
But weaknesses aren’t to be ashamed of. And to build a strong school and reduce impact, weaknesses must be acknowledged.
When we acknowledge weakness, we’re one step closer to creating a plan of attack. The plan will eliminate or reduce any impact the weakness may have on the school.
Here are a few weaknesses to consider for this SWOT analysis:
- Not enough co-curricular and sports activities.
- Lack of funding for specific sports/programs.
- Enhanced reports of cyberbullying.
- Not enough staff/faculty members.
- Staff unable to meet with parents.
- Lack of proper training for faculty.
- An overabundance of students.
- Poor internal communications.
- Poor testing scores.
- Bad reviews online.
How severe are your weaknesses?
Let’s use an example from the above list. Starting with “staff unable to meet with parents”.
To parents, this can have a big impact on their child’s grades. But for the school it’s a minor inconvenience. Especially compared to not having enough staff for every position in the school. Finding appropriate staffing is an issue requiring immediate attention.
There’s another good thing about weaknesses; it helps to create opportunities.
Opportunities: The positive changes for your school
SWOT analysis helps us to identify opportunities to benefit the school. And we also have the ability to create opportunity -— especially now that we’ve identified weaknesses.
Let’s look at how we can turn a weakness into an opportunity.
Weakness: Poor testing scores.
Opportunity: Introduce a new program designed to help students, after school or during their lunch period, to address previous test concerns.
This new program will assess students’ ability to understand the curriculum. Not only will the students receive the help they deserve, the school will be praised by students and parents alike.
Another weakness turned opportunity…
Weakness: Bad online reviews.
Opportunity: Respond to these reviews professionally, while also highlighting how the school plans to correct the issues presented in the reviews.
This shows the school is actively assessing problems and seeking out methods to correct said issues. It’s damage control. Without it, the reviews could get out of hand and fully tarnish the school’s reputation.
We’re creating opportunities out of weaknesses to limit their impact.
Other opportunities to include:
- Activate a volunteer committee for school related events.
- Seek out new investors and funding for programs.
- Cut or merge programs to move funding elsewhere.
- Ask students and parents for feedback.
- Highlight new program developments.
You also want to note which opportunities are coming up. Look at it this way:
- How can you use these opportunities to increase the school’s strengths (from the list you created?)
- How can you use these opportunities to decrease weaknesses?
- And where can we start creating opportunities?
Threats: Where weaknesses develop for your school
We acknowledge threats to create a plan. Because if we don’t understand the threat, it can’t be dealt with accordingly.
Let’s look at some threats:
- Poor planning of curriculum/activities.
- Too much internal communications.
- Lack of internal communications.
- New high school development.
- Plumbing complications.
- Parent complaints.
- Employee/work strikes.
- Lack of funding.
- Pulled funding.
Threats are to be on your radar at all times. If you can create a plan of action to address these threats, hop to it.
But if you can’t — such as the risk for strikes or labor disputes — being aware is a good first step. Because you can create a plan of response if these threats manifest into reality.
You do a SWOT analysis of your school because…
It highlights and expands strengths. It minimizes or even erases weaknesses. It allows the creation of opportunities. And it identifies threats to prevent blow ups.
It’s a framework to understand the present and future situation of your school. And all it takes to complete is time.
Image: Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock.com |
Normally plasma from the Sun either shoots off into space or loops back on the Sun’s surface. But the Solar Dynamics Observatory captured some plasma that couldn’t make up its mind. Here, darker, cooler plasma slid and shifted back and forth above the Sun’s surface for 30 hours on February 7-8, 2012. The view is shown in extreme ultraviolet light. As a backdrop, an active region just rotating into view shows bright plasma gyrating into streams — normally how the plasma behaves. SDO scientists say the darker particles are being pulled back and forth by competing magnetic forces, tracking along strands of magnetic field lines.
And by the way, tomorrow is SDO’s 2nd anniversary! It launched two years ago on February 11, 2010. Happy anniversary, SDO and thanks for all the great videos and data so far! We wish you many more! |
The circulatory system is critical to good health because it allows blood and lymph to transport oxygen and nutrients to and from cells in your body. This both nourishes and helps to fight disease. Your circulation also stabilises your body's temperature and pH.
Many vitamins and minerals in vegetables are critical for your circulatory system; they assist with the formation of blood vessels and are necessary for normal blood formation and clotting.
Remove leafy tops before storing—they pull moisture from the vegetable and impact shelf life. |
40% OF ALL THE FOOD THAT IS GROWN, HARVESTED AND PROCESSED IS WASTED.
It's a scary thought, but it's about more than the huge waste. When food scraps go to landfill they break down without oxygen, causing them to release methane into the atmosphere - a greenhouse gas 30x more potent than carbon dioxide. But don't fret! There's plenty of ways of making sure you waste as little food as possible. Even what we might consider 'scraps' are actually still packed with heaps of nutritious goodness and can be used for the base of entire meals! One of the best ways to do this is by turning your leftover food scraps or sad wilted greens into vegetable stock. Here's how to do it:
1. The first thing to do is collect all your scraps! Keep them in Tupperware container in the fridge or freezer so they don't rot or go mouldy.
Pretty much all vegetables can be used to make your stock! Wash and save the roots, stalks, leaves, ends, and peelings from vegetables such as leeks, scallions, garlic, fennel, chard, lettuce, potatoes, parsnips, green beans, squash, capsicums, eggplant, mushrooms, and asparagus. You can also throw in Corn cobs, winter squash skins, beet greens, and herbs like parsley and coriander.
On the other hand, vegetables like cabbage, kale, brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower and turnips can have a very overpowering taste so you might want to avoid putting them in your stock. We once used kale stems and it turned out somewhat bitter tasting. Plus, you can eat broccoli stems (like in a stirfry) so there's no need to throw them out in the first place!
If you really want to bulk out your stock, you can also use fresh vegetables such as chopped onion, carrot and celery. These three vegetables are usually used as the base for regular vegetable stocks.
Now to the cooking stage!
2. Put 1-2 litres of water in a pot on the stove and add your food scraps to the pot. There's no hard and fast rule here for water to food scrap ratio but I use about 2 litres of water for a 1 litre tub of food scraps.
3. Cover the pot and bring it to a boil, then partially uncover the lid and simmer for about 45 minutes.
4. Strain the liquid into a container or jar and let it cool down on the bench before refrigerating.
This is your stock! It can be a different colour depending on what veg you put in there. If there's any beetroot cuttings or red onion it might be a purpley colour. If there's heaps of greens there may be a more yellowy green tinge and if it's mainly roots potatoes and onion it will probably be more brown. They're all good so don't worry if the colour is a bit funky!
The stock can be used right away or stored in the fridge for 3-4 days in a sealed jar or container.
If you're not ready to use the stock soon, you can also pop it in a container in the freezer for 4 to 6 months!
Now, although this is a good way to make the most of the nutrients from your food scraps, there will still be leftover bits and pieces after the stock is made. The best thing you can do with these scraps is put them in a compost heap or worm farm. If you don't have access to one yourself you can jump online to find someone close to you who has a compost or even chickens! You may even know a friend or family member who can take the scraps with you.
Now all that's left to do is enjoy your delicious homemade veggie scrap stock! |
The concept of the kinetic chain regarding anatomy has been around since 1955 when Dr. Arthur Steindler adapted the theory of Franz Reuleaux, a mechanical engineer. Reuleaux proposed that a series of overlapping segments are connected via a pin joint, and these interlocking joints would create a system that allows movement of one joint to affect the movement of another joint within the kinetic link. Dr. Steindler contended that the human body could be viewed the same way, as a system of rigid, overlapping segments connected by a series of joints, collectively referred to as the kinetic chain. This idea proposed that movements occurring within each body segment would be capable of “closed-chain” or “open-chain” movement patterns.
Anatomically, the kinetic chain describes the interrelated groups of body segments, connecting joints, and muscles working together to perform movements and the portion of the spine to which they connect. The upper kinetic chain consists of the fingers, wrists, forearms, elbows, upper arms, shoulders, shoulder blades, and spinal column. The lower kinetic chain includes the toes, feet, ankles, lower legs, knees, upper legs, hips, pelvis, and spine. In both chains, each joint is independently capable of a variety of movements. Dependent on whether the distal end of the chain is fixed or free to move without restriction, each movement is classified as either closed or open.
A closed chain refers to a position where the most distal aspects of a given extremity are fixed to the earth or another solid object. This fixed position alters the movement of the joints and surrounding musculature up the chain. For example, if the feet are planted on the ground during a squat, the rest of the leg chain (i.e., ankles, knees, and hips) will move toward the fixed end of the extremity—the feet—as the body lowers into the squatting position. In contrast, an open chain refers to the distal end of an extremity moving freely in space—such as when performing a biceps curl with dumbbells or a seated leg extension on a weight machine—where the movement of the distal end of the extremity is not fixed.
Closed-chain movements promote joint stabilization and have the potential to recruit more muscles and their associated joints. Further, closed-chain movements are transferable to many daily movements that involve more than one joint, which may lead to better neuromuscular coordination and overall joint health. Thus, many closed-chain exercises are considered “functional” and used in programming for functional training purposes [i.e., purposeful exercise that trains movement—not isolated muscle groups—and intentionally incorporates balance and body awareness (proprioception)].
Open-chain movements, in contrast, involve more shearing forces at the involved joint compared to closed-chain movements and tend to recruit the musculature associated with only a single working joint in resistance training exercises like leg extensions and biceps curls.
Examples of closed-chain exercises include:
Notice that in each of the above exercises the distal end of the extremity is fixed, which results in the body moving about the fixed joint.
Examples of open-chain exercises include:
Notice that in each of the above exercises the distal end of the extremity is not fixed, and it moves about the body during the movement.
As an exercise and health professional, it is important to recognize that good program design includes exercises that provide the most bang for the buck. Single-joint, open-chain exercises do have their place, such as in programs that isolate and strengthen a particular area of the body for aesthetic reasons (e.g., focused hypertrophy in body building) or improved function, such as in rehabilitative or pre-habilitative protocols. However, multi-joint, closed-chain exercises that focus on movement patterns that are transferrable to activities of daily living, recreation, and sport-specific activities may ultimately provide the most value to your clients.
For additional information on this topic, see the ACE video, Muscle Actions and Open and Closed Kinetic Chain Movements.
American Council on Exercise. (2014). Personal Trainer Manual. (5th ed.,p. 350). San Diego, CA.
Boyle, Michael. (2004). Functional Training for Sports. (pp. 1-3). Champaign, Il., Human Kinetics.
Ellenbecker TS, Davies GJ. (2001). Closed Kinetic Chain Exercise: A Comprehensive Guide to Multiple Joint Exercise. Champaign, Il., Human Kinetics.
Hamill, J., Knutzen, K.M. (2003). Biomechanical Basis of Human Movement. (2nd ed., p. 91). Lippincott Williams & Wilkins Press.
Neumann, Donald A. (2010). Kinesiology of the Musculoskeletal System: Foundations for Rehabilitation. (2nd ed., pp. 6-7). Mosby Elsevier Publishing. |
The similarity in name between the herb marshmallow and the sweet treat is more than a coincidence, although the modern sugar puff ball no longer bears much relationship to the old-fashioned candy flavored with marshmallow herb.
Besides inspiring makers of campfire food, the marshmallow has also been used medicinally since ancient Greece. Hippocrates spoke of it as a treatment for bruises and blood loss, and subsequent Roman physicians recommended marshmallow for toothaches, insect bites, chilblains, and irritated skin. In medieval Europe, herbalists used marshmallow to soothe toothaches, coughs, sore throats, chapped skin, indigestion, and diarrhea.
What Is Marshmallow Used for Today?
Marshmallow contains contains large sugar molecules called mucilage, which are thought to exert a soothing effect on mucous membranes, and this is the basis of most proposed uses of the herb. However, only double-blind, placebo-controlled studies can prove a treatment effective, and no such studies of marshmallow have been reported at this time. (For information on why double-blind studies are so important, see Why Does This Database Rely on Double-blind Studies? )
On the basis of its supposed soothing properties, tea or lozenges containing marshmallow tea are often recommended for asthma , cough , colds , and sore throat. Marshmallow taken as tea or in capsules is sometimes recommended for Crohn's disease or ulcers , on the theory that mucilage might sooth the lining of the digestive tract. Finally, marshmallow ointment is sometimes recommended for irritated skin.
Marshmallow can be made into a soothing tea by steeping roots overnight in water and diluting to taste. This tea can be drunk as desired for symptomatic relief. Alternatively, you can take marshmallow in capsules (5 to 6 g daily) or in tincture according to label directions.
Marshmallow ointments can be applied directly to soothe inflamed or irritated skin.
- Reviewer: EBSCO CAM Review Board
- Review Date: 12/2015 -
- Update Date: 12/15/2015 - |
These territories were bequethed to the 'Augusta Badia of S. Silvestro of Nonantola' by the Longobardic kings around the year 750 a.d. In the year 776 a.d Carlo Magno, king of the Franks, upheld their rights to this property and it thus remained in their hands for about 1200 years until 1936. The Augustus Abbey, as it was defined in the property deeds, in turn, granted upon its estate, via notarial deeds, 'an investiture' (a kind of rental agreement) for a length of 99 years, equal to 'three generations' to important noble families, in exchange for an annual fee. Among the more famous Modenese families who were granted such an ‘investiture’ were the Molza, Castelvetri and Cavazza families.
The present architectural aspect of the court is due to certain modifications carried out between the end of the 1700’s and the start of the 1800’s, by members of the Cavazza family, the last owners subject to ‘investiture.’ The family, who had notably increased its wealth thanks to its grain trading business and it being suppliers of the French army during the Napoleonic campaigns in Italy, enlarged the pre-existing structure, adopting it to its needs. The original nucleus, which was undoubtedly very old, was much smaller than it
appears to be today and dates back to a Charlemagne territorial system of organisation, based on ‘curtes’: a collection of fortified buildings placed in the
centre of large farms.
The structure has always been architecturally characterised as being a closed court: hence the name ‘Corte della Quadra’ – ‘Square Court’. The ‘Quadra’ is, in fact, the central building and is commonly called ‘Palazzo della Quadra’, ‘Palazzo Cavazza’ or Villa Cavazza by local inhabitants. It is composed of three bodies: the central house and two lateral, symetrical buildings, one of which is surmouted by the ‘clock tower’ (torre dell’Orologio’) and the other by torre della Meridiana.
The buildings, consisting of porticos and lateral wings form the court that opens up in front of the villa.
The architectural transformation, in comparison to the previous buildings, has left ancient parts of the building intact and clearly visible: the ground floor halls of the wing with the clock tower and part of the porticos surmounted by the towers.
On the first floor of the central villa there is a very high-ceilinged ballroom, with a balustrade, which is similar to a larger one found in the Ducal Palace of Modena. A recent and carefully-executed overhall, that took over 10 years to complete, has restored the estate to its former glory and allowed it to be used for public
and private events.
Sala Plenaria: mq 460, it can be divided into two smaller rooms 200/400 seats each.
Other rooms: n.1 220 seats, n.2 150 seats, n.3 100 seats, n.4 and 5 70 seats.
Press room, banquet hall inside (up to 500 seats), air conditioning, elevators guests, staff, elevators, secretarial service, sound system, projection, video and audio-video, video conferencing, simultaneous translation (on demand), telephone lines, internet connection, TV closed circuit, personalized services
TYPE OF STRUCTURE
HOW TO GET THERE
By car: from Modena follow the direction Nonatola and then Bomporto. |
Folate (Folic Acid) Serum Test
The Folate Serum Test measures folate levels in the blood to screen for a deficiency.
What is the purpose of this test?
Order this Folate Serum Test, which measures folate levels in the blood to screen for a deficiency. Folate, which is also referred to as folic acid or vitamin B9, has many crucial functions in the body, such as aiding in the creation of DNA, which is responsible for your distinct genetic makeup. Folate testing is done to check for low levels of the nutrient. It may be ordered to follow up on an abnormal blood test or if symptoms could be caused by a folate deficiency.
Folate is found naturally in certain foods like:
- Leafy greens
- Citrus fruits
- It's also added to many foods in the form of folic acid
Folate deficiency is uncommon in healthy individuals who consume a balanced diet, and an excess of the vitamin is excreted from the body through urine because it is water-soluble.
Low folate or vitamin B12 levels can lead to megaloblastic anemia, a condition where the body has insufficient red blood cells. Folates are monitored during treatment to ensure that levels have returned to normal. Those with inflammatory bowel disease may require routine folate testing due to the digestive system's poor absorption of nutrients and medications that may impair folate absorption. Symptoms of other health issues, such as anemia, may also necessitate such testing.
When should I order a Folate Serum Test?
Individuals may order this test if they have experienced symptoms related to folate deficiency. Common signs or symptoms of folate deficiency include:
- Weakness and fatigue
- Shortness of breath
- Abnormal heartbeat
- Open sores on the tongue or inside the mouth
- Change of hair or skin color
- Difficulty concentrating
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Alan Seeger on World War I (1914; 1916)
The poet Alan Seeger, born in New York and educated at Harvard University, lived among artists and poets in Greenwich Village, New York and Paris, France. When the Great War engulfed Europe, and before the United State entered the fighting, Seeger joined the French Foreign Legion. He would be killed at the Battle of the Somme in 1916. His wartime experiences would anticipate those of his countrymen, a million of whom would be deployed to France. Seeger’s writings were published posthumously. The first selection is excerpted from a letter Seeger wrote to the New York Sun in 1914; the second is from his collection of poems, published in 1916.
1This is our fourth period of service in the trenches since coming to the front a month ago. … This style of warfare is extremely modern and for the artillerymen is doubtless very interesting, but for the poor common soldier it is anything but romantic. His role is simply to dig himself a hole in the ground and to keep hidden in it as tightly as possible. Continually under the fire of the opposing batteries, he is yet never allowed to get a glimpse of the enemy. Exposed to all the dangers of war, but with none of its enthusiasms or splendid élan, he is condemned to sit like an animal in its burrow and hear the shells whistle over his head and take their little daily toll from his comrades.
2The winter morning dawns with gray skies and the hoar frost on the fields. His feet are numb, his canteen frozen, but he is not allowed to make a fire. The winter night falls, with its prospect of sentry duty and the continual apprehension of the hurried call to arms; he is not even permitted to light a candle, but must fold himself in his blanket and lie down cramped in the dirty straw to sleep as best he may. How different from the popular notion of the evening campfire, the songs and good cheer.
3Cramped quarters breed ill temper and disputes. The impossibility of the simplest kind of personal cleanliness makes vermin a universal ill, against which there is no remedy. Cold, dirt, discomfort, are the ever present conditions, and the soldier’s life comes to mean to him simply the test of the most misery that the human organism can support. He longs for an attack, to face the barbed wire and the mitrailleuse, anything for a little freedom and function for body and soul.
4My comrade in arms is a young Servian, who went through all the Balkan campaign until the war broke out with the Bulgarians. Then he deserted at Salonica, for he was unwilling to fight against his brother people …. [T]he present method of fighting is almost insupportable to him, and he frets pitiably under the forced inaction … It is ignoble, this style of warfare, he exclaims. Instead of bringing out all that is noble in a man it brings out only his worse self—meanness and greed and ill temper. We are not, in fact, leading the life of men at all, but that of animals, living in holes in the ground and only showing our heads outside to fight and to feed.
5“I Have a Rendezvous with Death”
6I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air—
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.
7It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath—
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.
8God knows ’twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear…
But I’ve a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.
Source: Alan Seeger, Letters and Diary of Alan Seeger (New York: Scribner’s, 1917), 26, 29-30; Alan Seeger, “I Have a Rendezvous with Death,” Poems (New York: Scribner’s, 1916), 144. |
Click Image to Enlarge
LENS additive manufacturing systems deposit layer upon layer of material until a metal version of the CAD model is produced.
Waiting is the longest part of many molding operations. After material enters the mold, production comes to a virtual halt as the part cools to the point where it can be ejected safely. This accounts for up to 70 percent of the total cycle time.
To help plastics manufacturers slash long and costly cooling cycles, moldmakers now can use a new metalworking process to incorporate unique tool features that speed up the cooling of molded parts.
Laser Engineered Net Shaping, or LENST, is a layer-by-layer additive process that produces fully dense metal components directly from computer-generated designs. LENS can be used to make production molds with novel geometries and mixed-material compositions that can greatly enhance the cooling performance of the tool.
Using LENS, moldmakers can manufacture plastic injection mold tooling with functional enhancements that are difficult or impossible to machine. These features can include thermally conductive cores and cooling channels that conform to the shape of the mold surface. The result is a superior cooling effect that can lead to both reduced cycle times and improved part quality.
LENS is conceptually similar to rapid prototyping technologies that make parts directly from three-dimensional CAD models. However, LENS machines go beyond rapid prototyping in their ability to produce fully dense metal components, such as long-life production molds and tools.
To start the process, a high-powered Nd:YAG laser beam strikes a tiny spot on a metal surface, producing a molten pool. A nozzle blows a precise amount of metal powder into the pool to increase the material volume. The machine repeats this process over and over to deposit a layer of the structure. After one layer is deposited, another is positioned on top of it, and so on. The machine deposits layer upon layer until it has produced a metal version of the CAD model.
The process occurs inside a sealed chamber, where environmental variables can be tightly controlled. For example, the chamber can maintain an argon atmosphere with oxygen levels of less than 10 parts per million. This is essential when manufacturing parts made from aluminum, which is plagued by an oxide that prevents the material from properly wetting to the previous deposited layer.
LENS-deposited materials rapidly cool and solidify, producing fully dense metals with excellent hardness, strength and ductility. The material properties equal or exceed those of wrought materials. These superior material properties reduce wear and increase tool life. For the manufacturer, this translates into less mold maintenance and repair, as well as less downtime on the production line.
In part, the properties of LENS materials are a result of their fine grain structures. For example, metallographic analysis shows that the average grain size of LENS-deposited H-13 tool steel is just three microns - an order of magnitude smaller than grain sizes typically found in the H-13 used for injection molding.
The small grain size and homogeneity of LENS materials may be the keys to their superior corrosion resistance, which is especially important in the molding of polyvinyl chloride. During the molding process, PVC emits chlorine, which combines with moisture in the air to form hydrochloric acid. The acid attacks the mold, causing corrosion that can eventually lead to failure.
To increase the longevity of PVC injection-molding tools, manufacturers make them from corrosion-resistant materials, such as grade 420 stainless steel. In tests conducted by Dynamic Engineering Inc., a Minneapolis, MN-based builder of injection molds, LENS has produced 420 stainless steel that corrodes 30 percent slower than wrought versions of the material. Corrosion resistance can be increased even more by Hot Isostatic Press heat treatment after the LENS process.
Besides excellent material properties, LENS offers other advantages over conventional moldmaking techniques. Today, for instance, most mold tools are machined from a block of metal. Unlike these "subtractive" processes, LENS is an "additive" technique that deposits materials only where needed to make a mold. This simplifies mold design, reduces waste and improves mold performance.
As an additive process, LENS allows users to modify or test design iterations, rather than fabricating an entirely new tool with each change. It also can be used to repair damaged tools that would normally be discarded as waste by simply adding replacement material to the worn or fractured surface.
The layer-by-layer manufacturing technique also makes it easy to add mold features that are beyond the capabilities of other production methods. For example, cooling channels are normally drilled into a tool after fabrication. But drilling imposes straight-line limitations on channel paths, preventing them from following the contours of the mold surface.
With LENS, however, moldmakers can create three-dimensional channels that conform to the surface of the tool. Conformal channels can cut cooling time to a fraction of that required by molds with straight-line cooling passages, thereby reducing cycle times and improving part quality. In one test, a tool with conventional U-shaped cooling channels took 98 seconds to cool 50'C. By contrast, a LENS-fabricated tool with conformal cooling channels took just 30 seconds to cool the same amount.
In another case, a major automotive supplier compared the performance of a LENS-made H-13 conformal cooling tool with that of a tool made using conventional techniques. The company found that the LENS tool significantly reduced the cooling period for molded parts, which cut cycle times by 20 percent.
By shortening cycle times, LENS slashes equipment, overhead and labor costs of a molding operation. As a result, studies show that bottom-line profitability can jump more than 50 percent. Shorter cycle times also can boost profitability by speeding up production. If extra production increases sales by 20 percent, profitability can soar by as much as 200 percent.
A Cool Copper Core
To speed up cooling, improve part quality and cut cycle times even more, LENS also can add a thermally conductive material to a mold. In a job for a Fortune 100 company, for instance, LENS built a copper core into a mold with a 420 stainless steel surface. During molding operations, the thermally conductive core rapidly conducts heat away from the steel surface and transfers it to conformal cooling channels. This arrangement reduces cycle times by 15 percent, the user estimates.
LENS built the multi-material tool in a single operation, depositing the correct amounts of steel and copper powders at the right times and in precisely the right locations. After fabrication, the tool required only minor finishing and no additional heat treatment.
If programmed to do so, LENS can make gradual transitions from one material to another. This is advisable when the two materials have very different coefficients of thermal expansion. In the case above, for example, copper expands twice as much as tool steel. So if the transition between the copper and steel is abrupt, thermal cycling that occurs during the molding process will cause a great deal of stress at the interface between the two materials.
Programmed for gradient transition, however, the LENS machine gradually changes the expansion coefficient of the deposited layers. This reduces the likelihood that the part will fail at the material interface.
Laser engineered net shaping is a layer-by-layer deposition process that can be used to make metal parts for injection-molding and die-casting processes. Working directly from CAD files, LENS produces fully dense metal tools that can last for millions of cycles. With LENS, manufacturers can make molds out of multiple materials, with graded material transitions that reduce temperature-induced stresses in the mold. LENS also makes it easy to add conformal cooling channels to a mold. These channels dramatically reduce the cooling periods required by injection-molded parts, thereby improving part quality and slashing molding cycle times - boosting the production and profitability of molding operations.blog comments powered by Disqus |
Hector St. Jean de Crèvecœur Describes the American people, 1782
Hector St. John de Crèvecœur was born in France, but relocated to the colony of New York and married a local woman named Mehitable Tippet. For a period of several years, de Crèvecœur wrote about the people he encountered in North America. The resulting work was widely successful in Europe. In this passage, Crèvecœur attempts to reflect on the difference between life in Europe and life in North America.
The rich and the poor are not so far removed from each other as they are in Europe. Some few towns excepted, we are all tillers of the earth, from Nova Scotia to West Florida. We are a people of cultivators, scattered over an immense territory communicating with each other by means of good roads and navigable rivers, united by the silken bands of mild government, all respecting the laws, without dreading their power, because they are equitable. We are all animated with the spirit of an industry which is unfettered and unrestrained, because each person works for himself. If he travels through our rural districts he views not the hostile castle, and the haughty mansion, contrasted with the clay-built hut and miserable cabbin, where cattle and men help to keep each other warm, and dwell in meanness, smoke, and indigence. A pleasing uniformity of decent competence appears throughout our habitations. The meanest of our log-houses is a dry and comfortable habitation. Lawyer or merchant are the fairest titles our towns afford; that of a farmer is the only appellation of the rural inhabitants of our country. It must take some time ere he can reconcile himself to our dictionary, which is but short in words of dignity, and names of honour. (There, on a Sunday, he sees a congregation of respectable farmers and their wives, all clad in neat homespun, well mounted, or riding in their own humble waggons. There is not among them an esquire, saving the unlettered magistrate. There he sees a parson as simple as his flock, a farmer who does not riot on the labour of others. We have no princes, for whom we toil, starve, and bleed: we are the most perfect society now existing in the world. Here man is free; as he ought to be; nor is this pleasing equality so transitory as many others are. Many ages will not see the shores of our great lakes replenished with inland nations, nor the unknown bounds of North America entirely peopled. Who can tell how far it extends? Who can tell the millions of men whom it will feed and contain? for no European foot has as yet travelled half the extent of this mighty continent!
The next wish of this traveller will be to know whence came all these people? they are mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes. From this promiscuous breed, that race now called Americans have arisen…
In this great American asylum, the poor of Europe have by some means met together, and in consequence of various causes; to what purpose should they ask one another what countrymen they are? Alas, two thirds of them had no country… Formerly they were not numbered in any civil lists of their country, except in those of the poor; here they rank as citizens. By what invisible power has this surprising metamorphosis been performed? By that of the laws and that of their industry. The laws, the indulgent laws, protect them as they arrive, stamping on them the symbol of adoption; they receive ample rewards for their labours; these accumulated rewards procure them lands; those lands confer on them the title of freemen, and to that title every benefit is affixed which men can possibly require. This is the great operation daily performed by our laws. From whence proceed these laws? From our government. Whence the government? It is derived from the original genius and strong desire of the people ratified and confirmed by the crown…
What attachment can a poor European emigrant have for a country where he had nothing? The knowledge of the language, the love of a few kindred as poor as himself, were the only cords that tied him: his country is now that which gives him land, bread, protection, and consequence: Ubi panis ibi patria, is the motto of all emigrants. What then is the American, this new man? He is either an European, or the descendant of an European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations. He is an American, who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world. Americans are the western pilgrims, who are carrying along with them that great mass of arts, sciences, vigour, and industry which began long since in the east; they will finish the great circle. The Americans were once scattered all over Europe; here they are incorporated into one of the finest systems of population which has ever appeared, and which will hereafter become distinct by the power of the different climates they inhabit. The American ought therefore to love this country much better than that wherein either he or his forefathers were born. Here the rewards of his industry follow with equal steps the progress of his labour; his labour is founded on the basis of nature, self-interest; can it want a stronger allurement? Wives and children, who before in vain demanded of him a morsel of bread, now, fat and frolicsome, gladly help their father to clear those fields whence exuberant crops are to arise to feed and to clothe them all; without any part being claimed, either by a despotic prince, a rich abbot, or a mighty lord. Here religion demands but little of him; a small voluntary salary to the minister, and gratitude to God; can he refuse these? The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas, and form new opinions. From involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labour, he has passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence. –This is an American
Hector St. Jean de Crèvecœur, Letters from an American Farmer (New York: 1904), 49-56. |
Kids Dental Emergency
• How to save a broken tooth or a knocked out tooth
Kids Dental Emergencies
Tooth injuries are very common in babies and young children.
Parents must be prepared for these dental emergencies. In many cases a broken or even a knocked out tooth can be saved with proper handling and immediate dental care.
How to save a knocked out permanent (adult) tooth
If one of the permanent teeth is knocked out, it is possible to be saved if you:
If the tooth is placed soon back in its socket, there is an increased chance of saving it.
First aid for a knocked out primary (baby) tooth
Knocked out primary teeth should not be put back in their socket because this can cause damage to the permanent teeth already growing underneath them.
First aid for fractured / broken tooth
A dental mouth guard can protect your child's teeth from most of the mouth and teeth injuries. Mouth guards are flexible appliances made out of plastic that cover the upper teeth and gums to protect teeth and mouth's soft tissues from injury.
The cost of dental treatments can be significant and many patients may not afford it if they are not covered by their dental insurance. Learn how to choose a dental insurance plan that will provide the best dental treatment to you and your family. |
Congestive heart failure (CHF) as a result of systemic ventricular dysfunction represents the evolution of many heart disorders in childhood. Among these, dilated cardiomyopathy and some congenital cardiopathies are refractory to the known drug therapy, based on digitalic glycosides, diuretics and converting enzyme inhibitors. For these cases, the last therapeutic resource frequently remains heart transplantation. It is accepted that more than 50% of all children with CHF are candidates for transplantation . However, transplantation involves many impediments, among which the lack of donors is the most important one. If beta-blocking agents were until not long ago contraindicated in patients with CHF, the studies carried out over the past 10 years show that beta-blocking agents improve left ventricular function, the clinical picture of CHF and survival in adults with CHF. A recent consensus on CHF in adults currently recommends beta-blocking agents as part of the standard therapeutic protocol of CHF. This remarkable turn from contraindications to consensus recommendations is due to the deeper understanding of the pathophysiology of heart failure.
CHF is a symptomatic entity due to the incapacity of the heart to ensure the adequate perfusion and oxygenation of peripheral tissues. It manifests by fatigue, dyspnea, and signs of venous congestion. CHF is associated with severe ventricular dysfunction and pathological ventricular remodeling, changes that result in significant hemodynamic alterations. It is not surprising that doctors initially chose a treatment intended for these hemodynamic changes. Thus, traditional therapy of CHF recommends positive inotropic agents and peripheral vasodilators. But, the hemodynamic concept of the pathophysiology of heart failure proved to be incomplete. It was demonstrated that drugs with positive inotropic effects and phosphodiesterase inhibitors can result in the improvement of heart failure symptoms in the short term, but in the long term, they decrease survival [3,4]. At present, the concept of hemodynamic dysfunction has been associated with the concept of adrenergic hyperactivity. The activation of the sympathetic nervous system was described as one of the essential pathophysiological changes in patients with CHF or as one of the most important mechanisms responsible for heart failure progression . In CHF, the activation of the adrenergic nervous system results in increased levels of circulating catecholamines [6,7], which accelerates the heart rate, increases blood pressure and myocardial contractility, effects that are positive in the short term. However, in time, adrenergic hyperactivity leads to the impairment of hemodynamics in the failing heart [8,9]. Direct detrimental effects include myocyte destruction and catecholamine induced necrosis [10,11]. The additional adrenergically mediated myocyte loss accelerates apoptosis, the programmed cell death process. The acceleration of the heart rate and the increase in myocardial contractility result in increased myocardial oxygen consumption, in increased wall stress and, with time, in the hypertrophy of the heart walls, with the alteration of the myocyte and the aggravation of heart failure. These physiological links are the theoretical support of the beneficial effects of β-blocking agents that may lead to the prevention of chronic heart dysfunction in patients with CHF. Like many other classes of medications, beta blockers can be divided into three distinct groups. The first group consists of nonselective beta blockers without ancillary properties and includes such drugs as propranolol and timolol maleate. The second group consists of selective blockers of beta receptor subtypes without ancillary properties. This group includes metoprolol and atenolol. The third group consists of nonselective beta blockers that have the ancillary property of vasodilation. Included in this group are labetalol, carvedilol and bucindolol.
Carvedilol is a nonselective beta-adrenoreceptor antagonist and an alpha1-adrenoreceptor antagonist [12-15]. Carvedilol is a racemic mixture with nonselective beta-adrenergic blocking activity produced by the S(-) enantiomer and alpha(1)-adrenergic blocking activity provided by both the R(+) and S(-) enantiomers in equal potency. It has no intrinsic sympathomimetic activity. Beta-adrenergic blocking agents are believed to improve cardiac failure by reducing circulating catecholamine concentrations. High levels of catecholamines, while useful in the short-term to increase cardiac output, result over time in increased cellular necrosis, increased myocardial oxygen consumption, ventricular hypertrophy, and fibrosis. By reducing catecholamines, beta-adrenergic blocking agents improve systolic function, decrease fibrotic remodeling of dilated ventricles, improve clinical symptoms, and have been associated with decreased hospitalization and mortality. It has been suggested that these agents also reduce QT dispersion, reducing the potential for sudden death from arrhythmia. Although documented in adults, this effect has not been demonstrated in children. Carvedilol provides the additional benefits of systemic arterial vasodilation through its alpha-blocking activity, anti-oxidant, and anti-endothelin effects.It has no intrinsic sympathomimetic activity. Bucindolol and carvedilol produce less "inverse agonism" than most other beta blockers. Inverse agonism is the ability of a beta blocker to inactivate active state receptors. The beta blockers with the most inverse agonism, like propranolol, produce the greatest negative chronotropic and inotropic effects. Thus, bucindolol and carvedilol produce relatively fewer negative chronotropic and inotropic effects when compared with beta blockers like propranolol. The beta-blocking actions of carvedilol are generally evident in humans within one hour of administration, and the alpha-mediated vasodilatory effects, manifested by decreased peripheral resistance and decreased blood pressure, are evident within about 30 minutes of administration. The clinical significance of alpha blockade in conjunction with beta blockade in the treatment of CHF is not known. The use of alpha blockers alone, however, does not appear to reduce mortality in patients with symptomatic CHF. At high dosages, carvedilol exerts calcium channel blocking activity. It also has significant antioxidant properties. Carvedilol inhibits the generation of oxygen free radicals and prevents low-density lipoprotein (LDL) oxidation, which, in turn, reduces the uptake of LDL into the coronary vasculature. This antioxidant activity may contribute to carvedilol's cardioprotective effects. In fact, compared with captopril, carvedilol has demonstrated similarly favorable effects on the lipid profiles of hypertensive patients with dyslipidemia [13-15]. In normal subjects and patients with hypertension, carvedilol is rapidly and completely absorbed after oral administration, achieving peak plasma concentrations within one to two hours. The volume of distribution is about 1.5 to 2 liters per kilogram of body weight, indicating substantial distribution into extravascular tissues. Absorption is delayed an additional 60 to 135 minutes when the drug is administered with food. Carvedilol undergoes extensive stereoselective first-pass hepatic metabolism. In plasma, 98 percent of the drug is bound to plasma proteins, predominantly to albumin. The terminal elimination half-life of carvedilol ranges from 7 to 10 hours in most subjects. Carvedilol is cleared by aromatic-ring oxidation and glucuronidation in the liver. The oxidative metabolites are then conjugated with glucuronide and sulfate,and the resulting conjugates are excreted in the bile and eliminated in the feces; only 16 percent is excreted in the urine. Some of the metabolites of carvedilol have beta-adrenoreceptor-antagonist activity, and one 4-hydroxyphenyl metabolite is approximately 13 times as potent as carvedilol in this regard. The metabolites also have weak vasodilator activity, but the clinical importance of this property is unknown. The metabolism of carvedilol is affected by genetic polymorphism of cytochrome P-450 2D6 activity, in that patients with low activity have higher plasma concentrations of R-carvedilol, a stereoisomer that has both alfa- and beta-adrenoreceptor-antagonist activity. Drugs that inhibit cytochrome P-450 2D6 activity, such as quinidine, paroxetine, fluoxetine, and propafenone, may also increase plasma carvedilol concentrations. Thus, patients taking these drugs may be at particularly high risk of hypotension due to excessive α-adrenoreceptor blockade. In contrast, plasma concentrations of S-carvedilol, which has only beta-adrenoreceptor-antagonist activity, are increased only slightly in patients with low cytochrome P-450 2D6 activity [13-15]. Clearance of carvedilol is delayed in patients over 65 years of age. On average, their plasma carvedilol concentrations are 50 percent higher than in younger patients. Patients with liver disease also have high plasma carvedilol concentrations, but the half-life of the drug is unchanged. Patients with renal disease have slightly increased plasma carvedilol concentrations; the pharmacokinetics of carvedilol are not altered in patients undergoing hemodialysis. Drugs that increase cytochrome P-450 activity, such as rifampin, can accelerate the clearance of carvedilol. Hydrochlorothiazide does not influence the pharmacokinetics of carvedilol,and the pharmacokinetics of warfarin are not affected by carvedilol. Plasma digoxin concentrations rise slightly in patients given carvedilol. Patients with heart failure (particularly patients with New York Heart Association [NYHA] functional class IV heart failure) have higher plasma carvedilol concentrations than normal subjects of the same age, but the values overlap considerably between the two groups. The increase is higher for S-carvedilol than for R-carvedilol. Heart failure, by causing intestinal edema, may also reduce absorption of the drug. Since heart failure causes reduced cardiac output, depressed hepatic perfusion, and hepatic congestion, it could interfere with hepatic drug metabolism; these factors could influence the pharmacokinetics of carvedilol. However, in one study that assessed the pharmacokinetics of carvedilol in patients with heart failure, the stereoselective disposition of the drug was proportional to the dose over the therapeutic range (6.25 to 50 mg per day).
In 2001, the first two articles documenting the use of carvedilol in children were published and others followed up [12,16-24]. Bruns et all reported the experiences of 6 centers who had treated a total of 46 children between 3 months and 19 years of age . Thirty-seven of the patients had a dilated cardiomyopathy, while nine had congenital heart disease. Therapy was initiated at a dose of 0.08 mg/kg given twice daily, and titrated as needed to an average dose of 0.46 mg/kg (0.92 mg/kg/day). After three months of therapy, 67% of the patients had an improvement in their modified New York Heart Association (NYHA) class. Mean shortening fraction improved from 16.2% to 19%. While the majority of the patients improved or remained stable, 30% were considered to have adverse outcomes (death or the need for transplantation or a ventricular-assist device) despite treatment. The authors concluded that carvedilol was a useful adjunct to standard therapy for pediatric cardiac failure. Gachara et al. published their experience with carvedilol in eight infants with dilated cardiomyopathy . All patients were receiving digoxin, diuretics, and captopril. The average age at the start of therapy was 11 + 6.8 months. An initial dose of 0.1 mg/kg was given twice daily. The dose was titrated every 24 hours as needed, with an average maintenance dose of 1.08 + 0.4 mg/kg/ day. At follow-up (4.5 + 2.2 months), the patients showed significant improvement over baseline, with an increase in left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) from 24.4 + 5% to 38.5 + 11%. Five of the patients became asymptomatic, and two had only mild symptoms. In 2002, Azeka and colleagues conducted a prospective, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of carvedilol in 22 children with refractory heart failure . Carvedilol was initiated with a low dose of 0.01 mg/kg/day and increased as needed up to a target dose of 0.2 mg/ kg/day. At six months, there was a significant increase in LVEF in the carvedilol group (from 17.8% at baseline to 34.6%). Modified NYHA class improved in 9 of the 14 patients, allowing them to be removed from the transplant waiting list. Patients in the placebo group showed no improvement; two died and two required transplantation. Laer et al. reported the results of an open-label trial of carvedilol in 15 patients (6 weeks to 19 years of age) with cardiac failure who failed traditional management . Ten had dilated cardiomyopathy, and five had congenital heart disease. Carvedilol was started at 0.09 mg/kg twice daily and titrated at 2-week intervals to a maximum of adult dose of 50 mg/day. The target maintenance dose was 0.7 mg/kg/day. Twelve patients completed the 6-month trial, with a significant improvement in LVEF from 36% to 54%. Clinical symptom scores also showed statistically significant improvement. Mean arterial pressure declined from 75 mm Hg to 60 mm Hg and heart rate decreased from 116 beats/ min to 96 beats/min. During their open-label trial, Laer et al. compared the pharmacokinetic profile of carvedilol in the 15 children enrolled with nine healthy adults. In their study, the children exhibited higher maximum serum concentrations (average 16.9 ng/ml in children versus 11.2 ng/ml in adults), although AUC values were similar. Elimination half-life was significantly shorter in the pediatric patients than in the adults (2.9 versus 5.2 hours). When the pediatric patients were further divided into two groups (those 20]. All patients had remained symptomatic on traditional therapy. Six patients were given metoprolol (0.4-2.4 mg/kg/day) and six received carvedilol (0.4- 0.9 mg/kg/day). At six months, there was a significant increase in both shortening fraction (from 13 + 4% to 21 + 8%) and LVEF (from 26 + 8% to 41 + 17%). There were no significant differences between the patients given metoprolol and those given carvedilol. An early response to betaadrenergic blocker therapy was associated with increased survival and reduced need for transplantation. In 2003, Giardini et al. studied the effects of carvedilol in nine children with dilated cardiomyopathy over a one-year period. Therapy was initiated at 0.05 mg/kg/day and increased every 1-2 weeks to a target dose of 0.8 mg/kg/day. At 12-month follow-up, plasma concentrations of norephinephrine, dopamine, and aldosterone were significantly reduced compared to baseline. Positive effects on ventricular remodeling were noted, with significant reductions in end-diastolic and end-systolic diameters, and an increase in LVEF. Maunoury et al. demonstrated a similar benefit in 17 children (average age 39±57 months) given carvedilol . Treatment was initiated with a dose of 0.01 mg/kg/day and titrated to 0.2 mg/kg/day. After 6 months, LVEF increased from 26 + 11% to 43 + 17%, with 13 of the patients exhibiting more than a 10% improvement. In addition, the study showed a 38% increase in cardiac uptake of iodine-123 metaiodobenzylguanidine, representing a significant improvement in cardiac adrenergic neuronal function. In 2003, Ratnapalan and colleagues studied the interaction in eight children.Digoxin clearance declined from 153.0 + 92.3 ml/min/1.73m2 to 80.6 + 23.9 ml/min/1.73m2 after four days of concomitant carvedilol administration . All patients had an increase in serum digoxin concentrations, with two patients having levels above the therapeutic range. Based on their observations, the authors recommend reducing the dose of digoxin by 25% in children receiving carvedilol. Rusconi et al. reported their experience over a 3-year period . Carvedilol was added to standard therapy in patients with a persistent LVEF =40%. The review included 24 children between 1 day and 16.5 years of age. The average initial and final doses were 0.15 + 0.09 mg/kg/day and 0.98 + 0.26 mg/kg/day, respectively. Two patients discontinued therapy, one for asthma and the other for worsening cardiac failure. In the remaining patients, there was a significant increase in LVEF from 24.6 + 7.6% to 42.2 + 14.2%. Fifteen patients (68%) had improvement in their NYHA functional class. One patient died and 3 received transplants. In addition to these reports, a multicenter trial of carvedilol in children with heart failure is currently underway (Shaddy). With an expected enrollment of 150 children, this placebo-controlled study has been designed to address a composite of clinical outcomes including mortality, hospitalization, and symptomatic improvement, as well as measuring indices of ventricular function .
The integrated aspects of pharmacokinetics, metabolic drug interactions and clinical efficacy of carvedilol therapy in infants and children are important aspects for a better understanding and management of the pharmacotherapy in pediatric population. By the way it is important to elucidate other aspects of these essential steps in order to optimise the therapy in children. |
A team of researchers at the University of Alberta has unearthed a well-preserved Styracosaurus skull—and its facial imperfections have implications for how paleontologists identify new species of dinosaurs.
The skull was discovered by Scott Persons in 2015, then a graduate student in the Department of Biological Sciences, during an expedition in the badlands northwest of Dinosaur Provincial Park.
Nicknamed Hannah, the dinosaur was a Styracosaurus—a horned dinosaur over five metres in length with a fan of long horns. University of Alberta paleontologists led by Robert Holmes, professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, have learned much from those horns—because they aren’t symmetrical.
“When parts of one side of the skull were missing, paleontologists have assumed that the missing side was symmetrical to the one that was preserved,” explained Persons. “Turns out, it isn’t necessarily. Today, deer often have left and right antlers that are different in terms of their branching patterns. Hannah shows dramatically that dinosaurs could be the same way.”
The differences in the skull’s left and right halves are so extreme that had the paleontologists found only isolated halves, they might have concluded that they belong to two different species
“The skull shows how much morphological variability there was in the genus,” said Holmes. Like the antlers of modern deer and moose, Hannah shows that the pattern of dinosaur horns could vary significantly—meaning some fossils that were once assumed to be unique species will have to be reevaluated.
Tradition dictates that the person who finds an important dinosaur specimen gets to give it a nickname. “Hannah the dinosaur is named after my dog,” explained Persons, now a professor and museum curator at the College of Charleston. “She’s a good dog, and I knew she was home missing me while I was away on the expedition.” Despite the nickname, paleontologists have no way of knowing if the dinosaur was female. But they have learned other details from the skull—from a partnership with researchers in the Faculty of Engineering.
“Ahmed Qureshi and graduate student Baltej Rupal in the Faculty of Engineering assisted us in performing a 3D laser scan of the skull,” said Persons. “That let our publication to include a digital reconstruction, allowing scientists all over the world to download the 3D model and inspect it in detail.”
“This is the future of paleontological collections: digital dinosaurs.”
The paper was published in Cretaceous Research. |
Anyone who lives in a locale where nettle grows wild will eventually discover the powers of this dark green plant. Depending on the species, the fine hairs on its leaves and stem cause burning pain that lasts from hours to weeks. But this well-protected herb has also been used as medicine. Nettle juice was used in Hippocrates' time to treat bites and stings, and European herbalists recommended nettle tea for lung disorders. Nettle tea was used by Native Americans as an aid in pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing.
What Is Nettle Used for Today?
Currently, nettle root is more commonly used medicinally than the above-ground portion of the herb. In Europe, nettle root is widely used for the treatment of benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) , or prostate enlargement. Like saw palmetto, pygeum, and beta-sitosterol, nettle appears to reduce obstruction to urinary flow and decrease the need for nighttime urination. However, the evidence is not as strong for nettle as it is for these other treatments.
Note : Before self-treating prostate symptoms with nettle root, be sure to get a proper medical evaluation to rule out prostate cancer.
Nettle leaf has become a popular treatment for allergies (hay fever) based on one preliminary double-blind study.
Nettle leaf is highly nutritious and, in cooked form, may be used as a general dietary supplement.
What Is the Scientific Evidence for Nettle?
The evidence is much better for nettle root and prostatic enlargement than for nettle leaf and allergies.
Dosages of nettle root extract vary according to preparation, and we recommend following label instructions. Some nettle root products are standardized to their content of the substance scopoletin, but since this substance is not established as an active ingredient, the significance of this standardization remains unclear.
For allergies, the studied dosage is 300 mg twice a day of freeze-dried nettle leaf.
Interactions You Should Know About
If you are taking:
- Anti-inflammatory, antihypertensive, sedative, or blood sugar-lowering medications: Nettle might conceivably interact with them, although this is unlikely.
- Reviewer: EBSCO CAM Review Board
- Review Date: 12/2015 -
- Update Date: 12/15/2015 - |
New Guide Aims to Help States, Schools Classify English-Language Learners
As part of a wide-reaching effort to bring more consistency to services for English-language learners, a group of state education officials and ELL experts has unveiled a new set of recommendations on how states and school districts might improve how they identify and initially classify English-learners.
Classification policies and evaluation tools can vary widely from state to state, and even district to district, leaving widespread opportunity for misclassification of students.
As a result, students may be correctly classified as English-learners in one district or state, but may not get the support and services they need in another. Without clarity on how to correct misclassifications, students may remain stuck in the wrong classroom setting for years because educators are reluctant to question the placement.
Participants at a brainstorming session hosted by the Council of Chief State School Officers on how to improve the classification process acknowledged that it's a daunting task.
The CCSSO published a summary of their ideas, providing insight into how state education officials and ELL experts would like to tackle the issue. The summary, written by H. Gary Cook, of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, and Robert Linquanti, a senior research associate at WestEd, a San Francisco-based research organization, captures the recommendations from a May 2014 discussion and debate among state-level officials, ELL experts, and representatives from English Language Proficiency Assessment for the 21st Century (ELPA21) and World-Class Instructional Design and Assessment Consortium (WIDA), the two consortia of states developing new, common-core aligned English-language proficiency tests.
Some school districts participating in the session estimated that up to 5 percent of their students are misclassified. The most errors occur in kindergarten and 1st grade when students are less familiar with testing and other evaluations, Linquanti said.
The summary's authors found consensus that "more thoughtful, transparent, inclusive, and documented processes" are needed to appropriately classify ELLs and to allow for timely correction of misclassifications, and that a "strengthened initial EL classification process could be successfully implemented only with proper and sustained training and monitoring."
The recommendations from the May session are part of a broader effort to identify shared definitions of what it means to be an English-language learner and when those students no longer need language instruction. |
Mediant, submediant, and minor keys?
I am familiar with the degree names: tonic, supertonic, mediant, etc but not sure of their use in minor keys. Let's consider C major and minor. Some are clear, the dominant and subdominant will be G and F in both. The mediant is E in C major, is it E♭ in C minor? The submediant is even less clear, is it A♭ in C minor? What about A♮? It is an accidental in C minor but a common note nonetheless. Are there terms for the two As? What is the leading note: B♭ or B♮? B♭ is in the key signature but if a progression is actually leading up to the tonic then B♮ seems more likely even in C minor. Whichever is the leading note, how is the other referred to? |
Stephen Wolfram has had the sort of career that The Big Bang Theory's Sheldon Cooper might identify with: PhD in particle physics at 20, youngest-ever MacArthur Fellow at 21. At 26, Wikipedia tells us, Richard Feynman advised him to find a way to do his research with as little contact with non-technical people as possible because he didn't understand them, and Wolfram founded a company to do the work he wanted to do.
In Adventures of a Computational Explorer, Wolfram has assembled rambling tales of a variety of his exploits: the progressive mathematical development of 'Spikey', the company's logo; his work developing Wolfram Alpha; the art of naming functions; speculation about how quantum computing, AI, and the blockchain might usefully intersect; how to communicate generally with aliens; and the habits he has adopted to lead a productive life.
Most of these pieces will have the most resonance for those working in computing. Probably the two most mainstream articles are those describing how Wolfram and his son Christopher developed the physics and alien language for the 2016 movie Arrival, and the lessons he learned in kindergarten. The movie was based on Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life and the language displayed on the movie screen is both elegant and mysterious. Christopher Wolfram put considerable effort into making sure the computer code that's shown on-screen does what the script says it does, and Wolfram devised a theory for interstellar travel that he thought sounded plausible, even though there's no evidence that it would work in practice.
In the kindergarten essay, you get a better sense of Wolfram's personality when he tells you that as a child he figured out that he didn't need to memorise addition and multiplication tables because he could find the answer any time he needed it through the strategic placement of two rulers on his desk. As a six-year-old walking to nursery school in England he realised the chip missing from the sun meant an eclipse, and started pointing it out to other kids, who didn't see it. "Even if you notice something as obvious as a bit taken out of the side of the Sun," he writes, "there's no guarantee that you can convince anyone else that it's there." Following that, he writes, he also learned that even people who are sure they're right may be wrong.
Most of the book, despite its colloquial style, isn't as easy to parse as that, as Wolfram is over-fond of technical detail. And yet, if there's a thread through these pieces and Wolfram's work more generally, that kindergarten story provides the clue: bridging communication gaps – whether they're between humans and computers, humans and aliens, or just himself and other people. |
Leveraging the Research of Nobel Laureates
The winner of last year’s Nobel Prize in Economics was behavioral economist Richard Thaler, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Professor Thaler is co-author of the best-selling book Nudge, which describes research about how to help people make better decisions. Thaler points out that when left to our own devices we often make irrational decisions, but with help from knowledgeable and well-intentioned “choice architects,” decision-making can be dramatically improved. What constitutes better decisions is open to interpretation, but Thaler’s research suggests that there are several simple techniques that choice architects can use to help people make decisions that they are happier with, without resorting to mandates or expensive incentives. Thaler calls this approach “libertarian paternalism.”
Building on Thaler’s research, several governments have used the techniques outlined in Nudge to make public policies more efficient. David Halpern, head of the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) that was established by UK Prime Minister David Cameron in 2010, wrote a more recent book called Inside the Nudge Unit, referring to the BIT’s popular nickname. The BIT claims to have saved millions of pounds by influencing small, simple changes in the behavior of UK citizens. Governments, nonprofits, and corporations around the world have since followed suit with their own nudge unit-style projects.
The Accessibility Nudge Unit
To my knowledge, nobody has formally used the term Accessibility Nudge Unit to describe their own accessibility efforts, but there are organizations that are using the same techniques that Thaler and Halpern describe to nudge large organizations in the right direction in terms of accessibility. The California State University System’s Chancellor’s Office established its Accessible Technology Initiative (ATI) in 2007. The CSU ATI publishes resources and guidelines, holds professional development webinars for faculty and staff, and serves as a thought-leader by presenting and conferences and publishing articles about their approach to nudging one of the world’s largest four-year university systems toward accessible and inclusive policies. Perhaps most importantly, leaders of the CSU ATI team are careful to explain why accessibility is so vitally important to reaching the organization’s goals and how to get executive support for accessibility initiatives. Accessibility isn’t simply a mandate, it’s a set of choices that faculty and staff make every day in their work, and the ATI’s goal is to make those choices as simple as possible.
A specific example of how the California State University System uses choice architecture to make accessibility nudges is how they make it easy for staff at any of the 23 campuses to make their video content accessible, using captioning, transcription, audio description, and other video accessibility services from AST. Like many universities, they performed a thorough evaluation of video accessibility options and factors before selecting a vendor. But they didn’t stop at simply providing an approved vendor list. The CSU System makes it easy to request and purchase captioning by centralizing the reporting, billing, and account management functions for these services. It’s a classic example of Thaler and Halpern’s choice architecture guidelines; individual departments are still free to choose from a variety of options for making their video accessible, but when the preferred options are also the easiest to choose, users are happier with their decisions and with the results.
Carrots vs. Sticks vs. Nudges
Sometimes your organization will receive something more anxiety-provoking than a friendly nudge. When the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) opens an accessibility or disability rights investigation on your campus, it’s better compared with a stiff shove than a nudge. And the truth is, even organizations that are now known as accessibility leaders, such as the North Carolina State University System, started down the path to accessibility thanks to an OCR investigation. When handled well, an OCR investigation can completely change your campus culture and can actually improve the reputation of your organization. And while some may have thought that the new administration’s dislike of regulations might have slowed down enforcement of existing ADA and Rehabilitation Act regulations, signs seem to indicate that the OCR has not slowed down in the past year.
It’s important to remember that even if your organization is getting pushed rather than nudged toward accessibility, the best approach is not to simply “pass the buck” to your faculty and staff. A calm, rational approach that leverages the principles of an Accessibility Nudge Unit is still the best approach. As Richard Thaler has shown, humans often make irrational decisions even when they are not under duress. Passing the anxiety on to your staff only serves to increase the number and magnitude of irrational decisions. Providing your staff with a sensible choice architecture around accessibility decisions is the best route to success, both for your staff and for students, parents, and your community as a whole.
We’re Here to Help
So whether you are simply trying to be proactive and move your organization gracefully toward better accessibility in 2018, or you’ve been thrust into the spotlight by legal or enforcement action, it’s time to create an Accessibility Nudge Unit. Throughout the year we’ll be sending you helpful nudges, along with tips on how you can apply the principles of choice architecture and nudging to accessibility. In the meantime, if you have any video accessibility questions or need any assistance, please contact us. We’re here to help.
- Accessibility: A Shared Campus Responsibility Best Accomplished with Executive Support, by Susan Cullen
- Video Accessibility Legal Update (Annotated Webinar Transcript)
- Webinar Series Topics (Contact us if you would like to arrange a webinar for your organization)
- Schedule a Demo
- CaptionSync Support Center |
Recent natural disasters in Japan led to a partial meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. A new Current Concepts article reviews the history of such accidents, along with the short-term and long-term health risks associated with environmental exposure to nuclear fission products.
The health threat from each radioisotope depends on an assortment of factors. Radioisotopes with a very short half-life (e.g., 67 hours for molybdenum-99) or a very long half-life (e.g., 24,400 years for plutonium-239), those that are gaseous (e.g., xenon-133), and those that are not released in substantial quantities (e.g., plutonium-238) do not cause substantial internal or external contamination. In contrast, iodine-131 can be an important source of morbidity because of its prevalence in reactor discharges and its tendency to settle on the ground.
• What systems tend to be most affected in acute radiation sickness?
Much of the short-term morbidity and mortality associated with a high total or near-total body dose is due to hematologic, gastrointestinal, or cutaneous sequelae. Hematologic and gastrointestinal complications are common because bone marrow and intestinal epithelium are especially radiosensitive as a result of their high intrinsic replication rate. Cutaneous toxic effects are common because external low-energy gamma radiation and beta radiation are chiefly absorbed in the skin.
• What cancers are most closely associated with nuclear-power-plant accidents?
There are important differences between the type of radiation and dose rate associated with atomic-bomb exposure and those associated with a reactor accident. These differences may explain why studies evaluating leukemia and nonthyroid solid cancers have not shown consistently elevated risks in the regions around Chernobyl. However, there is strong evidence of an increased rate of secondary thyroid cancers among children who have ingested iodine-131.
Table 3. Signs and Symptoms of Acute Radiation Sickness in the Three Phases after Exposure.
Morning Report Questions
Q: How is the dose of radiation quantified?
A: The literature on radiation refers to dose both in terms of grays (Gy), the unit of measurement of the absorbed dose, and sieverts (Sv), the unit of measurement for the effective dose, which is the absorbed dose multiplied by factors accounting for the biologic effect of different types of radiation and the radiation sensitivities of different tissues.
Q: What is the mortality associated with various ranges of radiation exposures?
A: The estimated mortality associated with exposure to radioactivity is 0% for less than 2 Gy, less than 50% for 2 to 4 Gy, 20 to 70% for exposures of 4 to 6 Gy, and 50 to 100% for exposures of 6 to 8 Gy. |
Unit 10: Interacting with Instructors and Classes
This unit focuses on how to engage in the learning process through interactions with your instructors and other students.Interacting with the instructor and other students leads to a full educational experience. Whether you are attending a class online, sitting in a lecture hall, or participating in a small group study, you will find that by being actively engaged with your instructor and fellow students, you will be on the path to a more successful college experience.
Completing this unit should take you approximately 5 hours.
10.1: Assess Your Current Knowledge and Attitudes
10.2: Why Attend Class at All?
10.3: Participating in Class
10.4: Communicating with Instructors
10.5: Public Speaking and Class Presentations
10.6: Chapter Activities
Unit 10 Assessment |
Administrator: A person appointed by the court to manage the assets and liabilities of an intestate decedent.
Beneficiary: A person to whom another is in a fiduciary relation, whether the relation is one of agency, guardianship, or trust; especially, a person for whose benefit property is held in trust
Decedent: A dead person, especially one who has died recently.
Devise: The act of giving property by will. Although this term traditionally referred to gifts of real property—and in British usage the term is still confined to real property—in American usage the term has been considerably broadened.
Executor: A person named by a testator to carry out the provisions in the testator's will.
Intestate: Someone who has died without a valid will.
Legacy: A gift by will, esp. of personal property and often of money.
Probate: The judicial procedure by which a testamentary document is established to be a valid will; the proving of a will to the satisfaction of the court.
Testator/testatrix: A person who has made a will; especially, a person who dies leaving a will.
Trust: The right, enforceable solely in equity, to the beneficial enjoyment of property to which another person holds the legal title; a property interest held by one person (the trustee) at the request of another (the settlor) for the benefit of a third party (the beneficiary).
Will: The legal expression of an individual's wishes about the disposition of his or her property after death; especially, a document by which a person directs his or her estate to be distributed upon death .
All definitions come from Black’s Law Dictionary (11th ed. 2019).
Wills & Trusts explores the ways by which an individual’s property passes at death, how individuals may affect that passage by creating a will or will substitute like a trust during lifetime, what the law requires for a will or will substitute to be enforceable, the extent to which the law may limit the disinheritance of a surviving spouse or child, and how fiduciaries administer estates and trusts.
Wills & Trusts covers topics such as: intestacy, which provides for distribution of property by operation of law when a person fails to leave a valid will; probate estates; nonprobate transfers and will substitutes; the personal representative’s administration of a probate estate; the requirements for executing a valid will; will components; changes of circumstances after execution; revocation; interpretation; will contests; the creation of testamentary and living trusts; the trustee’s administration of a trust estate; the nature of beneficial interests under a trust instrument; rules of survivorship; future interests; the modification and termination of trusts; and powers of appointment.
[Summary from Wills and Trusts Course Description, UNM School of Law, http://lawschool.unm.edu/academics/course-descriptions/index.html (last visited 02/20/2018).]
Bloomberg Law: In the Search & Browse tab, choose All Legal Content. In the Select Sources box, type “estate,” “will,” or “trust” and select a source from the list that auto populates.
Bloomberg Law contains several treatises and practice manuals on estate and trust planning, such as Stocker & Rikoon on Drawing Wills and Trusts and Manning on Estate Planning.
Lexis Advance: Browse Topics—Estate, Gift & Trust
Westlaw: Under Browse—Topics—Estate Planning, various resources are listed including Regulations, Secondary Sources, Forms, and Proposed & Enacted Legislation.
Under Tools—West Key Number System, 154: Estates in Property, 390: Trusts, and 409: Wills may provide guidance in finding related materials. |
They are soft, cozy, colourful, warm, and comfortable; they dress our interior decors marvellously well, but they can reveal themselves to be very noxious to our health. Carpeting is a choice receptacle for all sorts of pollutants, and even cleaning them can be noxious. Here are some of the reasons.
The 20% of Canadians suffering from a pulmonary illness are certainly more aware than others on the question: carpeting, rugs and other similar floor coverings, as with upholstering materials, are collectors of dust and other allergen carrying micro organisms, not to mention irritating chemical emanations.
According to Don Fugler, main researcher at the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), the quantity of dust removed from carpeting is many times superior to that of a hard floor. And, if a broom can remove up to 95% of undesirable particles on a hard floor, passing the vacuum only removes, on average, 40% of dust on carpeting. “In fact, there are three types of elements which lodge in carpets and are real sponges.” Explains the researcher: “They can be of a biological nature (skin, hair, food, mites…) or mineral (earth, sand, lead…) or even chemical which notably comes from materials used during construction, particularly paint vapours.
To limit this interior pollution it is recommended, among other things, to remove shoes before entering the house, to vacuum carpets more than once a week, and to cover carpeting and furniture well during renovations.
So much for the ABC’s of regular maintenance. But the choice of having carpeting at home also has its risks when it comes to deeper cleaning. The two principal ones are mould and chemical products.
Give me Air!
The number one rule when comes time for cleaning is to take advantage of the best possible ventilation to allow for evacuation of toxic emanations of certain cleaning products, and a faster drying if we use liquid products. We should therefore choose a warm and dry period for this type of household activity because the danger of carpeting which stays humid too long resides in the formation of microscopic mushrooms known as mould. The 270 recognized species in Canadian homes all have the particularity of releasing chemical substances and spores which, according to Don Fugler, may have “at best, negligible effects on our health, or at worst, cause allergies and serious illnesses.” Other than persons already suffering from respiratory troubles, individuals having a weak immune system are at risk, as are pregnant women, children and older persons as well. Also, knowing that certain moulds are invisible, we will work harder to dry our carpeting and we will privilege rugs and carpets which we can take outside to fresh air, rather than carpeting and other unmoveable floor coverings. Another good reason for proceeding with cleaning carpeting in a well ventilated environment: the chemical agents contained in certain cleaning products. Other than pesticides, whose noxious effects we need not be reminded of, stain removers and protectors are the most dangerous because they often contain chemical solvents which give off toxic emanations. And to complete the difficulty chart, the composition of synthetic carpeting poses a problem due to substances contained in certain glues and various treatments administered at the time of manufacture (fungicide, pesticide, waterproofing, stain repellents and colour fixatives) can be activated by chlorine contained in cleaning water or in reaction to other products. In passing it is interesting to note that many carpets contain volatile organic elements (VOE), such as benzene, toluene, formaldehyde, who have the sad characteristic of releasing gas and vapours up to five years after installation, and solidify before re-depositing themselves on any surface of the house. Some of these are cancer-causing; others affect the nervous and endocrinal systems.
We can then understand very well that the Children’s Health Environmental Coalition (CHEC) would sanction the acquisition of coverings in non-treated natural fibres and suggests asking the manufacturer of your future carpeting to air it out for three days before delivery and to leave our windows open for at least the same amount of time after installation.
On the CMHC Internet site, many articles relate to perfluorooctyle sulfonate (PFOS), a substance appreciated for its hydrophobal and lipophobal properties, which is to repel water and oils. PFOS was the main ingredient in the Scotchgard® line of products, manufactured by 3M Corporation and distributed for 40 years before being removed this year from the ingredients of these products. Long thought totally inoffensive, PFOS has revealed itself to be a persistent organic pollutant (POP) of which traces have been found almost everywhere in the animal world, including humans, whose body takes an average of four years to be able to totally eliminate (the highest concentrations were found in children).
Illnesses attributable to PFOS are numerous; according to the Environmental Working Group, an ecological research group based in Washington, these are various irritations (eyes, nose, lungs), headaches, fatigue, nausea… We haven’t yet studied the cancerous effects in humans, but according to the conclusions of the most recent studies, doses measured in children and adults are sometimes even higher than those causing cellular, thyroidal and reproductive disturbances as well as malformations and cancers of the pancreas, breast, testicles, prostate and liver in laboratory animals. For its part, the Cooperation and Economic Development Organization (CEDC is an international organization grouping together thirty or so countries, including Canada) are even studying the possibility of the occurrence of PFOS in the development of bladder cancers, but research has barely begun and we are still incapable of measuring the real effects of this substance on the environment and the human being.
… Read more |
Typically, most cases of congestive heart failure in children are caused by afterload increases in the pressure dynamics of one or both chambers of the heart. In these conditions, pressure builds in one chamber of the heart due to an obstructive lesion in the outflow tract of the affected chamber. Several of the more common entities early in the first weeks of life are the left ventricular outflow obstruction syndromes, followed by congenital aortic stenosis and moderate-to-severe coarctation of the aorta. With these lesions, the systemic circulation has inadequate perfusion, and renal flow is diminished. The combination of increased fluid retention and chamber dilatation results in cardiac failure. Treatment of afterload increases is aimed at vasodilatation with either specific load-altering medications, such as nitroprusside or nitroglycerin, or the use of furosemide, which has both a diuretic effect and a vasodilatory effect. Correction of the mechanical obstruction is viewed as the ideal solution.14
Less often, congestive heart failure can be related to increases in preload representing an overall volume overload without obstructive pressure consequences. Typical entities include large VSDs, and persistent patent ductus arteriosus in premature infants. Anemias of different etiologies should be considered, especially iron deficiency anemia in small cow-milk-fed infants. Sickle cell anemia and thalassemia variants should also be considered. In the former group of conditions, decreasing the vascular volume with diuretics is beneficial. In addition, the use of digoxin may be beneficial prior to surgical repair. In the latter cases, transfusion is warranted along with judicious use of fluid restriction and diuresis.
Poor contractility is not usually considered a major cause of congestive heart failure in small infants, because the ventricular walls are still relatively noncompliant. In older pediatric patients, though, poor contractility becomes an issue. Kawasaki syndrome, idiopathic endocardial fibroelastosis, pulmonary hypertension associated with Eisenmenger syndrome, and toxic-metabolic causes should be considered in adolescent patients with congestive heart failure. Less frequent inflammatory causes include myocarditis, constrictive pericarditis, and collagen vascular diseases. Treatment is geared toward increasing contractility with dobutamine or digoxin. 15
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