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From Irish Druids and Old Irish Religions, 1894
The MISTLETOE had an early reputation as a guide to the other world. Armed with that golden branch, one could pass to Pluto's realm:—
"Charon opposed—they showed the Branch.
They show'd the bough that lay beneath the vest;
At once his rising wrath was hush'd to rest."
Its connection with health, as the All-heal, is noted by the poet Callimachus, under the appellation of panakea, sacred to Apollo:—
"Where'er the genial panakea falls,
Health crowns the State, and safety guards the walls."
As the seat of the life of the Oak, as then believed, it had special virtues as a healer. The Coel-Creni, or omen sticks, were made of it, and also divining-rods. It had the merit of revealing treasure, and repelling the unwelcome visits of evil spirits. When cut upon St. John's Eve, its power for good was greatest. "While the shamrock is emblematic of the equinox, the mistletoe is associated with the solstice," says St. Clair.
The ancient Persians knew it as the healer. It told of the sun's return to earth. Farmers in Britain used to give a sprig of mistletoe to the first cow calving in the year. Forlong points out the recovery of old heathen ideas; saying, "Christian priests forbade the mistletoe to enter their churches; but yet it not only got in, but found a place over the altars, and was held to betoken good-will to all mankind." It was mysteriously associated with the dove. The Irish called it the uil-iceach: the Welsh, uchelwydd. The County Magazine for 1792 remarked—"A custom of kissing the women under the mistletoe-bush still prevails in many places, and without doubt the surest way to prove prolific." Pliny considered it good for sterility. It was the only thing that could slay the gentle Baldur. In England there are some twenty trees on which the mistletoe may grow.
Certain plants have at different times been objects of special consideration, and worshipped as having divine qualities, or being possessed by a soul. Some were thought to manifest sympathetic feeling with the nation by which they were cherished. The fetish tree of Coomassie fell when Wolseley's ultimatum reached the King of Ashantee. The ruthless cutting of trees was deemed cruel. Even if they had no living spirit of their own, the souls of the dead might be there confined; but perhaps Mr. Gladstone, the tree-feller, is no believer in that spiritual doctrine.
In Germany one may still witness the marrying of trees on Christmas Eve with straw-ropes, that they may yield well. Their forefathers' regard for the World-tree, the ash Yggdrasill, may incline Germans to spare trees, and raise them, as Bismarck loves to do. Women there, and elsewhere, found consolation from moving round a sacred tree on the approach of nature's trial. The oldest altars stood under trees, as by sacred fountains or wells. But some had to be shunned as demoniac trees.
The Irish respected the Cairthaim, quicken-tree, quick-beam, rowan, or mountain ash, which had magical qualities. In the story of the Fairy Palace of the Quicken-tree, we read of Finn the Finian leader being held in that tree by enchantment, as was Merlin by the fairy lady. MacCuill, son of the hazel, one of the last Tuath kings, was so-called because he worshipped the hazel. Fairies danced beneath the hawthorn. Ogham tablets were of yew. Lady Wilde styled the elder a sacred tree; and the blackthorn, to which the Irishman is said to be still devoted, was a sacred tree.
Trees of Knowledge have been recognized east and west That of India was the Kalpa. The Celtic Tree of Life was not unlike that of Carthage. The Persians, Assyrians, and American Indians had their Trees of Life. One Egyptian holy tree had seven branches on each side. From the Sycamore, the goddess Nou provided the liquor of life; from the Persea, the goddess Hathor gave fruits of immortality. The Date-palm was sacred to Osiris six thousand years ago. The Tree of Life was sometimes depicted on coffins with human arms. The Lotus, essentially phallic, self-produced, was an emblem of self-created deity, being worshipped as such at least 3000 B.C. Homa was the Life-tree of Zoroaster. The bean was thrown on tombs as a sign of immortality. The banyan and the onion denote a new incarnation.
The Indian and Cingalese Bo or Asvattha, Ficus religiosa, sheltered Gautama when he gained what is known as Entire Sanctification, or Perfection. The sacred Peepul is the male fig, the female being Ficus Indica. The fig entwines itself round the palm. The Toolsi, Ocymum Sanctum, and the Amrita are also worshipped in India; so are the Lien-wha, or Nelumbium, in China; the cypress in Mexico, and the aspen in Kirghizland.
Trees and plants were devoted to gods: as the oak, palm, and ash to Jupiter; the rose, myrtle, and poppy to Venus; the pomegranate to Proserpine; the pine-apple to Cybele; the orange to Diana; the white violet to Vesta; the daisy to Alcestis; the wild thyme to the Muses; the laurel to Apollo; the poplar to Hercules; the alder to Pan; the olive to Minerva; the fig and vine to Bacchus; the lotus to Hermes. The leek of Wales, like the shamrock of Ireland, was an object of worship in the East, and was associated with Virgo. The Hortus Kewensis states that it first came to Britain in 1562. The mandrake or Love-apple was also sacred. Brinton gives a list of seven such sacred plants among the Creek Indians. The Vervain, sacred to Druids, was gathered in Egypt at the rise of Sirius the Dogstar.
From a sad, comfortless childhood Giles Truelove developed into a reclusive and uncommunicative man whose sole passion was books. For so long they were the only meaning to his existence. But when fate eventually intervened to have the outside world intrude upon his life, he began to discover emotions that he never knew he had.
A story for the genuine booklover, penned by an Irish bookseller under the pseudonym of Ralph St. John Featherstonehaugh.
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You won't be inundated with emails! — we'll just keep you posted periodically — about once a monthish — on what's happening with the library. | <urn:uuid:74e2e7ae-8e45-4ea9-9083-e37ba374fdaa> | {
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What is acupuncture?
Practitioners use acupuncture treatment – a traditional Chinese medicine – by inserting thin, sterile needles at specific points on the body to treat pain, facilitate healing and promote physical and mental well-being.
Acupuncture stimulates energy channels on the body – called Qi – that are considered pathways for vital energy. The points where the needles are inserted correspond to these energy channels, also called meridians. The number of meridians is not precisely known – some experts claim there are 14 main channels with 2,000 acupuncture points, while others claim up to 20 meridians.
According to the 2007 National Health Interview Survey, an estimated 3.1 million adults and 150,000 children in the United States used acupuncture the previous year. What should I be aware of if I undergo acupuncture?
Tell your whole team of health care providers – including primary care physicians – if you plan to seek acupuncture treatment or are undergoing acupuncture. This helps achieve safer, coordinated health care.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates acupuncture needles, requiring they meet certain standards, including being non-toxic, sterile, labeled for single use and used only by qualified practitioners.
Acupuncturists are highly regulated in the United States by the National Certification Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine (NCCAOM).
Most patients feel no or minimal amounts of pain when the acupuncture needles are inserted. The needles are solid yet hair-thin. Some report feeling energized, or relaxed, during treatment sessions. Movement or a defective needle can result in pain or soreness.
Acupuncture treatment sessions usually last between 45 and 90 minutes. A patient may go for acupuncture treatment over the span of several weeks or more.Is acupuncture safe?
In general it appears to be safe. However, there are reports to the FDA of serious adverse events such as Pneumothorax, Hepatitis, and cardiac trauma, among others.How do I find a qualified acupuncturist?
Ask your health care provider for referrals to qualified acupuncture practitioners. Your regular, conventional medical professional may even offer acupuncture.
Check credentials – acupuncturists in most states need licenses to practice; however, standards and education requirements vary by state. A license is a good indicator the acupuncture practitioner meets the state’s requirements, but it does not always ensure top-quality care.
Check with your primary care physician whether acupuncture may help your condition – do not rely on an acupuncturist without a conventional medical license to diagnose conditions.What symptoms and conditions are typically treated by an acupuncturist?
According to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, acupuncture is used to treat many types of pain. The most commonly reported use of acupuncture is for back pain, followed by joint pain, neck pain and headache pain. Research also suggests it’s effective in treating osteoarthritis, particularly knee pain.
Acupuncture has been studied as a treatment for a wide variety of conditions and pains – including substance withdrawal, postoperative dental pain, menstrual cramps, fibromyalgia, severe migraine pain and more – but it’s difficult to draw conclusions as to its effectiveness. Due to the many different acupuncture techniques, such as electrical versus manual, and variations in the controls used in studies and measuring outcomes, further research is needed to determine effectiveness. Related Articles:
On Pins and Needles | <urn:uuid:46b48dad-eb22-45a4-8d6a-d08ff83e65fd> | {
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What is family practice?
A family practitioner is a primary care doctor who provides health services to adults, children and adolescents. Family practitioners have a very broad scope of practice, but are usually the patient’s first consultation before being referred to other specialists, if necessary. The family practitioner performs annual physical examinations; ensures up-to-date immunization status; counsels patients on healthy lifestyles; monitors patients’ blood pressure, cholesterol and glucose levels; and ensures other baseline tests are within normal levels for the patient’s age and gender.When do I see a family practitioner?
In the United States, about one in four visits to a doctor are to a family practice doctor. Family care physicians care for the poor, indigent and underserved in the community more than any other physician specialty.
When a patient is an infant or child, he or she might see a family practitioner specializing in pediatric care. When the young patient transitions from childhood to adulthood during adolescence, he or she can see a family practice doctor specializing in adolescent medicine or a regular family practitioner, also known as adult-care physician. Around the ages 18-21, patients typically transition to an adult-care physician who is better suited to their health-care needs. What should I expect when I visit a family practitioner?
A family practitioner’s scope of practice varies, but these specialists typically provide basic diagnoses and non-surgical treatment of common medical conditions and illnesses.
To arrive at a diagnosis, family doctors will interview and examine the patient. This requires discussing the history of the present illness, including a review of the patient’s body systems, medication history, allergies, family history, surgical history and social history. Then the physician will perform a physical examination and possibly order basic medical tests, such as blood tests, electrocardiograms or X-rays. Ultimately, all this information is combined to arrive at a diagnosis and possible treatment. Tests of a more complex and lengthy nature may be referred to a specialist
Together with the patient, the family practitioner forms a plan of care that can include additional testing if needed, a referral to see a specialist, medication prescriptions, therapies, changes to diet or lifestyle, additional patient education, or follow-up treatment. Patients also may receive advice or education on improving health behaviors, self-care and treatment, screening tests and immunizations.What are the most common conditions family practitioners treat?
Shopping for a New Doc
Decoding Your Health Test Results
Patient Types: Which One Are You?
Questions to Ask When Looking for a New Doctor
- Common cold
- Gastrointestinal complaint
- Gynecological complaint
- High blood pressure
- Infectious diseases
- Musculoskeletal complaint
- Psychiatric disease
- Sexually transmitted disease
- Skin complaint
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NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Teenagers who have irregular periods are more likely to be overweight and obese and to have early warning signs of diabetes and heart disease than those with regular menstrual cycles, suggests a new study.
While the link between irregular periods and heart disease and diabetes is well established in older women, the new finding suggests that doctors might be able to identify this risk much earlier -- and try to do something about it.
"There may be a misconception in adolescent medicine ... that 'it takes a couple of years after menarche to get the engine running' and hence one might not want to be concerned about irregular adolescent menstrual cycles until much later," said Dr. Charles Glueck, one of the study's authors from the Cholesterol and Metabolism Center at the Jewish Hospital of Cincinnati.
"That's clearly wrong."
Even in young teenagers, very irregular menstrual cycles are not normal, Glueck told Reuters Health, and shouldn't be ignored.
He and his colleagues followed 370 girls starting at age 14 as part of a larger study initiated by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.
Once every year, girls were asked how long it had been since their last menstrual cycle. Researchers also periodically measured their levels of different sex hormones, glucose and insulin (markers of diabetes risk) and blood pressure.
They also collected information on girls' height, weight, and waist circumference.
The authors defined irregular menstrual cycles as lasting more than 42 days -- that is, the girl's period begins more than 42 days after the first day of the last one -- a criterion that's meant to catch the 2 percent of girls with the least regular periods, Glueck explained.
Between age 14 and 19, 269 of the girls reported regular periods at every annual visit. Another 74 of them had only one report of an irregular period, 19 girls had two reports, and eight said it had been at least 42 days since their last period at three or more visits.
The results, published in Fertility and Sterility, show that girls with the most reports of irregular periods were already heavier than others at age 14, and gained more weight and inches on their waist during the study.
Also at age 14, girls with more irregular periods had higher levels of testosterone -- a sex hormone associated with male characteristics.
By age 25, those who hadn't reported an irregular period had an average body mass index, or BMI, of 26.8 -- considered slightly overweight. In comparison, participants who had reported irregular periods at three or more appointments had an average BMI of 37.8, indicating severe obesity. Girls who reported one or two irregular periods had BMIs somewhere in the middle.
Reports of irregular periods were also linked to higher levels of blood sugar and insulin at age 25.
The authors couldn't be sure what was happening with girls' menstrual cycles during the rest of each year. Also, the findings do not prove that irregular periods cause girls to gain weight or are responsible for the increases in glucose and insulin levels - rather, the irregularity could be a signal of some other problem.
One possibility is that the ovaries might respond to changes in metabolism -- such as increased insulin levels, said Dr. Alice Chang, an endocrinologist at UT Southwestern Medical Center. That would suggest some of the diabetes-related risks came before problems with ovulation.
What the study results do show is that irregular menstrual cycles might be a warning that the body's metabolism isn't working as well as it should.
"These relationships which we see so clearly in adolescence and see prospectively into young adulthood are the same relationships which two to three decades later spell out in the development of cardiovascular disease, (heart attack), and type II diabetes," Glueck said.
Irregular periods might be a sign of polycystic ovary syndrome, or PCOS -- a hormonal disorder that's also linked to infertility and obesity -- Glueck added. Catching it in adolescence means the condition can be "very successfully treated" -- another reason for doctors to pay attention to irregular periods early.
Chang, who was not involved in the new research, agreed that the implications for PCOS are an important message to take from the study.
"When I see women diagnosed with PCOS, they often have symptoms all throughout adolescence, but it's not put together for them," she told Reuters Health. "We need to be more aggressive in adolescents about treating PCOS and treating obesity."
Glueck said that girls with irregular menstrual cycles should "raise flags" for doctors, who can also step in with early prevention measures against diabetes, obesity, and heart disease.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/lqeony Fertility and Sterility, online May 7, 2011.
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Explore your destiny as you discover what's written in your stars.
The latest news, tips and recipes for people with diabetes.
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Yoga for Back Pain
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Are YouMoney Smart? | <urn:uuid:f520888e-2b22-4af5-8020-69a19b5307dc> | {
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Kroto is now one of several prestigious individuals, including the groundbreaking Chemist Linus Pauling, who have enriched the Linfield community at an Oregon Nobel Laureate Symposium.
“The lecture-symposium was scheduled two years ago,” Director of Communications Mardi Mileham.
She mentioned that Kroto was selected to participate in the symposium by Dr. Fred Ross who retired from Linfield last spring.
Kroto is well-known for the co-discovery of the form of carbon now known as Buckminsterfullerene, or, “buckyballs” in 1985. This molecule is a spherical arrangement of 60 carbons in a pattern that resembles the stitching on soccer balls.
Up until its discovery, only two stable forms of carbon, graphite and diamond, were known to exist, Professor of Chemistry Thomas Reinert said.
He said this third stable form of carbon changed the way chemists thought about carbon and the bonds between atoms. Chemists learned that this form of carbon occurs in the universe, naturally. “It’s not just made up in a lab,” Reinert said.
Kroto discussed the importance of science and scientific education in his lecture that was interspersed with humorous remarks.
Kroto based his lecture on a quote that says science is the only thing we have to determine the truth to any degree of reliability.
“Science, for me, is a way of life,” Kroto said. He applied his scientific philosophy to several matters such as sustainability and indoctrination. Kroto stressed the importance of questioning everything and seeking evidence to support claims. He considers the acceptance of facts without evidence dangerous.
Kroto explained his “four out of five method.” He stated if you make an observation, make a hypothesis; if four out of five observations are in line with the hypothesis, you are “almost certainly right.”
Kroto’s current project is to try to teach science globally by using the Internet to share educational videos.
Professor of English Lit David Sumner commented on Kroto’s scientific emphasis saying that the sciences and humanities should work hand in hand. “A combination of the two is essential,” he said.
Senior Craig Geffre praised Kroto for his call to the researchers of natural sciences to be mindful of ethics and the outcome of their research. Kroto cited atomic bombs as examples of weapons that should not be further researched.
“Anthropologists and sociologists are careful in deliberating what the outcome of our research will be. I thought it was great that he emphasized ethics,” said Geffre.
For more information about Dr. Sir Harold Kroto and the discovery of buckminsterfullerene visit www.nobelprize.org.
Michele Wong/For the Review
Michele Wong can be reached at [email protected]. | <urn:uuid:dfc2156e-6208-4bc8-820a-c377aeb8d85e> | {
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A collection of paper, parchment, or any other material containing print, paintings, or other inscribed works that are all bound between two protective covers are called Books. However, an e-book is is a collection of text that is electronically formatted. Antique books come in the form of scrolls and codex. The protective binders that contain the sheets of paper containing writing may come in a hard protective cover called a hardback or in a softer, flexible cover called a paperback. Novels are the most popular form of books, although works such as The Holy Bible and The Koran are referred to as "The Book." | <urn:uuid:41fd67b1-f7ce-4a3f-848b-15c308eab98c> | {
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tree-equal tree-1 tree-2 &key test test-not => generalized-boolean
Arguments and Values:
test---a designator for a function of two arguments that returns a generalized boolean.
test-not---a designator for a function of two arguments that returns a generalized boolean.
generalized-boolean---a generalized boolean.
tree-equal tests whether two trees are of the same shape and have the same leaves. tree-equal returns true if tree-1 and tree-2 are both atoms and satisfy the test, or if they are both conses and the car of tree-1 is tree-equal to the car of tree-2 and the cdr of tree-1 is tree-equal to the cdr of tree-2. Otherwise, tree-equal returns false.
tree-equal recursively compares conses but not any other objects that have components.
The first argument to the :test or :test-not function is tree-1 or a car or cdr of tree-1; the second argument is tree-2 or a car or cdr of tree-2.
(setq tree1 '(1 (1 2)) tree2 '(1 (1 2))) => (1 (1 2)) (tree-equal tree1 tree2) => true (eql tree1 tree2) => false (setq tree1 '('a ('b 'c)) tree2 '('a ('b 'c))) => ('a ('b 'c)) => ((QUOTE A) ((QUOTE B) (QUOTE C))) (tree-equal tree1 tree2 :test 'eq) => true
Side Effects: None.
Affected By: None.
The consequences are undefined if both tree-1 and tree-2 are circular.
equal, Section 3.6 (Traversal Rules and Side Effects)
The :test-not parameter is deprecated. | <urn:uuid:0dff129e-b6b0-4cf2-aef9-9316f348a147> | {
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Jelly Mould Pavilions
27 March - 6 June 2010
'Jelly Mould Pavilions' is a quirky yet thought provoking exhibition by artist Lubaina Himid. The exhibition explores the challenges of commemorating the ongoing contribution of the people of the African diaspora to the history, culture and fabric of Liverpool.
'Jelly Mould Pavilions' features 30 hand-painted Victorian ceramic jelly moulds and 14 prints. The illustrations on the jelly moulds are inspired by influential Black figures such as Martin Luther King, William Still and Dred Scott, all strong and unique figures in the civil rights movement. Lubaina's inspiration also comes from brightly coloured textile patterns from all over the African continent.
Although these jelly mould monuments may never be built, their purpose is to encourage visitors to ask questions about the city's history, how we can celebrate and commemorate the Black community or whether we do this already.
Lubaina chose Victorian jelly moulds as they symbolise the African diaspora's link to the sugar industry that used slaves. The jelly moulds are a device to encourage visitors to talk about enslavement, commerce and pleasure.
Jelly mould interventions!
As well as the main exhibition at Sudley House there will be jelly mould interventions in the following venues:
You can see all the venues on the map below. Select a blue pin to find out about each location. You can view a larger version of the map here.
More about the artist
For more information about Lubaina's practice including forthcoming and major projects, recent exhibitions, works in collections and key note speeches, visit her website.
'Making Histories Visible' is an interdisciplinary visual art research project based led by Lubaina Himid with support from Susan Walsh. Find out more on the Making Histories Visible website.
More in depth information about the themes surrounding Jelly Mould Pavilions can be found on Lubaina's Jelly Mould Pavilions website.
This exhibition is part of 'Liverpool and the Black Atlantic', a series of city-wide exhibitions and events that explore connections between cultures and continents. | <urn:uuid:87070f97-c53e-4162-baa3-4a876fa64027> | {
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Livescribe for Blind or Visually Impaired Students02/22/12
Limited access to graphical materials is a problem for many blind or visually impaired students. With the Livescribe smartpen, creation of these resources is low-cost, portable, and easy to execute. Students and teachers can create tactile diagrams, maps, or study guides in or outside of the classroom.
The smartpen provides raised-line figures with audio information about the diagram elements by tracking the page position and sound recording. This type of technology allows students to have access to all types of materials. By adding Braille characters to their Livescribe notebook page, students can read along with their hands while having a full audio description when needed. The smartpen includes all the hardware and software necessary to allow audio playback and tactile graphics can be created by using a raised-line drawing kit or an APH “tong” tool. Livescribe sound stickers can also add audio to existing materials. For blind or visually impaired students, understanding graphs or visuals can be difficult if not impossible. The Livescribe smartpen aims to help make graphics more accessible for the blind and visually impaired.
Do you know a blind or visually impaired student using the Livescribe smartpen? Share your story with us below! | <urn:uuid:76c28959-8ec1-436e-9860-685edd23962c> | {
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According to a research team at the City College of New York (CCNY), tobacco dependence has a firmer grip on those who are poor or uneducated, making it harder for them to stay off cigarettes.
Smokers who had participated in a statewide smoking cessation program in Arkansas were tracked following the program by researchers from CCNY's Sophie Davis School of Biomedical Education. The participants came from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds, and while both rich and poor groups were able to successfully quit at roughly the same rate, the poorer an individual was, the harder it was for that person to overcome cravings and ultimately remain tobacco free.
Within three months of completing treatment, the poorest participants were 55 percent more likely than the richest to begin smoking again; at six months, that number jumped to 250 percent. Nationwide, Americans from households making less than $15,000 a year smoke three times more often than those making $50,000 a year or more.
Several hypotheses have been offered to explain the wide disparity. Smoking provides stress relief in times of hardship, and those of lower socioeconomic status are more likely to experience hardship, facing discrimination, job insecurity, and financial troubles. In addition, lower-paying jobs are less likely to offer the protection of local, state, and federal smoke-free laws. This means that even if a person successfully quits, he will find himself surrounded by smokers at work every day.
It is important to included these considerations when developing treatment programs, says the team from CCNY. Treatment focused on the needs of the middle class will necessarily require revision to fit lower economic status individuals. Suggestions include custom programs, but the CCNY team says that "booster sessions" after the main sessions are over may improve outcomes. It's hard to predict what stresses might drive someone back to cigarettes several months down the road, so it's important to continuing offering resources to those who will need them the most.
Source: City College of New York | <urn:uuid:ef7c8997-0cad-47ec-bfc3-33101b07b124> | {
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Wisdom From the Grammar Goddess: Rhetorical CommentsBy Diane Sandford, Published on July 26, 2004
Few people realize how badly they write. —William Zinsser, On Writing Well, 5th ed. (Harper, 1994), pag
People do not write well because they do not think well. They do not think well because they do not put in the effort. —E. Kim Nebeuts.
Faults of literary style are often faults of character. —Anonymous.
The final quotation above may seem curious. How can literary style be equated with morals or character? Writers with little substance to place on paper will occasionally try to expand their thoughts with an abundance of flowery vocabulary. It’s easy to spot writers who dabble in puffery: They pepper their writing with adjectives like very, extremely, much, etc.; and they embroider their ideas with jargon, unnecessary phrases, pretentious language, and clichés (ugh!). They focus their analysis on some small point, and write as if its significance has hitherto been unappreciated. We all do this to some extent. But when we find ourselves falling into these traps, we need to get out.
So my first rule of rhetoric is to be honest in your writing: Get to the point, don’t exaggerate, and be accurate. By the way, do you suppose some morally corrupt people may be honest writers, but that some saintly people may tend to puff up their writing? Alas, human character is complicated. Anyway, here are some of the rules of rhetoric that live in my brain.
1. Write honestly. What goes around, comes around. Most of our sins catch up with us before we die.
2. Proofread, revise, and proofread once again. My father once told me that thinking was the most painful activity in the world. For some reason, most human brains prefer to do no more than superficial thinking unless survival is involved. Proofreading and revision, the lowest forms of literary thinking, are chores we all want to avoid. Nevertheless, proofreading and revision are keys to improving. Here is a striking example of what revision can do:
A. In the last sentence of the Gettysburg Address there is a rallying cry for the continuation of the struggle.
B. In the last sentence of the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln rallied his audience to continue the struggle against the South.
—From Style: Toward Clarity and Grace, by Joseph M. Williams (The University of Chicago Press, 1990), page 28.
What intellectual process took place that transformed sentence A into the more powerful sentence B? The answer is that the author examined each sentence in the essay and asked the hard questions: What am I trying to say? Can I say this more explicitly? Is this even true? A puffed-up writer will fall under the weight of his own bad habits and lack of experience in revising. It is sad but true: Inflated writing is the result of laziness, deception, poor attitude, and stupidity. Puff is not a magic dragon.
3. Avoid affectations and fancy words. For example: The second statement follows mutatis mutandis from the first. The phrase mutatis mutandis (= "with corresponding changes") is, indeed, an impressive phrase, but it is also baffling to most readers. Avoid fanciful and pretentious vocabulary. The following extract from an autobiography of the French mathematician André Weil illustrates just how bad affective writing can be:
My life, or at least what deserves this name—a singularly happy life, its diverse vicissitudes withal—is bounded by my birth on May 6, 1906, and the death on May 24, 1986, of my wife and companion.
It may be argued that clever phrasing and curious words make reading more interesting, and to deny an author their use limits his tools and leads to mundane writing. This is the argument of a novice who confuses poetry and song lyrics with formal prose. Both of the previous examples are demonstrations of bad communication, because the words distract from the ideas. Writers who choose words and phrases like this are treating writing as an art form much like dancing—as an end unto itself—rather than as a tool to express ideas.
Samuel Johnson once recalled the following remark from a college tutor: “Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage that you think is particularly fine, strike it out." This, I think, is one of the great pieces of advice for beginners. Whenever a reader begins to notice the writing instead of the ideas carried by the writing, then the reader is being distracted.
4. Stick with the action, not the abstraction. Maybe this will help: After writing each sentence, imagine your boss, red-faced and screaming: “What are you talking about? I can’t understand you! Get to the point!” Minimize, and be concise. Your writing, like mine, is of interest only for the facts it brings the reader. Even most of those who dedicate their lives to the craft of writing don’t write particularly well. Bear in mind that your perspectives are rarely interesting to anyone else. (A striking exception, of course, is this article.)
5. Use passive constructions consciously. Here is the classic example of the passive voice: The ball was hit by the boy. This is fine if the ball is more important than the boy. If not, then change it: The boy hit the ball. The main objection to the passive is that it takes slightly more effort to parse.
Notice that ball comes before boy in the passive construction above. In a long sentence, such juxtaposition may force the passive voice. In technical and scholarly writing, the passive is often needed to place emphasis on a process, rather than on an observer or on the initiator of a process. Occasionally, the passive construction does work better than the active—e.g., The book was suppressed by its own author. When you use the passive, be aware of it, and know why.
A similar problem occurs with abstract verbs. The verbs lift, drop, smash, sever, destroy, for example, create mental images. The be verbs (be, been, being, am, is, are, was, were) are more abstract and require more effort to understand. Consider these two sentences:
Original: A need exists for greater candidate selection efficiency.
Revised: We need to select candidates more efficiently.
—From Style: Style: Toward Clarity and Grace, by Joseph M. Williams, page 30.
The second sentence is simple, concise, and easy to comprehend. This is generally not a problem with short sentences, but readers tire quickly when abstract verbs are used too often in complex sentences.
6. Use coordinating conjunctions (and, but, or, nor, so, for, and yet) to join parallel structures. For example: Success comes from suffering through depression and insecurity. This should be corrected to read: Success comes from suffering through depression and through insecurity. Lack of parallelism is a red flag that jars many readers. If only we had grammar police. Keep in mind that an intelligent reader is usually an unforgiving reader.
7. State your strongest arguments first. Do you think this is obvious? Aristotle taught the opposite. He also has been proven wrong through scientific tests of reading retention, but perhaps Aristotle was referring to oral debates or to the power of immediate persuasion. Some readers tune out early, so it’s important to capture their attention quickly.
8. Think. On occasion, an author is hard pressed to determine which interpretation of a sentence he or she originally intended. This occurs when writers splash words onto paper with little thought—i.e., they write before they think.
Writers must constantly ask: What am I trying to say? Surprisingly, often they don’t know. —William Zinsser, On Writing Well, 5th ed. (Harper, 1994), page 12.
These rules are no more—and are often considerably less—than guideposts to non-distracting communication. When followed, they do not guarantee intelligibility; when applied, they do not confer the attribute "fine writing." Even “acceptable” writing comes at the price of inordinate effort. Nothing is simple.
This month’s recommended resource is Style: Toward Clarity and Grace (University of Chicago Press, 1990; reprinted in 1995), by Joseph M. Williams. The book is a bit dry, but its ultimate value repays the effort. Gleaning insight is never easy.
Do you have a grammar question? Comments? Suggestions? Please let me know. | <urn:uuid:751661d9-17e7-44d5-9fa3-0a0fb32b8830> | {
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- Nietzsche on Tragedy by M.S. Silk and J.P. Stern
Cambridge, 441 pp, £27.50, March 1981, ISBN 0 521 23262 7
- Nietzsche: A Critical Life by Ronald Hayman
Weidenfeld, 424 pp, £18.50, March 1980, ISBN 0 297 77636 3
- Nietzsche. Vol. 1: The Will to Power as Art by Martin Heidegger, translated by David Farrell Krell
Routledge, 263 pp, £11.50, March 1981, ISBN 0 7100 0744 2
Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, was published in 1872, when he was 27, and while he was a Professor of Classics at Basel. It had the unusual effect, for him, of attracting some attention at the time of its appearance: after that, Nietzsche’s writings virtually ceased to be noticed until the 1890s, by which time he was, for the last 11 years of his life, insane, virtually without speech, and out of touch with the world.
Nietzsche said to his sister that this book was a ‘centaur’, a description which emphasises its oddness, underestimates its beauty, and misleads about the number of its components, since it is a blend not only of scholarship and literary prose, but of philosophy and assertive aesthetic judgment. It makes some historical claims in answer to an old question, the origin of tragedy among the Greeks; more importantly, it tries to characterise the nature of the Greek view of the world, how that is expressed in Greek tragedy, and what significance both that view and those plays can now have.
According to Nietzsche, two contrasting spirits stand over Greek, and over all genuine, art – Apollo and Dionysus. Apollo represents order, civilisation and the determinate image; Dionysus represents nature, fertility, rapture, and the dissolution of individuation into collective expression. Greek tragedy was a highly stylised and formal art which arose nevertheless from the cult of Dionysus, and at its highest, in Nietzsche’s view, it represents a peculiar moment at which the forces of Apollo and Dionysus were balanced – a balance which expresses a heroic understanding and acceptance of the destructive horror of things, a ‘pessimism of strength’.
These elements, the Dionysiac and the Apollonian (a term surely preferable to Silk and Stern’s ‘Apolline’), by no means merely represent, as they are often taken to do, a dichotomy of passion and reason, or of emotion and form. The basic element of the Dionysiac is indeed Rausch – ‘rapture’ in Krell’s translation of Heidegger, ‘ecstasy’ in Silk and Stern – but the corresponding idea of the Apollonian is dream, and the order which Classical art can set upon things itself has roots in a realm of illusion. The balance between these forces, and the consciousness which the tragic outlook involves, of the unity of destructive and creative forces, was embodied only in the earlier period of the Greek Classical Age – above all, in the tragedians Aeschylus and Sophocles. Of these, Nietzsche tends to emphasise Aeschylus, who was indeed the earlier, but (as Silk and Stern point out) it is certainly Sophocles who most clearly and unpityingly embodies what Nietzsche had in mind.
The third great tragedian, Euripides, destroyed tragedy, according to Nietzsche, or rather helped it to destroy itself, in association with the spirit of Socrates, that spirit of ‘Alexandrian optimism’ which trusted in reason to make the most basic questions of living into matters of discursive knowledge. That same rationalistic optimism led inevitably to a depreciation of art, including Plato’s celebrated rejection of it. The Platonic consciousness, and the later forms of moralism which in various ways Nietzsche assimilated to it, could not stand the power of tragedy, nor the metaphysical conclusion which, in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche saw as implicit in tragedy: that ‘only as an aesthetic phenomenon can existence and the world be eternally justified.’ | <urn:uuid:1a5e05c7-7a5a-4af6-994e-a0eb0de7bb68> | {
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Umesh Deshmukh, PhD
University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA
Approximately one-third of people with lupus develop nephritis, a complication that can cause kidney failure and sometimes requires chronic dialysis or transplantation.
Most research suggests that antibodies in the kidney play a role in the development of kidney failure in lupus, but exactly how this occurs is unclear.
“It starts with antibodies, there's no doubt about it,” Dr. Deshmukh says. “But antibody alone is not sufficient, you have to have T cells going into the kidney,” he says. T cells regulate immune responses in lupus.
Using carefully selected mouse models, Deshmukh and colleagues investigated whether it is antibodies alone that form the basis for kidney disease in lupus as well as where, when, and how T cells come into play.
Through the course of their research, Dr. Deshmukh and colleagues not only gathered substantial evidence to support their original hypothesis, but went on to work on a new mouse model of lupus in which they can test new approaches to target drugs to the kidney (immunoliposomes).
Their findings “change the perceived role of autoantibodies in the disease” he says. “If we find antibodies in the kidney, we jump to the conclusion that it's lupus nephritis, but our study will show that you can have antibodies in kidney and still be healthy because the damage starts with T cells.”
And while not included in the current grant, Dr. Deshmukh and colleagues have already started looking at drugs that can prevent T-cell mediated damage of the kidneys.
With a co-investigator, Dr. Deshmukh now has funding to explore the development of targeted drug delivery system using immunoliposome nanoparticles.
Genetic complementation results in augmented autoantibody responses to lupus-associated antigens. Sim DL, Bagavant H, Scindia YM, Ge Y, Gaskin F, Fu SM, Deshmukh US. J Immunol. 2009 Sep 1;183(5):3505-11
SmD peptide induces better antibody responses to other proteins within the small nuclear ribonucleoprotein complex than to SmD protein via intermolecular epitope spreading. Deshmukh US, Bagavant H, Sim D, Pidiyar V, Fu SM. J. Immunol. 2007 Feb 15;178(4):2565-71
Role for nephritogenic T cells in lupus glomerulonephritis: progression to renal failure is accompanied by T cell activation and expansion in regional lymph nodes. Bagavant H, Deshmukh US, Wang H, Ly T, Fu SM. J. Immunol. 2006 Dec 1;177(11):8258-65.
New insights from murine lupus: disassociation of autoimmunity and end organ damage and the role of T cells. Bagavant, H. and Fu, S.M. Deshmukh, U.S, Bagavant, H., Lewis, J., Gaskin, F., Fu, S.M. Curr. Opin. Rheumatol 2005 17:523-528.
Role of anti-DNA antibodies in the pathogenesis of lupus nephritis. Deshmukh US, Bagavant H, Fu SM. Autoimmun Rev. 2006 Jul;5(6):414-8. Epub 2005 Dec 7.
In 2006, Dr. Deshmukh won a $1.65 million NIH grant continue this work, and in 2009 received a two-year Alliance for Lupus Research (ALR) award of $499,780 to futher explore ‘modulating renal responses: a novel therapeutic approach to lupus nephritis” (as co-investigator).
Rev. July 2010
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- B Cells
- Cardiovascular System
- Cell Signaling
- Central Nervous System
- Dendritic Cells
- Environmental Triggers
- Gender Matters
- General Immune System Function
- Human Lupus Biology
- Lupus Pregnancy
- New to Lupus
- New Treatments
- T Cells
- Target Identification
- Why the Lupus Immune System Reacts to Its Own DNA | <urn:uuid:0c17941b-2b83-4df0-b457-8bb30be29904> | {
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FreeBSD man pages : readlink (2)
READLINK(2) FreeBSD System Calls Manual READLINK(2)
readlink - read value of a symbolic link
Standard C Library (libc, -lc)
readlink(const char *path, char *buf, int bufsiz);
Readlink() places the contents of the symbolic link path in the buffer
buf, which has size bufsiz. The readlink() function does not append a
NUL character to buf.
The call returns the count of characters placed in the buffer if it suc-
ceeds, or a -1 if an error occurs, placing the error code in the global
Readlink() will fail if:
[ENOTDIR] A component of the path prefix is not a directory.
[ENAMETOOLONG] A component of a pathname exceeded 255 characters, or
an entire path name exceeded 1023 characters.
[ENOENT] The named file does not exist.
[EACCES] Search permission is denied for a component of the
[ELOOP] Too many symbolic links were encountered in translat-
ing the pathname.
[EINVAL] The named file is not a symbolic link.
[EIO] An I/O error occurred while reading from the file sys-
[EFAULT] Buf extends outside the process's allocated address
lstat(2), stat(2), symlink(2), symlink(7)
The readlink() function call appeared in 4.2BSD.
FreeBSD 4.8 June 4, 1993 FreeBSD 4.8 | <urn:uuid:021e74b4-febc-4ef6-87b4-03f5565a7305> | {
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Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) is considered to be the greatest German mathematician of the nineteenth century. His discoveries and writings influenced and left a lasting mark in the areas of number theory, astronomy, geodesy, and physics, particularly the study of electromagnetism.
Gauss was born in Brunswick, Germany, on April 30, 1777, to poor, working-class parents. His father labored as a gardner and brick-layer and was regarded as an upright, honest man. However, he was a harsh parent who discouraged his young son from attending school, with expectations that he would follow one of the family trades. Luckily, Gauss' mother and uncle, Friedrich, recognized Carl's genius early on and knew that he must develop this gifted intelligence with education.
While in arithmetic class, at the age of ten, Gauss exhibited his skills as a math prodigy when the stern schoolmaster gave the following assignment: "Write down all the whole numbers from 1 to 100 and add up their sum." When each student finished, he was to bring his slate forward and place it on the schoolmaster's desk, one on top of the other. The teacher expected the beginner's class to take a good while to finish this exercise. But in a few seconds, to his teacher's surprise, Carl proceeded to the front of the room and placed his slate on the desk. Much later the other students handed in their slates.
At the end of the classtime, the results were examined, with most of them wrong. But when the schoolmaster looked at Carl's slate, he was astounded to see only one number: 5,050. Carl then had to explain to his teacher that he found the result because he could see that, 1+100=101, 2+99=101, 3+98=101, so that he could find 50 pairs of numbers that each add up to 101. Thus, 50 times 101 will equal 5,050.
At the age of fourteen, Gauss was able to continue his education with the help of Carl Wilhelm Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick. After meeting Gauss, the Duke was so impressed by the gifted student with the photographic memory that he pledged his financial support to help him continue his studies at Caroline College. At the end of his college years, Gauss made a tremendous discovery that, up to this time, mathematicians had believed was impossible. He found that a regular polygon with 17 sides could be drawn using just a compass and straight edge. Gauss was so happy about and proud of his discovery that he gave up his intention to study languages and turned to mathematics.
Duke Ferdinand continued to financially support his young friend as Gauss pursued his studies at the University of Gottingen. While there he submitted a proof that every algebraic equation has at least one root or solution. This theorem had challenged mathematicians for centuries and is called "the fundamental theorem of algebra".
Gauss' next discovery was in a totally different area of mathematics. In 1801, astronomers had discovered what they thought was a planet, which they named Ceres. They eventually lost sight of Ceres but their observations were communicated to Gauss. He then calculated its exact position, so that it was easily rediscovered. He also worked on a new method for determining the orbits of new asteroids. Eventually these discoveries led to Gauss' appointment as professor of mathematics and director of the observatory at Gottingen, where he remained in his official position until his death on February 23, 1855.
Carl Friedrich Gauss, though he devoted his life to mathematics, kept his ideas, problems, and solutions in private diaries. He refused to publish theories that were not finished and perfect. Still, he is considered, along with Archimedes and Newton, to be one of the three greatest mathematicians who ever lived.
|Contributed by Karolee Weller|
|Permission was requested by Michael Sirola in Tampere, Finland to translate this biography into Finnish for his blog. To read the Finnish translation goto http://www.designcontest.com/show/twsu-math-fi| | <urn:uuid:19e829d4-ba9a-46ad-92b3-9e91526f1816> | {
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In the medical realm and other areas (e.g., automotive, networking), architects often ask themselves at the time a new product has to be designed if they can afford application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). In past years, a lot has been published about the pros and con of using ASICs. These reports always speak about power consumption, size, and capabilities, but in the end there is a prohibitive factor: the price.
In the past year, the price of masks has increased considerably, and it is expected to increase even more. Prices above $5 million for masks are not so uncommon anymore. Who can actually afford such costs!?
This problem can be more acute for some high-performance, demanding applications such as medical imaging. In such applications we need to have significant processing capabilities and good power consumption performances… Sure, a well-designed ASIC would work wonders here. For an OEM, a dream come true would be to convince a semiconductor company to take an ASIC, pack it with some ARM and/or other cores and add some peripheries (e.g., LVDS, USB) and produce a chip.
That sounds good in theory, but in practice it is not so easy. Semiconductor companies are reluctant to produce chips that can be sold only to one customer, except in cases where the money is right. In the consumer market the sales volume is significant, but in a medical environment the number of sold parts is small so there has to be a special deal between the OEM and the semiconductor company. One can imagine that only a big enough OEM can afford to consider such a direction.
For example, if we would produce at this moment a VScan- (GE) or P10- (Siemens) like device (small, handheld ultrasound scanners) with a mask cost of $5 million, we would have to sell around 600 such devices for the amortization of only the mask cost. One has to sell 5000–6000 such devices to obtain a decent margin.
These cost problems will be reflected ultimately in the cost of care, in the amount of money each of us is contributing to the system. So, what is the solution to this cost problem?
One solution would be to use off-the-shelf hardware that is widely used in other applications. Sure, nothing can be more power efficient than a well-designed ASIC, but the price tag attached is a little prohibitive.
Since I am more or less active in the medical imaging area, let's see what off-the-shelf hardware we can use there.
For the signal processing part:
For the display and user interface part:
GPUs nowadays are very sophisticated and powerful, and it is definitely worth it to consider them for some bigger sized devices. FPGAs and DSPs are common solutions for signal processing applications, and the Figure 1 summarizes the capabilities and costs of each (in a medical ultrasound application).
Figure 1. The capabilities and costs of FPGAs and DSPs.
Atom and ARM cores are proven architectures in the consumer area, so it is only natural to be present in the selection of display and interface section. Power architecture–based devices are used more in the networking domain, and as such, they might be a little off limits due to possible on-chip accelerators, lack of connectivity, etc.
Regarding the off-the-shelf ASICs, Samplify Systems, for instance, designs frontends for the medical ultrasound. The user has some degree of freedom to bring some of his IP inside, but not much. Because the frontend characteristics are practically the parts that will determine in the end the image quality, this is a sensitive area. It is very difficult to sell such a product to many OEMs because there will be no real differentiation between products and because many of the OEMs already have patented and tested solutions of their own.
In my next posts I will speak about some of the off the shelf hardware available nowadays, and we can debate the suitablily of these architecutres.
Robert Krutsch is a DSP software engineer at Freescale Semiconductor. He received a bachelors degree specializing in automatics and computer science from the Polytechnic University of Timisoara, a bachelors degree from the Automation Institute at the University of Bremen, and a doctorate degree in automatic control from Polytechnic University of Bucharest. | <urn:uuid:378baa76-1c9b-4aef-a01d-03ca8c926123> | {
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The lacrimal or tear gland, located at the top outer edge of the eye, produces the watery portion of tears. The nasolacrimal duct system allows tears to drain from each eye into the nose. Disorders of these structures can lead to either eyes that water excessively or dry eyes. They may be congenital (present at birth) or caused by infection, foreign objects in the eye, or trauma.
Disorders of the nasal cavity and tear ducts are not as common in cats as they are in dogs. However, a few disorders occasionally are seen in this species.
Blockage of the Nasal Duct (Epiphora)
Occasionally cats will experience a chronic overflow of tears due to an obstruction of the nasal duct called epiphora. This is more common in Persian and Himalayan breeds. In most cases, there is no reason for concern when this occurs, as it does not lead to any medical problems. However, if appearance is an issue, the condition can be corrected surgically.
Inflammation of the Tear Sac (Dacryocystitis)
Inflammation of the tear sac is rare in cats. It is usually caused by obstruction of the tear sac and the attached nasolacrimal tear duct by inflammatory debris, foreign objects, or masses pressing on the duct. It results in watering eyes, conjunctivitis that is resistant to treatment, and occasionally a draining opening in the middle of the lower eyelid. If your veterinarian suspects an obstruction of the duct, he or she may attempt to unblock it by flushing it with sterile water or a saline solution. X‑rays of the skull after injection of a dye into the duct may be necessary to determine the site, cause, and outlook of longterm obstructions. The usual therapy consists of keeping the duct unblocked and using eyedrops containing antibiotics. When the tear duct has been irreversibly damaged, surgery may be necessary to create a new drainage pathway to empty tears into the nasal cavity, sinus, or mouth.
Dry Eye (Keratoconjunctivitis Sicca)
The condition known as dry eye results from inadequate tear production. It often causes persistent mucus and pus-filled conjunctivitis and slow-healing sores (ulcers) and scarring on the cornea. Dry eye is not common in cats but has been associated with longterm feline herpesvirus-1 infections. Topical therapy consists of artificial tear solutions, ointments, and, if there are no scars on the cornea, medications that contain steroids. In longterm dry eye resistant to medical therapy, surgery may be required to correct the condition.
Last full review/revision July 2011 by Kirk N. Gelatt, VMD; David G. Baker, DVM, MS, PhD, DACLAM; A. K. Eugster, DVM, PhD | <urn:uuid:33441c26-712f-4c44-9e84-2ad1a7350e3c> | {
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This early masterpiece of the Arts and Crafts Movement exemplifies the collaborative endeavors of William Morris and his circle to improve design standards. Morris believed that a return to the principles of medieval production, with fine artists creating functional objects, could help overcome the evils of industrialization. This cabinet, one of several in which Morris enlisted the participation of Sir Edward Burne-Jones, is an attempt to erase the distinction between the fine and the applied arts. The painting on leather with a punched background is itself a craftsman's medium. Although the cabinet is usually described as in the "medieval style," it is actually a vivid example of the ability of the Morris firm to convert the eclecticism that marked much of the art of the late nineteenth century into an original and modern style. Although Burne-Jones's painted figures are in medieval costume much of the decoration is equally Oriental in inspiration. Philip Webb's straightforward design, however, which boldly displays the casework skeleton on the exterior, anticipated the emphasis on structural elements that would inform the design revolution of the next century. | <urn:uuid:2f664993-a85a-464e-85be-7aeb8ba2b38f> | {
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Doorway from Abbey of Notre-Dame at Nevers
Seated Virgin and Child
Browse current and upcoming exhibitions and events.
This artwork is currently on display in Gallery 001
According to tradition, the monastery of Moutiers-Saint-Jean was founded by the first Christian kings of France, Clovis I and his son Clothar I. They are almost certainly depicted in the standing figures presenting their charters, now installed in the embrasures on either side of the portal. The small seated figures in the flanking niches represent biblical personages believed to prefigure or foretell Christ's Crucifixion. The tympanum above the doorway depicts Christ crowning the Virgin as the Queen of Heaven. This portal, probably from the north aisle of the cloister, would have led from the monastic precinct into the abbey church. The portal suffered severe damage during the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion; the heads of the two kings may have been repaired in the seventeenth century.
From the abbey of Moutiers-Saint-Jean, near Dijon, FranceMlle. Cambillarc , Moutiers-St.-Jean, France ; Jean Peslier , Vézelay, France ; [ Brummer Gallery , Paris and New York (sold 1932)]
© 2000–2013 The Metropolitan Museum of Art. All rights reserved. | <urn:uuid:fe283930-927f-476a-957b-f3ba00c36211> | {
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Benjamin Franklin was born to a poor soap boiler on January 17, 1706 in Boston, Massachusetts. He was one of many children in his family, and he learned to appreciate the rewards of hard work at age twelve as an apprentice at his brother James' printing shop. By the age of seventeen, Franklin's skills as a printer had become so strong that at twenty-two he left Boston to open his own printing shop in Pennsylvania. This is where he developed his two most famous publications, The Pennsylvania Gazette, the most popular newspaper in the colonies, and the annual Poor Richard's Almanac. Franklin was one of the first printers to use cartoons in his publications in order to accommodate the people who had not learned to read. He believed that his publications were a way to get information to every person, not just those who could read.
In Pennsylvania, Franklin founded organizations, became involved in the community, and assembled a vast collection of inventions that would allow people to live better lives. He started the first circulatory library known as the American Philosophical Society and founded an academy that would soon become the University of Pennsylvania. As a journalist, Franklin was constantly putting on and taking off his reading glasses. He became frustrated with the repetition of this task, so he cut the bottom half of his reading classes and put them in the frames of another pair of spectacles. He had given birth to the bifocals, which many of us still use today.
His scientific mind was always looking for ways to make life easier. This led him to invent the lightning rod, the Franklin stove, the odometer, and a variety of devices like the wooden "long arm." He also created the first fire company and the first fire insurance company in order to help people live safer lives. In 1748, Franklin retired from printing in order to focus his attention on electricity.
Franklin developed many electrical theories and often found innovative, and sometimes quite dangerous, ways to test them. One of his most well known theories was that lightning is a form of electricity. Discovering evidence to support this notion at first seemed to be a very difficult endeavor to achieve. How was he going to actually access lightning, a phenomenon that had mystified humans for thousands of years? Franklinís letters indicate that he initially planned a scheme that would involve a spire that was being built on a church in Philadelphia. He soon decided, however, that the spire would not be nearly tall enough to provide him adequate access to the clouds where lightning forms during a storm. A kite, he realized, could be flown to great heights, leading to the famous kite and key experiment.
Reportedly in June of 1752, Franklin and his son (who was twenty-one at the time, rather than a young boy as often appears in illustrations of the famous experiment) ventured into an open field as a thunderstorm approached. There they sent up a kite Franklin had constructed from silk. Because he knew that metal was a conductor of electricity, Franklin attached a metal rod to the top of the kite and a large metal key near the bottom of the string by which he held the kite. He thought that if lightning really were electricity, then it would charge the metal rod and would travel down the string to the key, electrifying it as well. The experiment worked exactly as he hoped. After flying the kite in the thunderclouds for some time, he noticed that the key gave off sparks when he touched it, a clear sign that it was electrified.
An educated Franklin brought his intellectual ideas and superior communication skills to the politics of a forming nation. In 1757, Franklin was sent to England as a representative of the colonies in the quarrel between England and the Colonies, and he returned as an advocate of independence. He served as a member of the Continental Congress where he helped Thomas Jefferson draft the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Franklin then became the ambassador to France, where he persuaded the French to aid the Americans in the Revolutionary War. He continued to serve the young nation in assisting the creation of the compromises developed at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.
As a journalist, scientist, inventor, statesmen, philosopher, musician, and economist, Benjamin Franklin can be thought of as a colonial Renaissance man. Through hard work and great ideas, Franklin helped shaped a young nation with the aid of his many hard-earned skills. Benjamin Franklin was a pivotal player in the foundation of the United States of America.
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Did San Luis Obispo produce any goods? Were they well-known for producing anything?
Did San Luis Obispo produce any goods? Were they well-known for producing anything? I'm working on a Mission report and I can't find any literature on
The primary products produced by the missions were cow hides and tallow. The cow hides were also known as Yankee dollars, because they were traded for manufactured goods brought by ships which were mostly from Boston. San Luis Obispo was also famous for being the first mission to make roofing tiles, which the other missions soon copied.
As of 1832, the last year for which records were kept, San Luis Obispo had a herd of 2.500 cattle and 5,432 sheep. San Luis Obispo also had large agricultural fields under cultivation. | <urn:uuid:ec9ad272-a1e0-4461-abcf-950b80c74bac> | {
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A new video explores the pros and cons of digital devices vs paper tools for recording and organizing ideas. It's a fun exercise to do. Like: no doubt that with Moleskine notebooks sharing demands a bit more effort. But they are more personal and need no batteries nor cables. No pinch-zoom function available on paper, but note taking can be quicker and more convenient than on a smart phone.
This list of pros and cons could go on forever. Or, is there a way of connecting smart phones to notebooks? Moleskine started to experiment on it, with the Smart Notebook created with Evernote, for augmented notebooking.
Smart Phones vs Moleskine Notebooks?
08 November 2012
Have a look at the video and leave your comments about pros and cons of notebooks vs digital devices or on possible ways of connecting the two. Enjoy. | <urn:uuid:d7081b0b-1dcf-4761-a286-5a90daaa8876> | {
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Term applied to the work of Giorgio De Chirico and Carlo Carrà before and during World War I and thereafter to the works produced by the Italian artists who grouped around them. Pittura Metafisica was characterized by a recognizable iconography: a fictive space was created in the painting, modelled on illusionistic one-point perspective but deliberately subverted. In de Chirico’s paintings this established disturbingly deep city squares, bordered by receding arcades and distant brick walls; or claustrophobic interiors, with steeply rising floors. Within these spaces classical statues and, most typically, metaphysical mannequins (derived from tailors’ dummies) provided a featureless and expressionless, surrogate human presence. Balls, coloured toys and unidentifiable solids, plaster moulds, geometrical instruments, military regalia and small realistic paintings were juxtaposed on exterior platforms or in crowded interiors and, particularly in Carrà’s work, included alongside the mannequins. In the best paintings these elements were combined to give a disconcerting image of reality and to capture the disquieting nature of the everyday.
The thinking behind this approach derived from the melancholic personalities of de Chirico and his brother, the writer and composer Alberto Savinio. It was encouraged by their reading (c. 1910) of the German philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer and Otto Weininger. They became interested in Nietzche’s notion of the eternal return and the circularity of time, which supported their own views about the re-enactment of myth. Their central concern was true reality (where the past recurs), which is hidden behind the reality of appearances and visible only to the ‘clearsighted’ at enigmatic moments. In his paintings de Chirico sought to unmask reality and reveal its mysterious truth. The modification of perspective and depiction of mundane objects provided the appropriate context.
In Paris (1911–15), de Chirico and Savinio became close friends of Guillaume Apollinaire , finding parallels to their understanding of Nietzsche in his conviction that the unifying element in contemporary painting was the idea of ‘surprise’, suggesting the inevitability of fate. It was Apollinaire who first called de Chirico’s painting ‘metaphysical’, referring to works produced in 1910 and 1911 (L’Intransigeant, 30 Oct 1913). De Chirico had been influenced by the work of the Symbolists and by that of Arnold Böcklin. By 1917, in Ferrara, he was painting in a simplified manner, in which crisp areas of colour outlined in black and a clear, dry modelling complement the disturbing subject-matter.
Carrà met de Chirico and Savinio for the first time in Ferrara in February 1917. A leading Futurist, Carrà had begun to withdraw from the movement in 1915 as he became interested in the combination of simplicity and monumentality in the work of Giotto and Paolo Uccello. Paring away superfluous detail in his paintings, he applied the structural lessons of these masters to figures and ordinary objects, attempting to reconcile art and nature. His understanding of Giotto’s use of a perspective subservient to the pictorial structure prepared him for the destabilizing space used by de Chirico. Carrà’s style fluctuated during these investigations, but in the metaphysical style of de Chirico he found a solution. The two painters worked closely for some months in 1917; while theoretical differences remained, their stylistic solution became known as Pittura Metafisica, a term that they were happy to apply to their work.
The Roman periodical Valori plastici appeared for the first time in November 1918 and became the proponent of Arte Metafisica, which had widened its activities in the preceding year. Savinio’s first book, Hermaphrodito, was published in 1918; Carrà held a show in Milan (1917–18), which included his Ferrarese works. De Chirico exhibited in Rome in 1918 (with Carrà) and 1919. During World War I the artists in Ferrara had been in touch with the periodical La raccolta in nearby Bologna. Through this connection Giorgio Morandi absorbed the metaphysical style; for a time c. 1918/19 his works came close to Carrà’s, in the crisp rendering of a limited group of objects. Morandi’s work was illustrated in Valori plastici, and he exhibited with de Chirico and Carrà but soon passed on to other considerations.
In 1919 Carrà published Pittura Metafisica; the book understated de Chirico’s importance in these developments and led to acrimony. A year later Filippo de Pisis, who had been part of the Ferrara group, published his lyrical prose collection about Ferrara, La città dalle 100 meraviglie. Although collages survive from 1916, de Pisis began to paint seriously only in 1919, using a soft impressionistic style for his vaguely metaphysical still-lifes. At this time the sculptor Arturo Martini, although dispensing with the characteristic perspective and mannequins, went some way towards reconciling Carrà’s Giottesque monumentality with the foreboding of de Chirico’s paintings by means of his small, clay figures. Martini’s use of the figure was symptomatic of Valori plastici’s sympathy towards the so-called post-war ‘rappel à l’ordre’. In its years of publication (1918–21), when the theoretical background of Arte Metafisica was being clarified by Savinio, de Chirico and Carrà, the style of both painters shifted radically from the position of 1917 to concentrate on the figure.
Several major artists were attracted by this development: Mario Sironi’s totemic mannequins turned into brooding solitary figures; and Felice Casorati used steep perspectives leading to dark interiors as the settings for his models. In Germany the impact of the two Valori plastici travelling exhibitions (1921 and 1924) was considerable. Featureless mannequins began to appear in the work of George Grosz, Rudolf Schlichter and Oskar Schlemmer. The effect was felt most profoundly, however, by Max Ernst. On his arrival in Paris in 1922, Ernst’s painting reflected the admiration of his poet friends for de Chirico. At that time only one painter, Pierre Roy (a pre-war friend of de Chirico), showed the influence of metaphysical art, but the painters who became Surrealists after Ernst almost all passed through a period of stylistic debt to de Chirico, notably Salvador Dalí and Alberto Giacometti (the leading creators of the Surrealist Object), René Magritte and Paul Delvaux.
These groups—Novecento Italiano in Italy, Magic Realism in Germany and international Surrealism—carried the style into the 1930s. Although Carrà occasionally painted metaphysical works, it was only in the paintings of Savinio and de Chirico that the philosophical background of Pittura Metafisica persisted.
From Grove Art Online
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Reasons to Attend a Presentation
Dates and Times of Presentations
How to Reserve/Schedule a
Time: 90 minutes
Content: Definitions of rape/sexual assault
Discussion of rape myths and effects of rape
Cultural contributors to rape
-avoid committing sexual assault
-help a friend who has been raped
-speak out against rape
Audience: Any men who want to learn more about how to prevent sexual assault. Great for male residence halls, fraternities, athletic teams, and other male organizations.
Presenters: Males who are trained in sexual assault prevention and who do NOT believe that “every man is a potential rapist.”
Requests: Requests for presentations can be emailed to [email protected] or by calling 994-5682.
Reduce the likelihood that the crimes of rape or sexual assault will occur within your organization. In addition to being criminal offenses, rape and sexual assault can bring sanctions from the university as well as national governing bodies, and can ruin the reputations of your members, the organization, the team, or the university.
-Good Public Relations
When a rape or sexual assault occurs (or is even rumored to have occurred) within an organization, word quickly spreads to beware of that group. Taking an active part in sexual assault prevention allows the rest of the MSU community see your organization in a positive light. Depending on your level of involvement, your group can be listed on the MSR website as a supporter so that others can see that your organization is committed to preventing sexual violence.
-Protect and Educate Your Members
A large number of men who committed rape or sexual assault didn’t know they had committed a crime, even though their actions clearly met legal criteria for these offenses. An MSR presentation will teach your members what the laws are and how to look out for yourself and your friends.
-Help Protect Females
We all have females who are close to us: friends, girlfriends, sisters, and mothers. Department of Justice statistics show that 1 in 4 women will be a victim of rape. Learning about sexual assault, rape, and what you can do to prevent it helps educate others and works towards keeping women safe.
Presentations for Fall have not yet been scheduled. Call us to arrange a special presentation for your group, or watch this space for a schedule or presentations.
To reserve a spot at one of the presentations, please call 994-5682. Spaces are limited to 15-20 people, so call soon to get the day and time you want! Feel free to bring snacks or beverages, but please be prepared to stay for the entire duration of the presentation. In some cases, we may be able to come to your organization and present directly; call for details. | <urn:uuid:8a212759-c976-4712-98c5-398bdc7719d4> | {
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OTTAWA — Hop cultivation, which has been dormant in Quebec for more than 60 years, could see a revival, thanks to a $400,000 Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and Quebec Ministry of Agriculture research project in a rural part of the province.
The study will help two farmers in Pontiac Country, near the Ontario border, grow 10 varieties of hops to determine which ones grow best and are most disease-resistant. The research project is expected to last three to five years.
Jacques Lance, who has a 364-hectare farm on Grand Calumet Island, said hop cultivation could help Quebec cattle and cash crop farmers diversify their crops and increase their incomes.
Richard Gravel, an Agriculture Canada spokesman, said scientists suggested the project in 2005 when the price of hops doubled. Gravel said almost all Quebec microbreweries are interested in the Pontiac study because they want locally produced hops.
Lance said the price of hops — green cone-shaped flowers that give beer a bitter tang — recently increased by more than 400 per cent in one year. He said even though the price has since declined he hopes to receive at least $10 a pound for this year's crop from a small, experimental plot.
An Agriculture Canada explanation of the project said it would transfer hop-growing techniques to other farms, improve regional economies and meet the needs of microbreweries.
Lawrence Cannon, MP for Pontiac and foreign affairs minister, and Jean-Pierre Blackburn, the minister of state for agriculture, announced the government investment in hop production at Lance's farm about 100 kilometres northwest of Ottawa on Thursday.
Lance said a shortage of hops has forced the price up and made it difficult for some microbreweries to find a reliable supply.
"The basic plan is to help farmers diversify their incomes and help microbreweries," Lance said. "The Quebec microbreweries are looking for a made-in-Quebec product because some growers told them they might not be able to supply them with hops any more.
"There had been a couple of bad years and that created a shortage. Hops had been selling at $4 to $5 a pound and then they went up to $40 or $50. Some big breweries tried to buy up almost all the hops and that left the microbreweries with a big problem." | <urn:uuid:941d6db8-de4a-4331-a494-8cc17d226f44> | {
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El Castillo/Temple of Kukulcán
The most dramatic structure in Chichén Itzá is El Castillo (the Castle), also known as the Temple of Kukulcán. At 24 meters (79 feet) it’s the tallest structure on the site, and certainly the most recognizable. Dating to around A.D. 850, the Castillo was built according to strict astronomical guidelines.
There are nine levels, which, divided by the central staircase, make for 18 platforms, the number of months in the Maya calendar. Each of the four sides has 91 steps; together with the platform on top, there are 365 steps, or one for each day of the year. There are 52 inset panels on each face, equal to the number of years in each cycle of the Calendar Round.
On the spring and autumn equinoxes (March 21 and September 22), the afternoon sun lights up a bright zigzag strip on the outside wall of the north staircase and the giant serpent heads at the base, giving the appearance of a serpent slithering down the steps. Chichén Itzá is mobbed during those periods, especially by spiritual-minded folks seeking communion with the ancient Mayas. The effect also occurs in the days just before and after the equinox, and there are many fewer people blocking the view.
Climbing the Castillo used to be a given for any visit to Chichén Itzá, and the views from its top level are breathtaking. However, an elderly tourist died in 2005, after tumbling from near the top of the pyramid to the ground. The accident, combined with longtime warnings from archaeologists that the structure was being irreparably eroded by the hundreds of thousands of visitors who climbed it yearly, prompted officials to close it off. Pyramids at other sites have been restricted as well, and it’s looking more and more like a permanent policy.
Deep inside the Castillo, and accessed by way of a steep, narrow staircase are several chambers. Inside one archaeologists discovered a red-painted, jade-studded figure of a jaguar.
© Gary Chandler & Liza Prado from Moon Yucatán Peninsula, 9th edition | <urn:uuid:0bb6ea08-0a56-4f44-8468-0f1d257b07d5> | {
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Radnor Lake State Natural Area
Just seven miles southwest of downtown Nashville, Radnor Lake State Natural Area (Otter Creek Rd., 615/373-3467) provides a natural escape for visitors and residents of the city. Eighty-five acre Radnor Lake was created in 1914 by the Louisville and Nashville Railroad Company, which impounded Otter Creek to do so.
The lake was to provide water for the railroad’s steam engines. By the 1940s, the railroad’s use of the lake ended and 20 years later the area was threatened by development. Local residents, including the Tennessee Ornithological Society, successfully rallied against development and Radnor Lake State Natural Area was established in 1973.
There are six miles of hiking trails around the lake, and Otter Creek Road, which is closed to vehicular traffic, is open to bicycles and walkers. A nature museum at the visitors center describes some of the 240 species of birds and hundreds of species of plants and animals that live at Radnor. The visitors center is open Sunday–Thursday 9 a.m.–4 p.m. and Friday–Saturday 8 a.m.–4 p.m.
Radnor is well-used and well-loved by Nashvillians, and for good reason. Very few American cities have such a large and pristine natural area so close to the urban center.
© Susanna Henighan Potter from Moon Tennessee, 5th Edition | <urn:uuid:1de423fc-8776-4595-a827-3d5db03cd9cc> | {
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Since the 1960s, Washington has clamped a strict trade embargo on Cuba in the expectation that economic distress would oust Castro or at least moderate his behavior. Since 1996 the U.S. embargo has been embodied in law (heretofore it was an executive order). Here’s what Uncle Sam says the embargo, enacted on February 3, 1962, by President Kennedy, is about:
The fundamental goal of U.S. policy toward Cuba is to promote a peaceful transition to a stable, democratic form of government and respect for human rights. Our policy has two fundamental components: maintaining pressure on the Cuban Government for change through the embargo and the Libertad Act while providing humanitarian assistance to the Cuban people, and working to aid the development of civil society in the country.
Critics call it a violation of international law that injures and threatens the welfare of Cuban people. The United Nations General Assembly routinely votes to condemn it (the 2009 vote was 187-3, with only Palau and Israel—which trades with Cuba—joining the United States in voting against the resolution).
Uncle Sam even fines foreign companies doing business with Cuba. Talk about shooting oneself in the foot! For example, when Hilton and Sheraton hotels worldwide were banned from accepting Cuban trade delegations, European unions and parliamentarians initiated a boycott of the hotel chains, while the Mexican government even fined Sheraton US$100,000 for expelling Cuban guests in violation of international law. Meanwhile, the ultimate irony and hypocrisy is that although no Cuban goods can be sold to the United States, the U.S. does permit sales of “agricultural” and certain other goods to Cuba under a waiver that runs from daiquiri mix to rolls of newsprint (even the Communist rag, Granma, is printed on paper from Alabama), to the tune of US$718 million in 2008!
The effects of the embargo (which Castro calls el bloqueo, or blockade) are much debated. In 1999, Cuba filed a claim for US$181 billion in reparations. However, in 2000, the International Trade Commission (ITC) determined that the embargo has had a minimal impact on the Cuban economy, citing domestic policies as the main cause of Cuba’s economic woes (for three decades, the effects of the embargo were almost entirely offset by massive subsidies from the Soviet Union). As President Carter noted during his visit to Havana in May 2002: “These restraints are not the source of Cuba’s economic problems. Cuba can trade with more than 100 countries, and buy medicines, for example, more cheaply in Mexico than in the United States.”
The paradox is that the policy achieves the opposite effect to its stated goals: It provides a wonderful excuse for the Communist system’s economic failings, and a rationale to suppress dissidents and civil liberties under the aegis of national security for an island under siege. It also permits Fidel Castro to perform the role of Cuba’s anti-imperialistic savior that he has cast for himself.
Although State Department officials privately admit that the embargo is the fundamental source of Fidel’s hold on power, U.S. presidents are wed to what Ann Louise Bardach calls a “transparently disastrous policy, trading off sensible and enduring solutions for short-term electoral gains [in Florida]” in response to fanatically anti-Castroite Cuban-American interests.
U.S. citizens who oppose the embargo and restrictions on U.S. citizens’ constitutional right to travel can make their views known to representatives in Washington.
Contact Your Senator or Representative in Congress (U.S. Congress, Washington, DC 20510, tel. 202/224-3121 or 800/839-5276, www.house.gov and www.senate.gov ). Write a simple, moderate, straightforward letter to your representative that makes the argument for ending the travel ban and embargo and requests he/she cosponsor a bill to that effect.
Write or Call the President (The President, The White House, Washington, DC 20500, tel. 202/456-1414, president [at] whitehouse [dot] gov). Also call or fax the White House Comment Line (202/456-1111, fax 202/456-2461, www.whitehouse.gov ) and the Secretary of State (202/647-4000, www.state.gov/secretary ).
Publicize Your Concern. Write a simple, moderate, straightforward letter to the editor of your local newspaper as well as any national newspapers or magazines and make the argument for ending the embargo.
Support the Freedom to Travel Campaign. Contact the Latin America Working Group (424 C St. NE, Washington, DC 20002, tel. 202/546-7010, www.lawg.org ), which campaigns to lift the travel restrictions and U.S. embargo, monitors legislators, and can advise on how representatives have voted on Cuba-related issues; and sign the Orbitz Open Cuba (www.opencuba.org ) petition. | <urn:uuid:3b1dd486-de71-442f-bdfe-11e8fe719761> | {
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Definitions of human
a. - Belonging to man or mankind; having the qualities or attributes of a man; of or pertaining to man or to the race of man; as, a human voice; human shape; human nature; human sacrifices. 2
n. - A human being. 2
The word "human" uses 5 letters: A H M N U.
No direct anagrams for human found in this word list.
List shorter words within human, sorted by length
All words formed from human by changing one letter
Browse words starting with human by next letter | <urn:uuid:555a45a4-8c79-4a61-9f82-3f7c513fb09e> | {
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Hidden for 10,000 years, Inner Space Cavern is one of the best preserved
caves in Texas and one of the few places where remains of prehistoric
animals were unearthed.
Inner Space Cavern was discovered by a Texas Highway Department
core drilling team in the Spring of 1963. While drilling through
40 feet of solid limestone, the bit broke into what is now known
as Inner Space Cavern. An adventurous employee of the highway department
was lowered into the hole while standing on the drill bit and holding
tightly to the stem. He was the first human being to enter INNER
SPACE. What an exciting voyage this must have been!
So come explore with us
and let us show you our side of Texas! | <urn:uuid:80547f5f-af36-41b7-a676-484f63f001bb> | {
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lot of wisdom that comes down from centuries cannot be proven scientifically.
Yet the modern world acknowledges a debt of gratitude to ancient people
who passed down their knowledge to their children who in turn transmitted
the knowledge to their children.
this reason, anthropologists and scientists study remote tribes in place
like Latin America or the Andaman Islands. They feel they can learn
a lot of ancient wisdom from tribals. Ayurveda, homeopathy, and Unani
medicine aren't taught in Europe or America. But they thrive in India.
Primitive tribals in Latin America, for instance, will cure a fever
by getting a patient to swallow a soup made form boiled roots and leaves.
They are illiterate, if you ask them how the soup works, They will shrug
and say they don't know. But their inherited knowledge has come down
over the centuries. It's the same thing with tantric items. They work
on the premise of staunch belief. | <urn:uuid:2c614d01-6b0d-45f8-97e4-edc7ec2a6fee> | {
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Texas Dust Storms
The same weather system that brought snow and ice to the American Midwest just after Thanksgiving 2005 also kicked up significant dust in western Texas and eastern Mexico. The winds associated with this cold front also fanned the flames of grass fires in the region, adding smoke to the mixture of aerosols. The most obvious dust cloud is a pale beige dust plume swirling through Texas and Mexico. However, a second, more orange-colored cloud of dust blows across northern Texas. Parts of northern Texas saw wind speeds around 60 miles per hour. Resulting dust storms reduced visibility to just 2.5 miles in some areas, and swamped local fire departments with calls regarding both fires and downed power lines.
Image Credit: NASA/GSFC/MODIS Land Rapid Response Team/Jeff Schmaltz | <urn:uuid:2091f67c-e700-47ea-81fd-57c4320514bc> | {
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A few days ago, I wrote a post about why the word barrel is abbreviated bbl. I thought I had done my homework. I had checked my sources and it seemed like my post was reliably sourced (going back as early as 1904) when I had attributed the abbreviation bbl to the use of blue colored barrels in the Pennsylvania oil industry in the 1860s.
Thankfully, an anonymous reader wrote in with a tip saying that bbl was in use long before the Pennsylvania oil industry. Sure enough, I did a little poking around on the internet and found some old cargo manifests from the early days of sail. I found one as early as 1764 that use the bbl abbreviation and it was certainly in use even before this.
(Manifest of the brig Sally, dated September 11, 1764 - note the bbl abbreviation)
So where did bbl come from? I contacted three reference librarians across the country, and after doing their research, all three came back with the "blue barrel" answer. When after I explained my earlier cargo manifest finds, one librarian from New York still put up a defense saying that "blue barrel" was well researched and had a long history of documented evidence.
One site I found took a couple of good guesses stating that the "b" may have been doubled originally to indicate the plural (1 bl, 2 bbl), or possibly it was doubled to eliminate any confusion with bl as a symbol for the bale. Of course these are just guesses.
I'll keep looking for a satisfactory answer and I'll let you know if I find anything. Of course if there's someone else with more information, feel free to post in the comments. | <urn:uuid:f62a3201-3c73-4ba8-b8cd-b6198ec9e735> | {
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The military ban on women in combat is coming to an end. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced the overturning of a 1994 Pentagon rule that restricts women from artillery, armor, and infantry jobs.
This country has had a storied history of women fighting for the country, despite various forces dissuading them from doing so. As of last year, for example, more than 800 women have been wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan (where about 20,000 women have served) despite the combat ban. But the story is older than that, as old as the country even. A woman by the name of Margaret Cochran fought in the Revolutionary War, and hundreds of women disguised themselves as men just to take up arms in the Civil War.
According to the National Archives, as many as 400 women fought during the Civil War while concealing their gender. Mary Livermore of the U.S. Sanitary Commission wrote in 1888:
Some one has stated the number of women soldiers known to the service as little less than four hundred. I cannot vouch for the correctness of this estimate, but I am convinced that a larger number of women disguised themselves and enlisted in the service, for one cause or other, than was dreamed of. Entrenched in secrecy, and regarded as men, they were sometimes revealed as women, by accident or casualty. Some startling histories of these military women were current in the gossip of army life.
Let’s meet some of these women who, in a sense, paved the way for today's ban reversal. Here are four women who fought, compiled from Larry G. Eggleston's Women in the Civil War.
- Loretta Janeta Velazquez was a total badass. Born to a rich Cuban aristocrat, Velazquez’s wealth played a key role in her fighting for the Confederate army. When her husband, William, went off to war in 1861, Velazquez wanted so badly to be with him that she offered to fight beside him incognito. William wouldn't hear it, and went off to war without her. Not content with life alone, Velazquez decided to use her wealth to finance and equip an infantry battalion, which she would bring to her husband to command. She cut her hair, tanned her skin, and went by the name Lt. Harry T. Buford. She went on to fight in various battles, including Bull Run and Shiloh, but her gender was twice discovered and she was discharged. So, naturally, she became a spy, with disguises in both the male and female variety.
- It must have been hard to hide your gender while serving in the war. Take it from Lizzie Compton, who enlisted at the age of 14. Her gender was discovered seven different times. But each time, she packed up her things and moved on to another regimen. Compton was wounded twice during her service, the first time by a piece of shrapnel as she charged up a hill at Antietam.
- Louisa Hoffman has the distinction of serving for both the Union and Confederate armies. When the war first started, she left her home in New York to enlist (as a man, of course) in the 1st Virginia Confederate Cavalry. But, after fighting at both battles of Bull Run, she had a change of heart, and headed up north to Ohio.
- Mary Seaberry was said to wear a disguise and have a manner that “never gave anyone in her regiment even the slightest hint that she was not a man.” Unfortunately for her, after being admitted into a hospital with a fever, there was no way she could hide her true identity. She was discharged “on the basis of sexual incompatibility.” | <urn:uuid:3bc76c0b-daca-4b76-88b4-dcfe82c675f5> | {
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Spider silk can be scary enough to insects to act as a pest repellant, researchers say.
These findings could lead to a new way to naturally help protect crops, scientists added.
Spiders are among the most common predators on land. Although not all spiders weave webs, they all spin silk that may serve other purposes. For instance, many tiny spiders use silk balloons to travel by air.
Science news from NBCNews.com
Researchers suspected that insects and other regular prey of spiders might associate silk with the risk of getting eaten. As such, they reasoned silk might scare insects off.
The scientists experimented with Japanese beetles (Popillia japonica) and Mexican bean beetles (Epilachna varivestis). These plant-munching pests have spread across eastern North America within the past half-century. [ Ewww! Nature's Biggest Pests ]
The beetles were analyzed near green bean plants (Phaseolus vulgaris) in both the lab and a tilled field outdoors. The investigators applied two kinds of silk on the plants — one from silkworms (Bombyx mori) and another from a long-jawed spider (Tetragnatha elongata), a species common in riverbank forests but not in the region the researchers studied.
Both spider and silkworm silk reduced insect plant-chewing significantly. In the lab, both eliminated insect damage entirely, while in the field, spider silk had a greater effect — plants enclosed with beetles and spider silk experienced about 50 percent less damage than leaves without spider silk, while silkworm silk only led to about a 10 to 20 percent reduction. Experiments with other fibers revealed that only silk had this protective effect.
"This work suggests that silk alone is a signal to potential prey that danger is near," researcher Ann Rypstra, an evolutionary ecologist at Miami University in Ohio, told LiveScience.
Rypstra was most surprised that the effect occurred even though the species involved do not share any evolutionary history together as predator and prey. This suggests "herbivores are using the silk as some sort of general signal that a spider — any ol' spider — is around and responding by reducing their activity or leaving the area," she said.
While more work will need to be done before this research might find applied use, the fact that the presence of silk alone reduced damage caused by two economically important pest insects "suggests that there could be applications in agricultural pest management and biological control," Rypstra said.
Rypstra is also interested in the chain reaction of events that silk might trigger in an ecosystem.
"For example, if an herbivore encounters a strand of silk and alters its behavior in a particular manner, does that make it more susceptible to predation by a non-spider?" Rypstra asked. "Do spiders that leave lots of silk behind have a larger impact in the food web, and how does it vary from habitat to habitat? These are just a couple of questions that we might be exploring in the near future."
Rypstra and her colleagues detailed their findings online Wednesday in the journal Biology Letters.
- Gallery: Spooky Spiders
- What Really Scares People: Top 10 Phobias
- Gallery: Dazzling Photos of Dew-Covered Insects
© 2012 LiveScience.com. All rights reserved. | <urn:uuid:2bf9f9b2-3cdc-4ce4-979e-a8d74b24efa5> | {
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Science Friday is a National Public Radio program for kids interested in science. The program menu allows one to listen to the weekly program, read questions related to the program and get suggestions for further study. Another good option in the program menu is the Sounds Like Science Mentor page. A topic of current interest is chosen each week and material concerning this topic is available. A scientist with expertise in this area is available to answer questions about the current topic. Other program menu topics have general information about NPR.
Newton's APPLE is a long-running PBS science show. The site is not very fancy, but surfing through the episodes will yield some excellent home science activities.
Bill Nye the Science Guy
Bill Nye the Science Guy is a Disney science TV show. One can read today's episode and research previous episodes. A current news portion includes science news and science of sports sections. A daily demo safe for kids to do is related to the news or the current episode. Film clips and sounds of science involve downloading files. Many museum sites are included in Top Ten Links.
Scientific American Frontiers
This site offers a forum where you can post your opinion about one of the shows. Teachers can get teacher guides to each show and also access on-line activity based on each show. There is a "related links" section which offers hyper text links for each show of the season. Students can post questions to the scientists involved in each show.
This site includes lesson plans and activities for incorporating PBS programming into classroom curriculum. | <urn:uuid:517d07db-c182-4547-b570-7904bcfeb58f> | {
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NetWellness is a global, community service providing quality, unbiased health information from our partner university faculty. NetWellness is commercial-free and does not accept advertising.
Saturday, May 25, 2013
Crackles in Inhaling
what is the cause of crackles? What can be done ?
"Crackles" refers to a non-specific, subjective description of an abnormal sound which is heard when someone listens to the lung. The list of problems which can cause crackles is quite long and varies. If indeed crackles are present, then some investigation to understand what might be causing this abnormal sound is important. This will likely be some picture of the lung. In general, abnormal findings should be investigated until a satisfactory explanation is obtained for the abnormal finding. Once a cause is identified, one can then define an appropriate course of action.
Robert Schilz, DO, PhD
Associate Professor of Medicine
School of Medicine
Case Western Reserve University | <urn:uuid:61b7ee4b-a053-4731-b336-7fa2d7ed9e1a> | {
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Sumatra, erected by a Decree of 30 June, 1911, and entrusted to the Dutch Capuchins. Previously it formed part of the Vicariate Apostolic of Batavia, which is under the care of the Jesuits of Holland. The new prefecture comprises Sumatra and the surrounding islands, including Bangka (area, 4888 sq. miles; population, 78,000) The Island of Sumatra, referred to as Jabadin by Ptolemy, and visited by Marco Polo in 1292, was discovered by the Portuguese navigator Siqueira in 1508, and occupied by the Dutch in 1599. It extends from 95º 16' to 106º 3' E. long., and from 5º 40' N. to 5º 59' S. lat., and has an area of about 181,000 square miles. The natives, of Malayan race, number about 5,500,000, exclusive of the little known inland tribes. They are indolent and cruel; their religion is a mixture of fetishism and Mahommedanism. At the beginning of 1911 the Jesuits had four chief mission centres in Sumatra, — at Medan, Padang, Koata Radja, and Tandjeong-Sakti, — and sixteen minor stations. The Sisters of Charity of Tilburg (Holland) were established at Padang. There were two mission schools, and 4600 Catholics of whom 3200 were Europeans.
Missiones Catholicæ (Rome, 1907), 263-6; Pius Almanak (Amsterdam, 1912); ZONDERVAN, Banka en zijne bewoners (Amsterdam, 1895); YZERMAN, Dwars door Sumatra (Haarlem, 1896).
APA citation. (1912). Prefecture Apostolic of Sumatra. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14333b.htm
MLA citation. "Prefecture Apostolic of Sumatra." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 14. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912. <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14333b.htm>.
Transcription. This article was transcribed for New Advent by Douglas J. Potter. Dedicated to the Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Ecclesiastical approbation. Nihil Obstat. July 1, 1912. Remy Lafort, S.T.D., Censor. Imprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York.
Contact information. The editor of New Advent is Kevin Knight. My email address is feedback732 at newadvent.org. (To help fight spam, this address might change occasionally.) Regrettably, I can't reply to every letter, but I greatly appreciate your feedback — especially notifications about typographical errors and inappropriate ads. | <urn:uuid:26a4de0e-5d2d-4bb6-af3b-5eb5b66a5b73> | {
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Environmental History of Georgia: Overview
Native American Influences
Humans arrived in the Southeast roughly 12,000 years ago. Over the millennia, Native Americans interacted with the landscape in numerous ways. Fire setting, first used to promote hunting, had perhaps the most significant impact.
Fire setting was probably common in the Piedmont. Varying fire-setting regimes would have created a patchy landscape, in which frequently burned, open oak forests adjoined less recently burned areas crowded with saplings, briars, and shrubs or unburned areas with more thin-barked trees. In the Coastal Plain, lightning perpetuated longleaf pine stands carpeted with diverse herbs or wiregrass and bounded by firebreaks like cypress swamps; Indian-set fires may have supplemented the natural regime. Scholarly opinion differs as to the fire regime in the mountains. Fires from lightning strikes are rare and low in intensity in most montane sites. Native Americans certainly supplemented the natural fire regime by burning in the river valleys to promote agriculture and probably burned many dry mountain ridges. Moist coves would have burned less often.
The settlement of
Thus, the landscape prior to European arrival was not entirely pristine. Rather, in a complex mosaic, human riverine settlements punctuated landscapes of large, fire-fostered pines and oaks abutting unburned areas such as cypress swamps in the Coastal Plain and huge cove hardwoods in the mountains.
European Settlement and Landscape Transformation
Europeans transformed the forested mosaic promoted by the Native Americans to a land forged for the production of goods for foreign markets. Huge harvests of forest resources in early colonial days were the first to demonstrate the size of the export market. Ginseng was collected to scarcity, and animal pelts were taken from southeastern forests in huge quantities. From 1700 to 1715 more than 1 million fox, elk, otter, and other skins were shipped from Charleston, South Carolina; from 1739 to 1761 more than 5 million pounds of deerskins alone were exported from the Southeast. Beavers were nearly extirpated from the state, and buffalo and elk were disappearing by 1760. Of the commodities that followed, rice, cotton, and timber spurred perhaps the greatest changes in Georgia's landscape.
Rice and Cotton
In 1750 the prohibition on owning slaves was lifted in Georgia, catalyzing large-scale commercial agriculture. Rice was the first commodity to transform a portion of Georgia's landscape. Landowners cleared large swaths of forest to construct plantations and rice fields. However, tidal rivers inundated and drained the impounded rice, limiting the most intense human agricultural impact to the tidal deltas.
Upon Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin in 1793, cotton production spurred a landscape transformation across the Piedmont and the western and Upper Coastal Plain. Following a cascade of land cessions from Native Americans, farmers rolled across the land, growing cotton for profit and corn for livestock and human consumption. They cleared and farmed a plot of land for a few years, then abandoned the depleted soil and moved on. Staggering amounts of soil were eroded off the barren fields; on average, 7.5 inches of topsoil were lost. The eroded sediments washed into streams, burying milldams and depositing as much as eight to fifteen feet of silt on some streambeds. The higher streambeds and absence of plants to impede winter storm runoff caused widespread flooding. Intense cotton farming and its deleterious effects continued until the 1920s, when the boll weevil, plummeting prices, and depleted soils contributed to a precipitous decline in production.
Hence, by the 1930s commercial agriculture, industrial logging, and nascent urbanization had created a landscape far different from that first encountered by Europeans. The stumps and scraggly trees of cut-over land, silted streams and denuded hillsides of abandoned farms, and growing networks of towns and transportation corridors had replaced much of the forest mosaic.
Conservation and Reforestation
In the mid-1900s two trends changed the tenor of human impact on the Georgia landscape. First, soil and timber depletion spurred conservation efforts. Second, much of the barren land reverted to trees.
An impetus to preserve wild landscapes had gained national momentum in the early twentieth century. Following that course, many state and national wildlife refuges, parks, and forests were established in Georgia in the 1920s and 1930s, in a movement that continued throughout the century.
While many farms adopted better farming practices, others were abandoned. In a trend that peaked in the 1960s, abandoned fields underwent secondary succession, a process in which grasses, shrubs, pines, and hardwoods succeed one another over time.
In the 1930s Charles Herty, a chemist at the University of Georgia, revolutionized land use in Georgia when he stimulated the pulpwood industry by using young pines to make white paper. Many old fields, particularly in the Coastal Plain, converted to pine plantations.
Urbanization and Regulation
In the second half of the twentieth century, human-environment interactions became increasingly complex. By the 1960s a dearth of regulation had permitted severe pollution problems. Urbanization accelerated. The population of Georgia doubled from roughly 4 million people in 1960 to more than 8 million in 2000, exacerbating pollution problems, straining water resources, and fragmenting the landscape through urban sprawl. At the same time, the science of ecology came of age and fostered an appreciation of biodiversity and an understanding of the links among species extinction, urban sprawl, and invasive exotic species.
Pollution and Water Supply Regulations
In 1960 very few air or water pollution controls existed. Industries released more than 400 toxic chemicals into the air, drinking-water quality was not regulated, and 70 percent of the municipal sewage in Georgia entered rivers untreated. Fossil fuel use spawned high levels of ground-level ozone in large urban areas. Construction sediment coated stream bottoms, and water supplies became problematic as demand from the growing population, industry, and agriculture increased. While ozone, water supply, and sediment proved more intractable, state and national regulations successfully addressed many egregious problems, markedly improving the environment.
Urban Sprawl and Species Conservation
Several forces countered these trends. In 1973 the federal Endangered Species Act was passed, spurring the protection of species in Georgia. Land conservation by many groups accelerated, and the Georgia Community Greenspace Program was created in 2000 through an act of the Georgia legislature. The voluntary program provides funds to encourage counties to preserve 20 percent of their land and water permanently as greenspace for the protection of natural resources and informal recreation.
R. Harold Brown, The Greening of Georgia: The Improvement of the Environment in the Twentieth Century (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2002).
Linda G. Chafin, A Field Guide to the Rare Plants of Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007).
Donald Edward Davis, Where There Are Mountains: An Environmental History of the Southern Appalachians (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000).
Timothy Silver, A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in South Atlantic Forests, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, England; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Mart A. Stewart, & quot;What Nature Suffers to Groe & quot;: Life, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, 1680-1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996).
Mark V. Wetherington, The New South Comes to Wiregrass Georgia, 1860-1910 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994).
Michael Williams, Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography (Cambridge, Eng.: University of Cambridge Press, 1989).
Leslie Edwards, Atlanta
A project of the Georgia Humanities Council, in partnership with the University of Georgia Press, the University System of Georgia/GALILEO, and the Office of the Governor. | <urn:uuid:bf63e449-6a9c-42dc-bb74-bfe5c106b951> | {
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SETI Pioneers by David Swift, University of Arizona Press, pp 434, $35/£32.50
The scientist at the sensitive radio receiver was baffled by the strange signals apparently coming from deep space. 'The thought flashed through my mind that the disturbances I had observed might be due to intelligent control . . . The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another.'
No, this is not a piece of science fiction. Nor is it an account of a contemporary NASA researcher into SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence). The scientist was Nikolas Tesla, tuning into 'the ether' back in 1899.
Despite a few suspicions of this kind, no one pursued SETI seriously until 1959, when interest in the subject suddenly exploded. Since then, hundreds of radio telescopes around the world have been pressed into service to scan the sky ...
To continue reading this article, subscribe to receive access to all of newscientist.com, including 20 years of archive content. | <urn:uuid:ebbf1b83-ea9b-48b3-9a3b-4f970ea6c537> | {
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DID shrinking guts and high-energy food help us evolve enormous, powerful brains? The latest round in the row over what's known as the "expensive tissue hypothesis" says no. But don't expect that to settle the debate.
The hypothesis has it that in order to grow large brains relative to body size, our ancestors had to free up energy from elsewhere - perhaps by switching to rich foods like nuts and meat, which provide more calories and require less energy to break down, or possibly by learning to cook: cooked food also requires less energy to digest.
Kari Allen and Richard Kay of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, turned to New World monkeys to explore the hypothesis. Previous studies offer a wealth of data on the monkeys' diets and show that their brain size varies greatly from species to species. But when the pair controlled for similarities between related species, they found no correlation between large brains and small guts (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2011.1311).
As Robin Dunbar at the University of Oxford points out: "It is one thing to say that the hypothesis doesn't apply to New World monkeys, and another to extrapolate that to humans."
If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.
Have your say
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Only personal subscribers may leave comments on this article | <urn:uuid:5da2971f-7ad1-46da-8894-812addcdbae4> | {
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Together, hydraulics and pneumatics are
known as fluid power. Fluid power is a partner in an evolving
high technology alliance that provides the world with
unprecedented control of force, torque, position and motion.
The combination of fluid power systems
with advanced electronics adds control and flexibility to the
strength of hydraulics and the speed of pneumatics. These 23
application examples show some typical applications for
this technology. The examples, though simplified for clarity,
are based on real applications.
As you read each one, you will learn
why fluid power was chosen as a power source (whether it be
hydraulic or pneumatic), and which categories of electronic
sensing and control were central to the design. The
applications are organized around four motion control
categories - force, position, velocity and acceleration - all
typical output requirements of a vehicle, machine or system.
Each application is also linked to NFPA's
Fluid Power Product Locator. This locator, with its links
to NFPA's manufacturing members, will facilitate your
exploration into the world of fluid power.
In addition to the applications below, see
the latest Case Studies of Applications Utilizing Pneumatic
and Hydraulic Technology.
The following applications in PDF
format are included here: | <urn:uuid:88c4732f-85bb-47b5-bd08-330090af9e5c> | {
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The Aurora Collection returns to the Natural History Museum
A world-class collection of 296 naturally coloured diamonds has been loaned to the Natural History Museum by diamond collectors Alan Bronstein and Harry Rodman. The Aurora Collection comprises 267.45 carats of exceptionally rare stones, from the 12 colour varieties, and reveals an enchanting spectrum from emerald green to blood red.
'Gems like these were not meant to be imprisoned in a dark vault for the momentary pleasure of a few eyes,' said Alan Bronstein, co-owner of the Aurora Collection. 'The true value of a collection is sharing it with as many people who are interested to experience nature's diversity of expression. It's thrilling to think that the collection will be seen by the 3.6 million visitors that come to the Natural History Museum each year.'
Coloured, so called 'fancy', diamonds have become more desirable than ever. Coloured stones were recently worn by actresses Halle Berry and Scarlett Johansson. Fancy diamonds are very rare: only one in every 10,000 gem-quality diamonds is coloured. The colour in diamonds results from tiny amounts of elements other than carbon, or from atomic scale defects, in the diamond structure.
'Each coloured diamond tells its own story, giving us insight not only into its formation but also to the deep earth processes that took place when the gem was formed,' said Alan Hart, Curator of Minerals at the Natural History Museum. 'For example, yellow diamonds are due to the presence of nitrogen in the structure and green diamonds owe their colour to natural radiation damage, It's an amazing opportunity to be able to display this unique collection of exceptionally rare gems at the Museum.'
The Aurora Collection was displayed for the first time in Europe in 2005 as part of the Natural History Museum's Diamonds exhibition. This stunning collection of diamonds is now on display at the end of the Museum's Minerals and Meteorites gallery. The display highlights a little-known property shared by coloured and white diamonds - some of them glow and change colour when exposed to ultra-violet light.
The Natural History Museum has secured £150,000 of funding, from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS)/ Wolfson Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund, to transform the space that contains the Aurora collection into a dazzling gem gallery. Redevelopment plans are currently being made and the gallery is set to be finished in December 2007.
Notes for editors
Winner of the 2006 Independent award for the UK's favourite museum, gallery or heritage attraction at the Museum and Heritage Awards for Excellence, the Natural History Museum is also a world-leading science research centre. Through its collections and scientific expertise, the Museum is helping to conserve the extraordinary richness and diversity of the natural world with groundbreaking projects in 68 countries.
Venue: Natural History Museum
Opening hours: Monday to Saturday 10.00-17.50, Sunday 11.00-17.50
Visitor enquiries: 020 7942 5000 Monday-Friday, 020 7942 5011 Saturday and Sunday | <urn:uuid:69af0bba-2e28-41e9-aeb0-008cd0514842> | {
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Thursday November 8 2012
There are more than half a million people with autism in the UK
“Genetic mutation discovered in people with autism,” The Daily Telegraph reports.
The newspaper goes on to say that this mutation “cuts communication between brain cells to about one-tenth of normal levels” and offers “a likely explanation” for the cognitive and behavioural difficulties experienced by people with autism.
This headline is loosely based on recent research into the impact of a previously discovered genetic mutation on the ability of brain cells to transmit signals. The Telegraph speculated that misfiring signals could cause the symptoms of autism.
The study was conducted using rat brain cells, and did not involve people with autism directly.
The researchers described the detailed molecular processes that occur between brain cells when the level of a specific protein is changed. Previous research had discovered that mutations to the gene that controls this protein occurred in people with some types of autism. The authors found that varying the level of this protein affected other proteins responsible for communication between the rats’ brain cells.
The research did not, however, examine the impact of this disrupted communication in people with autism, and should not be interpreted as offering “a likely explanation for their cognitive and behavioural difficulties” as reported by the Telegraph.
In addition, many experts think that autism may arise as the result of a combination of factors – not just genetics. Viewing autism as a purely genetic disease may well be an over-simplification.
Where did the story come from?
The study was carried out by researchers from Stanford University, the University of Auckland and Ulm University in Germany. The research was funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders, the US National Institutes of Health and other organisations throughout the US, New Zealand and Germany.
The study was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Neuroscience.
While the Telegraph appropriately pointed out that a treatment based on this research is years away, their coverage of the study is flawed. To start with, this research did not discover a genetic mutation in people with autism. That link had been previously established. The Telegraph’s coverage also fails to mention that the study was conducted in rats, and further misguides readers by picturing a scan of a human brain.
What kind of research was this?
Autism is often referred to by clinicians as Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) as there is a spectrum of autistic-type symptoms that, while sharing common features, can also vary considerably between individual cases.
This was a laboratory study that examined the impact of a genetic mutation on signalling (neural pathways) between rats’ brain cells.
Previous studies have linked several different genes to autism. This study looked specifically at one gene that contains the information used to make a protein called ProSAP2/Shank3.
People who lack one copy of this gene have a syndrome called Phelan McDermid syndrome – a syndrome with autism-like features. Other mutations in this gene have also been associated with autism.
Having three copies of the ProSAP2/Shank3 gene (rather than the usual two copies) has been associated with Asperger syndrome. This is a form of ASD that is usually associated with unaffected language development skills, but problems with social interaction and behaviour. While spoken language is unaffected in most people with Asperger syndrome, they often have difficulty understanding figures of speech (such as “it’s raining cats and dogs”).
The authors say that while the ProSAP2/Shank3 mutation has been linked to ASDs, scientists have not identified the specific functions of the protein that could account for this relationship. This study sought to characterise the protein’s function in sending signals between brain cells.
What did the research involve?
The researchers report that mutations in multiple genes have been linked to ASDs, and many of these affect proteins found in the part of nerve cells that make contact with other nerve cells and transmit signals. These connections within the nervous system are referred to as synapses.
Previous research on genetic mutations linked to ASDs suggests that these mutations may affect the synapses and how the nerve cells send signals and communicate with each other.
This study looked at how the ProSAP2/Shank3 protein affects other proteins at the synapse and how the nerve cells signal to each other. The researchers used rat brain cells grown in the laboratory and used various different methods to study the protein.
What were the basic results?
The researchers found that the levels of the ProSAP2/Shank3 protein affect the levels of other proteins at the synapse that are important in nerve cell signalling, and influence how signals are transmitted between nerve cells.
When the researchers looked at the mutated forms of ProSAP2/Shank3 that are associated with ASDs, they found that these abnormal forms of the protein disrupt nerve cell signalling.
How did the researchers interpret the results?
The researchers concluded that mutations to the ProSAP2/Shank3 gene affect a major brain cell signalling pathway. They say that: “it will be of considerable interest to determine whether other ASD-associated mutations also converge in this pathway”.
This study provides a target for future research into autistic spectrum disorders. The researchers have characterised the role that one protein plays in the signalling process of certain brain cells. But whether this research ultimately leads to the development of treatments for ASDs remains to be seen.
Even if further research reveals that the mutations to the ProSAP2/Shank3 protein play a causative role in autism, it is unlikely to account for or lead to a treatment for all ASDs. The various types of ASD suggest a complex origin of the disorders and a mutation to a single gene is unlikely to account for all the different disorders on the spectrum. There may also be environmental factors involved.
The authors say that as the number of genes found to be linked to ASDs continues to grow, the scientific community faces the challenge of explaining how mutations in so many genes could influence the development of ASDs. They suggest that multiple genetic mutations may affect the signalling pathway characterised in this study, and that further research that focuses on this pathway may be useful.
This study explored the effect of a genetic mutation on a specific signalling pathway in the brain that may be involved in some forms of autism. Contrary to the news headlines it did not discover a genetic mutation in people with autism and should not be interpreted to explain any cognitive or behavioural symptoms associated with autism or autistic spectrum disorders.
A greater understanding of the genetics and biology of ASD may eventually lead to new treatment options, but as the lead researcher is quoted as saying in The Daily Telegraph story, such treatments are likely to be years away.
Analysis by Bazian. Edited by NHS Choices. Follow Behind the Headlines on twitter. | <urn:uuid:f988d788-050a-46e3-ac2b-009764d1ea11> | {
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Hyperkalemia is higher-than-normal levels of potassium in the blood.
The kidneys normally remove excess potassium from the body. High potassium levels are more likely to occur when the kidneys are not working properly and are less able to get rid of potassium.
If your kidneys are not working well enough, taking extra potassium (for example from using salt substitutes that contain potassium or taking potassium supplements prescribed by your health care provider) could lead to problems.
Certain medicines may cause potassium levels to build up because of their effect on the kidneys, including water pills (diuretics) and blood pressure medicines.
Addison's disease is a disorder that causes an increase in total potassium.
There are often no symptoms with high levels of potassium. Symptoms that may occur include:
An ECG may show dangerous and abnormal rhythms such as:
You will need emergency treatment if your potassium level is very high, or if you have danger signs, such as changes in an ECG.
Emergency treatment may include:
Changes in your diet can help both prevent and treat high potassium levels. You may be asked to:
Your doctor may make the following changes to your medicines:
It is important to follow your health care provider's directions when taking your medicines:
Hyperkalemia; Potassium - high
Seifter JL. Potassium disorders. In: Goldman L, Schafer, AI, eds. Cecil Medicine. 24th ed. Philadelphia, Pa: Saunders Elsevier; 2011:chap 119.
Updated by: David C. Dugdale, III, MD, Professor of Medicine, Division of General Medicine, Department of Medicine, University of Washington School of Medicine. Also reviewed by David Zieve, MD, MHA, Medical Director, A.D.A.M., Inc.
The information provided herein should not be used during any medical emergency or for the diagnosis or treatment of any medical condition. A licensed physician should be consulted for diagnosis and treatment of any and all medical conditions. Call 911 for all medical emergencies. Links to other sites are provided for information only -- they do not constitute endorsements of those other sites. Copyright 1997-2013, A.D.A.M., Inc. Duplication for commercial use must be authorized in writing by ADAM Health Solutions. | <urn:uuid:190295a1-d6d2-464b-9379-7fb089e5133f> | {
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Invisible Learning :: a collaborative book & an online repository
Invisible Learning is a collaborative book & an online repository of ideas for sustainable innovation. Invisible Learning is a project that is open and distributed publically to share and disseminate innovative learning ideas.
The project places special emphasis on learning practices that do not necessarily develop from traditional environments designed for education. These include informal and non-formal modes of education.
Experimental project oriented toward eXploring, eXploiting, and eXporting innovative knowledge. 21st century skills are relevant, regardless of where or how acquired.
EXplore, eXploit and eXport innovative knowledge. Participants will share great ideas about redesigning education to foster sustainable innovation and connect with the people making these changes happen.
Through the development of:
1) a collaborative, printed book;
2) an e-book; and
3) a repository of innovative ideas at www.invisiblelearning.com, we seek to:
Share experiences and innovative perspectives, focused on rethinking strategies and innovative approaches to learn and unlearn continuously. Promote critical thinking of the role of formal, informal and non-formal education at all educational levels.
Contribute to the creation of a sustainable (and continuous) process of learning, innovating and designing new cultures for the global society.
This project aims to facilitate the creation of a globally distributed community of thinkers interested on the creation of new futures for the education. Sustainable innovation, invisible learning (informal learning and non-formal learning) and the development of 21st century skills are some of the core issues that will be analyzed and addressed in this project.
The project focuses on many of the ideas related to lifelong learning:
the development of skills for the 21st century (digital and analog).
the importance of knowledge (tacit and explicit). new emphases on the
creative, purposive applications of knowledge (innovation). and, the
new means in which we learn, teach, and collaborate (i.e., utilizing
social media). Participation is therefore open to all people:
educators, learners, innovators, researchers, the curious, people with
interesting experiences, etc.
How can you contribute?
There are many ways, but the most direct are:
• Submitting an article
• Sharing multimedia material
• Upload a video to YouTube (and sharing by adding the label “invisiblelearning”)
• Tagging related thoughts on Twitter with the tag: invislearning
• Sharing and disseminating via Facebook or other social networks
• Spreading the word by blogging on the project/topics, inserting a banner on your website, etc.
How do we disseminate knowledge and materials generated in the project?
• We will select the best submitted articles/texts that are strong,
creative, and clear to be published in a printed book (in addition to a
freely downloadable e-book).
• Creation of a repository of good ideas and successful experiences at www.invisiblelearning.com....
• Creation of a space for dialogue amongst global citizens. The
official languages of the project are English and Spanish.
Contributions in other languages, however, are always welcome.
Also, if you are willing and able to help promote the project on your website, you will find our banners at http://tiny.cc/NoJig...
About the Book Coordinators: John Moravec, PhD, is an educational futurist in the
Department of Organizational Leadership, Policy and Development and
faculty member in the Innovation Studies and Master of Liberal Studies
graduate programs at the University of Minnesota.
Cristóbal Cobo, PhD, is a professor and researcher at Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences in Mexico (FLACSO-Mexico). | <urn:uuid:28b1170f-2129-4e43-ba4d-dd505e0933a1> | {
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Pigments in sixteenth-century European painting
Marika Spring, Scientific Department, National Gallery, London
Making Art in Tudor Britain
Abstracts from Academic Workshops (2007-8)
Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council
Over the last few years, as part of the programme for revision of the scholarly catalogues, full technical examinations have been carried out on many of the sixteenth-century German, Netherlandish and Italian School paintings in the National Gallery. The results of analysis give a good overview of the pigments in sixteenth-century European paintings, which could provide a context in which to place the results from the Tudor paintings project. Many pigments were available all over Europe. However, it is interesting to consider whether there are distinct geographical characteristics in the way in which they were used, or whether local materials not available everywhere can be identified.
The pattern of use of blue pigments confirmed what had already been established; for example the more frequent use of high quality ultramarine in Italian paintings. It was also used extensively in Netherlandish paintings, but only three occurrences were found among the paintings in the German school catalogue. This may be for reasons of cost or availability, but it might also be because German painters had access to extremely good quality azurite. That in Saint Peter's robe in Saints Peter and Dorothy by the Master of the Saint Bartholomew Altarpiece (NG 707, 1505-10) is of an intense colour that rivals ultramarine.
John Bourchier, 2nd Baron Berners
attributed to The Master of the Brandon portrait
Another new discovery was the extensive use of colourless powdered glass. There are references to the addition of colourless powdered glass to paint in a number of documentary sources, including Richard Haydocke's 1593 translation of Lomazzo, which expands on what Lomazzo says by specifically mentioning that it was used as a drier. Several seventeenth-century documentary sources, many of them English, also suggest it should be added as a drier (see Spring 2004 for references). The presence of glass was first confirmed in paintings by Raphael, mainly mixed with red lake. In every example that has been analysed the glass contains manganese, which is known to be capable of acting as a siccative for oil; indeed it would be very suitable as a drier for the glazy transparent red paint. Further evidence that its purpose was to act a drier is the context in which it was used. It was found in the mordant gilding on the throne in Raphael's Ansidei Madonna (NG1171), where it cannot have been included for aesthetic reasons as it is hidden beneath gold leaf.
The composition of vessel glass has been extensively studied by archaeologists, and clear geographical distributions, related to the local materials that were used to make the glass, have been established. The composition of the glass in paintings follows the same geographical trends: the Italian paintings have all, so far, been found to contain glass of the soda-lime type, while no soda-lime glass has been found in the Northern European paintings. Instead, high lime or mixed alkali glass was used. It is clear that this is a material which could help to establish the geographical location in which a work was produced, in the same way that a gypsum ground usually indicates a painting from southern Europe while a chalk ground is usually found on northern European paintings. As it is widespread in European paintings of this period, it seems likely that it was also used by artists in England in the sixteenth century.
L. Campbell, S. Foister and A. Roy eds, compiled and written by R. Billinge, L. Campbell, J. Dunkerton, S. Foister, J. Kirby, J. Pilc, A. Roy, M. Spring and R. White, Early Northern European Painting, National Gallery Technical Bulletin, Vol.18, 1997.
M. Spring, 'Occurrences of the Purple Pigment Fluorite on paintings in the National Gallery', National Gallery Technical Bulletin, Vol. 21, 2000, pp. 2027.
M. Spring, 'Pigments in sixteenth-century painting of the German School', in The pictorial technique of Grünewald and his peers, ed. P. Béguerie-De Paepe and M. Menu, Musée d'Unterlinden, Colmar and C2RMF-CNRS, 2007, pp. 136144.
M. Spring, 'Raphael's materials: Some new discoveries and their context within early sixteenth-century painting', in Raphael's Painting Technique: Working Practices before Rome, Proceedings of the Eu-ARTECH workshop, London November 11th 2004, ed. A. Roy and M. Spring, Quaderni di Kermes, 2007, pp. 7786.
M. Spring, 'Perugino's painting materials: analysis and context within sixteenth century easel painting', Postprints of the workshop on the painting technique of Pietro Vannucci, called il Perugino, organised by INSTM and LabSTECH, Perugia April 14th15th 2003, Quaderni di Kermes, 2004, pp. 1724. | <urn:uuid:3c64984e-77ee-46cf-ab0a-1d6fbf89510f> | {
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Standing Bear in his formal attire
National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution
On their journey westward in 1804, Lewis and Clark learned about the Ponca, a small tribe living on the west bank of the Missouri River and along what are now the lower Niobrara River and Ponca Creek in northeast Nebraska. The two did not meet as the tribe was on a hunting trip to the west.
Early Life And Movement To Reservation
Standing Bear was born around 1829 in the traditional Ponca homeland near the confluence of the Niobrara and Missouri rivers. About thirty years later, the tribe sold its homeland to the United States, retaining a 58,000-acre reservation between Ponca Creek and the Niobrara River. On this reservation the Poncas lived a life of hardscrabble farming and fear-the United States did little to protect them from attacks from the Brule Sioux.
When the federal government created the Great Sioux Reservation in 1868, the Ponca Reservation was included within its boundaries, depriving them of title to their remaining lands.
Eviction And Removal
In 1877, the federal government decided to remove the Poncas to Indian Territory. Standing Bear, a tribal leader, protested his tribe's eviction. Federal troops enforced the removal orders, with the result that the Poncas arrived in Indian Territory in the summer of 1878. Discouraged, homesick and forlorn, the Poncas found themselves on the lands of strangers, in the middle of a hot summer, with no crops or prospects for any as the time for planting was long past.
Since the tribe had left Nebraska, one-third had died and nearly all of the survivors were sick or disabled. Talk around the campfire revolved around the "old home" in the north. The death of Chief Standing Bear's sixteen-year old son in late December 1878 set in motion the event which was to bring a measure of justice and worldwide fame to the chief and his small band of followers.
Honoring A Son's Wish
Wanting to honor his son's last wish to be buried in the land of his birth and not in a strange country where his spirit would wander forever, Standing Bear gathered a few members of his tribe-mostly women and children-and started for the Ponca homeland in the north. They left in early January 1879 and trekked through the Great Plains winter, reaching the reservation of their relatives, the Omahas, about two months later. Standing Bear carried with him the bones of his son to be buried in the familiar earth along the Niobrara River.
The Court Case - Standing Bear v. Crook
Because Indians were not allowed to leave their reservation without permission, Standing Bear and his followers were labeled a renegade band. The Army, on the order of The Secretary of the Interior, arrested them and took them to Fort Omaha, the intention being to return them to Indian Territory. General George Crook, however, sympathized with Standing Bear and his followers and asked Thomas Henry Tibbles, an Omaha newspaperman, for help. Tibbles took up the cause and secured two prominent Omaha attorneys to represent Standing Bear.
The lawyers filed a federal court application for a writ of habeas corpus to test the legality of the detention, basing their case on the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. The government disputed the right of Standing Bear to obtain a writ of habeas corpus on the grounds that an Indian was not a "person" under the meaning of the law.
Death And Commemoration
The case of Standing Bear v. Crook began on May 1, 1879 before Judge Elmer S. Dundy in U.S. District Court in Omaha and continued into the evening of the following day. On May 12, Judge Dundy ruled in favor of Standing Bear, reasoning that he and his band were indeed "persons" under the law, entitled to sever tribal connections and were free to enjoy the rights of any other person in the land. The government appealed Dundy's decision, but the Supreme Court of the United States refused to hear the case, leaving Standing Bear and his followers free in the eyes of the law.
Standing Bear died in 1908 and was buried alongside his ancestors in the Ponca homeland. At the eastern end of the 39-mile reach of the Missouri National Recreational River is a relatively new bridge. It links the communities of Niobrara, Nebraska, and Running Water, South Dakota. The official name of the structure is the Chief Standing Bear Memorial Bridge.
Click here for more details on Standing Bear and the Ponca Tribe, with a list of suggested additional reading. (PDF file) | <urn:uuid:fdc02ec5-7827-476b-a491-e9263d13bcc0> | {
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Virginia Tech's Bill Hopkins holds a female wood duck, as part of the studies he and his colleagues are conducting to determine how the physiology and behavior of female amphibians, turtles and birds affect their offspring, and the consequences these interactions may have for population health. See more images and read more about wood ducks.
Credit: Photo by Kate Hasapes; courtesy Bill Hopkins, Virginia Tech
Gail Patricelli, an animal behaviorist at the University of California, Davis studies animal communication and sexual selection, with a focus on understanding the amazing diversity and complexity in animal signals. Check out the story in this Science Nation video. Credit: Science Nation, NSF
Research conducted by biologists at the University of Maryland, College Park shows that when two neighboring termite families meet within the same log, one or both families' kings and queens are killed and a new, merged, cooperative colony results. Check out the story in this audio slideshow and news release.
Credit: Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation
According to a study by scientists at the University of Arizona, female house finches are able to change their hormonal makeup to ensure male birds hatch later, grow faster and spend less time in the nest than their sisters. Read more in this news release.
Credit: Alex Badyaev
The Integrative Organismal Systems Division (IOS) in NSF's Directorate for Biological Sciences supports research aimed at an integrative understanding of organisms. The goal is to predict why organisms are structured the way they are and function as they do. The division particularly encourages research projects that innovatively apply systems biology approaches and that lead to new conceptual and theoretical insights and predictions about integrated organismal properties that may be experimentally verified.
Scientists studying the relationship between testosterone and natural selection in an American songbird, the dark-eyed junco, reported that extreme testosterone production puts male dark-eyed juncos at a disadvantage.
A University of California, San Diego study shows that increased environmental variation causes birds to lay more eggs at a time. In addition, increased predation pressure experienced by open-nesting birds causes them to lay smaller clutches than cavity-nesting birds, literally having fewer eggs in one basket to spread the risk.
August 23, 2010
Make Way for Ducklings
What wood ducks are revealing about threats to our fine feathered friends
Parent birds know best when it comes to taking care of their babies. But, when food gets scarce and they are forced to fly longer distances to grab a bite, "egg sitting" time drops off. What impact does this have on their brood?
"I guess everybody, from a human health perspective, knows that what a mother does during pregnancy can have all sorts of effects on her babies," says Bill Hopkins, an associate professor in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife Sciences at Virginia Tech. He is holding a duckling in his hand. It's one of many he and his team are studying. "We study how these little guys can be affected by the things that mom does."
A member of his research team, Sarah DuRant, examines an egg. "If you look really closely," she says, "you can see the embryo moving."
With the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF), ecologists Hopkins and DuRant are studying wood ducks to better understand the impact of mom's nesting behavior on her ducklings and their ability to survive.
"How much time a female spends on her nest is going to influence the temperature that the nest is at," notes DuRant. The researchers incubate eggs at different temperatures to simulate warmer and cooler nesting conditions. "What we're interested in are very, very subtle changes in temperature, maybe a degree Celsius at most," adds Hopkins.
DuRant says they already see differences in the developing embryo. "Our embryos in the lowest temperature are going to develop a little bit slower than embryos in our higher temperatures," she says.
And once the ducklings are hatched, researchers are finding that just a slightly cooler nest can dramatically alter the health and vitality of an individual.
"They may look healthy, but if you actually dig a little deeper, we see a number of physiological deficits. Their immune systems aren't developing as rapidly. They appear to be almost developmentally stunted," explains Hopkins. "We see that they have changes in terms of endocrine function; in terms of stress hormones. We see changes in thermoregulatory capacity and locomotor performance. They swim slower than the same individuals from the same clutch. Swimming is a critical part of their early survival. They've got to avoid predators."
This research is not just about wood ducks. It has implications for many birds living in conditions where their nesting behaviors and habitats are disrupted.
"If their immune system isn't functioning as well as it needs to be and disease wipes through, then those guys aren't going to make it," says DuRant. "For many species that are breeding earlier in the year, those young are going to be exposed to colder temperatures so if they can't regulate their body temperature, then they're also going to die."
Hopkins hopes these findings will improve future conservation strategies.
"If you have an area, say, that's subjected to ecotourism, where you may have a lot of disturbance around nesting areas, those sorts of areas may actually come at a cost," he says.
That could adversely affect the health and vigor of future generations. Hopkins and his team want to learn all they can about what it will take to keep these little guys thriving--and following in mom's footsteps. | <urn:uuid:488601a4-8dd1-4d73-b45b-dba4021c1e67> | {
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|Extracts from SCN News (UNSSCN, 1991, 8 p.)|
The photograph on our cover is horrifying. Another baby girl dies unnecessarily. The Department of Child Development, Government of India, with assistance from UNICEF, has produced a compelling account of the plight of "The Lesser Child".
"In a culture that idolizes sons and dreads the birth of a daughter, to be born female comes perilously close of being born less than human. Today the rejection of the unwanted girl can begin even before her birth: prenatal sex determination tests followed by quick abortions eliminate thousands of female foetuses before they can become daughters. Those girls who manage to survive till birth and beyond find that the dice is heavily loaded against them in a world that denies them equal access to food, health, care, education, employment and simple human dignity.
"Born into indifference and reared on neglect, the girl child is caught in a web of cultural practices and prejudices that divest her of her individuality and mould her into a submissive self-sacrificing daughter and wife. Her labour ensures the survival and well-being of her family but robs her not only of her childhood but also of her right to be free of hunger, ignorance, disease and poverty.
"We expect tommorrow's woman to become the pivot of social change and development. Yet today we deprive her of her rightful share of food, schooling, health care and employment, then marvel that she does not come running to get her children immunized, or when she refuses to send them to school or practice good nutrition, hygiene and birth control ... Unless the girl becomes a priority in health, nutrition and education policies, can there be Health for All by 2000, or universal elementary education, or social justice and equality? It is already late. But perhaps not too late."
A number of key statistics are used to illustrate the problem. The sex ratio (females per thousand males) is shown to have declined during this century, for example from 972 in 1901, 950 in 1931, and down to 933 in 1981; variation in the sex ratio between states is also illustrated, with a high value of 1032 in Kerala, dropping to below 800 even in some states (although migration may account for some of this, it clearly does not account for all). Anthropometric data also tell a sad tale: data quoted from one area show, for example, these differentials for growth retardation (adding mild, moderate, and severe). In infants, the prevalence among females was estimated at 79%, versus 43% in males - almost double; in one to two year olds, these figures became 86% compared with 63%; and preschoolers 72% against 65%. This also illustrates that the effects are particularly severe in the first year of life, and suggests that girls become relatively better able to look after themselves as they grow older. The morbidity patterns quoted, from rural Tamil Nadu, show much higher incidence of diseases such as respiratory infections among young girls; poignantly, the only condition in which boys are more affected than girls is dental caries, perhaps resulting from the observation made in "The Lesser Child" that "although there are great variations in feeding practices across the country, it is generally true that boys eat better than girls even in privileged families. Sons are more likely to be given milk, eggs, meat and fruit in their diet. As they grow older, boys spend part of their earnings on food and snacks while girls continue to eat the same unvaried diet at home."
"Through a haze of heat and pain, Sushma hears the dai mutter 'Another daughter' and bursts into uncontrollable sobs. Throughout her third pregnancy she has fasted and prayed for a son. Burdened by the guilt of having two daughters, she has supplicated every deity she knows, praying to Shiva, to Santoshi Mata, even walking to the outskirts of the village to prostrate herself at the grave of the Pir Baba. Now the sound of her mother-in-law's wailing fills the air ..."
Source: "The Lesser Child", p. 4.
The book, though short, makes the compelling point very clearly and repeatedly. But it continues to suggest that not only long term changes must be brought about, particularly through education, but that there are also programmes that can be effective now. "The glaring disparity between male and female infant mortality rates, if plotted on a map, shows a clear belt running across the north-western part of the country, with a few pockets elsewhere, and this is where immediate health and nutrition interventions must now focussed."
"The ICDS (Integrated Child Development Services) network is clearly one effective response to the problem of early neglect of young children. Through its immunization, nutritional supplementation and pre-school education components (which now reach ten million children) it can offset the discrimination a girl faces at home and can lay the foundation for healthy physical and mental development. But an urgent answer has to be found for meeting the needs of girls in the 6-14 year age-group, for this is when they have either dropped out of school or are too old for ICDS and are nobody's concern. They have to wait until they are 15, which is when they become another target group that the health system recognizes - "women in the reproductive age-group". Perhaps it is time to enlarge the scope of ICDS projects so that they can include girls between the ages of 6 and 14 years. This is an important period in a girl's life, when major biological, psychological and social changes take place. . . . repeated adolescent pregnancies, common in many parts of rural India, arrest this growth spurt and prevent full physical maturation of the girl, affecting not only her own health, but also the survival and development of her offspring."
Although the book is specific to India, the issue extends far wider. Indeed, the same thoughts are exactly right for many other places, whatever the child's gender. The book finishes like this.
"An integrated and holistic approach to the girl-child's development is essential for the creation of a new environment in which she can be valued and nurtured. Our search for brave new efforts to give the girl-child her due, to allow her to evolve to her full potential, involves a process of social mobilization that will make her everyone's concern: the media, the family and the community, as well as government and voluntary agencies. By supplementing formal schooling with non-formal education that conforms to local needs and constraints; by enlarging the ambit of child development programmes with the creation of new channels to reach adolescent and pre-adolescent girls; by reinforcing constitutional mandates through widespread awareness of the rights of girls: these are only some of the ways in which we can empower the girl child to enter the mainstream of economic and social activity. And help her to walk out of the maze of neglect in which she has been lost for centuries."
Source: "The Lesser Child", Dept. of Women and Child Development, Ministry of Human Resource Development, Govt. of India, with assistance from UNICEF. | <urn:uuid:5c40a454-ff96-4db8-be44-077831c46859> | {
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U.S. sees increase in shark attacks
Published: Monday, February 11, 2013 at 9:37 p.m.
Last Modified: Monday, February 11, 2013 at 9:37 p.m.
Shark attacks in the U.S. increased last year, and Florida led the way, claiming nearly half of those attacks. But don't panic — that could actually be a good sign, said scientists who released a report Monday on worldwide shark attacks.
According to the University of Florida's International Shark Attack File, out of 80 shark attacks worldwide last year, 53 occurred in the U.S. — the most since 2000. Florida had 26 of them, with most in Volusia and Brevard counties because of the high surfing activity there.
George Burgess, the director of the Florida Program for Shark Research at the Florida Museum of Natural History, said these numbers follow a typical pattern.
"Florida, with this extremely long coastline, warm to subtropical climate, large population, and of course a massive tourism base, means that we put lots of people into the water year-round," Burgess said. "The opportunities for a human and shark to get together have gotten greater."
And so, the actual shark attack rate has not increased, but human activity has.
Shark preservation efforts — to stave off the overall decline in sharks' populations since the 1970s — have also improved in the U.S., increasing both the shark population and sharks' contact with humans, said Christopher Lowe, a professor of marine biology at California State University at Long Beach and director of the shark lab there.
"My personal feeling is that I wouldn't be surprised to see things creep up over time … overall we are getting more sharks back because of better fishing management," Lowe said. "But at the same time we are putting more people in the water … increasing the potential for an encounter."
Burgess said that sharks like to hang out close to points of entry for surfers, at water depths as shallow as 5 or 6 feet. They also like the same fishing-rich environments as humans.
"Every time we go to the beach, we are invading a natural world that is already occupied by animals and plants in that area," Burgess said. "We need to remember that when we enter the sea it's not the equivalent of going to the YMCA pools here in Gainesville. It's a wild world out there."
Most shark attacks, however, are relatively benign — and not the kind of terror-inducing episodes inspired by the movie Jaws. There are more than 400 species of sharks, and most have teeth designed to hold and swallow fish whole — not sheer and bite things like humans, especially if the sharks are smaller than humans, which many are, Lowe said.
"The amazing thing is surfers are bitten 200 yards offshore, and they manage to paddle to the beach. If sharks were intent on eating humans, (surfers) would not ever be able to make it back to the beach. For whatever reason, sharks give up."
Lowe added that the chances of a shark attack are also very low.
"Your chances of dying driving to the beach are so much greater that it's just unbelievable, and we don't think twice about jumping in our car and going someplace," Lowe said.
"I know a lot of surfers and their philosophy is, ‘I love surfing and I'm going to keep doing it.' "
One person in the U.S. died last year due to a white shark attack — in California. White sharks also killed three people in South Africa and two in Australia; and bull sharks killed two people in the island of Reunion.
"As a rich nation, we are blessed with the ability to take care of our victims on the beach very quickly," Burgess said.
The U.S. also leads in efforts to counter the decline of sharks because of overfishing them — mostly for their valuable fins, said Sonja Fordham, the president of Shark Advocates International, a project of the Ocean Foundation in D.C.
And regulatory efforts aim to preserve the important role that sharks play in the sea. "We think their disappearance would have negative cascading consequences for the ecosystem," Fordham said, adding, "There's also growing interest in a decent number of sharks for eco-tourism such as whale sharks and hammerheads … which brings significant revenue to coastal communities."
Contact Kristine Crane at 338-3119 or [email protected].
Reader comments posted to this article may be published in our print edition. All rights reserved. This copyrighted material may not be re-published without permission. Links are encouraged. | <urn:uuid:a375e033-a7e2-4fb5-88c4-283f4be4ccf1> | {
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The coastal cactus wren builds its nests in patches of old-growth prickly pear cactus, providing itself protection from predators.
However, recent fires and past land uses have eliminated most of the mature cactus, which in turn threatens local cactus wren populations.
Irvine Ranch Conservancy Docent Lynda Armbruster plants a cactus bulb during a restoration project.
JEFFREY ANTENORE, FOR THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Organizations such as the non-profit Nature Reserve of Orange County, the city of Irvine and the Irvine Ranch Conservancy are working together to expand the wren's habitat, by connecting isolated patches of prickly pear cactus with each other to over time create a larger, contiguous habitat for the coastal cactus wren.
But why go to all this effort? It's just one bird, and one plant.
"If you think of a strong, bio-diverse ecosystem as a building and individual species as bricks, each brick you remove makes the building weaker," said Michael O'Connell, executive director of Irvine Ranch Conservancy. "If enough bricks disappear, the building crumbles. This is what happens in ecosystems too."
The conservancy works with landowners such as OC Parks and the city of Irvine and other partners to help them manage their lands and obligations under the Natural Community Conservation Plan.
One such project underway in the Shady Canyon area of Irvine is the Mule Deer Restoration Project, named for its proximity to the Mule Deer trail in the city of Irvine's Open Space Preserve.
The conservancy is restoring more than two acres of habitat, including a number of cactus plantings.
The area was grazed by cattle until the end of the last century, leaving non-native grasses and other weeds that inhibit re-growth of native plants.
The coastal cactus wren is not a strong flier, so young birds looking for their own place to live don't really fly too far from the nest. Patches of cactus have to be relatively close to each other for wrens to move among them.
This restoration project is part of an overall plan for "habitat linkages," which will eventually connect patches of existing coastal cactus wren habitat in the James Dilley Reserve off Laguna Canyon Road to these in Shady Canyon.
In addition to native grasses and shrubs, planting plans include 4,500 prickly pear cactus "pads" (oval flat segments of the cactus sometimes called "nopales"), along with 20 large, mature cactus plants to anchor the cactus islands.
By incorporating mature plants, the conservancy hopes to encourage a faster return of coastal cactus wrens and nesting.
The project includes before-and-after monitoring of both the cactus patches and coastal cactus wren to track growth and population expansion.
Along with conservancy staff, the UC Irvine Center for Environmental Biology is also partnering in the project. A UCI scientist tests soil before planting and during the project to track changes, and environmental science students are participating in planting and data collection.
The public is also welcome to join in the Mule Deer Restoration project and help build the habitat linkage. To learn more about these activities or to register, visit irlandmarks.org/activities.
- This story was submitted by Jenn Starnes of the Irvine Ranch Conservancy | <urn:uuid:64242605-58d6-411c-9717-a7404d3248c3> | {
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Trees are amazing organisms. They are tall, massive, mighty and upright. But trees can be really really unusual. From deadly trees that throw exploding fruits, to those with rainbow branches and trunks, here are some of the strangest trees which will change the way you looked at these beautiful creatures.
Animals have always accompanied men at war. They have carried our soldiers and pulled our cannons. If you think that's all, then check out these stories of some of the craziest uses of animals in war.
This is one of the worst examples of war brutality. Anti tank dogs were first developed by the Soviet Union to take down German tanks during World War II. The idea was simple yet effective. Dogs were trained to find food under tanks and then starved before a battle. The dogs were then released in battle, jumping under tanks hoping for food. Each dog carried a 10-12 kg bomb which had a lever that detonated the bomb when the dog dived under the tank.
Anti tank Dogs
Socotra is a collection of 4 islands cut away from the rest of the world about 6 million years ago. It is one of the most isolated places on earth. Socotra's long isolation and fierce climate has given birth to a unique variety of endemic flora, giving Socotra the distinction of being 'the most alien looking place on earth'. | <urn:uuid:997fba63-cb55-47cf-bab0-e2c25d8c7e6b> | {
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Quarrel with the King: The Story of an English Family on the High Road to Civil War : Quarrel with the King tells the story of the first four earls of Pembroke, their wives, children, estates, tenants, and allies, following their high and glamorous trajectory from the 1520s through 1650 - the most turbulent and dramatic years of English history - across three generations of change, ambition, resistance, and war. The Pembrokes were at the heart of it all: the richest family in England, with old blood and new drive, led as much by a succession of extraordinary women as by their husbands and sons. It is also the story of a power struggle, over a long century, between the family and the growing strength of the English Crown. For decades, questions of loyalty simmered: Was government about agreement and respect, or authority and compulsion? What status did traditional rights have in a changing world? Did a national emergency mean those rights could be ignored or overturned? These were the issues that in 1642 would lead to a brutal civil war, the bloodiest conflict England has ever experienced, in which the earl of Pembroke - who had been loyal till then - had no choice but to rebel against a king who he felt had betrayed both him and his country. At other times, the Pembrokes both threatened the Crown and acted as its bruisingly efficient and violent agents. They were ambivalent figures: flag bearers for an ancient England and time servers in some of the most corrupt courts England has ever known; fawning courtiers and indulgent landlords; puritanical aristocrats and rebel grandees. Nicolson's book amounts to a study in all the ambiguities involved in the exercise and maintenance of power and status.
|History & Geography||Modern| | <urn:uuid:7f1f23e3-b48c-4727-b2d7-cc47c1722854> | {
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Avery Coonley Gardens
The Coonley Estate was built by Frank Lloyd Wright and originally included the House, the Stable, The Gardener’s Cottage and extensive gardens. Jens Jensen designed and implemented a landscape plan in 1913 for the property which utilized Wright’s hardscape plan.
Today the landscape contains a number of oak trees predating the house and hawthorns planted by Jensen. The restored landscapes of the main part of the Coonley House and the Stable (Coach House) include Jensen’s landmark features: hawthorns, oaks, red bud, sumac, blackberries and mature shrubs, flowers, ferns and grasses. A grove of birch trees and ferns has been recreated on the front grounds of the house.
The living room unit and its walled garden are the center of the house. The garden features a terrace with 10 planters, a pergola and a reflecting pool. Nasturtiums grow in the planters and native water lilies bloom in the pool in summer. Wright created a walled sunken garden to unify the Coonley House and the Stable.
The walled garden was restored in 2007. Wright’s original sidewalk garden plan and concrete hotbeds were recovered by removal of extensive invasive species trees and shrubs, construction debris, and incorrect patio tile and dirt. The entire original sidewalk system was restored or, in places, recreated. Jensen’s design for a pool with eight surrounding iris beds was implemented. Other beds in the sunken garden and the stable yard and front yard were planted with native plants.
The Prairie School represented here by both Wright and Jensen was an important part of the American Arts and Crafts movement of the early 20th Century. | <urn:uuid:5c1d4d5a-b64a-4b34-97fb-6c719ee2f3c2> | {
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The Storyline of the operetta follows that of Wilde's brilliant play. The plot hinges on two young men - John (Jack) Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff - who both use the name "Ernest" to woo two young ladies - Gwendolyn and Cecily - who have made up their minds they can only marry men by the name "Ernest". The hidden identity plot is the source of much comic confusion for the young couples and much laughter for audiences.
To further complicate matters (and add to the comedy), the consent of the formidable Lady Bracknell (Algernon's aunt) must be obtained before the young couples can marry. In the process Jack discovers his parentage - that his true name is Ernest, that Algernon is his brother, and the Lady Bracknell is his aunt. Naturally, she consents to the marriage of Jack/Ernest to Gwendolyn and the two young couples will now live happily ever after.
courtesy of Mr. Davies and Mr. Benson
|Character List (Major):
Lady Bracknell (low mz)
Gwendolyn (high mz)
Cecily (high s)
a chamber version of this opera for just these 5 characters is available under the title The Importance of Being Earnest
|Character List (Minor):
Miss Prism (lyr s)
Dr. Chasuble (high bar)
Lane, Man Servant (b-bar)
Merryman, Butler (b-bar)
Toronto Star, John Terauds, 02-21-2008; Whole Note Magazine, 02-2008; Greek Press, James Karas; Globe and Mail, Ken Winters, 2-25-2008; classical963fm.com, Paula Citron | <urn:uuid:137d3081-972b-4caf-8b07-3c87a8ce7b30> | {
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Malaria is a deadly disease spread by mosquitoes and is estimated to kill one person every 30 seconds, according to the World Health Organization. The majority victimized by this disease are children under the age of five, living in impoverished conditions throughout Africa . Yet, as the epidemic continues to escalate, more than 1.5 million people die from malaria disease each year, and more than 300 million cases are reported in over 90 countries worldwide.
In spite of these staggering statistics, an ancient Chinese herb known as artemisinin (also called ginghaosu) is proving to be a new weapon in the fight against this deadly disease. In recent test trials performed by the WHO, artemisinin-based drugs quickly reduced fevers and rapidly lowered blood-parasite levels, which can keep small outbreaks in mosquito-infested areas from becoming epidemics. Additional research findings showed the use of artemisinin was a cure for malaria in more than 90 percent of cases in certain countries.
It is estimated by the WHO that 40 percent of the world's population is at risk for malaria disease each year. While Westernized countries eradicated malaria back in the 1940's, third world countries constantly battle infections, primarily because they lack the medical resources to properly fight epidemic outbreaks. Countries where malaria disease can be predominately found include parts of Mexico , Central and South America , Dominican Republic , Haiti , Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia, Indian Subcontinent, China , and Oceana.
In the indigent areas where the disease runs rampant, malaria is easily transmitted from person to person by a simple mosquito bite. Once bitten by a mosquito carrying the malaria infection, the iron rich blood cells in the host are attacked by the parasite through the bloodstream. The parasite then multiplies and causes the red blood cells in the human host to rupture, thus instigating immediate malaria symptom such as extreme exhaustion, high fever, shaking, chills, and severe sweating. Additional malaria symptom can include: fatigue, dizziness, headache, dry cough, nausea/vomiting, loss of appetite, abdominal cramps, diarrhea, and body aches.
However, artemisinin is not only a treatment for the disease, but a viable solution to the epidemic, as each patient treated with artemisinin then contains a sterile form of malaria disease, reducing the diseases intensity.
According to Jack Miller, licensed acupuncturist and President of Pacific College of Oriental Medicine, "This is another example of science confirming the tremendous value of Chinese herbal medicine. It is very important that we make other herbs a part of mainstream treatments, for example antibiotic herbs. As more bacterial strains become resistant to pharmaceutical antibiotics, some reliance on herbs will become very important."
Discovery of the Healing Chinese Herb
The Chinese first extracted artemisinin from the sweet wormwood plant for medicinal use more than 2,000 years ago. In 340 AD a Taoist scribe finely grinded the wormwood plant, in order to extract the purifying agents to create an herb remedy for treating a high fever. Over a thousand years later, a Chinese sage known as Li Shizen discovered elements of the herb helped to ameliorate malaria symptom. Since this time, artemisinin's beneficial agents have continually been used by those practicing Traditional Chinese Medicine, applying the Chinese herb remedy to a variety of ailments including hemorrhoids, coughs and fevers as well as malaria.
However, Western medicine did not discover the healing properties of the herb until the 1960's. Chinese scientists became interested in the plant's reputed qualities and started to look at ancient Chinese herb remedies, only after testing traditional medicines had failed to produce an effective cure for malaria disease.
Once scientists discovered artemisinin was used as an herb remedy for fever, they set about distilling the herb into a tea, and then added chemicals trying to isolate the active compound in the plant. Next, the herb was manufactured in drug form and used to conduct tests on malaria patients in the 1980's. Their water-soluble form of artemisinin, called artesunate, was found to clear malaria parasites from patient's bodies faster than any drug in history. Before the Chinese launched their massive antimalarial drive, several million Chinese were infected with the disease each year. Now fewer than 100,000 fall victim to the disease.
Despite the success the Chinese had with transforming the herb into drug form, their accomplishments were not published outside of the country for more than two decades. Once the extraordinary powers of the herb become public information, researchers across the globe have become focused on how to manipulate artemisinin with modern synthetic drugs so they can inexpensively manufacture and mass-produce the remedy all across the world.
Providing a Crucial Cure for Malaria
In rural Africa , children suffer from as many as six bouts of malaria a year. In the past, this disease has been poorly treated, and the children affected by this disease die slowly of anemia. Those who survive are affected both mentally and developmentally in their growth. The primary reason these children are continually affected is because the current drug treatment Chloroquine, used since 1970, is practically useless as resistance is up to 90 percent in some areas and continuing to spread.
Artemisinin may prove to be the final solution to malaria disease as researchers are looking at the possibility that a patient may never develop resistance to the treatment.
According to Todd Luger, L.Ac., Director of Chinese Herb Academy, " Artemisinin shows promise in the treatment of malaria as well as other diseases as serious as cancer. It appears to affect the life cycle of the malaria parasite as well as the life cycle of cancer cells."
What makes this herb different from past remedies such as the drug Chloroquine, is that it kills the parasite before it has time to recognize the drug's structures. In order to prevent patients from becoming resistant to artemisinin, researchers are developing multi-drug cocktails. Using two drugs in conjunction with one another ensures destruction of the malaria parasite; therefore, if the virus was resistant to one drug, the other drug should prove to be effective. This has proven to be an effective method in treating other diseases that produce resistant strains such as AIDS and cancer.
Artemisinin is particularly effective because it acts like a bomb when introduced into the blood stream. The two main oxygen atoms that break apart in the presence of iron, filter into the red blood cells where the malaria parasite inhabits, and explodes, releasing lethal toxins that destroy the parasite. This process rapidly reduces the number of parasite in the blood to extremely small numbers. In fact, test trials have shown that artemisinin is an effective cure for malaria, killing 99 percent of malaria parasites within 48 hours, but to completely cure the infection the drug must be taken for week.
In a large scaled assault on the malaria epidemic, the WHO has dedicated itself to cutting the number of deaths from malaria over the next decade in half. This campaign will push the WHO to acquire more than 100 million doses of artemisinin it estimates it will need by late 2005. | <urn:uuid:437fcd51-3613-4cfc-a9b4-23e14e13241a> | {
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The History of Information (III)
Get flash to fully experience Pearltrees
A waste book was one of the books traditionally used in bookkeeping . It comprised a daily diary of all transactions in chronological order. [ 1 ] It differs from a daybook in that only a single waste book is kept, rather than a separate daybook for each of several categories. The waste book was intended for temporary use only; the information needed to be transcribed into a journal in order to begin to balance one's accounts. [ 2 ] The name of the book derives from the fact that, once its information was transferred to the journal, the waste book was unneeded. [ 3 ] The use of the waste book has declined with the advent of double-entry accounting .
Why Study Accounting History? The history of accounting is as old as civilization, key to important phases of history, among the most important professions in economics and business, and fascinating. Accountants participated in the development of cities, trade, and the concepts of wealth and numbers. Accountants invented writing, participated in the development of money and banking, invented double entry bookkeeping that fueled the Italian Renaissance, saved many Industrial Revolution inventors and entrepreneurs from bankruptcy, helped develop the confidence in capital markets necessary for western capitalism, and are central to the information revolution that is transforming the global economy. There are no household names among the accounting innovators; in fact, virtually no names survive before the Italian Renaissance.
John Harrison (24 March 1693 – 24 March 1776) was a self-educated English carpenter and later a clockmaker . He invented the marine chronometer , a long-sought device in solving the problem of establishing the East-West position or longitude of a ship at sea, thus revolutionising and extending the possibility of safe long distance sea travel in the Age of Sail . The problem was considered so intractable that the British Parliament offered a prize of £ 20,000 (comparable to £2.87 million in modern currency) for the solution. [ 1 ] [ 2 ]
The Calendar (New Style) Act 1750 (c.23) (also known as Chesterfield's Act after Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield ) is an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain . It reformed the calendar of England and British Dominions so that a new year began on 1 January rather than 25 March ( Lady Day ) and would run according to the Gregorian calendar , as used in most of western Europe . [ edit ] Reasons for change
A calendar is a system of organizing days for social, religious, commercial, or administrative purposes. This is done by giving names to periods of time , typically days , weeks , months , and years . A date is the designation of a single, specific day within such a system. Periods in a calendar (such as years and months) are usually, though not necessarily, synchronized with the cycle of the sun or the moon . Many civilizations and societies have devised a calendar, usually derived from other calendars on which they model their systems, suited to their particular needs. A calendar is also a physical device (often paper).
The Gregorian calendar , also called the Western calendar and the Christian calendar , is internationally the most widely accepted and used civil calendar . [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] It has been the unofficial global standard for decades, adopted for pragmatic interests of international communication, transportation, and commercial integration, and recognized by international institutions such as the United Nations and the Universal Postal Union . [ 4 ] The calendar was a reform in 1582 to the Julian calendar . [ 5 ] The motivation for the reform was to bring the date for the celebration of Easter to the time of the year in which the First Council of Nicaea had agreed upon in 325. Because the spring equinox was tied to the celebration of Easter, the Roman Catholic Church considered this steady movement in the date of the equinox undesirable. The reform was adopted initially by the Catholic countries of Europe.
Manuel Castells ( Spanish : Manuel Castells Oliván ; born 1942, Hellín , Albacete , Spain ) is a Spanish sociologist especially associated with research on the information society , communication and globalization . The 2000–09 research survey of the Social Sciences Citation Index ranks him as the world’s fifth most-cited social science scholar, and the foremost-cited communication scholar. [ 1 ] He was awarded the 2012 Holberg Prize , [ 2 ] for having "shaped our understanding of the political dynamics of urban and global economies in the network society." [ 3 ] [ edit ] Life
The term Network Society describes several different phenomena related to the social, political, economic and cultural changes caused by the spread of networked, digital information and communications technologies. A number of academics (see below) are credited with coining the term since the 1980s and several competing definitions exist. The intellectual origins of the idea can be traced back to the work of early social theorists such as Georg Simmel who analyzed the effect of modernization and industrial capitalism on complex patterns of affiliation, organization, production and experience. [ edit ] Origins
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (15 May 1689 – 21 August 1762) was an English aristocrat and writer. Montagu is today chiefly remembered for her letters, particularly her letters from Turkey, as wife to the British ambassador, which have been described by Billie Melman as “the very first example of a secular work by a woman about the Muslim Orient”. [ 1 ] [ edit ] Early life Lady Mary Pierrepont was born in London on May 15, 1689; her baptism took place on May 26 at St.
The first issue of the Journal des sçavans (title page) The Journal des sçavans (later renamed Journal des savants ), established by Denis de Sallo , was the earliest academic journal published in Europe. Its content included obituaries of famous men, church history, and legal reports. [ 1 ] The first issue appeared as a twelve page quarto pamphlet [ 2 ] on Monday, 5 January 1665. [ 3 ] This was shortly before the first appearance of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society , on 6 March 1665. [ 4 ] The journal ceased publication in 1792, during the French Revolution , and, although it very briefly reappeared in 1797 under the updated title Journal des savants , it did not re-commence regular publication until 1816. From then on, the Journal des savants became more of a literary journal , and ceased to carry significant scientific material. [ 1 ] [ 5 ]
Joseph Moxon (8 August 1627 - February 1691 [ 1 ] ), hydrographer to Charles II , was an English printer of mathematical books and maps, a maker of globes and mathematical instruments , and mathematical lexicographer . He produced the first English language dictionary devoted to mathematics. In November 1678, he became the first tradesman to be elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society . [ edit ] Life Between the ages of around 9 and 11, Moxon accompanied his father, James Moxon, to Delft and Rotterdam where he was printing English Bibles.
Cover of the first volume of Phil. Trans. , covering the years 1665 and 1666 The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society ( Phil. Trans. ) is a scientific journal published by the Royal Society of London. It was established in 1665, [ 1 ] making it the first journal in the world exclusively devoted to science, and it has remained in continuous publication ever since, making it the world's longest-running scientific journal.
John Graunt (24 April 1620 – 18 April 1674) was one of the first demographers , though by profession he was a haberdasher . Born in London , the eldest of seven or eight children of Henry and Mary Graunt. His father was a draper who had moved to London from Hampshire. In February 1641, Graunt married Mary Scott, with whom he had one son (Henry) and three daughters. Graunt, along with William Petty , developed early human statistical and census methods that later provided a framework for modern demography. He is credited with producing the first life table , giving probabilities of survival to each age.
In the philosophy of science , a protoscience is a new science trying to establish its legitimacy. [ 1 ] Protoscience is distinguished from pseudoscience by its standard practices of good science, such as a willingness to be disproven by new evidence, or to be replaced by a more predictive theory. [ citation needed ] Compare fringe science , which is considered highly speculative or even strongly refuted. [ 2 ] Some protosciences go on to become an accepted part of mainstream science . [ 3 ] All sciences would have qualified as protosciences before the Age of Enlightenment , since the scientific method still hadn't been developed, and there was no structured way to prove legitimacy. A standard example is alchemy , which from the 18th century became chemistry , or pre-modern astrology which from the 17th century became astronomy . [ edit ] Definitions
Robert Boyle , FRS , (25 January 1627 – 31 December 1691) was a 17th-century natural philosopher , chemist , physicist , and inventor, also noted for his writings in theology . He has been variously described as Irish, English and Anglo-Irish , his father having come to Ireland from England during the time of the Plantations . Although his research clearly has its roots in the alchemical tradition, Boyle is largely regarded today as the first modern chemist, and therefore one of the founders of modern chemistry , and one of the pioneers of modern experimental scientific method . | <urn:uuid:9d0811dd-c0fa-4178-bf78-67af98610baa> | {
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In 1900, The Prohibition Act, sometimes called the "Scott Act", and described as "An Act Prohibiting the Sale of Intoxicating Liquor", was passed by the Provincial Legislature.
This Act replaced all previous legislation dealing with liquor and totally prohibited the use or sale of any form of liquor for beverage purposes. It did provide however, for the sale at wholesale, by persons known as "Vendors" to physicians, chemists, druggists, and persons engaged in art or trade in which alcohol was used. The physicians, chemists and druggists could in turn sell the liquor so purchased to any person presenting a physician prescription prescribing liquor for medicinal use.
The enforcement of the Act was in the hands of a Chief Inspector and such other Inspectors as were required. It would appear that these Inspectors had very broad powers to arrest, search and prosecute. It is noted in the minutes of the Council that there was a fairly large turnover in Inspectors. In a number of cases the dismissal would be based on a complaint from the Temperance Alliance or a petition from a community. During this period also, there were a number of disputes between the Alliance and the Government as to the advisability of granting vendors licenses to certain persons or in certain places.
In 1901, a further source of supply was established by an amendment to the Act permitting persons to establish themselves as dealers in liquor and to transact business both within and without the Province. As a result of this amendment, several warehouses were established - to sell to the wholesale Vendors and to export to other points.
Although a number of amendments were made to the Act in ensuing years, it was not until 1918 that any major changes took place. In that year, the Act was completely re-written. It provided for the establishments of a six-member Board of Commissioners to be appointed for a three year term by the Lieutenant-Governor-in-Council to administer the Act. The Commission were given the power to license one wholesale Vendor and as many retail Vendors as were deemed necessary. These retail Vendors were to replace the physicians and druggists who, up to this time had filled the role.
The Vendors were to be paid on a commission basis varying from 10% to 50% with the percentage increasing with the volume. The retail Vendors could sell to any person presenting a prescription 24 oz of wine or spirits or 12 quarts of ale not oftener than once a day. However, this quantity could be doubled if the person lived more than ten miles from the Vendor.
In 1919, an amendment to the Act introduced what came to be known as "Scripts". These were, in effect, pre-printed prescriptions, to be supplied to the physicians by the Prohibited Commission. They were serially numbered and it is believed that the number issued to each physician was controlled as previously there had been no limit to the number of prescriptions a physician could write and abuses were creeping in to the system.
The 1919 Amendment also provided for the holding, in 1920, of a referendum on the whole question of Prohibition. However, the Government changed before the end of the year, and as the incoming Government had campaigned on a Prohibition plank, the referendum was never held.
In 1920, funds were made available to the Commission to be used by the wholesale Vendor for the purchase of liquor. Salaried retail Vendors were established at Charlottetown, Summerside, Montague and Alberton selling at prices set by the Commission.
A list of the six Commissioners in 1920, shows them all to be clergymen.
The Act was again revised in 1928. The six member Commission was abolished and in its place, a new Commission consisting of a Chairman and two members, all salaried, was established. This Commission, like the previous one, was appointed by the Lieutenant-Governor-in-Council. This continued until 1937, when in another revision, the entire operation was placed under the direct control of the Attorney-General.
It was in 1945 however, that an amendment was introduced that marked the beginning of the end of Prohibition. This amendment stated that provided a physician felt that the use of liquor over an extended period would benefit the health of a patient, he could prescribe 26 oz of spirits, or 104 oz of wine, or nine full quarts of ale, to be delivered weekly over a six month period. Upon receiving such a prescription, the patient could exchange it for a warrant which had coupons on it redeemable weekly for the quantity above. These were not accumulative and had to be redeemed on the due date.
This particular amendment was refused Royal Assent at the conclusion of the Session on May 5th, but with the appointment of a new Lieutenant Governor, received the necessary assent in October, and came into effect.
This system prevailed, until a new Act, known as the "Temperance Act" was introduced in the 1948 Session. This Act provided for the repeal of the Prohibition Act and the establishment of a Government Liquor Control System similar to the other Provinces, with the rather curious difference that the Commission to be established to administer the Act, would be known as the "Temperance Commission". Under the Act, residents would require a permit to purchase liquor and a special permit would be available to visitors. The quantity an individual could purchase at any one time remained unchanged. A number of the permits were introduced for other specific uses of liquor. Among these was a permit permitting liquor in messes, canteens, Legion branches and non-profit clubs. The quantity that could be purchased was specified on the permit as were the hours of consumption.
This new Act was subject to the approval of the electorate by means of a plebiscite, held on June 28th, 1948. The result was in favour of the new Act, and the sale of liquor for beverage purposes became legal on July 6th, 1948.
The Temperance Act received a number of amendments in the next thirteen years. Two were of major significance to the public. In 1952, an amendment permitted four weekly rations to be purchased at any one time in the month; and in 1960, all quantity restrictions were removed.
The word "Temperance" finally disappeared in 1961, when the Act became "The Liquor Control Act", and the Commission, "the Liquor Control Commission".
As the result of a case in 1963, the Courts found that the special permits issued to clubs and canteens permitted possession only by the organization and any such liquor could not be re-sold. However, action was withheld until an amendment to the Act was passim in the 1964 Session providing for the regular licensing of premises as practiced in other Provinces. The outstanding special permits were then resigned and applications received and licenses issued to those qualified under the new legislation.
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Poisonous to: Dogs
Level of toxicity: Generally moderate to severe
Common signs to watch for:
- Abnormal drinking or urination
Grapes, raisins, and even currants (some currants are actually small, black grapes) are toxic to your dog! In fact, there have been anecdotal reports of cats and ferrets being affected by these also. Ingestion of even a small amount of grapes, raisins, or currants can result in severe, acute kidney failure. All types of grape- or raisin-containing products (including grape juice, trail mix, bagels, etc.) can result in this. Even organic, pesticide-free, grapes grown in home gardens can result in toxicity. Although the mechanism of action is not clearly understood on how grapes, raisins and currants are poisonous at this time, this common fruit can result in anorexia, vomiting, diarrhea, and potentially severe acute renal failure (which develops several days later). The toxicity is not necessarily dose-dependent, and symptoms can occur with even small ingestions. Decontamination (e.g., inducing vomiting, decontaminating with activated charcoal, etc.), aggressive supportive care, aggressive IV fluid therapy, and kidney function (e.g., BUN/creatinine) monitoring is recommended.
If you suspect your pet ingested grapes, raisins, or currants, call your veterinarian or Pet Poison Helpline for treatment recommendations.
Poison type: Foods
Alternate names: Vitis, raisins, currants, sultanas | <urn:uuid:678962d1-2bb9-4c2b-87c5-439354e5eb7b> | {
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Fourth Pennsylvania CavalryMade in United States, North and Central America
Artist/maker unknown, American
Oil on canvas
Currently not on view
1968-222-3The Collection of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch, 1968
LabelThe troops of the Fourth Pennsylvania Cavalry were mustered into service between August and October of 1861, under the leadership of commanding officer Colonel David Campbell, with orders to assist in the defense of Washington, D.C. The regiment's military successes were notably attributed to Colonel Campbell's strict discipline and personal supervision of drills, parades, and guard mounts, evident in this painting. The Fourth Pennsylvania Cavalry went on to serve in the Battle of Gettysburg, the Wilderness Campaign, two of Sheridan's raids, and the Appomattox Campaign, and were present at Lee's surrender at the Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865. | <urn:uuid:1a7be027-f7aa-4d52-9ef4-359efbaa980e> | {
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S-1. Sunlight & Earth
S-1B. Global Climate
S-3.The Magnetic Sun
S-4. Colors of Sunlight
Optional: Doppler Effect
S-4A-1 Speed of Light
S-4A-2. Frequency Shift
S-4A-3 Rotating Galaxies
and Dark Matter
S-5.Waves & Photons
Optional: Quantum Physics
Q3. Energy Levels
Q4. Radiation from
One widely used property of waves is the shift in frequency when the source approaches or recedes. If the engine of a train blows its whistle as it passes by, a listener standing near the track cannot help but notice that the tone of the whistle drops as it passes.
Actually, the tone is already raised above its normal note as the engine approaches, and then drops below it as it recedes. This shift in frequency, also noted in electromagnetic waves such as light or radio, is named the Doppler Effect after its discoverer, the Austrian Christian Doppler, born in 1803.
Earlier, a somewhat similar phenomenon was discovered by the Dane Ole Roemer in 1676. The story deserves to be told because it also led to the first determination of the velocity of light.
Those were the times when the sailing ships of seafaring nations – especially, France, Spain, Britain and the Netherlands (Holland) – fought to dominate the oceans and to establish (and protect) trade routes and distant bases. In such a struggle, one technology was crucial: commanders of ships had to somehow know at all times their position in mid-ocean, that is, their latitude and longitude.
Latitude was relatively easy: the elevation of the celestial pole above the horizon (deduced, for instance, from the position of the pole star) gave that. Or else, the elevation of the Sun when it was most distant from the horizon ("solar noon"), i.e. made the greatest angle between it and the horizon, gave the latitude (after being adjusted for the day of the year). The cross staff, or a later more accurate instrument, the marine sextant (or the octant) allowed "shooting the Sun," i.e. finding its elevation above the horizon, and by combining several timed observations, its greatest elevation for that day could be derived.
Longitude was much harder. It required knowledge of the time at Greenwhich (longitude zero) when a cross staff or sextant determined that the Sun was passing local noon. For example, if the Sun passed local noon when it was 1 p.m. at Greenwich, the ship was 15° west of Greenwich, because
To get this information, the captain needed a clock which kept accurate time for a many months: it could be set in Greenwich (or set to Greenwich time at a location of known longitude), and used later to give "Greenwich time" of local noon. Such clocks ("chronometers") were in fact developed in the 1700s, but clocks of the 1600s were not accurate enough, especially on a ship that rolled and pitched, and their errors accumulated rapidly.
A less precise clock may be used, if somehow it can be constantly corrected, reset to the correct "Greenwich time" at frequent intervals. In a later era this was done using time signals obtained by radio, but in the 1600s accurately timed celestial phenomena held the greatest promise. One class of such phenomena were the eclipses of the four large moons of Jupiter, discovered by Galileo and easily seen through even a small telescope.
In particular, Io, the innermost moon of Jupiter, seemed suitable: being closest to Jupiter, Kepler's 3rd law assured that it had the fastest motion, making its entry into eclipses and out of them particularly rapid. With an orbital period of 1.77 days, Io also offered the largest number of eclipses, and every one of its orbits crossed Jupiter's shadow. (In the satellite age Io was found to have other unique features, such as sulfur volcanoes.)
Giovanni Domenico Cassini, an Italian astronomer who headed of the Paris Observatory, therefore assigned Roemer to make a table of the predicted times of Io eclipses, allowing sailors at sea to set their clocks (within a minute or so, deemed accurate enough). Roemer did so, but soon discovered that the period was not constant. When Earth (which moves faster than Jupiter) was approaching Jupiter, the observed period was shorter, and when it was receding, longer.
He guessed the reason: light did not spread instantly, but (like sound) did so at a certain speed. If Earth and Jupiter maintained a constant distance, the eclipses would have been spaced at regular intervals, equal to the orbital period of Io. When Earth is approaching, however, the return trip is shortened, compared to the time it would have taken if the distance stayed constant. When Earth is receding, the return trip is longer, and the time between eclipses is longer too
That gave Roemer convincing evidence that light spread in space with a certain velocity--later denoted by the letter c (lower case, not capital). However, he and his contemporaries had only a vague idea how big c was, because the dimensions of the solar system were uncertain. About that same time, the French astronomer Jean Richer used a telescope to estimate of the distance of Mars, and gradually, the value of c was obtained with increasing accuracy. Today it is known to an accuracy of 9 decimals, and has therefore been used to define the metre, the unit of length, replacing optical wavelengths or scratches on a metal bar kept in a vault (supposedly derived from the size of our globe).
And the problem of longitude?
It turned out that observing the eclipses of Io from a constantly moving ship, even in a calm sea, was a difficult task. Even a small telescope magnifies all motions tremendously, and early telescopes in particular showed only a small patch of the sky. Also, the method required a sky free of clouds. On the other hand, the method proved very useful for determining the longitude of ports, capes, islands and other features on land.
Consistent determinations of longitude from a moving ship had to wait for sophisticated clocks, using a balance wheel compensated for changes due to variation of temperature. One early model of such a "chronometer" accompanied Captain James Cook on his journey around the world.
(S-4A-2) The Frequency Shift and the Expanding Universe
(S-5) Waves and Photons
Timeline Glossary Back to the Master List
Author and Curator: Dr. David P. Stern
Mail to Dr.Stern: stargaze("at" symbol)phy6.org .
Last updated: 9 December 2006 | <urn:uuid:9268091d-e08f-49a1-9c2a-bfdc6d447834> | {
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Mechanics: Circular Motion and Gravitation
Circular Motion and Gravitation: Audio Guided Solution
A loop de loop track is built for a 938-kg car. It is a completely circular loop - 14.2 m tall at its highest point. The driver successfully completes the loop with an entry speed (at the bottom) of 22.1 m/s.
a. Using energy conservation, determine the speed of the car at the top of the loop.
b. Determine the acceleration of the car at the top of the loop.
c. Determine the normal force acting upon the car at the top of the loop.
Audio Guided Solution
Click to show or hide the answer!
b. 30. m/s/s
c. 1.9 x 104 N
Habits of an Effective Problem Solver
- Read the problem carefully and develop a mental picture of the physical situation. If necessary, sketch a simple diagram of the physical situation to help you visualize it.
- Identify the known and unknown quantities in an organized manner. Equate given values to the symbols used to represent the corresponding quantity - e.g., m = 61.7 kg, v= 18.5 m/s, R = 30.9 m, Fnorm = ???.
- Use physics formulas and conceptual reasoning to plot a strategy for solving for the unknown quantity.
- Identify the appropriate formula(s) to use.
- Perform substitutions and algebraic manipulations in order to solve for the unknown quantity.
Read About It!
Get more information on the topic of Circular Motion and Gravitation at The Physics Classroom Tutorial.
- Mathematics of Circular Motion
- Newton's Second Law - Revisited
- Situations Involving Energy Conservation
Return to Problem Set
Return to Overview | <urn:uuid:1d779db4-f950-4006-9a69-5785000fcf08> | {
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Should I write: [itex](1-t)[(1-t)(2-t)-2 = -(t-3)(t-1)(t)[/itex]. This is the characteristic polynomial. Thus, the roots are 3,1,0. These are the eigenvalues. If I have equations,
(1-t)x + 2y = 0
1x + (2-t)y = 0
(1-t)z = 0,
and I plug in for t=0,1,3, I find for t=3 that eigenvectors are multiples of (1,1,0). For t=1, eigenvectors are multiples of (0,0,1). For t=0, eigenvectors are multiples of (-2,1,0). The matrix is diagonalizable because T has three linearly indep. eigenvectors.
Because these vectors are linearly independent, and because the number of vectors = dim(R3), these vectors span R3. Thus, R3 is the eigenspace of T (???)
How does that look? | <urn:uuid:42c86bf5-494c-4912-bdda-c646595625e6> | {
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|Oct17-07, 09:45 PM||#1|
p value (stats)
1. The problem statement, all variables and given/known data
Measurements o the percentage of enrichment of 12 fuel rods used in a nuclear reactor were reported with a sample mean of 3.26. Test the hypothesis H_0: [tex]\mu[/tex]=2.95 versus H_1: [tex]\mu\neq[/tex]2.95, and draw appropriate conclusions. Use the p-value approach.
2. Relevant equations
3. The attempt at a solution
I honestly don't know where to begin since the variance is unknown. Can someone help me out?
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|stats help||Introductory Physics Homework||1| | <urn:uuid:cdd7cf61-2ecc-4291-949c-dd481409bc93> | {
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Article Archive >> Community
Reflections: Why was the hatter mad?
Why was the hatter mad?
By William L. Bulla
What is a Mad Hatter? He is not something we experience in our every day life. However, he is something we read about, even as children, in the story of "Alice in Wonderland", and again, "Through the Looking Glass."
Over the years we have read about both the Mad Hatter and his partner the March Hare. Both of these characters have seemed a bit mad.
Recently my friend Sean asked, "why do they say 'mad as a hatter'?" I said I thought it came from Lewis Carroll's "Alice In Wonderland". He told me I was wrong. He said it had to do with the mercury used in preserving the furs from which they made the hats. Of course, I didn't believe him so I decided I should look into the issue. Sean was right. It was the chemicals used in preserving the fur used in making hats that caused the hatter's to go "mad".
The most famous Mad Hatter, of course, is the one from the Mad Tea Party in Alice in Wonderland, the partner of the March Hare. Both mad, of course. But Lewis Carroll did not invent the phrase, although he did create the character. The phrases "mad as a hatter" and "mad as a March hare" were common at the time Lewis Carroll wrote the first publication of Alice In Wonderland in 1865. The phrase had been in common use in 1837, almost 30 years earlier. Carroll frequently used common expressions, songs, nursery rhymes, etc., as the basis for characters in his stories.
The origin of the phrase, it's believed, is that hatters really did go mad. The chemicals used in hat-making included mercury nitrate, used in curing felt. Prolonged exposure to the mercury vapors caused mercury poisoning. Victims developed severe and uncontrollable muscular tremors and twitching limbs, which became known as "hatter's shakes"; other symptoms included distorted vision and confused speech. Advanced cases developed hallucinations and other psychotic symptoms.
The victims were the hatters, not the wearers of hats. The hatters were exposed to the mercury fumes, which would have been long dissipated, or of insignificant strength, by the time the hat was worn. This use of mercury is now subject to severe legal restrictions (if not banned) in the U.S. and Europe.
The March Hare and the Hatter make a brief reappearance in Alice Through the Looking Glass as the King's messengers, "Haigha" and "Hatta." These names are the only hint as to their identities other than the illustrations from the book published in 1871.
"In that direction," the Cat said, waving its right paw round, "lives a Hatter: and in that direction," waving the other paw, "lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they're both mad."
"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be, said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."
So, who knows for sure? Maybe we all become a bit mad in March.
William L. Bulla is a freelance writer residing in Washington County.
<< back to Articles on Community
<< back to All Articles | <urn:uuid:427ac10c-4080-46d5-b1a5-123b6306b071> | {
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|Sat August 11, 2012 08:59PM (PDT)|
A map displaying historical seismicity within 50 Km of a queried earthquake.
Historic Map Legend
The sizes of symbols scale with earthquake magnitude, and their color with either the age of the earthquake relative to the one starred or its depth, as shown in the legend below, and selected in the panel to the right of the map. Clicking on an earthquake symbol shows its basic information and a link to a page with more details about the individual earthquake. Probable surface explosions (usually due to quarrying or road building) are shown as stars.
Historic Eqs Map Panel
Using the tools in this panel you can control the earthquakes shown on the map. The minimum magnitude to plot is selected by the slider. The "Time" and "Depth" determines whether earthquake age or depth are used to color the symbol.
- 1) To begin, click the "Draw" button
- 2) Click a point on the map, this will be the left side of the cross-section.
- 3)Click a second point on the map, this will be the right side of the cross-section.
- 4) Drag square on line to include events to plot.
- 5) Select plot type and depth constraint if any.
- 6) Click "Plot"
Events on map
|Mag||Time (Local)||Depth (Km)| | <urn:uuid:a9db9676-5e4e-4044-870d-99a59df0511d> | {
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Malcolm X (May 19, 1925 – February 21, 1965), born Malcolm Little and also known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, was an African-American Muslim minister and human rights activist. To his admirers, he was a courageous advocate for the rights of blacks, a man who indicted white America in the harshest terms for its crimes against black Americans. Detractors accused him of preaching racism, black ... more »
Click here to add this poet to your My Favorite Poets.
Quotationsmore quotations »
The day that the Black man takes an uncompromising step and realizes that he is within his rights, when his own freedom is being jeopardized, to use any means necessary to bring about his freedom or p...Malcolm X (1925-1965), U.S. African-American leader. Oxford Union Society Debate, Dec. 3, 1964. Malcolm X Talks to Young People, ed. Steve Clark (1991...
If violence is wrong in America, violence is wrong abroad. If it is wrong to be violent defending black women and black children and black babies and black men, then it is wrong for America to draft u...Malcolm X (1925-1965), U.S. African-American leader. speech, Nov. 1963, New York City.
''The Negro revolution is controlled by foxy white liberals, by the Government itself. But the Black Revolution is controlled only by God.''Malcolm X (1925-1965), U.S. black leader. speech, Dec. 1, 1963, New York City.
If you're born in America with a black skin, you're born in prison, and the masses of black people in America today are beginning to regard our plight or predicament in this society as one of a prison...Malcolm X (1925-1965), U.S. African-American leader. Interview June 1963. Malcolm X: The Man and His Times, pt. 3, "Malcolm X Talks with Kenneth B. Cl...
Comments about Malcolm X
Happy Birthday Naim Frashëri!
(1846-1900) Albanian poet and writer
World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development
celebrated on May 21st every year
Your Favorite Poets’ Favorite Books of Poetry
Daily Rituals of Famous Authors
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What is Ipecac Syrup?
Ipecac syrup is a medicine that causes vomiting.
In the past it was used to partially empty a person’s stomach after a poison.
It is now rarely recommended.
It is NOT necessary to keep ipecac syrup in your home.
In case of poisoning, call the poison center right away at.......
What Happened to Ipecac Syrup?
For years, parents were told to keep
ipecac syrup at home. This medicine could be used to make a child vomit
after swallowing poison. Now, your doctor doesn’t tell you to keep it. The
poison center doesn’t tell you to use it. You can’t even buy ipecac in the
What happened? And NOW what should
The short story: Call the
poison center right away at 1-800-222-1222 if you think someone has been
poisoned. If the poison was swallowed, breathed in, or splashed on someone’s
skin or eyes, the poison center experts will tell you what to do right away.
Local experts will answer your phone call, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Most of the time, you can stay safely at home with the poison center’s
advice. But, be prepared:
Click here to order phone stickers and magnets with the poison
center’s emergency number.
Click here for first aid instructions for poisoning.
The longer story: It seemed
to make sense. If someone swallowed poison and then threw up, they shouldn’t
get sick. This treatment approach was used for decades.
At first, people who swallowed
poison were given many ineffective remedies:
- raw egg white;
- the "universal antidote" of burnt toast, tannic
acid and milk of magnesia;
- salt water;
- tickling the back of the throat.
Sometimes, these remedies did cause
vomiting. But they often caused problems of their own. For example, too much
salt caused sodium poisoning, seizures and even death. Gagging someone often
caused throat bleeding and swelling. Also, these home remedies were never
reliable enough to be used to treat poisoning. And complicated charts about
what remedy went with what poisoning were confusing.
Small brown bottles of ipecac syrup
seemed to solve these problems. When given to children or adults, ipecac
made most of them throw up within 20-30 minutes. Since at least the 1960’s,
standard parenting advice included keeping a bottle of ipecac syrup at home.
In fact, many pediatricians and health clinics gave ipecac to parents, “just
What we know now: It turns
out that a big piece of the picture was missing. Yes, ipecac made people
throw up, whether or not they swallowed poison. But did throwing up keep
them from actually getting sick from the poison?
Recently, researchers looked at all
of the evidence about ipecac syrup. They agreed that ipecac syrup reliably
caused vomiting. They also agreed that this didn’t make any difference! In
other words, there was little research to show that people who swallowed
ipecac after poisoning did any better than others.
In addition, this review
highlighted some problems with ipecac:
- There are times when ipecac is unsafe. It
shouldn't be given to someone who swallowed chemicals that cause burns
on contact or medicines that can cause seizures very quickly. It
can be dangerous to people with some types of medical problems.
When such poisoning victims got ipecac anyway, they developed serious
complications or even died.
- More and more people with eating disorders were
using ipecac to make themselves throw up. Regular use of ipecac
syrup is dangerous; for example, chronic users have died from heart
- Sometimes people vomiting after ipecac could not
keep down other drugs they needed to treat their poisonings.
Based on these facts,
pediatricians, poison centers, and federal regulators have re-evaluated the
use of ipecac. Follow the links at the end for the fine print.
Should you keep ipecac at home?
- The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends
that ipecac syrup NOT be stocked at home.
- Likewise, the American Association of Poison
Control Centers no longer recommends that parents keep ipecac syrup at
- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is
considering a recommendation from one of its expert panels to make
ipecac syrup a prescription-only drug. To date, FDA has not acted
on the panel recommendation.
- In the Washington, DC metropolitan area, the
National Capital Poison Center does not recommend that parents stock
ipecac syrup at home. In fact, most pharmacies no longer stock ipecac
I hear about activated charcoal…Activated
charcoal is a medicine that is used to treat some serious poisonings. It is
often given in emergency departments and sometimes, but rarely, at home.
The National Capital Poison Center
does NOT recommend that parents keep activated charcoal at home. It goes
back to research. Most studies do not show a benefit to keeping and giving
activated charcoal at home.
The bottom line: Parents,
child care providers, and everyone who spends time with children should post
the poison center phone number on or near every phone. Call 1-800-222-1222
right away for a possible poisoning. Trained experts will guide you: if
treatment is needed, they’ll tell you what to do. They will call you back to
be sure that everything is all right.
For more information:
- In 2003, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
FDA Nonprescription Drug Advisory Council held a hearing about the
over-the-counter status of ipecac syrup. The advisory panel then
recommended to FDA that ipecac syrup no longer be available as a
non-prescription drug. FDA has not made a decision (as of 12/05),
but documents from the hearing are available on the web site. Go
to www.fda.gov and enter the search
term "ipecac". You will find the regulatory history of ipecac and
presentations and submissions for and against the over-the-counter
availability of ipecac syrup.
- In 2003, the American Academy of Pediatrics
issued a policy statement "Poison
Treatment in the Home" which concluded that ipecac syrup should no
longer be routinely used in the home. Instead, they recommended
that the first action of a caregiver of a child who may have swallowed a
poison is to call the local poison control center at 1-800-222-1222.
- In 2004, an expert panel of toxicologists issued
on the Use of Ipecac Syrup in the Out-of-Hospital Management of Ingested
Poisons." Panel members from the American Association of
Poison Control Centers, the American Academy of Clinical Toxicology and
the American College of Medical Toxicology concluded that ipecac is
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For a few short weeks last September, the Northwest and Northeast passages through the Arctic Ocean were simultaneously ice-free from end to end, the first such clearing in the time that satellites have monitored the region. Merchants have long sought routes through the ice packed waters that link the pacific and Atlantic. But researchers at the Naval postgraduate school in Monterey, California, say that we could now see an entire Arctic Ocean, not just passages along the coasts, with icefree summers, as soon as 2016.
That is a bleak environmental scenario. but it also means that cargo ships could shave thousands of miles off their journeys. Already, Russia is touting the Northeast Passage (a.k.a. the Northern Sea Route), which hugs its Arctic Coast, as a shorter, safer alternative to the pirate-infested waters near Egypt’s Suez Canal. The country’s fleet of for-hire, icebreaker escorts are on duty, and more are on order. although the major container shipping lines have yet to test the icy waters, more local cargo ships and tankers have been traversing the passage recently.
Equally desired is a shipping lane through the less-developed Northwest passage on the Canadian side of the Arctic. Although a labyrinth of frozen islands makes transit more challenging, China could get goods to the East coast of the U.S. without a lengthy detour through the Panama Canal or an overland trip by railroad. Similarly, travel between the Northwest U.S. and Europe would be 2,300 miles shorter. Many climate scientists say the Northwest could become passable on a regular basis by 2020.
Designers such as Aker Arctic, a Finnish firm, are developing ships that could travel the new routes even in the off-season, including icebreakers that can move sideways to blast channels for big cargo ships, and container ships with reinforced sterns that plow through ice rearend first so they don’t need an icebreaker to accompany them. Meanwhile, the Arctic Regional Hydrographic Commission, formed last October, is coordinating efforts to map the more than 90 percent of Arctic waters for which nautical charts are decades out of date or nonexistent.
Five amazing, clean technologies that will set us free, in this month's energy-focused issue. Also: how to build a better bomb detector, the robotic toys that are raising your children, a human catapult, the world's smallest arcade, and much more. | <urn:uuid:77da14a4-30b9-49cf-954f-0ac417ea92df> | {
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Causes of Spotting at 26th Week of Pregnancy
| December 1, 2011
It is only natural for a woman to get highly concerned on noticing spots of blood on tissue or her underwear during the course of pregnancy. This is because spotting could be a sign that something is wrong with the baby or the pregnancy. Fortunately, since the 26th week of pregnancy falls in the second trimester, the risks of losing the baby are considerably lower.
Spotting in the 26th week of pregnancy could occur because of several reasons, some of which include vaginal exams, physical exertion or sexual intercourse. However, at times, spotting at 26 weeks pregnant could also be an indication of a problem with the placenta, or an infection. Therefore, it is always advisable to speak to a health care provider about it and preferably undergo a checkup. In case the spotting is accompanied by cramps, or turns to light or heavy bleeding, it needs to be checked by a doctor immediately.
Brown discharge at 26 weeks pregnant
The appearance of brown discharge could occur at any time during the course of pregnancy. Brown discharge usually means that the body is getting rid of old blood, which is rarely a cause for concern. In case it happens during the first few weeks, it is a sign of implantation, which is the fertilized egg attaching itself to the wall of the uterus. However, in the second trimester, brown vaginal discharge can be seen after engaging in sex or undertaking any other form of strenuous physical activity. However, a doctor should be informed in case of spotting at any time of during the pregnancy. If the discharge is heavy or pinkish in appearance, it is a cause for concern and should be checked by a doctor immediately.
Cramping at 26 weeks pregnant
It is a well-known fact that abdominal cramps are a common occurrence during the first trimester of pregnancy. However, most women are not sure if cramps during the 26th week are a normal occurrence or not. Mild and occasional cramping in the second trimester is not a cause for concern, as long as it is not accompanied by spotting, bleeding, vaginal discharge or diarrhea. However, in case the cramping is persistent, severe or goes on for a long time (more than a couple of hours), consult a doctor without any delay.
Implantation bleeding at 26 weeks pregnant
Implantation bleeding occurs during the initial stages of pregnancy, when an egg that has been fertilized gets implanted into the uterine wall lining. This is a very common sign of pregnancy and is not a cause for concern. However, it is important to remember that implantation bleeding occurs only in the initial stages. Bleeding in the 26th week of pregnancy cannot be caused by implantation and may indeed be a sign of a major complication, or perhaps even miscarriage. Therefore, it is absolutely essential to visit a doctor in case bleeding is noticed in the 26th week.
Pregnancy and Baby Care Questions | <urn:uuid:70ce792e-aa06-446e-adde-5fb5efc44bf2> | {
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The number of people aged 65 and over living with cancer in the UK is set to treble by 2040, Macmillan Cancer Support is warning today.
According to new research funded by Macmillan and carried out by King’s College London, the number of older people with cancer will increase to 4.1 million by 2040, up from 1.3 million in 2010, due to a number of factors including the ageing population and increasing survival rates.
The figures are almost four times higher than for people in the 45-64 age bracket.
The greatest increase in incidence is expected to be seen in lung cancer in older women.
This is forecast to more than double between 2010 and 2040, from 319 people per 100,000 to 831.
On the other hand, lung cancer prevalence in older men is expected to fall, due to a dramatic decline in smoking among men since the 1970s.
Professor Henrik Møller, one of the study’s authors at King’s College London, said the large increases expected to be seen in the oldest age groups in the coming decades will bring with them increasing pressures upon health services.
Ciarán Devane, chief executive at Macmillan Cancer Support, described the care of older cancer patients as a “ticking time bomb” for society.
He said: “These stark predictions should act as a warning to the NHS and social care providers of the problems ahead if older cancer patients are not offered the best treatment and support.
“We have a moral duty to give people the best chance of beating cancer, regardless of their age. For cancer survival to improve, older people must be given the right treatment at the correct level of intensity, together with the practical support to enable them to take it up.”
Macmillan says that older cancer patients currently face a multitude of barriers to getting the best care and treatment, which include a lack of practical support at home and poor management of non-cancer related health problems.
Macmillan is calling for a more effective way of assessing older people for treatment, more short-term practical support to enable them to take up recommended treatment and training for professionals working with older people within the NHS to promote age equality.
Macmillan, in partnership with Age UK and the Department of Health, has set up five pilots to test new models of older people’s care. They will report in December 2012.
Would you like to know more about affordable cashplans including worldwide cover without obligation? Contact Private Healthcare Bureau NOW | <urn:uuid:579546ea-a7f1-4a8f-afed-3bfad385268c> | {
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If you look back on your own days as a student, you can recall with ease teachers who made learning fun. You wanted to be in their classes. Best of all, you were certain that those teachers liked you and missed you on those days when you had to be absent. If you succeed at nothing else in your career, you should aim to create that same effect on your students. What makes certain teachers gifted? Charisma. According to a standard definition, charisma is "a unique personal power belonging to those individuals who secure the allegiance of large numbers of people." Fortunately, classroom charisma is a learned trait. It is something that you should begin working on the first day you teach to your last.
How do you rate your classroom charisma? How do you create an environment in your classroom in which your students are made to feel that they are accepted and necessary to the proper functioning of the class? How do you create a nurturing, and positive climate in your classroom? Be specific. For example, I smile and greet students as they come into the classroom. I use questioning techniques that engage all students. My lessons are packed with a variety of interesting activities. I dress professionally. I use techniques that appeal to all of my students' learning styles. I establish procedures and routines and stick to them. | <urn:uuid:2734668d-2672-41ee-976b-b939ca944c81> | {
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Learn All Year Long
ReadWriteThink has a variety of resources for out-of-school use. Visit our Parent & Afterschool Resources section to learn more.
Telling My Story: Make a Bio-Cube
|Grades||3 – 5|
|Activity Time||20 to 30 minutes to create and construct the cube, plus time to write and discuss|
The Bio-Cube tool asks children to describe a person using key pieces of information. Constructing an “All About Me” cube gives children a chance to share interesting details and thoughts about themselves, including their biggest obstacles and important quotations. Get into the spirit by making a Bio-Cube about yourself before sharing the activity. Children can also use the cubes as the basis for a short writing task.
Successful students can do more than just understand what they’ve read; they can also boil it down to the essential information. The Bio-Cube tool helps children condense what they want to say about themselves. The cube activity also offers a chance for self-discovery, allowing children to see how complex they are.
This activity was modified from the ReadWriteThink lesson plan “Getting to Know You: Developing Short Biographies to Build Community.” | <urn:uuid:aa5eecb1-6160-4f36-93ef-5c6a8ccae2dc> | {
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The thirty-third day of the Omer, is a festival known by the phonetic sound of the number thirty-three in Hebrew, Lag b’Omer. Bonfires are lit and ecstatic dancing and mystical studies are undertaken in honor of the memory of the luminary of Jewish mysticism, Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai, known by the acronym Rashbi.
Rashbi is recorded as having died on day of the thirty-third day of the Omer after telling the secrets of his mystical practices. He is traditionally considered to be the author of the primary Jewish mystical text, the Zohar, which means radiance. And that very text says that Rabbi Shimom and his home were filled with a dramatic radiance while he shared his final secrets on the day of his death. The many teachings we have in his name shed light to this day on practices which support a core tenet of Judaism: our capacity to evolve as people; which is why special customs for children and families also prevail on this day including: | <urn:uuid:211d5c7f-0bee-47d4-88dd-eb90ea044b68> | {
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Pakistan’s National Mammal Is Making A Comeback
The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) announced today that the markhor – a majestic wild goat species – is making a remarkable comeback in Pakistan due to conservation efforts.
WCS-led community surveys have revealed that markhor populations in northern Pakistan’s Kargah region in Gilgit-Baltistan have increased from a low of approximately 40-50 individuals in 1991 to roughly 300 this year. These community surveys suggest that the total markhor population where WCS works in Gilgit-Baltistan may now be as high as 1,500 animals, a dramatic increase since the last government estimate of less than 1,000 in 1999.
Pakistan’s national mammal, markhor are known for their spectacular, corkscrew horns that can reach nearly five feet in length. They are an important prey species for large carnivores such as wolves and snow leopards. Markhor have been listed as Endangered by IUCN since 1994, with a 2008 global population estimate of less than 2,500 animals across five countries: Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and India. They are threatened by illegal hunting, habitat destruction, and competition from domestic goats and sheep.
“We are thrilled that markhor conservation efforts in Pakistan are paying off,” said Peter Zahler, WCS Deputy Director of Asia programs. “Markhor are part of Pakistan’s natural heritage, and we are proud to be assisting the communities of Gilgit-Baltistan and the Government of Pakistan to safeguard this iconic species.”
WCS, led by Program Manager Mayoor Khan, has developed a conservation program that helps create community conservation committees and trains wildlife rangers throughout Gilgit-Baltistan. Rangers focus on monitoring wildlife and enforcing both local and national laws and regulations related to hunting and other resource use. Illegal hunting and logging have stopped in most of the valleys where the community rangers are active. WCS has been the only conservation organization working in Diamer District of GB since the program’s inception in 1997.
Altogether, there are now 53 community conservation committees within the WCS Pakistan program covering four districts. WCS has helped many of these committees form a larger conservation institution, the Mountain Conservation and Development Programme, which brings together members from each committee with government officials to help co-manage the region’s wildlife and forests.
WCS has recently developed a new management structure called “markhor conservancies” that use markhor herd home ranges to link different village resource committees together for coordinated monitoring and protection. This ensures that markhor are safeguarded as they travel across steep-sided mountains into different areas.
WCS has been active in research and conservation of markhor dating back to Dr. George Schaller’s seminal field work in the 1970s that led to the publication of the book Mountain Monarchs in 1977. WCS opened the Pakistan Country Program in 1997 aimed at helping communities protect markhor and other wildlife in the region such as snow leopards and Asiatic black bear. WCS also works on markhor conservation in Afghanistan.
On The Net: | <urn:uuid:fa7ae412-6226-49e6-b9b7-5370c9445fd4> | {
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How to Animate Photos
While several computer programs allow you to turn still photographic images into animated films, the process is also possible using simple handheld devices. Optical toys popular in the 19th century brought to life still photographic images. The thaumatrope (a card that spins), flip book, and zoetrope (a drum that spins) depend on the persistence of vision to blend individual images, thereby creating the illusion of continuous motion.
In our web resources, How to Make a Zoetrope provides detailed information to build a zoetrope drum and animation strips. You can watch examples of thaumatropes and flpbooks in Photographic Flip Books and Photographic Thaumatropes, and can view historic and contemporary stereo cards in Stereo Cards.
The Reframing Photography book provides step-by-step instructions for making thaumatropes and flip books. For additional resources and examples of pre-cinematic animation devices, check out the Pre-Cinematic Animation Devices page in our Resources > Topics section of this website. | <urn:uuid:34578107-0697-40d1-bf26-51d3e4900cd2> | {
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ABSTRACT - DELIVERABLE 196
Report on the restoration success of two lowland streams following re-meandering projects
Lowland streams are characterised by a gentle slope of terrain (zero to five per mill) and sandy soil. They occur in the flat lowland areas of the Western European plain. Lowland streams are fed by rainwater; they often lack a well-defined source. Thus, their discharge shows a smoothed relation with the amount and frequency of precipitation in the various seasons.
Lowland streams occur in the eastern and southern part of the Netherlands. Their current velocity varies from 5-30 cm s-1 in summer and early autumn and from 30-60 cm s-1 in late autumn to spring. Often the rainwater fed upper courses dry up in summer, though sometimes they are fed by a helocrene spring and then show a more constant discharge pattern (Verdonschot, 1990).
After a long period of adapting lowland streams and their catchments to agricultural, domestic, drinking water and industrial needs, awareness of the damages of these alterations has increased. In the Netherlands, only about 4% of the streams still have a natural hydro-morphology. On the last ten years, the ecological importance of streams has become more and more apparent.
Currently, stream restoration is one of the answers to the lowland stream deterioration. In order to make the proper choices in stream restoration; one firstly has to understand the complex spatial and temporal interactions between physical, chemical and biological components. The success of restoration depends on steering the appropriate key factor(s). Whichever factor this is, differs for each stream and each site.
To provide a more detailed idea of the status of the ecological effects of lowland stream restoration projects a pragmatic approach is to analyse current project. This means learning by doing!. The examples analysed examples represent an average overview of stream restoration in The Netherlands. They make clear what can be expected looking more in detail at the positive and negative aspects from an ecological point of view.
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THE BAN ON
Anti-personnel landmines are an insidious weapon of war. They are simple and cheap
to produce, costing only about $30.00 U.S. to manufacture. They either maim or kill anyone
who steps on one. They remain active for decades. They keep on injuring and killing people
long after the war has ended.
They are usually buried underground or left above ground, camouflaged. When tripped,
the resultant explosion will often either slice off the victims limbs or cause sufficient
injury to require the amputation of one or more limbs.
Some facts about landmines:
|The U.S. campaign to eliminate landmines estimates that there are up to 70 million
landmines scattered throughout 68 countries.|
|About 26,000 people are killed or maimed each year. This is one injury or death every 20
|Children under the age of 15 form about 30 to 40% of the casualties.|
|Countries with significant numbers of uncleared mines include: Afghanistan,
Angola, Cambodia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Germany,
Guatemala, Honduras, Jordan, Lebanon, Nicaragua, Somalia, Sudan, and Zimbabwe.|
|Hurricane Mitch in late 1998 flooded much of the land in Nicaragua. This has moved
landmines left over from the Contra wars in the 1980's from their original locations and
scattered them around the countryside. Often, they have become covered with mud and are
now very difficult to detect.|
|China and Russia are the main manufacturers of landmines.|
|The process of de-mining will take many decades.
Signing of the landmine treaty:
The United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution in 1996 calling for
vigorous pursuit of negotiations on a ban treaty "as soon as possible."
The landmine treaty, popularly known as "The Ottawa Treaty" was drawn
up in 1997-DEC. It bans the use, stockpiling, production and transfer of anti-personnel
landmines. "The 1997 Mine Ban Treaty...comprehensively bans all antipersonnel
mines, requires destruction of stockpiled mines within four years, requires
destruction of mines already in the ground within ten years and urges extensive programs
to assist the victims of landmines." 3
By the end of 1999-FEB, 134 nations had signed the treaty. This includes most of the
countries of the world, including Canada, France, Germany, Nicaragua, South Africa, the
United Kingdom, and Vatican City. The few nations that have not signed the treaty include
China, Iran, South Korea, Pakistan, Turkey, the United States and Yugoslavia. All of the
countries in NATO except for the U.S. and Turkey have signed the treaty. 67 nations had
ratified the treaty by 1999-FEB-28.
1998-DEC-30 was chosen to be a national call-in day to persuade President Clinton to sign
the treaty. 1 Marissa Vitagliano, is the coordinator of the U.S.
Campaign to Ban landmines, a coalition of over 300 groups. He asked that people:
"Put calls into the president. Demonstrate that we haven't forgotten the
issue. Say that we want him to sign now." Although the national call-in
day has passed, interested individuals can still call the White House comment line at
(202) 456-1111 or send e-mails to [email protected]
Implementation of the landmine treaty:
The Ottawa Mine Ban Treaty came into effect throughout most of the world on
1999-MAR-1. The biggest bell-ringing event in history occurred at noon on that day, as
churches around the world ring their bells. 2 Churches in
Brazil, France, Italy, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom had agreed to celebrate. The
International Campaign to Ban LandMines brought on-line churches from other countries.
Rebecca Larson, secretary for research and development education at the Lutheran
World Federation's (LWF) headquarters in Geneva, commented on 1999-FEB-17: "There's
a very active campaign in the U.S., and on March 1 there will be pressure on President
[Bill] Clinton for the US to sign...Throughout the past five years there has been
a significant spiritual element in the campaign, and at the intergovernmental meetings
regarding the treaty there has been ecumenical and interfaith prayer for the ban on
land-mines, for the de-miners, and for the victims and survivors of land-mines."
Over 1,000 non-governmental organizations have formed the International Campaign. More
than a third of these are faith groups.
U.S. reluctance to sign:
landmines currently provide the only feasible way of preventing passage through the
buffer zone that separates North and South Korea. President Clinton believes that it would
be irresponsible of him to sign the treaty at this time. He has suggested the date of
2006. By that time, alternatice weapon systems should have been developed.
President Clinton's proposed goal of the year 2006 is conditional on the development of
a substitute defensive system. In them meantime, the Pentagon is seeking nearly $50
million from Congress in 1999 to develop a new landmine system called
Stephen Goose, Program Director for the Arms Division of Human Rights
Watch commented: "The goal of 2006 is already unconscionably distant...RADAM
is the latest of a growing number of indicators that the Pentagon is not serious about the
2006 deadline, and that it is very unlikely to be met."
On 2001-DEC-3, the fourth anniversary of the opening for signature of the
Mine Ban Treaty, Human Rights Watch issued a press release which
revealed that "45 percent of the 1.2 million long-lasting "dumb"
(non-self-destructing) antipersonnel mines retained for use in Korea are stored
at depots in the continental U.S. Another 50 percent are in Korea, but at the
onset of conflict will be handed over to South Korean troops for their use. The
U.S. earmarks only the remaining 5 percent of the mines for immediate use by
U.S. troops in South Korea." 4 Steve Goose, program
director of Human Rights Watch's arms division commented: "This new
information seriously calls into question the major rationale put forth by the
Pentagon for not banning anti-personnel mines. The U.S. has repeatedly said that
these mines are needed to stop a massive surprise attack by North Korea.
Obviously, they are not needed for that if they are sitting in warehouses in the
U.S." 4 Human Rights Watch has issued a Memorandum
for U.S. Policymakers o Landmines, dated 2001-NOV. 5
- Alexa Smith, "Call-In Day Set to Push For Landmine Ban," PCUSA NEWS,
- Edmund Doogue, "Churches Are Asked to Ring Bells on March 1 for Land-Mine Ban,"
PCUSA NEWS, #99069, 1999-FEB-17
- News release, "Historic Land Mine Ban Treaty Takes Effect: U.S. Plans for New
Mine system Criticized," Human Rights Watch, 1999-MAR-1.
- News release, "Landmines: Almost Half of Korea Mines in U.S.,"
Human Rights Watch, 2001-DEC-3
- "Memorandum for U.S. Policymakers on Landmines. November 2001. Subject:
Issues and Questions for the Landmine Policy Review," Human Rights Watch,
Copyright © 1998 to 2001 incl. by Ontario
Consultants on Religious Tolerance
Latest update: 2000-DEC-4
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Everyone has heard of coccidia at some point or another or have been the owners of reptiles with this bothersome parasite. For those who don't know, coccidia is a protozoan parasite that affects reptiles of all species and tends to cause a bad runny diarrhea usually of yellow coloration. The parasite attaches to the intestinal mucosa and prevents the proper absorption of nutrients by the reptile host, thus causing weight loss, diarrhea, lethargy, anorexia and eventually death. It is highly contagious and can be passed by contact with infected reptiles. Treatment is possible and involves thorough cleaning and disinfection of the habitat as well as proper medications that are only legally available through a licensed veterinarian. Holistic medications are rumored to be effective against coccidia but it has been my personal experience that this isn't always the case. The good news is that the holistic meds rarely, if ever, harm the reptile so you can't go wrong trying them if you wish to. However, if money is tight, you might want to consider the benefits of spending $30 on a product that may help vs. using the money towards paying for a consult and medications that will help. So with all that said, let me introduce you to Coccidia: This species is likely in the genus Eimeria. This sample was taken from a Leopard Gecko. For the following pics, let's count from 1-4: One Two Three Four You have just seen the development of another species of Coccidia, likely Isospora sp., from a Panther Chameleon. The 4 celled oocyst (or "egg") seen in the last pic is the more common form we see in full blown infections but this particular guy had an infection so severe that all stages of development of the oocysts were seen. This chameleon has already been through a trial of holistic medications for 21 days according to the owner. We treated the chameleon with traditional medications and the recovery was successful. He was weak and almost didn't make it but the owner did a great job nursing him back to health during the treatment. Despite what has been said in many forums on the internet, coccidia is quite easy to acquire and can be quite prevalent in many species, such as Bearded Dragons. It can be transmitted via feeder insects and reptiles that appear fat and healthy can be infected with coccidia as well. Parasites are just another occupational hazard we have to deal with in the reptile hobby and your best bet is to have your reptiles checked for parasites at least every 6 months so you can be on top of any infection that might show up. | <urn:uuid:8c596b9c-9ab6-46eb-9146-8611fcf73f4d> | {
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Egypt's Mubarak -- from presidency to prison
REUTERS - Here is a look at Hosni Mubarak from the start of his presidency to when he was sentenced to life imprisonment on Saturday for his role in killing protesters involved in a uprising that toppled him from power last year:
October 6, 1981 - Vice-President Mubarak is thrust into office when Islamist radicals gun down President Anwar Sadat at a military parade. He is approved as president in a referendum in November.
June 26, 1995 - Gunmen attack Mubarak's car as he arrives at an African summit in Ethiopia's capital Addis Ababa. He escapes unhurt and returns to Egypt.
November 17, 1997 - Islamist militant group al-Gama'a al-Islamiya (Islamic Group) kills 58 tourists and four Egyptians at an ancient temple near Luxor. It is the most dramatic act in a 1990s rebellion by Islamists seeking to establish an Islamic state. The revolt is eventually crushed by state security.
March 2005 - Street protests by the Kefaya (Enough) Movement draw hundreds across Egypt to oppose a fifth six-year term for Mubarak or any attempt to install his son Gamal in his place.
May 11, 2005 - Parliament votes to change the constitution to allow contested presidential elections, dismissing opposition complaints that strict rules would prevent genuine competition.
September 27, 2005 - Mubarak is sworn in for a fifth consecutive term after winning the first multi-candidate presidential vote on September 7. Rights groups say the vote was marred by abuses. His closest rival, Ayman Nour, comes a distant second and is later jailed on charges he says are politically motivated.
December 8, 2005 - The Muslim Brotherhood wins 20 percent of the seats in parliament, its best showing. Rights groups say the vote was vitiated by irregularities to ensure Mubarak's ruling party retains a big majority.
April 2008 - Riots erupt in a number of cities over wages, rising prices and shortages of subsidised bread.
March 27, 2010 - Mubarak reassumes presidential powers after three weeks recovering from gallbladder surgery in Germany.
November 29, 2010 - A parliamentary election virtually eliminates opposition to Mubarak's ruling party in the assembly before a 2011 presidential vote. The Brotherhood and several other opposition groups boycott the parliamentary election.
January 25, 2011 - Anti-government protests begin across Egypt, driven by discontent over poverty, repression and corruption.
January 28 - Mubarak orders troops and tanks into cities overnight to quell the demonstrations.
January 31 - Egypt swears in a new government. New Vice-President Omar Suleiman says Mubarak has asked him to start dialogue with all political forces.
February 10 - Mubarak says national dialogue under way, transfers powers to vice-president but refuses to leave office immediately. Protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square are enraged.
February 11 - Mubarak steps down and a military council takes control.
April 12 - Mubarak is hospitalised after being questioned by prosecutors. The next day, Egypt orders Mubarak detained for questioning on accusations he abused his power, embezzled funds and had protesters killed.
August 3 - Mubarak, wheeled into a courtroom cage on a bed to face trial, denies the charges against him. His two sons, Gamal and Alaa, also deny the charges. In subsequent sessions, Mubarak always appears on a hospital stretcher.
June 2, 2012 - Mubarak is sentenced to life in prison for his role in the killing of protesters and is flown from the Cairo court to Tora prison on the outskirts of the capital, where he is admitted to a hospital facility.
(Reporting by David Cutler, London Editorial Reference Unit)
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An Internet of Food
March 03, 2006
Innovation Lab coordinates a new pilot demonstrating future uses of RFID in the prepared food sector. RFID tags are poised to replace the traditional bar code, not least because the tags allow producers and retailers to manage inventory and the supply chain more efficiently. But what might this technology mean for consumers? The project, which is funded by the Danish Ministry of Science Technology and Innovation, will explore how RFID tagging of ordinary supermarket purchases will affect how ordinary families experience their food, all the way from the shopping cart to the frying pan.
The project will trial a wide range of the new services which RFID tagging of food products will make possible:
• Expiry management: the refrigerator monitors product expiry dates, helping consumers avoid waste.
• Dietary and nutritional guidance.
• Food safety: direct information to consumers in case of product recall.
• Inspiration: Recipes and suggestions based on actual contents of refrigerator/cupboard.
• Inventory management: the contents of the refrigerator can be ‘seen’ without opening the door, even from the local supermarket.
• Marketing of related and/or complementary producter.
Each of the 20 participating families will be given a ‘kitchen console’ and RFID reader through which the digital product information linked to the RFID tags can be accessed. The console can also be used as an internet terminal (for recipe surfing and downloading, watching movies, playing video games, planning of family activities). Every week each family will receive a shopping basket of groceries in which each item is marked with an RFID ‘bar code’.
The project is a collaboration between Denmark’s leading packaged food producers and both public and private information and communications technology specialists.
RFID takes the Internet-based dialogue that has revolutionized marketing and product information to a new level of honesty, detail, and accessibility. Simply put, RFID tags make it possible to paste an entire homepage/website on the side of a milk carton or bunch of broccoli. Because the amount of information that can be shared isn’t limited by the physical boundaries of a product’s packaging, producers can communicate much more detailed and varied messages to consumers.
• The RFID tag links to a database on the internet. By pointing a reader at the tag, a user can download the information linked to that specific tag. The product’s label is in fact virtual, consisting of the information that appears on the display connected to the reader.
• The virtual product label can contain sound and video as well as text, which allows producers to experiment with multimedia content for different audiences and situations.
• The virtual product label isn’t static – it can be changed by updating the database on the net. This enables producers to update information even after the consumer has purchased the product.
The project ends in November 2006.
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Photo: Getty Images
The fly half is the pivotal attacking position in the team. With the full compliment of running, passing and kicking skills, they decide what to do and when to do it.
The fly half position on the field is crucial to how they mount an attack; they decide when to run and break through the opposition defence or bring the centres, wings and forwards into play with a variety of passes or kicks.
They are also often responsible for organising the back line defence for set pieces.
They should be a competent kicker out of hand, placing high or diagonal kicks or threading chip or grubber kicks to keep possession and threaten the opposition try line. Also, they may have to make long clearing kicks to ‘touch’ to relive pressure on their defensive line.
Often the place kicker too, a fly half should be nerveless when they kick for goal.
Practices should include:
Running – receiving passes from different angles and distances, while static and on the move
Running – making explosive breaks with ball in hand, with evasive running skills to avoid contact
Kicking – all types of kicks with both feet, varying the amounts of pressure and the difficulty of target
Kicking – place kicking for goal from different angles and distances
Passing – range of passing while on the run | <urn:uuid:c59d5e25-9bd6-4ac2-9ce1-2ce8b6c5b8d7> | {
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Rabies is still a threat worldwide and in Missouri. In the U.S., it has been reported in nearly every state. This summer, the Missouri Health Department reported that one of the showhorses, shown in the Saddlebred Show and stabled in Barn C, had contracted the disease. The horse was noticeably sick on Aug. 17 and died two days later.
This year, U.S. experts on rabies are warning that there is more reason to be vigilant than ever. In Medical News Today, Aug. 27, 2008, Dr. Charles Rupprecht, chief of the rabies program at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, said that due to a variety of regulatory and manufacturing issues, there is, temporarily, a limited supply of rabies vaccine for humans. It is more important than ever to vaccinate pets.
“The best way to limit the need for human rabies vaccine is simply to make sure pets are vaccinated. We know that dogs and cats are not the most common animals found rabid in the United States, but they are the animals most frequently involved in multiple human exposures,” he explains. “Your local veterinarian plays a key role in controlling rabies.’
Unfortunately, cats are less likely than dogs to be vaccinated against the virus and Dr. Rupprecht added that cat owners are more likely to be exposed to rabies. The American Veterinary Medical Association’s “U.S. Pet Ownership & Demographics Sourcebook” states that only 64 percent of cats visit a veterinarian every year, compared to 83 percent of dogs.
Any mammal can get rabies, including humans. Infected bats, monkeys, raccoons, foxes, skunks, dogs or cats provide the greatest risk to humans, however the disease can also spread through exposure to infected domestic farm animals. The disease is 100 percent deadly in any species once the animal starts showing signs of the disease.
Over 90 percent of reported rabies cases in the United States are wild animals commonly seen in neighborhoods and backyards, such as raccoons, skunks and bats. (A person can be bitten by a bat and not even feel it, so awareness is important.) Pets are the barrier between those animals and loved ones. By protecting pets, individuals are also protecting their loved ones.
Besides ensuring that all dogs, cats and ferrets get vaccinated, other precautionary measures include: don’t let pets roam free, don’t feed or water pets outside as stray animals are attracted even to empty bowls, and cover your garbage cans securely to keep raccoons away.
If any animal bites your pet, take it to the veterinarian immediately and contact Animal Control if it was from a stray animal. Report any stray animals and any strange behavior among animals to city or county animal control officers. If you are bitten or scratched, wash the wound thoroughly and see your physician immediately. You should also report the bite to your local health department.
Rabies kills over 55,000 people every year, mostly in Africa and Asia. Over half of those killed are children under the age of 15. Millions of animals die after contracting the virus through a bite, or saliva from an infected animal entering a wound. The virus is 100 percent preventable and that prevention is available through getting pets vaccinated. | <urn:uuid:b3316341-69b1-4624-a5dc-87c528f7bc00> | {
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1787 A Little Pretty Pocket Book-First Book To Mention Baseball
Starting Bid - $5,000.00, Sold For - $22,040.00
Offered here is the rarest and arguably the most significant early baseball book in existence: A Little Pretty Pocket Book, authored by John Newbery and published in 1787 by Isaiah Thomas, Worcester, Massachusetts. This particular book (3 x 4.75 inches) is the earliest available American edition of this important work, which was first published in London, England in 1744 (although no extant copies of that edition are known). Its great significance to both baseball historians and bibliophiles alike lies in the fact that the book contains the first known reference to the game and the first appearance of the word "base-ball" in print. Additionally, it is also considered to be the very first children's book devoted primarily to games and juvenile entertainment. The small book describes, in verse, thirty-two children's games and pastimes (one to a page), each accompanied by a woodcut illustration and brief moral. Also included are various fables, rules for behavior, and a tutorial on the alphabet. As noted earlier, the most important game described within its pages is that titled "Base-Ball." The verse reads: The ball once struck off; Away flies the boy; To the next destined post; And then home with joy. The illustration above the verse pictures three young boys and three bases marked by posts. While none of the players is depicted holding a bat, one of the youths stands ready to pitch the ball. Neighboring pages describe the games of stool-ball, trap-ball, and tip-cat, respectively, with each accompanying woodcut engraving also representing the earliest known illustrations for each of those games. In our thirty-six years of specializing in nineteenth-century baseball items, we have never once handled this book, or seen or heard of one available in a sports or baseball auction. In every attempt at compiling a complete bibliography of baseball literature (there have been many, from Anton Grobani to David Block), this is the first American volume with baseball content, and the first to use the word "Base-Ball." Very few copies of the 1787 first American edition exist today, probably fewer than five, with all residing in public institutions or the world's most prominent private collections. It should be noted that no extant copies of the original 1744 English edition, nor any of the subsequent eight English editions, are known. Single copies of the 10th (1760), 11th (1763) and 12th (1767) English editions exist in institutional library collections, as do two of the 1770 editions. There were two earlier pirated American editions published. One was printed in 1762 (New York; Hugh Gaine) and the other in 1786 (Philadelphia; W. Spotswood). Of those two reported printings, only one example (the 1762 Gaine edition) is known and it resides in a public institution. This particular example once resided in the famed Bradley Martin collection, one of the most prestigious book collections ever assembled. (The Martin collection was later sold in 1990 at Sotheby's, where this particular book appeared as Lot 2411.) 122pp. (2pp. ads). The untrimmed sheets are rebound in three-quarter blue morocco with marbled paper covered boards (most likely a nineteenth-century rebinding). The binding joints are rubbed, the cover is otherwise in Excellent condition. A bookplate from a former owner is affixed to the interior cover. Light pencil notations on front flyleaf. The book is housed in a beautiful custom-made leather slipcase. This is an outstanding copy of this great and most significant rarity. This is perhaps the only copy we will ever see available. This is a museum-quality relic, and a worthy centerpiece to the most advanced collection or library. Reserve $5000. Estimate $10,000++. SOLD FOR $22,040.00
(Click the smaller thumbnails to the left and right (if any) to cycle through each photo in the gallery of images for this lot.) | <urn:uuid:a471f30b-ce17-4aac-896e-c35d3c5b10dd> | {
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Many years ago if you wanted to design something that used a microprocessor, you pretty much had to use some standard package provided by a vendor who had specialized software specific for that processor. You would use a non-standard interface to generate non-standard code to do the non-standard things that your product needed to do.
If you were to upgrade your product to use a different processor, you would start all over again. The typical product lifetime of a processor-based piece of equipment is three years, and the typical software development cycle may exceed a year. If you were trying to keep three products in the manufacturing pipeline, this would require the undivided attention of a dedicated software engineer just to keep up.
POSIX to the rescue
Every software based product requires a basic set of code plus some special code that uniquely defines your product. Most of the unique code consists of drivers and some product-specific routines. Everything else duplicates what has already been done for previous products. To help prevent duplication, a set of rules has been developed by the software community. It’s called POSIX (Portable Operating System Interface). Once code has been written to this standard, it can be reused in many other products. Linux, even at the kernel level, provides a POSIX interface for the basic functions. This is further enhanced by a runtime library which is linked with your software.
Linux and POSIX
Because of Linux and POSIX, not all of your code has to be changed if you change the hardware. Let me give you an example. Suppose you were making a weigh-scale. It is a box that is connected to a strain-gage. It has some calibration, tare, linearization, and temperature-compensation routines. It is nearly identical to last year’s model but you couldn’t get the processor anymore and, since it was a new product, you decided to change the display.
Just some drivers
If you had used Linux and the POSIX interface with the old product, you’d need to write a new display driver, and new hardware interface to the strain-gage. That’s it. Perhaps there might be a few code changes to take advantage of the new display, but otherwise major portions of last year’s code could be reused.
This might not work
If the code for the last product isn’t available anymore, isn’t documented, or was poorly written, you can’t reuse it. That’s where Route 495 Software can be helpful. We know how to write reusable code. We also know how to document it so it will not only pass your QC department’s inspection, but also use the methods, words, and interfaces about which the software community has been trained. This makes it appealing to the software engineer who is expected to reuse significant portions of it.
This webpage copyright © 2009, Route 495 Software, LLC | <urn:uuid:81fe85b6-ef5e-42a1-bb40-f3e72cc93571> | {
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Excursus on the Public Discipline or Exomologesis of the Early Church.
(Taken chiefly from Morinus, De Disciplina in Administratione Sacramenti Pœnitentiæ; Bingham, Antiquities; and Hammond, The Definitions of Faith, etc. Note to Canon XI. of Nice.)
“In the Primitive Church there was a godly discipline, that at the beginning of Lent, such persons as stood convicted of notorious sin were put to open penance, and punished in this world that their souls might be saved in the day of the Lord; and that others, admonished by their example, might be the more afraid to offend.”
The foregoing words from the Commination Service of the Church of England may serve well to introduce this subject. In the history of the public administration of discipline in the Church, there are three periods sufficiently distinctly marked. The first of these ends at the rise of Novatianism in the middle of the second century; the second stretches down to about the eighth century; and the third period shews its gradual decline to its practical abandonment in the eleventh century. The period with which we are concerned is the second, when it was in full force.
In the first period it would seem that public penance was required only of those convicted of what then were called by pre-eminence “mortal sins” (crimena mortalia 75 ), viz: idolatry, murder, and adultery. But in the second period the list of mortal sins was greatly enlarged, and Morinus says that “Many Fathers who wrote after Augustines time, extended the necessity of public penance to all crimes which the civil law punished with death, exile, or other grave corporal penalty.” 76 In the penitential canons ascribed to St. Basil and those which pass by the name of St. Gregory Nyssen, this increase of offences requiring public penance will be found intimated.
From the fourth century the penitents of the Church were divided into four classes. Three of these are mentioned in the eleventh canon, the fourth, which is not here referred to, was composed of those styled συγκλαίοντες, flentes or weepers. These were not allowed to enter into the body of the church at all, but stood or lay outside the gates, sometimes covered with sackcloth and ashes. This is the class which is sometimes styled χειμοζομένοι, hybernantes, on account of their being obliged to endure the inclemency of the weather.
It may help to the better understanding of this and other canons which notice the different orders of penitents, to give a brief account of the usual form and arrangement of the ancient churches as well as of the different orders of the penitents.
Before the church there was commonly either an open area surrounded with porticoes, called μεσάυλιον or atrium, with a font of water in the centre, styled a cantharus or phiala, or sometimes only an open portico, or προπύλαιον. The first variety may still be seen at S. Ambrogios in Milan, and the latter in Rome at S. Lorenzos, and in Ravenna at the two S. Apollinares. This was the place at which the first and lowest order of penitents, the weepers, already referred to, stood exposed to the weather. Of these, St. Gregory Thaumaturgus says: “Weeping takes place outside the door of the church, where the sinner must stand and beg the prayers of the faithful as they go in.”
The church itself usually consisted of three divisions within, besides these exterior courts p. 26 and porch. The first part after passing through “the great gates,” or doors of the building, was called the Narthex in Greek, and Færula in Latin, and was a narrow vestibule extending the whole width of the church. In this part, to which Jews and Gentiles, and in most places even heretics and schismatics were admitted, stood the Catechumens, and the Energumens or those afflicted with evil spirits, and the second class of penitents (the first mentioned in the Canon), who were called the ἀκοῶμενοι, audientes, or hearers. These were allowed to hear the Scriptures read, and the Sermon preached, but were obliged to depart before the celebration of the Divine Mysteries, with the Catechumens, and the others who went by the general name of hearers only.
The second division, or main body of the church, was called the Naos or Nave. This was separated from the Narthex by rails of wood, with gates in the centre, which were called “the beautiful or royal gates.” In the middle of the Nave, but rather toward the lower or entrance part of it, stood the Ambo, or reading-desk, the place for the readers and singers, to which they went up by steps, whence the name, Ambo. Before coming to the Ambo, in the lowest part of the Nave, and just after passing the royal gates, was the place for the third order of penitents, called in Greek γονυκλίνοντες, or ὑποπίπτοντες,and in Latin Genuflectentes or Prostrati, i.e., kneelers or prostrators, because they were allowed to remain and join in certain prayers particularly made for them. Before going out they prostrated themselves to receive the imposition of the bishops hands with prayer. This class of penitents left with the Catechumens.
In the other parts of the Nave stood the believers or faithful, i.e., those persons who were in full communion with the Church, the men and women generally on opposite sides, though in some places the men were below, and the women in galleries above. Amongst these were the fourth class of penitents, who were called συνεστῶτες, consistentes, i.e., co-standers, because they were allowed to stand with the faithful, and to remain and hear the prayers of the Church, after the Catechumens and the other penitents were dismissed, and to be present while the faithful offered and communicated, though they might not themselves make their offerings, nor partake of the Holy Communion. This class of penitents are frequently mentioned in the canons, as “communicating in prayers,” or “without the oblation;” and it was the last grade to be passed through previous to the being admitted again to full communion. The practice of “hearing mass” or “non-communicating attendance” clearly had its origin in this stage of discipline. At the upper end of the body of the church, and divided from it by rails which were called Cancelli, was that part which we now call the Chancel. This was anciently called by several names, as Bema or tribunal, from its being raised above the body of the church, and Sacrarium or Sanctuary. It was also called Apsis and Concha Bematis, from its semicircular end. In this part stood the Altar, or Holy Table (which names were indifferently used in the primitive Church), behind which, and against the wall of the chancel, was the Bishops throne, with the seats of the Presbyters on each side of it, called synthronus. On one side of the chancel was the repository for the sacred utensils and vestments, called the Diaconicum, and answering to our Vestry; and on the other the Prothesis, a side-table, or place, where the bread and wine were deposited before they were offered on the Altar. The gates in the chancel rail were called the holy gates, and none but the higher orders of the clergy, i.e., Bishops, Priests, and Deacons, were allowed to enter within them. The Emperor indeed was permitted to do so for the purpose of making his offering at the Altar, but then he was obliged to retire immediately, and to receive the communion without.
(Thomassin. Ancienne et Nouvelle Discipline de lEglise. Tom. I. Livre II. chap. xvj. somewhat abridged.)
p. 27 In the West there existed always many cases of public penance, but in the East it is more difficult to find any traces of it, after it was abolished by the Patriarch Nectarius in the person of the Grand Penitentiary.
However, the Emperor Alexis Comnenus, who took the empire in the year 1080, did a penance like that of older days, and one which may well pass for miraculous. He called together a large number of bishops with the patriarch, and some holy religious; he presented himself before them in the garb of a criminal; he confessed to them his crime of usurpation with all its circumstances. They condemned the Emperor and all his accomplices to fasting, to lying prostrate upon the earth, to wearing haircloth, and to all the other ordinary austerities of penance. Their wives desired to share their griefs and their sufferings, although they had had no share in their crime. The whole palace became a theatre of sorrow and public penance. The emperor wore the hairshirt under the purple, and lay upon the earth for forty days, having only a stone for a pillow.
To all practical purposes Public Penance was a general institution but for a short while in the Church. But the reader must be careful to distinguish between this Public Penance and the private confession which in the Catholic Church both East and West is universally practised. What Nectarius did was to abolish the office of Penitentiary, whose duty it had been to assign public penance for secret sin; 77 a thing wholly different from what Catholics understand by the “Sacrament of Penance.” It would be out of place to do more in this place than to call the readers attention to the bare fact, and to supply him, from a Roman Catholic point of view, with an explanation of why Public Penance died out. “It came to an end because it was of human institution. But sacramental confession, being of divine origin, lasted when the penitential discipline had been changed, and continues to this day among the Greeks and Oriental sects.” 78 That the reader may judge of the absolute candour of the writer just quoted, I give a few sentences from the same article: “An opinion, however, did prevail to some extent in the middle ages, even among Catholics, that confession to God alone sufficed. The Council of Châlons in 813 (canon xxxiij.), says: Some assert that we should confess our sins to God alone, but some think that they should be confessed to the priest, each of which practices is followed not without great fruit in Holy Church.…Confession made to God purges sins, but that made to the priest teaches how they are to be purged. This former opinion is also mentioned without reprobation by Peter Lombard (In Sentent. Lib. iv. dist. xvij.).”
Cyprian. De Bono Patient., cap. xiv.25:76
Morinus, De Pœnitent., lib. v., cap. 5.27:77
Vide, Thomassin. Lib. cit. Livre II. Chapitre vii. § xiii. where the whole matter of Nectariuss action is discussed.27:78
Addis and Arnold. A Catholic Dictionary; sub voce Penance, Sacrament of. | <urn:uuid:d3348be9-1d17-480c-8d22-2df0d7d02ce8> | {
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The SAGE idea is modeled after interscholastic sports. It works like this. A team of at least three teenagers is formed, either by the teens themselves or in conjunction with an entrepreneurial coach or adult ally (e.g., teacher, business leader, or sponsoring organization). If the team is affiliated with a high school, it can be part of an existing class, or it can be co-curricular. In the late spring or early summer of each year, the teams travel to a tournament to present the results of their innovations to a panel of jurists recruited from the business and civic community.
The ticket to enter the competition? A SAGE team must enter one of two categories. It must choose to operate either a:
By operating an SRB or an SEB, the team earns the right to travel to a regional or national tournament. At the national tournament, the best team in each category wins the right to represent their country at the SAGE World Cup.
If SAGE teams are searching for new ideas, they are advised to learn about the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals. The eight goal recognizes the importance of cooperation to develop and implement strategies for decent and productive work for youth. Moreover, in his book, The World is Flat, journalist Thomas Friedman (2005) commented on the importance of youth empowerment.
His comments apply to SAGE’s goals:
“Give young people a context where they can translate a positive imagination into reality, give them a context in which someone with a grievance can have it adjudicated in a court of law without having to bribe the judge with a goat, give them a context in which they can pursue an entrepreneurial idea and become the richest or the most creative or most respected people in their own country, no matter what their background, give them a context in which any complaint or idea can be published in the newspaper, give them a context in which anyone can run for office—and guess what? They usually don’t want to blow up the world. They usually want to be part of it.”
SAGE is premised on the compelling usefulness of assisting youths to plan and operate businesses, as a means to for them to use their classroom learning and develop self-reliance. Entrepreneurship is a ke y element; according to C.K. Prahalad, author of The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid [Wharton School Publishing, 2005]: “Companies, academics and NGOs are beginning to see that the private sector can play a key role in improving the quality of life for many people, including poverty reduction.” Collaboration is crucial between the private and public sectors, and market development at the “bottom of the pyramid” can create millions of new entrepreneurs at the grass roots level—from women working as distributors and entrepreneurs to village-level micro enterprises. “Entrepreneurship on a massive scale is the key,” he said [p. 2].
Our program fills an unmet need at the high school level because many young people who want to become entrepreneurs may never be able to realize their dreams. They do not have the necessary knowledge or skills to act on that knowledge; they are missing role models or personal relationships to see what it means to be a successful entrepreneur; and they lack encouragement needed to undertake a new venture.” (Walstad, W. & Kourilsy, M.L. (1998), Entrepreneurial attitudes and knowledge of black youth, Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice, 23(2), 5-18. | <urn:uuid:260b90bb-f1d3-498d-a38b-0a68c4b64639> | {
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What is Obesity?
According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), an increase in 20 percent or more above your ideal body weight is the point at which excess weight becomes a health risk. Today 97 million Americans, more than one-third of the adult population, are overweight or obese. An estimated 5 to 10 million of those are considered morbidly obese.
Obesity becomes "morbid" when it reaches the point of significantly increasing the risk of one or more obesity-related health conditions or serious diseases (also known as co-morbidities) that result either in significant physical disability or even death.
According to the National Institutes of Health Consensus Report, morbid obesity is a serious disease and must be treated as such. It is a chronic disease, meaning that its symptoms build slowly over an extended period of time. Morbid obesity can cause many life-threatening health problems and ultimately lead to a shorter life. The risk of an early death for those who are obese is two times that of a non-obese person.
There are several medically accepted criteria for defining morbid obesity. You are likely morbidly obese if you are one or more of the following:
- more than 100 lbs. over your ideal body weight, or
- have a Body Mass Index (BMI) of over 40, or
- have a BMI of over 35 and are experiencing severe negative health effects, such as high blood pressure or diabetes, related to being severely overweight
If you are struggling with morbid obesity, and have been unable to achieve a healthy body weight for a sustained period of time, even through medically supervised dieting and exercise; gastric bypass surgery or lap band surgery may be right for you. Together, you and your bariatric surgeon take steps to determine:
- If surgery is the right treatment for you
- Which type of procedure is right for you
- If you are mentally and emotionally prepared to make lifelong lifestyle changes
- That you have, or will have, the necessary support system around you
Once you and your surgeon have determined that weight loss surgery is an option for you, you will begin the prequalification process. This includes a series of tests and meetings with a nutritionist, psychologist, and other support staff members in sessions leading up to surgery. Each healthcare professional will help you prepare for the changes and challenges that lie ahead. | <urn:uuid:b6f37b9c-9780-427c-9c2f-e412865e1ce5> | {
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14 June 2007. Two recent genome-wide association (GWA) studies support the notion that many genetic variants each contribute a little to the risk of developing bipolar disorder. The largest of the new studies, published in Nature on June 7, comes from The Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium, a collaboration of genetics researchers in the United Kingdom, including lead author Peter Donnelly of the University of Oxford, England, and Nick Craddock of Cardiff University, Wales. It comes on the heels of another study, directed by Francis J. McMahon of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), that appeared online in Molecular Psychiatry on May 8.
Some of the markers implicate genes or chromosomal regions that have previously been tied to schizophrenia, which will add grist to the argument that schizophrenia and bipolar disorder share too many symptoms and genes to justify defining them as distinct syndromes (see SRF Live Discussion led by Nick Craddock and Mike Owen; Maier et al., 2006).
In their study, McMahon, first author Amber E. Baum of NIMH, and colleagues in Germany and the United States searched for single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) linked to the risk of having bipolar l disorder. This “classic” form of bipolar disorder features one or more manic or manic-depressive episodes, and sometimes psychosis or episodes of major depression (see NIMH information about the different forms of bipolar disorder). Baum and colleagues recruited 461 unrelated people with bipolar l disorder who had affected siblings, and 563 controls without major depression or a history of bipolar disorder or psychosis; all had solely European ancestry. As a check against the false positives that can compromise GWA studies, the researchers replicated their findings in a German sample of 772 people with bipolar l disorder, identified through hospital admissions and linkage studies, and 876 controls with no history of affective disorder or schizophrenia.
To control costs, the investigators used pooled DNA from many subjects to detect genes related to bipolar disorder and used individual genotyping to confirm the associations. This process detected 10 genes that were associated with bipolar disorder in both samples when analyzed separately and an extra 15 in the combined samples. Several mapped to areas previously tied to bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. Controls as well as cases had risk alleles, but cases typically carried nine or more.
Calling the effect sizes “modest,” Baum and colleagues write that the highest odds ratio based on individual genotyping, 1.67 (95 percent CI 1.32-2.13), was for a SNP in SORCS2, “which maps to a region on chromosome 4p that has been widely linked to bipolar disorder.” Three SNPs in SORCS2 and three in the gene encoding diacylglycerol kinase eta (DGKH) showed significant associations in both samples. The enzyme DGKH is notable in that it acts in a lithium-sensitive pathway.
The Wellcome Trust study searched for genetic ties to seven diseases in residents of Great Britain and addressed methodological issues that affect GWA studies. It enrolled 2,000 cases each for bipolar disorder, coronary artery disease, Crohn’s disease, hypertension, rheumatoid arthritis, type 1 diabetes, and type 2 diabetes. Bipolar disorder cases had contacted mental health services and met Research Diagnostic Criteria for a lifetime diagnosis of the disorder. Half of the 3,000 controls were born during one week in 1958; the others gave blood anonymously for the study. Analyses omitted people of non-Caucasian descent.
Case-control comparisons found 24 independent associations that met the consortium’s strictest criteria (P <5 x 10-7), including one each for bipolar disorder and coronary artery disease, nine for Crohn’s disease, three for rheumatoid arthritis, seven for type 1 diabetes, and three for type 2 diabetes. According to the researchers, many coincide with prior findings, and others have been backed by later studies, validating the GWA approach.
As Craddock, who led the bipolar part of the study, tells SRF via e-mail, “The data suggest that, at least as currently defined, there are fewer susceptibility genes of relatively large effect in bipolar disorder than for several of the other diseases studied, but more genes of smaller effect.” One SNP on chromosome 16p12 stands out for its strong evidence of a link with bipolar disorder, though this finding did not receive additional support in comparisons that used an expanded reference group of nearly 15,000 subjects, which was created by adding cases from the other six disease groups to the controls. While acknowledging the need for replication, the authors note that several genes at that site could affect bipolar disorder, including DCTN5 or dynactin 5, which “encodes a protein involved in intracellular transport that is known to interact with the gene ‘disrupted in schizophrenia 1’ (DISC1).” Other genome regions topping the list as possibly important for bipolar disorder (P values in the 10-5 range) contain genes affecting voltage-gated potassium channels and synaptic function, as well as GABA and glutamate neurotransmission. The marker in SYN3, the gene for synapsin 3, is notable in this regard, as synapsin 3 has been linked to schizophrenia in association and expression studies.
At first glance, it may seem that the NIMH and Wellcome papers implicate different genes in bipolar disorder. However, Craddock explains that the data sets have yet to be perused in enough detail to warrant that conclusion, since the papers focused on the “top hits.”
To Baum and colleagues, GWA studies serve as “a powerful alternative to genetic linkage studies, which are often underpowered to detect genes contributing to complex phenotypes, and to candidate gene association studies, which are biased by the choice of genes included.” Even so, Craddock warns, “There are opportunities for problems at every stage from sample preparation, through running chips, to cleaning and managing data. With such large data sets, small errors can generate highly significant differences between cases and controls. Such spurious positives must be weeded out ruthlessly before the data set is analyzed.”
Despite the large samples needed to adequately power GWA studies, methods used in the NIMH and Wellcome studies, such as pooling DNA and sharing control groups, can make them more manageable. Researchers intrigued by the possibilities can dive into the data sets themselves: just surf to the NIMH or WTCCC websites and apply for access to compare and contrast the results.—Victoria L. Wilcox.
Baum AE, Akula N, Cabanero M, Cardona I, Corona W, Klemens B, Schulze TG, Cichon S, Rietschel M, Nöthen MM, Georgi A, Schumacher J, Schwarz M, Abou Jamra R, Höfels S, Propping P, Satagopan J, Detera-Wadleigh SD, Hardy J, McMahon FJ. A genome-wide association study implicates diacylglycerol kinase eta (DGKH) and several other genes in the etiology of bipolar disorder. Molecular Psychiatry. May 8, 2007. Advance online publication. Abstract
The Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium. Genome-wide association study of 14,000 cases of seven common diseases and 3,000 shared controls. Nature. June 7, 2007;447(7145):661-678. Abstract
Q&A with Nick Craddock. SRF questions by Hakon Heimer and Victoria L. Wilcox.
Q: What do you see as the most important findings of the Wellcome Trust study regarding the genetic underpinnings of bipolar disorder?
A: This data set, and others that will become available in the near future, open up the possibility for systematic identification of the biological systems influencing bipolar and related disorders. The most significant association signals are obviously of great interest, and many are likely to implicate specific genes in pathogenesis. However, the great strength is having genotypes available on all individuals for all SNPs because this allows (a) sets of genes to be examined for association (rather than just one SNP at a time), and (b) subsets of patients to be examined according to their clinical characteristics (rather than just treating them as a “case”).
Q: How do the findings relate to schizophrenia and other psychoses?
A: We have also examined an additional set of 700 mood-psychosis spectrum cases using the same approach (not yet published) and are currently undertaking analyses that will inform understanding of the relationship among bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and related psychoses.
Q: Do the Wellcome Trust results alter or strengthen ideas about breaking down the “Kraepelinian divide”?
A: The published findings related to a specific definition of bipolar disorder and used only a case-control analysis and so, themselves, do not directly address the issue of the relationship between mood disorders and psychosis. Our ongoing analyses will.
Q: The study included patients with bipolar disorder classified by “Research Diagnostic Criteria.” How would this group differ from patients diagnosed in clinics in the UK or in the U.S.? Is this group of patients likely to be different from the Baum study population?
A: The vast majority of the sample also meets DSM-IV criteria for bipolar l disorder. The main difference is that about 9 percent of the sample meets criteria for bipolar II disorder. (Research Diagnostic Criteria were developed in the U.S., and DSM-III was largely based on them.)
Q: It seems that the Wellcome study and the Baum study differed in the genes they found linked to bipolar disorder. What might account for that?
A: That is a premature conclusion. The important question is whether, when the two data sets are compared in detail, there is evidence of support for loci across the studies. I think it likely that when this is done there will be genes that receive support from both data sets.
It is wrong to focus just on top hit(s) because in complex genetics you do not expect the same top signals to arise in each data set examined. This is the experience in diseases, such as type 2 diabetes, where several susceptibility genes are robustly known. Even in very large data sets (larger than that of Baum et al.), a particular robustly known gene may not show a strong signal.
Q: When will the data become available to other researchers?
A: Researchers can apply for access to the data, and details are given in the paper. The process should not take long. | <urn:uuid:86c94fa0-6a77-468c-933a-ddfa11628ea5> | {
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|Product #: EMC0765008_TQ|
Australia: Introduction (Resource Book Only) eBookGrade 3|Grade 4|Grade 5|Grade 6
Please Note: This ebook is a digital download, NOT a physical product. After purchase, you will be provided a one time link to download ebooks to your computer. Orders paid by PayPal require up to 8 business hours to verify payment and release electronic media. For immediate downloads, payment with credit card is required.
This geography unit for grades 3-6+ provides information and activities for students to begin learning about Australia, including thinking about what they know already, location activities, directions and forms for creating a geography center, and answer key. (Find additional units by searching 'Australia Geography.')
Submit a review | <urn:uuid:03607891-6f45-4683-9338-825186218b44> | {
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The National Football League is facing lawsuits by 4,000 former players who allege the organizations failed to protect them from the long-term consequences of concussions.
A psychologist that consulted with the Montreal Canadiens hockey team and treated players with concussions for 15 years undertook research into the effects of concussions on children and young athletes as well as older athletes.
To study the effects of concussions,
Dr. Maryse Lassonde, a neuropsychologist and the scientific director of the Quebec Nature and Technologies Granting Agency
had athletes perform specific visual and auditory tasks and also mapped their brains with the help of EEG and MRI equipment, in addition to testing brain chemistry. | <urn:uuid:6eb41131-f801-4150-8380-da587904f7df> | {
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Mar. 18, 1998 One in 10 health care workers frequently exposed to rubber surgical and examination gloves is on the cusp of developing allergy symptoms that could seriously affect both their health and their careers, according to a new study from Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions.
Tests show that 2.5 percent of the group are already having allergic reactions to proteins from the gloves, but another 10 percent are "sensitized" to the proteins: they have special antibodies linked to allergies and specific for the rubber proteins, but no allergy symptoms yet.
"They have produced IgE antibodies, and when these antibodies re-encounter rubber proteins under the right circumstances, they can set off a potentially serious allergic reaction," says Robert G. Hamilton, Ph.D., associate professor of medicine, who led what is believed to be the first definitive U.S. prevalence study of allergies to rubber proteins.
Hamilton presents his group's results, funded by the National Institutes of Health, on March 15 at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology.
Hamilton has been a leader in efforts to reduce hospital use of products containing rubber, sometimes called latex, for health care professionals and patients. He is concerned that the potentially life-threatening consequences of this allergy are still very underappreciated. Reactions can range from a localized skin rash or sneezing to respiratory distress or death.
"These reactions become progressively worse with repeated exposures, so it's important to identify both those who are sensitized and those who already have allergy symptoms," says Hamilton. "By stopping exposure, we should be able to stop the sensitized but asymptomatic group from developing symptoms."
Examination and surgical gloves are believed to be the main risk factors for health care workers, but other stretchable rubber objects, such as balloons or condoms, can cause a reaction. Rubber proteins from the gloves can be absorbed through direct skin contact. They also can attach to corn-starch donning powder inside the gloves and enter the body through inhalation when the gloves are pulled off and the powder becomes airborne.
Hamilton's group studied 168 Hopkins anesthesiologists, first identifying those already allergic with "real life" exposure: wearing a glove and inhaling the powder after removal. Two-and-a-half percent had clinical symptoms.
He also gave subjects a "skin-prick" test with a rubber extract and a blood test to see if IgE antibodies specific for rubber proteins were present.
Twelve-and-a-half percent were positive, meaning that a full 10 percent have become sensitized but are not symptomatic yet.
Performance data for the extract Hamilton used in the skin test, which his team developed, are undergoing review by the Food and Drug Administration. Approval for nationwide distribution is possible within a few months, which would make the extract the basis of the first characterized latex skin test reagent in the United States.
A task force to study use of the gloves and other products containing rubber at Hopkins has led to the use of alternative gloves made from vinyl and nitrile.
Co-authors on the study were Robert Brown, M.D., and James Schauble, M.D.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
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Sep. 28, 2008 Auctions are an old and widely used method for allocating goods that have become increasingly common with the advent of internet auctions sites such as Ebay. Previous economic research has shown that in an auction people tend to bid "too high," or overbid, given the value of the item for sale.
By combining brain imaging techniques with behavioral economic research, neuroscientists and economists at New York University were able to provide new insight into this tendency to overbid. Specifically, they show that the fear of losing the social competition inherent in an auction may, in part, cause people to pay too much. The research, which suggests an expanded role for neuroscience in understanding economic behavior, appears in the latest issue of the journal Science.
The goal of the study was to provide insight into the neural circuitry of experimental auctions, and then to use this insight to generate and test a novel economic approach to understand overbidding. It was conducted by a team of NYU neuroscientsts and economists. The neuroscientists were NYU Professor Elizabeth Phelps and Mauricio Delgado, now an assistant professor at Rutgers University in Newark, N.J. The economists were Andrew Schotter, a professor in NYU's Department of Economics, and Erkut Ozbay, a former NYU doctoral student and now an assistant professor in the University of Maryland's Department of Economics.
The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine patterns of brain activation as participants played either an auction game with a partner or a lottery game. In both games participants could win money, but in the auction game winning depended on outbidding a partner. An examination of activation in the striatum, part of the brain's reward circuitry, showed the primary difference when winning or losing in the auction vs. lottery games was an exaggerated response to losses in the auction game. The magnitude of this exaggerated loss response in the striatum during the auction game correlated with the tendency to overbid, suggesting the intriguing hypothesis that perhaps the prospect of losing the social competition inherent in an auction may lead people to bid "too high."
To confirm this hypothesis, a follow-up behavioral economic study was conducted. Three groups of participants played an auction game against a partner under different circumstances. The control group was simply given values and asked to make bids. The Bonus-Frame group was told that if they won the auction, they would also receive a bonus of 15 experimental dollars. The Loss-Frame group was given 15 experimental dollars prior to the auction, but participants were told they would lose the 15 dollars if they failed to win the auction.
In both the Loss and Bonus-Frame conditions, only the winners would get an additional 15 experimental dollars, so the auctions were strategically identical. The difference was simply the way it was framed to emphasize losing or winning. Consistent with the hypothesis that contemplation of loss may, in part, drive overbidding, participants in the Loss-Frame condition consistently bid higher than the other two groups, resulting in a greater potential profit for a hypothetical auctioneer.
According to Schotter, "such a result would not have been predicted by existing economic theory. While there have been investigations of overbidding which have attributed the phenomenon to either risk aversion or the 'joy of winning,' it was the use of imaging data which allowed us to distinguish between these conflicting explanations and actually arrive at a new and different one, the 'fear of losing.' Our results provide evidence of how an understanding of the neural systems of economic behavior might inform economic theory."
"These results highlight a role for the contemplation of social loss in understanding the tendency to bid 'too high' in auctions and emphasize the importance of considering social factors in economic decisions," Phelps explained. "By combining neuroeconomic and behavioral economic techniques we were able to provide novel insight into a classic economic problem."
"Although there have been a number of neuroeconomic studies that have used economic games to further our understanding of brain function, the benefits to traditional behavioral economics as a result are unclear," Delgado added. "Because of recent advances in neuroeconomics and our knowledge of the neural circuitry related to reward, we were able to use neuroimaging results to highlight the importance of framing, and specifically the contemplated loss, as an explanation for overbidding during experimental auctions."
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Apr. 26, 2009 During these trying financial times, the cost of healthcare and how much we are willing to pay for it is at the top of our economic concerns. The financial value of pain has a wide ranging influence, affecting drug prices and injury compensation. But what about on an individual level — is it possible to place a value on our health, to prevent pain and suffering?
University College London psychologists Ivo Vlaev and Nick Chater, and neuroscientists Ben Seymour and Raymond J. Dolan were interested in just how much money volunteers were willing to pay to avoid pain and discomfort.
Study participants were given money, with the understanding that they could keep for themselves whatever cash remained. They experienced one pulse of electric shock and then had to indicate how much money they would pay in order to avoid receiving 15 more shocks of the same intensity.
Then, a computer program would determine how much the volunteers would actually have to pay. The program would randomly select a dollar amount — if that amount was higher than what the participants were willing to pay, then the participants would be shocked. However, if the computer's price was lower than the participant's price, then they would pay the computer's price and avoid the pain.
The volunteers were informed that the computer selection would be completely random, so it was really in their best interest to select a price that accurately reflected how they value the pain from the electric shock. For each volunteer, this process was repeated a number of times, with differing intensities of shocks.
The results, described in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, reveal that demand for pain relief is almost completely dependent on pain experienced in the recent past and the available cash on hand. That is, the participants were willing to pay more money to avoid pain if that pain was more intense compared to previous trials. In addition, the price they were willing to pay was based on what they were given (money-in-the-pocket) rather than on their overall wealth.
These findings suggest that the value we place on relief from suffering is flexible and that activity of health markets cannot be predicted by the behavior of individuals. This is the first scientific study showing that our reaction towards pain is a relative judgment, based on our previous experience with that pain. The authors conclude that pain is a major health issue and with around $60 billion spent on painkillers worldwide each year, they note that these findings "are likely to have substantial economic implications."
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- Ivo Vlaev, Ben Seymour, Raymond J. Dolan, Nick Chater. The Price of Pain and the Value of Suffering. Psychological Science, 2009; 20 (3): 309 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02304.x
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead. | <urn:uuid:3feea9a9-286f-4461-834b-fcb30e38e6c6> | {
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Descriptions of the Fields of Science
Chemistry is the science of matter at or near the atomic scale. (Matter is the substance of which all physical objects are made.)
Chemistry deals with the properties of matter, and the transformation and interactions of matter and energy. Central to chemistry is the interaction of one substance with another, such as in a chemical reaction, where a substance or substances are transformed into another. Chemistry primarily studies atoms and collections of atoms such as molecules, crystals or metals that make up ordinary matter. According to modern chemistry it is the structure of matter at the atomic scale that determines the nature of a material.
Chemistry has many specialized areas that overlap with other sciences, such as physics, biology or geology. Scientists who study chemistry are called chemists. Historically, the science of chemistry is a recent development but has its roots in alchemy which has been practiced for millennia throughout the world. The word chemistry is directly derived from the word alchemy.
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Free Name Search | <urn:uuid:65386665-f202-4b45-8afc-b2c62fb38072> | {
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Download the Exhibit Descriptions in Portable Document Format (PDF)
Exhibition consists of a set of connected wall panels of different building materials in a mock "earthquake zone," setting the stage for all of the interactive components. The Shake Table is freestanding; the rest of the exhibits are attached to the wall panels.
Try to replicate the motion of any of three different historic earthquakes by bouncing up and down on a platform; see your own seismogram on the monitor in real time as you attempt to match the original seismogram. You'll even get a score! How well did you do?
How quickly can you assemble a map of the Earth according to its plate tectonic boundaries? Press the button to begin, then put the puzzle pieces in place on the big panel. Hurry, you have two minutes before the pieces fall!
Plates in Motion
Spin the dial and watch stunning tectonic motion as the plates move around, break up and reassemble. You can start at 600 million years ago, spin to the present, and then go all the way to 200 million years into the future. Go backward and forward in time. Can you find our current tectonic plate arrangement? You won't even recognize the continents as they'll be 200 million years into the future.
See a real-time display, updated every fifteen minutes, that shows the hundreds of earthquakes of the past two weeks. Look for larger-magnitude quakes with their bigger circles. Notice how the quakes cluster around the tectonic plate boundaries.
Earthquake Shake Table
Be an engineer! Design and build model structures of blocks and reinforcing rods, then turn the dial to test the results against earthquake forces on the shake table. Did your structure stand up? Can you make it safer?
Visitors can choose from five fast-paced award-winning videos of a diverse group of real engineers working to make our world safer during earthquakes. Watch footage of earthquakes and find out what can happen when the earth shakes; learn what causes earthquakes and see how engineers are using amazing tools and technology to test and improve building techniques and materials, even shaking full-size bridges or bending 16-meter (50') pipe sections. (Each video is about 1 1/2 minutes long.)
Engineering Research Centers
At this touch screen station, learn about the National Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) network, a group of fourteen university research facilities where engineers test buildings and structures with giant shake tables, centrifuges, tsunami tanks, and other large-scale equipment. See some of the different experiments that take place at each of the sites! | <urn:uuid:96fa2838-7595-480b-b321-bb08db42ba4e> | {
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IN THE TANK: The Daya Bay experiment currently employs six detectors, with a total of 120 metric tons of liquid detector material, to register passing neutrinos. Image: Roy Kaltschmidt, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Neutrinos are devious little particles. Only in the late 1990s were they shown to have mass, after decades of head-scratching hints to that effect. They can oscillate between three neutrino types, or "flavors," changing their identity on the fly. And, perhaps most famously, they were accused just last year of breaking cosmic law by traveling faster than light. (The jury is out, but an acquittal appears imminent.)
Now investigators are just a bit closer to figuring out the neutrino's modus operandi. A collaboration of physicists says it has measured one of the key descriptors of the neutrino's flavor-changing behavior—a number called theta 13 (pronounced "theta one three"). That number, known as a mixing angle, describes the probability that an electron neutrino's antiparticle, the electron antineutrino, will oscillate into another flavor over a relatively short distance. (Each of the three neutrino flavors—electron, tau and muon—has its own antiparticle partner.) Two other neutrino oscillation parameters, or mixing angles, have already been measured, but theta 13 is relatively small compared with the other two and has proved harder to pin down.
Since last year a group of physicists has been trying to measure theta 13 by tracking antineutrinos given off by a large Chinese nuclear power plant. The Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment collaboration built a series of six detectors, some near the reactors and some more than a kilometer farther away, to track how electron antineutrinos morph into other flavors as they travel through space. Because the detectors are tuned to identify only electron antineutrinos, any oscillation means that the neutrinos will escape detection—that is, they will seem to disappear. Other experiments have taken the opposite tack, looking for the appearance of electron neutrinos in a beam carrying other types of neutrinos.
In just two months of data, the distant set of detectors registered more than 10,000 hits by electron antineutrinos. But that is only 94 percent as many as would be naively expected by extrapolating from the detectors closest to the nuclear reactors. That means that a substantial fraction had oscillated to another flavor on their relatively short journey. "What we're seeing now is this disappearance of [electron antineutrinos] is at the 6 percent level," says neutrino physicist Karsten Heeger of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, a member of the Daya Bay collaboration. "It's a fairly large effect." Heeger presented the experimental results March 8 at a symposium at Duke University, and the group has submitted its study to Physical Review Letters.
The experiment is not even fully built yet—a seventh and eighth detector are in the works—but already the Daya Bay team has observed enough disappearances to quantify how the process works. The new estimate, which falls within previous limits set by other experiments, establishes that theta 13 is not equal to zero, and in fact is relatively large compared with what was plausible in light of other recent results. A zero value for theta 13 would mean that electron neutrinos would not appear in beams of muon neutrinos or, in the Daya Bay case, that electron antineutrinos would not disappear by the time they reached the far detectors. Another reactor experiment, called KamLAND, has also registered the disappearance of antineutrinos over much larger distances, where the oscillation is described by the mixing angle theta 12, rather than theta 13.
"We are the first experiment that measures it and shows that it is nonzero," Heeger says of theta 13. "There have been recent indications, but none of the other results were significant enough to match what we physicists call a discovery." The Daya Bay group claims better than 5-sigma evidence in support of a nonzero value for theta 13. 5 sigma, or five standard deviations, implies that the finding has only a one-in-several-million chance of being caused by a statistical fluke. | <urn:uuid:47264ba4-bbe4-4982-b518-14319bf1a0b8> | {
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Ritalin Dose Changes Effect
Research with rats finds that Ritalin at low doses encourages neurons to fire together, but at high doses it's just another stimulant. Christopher Intagliata reports
More 60-Second Science
In this engrossing journey into the lives of psychopaths and their infamously crafty behaviors, the renowned psychologist Kevin Dutton reveals that there is a...
Read More »
[The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.]
Doctors prescribe Ritalin to hyperactive kids to calm them down and increase their attention span. And college kids have taken to using Ritalin to concentrate when they hit the books. But it hasn’t been clear how the drug boosts focus. Now a paper in the journal Biological Psychiatry suggests how it might work.
Neuroscientists dosed rats with Ritalin and had them perform the kind of working memory task ADHD patients have trouble with. At the same time they measured neural activity with tiny electrodes implanted in the rats’ brains. At low doses, Ritalin primarily affected the prefrontal cortex, jacking up its sensitivity to signals coming in from the hippocampus. And here’s how the drug seemed to help with attention—it strengthened choruses of neurons firing together and put a damper on scattered, uncoordinated activity.
But at high doses, the prefrontal cortex tuned out, and Ritalin’s effects were similar to those of other stimulants. The rats lost their cognitive edge and they became hyperactive, sniffing and licking repetitively. So Ritalin shows you can indeed have too much of a good thing—to the point of distraction.
60-Second Science is a daily podcast. Subscribe to this Podcast: RSS | iTunes | <urn:uuid:e5c9bb67-9485-410a-b50a-e03bd0c4f3d7> | {
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The Ultimate Science Project Experimenter's Catapult Kit!
With 400+ possible configurations and tuning options, this historically accurate catapult provides a hands-on example of basic physics, including mechanical advantage, levers, gravity and energy. This kit is perfect for school science fairs!
No glue required: kit assembles using rubber bands (included). You supply the counterweight material.
Completed frame is 14.5” l x 7” w x 11” h. Arm measures 20.25”. Includes 3/4" and 1" wooden projectiles, rubber bands, counterweight box, leather sling pouch, nylon sling twine, welded steel ring. Instructions feature experiments and historical information. Range is from 10 to 40 feet depending on configuration, projectile choice, etc
For a Master carpenter doing a sloppy job: about 30 minutes. A person with no kit building experience being extremely meticulous: about 1 hour.
This kit provides a real world, hands on example of many aspects of basic physics. It exposes the student to concepts of mechanical advantage, levers, gravity and energy, to name a few. It can demonstrate the storage and conversion of potential energy to kinetic energy through levers, and it is equipped with optional wheels, to demonstrate conservation of momentum. All in all, the concepts of efficiency, power and work can be demonstrated and applied.
This kit is useful for teaching engineering, science, design of experiments, problem solving and Cause/Effect relationships. It was designed to get students to think about physics in a real world, tangible context. Theories can be made and tested; this process, and analyzing why the observed results occur can ultimately lead to other, more advanced concepts in physics, mechanics and mathematics. Carrying out the experiments teaches the scientific method, and contextualizes statistics. Analyzing the data can make use of statistical methods from basic averages to much more advanced topics if desired.
With 18 pages of instructions including assembly of every basic configuration, suggested experiments, tuning guidelines, independent and dependent variables to record and measure, data tables, historical information about trebuchets and catapults, and more, it should be easy to get started with this Ultimate Science Project Kit!
WARNING! This is a representative model of a real ancient military weapon. It contains a fast moving arm that can cause injury if you make contact when firing. Use only under strict adult supervision. | <urn:uuid:9c7a0bd9-2dd1-4574-b80a-a3da6993f810> | {
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