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School helps its students practice social networking
Because we all learn by practicing and to get its middle schoolers ready for adult life in a digitally enhanced networked world, The School at Columbia University created The Social Network. “It’s basically the pre-kindergarten version of Facebook,” Forbes reports. There’s also The Tube for sharing videos and The Gallery for photos. All of it is archived at the end of the year so that – with school-based social networking, anyway – students don’t end up with permanent digital footprints, and in 6th grade, when they start using the tool, they’re carefully initiated in the conditions of social-media environments. The School’s director of digital communications, Don Buckley, told Forbes that The School wants the kids to learn about “the quandaries of digital life” in the safety of a “walled garden” (hear, hear! I hope other schools will follow suit and this will snowball). Buckley’s clearly influenced by what social media researcher danah boyd wrote about the “invisible audiences,” “persistence,” and replicability of social media because he told Forbes these are the conditions explained to students. “The school’s technology integrator, Karen Blumberg, works closely with students and addresses ‘drama’ when it inevitably arises,” Forbes reports, adding that “having their social network in-house makes it easier for school administrators to see and confront situations unfolding online.” This is only logical!
About 2.5 years ago, I wrote about how school enriched my media use for me (back then, it was mostly just books). I wrote that our children now need school’s help in increasing the value of their social-media use as much as print, film, etc. I was thinking in terms of both enrichment and relevance for students, but The School at Columbia University is illustrating how much more school-based social media bring to students than even enrichment and relevance. They increase students’ safety, media literacy, and civic engagement by teaching, modeling, and giving them chances to practice safe, constructive, purposeful use of social media. Let’s replicate that! [See also this about why (digital) citizenship needs to be a verb.] | <urn:uuid:3c6dc20e-fd68-45a0-8f9b-6af2590e49a4> | {
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The Da Vinci Notebooks at sacred-texts.com
Why did nature not ordain that one animal should not live by the death of another? Nature, being inconstant and
taking pleasure in creating and making constantly new lives and forms, because she knows that her terrestrial materials become thereby augmented, is more ready and more swift in her creating, than time in his destruction; and so she has ordained that many animals shall be food for others. Nay, this not satisfying her desire, to the same end she frequently sends forth certain poisonous and pestilential vapours upon the vast increase and congregation of animals; and most of all upon men, who increase vastly because other animals do not feed upon them; and, the causes being removed, the effects would not follow. This earth therefore seeks to lose its life, desiring only continual reproduction; and as, by the argument you bring forward and demonstrate, like effects always follow like causes, animals are the image of the world. | <urn:uuid:d0406f84-3d5c-47a1-bc58-279d630c3e57> | {
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us discuss a question often asked by many people: What is
the difference between Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism? To
see things in their proper perspective, let us turn to the
history of Buddhism and trace the emergence and development
of Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism.
Buddha was born in the 6th Century B.C. After attaining Enlightenment
at the age of 35 until his Mahaparinibbana at the age of 80,
he spent his life preaching and teaching. He was certainly
one of the most energetic man who ever lived: for forty-five
years he taught and preached day and night, sleeping for only
about 2 hours a day.
Buddha spoke to all kinds of people: kings and princes, Brahmins,
farmers, beggars, learned men and ordinary people. His teachings
were tailored to the experiences, levels of understanding
and mental capacity of his audience. What he taught was called
Buddha Vacana, i.e. word of the Buddha. There
was nothing called Theravada or Mahayana at that time.
establishing the Order of monks and nuns, the Buddha laid
down certain disciplinary rules called the Vinaya for
the guidance of the Order. The rest of his teachings were
called the Dhamma which included his discourses, sermons
to monks, nuns and lay people.
months after the Buddha's Mahaparinibbana, his immediate
disciples convened a council at Rajagaha. Maha Kassapa, the
most respected and elderly monk, presided at the Council.
Two very important personalities who specialised in the two
different areas - the Dhamma and the Vinaya - were
present. One was Ananda, the closest constant companion and
disciple of the Buddha for 25 years. Endowed with a remarkable
memory, Ananda was able to recite what was spoken by the Buddha.
The other personality was Upali who remembered all the Vinaya
these two sections - the Dhamma and the Vinaya -
were recited at the First Council. Though there were no
differences of opinion on the Dhamma (no mention of
the Abhidhamma) there was some discussion about the
Vinaya rules. Before the Buddha's Parinibbana,
he had told Ananda that if the Sangha wished to amend
or modify some minor rules, they could do so. But on that
occasion Ananda was so overpowered with grief because the
Buddha was about to die that it did not occur to him to ask
the Master what the minor rules were. As the members of the
Council were unable to agree as to what constituted the minor
rules, Maha Kassapa finally ruled that no disciplinary rule
laid down by the Buddha should be changed, and no new ones
should be introduced. No intrinsic reason was given. Maha
Kassapa did say one thing, however: "If we changed the
rules, people will say that Ven. Gotama's disciples changed
the rules even before his funeral fire has ceased burning."
the Council, the Dhamma was divided into various parts
and each part was assigned to an Elder and his pupils to commit
to memory. The Dhamma was then passed on from teacher
to pupil orally. The Dhamma was recited daily by groups
of people who often cross check with each other to ensure
that no omissions or additions were made. Historians agree
that the oral tradition is more reliable than a report written
by one person from his memory several years after the event.
hundred years later, the Second Council was held to discuss
some Vinaya rules. There was no need to change the
rules three months after the Parinibbana of the Buddha
because little or no political, economic or social changes
took place during that short interval. But 100 years later,
some monks saw the need to change certain minor rules. The
orthodox monks said that nothing should be changed while the
others insisted on modifying some rules, Finally, a group
of monks left the Council and formed the Mahasanghika -
the Great Community. Even though it was called the Mahasanghika,
it was not known as Mahayana, And in the Second Council, only
matters pertaining to the Vinaya were discussed and
no controversy about the Dhamma is reported,
the 3rd Century B.C. during the time of Emperor Asoka, the
Third Council was held to discuss the differences of opinion
among the bhikkhus of different sects. At this Council the
differences were not confined to the Vinaya but were
also connected with the Dhamma. At the end of this
Council, the President of the Council, Moggaliputta Tissa,
compiled a book called the Kathavatthu refuting the
heretical, false views and theories held by some sects. The
teaching approved and accepted by this Council was known as
Theravada. The Abhidhamma Pitaka was included
at this Council.
the Third Council, Asoka's son, Ven. Mahinda, brought the
Tripitaka to Sri Lanka, along with the commentaries
that were recited at the Third Council. The texts brought
to Sri Lanka were preserved until today without losing a page.
The texts were written in Pali which was based on the Magadhi
language spoken by the Buddha. There was nothing known as
Mahayana at that time.
the 1st Century B.C. to the 1st Century A.D., the two terms
Mahayana and Hinayana appeared in the Saddharma Pundarika
Sutra or the Sutra of the Lotus of the Good Law.
the 2nd Century A.D. Mahayana became clearly defined.
Nagarjuna developed the Mahayana philosophy of Sunyata
and proved that everything is Void in a small text called
Madhyamika-karika. About the 4th Century, there were
Asanga and Vasubandhu who wrote enormous amount of works on
Mahayana. After the 1st Century AD., the Mahayanists
took a definite stand and only then the terms of Mahayana
and Hinayana were introduced.
must not confuse Hinayana with Theravada because
the terms are not synonymous. Theravada Buddhism went
to Sri Lanka during the 3rd Century B.C. when there was no
Mahayana at all. Hinayana sects developed in
India and had an existence independent from the form of Buddhism
existing in Sri Lanka. Today there is no Hinayana sect
in existence anywhere in the world. Therefore, in 1950 the
World Fellowship of Buddhists inaugurated in Colombo unanimously
decided that the term Hinayana should be dropped when
referring to Buddhism existing today in Sri Lanka, Thailand,
Burma, Cambodia, Laos, etc. This is the brief history of Theravada,
Mahayana and Hinayana.
what is the difference between Mahayana and Theravada?
have studied Mahayana for many years and the more I study
it, the more I find there is hardly any difference between
Theravada and Mahayana with regard to the fundamental
Both accept Sakyamuni Buddha as the Teacher.
- The Four Noble Truths are exactly the same in both schools.
- The Eightfold Path is exactly the same in both schools.
- The Paticca-samuppada or the Dependent Origination
is the same in both schools.
- Both rejected the idea of a supreme being who created
and governed this world.
- Both accept Anicca, Dukkha, Anatta and Sila,
Samadhi, Panna without any difference.
are the most important teachings of the Buddha and they are
all accepted by both schools without question.
are also some points where they differ. An obvious one is
the Bodhisattva ideal. Many people say that Mahayana
is for the Bodhisattvahood which leads to Buddhahood
while Theravada is for Arahantship. I must point out
that the Buddha was also an Arahant. Pacceka Buddha is also
an Arahant. A disciple can also be an Arahant. The Mahayana
texts never use the term Arahant-yana, Arahant Vehicle. They
used three terms: Bodhisattvayana, Prateka-Buddhayana,
and Sravakayana. In the Theravada tradition these three
are called Bodhis.
people imagine that Theravada is selfish because it teaches
that people should seek their own salvation. But how can a
selfish person gain Enlightenment? Both schools accept the
three Yanas or Bodhis but consider the Bodhisattva
ideal as the highest. The Mahayana has created
many mystical Bodhisattvas while the Theravada considers
a Bodhisattva as a man amongst us who devotes his entire
life for the attainment of perfection, ultimately becoming
a fully Enlightened Buddha for the welfare of the world, for
the happiness of the world.
Types of Buddhahood
are three types of Buddhahood: the Samma Sambuddha who gains
full Enlightenment by his own effort, the Pacceka Buddha who
has lesser qualities than the Samma Sambuddha, and the Savaka
Buddha who is an Arahant disciple. The attainment of Nibbana
between the three types of Buddhahood is exactly the same.
The only difference is that the Samma Sambuddha has many more
qualities and capacities than the other two.
people think that Voidness or Sunyata discussed by
Nagarjuna is purely a Mahayana teaching. It is based
on the idea of Anatta or non-self, on the Paticcasamuppada
or the Dependent Origination, found in the original Theravada
Pali texts. Once Ananda asked the Buddha, "People say
the word Sunya. What is Sunya?" The Buddha
replied, "Ananda, there is no self, nor anything pertaining
to self in this world. Therefore, the world is empty."
This idea was taken by Nagarjuna when he wrote his remarkable
book, "Madhyamika Karika". Besides the idea
of Sunyata is the concept of the store-consciousness in Mahayana
Buddhism which has its seed in the Theravada texts. The Mahayanists
have developed it into a deep psychology and philosophy.
Dr. W. Rahula | <urn:uuid:e031e044-44f0-47b7-b1a0-9985bebd1af0> | {
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Tuesday, September 22, 2009
The USCCB on proselytism...
Proselytism, or the deliberate targeting of another Christian or group of Christians for the sole purpose of getting them to reject their church to join another, is not allowed. Some people may feel called in conscience to change from one tradition to another, but “sheep stealing” is unacceptable. USCCB
The Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith does not equate proselytism with “sheep stealing,” but with coercion. In its 2007 Doctrinal Note on Some Aspects of Evangelization, the Congregation teaches:
The term proselytism originated in the context of Judaism, in which the term proselyte referred to someone who, coming from the gentiles, had passed into the Chosen People. So too, in the Christian context, the term proselytism was often used as a synonym for missionary activity. More recently, however, the term has taken on a negative connotation, to mean the promotion of a religion by using means, and for motives, contrary to the spirit of the Gospel; that is, which do not safeguard the freedom and dignity of the human person. It is in this sense that the term proselytism is understood in the context of the ecumenical movement. - Catholic Culture | <urn:uuid:5c5753f1-ab30-4e5d-bc45-f3e009c79a4d> | {
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Salt marshes and other coastal habitats have been degraded worldwide by development, altered river flows, and other human impacts. Many land managers have sought to mitigate these effects through large-scale restoration—planting marsh grasses, seagrasses, oysters, and other ecologically important species. But restoration can be prohibitively expensive, and it has at times required repeated replanting. Recently, small-scale field experiments have suggested that restoration could be improved by taking advantage of natural partnerships between organisms. For example, marsh grasses planted in clumps can grow twice as fast as dispersed plantings, and sea otters can help marsh grasses by removing grass-eating crabs.
To test whether these partnerships can increase yields and decrease costs of large-scale restoration under a variety of conditions, the Lenfest Ocean Program is supporting Dr. Brian Silliman of Duke University and colleagues to conduct experiments at four active restoration sites around the world. The sites are in North Carolina, California, The Netherlands, and China. The team will compare clumped plantings with plantings that are dispersed, in keeping with current restoration practice. It will also compare grass plantings in the presence of potential cross-species partners, such as oysters and otters, with plantings in the absence of such species. The project is set to last from 2018 through 2021, with monitoring to continue at least through 2028. | <urn:uuid:c45f3378-1718-4734-9649-8a6693244a5c> | {
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A Pokemon's Speed determines who goes first in battle. A Pokemon with 200 Speed will move before a Pokemon with 199 Speed.
Some moves have "priority". A move with a higher priority will move before one with lower priority. For example, if a Pidgeot with 300(just an example) speed went against a Deoxys with 301 speed, the Deoxys would normally move first. But if Pidgeot used Quick Attack, and Deoxys used Light Screen, Pidgeot would move first because Quick Attack has higher priority. If two Pokemon use a move with the same priority, the Pokemon who has more speed will move first. Example, Pidgeot and Mew. Mew uses Quick Attack, and so does Pidgeot. If Pidgeot or Mew has lower speed than the other, that one will move last.
If two Pokemon with the same speed use a move with the same priority, whoever moves first is determined randomly. | <urn:uuid:f6ab579e-d51f-459a-a0b8-e52cdcb7365c> | {
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As advocates for global wellness and preventive care we recommend vaccinating based on the guidelines developed by the Centers for Disease Control, American Academy of Pediatrics, and the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.
We aim to educate our patients and care givers on evidence based immunization information. We respect a parent’s right to delay or refuse vaccines and work with parents to establish an altered immunization schedule.
If you choose not to vaccinate your child, you will be required to sign a refusal of immunization form, as per our practice policy.
Many parents have question about childhood immunizations. As a caregiver you have the right to be well informed about the healthcare needs of your little ones. The aim of this brochure is to provide answered for frequently asked questions regarding immunizations. The questions have been answered by the Nurses Practitioners here at Whole Life Health Care. If you have further questions or concerns please be sure to share them with your provider.While we respect a parent’s right to refuse vaccinations, we must also stress their importance in preventing disease and sickness. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention has called immunizations the greatest public health achievement of the 20th century.
Are vaccines required for children to attend school> Which vaccines does New Hampshire mandate?
All 50 states require vaccinations for public schooling, although there is no mandatory federal law. the state of New Hampshire requires school age children to receive vaccines and boosters for: Hepatitis B, Diphtheria, Tetanus, Pertussis, Polio, Measles, Mumps, Rubella and Chickenpox. Exemptions are permitted for religious reasons. Please contact your school district for specifics.
What are all these vaccinations for?
- Tdap/Td – Protects against diphtheria, tetanus (lockjaw) and pertussis (whooping cough)
- Hep A – Hepatitis A, an acute infection of the liver
- Hep B – Hepatitis B, a chronic infection of liver
- Hib– Haemophilus influenza type b, a leading cause of bacterial meningitis in children under 5yrs
- HPV– Human papillomavirus, which causes cervical cancer,as well as oral/anal cancer, and genital warts
- Influenza– Protects against the flu, a viral infection
- IPV– Protects against polio
- MCV4– Meningococcal disease, a leading cause of bacterial meningitis in children
- MMR– Protects against measles, mumps, and rubella
- RV– Rotavirus, which causes vomiting, diarrhea, stomach flu, and inflammation of the stomach and intestines
- Varicella– Varicella zoster virus, (chickenpox and shingles)
Why has the list of required vaccines continuously increased over the past 50 years?
With advances in research and technology, more vaccines are available for preventative disease. Vaccine safety and cost effectiveness has improved dramatically. Although we give more vaccines between infancy and age six, the total number of substances needed to boost the immune system has declined from 3,200 in 1960 to 130 in 2013.
New vaccines come out so fast!How do I know the vaccines are actually safe for my child?
Vaccine development is a long, complex process that lasts 10-15 years. Immunizations are carefully monitored by the CDC and FDA. Initially, the vaccine must undergo preliminary laboratory testing, followed by three clinical trials, starting with a small adult population. If the vaccine is intended for children, researchers work their way down the age ladder and carefully monitor subjects for efficacy and side effects. Only then will a vaccine get FDA approval and license.
What is herd immunity?
Herd immunity is the principle that an unvaccinated child will be protected from disease if surrounded by other children who are vaccinated. In order for herd immunity to work, the number of vaccinated children in a community should be above 80%. Recent studies show that so many children are not being vaccinated, especially in progressive communities, that vaccine rates drop below 50% in some areas. When exposed to a vaccine preventable disease, these children are at a higher risk of contracting an infection.
I heard that there is often an inactivated “live” virus in the immunizations given, is that true?
A live, attenuated, vaccine is one in which the virus is weakened and made harmless to the body. When introduced, this virus will reproduce slowly as the body learns to create heightened immunity to the virus making it less likely to contract the disease when exposed. Using a live virus is more cost effective and produces a faster immune response. Live viruses are not given to anyone who is immune compromised and are spaced over a minimum of four weeks.
Should I purposely expose my child to chickenpox, or get the varicella vaccine?
The sooner your child is exposed to the chickenpox virus, the sooner your child gains immunity. Exposing an older child to chicken pox can put them at risk for serious disease complications and hospitalization. Therefore, we recommend both exposure through contact or to the varicella vaccine after twelve months. Remember if your child does get infected, you and your child will be housebound for upwards of two weeks. Please speak with your healthcare provider for specifics and which option is right for your child.
We vaccinate for diseases that aren’t around anymore. Why vaccinate for unseen diseases?
While Polio and Measles are rarely seen in the USA, these diseases can unfortunately still be found globally. Our world is smaller with frequent travel, foreign commerce, and increased inter connectivity. If a disease exists anywhere in the world, a traveler could unknowingly bring it to the USA. This disease would infect the unvaccinated, spread quickly, and cause an epidemic. Because of world wide vaccination efforts small pox has been completely eradicated globally; this vaccine is no longer needed or available.
What about Autism and the MMR vaccine?
The claim that vaccines (specifically the MMR vaccine) cause Autism is inaccurate; the original documentation has been found to be fraudulent. A genetic predisposition and prenatal exposure to chemicals and environmental toxins have long been considered in the development of Autism spectrum disorder. Research is underway studying the biological mechanisms that effect brain development. Please refer to “Autism Speaks” an autism advocacy organization at www.autismspeaks.org and the Centers for Disease Control at www.cdc.gov for further information.
What is I am still nervous?Can I separate the MMR vaccine or create my own alternative vaccination schedule?
Combination vaccines have been used since the 1940s and have several advantages over single strand vaccines. They simplify the vaccination process and are designed to work synergistically for optimal protection with no adverse effects. Separate MMR vaccines are generally unavailable due to the extreme cost in manufacturing, thus we do not provide this option here at Whole Life. If you feel strongly about using an alternative vaccination schedule we encourage you to bring the plan to your provider.
Many vaccines contain substances I don’t feel should be added to a vaccine (thimerosal, mercury, aluminum, etc.)Are these substances safe?
Vaccines contain very small amounts of other ingredients, all of which play necessary roles in manufacturing the vaccine, or by ensuring the vaccine is safe and effective. Single dose vials in the United States do not contain mercury (thimerosal). Although no evidence exists of any harm caused by low levels, it was removed as a precautionary measure. Thimerosal is necessary in vaccines that come in multi-dose vials to prevent contamination. Aluminum salts help to stimulate the body’s immune response. Any additives in vaccines are to prevent a loss in potency over time and to prevent secondary bacterial growth. | <urn:uuid:62ee6995-3a47-4799-a213-73e26860d4e6> | {
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About the Speaker: Petr Baldrian, Head Laboratory of Enviromental Microbiology, Institute of Microbiology, Prague
Petr Baldrian is the head of the Laboratory of Environmental Microbiology of the Institute of Microbiology in Prague. He has graduated in Microbiology from the Faculty of Science, Charles University, Prague where he now teaches Microbial ecology, Microbial processes in the environment and Geomicrobiology. His research focuses the importance of microorganisms – fungi and bacteria – in the ecosystem processes especially in forest ecosystems, their involvement in the turnover of organic compounds and interactions with other organisms. Another topic is the application of environmental microbial strains in biotechnology. He is the author or co-author of 140 papers (ResearchGate).
About the Presentation: Microbes in forest soils: tracing the activity of communities and individual taxa
In forest soils, microbes are important drivers of soil processes, because they mediate decomposition as well as nutrient transfer from primary producers into soil. Metatranscriptomics, metaproteomics and enzyme activity assays that can assess the dynamics of microbial processes and assign functions to higher taxa show that microbial activity undergoes seasonal cycling with a fungal dominance in summer and bacterial dominance in winter affecting multiple processes ranging from ectomycorrhizal symbiosis to decomposition1. The results characterize the summer season as a period with rapid microbial growth accompanied by decomposition of recalcitrant plant biopolymers likely induced by the priming effect of photosynthates delivered by plant roots. Winter appears to be a period of slow growth when reserve compounds such as starch, glycogen and trehalose are utilized. Methods focusing environmental metacommunities are, however, not able to identify individual microbial species, participating in the soil processes. To do that, individual microbial taxa need to be isolated and analyzed. Genomes of 20 dominant bacterial strains from the spruce forest soil were sequenced as well as genomes of ectomycorrhizal fungi, obtained from fruitbodies collected at the study sites. Mapping of metatranscriptomic reads on genomes of dominant bacteria showed, interestingly, that Acidobacteria are the likely major producers of decomposition-related enzymes that possess high counts of glycosyl hydrolases in their genomes, in contrast to Bacteroidetes and Proteobacteria. Transcript profiles of bacteria and fungi in situ differ among horizons as well as among seasons showing the effect of environmental conditions on transcription.
1 Žifčáková L, Větrovský T, Howe A, Baldrian P. 2016. Microbial activity in forest soil reflects the changes in ecosystem properties between summer and winter. Environmental Microbiology 18:288-301. | <urn:uuid:479509fd-3255-4a67-98fa-6bc07ac705e4> | {
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|Rome history||Sleeping||Contact Us|
Paintings and in particular frescoes (or Frescos) were a favourite method of interior decoration within buildings of ancient Rome. Particularly within the houses of the rich. The art of painting walled surfaces was inherited in part from the Greeks and in part from the Etruscans who as early as the 8th century were already painting the interior plastering of their tombs (nothing remains of Etruscan housing and a few remains have been found of their temples). Certainly temple buildings would also be painted.
The painters of such work were by and large foreigners likely of Greek background but as with all situations where artists find themselves in a market thriving in liquidity and commissions much innovation followed. The art produced was a mixture of the artists' abilities and the purchaser's tastes so that a great variety of work was produced and innovation ensued. Some examples of innovation in ancient roman art and painting include the introduction of landscapes and idyllic settings, often with small figures dominated by the monumental setting (also mentioned by Vitruvius in De Architectura), another example might include still life work (I have no references or proof - it's a suggestion worth following up, not to mention the love of portraiture such as is seen in various techniques, for example gold leaf portraiture on glass or encaustic (wax) on wood such as found in north Africa, not to mention the portraits on fresco in Pompeii are all amazing.
As is always the case, some artistic innovations had their detractors, for example Vitruvius wasn't very taken with the growing appreciation for fantasy creatures and settings which became increasingly frequent in 3rd and 4th style Roman painting.
The principal colours used by the Romans for their paintings were ocre (an earthy yellow), blue (very difficult/expensive to make), red also known as Pompey Red and black. These colours were used to mix a range of tones and other colours as necessary. The manner in which they obtained these colours is still under investigation, particularly the means of achieving the distinctive Pompeii Red. The raw materials were mineral, animal and vegetable matter. For example the powder of charred bones is still used to make an excellent black. Roman chroniclers mention 7 mineral colours and 9 mixed colours.
But if we wish to go into a little more detail of what was available during the age of Roman rule....
The earliest palette was made of basic earthy colours: red earth (called Burnt Siena during the Renaissance), yellow earth (Raw Siena, a Renaissance name and colour actually) and carbon black (charcoal). By the fourth millennium BC Egyptian artists had increased the range of this basic pallette to include some bright colours, especially malachite (green) and azurite (blue) obtained by crushing the minerals. Brighter forms of red extracted from cinnabar (a type of rock) and yellow made from arsenic. Egyptian artists also added a range of vegetable dyes as well as other ground materials such as glass.
Greek artists added other colours to this range including colours such as red, white and green from Lead and Copper salts.
The available pallette at the time of the Romans would therefore have been something like the following:
Black, Lead White, Chalk white, Raw Siena, Burnt Siena, Malachite green, Azurite (like French Ultramarine blue), Cinnabar red, Orpiment yellow, Cerulean blue (the name comes from the latin for sky), Indigo, Rose Madder, Verdigris green and Vermilion (a good component for painting skin tones especially if mixed with a little Burnt Siena and Orpiment Yellow.
Clearly the more brilliant colours tended to be the most expensive and difficult to manufacture. The colours were extremely durable because of the fresco technique utilised to apply them to the surface (usually a wall with fresh plaster). Some examples available today, such as the garden painted in the villa of Livia at the gates of Rome or the Boscoreale villa removed to the Metropolitan museum are still astounding for their brilliance and variety of shades notwithstanding the effects of time.
The raw colour powders were bound in much the same way as today: through mediums such as animal glues, egg yolk or gum extracted from plants to form a sort of tempera medium. These were particularly necessary if the paint was to be applied on top of a dry surface rather than being applied through the more durable techniques of fresco.
The techniques used to paint the frescoes have been handed down to us by writers such as Pliny the younger and the architect Vitruvius. As a small testimony of the influence of Roman thought and technique on art through the ages we should remember that Vitruvius was the source of inspiration for Leonardo's studies on human proportion and the famous drawing of a man inscribed in a circle and square, known as Vitruvian man.
The base for these paintings clearly had to be perfectly clean and smooth. This was obtained through repeated layering of plastering and fine sand which would be finally polished with a fine layer of marble dust which was rendered compact and hard.
The surface would then be dampened before the colours could be applied. The colour would be absorbed into the smooth compact, but porous, surface layers and become a permanent part of it. The finished painting would then be polished to a shiny finish probably through the application of oils and a final wax seal.
A more secure and longer lasting method employed a lime based mortar achieved from a long process of soaking the lime. The mortar would be applied in a smooth layer and the colour immediately applied whilst the surface was still damp. A rough drawing could be scratched on top of the plaster for the more difficult figures and forms before applying the paint.
The chemical process within the lime mortar ensured that the colour was perfectly bound to the wall. Polishing would be as described above. This method of fresco (an Italian word meaning "fresh" or "cool") is exactly the same as the fresco method utilised a thousand years later during the Renaissance by artists such as Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel.
The artist had to be extremely skilled as mistakes could not be rubbed out but would have to be scraped out and re-plastered. He also had to be very fast in order to complete the plastered area before it dried out. As a result, only sections of wall would be plastered and painted at any one time and the resulting "joints" would have to be perfectly matched up and/or hidden as part of the geometrical composition of the painting. Plastering and painting would normally be executed in horizontal sections starting from the top of the wall so as not to spoil areas below.
Given the lengthy and complex procedures involved it is evident that a whole team of men would be required to undertake the different tasks involved in the process, with each person specialised in his own particular area.
Art in ancient Rome: | Art in Ancient Rome - Introduction | The decadence of classical art | Foreign influence | The Greek revolution | Ancient Roman Paintings | Painting Styles | Drawing | Ancient Roman Mosaics | ancient roman jewelry | Sculpture | roman statues | Architecture | Literature and Theatre |Ancient Rome Literature | poems about Rome | roman music | roman pottery | | <urn:uuid:90dcaef5-6bb2-4935-a6b1-9c992f1ebb1f> | {
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Diabetes and Vaccines
Increasing vaccine use in people with diabetes
People living with diabetes are at increased risk of developing serious complications from vaccine-preventable diseases. These include influenza, pneumococcal disease, hepatitis B, shingles, tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis.
The problem is that many of them don't know it. Case in point: The influenza vaccine. The MADIABETES cohort study found that only 66% of people with diabetes received the flu vaccine; and the higher someone’s A1C, the less likely they were to get it. The most common reason: they didn’t feel they were at risk.
AADE has partnered with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to spread the word on the importance of vaccines for people living with diabetes. To help with this effort, the CDC has created an engaging animated infographic, below. We encourage you to use it when educating your patients about the role of vaccines in keeping them healthy.
And for additional reading, take a look at AADE’s Vaccination Practices for People with Diabetes Practice Synopsis and a recent AADE in Practice article about “Partnering with Pharmacists to Improve Vaccination Rates,” which also includes a list of immunization regulations by state. | <urn:uuid:6002d223-f0ee-44ee-afef-914006a060d0> | {
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City Council and Mayor
About the City of Gallup Government
The City of Gallup is a municipal government incorporated under the laws of the State of New Mexico. The city charter follows the council-manager form and provides for five elected positions: the mayor, and four city councilors. The elected officials oversee the policies and practices of the city government. Gallup is the county seat of McKinley County.
Elected Terms of Office
The city is divided into four council districts, each of which elects a councilor for a term of four years. The terms of councilors are staggered so that two councilors are elected every two years for a four-year term. The mayor is elected by all registered voters within the city for a term of four years.
Please visit our Elections and Representatives page for more information.
- Second and fourth Tuesdays of each month
- 6:00 pm Mountain Time
Agendas & Minutes
Agendas are available prior to the meetings. Minutes are available following approval.
Most Recent Agenda | View All Agendas and Minutes | <urn:uuid:075e8169-9675-47c6-85cc-c147359a26f2> | {
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Odessa, the Greek Street – the first street parallel with Deribasovskaya – in the early twentieth century
We actually wanted to publish this post some days ago, on March 25, the feast of the Greek independence, but it’s not yet too late. The reason was that the Filiki Heteria, “Friendly Society”, founded in 1814 in Odessa, one of the most important Greek cities of the era, played a decisive role in launching the Greek Revolution of 1821, as we will se below. We have illustrated the article of the Hellenist expert Tamás Glaser, written for our journey to Odessa, with pictures selected from Russian and Greek sites.
The history of Odessa was intertwined since its foundation with that of the Greeks. On May 27, 1794 Empress Catherine decided the founding of the city on the place of an earlier Ottoman fortress, and, incidentally, of an ancient Greek colony. It was first mentioned by the name of Odessa in January 1795.
As to the origin of the name, a number of versions compete with each other. According to one, the name refers to the ancient Greek settlement of Odēssos, a little further away, around the modern Varna in Bulgaria, and Catherine deliberately gave this name to the city to be found, so as to attract the hoped-for Greek settlers, whom – besides the many other invited ethnic groups – she intended to provide with a special role.
The settlement of the Greeks on the territories annexed to Russia as a result of the Russo-Turkish War of 1792 was part of Catherine’s “Greek plan”. According to this idea, Russia, acting as the advocate of the oppressed Christians of the Ottoman Empire, would undermine the Sultans’ rule by referring to its own historic rights going back to the co-religionist Greek Byzantium, with the ultimate aim of “erecting the cross on the dome of the Hagia Sophia again”, that is, to include the region in the Russian sphere of influence.
Greeks already lived since the seventeenth century on the northern Black Sea coast. Their number increased toward the late eighteenth century, when the territory gradually went under Russian rule, and when, during the repeated Russo-Turkish wars, the Greeks serving in the Russian army or those rebelling against the Turks (often on Russian instigation) and then fleeing the reprisals, mainly settled in this region with favorable climatic and economic characteristics. The majority of the immigrants at that time came from Epirus, Macedonia and the Peloponnese.
Greek women from the Little Arnaut Street. The Arnauts, settling in the mid-1800 at the then edge of the city, in the Little and Great Arnaut Streets, were Greeks originating from the northern Balkans and Moldova, often speaking Albanian or Vlach, who participate in a large number in the anti-Turkish wars.
On April 19, 1795 Catherine issued a decree, in which she offered various privileges (tax exemptions, low cost loans, commercial advantages, free land, and – not least – such personal and political freedoms, of which the majority of the Russian population could not even dream) to the Greeks and Christian Albanians who were willing to settle in the newly established city. From then on the number of immigrants dramatically increased. This time, most of them came from the islands of the Aegean Sea. The Russo-Turkish war of 1806-1812 brought about a new wave of immigration.
In the newly conquered southern Russian territories, the Russian state considered the co-religionist Greek population as a stabilizing factor, and thus from the outset sought to give them an advantageous position. Typically, the area of the city was divided at the beginning of its construction into a “military” and a “Greek” district. They set up a special committee for Greek affairs. In parallel, a volunteer Greek military formation was recruited, which took part in the wars of the following decades.
Odessan Greek soldiers in the early 20th century. From Katy Georgiou’s article on the Northern Greek diaspora.
At the foundation of the city the proportion of the Greeks was 9.5% (224 persons in a total population of 2349 persons), which by 1817 sunk to 5%, and in 1910 was only 1.8% (which, of course, was a growth in absolute terms in the dynamically growing city, at least until the mid-nineteenth century). The Greek consulate’s annual report of 1910 estimated the number of the Greeks at 10 thousand. (By comparison, the 1897 census puts the number of Jews at around 120 thousand.) The influence of the Greeks, however, was always considerably higher than their proportion: their role in the city’s commercial and cultural life remained dominant for a century.
The Greek trade from the outset was based mainly on the sale of the rich grain harvest of the South Russian black soil. During the Napoleonic wars, the Greek ships carried grain by breaking through the French and British blockades to Western Europe, struggling with the disruption of supply, by which their owners laid the basis for huge fortunes. In 1819 Odessa received free port status (the goods could be imported and exported with a significant reduction of duties, or sometimes even duty-free), which further boosted trade.
Thus the Greeks had a leading role from the beginning in the city’s commercial and economic life. In the 1850s, the Greek trading companies conducted the most traffic. The resulting, often fabulous wealth was invested, in addition to the development of their own companies, into real estate acquisition and construction, but they also generously supported the Greek communities in Odessa, and in the Ottoman Empire, and later the Greek state, too.
At this point it is worth to mention, that one of the first and defining episodes of the series of events leading to the formation of the Greek state is also linked to Odessa. In 1814 three Greek merchants founded here the secret (somewhat Masonic-style) organization called Filiki Eteria (“Friendly Society”) with the aim to prepare the uprising against the Turks and the liberation of Greece. The uprising broke out just seven years later, in 1821, and it reached its goal by the end of the decae. The house where the Society was founded, together with the two other building attached to it, today host the Filiki Eteria Museum and the Greek Cultural Institute (Krasny Pereulok 16-20).
The history of the Filiki Eteria in the Russian Greek high school history book: membership certificate and seal of the society; taking an oath (in the picture, F. Koloktronitis, later chief commander of the Greek army); the founders of the society: Emmanuil Xanthos from Patmos, Nikolaos Skoufas from Arta and Athanasius Tsakalov from Joannina (wax figures in the Society’s museum in Odessa)
The families playing the greatest role in the city’s prospering settled there between 1819 and 1825. Many of them soon established merchant houses, which in a few years arrived to a dominant role. Some families from among the best known are: Rhodokanakis, Rallis, Papudov, Iraklidis, Mavros, Maraslis, Inglesis, Skaramangas, Sevastopoulos… In 1835, the Greek merchant houses transacted 37%, and in 1860 46% of the import and export passing through Odessa.
The merchant house as a business form had great advantages, which the Greeks could exploit more than the other groups. This was due partly to their leading commercial methods (contracting the crop in advance, continuous monitoring of the demand and the markets, organization of the flow of information, etc.), and partly to their extensive family and business networks covering the markets of the Middle East and Western Europe, but for example in the case of the London-based Rallis family, also India, Japan and even Northern and Southern America. In addition, the Greek merchants invested large sums in ship building and hiring, which allowed commercial shipping being separated as a separate business from other commercial activities.
From the early nineteenth century, the Greeks took the initiative in the establishment of banks and insurance companies as well. At that time they set up in Odessa, among others, the Greek-Russian Insurance Association, the Commercial Loan Fund and the United Hellenic Skaramangas Bank.
Some Greek monuments in Odessa, as shown in the Russian Greek high school history book: the port of Odessa in the early nineteenth century; the building of the Greek Cultural Foundation in the Greek Street; house number 1 in Greek Street; the Filiki Eteria Museum (the other facade of the Foundation, overlooking the Greek Square)
The Greeks were also at the forefront of the industry and industrial innovations. The products of K. Saliangas’ silk weaving factory, working with modern machines, were highly sought after both in Russia and abroad. The bakery of N. Ambatielos used the most modern equipment, Spiridon Patsiolas operated a well-established pasta factory. Several tannery and tobacco factories were in Greek ownership, but there were also Greek-owned shoe factories and salami producers, fish oil processing and wine production companies.
From the 1870s the Jewish merchants overshadowed the Greeks in the Odessan transit trade, and the American grain raised a massive concurrency to the Russian one. However, the role of the Greeks was far from being over, and was even expanding in retail commerce: they owned increasingly more shops and department stores in the heart of the city. The most famous was Petrokokkinos’ department store on the Deribasovskaya, which, according to contemporary descriptions, was nothing short of its Western European counterparts. It traded with colonial and industrial goods, and it had also Chinese and Japanese products on its shelves. Its stately, richly decorated building was one of the city’s attractions. The Greek businessmen, who became wealthy in the previous decades, now increasingly turned to real estate and construction business. The memory of their activity is still preserved by luxurious villas, elegant neoclassic and eclectic buildings.
|The Greek church dedicated to the Holy Trinity at Ekaterinskaya 67, between Bazaar and Great Arnaut Streets|
The Greek community settled in Odessa soon started to organize its religious and cultural institutions. Already in 1795 they built a wooden church, and in 1808 they consecrated the Holy Trinity Church, uniting neoclassical and Byzantine elements. In the following decades a lot of community organizations worked in the city, among which the most important were the Holy Trinity Greek Church Brotherhood (1864), the Greek Philanthropist Society (1865), the Odessan Greek Charitable Association (1871), which also operated a home for elderly people, and the Omonia (“Consent”) Club (1900), including the richest members of the Greek community.
The community also financed several high-quality educational institutions. The most important among them was the Greek Commercial School, founded in 1819, which also offered secondary and higher education, and gave education to several important future businessmen, scholars and politicians. This school existed until the Bolshevik seizure of power, and it had a rich library as well as – from 1827 – its own press. The other famous Odessan Greek school was the Rhodokanakis Girls Educational Institute (1872). Its professors included Kalliopi Siganu-Parrain, a forerunner of the Greek feminist movement.
Already from the late 1810s a thriving Greek cultural life evolved in the city. The Greek theater opened in 1814, and soon it became a focal point not only of Odessa, but of the intellectual life of the whole Greek world. Many important figures of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Greek intellectual elite visited Odessa, and several of them spent here a longer life, learning and teaching in the Greek schools. Some of the most important among them are the leading 19th-century historian Konstandinos Paparrigopoulos, the famous poet and polymath Alexandros Rizos Rangavis, the popular author and first IOC president Dimitrios Vikelas, as well as Iannis Psicharis, born in Odessa, who played a major role in the renewal of the Greek language. Interestingly, the Greek press in Odessa received an impetus only from the 1890s, but then they published five Greek daily newspapers and several journals until as long as 1919.
|Grigorios Maraslis (1831–1907)|
The Greeks lived almost everywhere in Odessa, but most of them in the Bulvarny (today Primorsky) district. Here was also the “Greek market”, while the Greek Street running through the district still preserves the memory of its former residents.
The prosperity of the Odessan Greeks was ended by the Bolshevik revolution and the intervention following it. In early 1919, a a Greek army also landed with the intervention troops, and the majority of the Greek population, which had few sympathy for the Bolsheviks, enthusiastically welcomed them. However, the fortunes of war turned, and the intervention forces retreated. They were followed by nine-tenth of the Greek population of Odessa and its surroundings, ca. 28,000 people. The survivors tried to adapt themselves to the new circumstances: the Girls Education Institute now housed the Greek Workers’ School, and some other schools and clubs were also allowed to operate. In 1937, however, the Greek communities were declared “capitalistic elements”, their institutions closed, and thousands of them deportated to Central Asia. This was the fate of the Odessan Greeks as well. Some of the survivors could settle back to their former place of residence only at the time of Khrushchev’s “thaw”.
Maria Karavia’s Οδησσός, η λησμονημένη πατρίδα (Odessa, the forgotten homeland, 1999) is a comprehensive book on the former Greek Odessa
In Odessa still there live some Greeks who are descendants of the old settlers, although we have no exact data on their number (according to unconfirmed press information, they might be about a thousand). Since 1988, they have also run a Greek club. Not far from the city, the inhabitants of a small village, Sverdlovo (Maly Buyalyk) are also descendants of the Greeks settled two hundred years ago. About a quarter of the inhabitants speak the language of their ancestors, and recently they have made serious efforts to preserve their dialect and culture. | <urn:uuid:f88fd14b-99dd-402a-b9bf-fd6a58bd2f5d> | {
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While a lot of time and effort goes into ensuring that networks are patched, the gap between vulnerability announcements and patch availability remains a serious and often costly issue for too many companies.
But by proactively managing the risks, you can strengthen general defences until those critical system patches arrive.
The first step is to take advantage of information that is available. Operating system suppliers such as Microsoft and application suppliers such as Citrix and Apple regularly release a list of known vulnerabilities that they are working on.
This information can help reduce the risks associated with the vulnerability, which is the reason why the suppliers release it in the first place. But vulnerability alerts also attract the attention of those who craft malicious code. The industry has little choice but to be proactive in managing the risk.
Most vulnerabilities have both a known port number for network access and a recognisable pattern of attack, which is often the first information available about a given vulnerability.
Blocking a port number on the firewall is the first line of defence for reducing the risks associated with a known vulnerability. The tactic was used by many companies to counteract the Blaster worm, which used several ports to spread its malicious code.
Often a rule set for an intrusion prevention system (IPS) will also be available. Such pattern recognition rules help an IPS identify malicious network activity and shut it down before it can contaminate more systems.
By ensuring the rule set on an IPS or IDS (an intrusion detection system, which will alert you only if it detects malicious activity) is up to date, you minimise the risk of malicious activity.
While many years have passed since the ILoveYou, Melissa and BubbleBoy viruses troubled e-mail servers, unchecked e-mails remain the primary source of network contamination. Configuring the corporate spam filters is therefore another important step in protecting the network from similar attacks. Prohibiting access to online e-mail services such as Yahoo and Gmail can also reduce the quantity of spam.
However, unless you inform all staff of the dangers posed by malicious code, an employee may unwittingly cause an infection despite the best efforts of the security professionals. It is crucial that end-users know how to use the internet safely, and how to recognise phishing websites and e-mails.
Educating employees about these types of attacks and alerting them to dangers as they arise is now an essential step in securing the organisation.
Such measures should be part of a formalised procedure for addressing the risks associated with a vulnerability. Figuring out how to react to a situation can otherwise be a time-consuming process. Much of the stress associated with a vulnerability is due to questions from management, such as what are we doing about this?, how does it affect us?, and who is working on this?
When a vulnerability alert is released, your job is to stay on top of developing events, train employees not to fall victim to the scams and actively manage risks on the network - and then apply the patch as soon as it is available.
Proper risk management of unpatched system vulnerabilities is as essential to maintaining network integrity as the patches themselves. | <urn:uuid:b944c8eb-c2ca-41f7-b37f-069d1d6ecfbd> | {
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Answered By: Michael Davidson Last Updated: Sep 21, 2016 Views: 41
First, are you using MLA or APA (or another) citation format?
In MLA, you are advised to locate the original source and cite that. If the original is not available, in-text citations use this format: (qtd. in Jones: pp) where Jones is the second source author's name and pp is the page number. Then you cite it normally in your works cited list. Here is the section of the MLA Handbook with this information:
If you have any other questions, or if you are using a different citation style, please write back. | <urn:uuid:5adbf8e0-f799-4863-b053-732741514165> | {
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Things to shake, rub, scrape, grind, etc.
The PhISEM (Physically Inspired Stochastic Event Modeling) project provieded support for the "new algorithms lead to new controllers lead to new algorithms..." principles. This work on the synthesis particle-type percussion and real-world sounds led to set of new instruments, not only for control of shaker/scraper sounds and sound effects, but also for algorithmic interactive music. For example, the Frog Maraca sends MIDI commands to control a simple algorithmic fusion jazz combo of bass, piano, and drums. The success with both adults and children of the Frog Maraca came from its simple interface (just shake it), the fun of making fairly complicated music with such a simple and whimsical looking device, and the fact that it only perfomed one function (and always pefromed that function when tuned on). A related shaker percussion instrument controller was a Tambourine that could also compose algorithmic modal marimba solos when shaken.
Constructing the PhISEM controllers provided rich evidence that "Programmability is a curse." and a correlary "Smart instruments are often not smart." What these principles are meant to address is that the programmability of computer-based musical systems often make them too easy to configure, redefine, remap, etc. For programmers and composers, this provides an infinite landscape for experimentation, creativity, writing papers, wasting time, and never actually completing any art projects or compositions. For normal humans, being able to pick up an instrument with a simple obvious interaction and "play it" only make logical sense. That the instrument is "learning from their play and modifying its behavior" often does not make any sense at all, and can be frustrating, paralyzing, or offensive. PhISEM controllers have a single embedded microcontroller, programmed for one or two functions (selectable by the state of a button on power-up), and they put out standart General MIDI signals. Except for the need to replace batteries (Die Batteries Die!!). these controllers have a strong possibility of working perfectly as designed in 10 (perhaps 20) years. Those who craft complex systems using custom hardware, multiple computers, and multiple operating systems, can make no such claims.
Download Tambourine Soundfile | <urn:uuid:e7f6a971-8930-4d25-9fb6-789bc03ac193> | {
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Schools are supposed to comply with specific nutritional guidelines, as set out by the National School Lunch Program. Lunch is supposed to contain no more than 30% of calories from fat and 10% from saturated fat, should have a source of protein and a serving of calcium. While this is all well and good, the unfortunate truth about school lunches is that they do not make the nutritional grade.
Have you ever seen what’s served in the cafeteria? I have – first-hand, as I spent 6 weeks during my nutrition field hours in a public school cafeteria. Pizza, Chicken tenders and french fries, hamburgers, salad with full-fat dressing. Kid-friendly (so it sells), but not figure-friendly. And what about the “extra” stuff that is also sold, but not as part of the school lunch program? Schools also sell cookies, candy, baked goods, soda, and sports drinks. These items are not only big sellers, but an added source of revenue for schools. The bottom line is this: if your child is eating from the cafeteria, he/she is likely taking in close to 1,000 calories of high sodium, high fat, low fiber calories during lunch.
What to do?
As most parents, I’m sure you are an advocate for your child, including decisions regarding their health. Take charge of this situation by saying “No” to school lunches and “Yes” to brown-bagging it. Whether your child is in pre-school, elementary, middle, or high school, they will benefit physically and mentally from a healthy, homemade lunch.
Making lunch doesn’t have to be a time-consuming ordeal. In fact, make it easier on you by getting the kids involved. Sit down with them and make a list of all of the things they would like to eat. They may need a little help from you with some ideas, but you’ll walk away from the discussion with options so that you’re not making the same thing every day.
What to pack?
Every lunch should contain a source of whole grain: whole wheat bread/English muffin/pita bread/tortilla, brown rice, quinoa, whole-grain pasta.
Lean protein: turkey breast, chicken breast, hard-boiled egg, beans, hummus, light string cheese, light shredded cheese.
Fruit & Veggies:Make sure to include 1 piece of fruit;1 snack-size baggie of veggies with hummus/black bean dip/guacamole/salsa; layer veggies onto your sandwich or stuff them into a pita or wrap; a bottle of Fruit 2 day.
Water: Keep them hydrated by packing a 1 liter bottle or 2 (16 oz.) bottles. A great trick to keeping the food nice and chilled is to freeze a bottle of water and then use it as the ice pack. The ice will thaw during the morning, leaving your child with water to drink and a lunch kept nice and cool.
Snacks: Always pack a snack for your child, as they do need a mid-morning pick-me-up. Good ideas include fruit, nuts, or a healthy energy bar. My favorites include Kashi, Lara, Kind, Pure, Zing, and Gnu. Stay away from bars that are coated in chocolate or full of candy bits.
Skip the treats: Kids do not need dessert in the middle of the day, so keep the cookies, candy bars, and the like out of their lunches.
The bottom line: Kids spend very little time eating lunch, as they’d rather be off with their friends playing (elementary school age) or “hanging out” (middle & high school). Knowing this, please don’t pack too much stuff. Usually a sandwich/salad/pasta salad and a piece of fruit is enough. If you pack the main course full of healthy, well-balanced stuff, then they’re good to go. | <urn:uuid:43784a2c-4ccf-40b2-865c-97941d10a722> | {
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Although a number of factors contribute to acne, the initiating event is hormonal stimulation of the sebaceous glands beneath the skin. “The sebaceous glands produce sebum, the oily substance that gets transmitted onto the skin’s surface,” explains Dr. Eichenfield. Each bulb-shaped gland leads to a narrow duct called a follicle; each follicle contains a strand of hair.
“Once kids reach puberty,” he continues, “not only do the glands become more active, but the chemical composition of the sebum changes.” Ordinarily, a follicle’s inner lining sheds dead cells into the sebum, which gets deposited onto the skin, waiting to be scrubbed away.
For reasons that aren’t clear, in acne the cells clump together and plug the opening, or pore. This prevents the oil from escaping. It also forces bacteria that normally reside in the skin (called Propionibacterium acnes, or P. acnes), to proliferate inside the narrow follicle. Eventually the sebum seeps out of the opening. If chemicals produced by P. acnes inflame the skin, a reddish pusfilled pimple begins to grow there.
Acne, whiteheads and blackheads are all by-products of the same process. Acne refers to an enlarged follicle that protrudes from the surface of the skin; whitehead describes a plugged follicle that remains just beneath the surface. When the follicle opens partially to reveal a black speck the size of a pinhead, it is called a blackhead. Contrary to popular myth, “the discoloration is pigment, not accumulated dirt,” stresses Dr. Eichenfield. “Blackheads are just another type of acne.” Still other acne lesions include:
- Paranasal erythema: an early form of acne commonly seen in kids on the cusp of puberty.
- Papule: an inflamed, small, pink bump that is tender to the touch.
- Nodule: a large, solid lesion lodged far below the skin’s surface; is frequently painful.
- Cyst: another painful deep-seated lesion. Cysts, however, are inflamed and contain pus. They can also leave scars. Only one in twenty cases of acne are this severe. | <urn:uuid:8371eefa-6879-494c-822f-38207491aa9b> | {
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What exactly is the ‘Digestive System’?
When we say ‘digestive system‘ we are referring to the system within our body which helps us process food. Included this system is the gastrointestinal (GI) tract along with the liver, pancreas and gallbladder. The GI – or Digestive – Tract consists of a series of hollow organs which connect to a long, twisting hollow tube from the mouth to anus. These organs are the mouth, esophagus, stomach, small intestine, large intestine, and anus. The liver, pancreas, and gallbladder are the solid organs of the digestive system.
The small intestines consist of three parts – the duodenum, the jejunum and finally the ileum. The large intestine, in turn, consists of the appendix, cecum, colon, and rectum. The diagram below shows the locations of each aspect in proximity to each other:
How does it work?
Each part of your digestive system helps a) to move food and liquid through your GI tract, b) break food and liquid into smaller parts, or c) both. Once foods are broken into small enough parts, your body can then absorb and move the nutrients to where they are needed. Your large intestine absorbs the remaining water, and the waste products of the entire process of digestion become stool. The digestive process is controlled by nerves and hormones within your body. As well as this, bacteria naturally occurring in your GI tract – also called gut flora or microbiome – help greatly with digestion. Some parts of your nervous and circulatory systems also help. Working together; nerves, hormones, bacteria, blood, and the organs of your digestive system digest the foods and liquids you eat or drink each day. This is all done without a thought, a subconscious and natural part of being a human being.
Why is digestion important?
Digestion is important because your body needs nutrients from food and drink to work properly and to stay healthy. Proteins, fats, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals, and water are all nutrients. Your digestive system breaks nutrients into parts small enough for your body to absorb and uses them for energy, growth, and cell repair.
- Proteins break into amino acids
- Fats break into fatty acids and glycerol
- Carbohydrates break into simple sugars
How does food move through my GI tract?
Food moves through your digestive system by a process called peristalsis. Within your small intestine and colon, there is a muscle within the wall of the tubing which enables movement. It is this – an involuntary constriction and relaxation of the muscle, creating wave-like movement – which pushes food and liquid through your system and mixes the contents within each organ. As well as the use of peristalsis to move food through your GI tract, your digestive organs also break food into smaller parts using digestive juices; such as stomach acid, bile, and enzymes.
The below table shows what each aspect of your digestive system does:
Mouth – is the beginning of the digestive tract. In fact, digestion starts here when taking the first bite of food. Chewing breaks the food into pieces that are more easily digested, while saliva mixes with food to begin the process of breaking it down into a form your body can absorb and use.
Esophagus – Located in your throat near your trachea (windpipe), the esophagus receives food from your mouth when you swallow. By means of a series of muscular contractions called peristalsis, the esophagus delivers food to your stomach.
Stomach – a hollow organ that holds food while it is being mixed with enzymes that continue the process of breaking down food into a usable form. Cells in the lining of the stomach secrete a strong acid and powerful enzymes that are responsible for the breakdown process. When the contents of the stomach are sufficiently processed, they are released into the small intestine.
Small intestine – Made up of three segments – the duodenum, jejunum, and ileum – the small intestine is a 22-foot long muscular tube that breaks down food using enzymes released by the pancreas and bile from the liver. Peristalsis is also at work in this organ; moving food through and mixing it with digestive secretions from the pancreas and liver. The duodenum is largely responsible for the continuous breaking-down process, with the jejunum and ileum mainly responsible for absorption of nutrients into the bloodstream.
The contents of the small intestine start out semi-solid but end in a liquid form after passing through the organ. Water, bile, enzymes, and mucous contribute to the change in consistency. Once the nutrients have been absorbed and the leftover-food residue liquid has passed through the small intestine, it then moves on to the large intestine, or colon.
Pancreas – secretes digestive enzymes into the duodenum, the first segment of the small intestine. These enzymes break down protein, fats, and carbohydrates. The pancreas also makes insulin, secreting it directly into the bloodstream. Insulin is the chief hormone for metabolizing sugar.
Liver – The liver has multiple functions, but its main function within the digestive system is to process the nutrients absorbed from the small intestine. Bile from the liver secreted into the small intestine also plays an important role in digesting fat. In addition, the liver is the body’s chemical ‘factory’: it takes the raw materials absorbed by the intestine and makes all the various chemicals the body needs to function. The liver also detoxifies potentially harmful chemicals, as well as breaking down and secreting many drugs.
Gallbladder – The gallbladder stores and concentrates bile, and then releases it into the duodenum to help absorb and digest fats.
Colon (large intestine) – The colon is a 6-foot long muscular tube that connects the small intestine to the rectum. The large intestine is made up of the cecum, the ascending (right) colon, the transverse (across) colon, the descending (left) colon, and the sigmoid colon, which connects to the rectum. The large intestine is a highly specialized organ that is responsible for processing waste so that emptying the bowels is easy and convenient.
Stool – or the waste left over from the digestive process – is passed through the colon by means of peristalsis, first in a liquid state and ultimately in a solid form. As stool passes through the colon, water is removed. Stool is stored in the sigmoid colon until a ‘mass movement’ empties it into the rectum once or twice a day. It normally takes about 36 hours for stool to get through the colon. The stool itself is mostly food debris and bacteria. These bacteria perform several useful functions, such as synthesising various vitamins, processing waste products and food particles, as well as protecting against harmful bacteria. When the descending colon becomes full of stool – or feces as it then becomes known as – it empties its contents into the rectum to begin the process of elimination.
Rectum – The rectum (Latin for ‘straight’) is an 8-inch chamber that connects the colon to the anus. It is the rectum’s job to receive stool from the colon, to let the person know that there is stool to be evacuated, and to hold the stool until evacuation happens. When anything comes into the rectum, sensors send a message to the brain. The brain then decides if the rectal contents can be released or not. If they can, the sphincters relax and the rectum contracts, disposing its contents. If the contents cannot be disposed, the sphincter contracts and the rectum accommodates so that the sensation temporarily goes away.
Anus – The anus is the last part of the digestive tract. It is a 2-inch long canal consisting of the pelvic floor muscles and the two anal sphincters (internal and external). The lining of the upper anus is specialized to detect rectal contents. It lets you know whether the contents are liquid, gas, or solid. The anus is surrounded by sphincter muscles that are important in allowing control of stool. The pelvic floor muscle creates an angle between the rectum and the anus that stops stool from coming out when it is not supposed to. The internal sphincter is always tight, except when stool enters the rectum. It keeps us continent when we are asleep or otherwise unaware of the presence of stool. When we get an urge to go to the bathroom, we rely on our external sphincter to hold the stool until reaching a toilet, where it then relaxes to release the contents.
Next time… the focus is around how digestion and the system function when you have a digestive condition, such as IBD.
Do you have any questions or queries? Or just want to share your own experiences? You can leave me a reply here or leave comments via my social media accounts – on Twitter, find my blog page on Facebook and over on Instagram
National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases – Your Digestive System and How It Works
TED-Ed – How Your Digestive System Works (video)
Mayo Clinic – (slide show) See how your digestive system works
IBD Relief – What is the Digestive System and How Does it Work?
The IBD Clinic – How does Digestion Work
Cleveland Clinic – The Structure and Function of the Digestive System | <urn:uuid:2c86ec33-8781-42fe-8d25-fe98926d70d6> | {
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The health risks of smoking have been well documented since the first Surgeon General's report on smoking and health, in 1964. Nicotine gum, which first became available in 1984, was an all-new approach to help smokers quit this very addictive habit.
It is, in fact, the nicotine in cigarettes that causes the addiction. The long-term effects of smoking, however — such as heart disease, cancer, and chronic lung disease — are caused by other chemicals in cigarette smoke, including carbon monoxide.
Using nicotine gum — especially under a physician's guidance, or while regularly attending a support group — can double the quitting success rate from approximately 10 to 20 percent. Most side effects are short lived and include jaw soreness (from chewing), headache, and increased saliva production. If too much nicotine gets into a person's system from chewing the gum, symptoms may include dizziness, a racing heart, nausea, and insomnia.
Long-term effects are less well recognized and reported. Though the recommended period of use is only three months, more than half of people trying to quit smoking will use the gum for over six months. One study has also suggested that long-term use of the gum may lead to an increased level of insulin because of the development of what is called insulin resistance. This may, over time, lead to abnormalities in the regulation of blood sugar level, and to diabetes. It is also important to note that there are no known vascular or heart problems associated with long-term use of nicotine gum.
I would encourage your husband to try to slowly decrease his use of the gum. Remember, however, that he has taken a most important step in improving his health by quitting smoking.
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The face of a medieval monk looks out of a glass case in the British Museum in London. His young, handsome, tonsured head was exquisitely carved in stone. It is life-size. You can see where it has been broken from the wall, for this compelling, realistic portrait was once part of the architecture of a British abbey. All around it in the museum's medieval gallery are other fragments from religious buildings that were destroyed after Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries in the 1530s.
It would be inaccurate to call the monk in the British Museum a "Catholic" because Catholicism in its modern form is as much a product of the Reformation as the Protestant Church of England is. As Christendom divided in the 16th century, practices that had grown up informally over a millennium were scrutinised, analysed, and either rejected or – if you remained a follower of the pope – defended. Those tenets of the Old Religion that seemed to work for a newly embattled church were codified by the Council of Trent and then promoted by Catholic artists. Meanwhile, in Britain, radical Protestants were deeply suspicious of visual images in church. They smashed "idols", defaced statues, demolished stained glass, ravaged rood screens.
Religion became a topic of dispute in 16th-century Europe, as it is today. People reached new heights of intolerance in pushing their points of view in deliberate deafness to the other side – as they do today. Let's not sentimentalise medieval Christianity; it had a very long history of persecuting heretics such as the Cathars, not to mention Jews. But in Britain after the Reformation those who defined themselves as what we call Catholics became a truly persecuted minority. It was not only stone monks that were destroyed. Real monks and nuns were burned.
If you contemplate the history of art you can hardly avoid this violent legacy of religious bitterness. Atheist critics of the pope's visit to Britain will, of course, argue that it just proves the madness and cruelty of all religion. Sure, in the abstract, I agree. But in human reality, as a matter of lived experience, Catholics were a persecuted group in Britain for centuries. Even after burning at the stake went out of fashion they suffered a stringent set of social and political restrictions until religious minorities were emancipated in the 19th century. As for the visual glory of medieval art, it never returned. This is a history of persecution, and the first state visit by a pope since the Reformation is a liberal moment, for it marks the official end of one of the great divides of history, the disappearance of one of the most murderous hatreds. It is an event to be quietly glad about, if you believe in a tolerant secular society. | <urn:uuid:2fda59c4-2556-4c2a-89f3-564469c2a2d9> | {
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Developed by a team of researchers at the Wake Forest University Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials, a scrap of felt-like material holds the key to making fabrics of the future work as hard as you do.
The research, published in the February issue of the technology journal Nano Letters, revolves around the use of nanotechnology to create composite fabrics from carbon nanotubes and polymers. The “nano” part of that equation revolves around three-dimensional (usually carbon) molecules less than 100 nanometers in any dimension (height, width or depth)—a definition provided by the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM). A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. The polymers are long-chain compounds like polyesters, which in the ’70s gave birth to horrendous pantsuits for men.
By layering these compounds, lead researcher and grad student Corey A. Hewitt (shown above) and team, under the guidance of center director David Carroll, discovered that they could create a fabric, dubbed Power Felt, that converts body heat into electricity. The field is known as thermoelectricity, and their discovery could lead to harvesting wasted energy not merely from body heat—to create “smart” fabrics that warm or cool the wearer, or even recharge a cell phone—to capturing waste heat from the exhaust of a vehicle to provide onboard engine diagnostics, for example, or an interactive menu that allows owners to run a GPS system.
So far, the outrageous cost of bismuth telluride—$455 a pound, but still the most widely used compound in consumer-oriented thermoelectric products—has prevented large-scale development of such useful products. Now, thanks to nanotech, seat cover fabrics in your car could keep you on track and on time at about the same cost as quality replacement seat covers. (Just so they don’t get too smart and start telling us how to drive!) | <urn:uuid:e9051359-e8fa-45f8-9712-53be8450ae47> | {
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A new report says the world’s minorities and indigenous peoples suffer more ill health than other segments of the population. It says decades of marginalization, poverty and displacement have led to profound health inequalities.
Minority Rights Group International has released its annual report: State of the World’s Minorities and Indigenous Peoples.
“The right to health, as you know, is a precondition for all other rights. It’s essentially the right to survive. We found that health outcomes generally are far worse for minorities and indigenous peoples worldwide,” said Carl Soderbergh, the group’s director of policy and communications.
He said no one region is worse than another.
“We see this right across the board whether we’re talking about Roma in Europe with higher infant mortality rates to indigenous communities and Afro-descendant in the Americas. Indigenous children in Guatemala, for example, suffer chronic malnutrition nearly twice the rate of majority children. In South Asia, also, we see high child malnutrition rates among the Dalit community -- and in many countries in Africa, also, worse health indicators for minorities and indigenous peoples,” he said.
Soderbergh said the report cites the main cause of marginalization.
“Essentially, it boils down to one word – exclusion. That minorities and indigenous peoples do not get to be involved in the design and implementation of major national healthcare initiatives. For example, very often healthcare campaigns are not conducted in minority or indigenous languages. This is a particular problem we’ve seen in Africa.”
He gave an example of exclusion in Namibia.
“We understand that no health campaigns have been conducted in the San indigenous languages. And so therefore San communities are excluded from the very vital knowledge about HIV/AIDS prevention. That’s just one example, but there are many right across the continent,” he said.
The Minority Rights Group International report says that loss of land and displacement have contributed to poor health.
“First of all,” he said, “it exacerbates the poverty level of minority and indigenous communities. So, they may not be able to afford, if they are sick, the transport costs to get to healthcare clinics. They may not be able to afford the fees when they arrive. And also, very crucially, they’ll lose access to the traditional medicines that they have learnt about, over the centuries, and used.”
Soderbergh added, for example, the Batwa people of the Great Lakes region have suffered major displacement. But the communities that still had access to traditional medicines seemed to fare better than those who did not.
According to the report, some cultural practices are also affecting the health of minorities and indigenous peoples. It names early marriage and female genital mutilation as major risk factors.
“These two practices in particular the increase the risk of something called obstetric fistula, which is a gynecological problem that can be deadly if not treated. And certainly leads to the exclusion of minority and indigenous women, who have this problem,” he said.
Obstetric fistula can occur during prolonged hard labor in childbirth. A fistula is a hole or tear between the rectum and vagina or between the bladder and vagina. It leaves a woman incontinent and often shunned by the community because of the odor.
Minority Rights Group International said minority and indigenous communities must be involved in the design and implementation of health care initiatives. It calls on the U.N. General Assembly to hold meaningful consultations on the issue. The United Nations is scheduled to hold a summit on indigenous peoples late next year.
Soderbergh warned that any programs that replace the expiring Millennium Development Goals are “doomed to fail unless discrimination towards minorities and indigenous peoples is urgently addressed.” | <urn:uuid:fcb7abd3-7456-407a-b353-b6a3a179695c> | {
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Scientists can now “see” a single living cell made visible by its own light. A new image intensifier, which amplifies the very faint light of an individual cell in a way somewhat like the television screen makes its bright picture, has been developed. It can be made to amplify light as much as a million and a half times….
George T. Reynolds of Princeton … used the image intensifier with a microscope to take pictures of Noctiluca miliaris, a tiny sea creature that gives the ocean its phosphorescent glow when present in large numbers…. The image intensifier consists of a photo-sensitive surface and a viewing screen, with five intervening membranes of aluminum oxide, each a one-hundred-thousandth of an inch thick.
George Reynolds’ imaging process | <urn:uuid:81c16885-94ec-4b8d-b260-d83f48c25a81> | {
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need help on potential energy problem (less than 45 min left)) This is due online at 11:00 pm tonight! Otherwise I wouldn't post here I'd ask my prof for help. 1. The problem statement, all variables and given/known data A 20.0 kg block is connected to a 30.0 kg block by a string that passes over a light, frictionless pulley. The 30.0 kg block is connected to a spring that has negligible mass and a force constant of 280 N/m, as shown in the figure below. The spring is unstretched when the system is as shown in the figure, and the incline is frictionless. The 20.0 kg block is pulled 20.0 cm down the incline (so that the 30.0 kg block is 40.0 cm above the floor) and released from rest. Find the speed of each block when the 30.0 kg block is 20.0 cm above the floor (that is, when the spring is unstretched). P.S. the incline is 40 degrees above the horizontal and the 20kg weight is on that horizontal, while the 30kg block is vertical. 2. Relevant equations .5mV^2=PE .5Kx^2=PE KE=PE 3. The attempt at a solution I set up the problem to have potential energy of the 30kg block increased and the 20kg block decreased, with the potential energy in the spring increased. This came out to 30*9.81*.2-20*9.81*.2/sin(40)+.5*280*.2^2. With the total potential energy of the system I promptly set it equal to the kinetic energy and solved for the mass of the system (sqrt(2*PE/50)). The answer was not correct. I looked in my text book for a similar question and found one exactly like it, except with the spring constant being 250. The back of the book said the answer was 1.24m/s. I tried to replicate the results with my previous attempt with no avail. And I've tried all deviations, such as changing the plus and minuses, and solving for individual masses. Got close but no cigar. The book and online homework said specifically to carry out all operations to 4 decimal places, and I did, so that's not the problem either. For the love of god help me quickly. | <urn:uuid:bc29e019-bd25-4bd8-bc83-1c49afe6d8d1> | {
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Progress Made Toward Planetary Science Decadal Priorities
This post is adapted from a National Academies press release:
Despite significant cuts to NASA's Planetary Science Division budget early in this decade, the space agency has made impressive progress in meeting goals outlined in the 2013-2022 planetary decadal survey by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, says a new midterm assessment from the National Academies. The report notes that the agency met or exceeded the decadal survey's recommendations for funding research and analysis, and for technology programs. However, NASA has not achieved the recommended timeline for New Frontiers and Discovery missions for the decade. At least one more New Frontiers mission and three Discovery missions should be selected before the end of the decade in order to achieve the schedule recommended in Vision and Voyages.
The decadal survey, Vision and Voyages for Planetary Science in the Decade 2013-2022, recommended a suite of planetary science flagship missions that could provide a steady stream of important new discoveries about the solar system as well as prospective mid-size missions and science, research, and technology priorities. It also included a set of decision rules on how to deal with funding shortfalls as well as possible increases. The new report assesses progress made by NASA so far and offers recommendations for preparing for the next decadal survey.
"Since the publication of Vision and Voyages, planetary science has made many advances, including acquiring results from several highly successful missions," said Louise Prockter, director of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, and co-chair of the committee that conducted the study and wrote the report. "This decadal survey has served the planetary science community well, justifying a plan for planetary science that has been successful in supporting research and obtaining steady funding for missions."
NASA has begun development of two of the decadal survey's top recommended flagship missions, the Europa Clipper, an interplanetary mission that will place a spacecraft in orbit around Jupiter in order to perform a detailed investigation of the moon Europa, and the Mars 2020 rover, which will collect samples for eventual return to Earth. However, the committee noted its concern about the aging infrastructure orbiting Mars, which is vital for communicating with the rovers on the surface. The loss of one or more of these spacecraft could make it difficult for NASA to support the return of samples from the surface of Mars.
"NASA has made a strong investment in technology that has exceeded the Vision and Voyages recommended levels," said committee co-chair Joe Rothenberg, former NASA associate administrator for space flight, Goddard Center director, and co-chair of the committee that conducted the new study and wrote the report. "This investment has not only enabled science missions in this decade, but is providing for the long-term technology development needed for missions in the next decade, including the Mars sample return program and the exploration of planetary bodies with extreme environments."
The committee developed recommendations for the remainder of the decade based on categories including large strategic missions, NASA's Mars exploration program, telescopes and planetary science, and education and public outreach. Among the recommendations:
- Continue to closely monitor the cost and schedule associated with the Europa Clipper to ensure that it remains executable within the approved life-cycle cost range.
- Continue planning and begin implementation of NASA's proposed "focused and rapid" architecture for returning samples from the Mars 2020 mission so as to achieve the highest priority decadal flagship-level science.
- Reevaluate the Mars Exploration Program, which currently has only the Mars 2020 rover in its future missions queue.
- Continue investment in development of mission-enabling technologies at 6% to 8% of the Planetary Science Division's budget.
- Link education and outreach activities directly to the missions that are providing the science content for those programs, working directly with mission scientists and engineers to ensure a strong connection to NASA's mission results.
In preparation for the next decadal survey, the report recommends that NASA sponsor eight to ten mission concept studies that include options described in the Academies report, Getting Ready for the Next Planetary Decadal Survey. Concept studies have value for the next decadal survey, enabling science objectives to be defined, the overall mission scope to be determined, and the community to begin preparing for the next decadal survey.
The midterm study was funded by NASA. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine are private, nonprofit institutions that provide independent, objective analysis and advice to the nation to solve complex problems and inform public policy decisions related to science, technology, and medicine. The National Academies operate under an 1863 congressional charter to the National Academy of Sciences, signed by President Lincoln. | <urn:uuid:46c106a7-ecfd-4681-8348-f458d38e298d> | {
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1. Based on his skill in basketball, it was computed that when Joe threw a free throw, the odds in favor of his making it were 4 to 28 find the probability that when Joe shot a free throw he made it. Out of every 100 free throws he attempted on the average how many did he miss.
2. From 9 names on a ballot, a committee of 5 will be elected to attend a political national convention. How many committees are possible.
3. You are dealt one card from a 52- card deck. Find the probability that you are dealt a numbered card or a spade.
4.A set of data items is normally distributed with a mean of 500. Find the data item in this distribution that corresponds to the given z-score.
z=1.5 if the standard deviation is 50
5. A teacher and 12 students are to be seated along a bench in the bleachers. In how many ways can this be done if the teacher must be seated in the middle and the one difficult student in the class must sit to the teachers immediate left?
6. An ice chest contains 4 cans of apple juice, 3 cans of grape juice, 9 cans of orange juice and 2 cans of pineapple juice. Suppose that you reach into the container and randomly select three cans in succession. Find the probability of selecting no grape juice.
7. In a contest in which 10 contestants are entered, in how many ways can 4 distinct prizes be awarded.
8.You are dealt 6 cards from a shuffled deck of 52. find the probability of getting 3 jacks and 3 aces.
Thanks for reading. any help is appreciated. | <urn:uuid:63f1398e-ba8e-4090-b4e2-10b9a1b32aa1> | {
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Mathematics can produce feelings of dread and anxiety for many children. The thought of solving a complicated sum, or performing mental calculations in front of other people, is often enough to bring on the sweaty palms, racing heartbeat, and a feeling of insecurity and inadequacy.
Research shows that mathematics anxiety can begin as early as the first grade, so it’s important that parents take early measures to prevent their child from developing negative feelings about mathematics.
Here are six ways parents can help their child to overcome mathematics anxiety, and how to help young children develop a positive attitude towards numbers and arithmetic early on.
1. Don’t let your own anxieties get in the way
As adults, many of us have our own insecurities about mathematics, and aren’t afraid to express it. This can send the wrong message to your child, for example: ‘If my parent doesn’t need mathematics, then I don’t’, or ‘If adults think mathematics is hard, then there’s no hope for me.’ Try to avoid talking negatively about mathematics and be conscious of how your perceptions can unintentionally impact your child’s confidence.
2. Embrace mistakes
Avoid getting frustrated or putting a big red X over an incorrect answer. Instead of saying ‘No that’s wrong’, you can say, ‘Let’s work this out together.’ Ask your child to show you how they have tried to solve a problem and say, ‘What might happen if we try this instead?’ A good idea is to use different shaded pencils to show different strategies. Mistakes are a natural and integral part of learning, and it’s important for your child to understand that. Assure your child that even you make mistakes from time to time.
3. Be positive
Positive reinforcement is a valuable tool for helping struggling children to build their confidence and stay motivated to learn. It’s about reinforcing what they do right, rather than focusing on what they do wrong. When your child sits down to solve a sum or shows determination towards understanding a particular skill or concept, be sure to reward your child with encouragement, praise, a smile, or even a hug.
4. Try an online mathematics program
Online learning programs are a fantastic way to build your children’s confidence in in the familiar and nurturing home environment. A research-based education program like Mathseeds is designed to match your child’s individual ability and progress at their own pace with interactive, one-on-one lessons. Online programs are also great for motivating children to learn and improve, with rewards, vibrant animations, and entertaining songs.
5. Express fears in writing
Researchers have found that expressive writing can be an effective tool in helping children overcome feelings of anxiety. In one study, a group of students who were asked to write about their fears before an exam were able to improve their average grade from around a B- to a B+. You can encourage your child to list words to describe how mathematics makes them feel. You can even help them to write a story about a character that overcomes a fear of mathematics, and winds up learning to enjoy it!
6. Relate mathematics to real-life situations
Encourage your child to see how mathematics can be applied to real-life situations, and why it’s so important. This will allow their natural sense of curiosity to take over their fears. Your child will become more eager to learn, ask questions, and look out for more opportunities to show you how well they’ve grasped key concepts. You can integrate mathematics into everyday activities such as shopping, creating a weekly budget, and cooking. Read more ways to help your child apply mathematics to real world situations here.
Mathseeds is the comprehensive online mathematics program that makes learning fun for children aged 3 to 8. It includes interactive games, activities, lessons and rewards that help children learn early mathematical skills and concepts. You can sign up for your free trial of Mathseeds and Reading Eggs today. | <urn:uuid:be5dd3d2-a429-4c1d-9f62-50e7b9ad9e0f> | {
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Tags: Alcubierre metric, Alcubierre Warp Drive, Cassimere Effect, dark energy, Dr. Claudio Maccone, Dr. Eric Davis, Dr. Harold Sonny White, Dr. Richard Obousy, Eagleworks Laboratories, exotic energy, extreme blueshifts, faster than light travel, flat space time, Icarus Interstellar, interstellar dust, interstellar flight, mega materials, Miguel Alcubierre, NASA, negative, negative energy, nonlocality., postwarp particle beams, pressure, quantum vacuum energy, sun gravitational lens telescope, warp bubble, warp ring, White-Juday warp field interferometer, worm holes, zero gravity
Dr. Richard Obousy, Dr. Eric Davis, Dr. Harold Sonny White, Friday, 1-4-13
Guests: Dr. Richard Obousy, Dr. Eric Davis, Dr. Harold Sonny White. Topics: Faster Than Light (FTL) Travel, Warp Drive, Interstellar Travel. Please direct all comments and questions regarding Space Show programs/guest(s) to the Space Show blog, http://thespaceshow.wordpress.com. Comments and questions should be relevant to the specific Space Show program. Written Transcripts of Space Show programs are a violation of our copyright and are not permitted without prior written consent, even if for your own use. We do not permit the commercial use of Space Show programs or any part thereof, nor do we permit editing, YouTube clips, or clips placed on other private channels & websites. Space Show programs can be quoted, but the quote must be cited or referenced using the proper citation format. Contact The Space Show for further information. We welcomed our three guests, Drs. Obousy, Davis, and White to the program to discuss FTL travel, warp drive, and interstellar flight. More information is available at the Icarus Interstellar website, http://www.icarusinterstellar.org. We did not take a break during our program. Also, at times our discussion was technical and scientific. I looked up many terms & used my search engine frequently during the discussion given the advanced nature of the subject and our discussion. Don’t be shy about looking up that which you may not understand or know about. I promise, if you do it will be well worth your time. We started with an introduction to Icarus Interstellar, FTL travel, and why interstellar propulsion & travel is important. Our guests then suggested the two most common approaches to FTL travel included warp drive and worm holes. For most of the program, we focused on the characteristics and research around warp drive. Our guests explained their research, including how they were able to develop the theories that reduced the amount of energy needed for warp drive from Jupiter size energy requirements to energy requirements representing the approximate mass of Voyager 1. Our discussion addressed the Miguel Alcubierre warp drive in light of the advanced work by Dr. White and others. The concept of the McMonigal Fatal Flaw was addressed with our guests explaining why it was not applicable. The workings of the warp drive were explained and though the discussion was heavy in physics, I urge you to take the time and embrace & learn about the advanced theoretical physics subjects discussed by our guests. Later, a listener asked about the use of a sun gravitational lens telescope at a specific AU from the sun as perhaps an alternative to interstellar flight. As you will hear, such a device would likely be a good tool enhancing FTL travel, not replacing it. As our discussion progressed, or guests rebutted many of the warp drive criticisms. Near the end of the program, we talked about what was needed to go from the lab and theory to small scale demo experiments to prove out the concepts. Our guests referenced to the Chicago Pile-1(CP-1) 1942 nuclear experiment & the subsequent step by step evolution of nuclear technology. Our guests talked about starting small with a demo proof and evolving upwards with more and more discovery, technology, and engineering. Another example cited for the typical development path included the discovery of the electron in 1897 followed by the discovery of the proton in 1917, and the discovery of the neutron in 1932. Throughout our discussion, our guests put forth compelling reasons why we should be developing FTL travel and interstellar spaceflight. Their respective concluding comments reinforced the importance and why of our being interested in FTL and exotic concepts.
Please post your comments/questions on The Space Show blog per above. If you want to email our guests, you can do so through me. | <urn:uuid:9f28b54c-b14a-4191-8df6-66ba1945fd75> | {
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New training programmes at Loyola Engineering College aim to enhance students’ professional skills.
T.S. Atul Swaminathan
With a majority of fresh engineering graduates lacking professional skills, Loyola-ICAM College of Engineering Technology (LICET), Nungambakkam, has introduced a couple of training programmes for making engineering graduates ready for the industry.
The programmes, ‘Training by System Discovery’ and ‘Training by System Analysis,’ is expected to help students prepare for their future projects.
Under the ‘Training by System Discovery’ programme, students work on commonly-used engineering systems such as an electric fan, a water pump, a starter motor, and a refrigerator.
“The first-year students have hands-on experience by dismantling the systems, understanding the function of each internal sub-components and studying the circuits. Later, they assemble the system and ensure it works properly,” Dr. Jose Swaminathan, Principal, LICET, said. An orientation programme, ‘Bridge Course,’ is also conducted for these students. It is a short-course lasting 30 days.
The module comprises of English, Applied Mathematics, Engineering Graphics and Fundamentals of Computing.
Students are taught the skills they need for their course of study.
The course is also conducted for the second-year students at Loyola and Anna University and its affiliated colleges, Mr. Swaminathan added.
At the end of the course, an introduction game-cum-talent show is conducted, where students are divided into three groups, each named after a manufacturing company.
The students are asked to design a product according to specifications given by a faculty member.
The best product is awarded. This helps students know their counterparts, interact with their faculty members, encourages team spirit, and kindle creativity.
Training by System Analysis programme is conducted for second-year students. Here they learn to dismantle the systems, understand the functions, importance and design requirement of each sub-components. Students prepare a two-dimensional engineering drawing of each sub-component and write about their role in the main system. This helps the students to learn the usage of various tools and manufacturing process involved in the fabrication of the systems, Dr. Swaminathan noted.
The college is planning to establish an International Standard Experiential Learning Lab with innovatively designed training gadgets for engineering education.
Each gadget will educate the students about the engineering concepts, design details of system and sub-systems, selection of equipment, methods of fabrication and working principles.
The lab will be established at a cost of Rs. 54.4 lakh. | <urn:uuid:04a0c4db-4708-4c60-b2df-f4efdd192dad> | {
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The mystery of how Father Christmas can deliver presents to 700 million children in one night, fit down the chimney and arrive without being seen or heard has been 'solved' by a physicist at the University of Exeter.
Santa and his reindeer zoom around the world at such speed that - according to relativity theory - they would shrink, enabling Father Christmas and a huge sack of presents to fit down chimneys.
Dr Katy Sheen, a physicist in the Geography department at the University of Exeter, has also found a scientific explanation for why Santa is not heard arriving by children, and why they rarely catch a glimpse of him on Christmas eve.
She will explain to children at the University of Exeter (Wednesday 14th December), that Santa's stealth delivery is partly explained by special relativity theory devised by Albert Einstein, whom Dr Sheen thinks bares a passing resemblance to Santa.
Relativity theory explains how Father Christmas can fit down the chimney. At the speeds he needs to travel to deliver presents to every child, Father Christmas shrinks - or gets thinner - in the direction he is travelling. And he has to be careful not to stop for a mince pie in a chimney, or he could grow back to full size!
Dr Sheen will tell children at the University of Exeter's Science of Christmas Festival on Wednesday 14th December that relativity also explains why Father Christmas appears not to have aged throughout the ages, because relativity can slow down clocks.
When Dr Sheen was seven years old she wrote a letter to Father Christmas asking why he never got any older (letter attached). She received a response in shaky handwriting telling her it was 'all magic'. But the budding physicist was not convinced and wanted a rational explanation - which 26 years later she has now found.
As evidence of how Father Christmas's enormously fast delivery round has kept the years off him, she will present a picture of St Nicholas from 1901 and a photo from this year to the children at her talk.
The physicist has calculated that Santa and his reindeer would have to travel at about 10 million kilometres per hour to deliver presents to every child expected to celebrate Christmas in 31 hours (taking into account world time zones).
If millions of children have been good, and deserve bigger stockings, he may need to travel even faster. Such speed would make him change from red to green and, at greater speeds, he would disappear! Children would not be able to recognise him as he would appear as a rainbow-coloured blur, eventually disappearing to the human eye.
Travelling at more than 200,000 times faster than Usain Bolt, the world's fastest man, the laws of physics explain why Father Christmas is rarely seen by children while delivering presents.
The Doppler effect would make Santa change colour because the light waves he releases would get squashed at such a high speed.
The Doppler effect also explains why children cannot hear Father Christmas arrive. As Santa and his sleigh approach, the sound of bells and his deep 'ho, ho, ho' would get higher and higher (like when an ambulance siren whizzes by) and then become completely silent, because he would move beyond human hearing range. Even the sound of Santa urging on Rudolph would become unrecognisable, and then inaudible to the human ear.
If children hear a bang on Christmas night, it may not be the sound of Santa dropping his presents, landing on their roof in his sleigh, or sliding down the chimney with a plop. Santa's reindeer could have broken the speed of sound, resulting in a 'sonic boom.'
Dr Sheen, a physicist working in the University of Exeter's Geography department, is not planning to present her research to a peer-reviewed journal (it's prepared with the festive spirit in mind), and has done the calculations in her own time to interest children in science and physics.
Sheen will demonstrate the impact of the Doppler effect - which would make Santa able to deliver his presents without detection - by letting the children listen to the sound of a speeding ambulance, even though it is much slower than Father Christmas and his sleigh.
The Doppler effect is responsible for making a siren, such as on an ambulance or a police car, increase in pitch as it comes towards you and lower pitched as it drives away. This is because the wave length changes when it moves towards and away from you.
Dr Sheen calculated how fast Father Christmas would have to travel by working out the number of households likely to be celebrating Christmas around the world, along with the number of children likely to be in them. She hopes her explanation for Santa's stealth delivery system - and therefore his very existence - will inspire children to take a greater interest in physics, and put a science kit on the list of presents they want in their stockings.
"Visiting around 700 million children in 31 hours would mean he would have to travel at 10 million kilometres an hour if he is to deliver presents to every child," Dr Sheen said. "How does Santa manage to reach these phenomenal speeds? Well that's magic! However, he would certainly need a lot of fuel - so don't forget his glass of sherry, a mince pie or two and some carrots for the reindeer!"
Explore further: Should parents lie to children about Santa? | <urn:uuid:36a70d0b-a542-428d-914c-423947e69805> | {
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When we are children probably the first lesson that many of us learn is that there are always consequences for our actions. It does not matter whether the consequences are good or bad, small or big, something is going to happen because of the decision that we made. And that is something that we have to live with. There is no getting around this fact. And nowhere does this lesson ring true than in the world of computer security.
When you are in the world of computer security you have to make decisions all of the time. And most of the time these decisions are going to affect someone else in the organization. Sometimes the effect will be positive and other times the effect will be negative. And when the effects are negative you are going to have someone mad at you.
Most of the time, these decisions come down to privacy versus security. In the world of computer security to have one you must be willing to give up the other. But you do not do it in extremes. You try your best to find a nice balance. This balance must ensure that everyone still has a nice, relatively healthy working environment while at the same time still being safe.
This means that you have to make decisions sometimes that will look like you are invading your co workers privacy. Or at the very least it will look like you are invading your co workers freedom. For example, a lot of security administrators have made the decision to shut down Facebook from the company network. They do not trust the traffic that comes in from it and also it waste a lot of workers time. So now your fellow workers are looking at you like you are a traitor. That is because you had to sacrifice a little bit of privacy and freedom to gain more security. It is a hard choice but probably the right one to make.
You will run across decisions like this all of the time. And you will have to take the time to make sure that you are in the right when you finally make the decisions. Not everyone is going to be happy but that is better than having an insecure network and losing your job. | <urn:uuid:8e5b6290-8f28-4ba2-ab0c-fa26b5b739b4> | {
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Relics are portions of the earthly remains of Orthodox believers, usually saints. Relics may also include clothing and vestments worn by saints, or items such as pieces of the True Cross. Particles of relics of saints usually are embedded in altar tables during consecration of churches.
St. Cyril of Jerusalem writes:
"Though the soul is not present a power resides in the bodies of the saints because of the righteous soul which has for so many years dwelt in it, or used it as its minister."
God also performs miracles through the holy relics of saints, in this way revealing his glory and glorifying his saints in whom he is pleased. One example is the relics of Saint Nektarios, which emitted a sweet-smelling sweat after he had passed away and showed no sign of decay until 20 years after his death.
- Why Relics?
- The Place of Holy Relics in the Orthodox Church (or here) by St. Justin Popovich
- On the Veneration of the Holy Relics and Remains of the Saints by Archpriest Vasily Demidov
- Gleanings from Orthodox Christian Authors and the Holy Fathers
Pictures of relics
- Holy Relics from Orthodox photos.com
- The relics of St. Innocent of Irkutsk, in the Znamensky Monastery Cathedral, Irkutsk, Siberia, Russia
- Holy Relics - A pamphlet by T. L. Frazier | <urn:uuid:ee4a958a-0be1-45f7-92d6-1cf06a20a057> | {
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Stanford’s “autonomous” helicopters teach themselves to fly via “apprenticeship learning”
So the researchers had Oku and other pilots fly entire airshow routines while every movement of the helicopter was recorded. As Oku repeated a maneuver several times, the trajectory of the helicopter inevitably varied slightly with each flight. But the learning algorithms created by Ng’s team were able to discern the ideal trajectory the pilot was seeking. Thus the autonomous helicopter learned to fly the routine better — and more consistently — than Oku himself.
During a flight, some of the necessary instrumentation is mounted on the helicopter, some on the ground. Together, they continuously monitor the position, direction, orientation, velocity, acceleration and spin of the helicopter in several dimensions. A ground-based computer crunches the data, makes quick calculations and beams new flight directions to the helicopter via radio 20 times per second.
The helicopter carries accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers, the latter of which use the Earth’s magnetic field to figure out which way the helicopter is pointed. The exact location of the craft is tracked either by a GPS receiver on the helicopter or by cameras on the ground. (With a larger helicopter, the entire navigation package could be airborne.) | <urn:uuid:4b8fab21-4e90-437d-9619-80a0137866e6> | {
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Cells' Molecular Motor Diversity Confounds Evolution
by Jeffrey P. Tomkins, Ph.D. *
Scientists believe that the study of genes that encode the proteins for molecular motors will help solve the mysteries of evolution. However, the result of a study published in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution has only served to support the predictions of special creation—that unique variants of cellular complexity and innovation exist at all levels of life.1
Molecular motors are important features of eukaryotic cells that are formed by a variety of protein types. One group of molecular motors is called the myosins, which have recently been studied in everything from one-celled eukaryotes to humans. The goal of this and many other studies has been the ever-elusive characterization of the mythical Last Eukaryotic Common Ancestor (LECA).2
The fictional LECA creature represents the final stage of a transition between a bacterial-archaeal prokaryote (the smallest and simplest organism) and a one-celled eukaryote (a cell with a nucleus and other organelles). The main problem with this idea is that, not only does no such creature exist, but eukaryotes also contain molecular similarities to both bacteria and archaea—prokaryotes that are found in completely separate domains of cellular life. Another major problem is that many complex molecular and cellular features unique among eukaryotes are not found in any prokaryotes. Because of this elaborate mosaic of cellular features, the development of any evolutionary story for the origin of eukaryotes has been fraught with much difficulty.
Researchers had hoped to find that matters would be clarified by myosin proteins derived from the DNA sequences of different single-celled eukaryotes, such as flagellated protozoa (protozoa with a whip-like tail), amoeboid protozoa, and algae.1 Instead of finding a pattern of evolving myosin "motor" genes (simple to complex) as life seemingly became more advanced, they found that the highest numbers of different types of myosin genes were found in single-celled eukaryotes. The authors stated, "The number of myosin genes varies markedly between lineages [types of eukaryotes]," and "holozoan genomes, as well as some amoebozoans and heterokonts, have the highest numbers of myosins of all eukaryotes. In particular, the haptophyte Emiliania huxleyi has the highest number of myosin genes (53), followed by the ichthyosporean Pirum gemmata (43), the filasterean M. vibrans (39), and the metazoan Homo sapiens (38)."1
The end result of all this labor was ultimately counterproductive to the formation of any sort of evolutionary tree. The researchers stated, "We do not aim to infer a eukaryotic tree of life from the myosin genomic content."1 This is because the data was not amenable to do so. Instead, they noted that "we provide an integrative and robust classification, useful for future genomic and functional studies on this crucial eukaryotic gene family."1
So, how did the authors explain the incredible complexity found across the spectrum of life in myosin gene content that had no clear evolutionary patterns? They explained it by 1) convergence (the sudden and simultaneous appearance of a gene with no evolutionary patterns in different taxa), 2) lineage-specific expansions (different myosin gene complements found in different creatures), and 3) gene losses (missing genes that evolutionists thought should have been there). None of these ideas actually explain why there is no evolutionary pattern of simple-to-complex in myosin gene content across the spectrum of life. Specifically, the ideas of convergent evolution and lineage-specific expansions are nothing more than fancy terms for the fact that these different types of myosin genes appeared suddenly in unrelated creatures at the same time.
Clearly, the only scientific model that predicts this type of molecular and cellular complexity and innovation across all forms of life is one associated with special creation. Each created kind is genetically unique and has its own special and complex gene repertoire needed for the niche that it fills.
- Sebé-Pedrós, A. et al. 2014. Evolution and classification of myosins, a paneukaryotic whole genome approach. Genome Biology and Evolution. 6 (2): 290-305.
- Koumandou, V. L. et al. 2013. Molecular paleontology and complexity in the last eukaryotic common ancestor. Critical Reviews in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. 48 (4): 373-396.
*Dr. Tomkins is Research Associate at the Institute for Creation Research and received his Ph.D. in genetics from Clemson University.
Article posted on April 7, 2014. | <urn:uuid:c87cec6f-6092-435e-9237-3ca268f6e697> | {
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October 13, 1970 – The unarmored threespine stickleback was listed as endangered under the precursor to the federal Endangered Species Act.
November 17, 1980 – The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed to designate critical habitat for the unarmored threespine stickleback.
December 26, 1985 – The Service published a recovery plan for the stickleback.
January 11, 2002 – The Center filed a lawsuit to protect habitat for the stickleback, since the Service had failed to finalize its more than 20-year-old proposal. Unfortunately, we lost the suit when the Service “finalized” the proposal by withdrawing it.
|Photo © Warwick Sloss/naturepl.com||HOME / DONATE NOW / SIGN UP FOR E-NETWORK / CONTACT US / PHOTO USE /| | <urn:uuid:99e9c4f0-840f-4ebf-a167-93bc2c38e5b8> | {
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The Spin Racket: Ping-Pong Champs Are Intuitive Masters of Fluid Dynamics
Article ID: 592405
Released: 8-Aug-2012 10:00 AM EDT
Source Newsroom: American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics
Newswise — Table tennis players wield their paddles with an intuitive command of the forces of nature. With Newton at their sides, skilled athletes can force a ball to dip, spin, and hop in a constantly shifting strategic game of deception, power, and accuracy.
Curve balls may help a pitcher strike out batters in baseball; and some nasty spin can make an opponent sweat to return a tennis serve. But more so than in any other ball game, in table tennis – where the ball is so light and so small –dedicated players must master the physics of spin.
“While [the spin] strategy is also employed in baseball, tennis, cricket, and sometimes soccer, it absolutely dominates the game of ping-pong,” says David R. Dowling, professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “A straight-up fire-throwin’ fast ball pitcher may be successful in baseball. However, the equivalent table tennis player, who does not use spin to make the ball’s trajectory curve, may easily be defeated by a table tennis player who does use spin.”
The reason spin is such a dominating force in ping pong can be seen when you consider that the ball is actually traveling through a fluid, in this case air. In physics terms, when a ball travels without spin, the air moves over the top, bottom, and sides at the same speed and the pressure forces are balanced. However, when a ping pong ball spins as it travels through the air, these pressure forces become imbalanced, causing the ball to veer off to the side or move higher or lower as it flies. Ping-pong players use these imbalanced forces to control a ball’s path.
For example, imagine a ping-pong ball somersaulting through the air with top spin. In this case, the top of the ball is moving “into” the wind and the bottom is moving “with” the wind, so the wind’s speed is relatively greater on top of the ball than under it. The faster and slower wind speeds translate to higher and lower fluid pressure on the ball. This pressure difference causes a spinning ball to curve toward the side with lower pressure. In the case of a ball with top spin, that means downward.
The phenomenon, which fluid dynamicists call the Magnus effect, can send a ping-pong ball curving up, down, left, or right – always at a right angle to the direction of motion – depending on which way the ball is spun.
Fluid dynamics’ importance for the sport becomes clearer at high altitudes, where there are fewer air particles for a ball to collide with. Here, the thinner atmosphere reduces an object’s air resistance and weakens the Magnus effect, causing a ball with top spin to travel farther than it would at sea level, says environmental fluid mechanics expert Jorge Escobar, an assistant professor at Javeriana University in Bogotá, Colombia, and a competing table tennis player for 15 years. In his city, 9,000 feet (2,745 meters) above sea level, even experienced players might find their returns flying far beyond the edge of the table, Escobar says.
Play depends on more than the density of air; the shape and weight of the ball, as well as the distance it has to travel, also affect how much control a player can exert. A larger or heavier ball could travel the relatively short field of play of a ping-pong table without much spin-induced trickery.
But the smaller and lighter table tennis ball is at the mercy of the Magnus effect – and inexperienced players are at the mercy of opponents who can skillfully exploit it.
Of course, players don’t have to understand the physics behind these effects to take advantage of them in a game. But “if you know a little bit [of] the science behind it, you have a better sense about what you’re doing,” says Hassan Masoud, mechanical engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and a table tennis player himself.
To win at ping-pong, explains Dowling, players have to do something that their opponents are not expecting. Sometimes it’s a question of just keeping the ball on the table. Sometimes it’s an offensive or defensive move designed to confuse an opponent. Players can “chop,” for example, imparting spin to the ball by swinging their rackets so that the ball almost rolls along the surface of the rubber. Or they can “block,” stopping a spinning ball and sending it back at the offensive hitter with whatever spin they used themselves. Aggressive players will impose “crazy, crazy spins” on a ball, Escobar says; they might even try to fool their opponents by faking a hand or wrist movement to hide the type of spin they have imparted.
For Olympics spectators interested in watching the fluid dynamics of ping-pong in action, a birds-eye view can reveal the side-to-side curving of a well-spun serve. Dowling also recommends keeping your eyes on the receiver rather than the hitter. In a game that moves so quickly, players must pay attention to how their opponents are hitting the ball and what type of spin they use.
“The player who’s about to hit it has already decided what they’re going to do,” Dowling says. “The receiving player has to be in position and ready, or they’re going to be aced.”
Dowling and Masoud are both members of the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics. | <urn:uuid:865667ac-a295-458e-b559-fc5040b4140d> | {
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Essay by Timothy N. Osment
“From Asheville to the Tennessee line, the Southern Railway follow the tortuous windings of the French Broad River, crossing it from bank to bank several times.” ~From “With Pen and Camera thro’ the Land of the Sky, 1904.”
Early in the 19th century railroads were being built throughout the expanding United States. Western North Carolina was growing as well. Asheville, a crossroads for agriculture, was also emerging as a magnet for tourists seeking the healing climate, loggers looking to harvest timber, and miners interested in the large deposits of minerals.
Easy access was a necessity for all of these groups, and railroad expansion offered the solution. Financial backing and the rugged terrain were immediate challenges. But the Civil War, which devastated families, businesses, communities, and commercial growth, blocked railroads for over a decade.Until the 1870s, railway routes to western North Carolina ended at the steep mountainside at Old Fort. There goods and passengers were required to transfer to stage coaches. Finally, in March 1879, after several years of difficult construction and great expense, the railroad finally entered Buncombe County through the Swannanoa Tunnel. Less than twenty years after the end of the Civil War, the Eastern Continental Divide was conquered. On October 3, 1880, the Western North Carolina Railroad made its first scheduled arrival at Biltmore. Trains brought money, power, and a taste of affluence to Western North Carolina.
The Murphy branch of the WNC RR made it to Pigeon River (present-day Canton) in January 1882 and Waynesville later the same year. Now Balsam Mountain challenged the railroad’s trek west. Abandoning plans to tunnel through the mountain, engineers laid the tracks along a dangerous and difficult grade up and over Balsam. At 3100 feet, Balsam Gap became the highest railroad pass east of the Rockies. From there the WNC RR dropped into Dillsboro and proceeded to Bryson City and Andrews, finally reaching Murphy in 1891. Murphy celebrated by laying the cornerstone of its new courthouse on the same day the railroad made its first scheduled stop in the town.
One of the saddest episodes in constructing the WNC RR occurred when workers were constructing the 863-foot Cowee Tunnel, just west of Dillsboro. At the time, prison chain-gangs were being exploited as a cheap source of labor. One morning, crossing the Tuckasegee River to the tunnel, a boat carrying iron-shackled convicts capsized. Bound in death as in life, 19 inmates drowned. With sad irony, they were buried in unmarked graves on a hill overlooking the tunnel.
The WNC RR experienced its heyday in the 1940s during construction of the Fontana Dam. At the time, the temporary “Fontana Village” was the largest city west of Asheville. The increased popularity of automobile and bus travel took its toll on the railroad. Passenger service was discontinued in 1948. Freight traffic declined as resources like lumber, copper, and iron were depleted. In 1988 the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad was created in Dillsboro. The industrial focus of the rails now shifted to tourism and preservation. As a living museum steeped in history, the GSMR carries nearly 200,000 passengers annually. Today, modern day rail travelers follow the same breathtaking route once used by dignitaries, families, laborers, logs, and minerals. “Eat Taters and Wear No Clothes!” That was the nickname locals gave the East Tennessee & Western North Carolina Railroad. Another early railroad in Southern Appalachia, it ran from Johnson City, Tennessee, to Boone, North Carolina, from the late 1800s until 1950. For several rural mountain communities it was one of the few sources of contact with the outside world during the Great Depression. Respected and loved for their neighborly ways, employees of the ET & WNC were known to pick up items “in town” for those unable to make the trip–and even sometimes let locals jump on and ride for free. When questioned about their generosity they replied, “Well, we were going that way anyhow!” Before the railway was completed it was often commented that the only way to get to Boone was to be born there. The shrill whistle of the ET & WNC echoing through the mountains was a comfort to local residents and provided an additional nickname, The Tweetsie.
This essay was produced primarily from information gathered from The Great Smoky Mountains Railroad, the Archives of Appalachia at East Tennessee State University, The History of Western North Carolina by John Arthur and Jeffrey Weaver, and johnsonsdepot.com.
For more information please see:
- The Western North Carolina Railroad, 1855-1894 by William Abrams, Jr., 1976.
- Tweetsie Country: the East Tennessee and Western North Carolina Railroad by Mallory Ferrell, 1991.
- Trains, Trestles, and Tunnels: Railroads of the Southern Appalachians by Lou Harshaw, 1977.
- A History of Railroading in Western North Carolina by C. Franklin Poole, 1995.
- Reminiscences of an Old-Timer by Ross Smith, 1930.
- Railroad Crossings of the Blue Ridge: 1879-1909 by Neal Westveer, 1990. | <urn:uuid:6e4ae0c5-4dbf-4c52-99fc-258a277f7a20> | {
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Researchers Exploring How Microwaves May Be Used To Treat Malaria
The New York Times describes a research proposal to investigate the use of low-level microwaves to treat malaria that has received a $1 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
“The idea … is based on the fact that malaria parasites invade red blood cells and eat the hemoglobin inside them. Hemoglobin contains iron – and, as any bozo who’s ever tried to heat up a sandwich wrapped in tinfoil knows, it’s a bad idea to microwave metal. Of course, the red cells containing parasites are floating along in arteries right next to healthy red cells,” but the microwaves cannot damage the healthy cells because they do not contain the iron-carrying parasites, the newspaper writes (McNeil, 8/22). | <urn:uuid:d7e19324-7f32-4b0f-a0ac-21a35dad6e41> | {
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WASHINGTON (AP) — In noisy, energetic New York City, the pilots of a spindly plane that looks more toy than jet hope to grab attention in a surprising way: By being silent and consuming little energy.
This revolutionary solar-powered plane is about to end a slow and symbolic journey across America by quietly buzzing the Statue of Liberty and landing in a city whose buildings often obscure the power-giving sun. The plane’s top speed of 45 mph is so pokey, it would earn honks on the New Jersey Turnpike.
The plane is called Solar Impulse. And it leaves from Washington on a commuter-like hop planned for Saturday, depending on the weather. It will take hours for the journey and offers none of the most basic comforts of flying.
But that’s OK. The aircraft’s creators say its purpose really has little to do with flying.
They view themselves as green pioneers — promoting lighter materials, solar-powered batteries, and conservation as sexy and adventurous. Theirs is the high-flying equivalent of the Tesla electric sports car. They want people to feel a thrill while saving the planet. Think Charles Lindbergh meets Rachel Carson.
And if there’s one person who knows about adventure and what it means to Earth, it’s Bertrand Piccard.
He’s one of the two pilots who take turns flying Solar Impulse. His grandfather was the first man to see the curve of the Earth as a pioneering high-altitude balloon flier more than 80 years ago. His father more than half a century ago first took a submarine to the deepest and most inaccessible ocean trench on Earth.
And now in the 21st Century outside the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum annex not too far from a retired space shuttle, Piccard says there’s no truly new place on Earth for explorers to pioneer. At 55, he’s tried.
He already was the first person to fly around the world non-stop in a balloon, but that wasn’t really enough. So Piccard found a way to explore by looking inward and acting globally.
“It’s an exploration of new ways of thinking,” said Piccard, who is also a psychiatrist. “It’s important to understand that pioneering is not only what you do. It’s how you think. It’s a state of mind more than action.”
For him, there was no better cause than clean technology.
“After a conquest of the planet, the 21st Century should be about improving the quality of life,” Piccard said. And the lightweight beanpole that’s called Solar Impulse “is something spectacular in order to capture the attention of the people. If you make a solar bicycle to drive, nobody would care. If you make a solar plane, everybody cares. Everybody wants to see it.”’
Europe saw it first with a test flight from Switzerland and Spain to Morocco last year. This year’s U.S. flight is another trial run that’s really preparation for a 2015 around-the-world trip with an upgraded version of the plane. Solar Impulse has been to San Francisco, Phoenix, Dallas, St. Louis, Cincinnati and Washington. All that’s left is New York’s JFK Airport and Piccard talked about having to wait his turn to land with all the big jets.
“We’re flying the most extraordinary airplane in the world,” Piccard said.
Although it’s promoted as solar-powered, what really pushes the envelope with this plane is its miserly energy efficiency, said Solar Impulse CEO Andre Borschberg, the plane’s other pilot.
Parts of its wings are three times lighter than paper. Its one-person cockpit is beyond tiny. Borschberg lowers himself gingerly into it for a television camera, grimaces, and practically wears the plane it is so snug on him.
Most of the 11,000 solar cells are on the super-long wings that seem to stretch as far as a jumbo jet’s. It weighs about the size of a small car, and soars at 30,000 feet with what is essentially the power of a small motorized scooter. When it landed at Dulles International Airport in suburban Washington after midnight on June 15, its wings were lit with 16 LED lights that used less power than two 100-watt bulbs.
“We can use much less energy than we use today without the sacrifice,” Borschberg said. “And that’s really important.”
People won’t sacrifice to save energy or the planet, but if they are smart they don’t have to, Borschberg said. That’s why he and Piccard pointedly talk about “clean technologies” not “green technologies.” They think “green” has the image of sacrifice.
The only sacrifice with the plane is staying up in the air alone for 20 hours in such a small space.
And even then, the two pilots don’t call it a sacrifice. Borschberg said after a while it feels homey and enveloping and it’s hard to get out of the cocoon. Sitting for eight hours in an economy class seat on a commercial airplane is cramped; doing what you love by sitting three times longer in this plane isn’t, Piccard added.
The flights are long because here’s another thing about Solar Impulse: It’s slow. Its cruising speed of just under 45 mph would get them honked at on an highway.
So that has meant a lot of 4 a.m. take-offs in the dark and landings well after midnight. But Borschberg, who will pilot the last leg from Washington to New York, is hoping for a daylight approach to New York City so he can get a photo opportunity with the Statue of Liberty.
Borschberg and Piccard both say this is not about clean-energy planes for the future. What they’re doing is more likely to improve energy efficiency on the ground, in cars and homes, agrees U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz who met with the pair to talk up future energy a couple days after they landed at Dulles.
Still, questions of practicality come up.
“It’s clearly a stunt,” said John Reilly, co-director of MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. “And it’s clearly an attention-grabbing stunt. The idea that you could fly an airplane powered by the sun is kind of hard to believe. So doing it is an impressive stunt, I suppose.”
But these types of gimmicks do pay off at times, Reilly said.
It will pay off more than promoting solar and other renewable energy technologies as economic stimulus, which is what happened four years ago, said University of Colorado science policy professor Roger Pielke Jr. He compared it to giant prizes that encourage private companies to go into space or build robot-driven cars, which are proving successful.
“I don’t think it’s just a stunt,” Pielke said. “The idea is that you’re pushing boundaries and you’re putting on shows for people and achieving milestones.”
This, Pielke said, is “an essential part of technological innovation. It gives people an opportunity to attempt what previously was thought of as impossible.” | <urn:uuid:45052ea9-9c9d-48fc-8766-9a2456fc562f> | {
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A working honeybee, Apis mellifera, visiting a flower and collecting pollen.
Bees are insects. The species in the Museum's beehive is called Apis mellifera. The honeybee lives in groups called colonies. They first evolved about 35 million years ago in tropical Africa and because honey is so popular, bees now live all over the world.
No. There are different bees for different jobs. Every colony has one queen, which is the largest bee. The workers are female bees and are the smallest in size but the largest in number. There are also male drones and the brood is made up of eggs, larvae, and pupae.
The hive is the colony's home or nest. The outside is often a man-made box like this one, and the inside is made from wax, which the bees produce themselves. The queen and most of the bees live in the bottom of the hive in the brood chamber. The top contains the honey.
Beehives in a field.
A honeybee will rarely sting away from the hive, except when stepped on or roughly handled. If a bee is buzzing around you, she may smell perfume, soap, or hair spray and think the smell is nectar or food. She will check you out to see if she can find the nectar, but if you stand very still, she will realize there is no nectar and go away.
Like other insects, honeybees communicate using many different chemicals and odours. Honeybees can direct other bees to food by dancing. The movements tell them the location and direction of the food.
As the number of bees in the hive increases, some of the bees leave to set up a new colony in a new location. They form a big group known as a swarm. The queen leaves the colony and about half of the worker bees and drones follow her in search of a new home. She is usually replaced with a new queen after a couple of weeks. Another new queen is left behind with the other half to continue the old colony.
A close up of a honeycomb.
Each type of bee has a different job in the colony. Worker bees do different things depending on how old they are. If a worker (sterile female) is born in the spring, she probably only lives 4 or 5 weeks. If she’s born in the autumn when there’s less work to do, she may survive the winter.
The queen lays each egg in one cell of the honeycomb. Each egg hatches and a little worm-like larva crawls out. The worker bees feed pollen and honey to the baby larva. Soon, it spins a web blanket inside the cell and becomes a pupa. After 16 to 24 days, a fully grown bee climbs out of the cell. They live between 3 to 6 months depending on the time of year and food available. | <urn:uuid:ec9dbbd3-61cc-453a-a3a5-e7ebba094282> | {
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Dear brothers here on the podium, dear sisters and brothers in Christ,
thank you so much for letting me contribute to our topic as a voice from Protestantism. I will briefly present a few examples that make it clear what the historical power of prayer is.
Looking into the Protestant world, the foremost place is definitely that of Martin Luther, who was a great man of prayer.
Martin Luther, a man of prayer
For 20 years, he lived as an Augustine hermit, practicing the tradition of monastic Liturgy of the Hours, and also after the occidental Church broke apart, he remained a great man of prayer and meditation. "Today I have got a lot of things to do, so I need to pray a lot today", he once said, and he prayed three to four hours a day. For him, praying is the Christian's craft. "The way in which a shoemaker makes a shoe and a tailor makes a skirt is also the way in which a Christian should pray. A Christian's craft is to pray." Every word of the Bible, he said, can be wrought into a fourfold crown: teaching, thank, confession, request
For spreading the reformation, Luther relied on the power of the word and the power of prayer. He rejected the use of violence for purposes of faith, as it was preached by parts of the left wing of Reformation.
He considered prayer capable of all that is good, and prayer for peace was especially important for him. Thus, he translated the old Latin prayer for peace "Da pacem, Domine, in diebus notris" into German when the Turks were besieging Vienna. This sung prayer
Mercifully grant us peace, Lord God, in our times
For there is none other who could struggle for us
than you alone, our God.
has remained one of the most frequently sung prayers for peace among Protestants until today. It is no longer, and has not been for quite some time, a prayer for help against the Turks. Instead, in the 1980s, it became one of the most important prayers of the Peace Movement.
Noon prayers for peace
Even today, many Protestants say a prayer for peace every noon at twelve, when the bell calls for prayer. When the leadership of our Church, the Regional Church Council, convenes in Munich, we always interrupt the session at noon for prayer. This always reminds us that it is not it the hands of us humans to make peace on earth by ourselves, as our human ways of making peace always require God's assistance. "For there is none other that could struggle for us than you alone, o God."
The prayer for reconciliation in Coventry cathedral
The Cross of Nails Community and the prayer for reconciliation in Coventry Cathedral have been and still are a great source of reconciliation. On November 14th, 1940, the English city of Coventry was attacked by German bombers. 550 people died and numerous buildings were destroyed, among which also St. Michael's Cathedral.
During the works to clean up the rubble of the church, the then provost Richard Howard took three large carpenter nails from the roof truss that had been retrieved from the rubble and had them formed into a cross. Furthermore, he had the words "Father Forgive" written on the wall of the chancel and he had a cross made from two charred beams. Today, the original Cross of Nails stands on the altar of the newly built cathedral and is seen as a sign of reconciliation and peace.
Bill Williams, who was provost from 1958 to 1981 developed the idea of a community of Cross of Nails centers, and thus Cross of Nails Communities have formed worldwide as ecumenical communities of faith. Today, 53 parishes from 37 cities belong to it, worldwide, there are now over 160 of them. In 1960, the Coventry prayer for reconciliation was formulated and since then, it has been prayed every Friday noon in the chancel of the ruin of the old Coventry cathedral and in all churches that were destroyed in World War II, then rebuilt and are now part of the Cross of Nails Community. This prayer has made an essential contribution to the reconciliation of former enemies, who now jointly commit themselves for peace.
Prayer in Taizé
The Community of Taizé also has its origins in World War II. Its founder and prior, Roger Schutz, started out by helping persecuted Jews survive in this small village in Burgundy. Then brothers from different denominations congregated around him and they began living a monastic life in the old tradition of the religious orders. In different socially and economically deprived areas of the world, brothers live together with the locals and commit themselves for them. Many things have changed for the better. The source of this transforming power is faithful and constant prayer. Taizé shines a light into the Church but also into the dark places of the world. Similar things can be said about the work of traditional orders but also of more recent Protestant communities such as the Christ Bearers in Triefenstein, who pray, for instance, in Congo and in Kabul/Afghanistan and are there for the people as doctors and instructors.
Peace Prayers in the German Democratic Republic (GDR)
In a downright miraculous way, prayer for peace showed its historical power in the peaceful revolution of 1989 in the GDR. This is how things worked out:
From 1981 onwards, peace prayers were held in the trade fair city of Leipzig, since 1982 they took place every Monday. In addition, there were other events organized by the Peace Movement and in various churches. These peace prayers had a strong political and also regime-critical focus. More and more people took part in them, people who would no longer put up with life in the GDR and wanted to emigrate. With the general public becoming aware of this development, there was an increasing pressure from the State on the Church leadership to do something against this kind of peace prayer. But the pastors and groups that held these peace prayers could get their way against the Church leadership. After the results of the July 1989 municipal elections had been rigged, the Leipzig peace prayer become increasingly popular and many people flocked to them. The Monday prayers and demonstrations carried the protest into the streets and into society and made it visible. The state intervened, arresting many participants who demonstrated in the streets after the peace prayer. But resistance increased, with prayer giving people the inner force to remain non-violent. Those protesting after prayer now no longer called out "We want out!" but "We'll stay here!". Strengthened by prayer, people took their Christian responsibility for their land seriously.
One year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a former member of the Socialist Unity Party's leadership, Horst Sindermann, admitted: "We had planned everything and we were prepared for anything, except for candles and prayers." That was how it happened. Prayer brought down what had been secured with separation fences, barbed wires and automatic shooting mechanisms. Those who prayed were well aware that an outside intervention was needed and that they would not be able to pave the way into freedom by themselves. They were the pioneers of the peaceful revolution.
Of course, decisive contributions to these developments were made by Gorbachev's perestroika and John Paul the Second's courageous words and deeds. But it is essentially due to the Monday prayers that there was a peaceful revolution in the GDR and an end of the dictatorship without bloodshed.
Peace Prayers of World Religions
The power for reconciliation and understanding that has sprung from the Peace Prayers of World Religions initiated by Pope John Paul the Second has been (will be) presented by more competent speakers on this podium.
International Day of Peace Prayer
It is not only within the Churches that peace prayers have grown. They were also fostered in the domain of politics. Thus, during a United Nations General Assembly in 1981, it was decided to introduce an "International Day for Peace". In 2001, its date was fixed on September 21st. The then Secretary General Kofi Annan asked to increase the number of activities on this day. This is how the International Day of Prayer for peace was created in 2001, whose first participants, in an ecumenical framework, were the great Churches. On this occasion, the Decade for Overcoming Violence was also founded.
Let me conclude my contribution with the Coventry Prayer for Reconciliation.
All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
Therefore let us pray:
The hatred which divides nation from nation, race from race, class from class,
The covetous desires of men and nations to possess what is not their own,
The greed which exploits the labors of men, and lays waste the earth,
Our envy of the welfare and happiness of others,
Our indifference to the plight of the homeless and the refugee,
The lust which uses for ignoble ends the bodies of men and women,
The pride which leads us to trust in ourselves, and not in God,
Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you. Amen | <urn:uuid:942a4558-2279-4c0b-b92e-a04297d1e270> | {
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CELEBRATE EARTH WEEK
Save 70% on video training and simulators now through April 27*—use code EARTH. Shop now.
Sams Teach Yourself Visual Basic.NET in 21 Days provides readers with 21 structured lessons with step-by-step guidance to real-world tasks. Each chapter also contains exercises that reinforce the lessons learned in each chapter. Tips, Notes, and Cautions provide additional advice from the authors on how to get up-to-speed and programming quickly with Visual Basic.NET.
(NOTE: Each chapter concludes with a Summary, Questions & Answers, and a Workshop Section.)
Week 1 — At a Glance.
Understanding Computer Programming. Why Write Computer Programs? A Brief History of Visual Basic. What Is .NET? Building Your First Visual Basic .NET Application.Day 2. Working with Visual Basic .NET.
The Visual Studio IDE. Creating Our First Windows Application.Day 3. Introduction to Programming with Visual Basic .NET.
Variables and Assignment. Some Suggested Naming Standards. Simple Calculations. Writing Your Own Routines. Sample Application: Calculating a Future Value.Day 4. Controlling Flow in Programs.
Making Choices with Control Statements. Boolean Expressions and Boolean Logic. Dealing with Multiple Possibilities: The Select Case Statement. Looping. Applications of Your New Found Knowledge. Avoiding Complex Loops Through Recursion.Day 5. Application Architecture in .NET.
What Is Application Architecture? Possible Architectures in .NET. Deciding Which Architecture to Use.Day 6. What to Do When Good Programs Go Bad, and Making Sure They Don't.
Structured Exception Handling. Debugging.Day 7. Working with Objects.
Getting Started: What Is an Object? Turning Concept into Code. Advanced Topics.Week 1 — In Review.
What Is the .NET Framework? Important Classes in the .NET Framework. Finding What You Need in the .NET Framework.Day 9. Building a User Interface with Windows Forms
An Overview of Windows Forms. Creating a Windows Forms Application. More About Controls. Input Validation. Using the MessageBox Class. Nonvisible Controls. Building Your Own Dialog Boxes.Day 10. Building the User Interface with Web Forms.
The Web Programming Model. Using Standard Web Forms Controls. Using Advanced Web Forms Controls. Using the Validator Controls.Day 11. Introduction to Databases.
A Database Is the Solution to All of Life's Problems. An Introduction to SQL. Common Database Problems and Solutions. Creating the Sample Database. Testing the Setup with System.Data.Day 12. Accessing Data with .NET.
An Overview of Data Access in .NET. Standard Database Tasks. Working with Data Sets. Data Binding.Day 13. Using the Server Explorer.
What Is the Server Explorer? Exploring Services. Working with Services. Writing Programs that Use Services.Day 14. Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming.
Overview of Object-Oriented Programming. Important Concepts in OOP. Designing an Application Using OOP.Week 2 — In Review.
Creating Objects. Using the Objects You Create.Day 16. Advanced Windows Forms.
Menus. Multiple Document Interface Programs. Advanced Windows Forms Controls.Day 17. Using the .NET Framework.
Streams and Files. Drawing with the Graphics Classes.Day 18. Finishing Touches.
Documenting Your Application. Best Practices and Coding Standards. Using Source Code Control.Day 19. Deploying Your Application.
Introduction to Deployment. Multiproject Deployments.Day 20. Introduction to XML.
What Is XML? Working with XML.Day 21. Creating Web Services with Visual Basic .NET
What Is a Web Service? The Simple Object Access Protocol. Creating a Simple Web Service. Creating a Web Service Client. A More Involved Web Service.Week 3 — In Review.
Answers for Day 1. Answers for Day 2. Answers for Day 3. Answers for Day 4. Answers for Day 5. Answers for Day 6. Answers for Day 7. Answers for Day 8. Answers for Day 9. Answers for Day 10. Answers for Day 11. Answers for Day 12. Answers for Day 13. Answers for Day 14. Answers for Day 15. Answers for Day 16. Answers for Day 17. Answers for Day 18. Answers for Day 19. Answers for Day 20. Answers for Day 21.Index. | <urn:uuid:5a61dff8-8198-4c42-9f1c-6acfcf10461c> | {
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In Brazil, a novel recycling project cleanly disposes of old refrigerators that harm the climate.
Project goal: Climate-friendly disposal of old refrigerators
Project scale: The new recycling plant can dispose of 400,000 old appliances per year, recovering harmful chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs from the cooling systems and those contained in the foam insulation
Project investment: Over 5 million euros ($6.70 million), of which 3,5 million was earmarked for the recycling plant
Televisions and refrigerators are an integral part of every Brazilian household, and families who can't afford new ones buy them second-hand. The result is that one in ten refrigerators in Brazil is more than 16 years old, and therefore a long way from being green: the old appliances contain gases called CFCs. Their disposal releases high levels of these environmentally harmful gases into the atmosphere. At a state-of-the-art recycling plant run by the International Climate Initiative in Brazil, the old refrigerators can now be cleanly disposed off in a process that captures many millions of tonnes of carbon.
A film by Vanessa Fischer | <urn:uuid:30fa2a31-aea9-4a34-a125-f56ff09125c3> | {
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The CCA movement is vibrant is Mexico, growing in Guatemala but merely nascent in Belize. Indigenous and some mestizo communities have historically managed their territory in a way that ensures the protection and sustainability of their resources.
A long-standing common practice is to maintain a part of their territory in a forested area with minimal human impact.
Indigenous autonomy movements are a strong trend in Mesoamerica, particularly in Chiapas and Oaxaca. In these cases, CCAs are embedded in a wider struggle for liberty, democracy, justice, land tenure, control of natural resources use, production, knowledge, technology, education and culture. | <urn:uuid:6a11c901-1b4c-4877-a096-47fdb723b57c> | {
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King Henry VIII - Mind of a Tyrant
King Henry VIII - Mind of a Tyrant Previous Broadcasts
KQED 9: Fri, Feb 8, 2013 -- 9:00 PM
At first it was lust, then love on the king's part, "his so great folly" recorded in the seventeen letters he wrote to her in 1527 and 1528. But when Anne refused to become his mistress ("I had rather lose my life than my honesty" - in the end she lost both) Henry conceived the idea of marrying her. That required a Papal annulment of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon. This ought not to have posed a problem for a king, but David Starkey's research in the Vatican Archives has revealed the real story of Henry's futile six-year struggle to get what he wanted from Clement VII. During this time, and prompted by Anne, Henry began to re-think the nature of the English monarchy. He came to believe that he had spiritual as well as temporal powers: that the King, not the Pope, should rule the Church in England.
- KQED 9: Sun, Feb 10, 2013 -- 2:00 PM
- KQED 9: Sat, Feb 9, 2013 -- 3:00 AM | <urn:uuid:13e587be-9229-429c-a2d9-14c223c09133> | {
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The town of Redlands, California, was platted by the Redlands Water Company in 1887 and incorporated in the following year. In the early 1890s, Redlands was considered just another thriving orange-growing city. By the 1920s, however, it was known as the most charming and lovely city in San Bernardino County, due largely to the many fine estates built by Eastern capitalists. Redlands was a desirable destination for many affluent families seeking an escape from the winter doldrums of the Midwest and the East Coast. Indeed, Redlands became a winter haven, much like Palm Springs would become in later years.
Redlands benefited from two significant events. First was the arrival in the community of two brothers, Alfred and Albert Smiley, in 1889; second was the founding of Redlands University in 1907. The Smiley brothers purchased 200 acres on the southern ridge overlooking the town. There they built their homes and proceeded to develop the land into a semi-tropical Eden. Eventually, they expanded their real estate to 400 acres and planted more than a thousand different kinds of trees and shrubs. Their property became known as Cañon Crest Park and was a destination for lovers of all things botanical. Wealthy families who wished to settle in Redlands followed the Smiley brothers’ lead and built large estates along the hills south of Highland Avenue. Their beautiful homes and grand gardens overlooked the San Bernardino valley.
To the east of Cañon Crest Park, a New York leather wholesaler, TY England, purchased a thirty-nine-acre parcel of land. He developed his property into part orange grove and part botanical park. Though privately owned and privately developed, it was open to the public. England named his property Prospect Park. Adjacent to, and to the west of, Prospect Park was the property of Cornelia Ann Hill, a widow from New York. In 1896, she purchased 3.5 acres in the Belleview tract for $3,000. She hired the Los Angeles architectural firm of Dennis and Farwell to design her dream home, inspired by the castles she had visited in the Loire Valley in France.
It is somewhat of a mystery why the widow Hill decided Redlands was to be her new home. California was far removed from the climate of New York. One assumption is that she met the Smiley brothers, also from New York, at their resort, Mohonk Mountain House, which was only a short train ride from her home in Middleton.
Having “discovered” Redlands, the Smileys encouraged folks to either visit or invest there. Mrs Hill had lost her husband and six daughters to tuberculosis within a ten-year period. Perhaps the grief she experienced and the persuasion of the Smiley brothers led her to Redlands to build her own “castle” on the hill.
Cornelia Hill’s castle became an elegant grove home, with an expansive front terrace planted primarily in citrus and stone fruits. A formal garden filled the area behind the house. The plantings were selected for her by the renowned horticulturist Franz Hosp, who had also helped the Smileys and England choose trees and shrubs for their projects. Hosp was responsible for many properties in Southern California, including: Ganesh Park, Pomona; Victoria Avenue, Riverside; and Hosp Grove, Carlsbad. He is also known for developing the ‘Climbing Cécile Brünner’ rose, a classic and much loved rose worldwide.
Alas, Mrs Hill became disenchanted with her lovely castle. This is another mystery. One theory is that the “Victorian-French” style of the house did not fit with her passion for collecting Native American artifacts. For whatever reason, Mrs Hill decided to put the mansion up for sale and build a new home closer to downtown Redlands.
Alfred and Helen Kimberly, of Kimberly-Clark Corporation, based in Neenah, Wisconsin, had been wintering in Redlands for a few years. They were familiar with Mrs Hill’s spectacular home in the hills. When they heard it was to become available, they immediately purchased it as a retirement home. The purchase was made and contracts signed in 1905, and the wealthy couple moved to their “new” home. Some architectural remodeling was done to suit their tastes, and they christened their new home and property “Kimberly Crest.”
In 1908, Helen Kimberly, a keen gardener, decided to design and build a formal garden to enhance the front “yard” of the mansion, where the only semblance of a formal garden had been the beautiful Venus fountain that Mrs Hill had installed when the house was built.
The Venus Fountain
The Venus fountain had been purchased from the JL Mott Company catalog. They specialized in iron and “pot metal” ornamental garden pieces. We do not know who the original sculptor of the fountain was, but we know it was entered into many world expositions, including the Columbian Exposition in Chicago and the Pan-American Exposition in Mexico City at the turn of the century. It was entered in many European expositions as well.
The statue is representative of Greek mythology. Astride two dolphins are cherub-like Tritons—“Trumpeters of the Sea”—both sons of Poseidon and Amphitrite. A sea nymph—“Venus”—stands atop the Tritons, cradled in a clamshell. The fountain’s title is “Venus Rising from the Sea.” The similarity to Botticelli’s painting, “Birth of Venus” is plainly evident.
Apparently, the Kimberlys were never enamored of the Venus fountain but decided to let it remain and design a proper landscape around it.
A Proper Landscape
- The Kimberlys needed a professional landscape architect to design their landscape. Helen wanted a garden reminiscent of those she had seen around hillside villas in Italy. They decided to ask their son-in-law, George Bergstrom, to implement their desires. Bergstrom was a prominent architect, but had never designed a landscape or garden before. He had designed many large commercial buildings throughout California and in the Midwest, but landscape design was not his discipline.
We can imagine the family discussions that ensued, with Bergstrom kindly resisting at first; ultimately, at the urging of his wife Nancy and his mother-in-law Helen, he agreed to tackle the project. His design is a wonderful example of an Italian hillside villa garden, with all the elements present: a large flat terrace enclosed by concrete pillars, topped by urns or finials; concrete balustrade and exedra; pools and ponds lush with plants, koi, and goldfish; pergolas; and long sets of steps used as a central sightline through the garden. Again, Franz Hosp was enlisted to help plant the new garden, which had now expanded to 6.2 acres, two of which were planted in citrus.
Hosp chose many exotic trees and shrubs for the Kimberly’s new garden. As he had done at Cañon Crest Park and Prospect Park, he planted specimens from all around the globe. Plants from the five mediterranean-climate regions thrived because of the similar climate afforded in Redlands. In addition, many plants beloved in the gardens of the Kimberlys’ home state of Wisconsin were tried and performed beautifully despite the different climate. Spireas, wiegelas, peonies, elms, and maples comingled with palms, eucalypts, watsonias, and agapanthus. Roses were used to tie together the diversity of plants into a big garden bow!
The contract was signed in November 1908; work began that winter and was completed by the following winter. The cost of the project was contracted at $3,000. Taylor Bros Brick Company of Redlands and Redlands Plumbing Co won the contracts for construction and irrigation.
Bergstrom eventually moved to Washington, DC and became one of the two architects chosen to design the Pentagon, the world’s largest office building.
The Garden Grows
In 1929, Helen’s grandchildren decided to honor their grandmother with an expansion of the garden around the lower pool. They hired famed Los Angeles area landscape architect Edwin Huntsman Trout. He proposed an allée of tree roses leading to a heart-shaped border of boxwood containing a colorful array of tea roses inside. Helen loved the new garden so much she had one of her favorite sculptures, ‘Shy Girl,’ installed in the center of the heart.
Helen Kimberly kept a detailed journal of monthly tasks in the garden. This journal endured for many years after her passing in 1933. Her daughter, Mary Emma Shirk, used the timely advice noted by her mother and updated it through her years at Kimberly Crest.
Mary Emma Shirk, the youngest of seven Kimberly children, was widowed in 1920 and came to live with her aging parents. She lived in Kimberly Crest until her passing in 1979. She was a beloved and respected Redlands resident. She helped save Prospect Park from development and helped form a nonprofit association to administer Kimberly Crest House and Gardens as a museum and semi-public garden.
Kimberly-Shirk Association now owns and maintains Kimberly Crest House and Gardens. Tours of the garden and support for the preservation efforts are provided by a devoted group of volunteers, The Kimberly-Shirk Association Docent Auxiliary.
Since most of the construction was done in 1909, 2009 has been designated as the Kimberly Crest garden’s centennial year.
If You Should Like to Visit . . .
Kimberly Crest House and Gardens is located at 1325 Prospect Drive, Redlands, CA 92373. The garden is open without charge from 1 pm to 4 pm. For more information, visit www.kimberlycrest.org. | <urn:uuid:6d4d3e95-fd19-4787-a247-6be648e46d98> | {
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Innovation & Technology: For Innovation and Technology in Maritime SAR
In order to prepared for, and be effective in emergency situations, organisations must learn to work together and SAR personnel need to gain as much experience as possible.
This is best achieved through practice and realistic exercises.
But, effective training opportunities structured around complex maritime incidents are very limited, mainly because of high costs, the potential risks to participants in live SAR exercises, and a limited number of participating SAR personnel.
As a result, seagoing authorities all need more training and exercises.
The joint R&D project ‘Maritime Simulators Network’ (MAR-SimNET; 2013-2017) aims to provide this training.
The simulator offers a valuable opportunity to practice difficult navigational situations and communications, to manage bridge resources, while providing training in soft skills too.
The simulator can be used to build experience with global maritime distress and safety systems (GMDSS) devices, and offers for the first time a chance to combine ship handling skills and GMDSS simulation.
However, the MAR-SimNET Project viewed this as just the first step in creating a simulator for SAR purposes.
Real SAR missions do not just involve ships; a real SAR mission also involves the Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre (MRCC) and the coastal radio stations. But before the MAR-SimNET Project, MRCC simulators had not yet been developed – thanks to this project, now they have.
The last important players in SAR missions are helicopters, which provide quick transportation of rescue equipment and accident victims, or other assisting units either on-the-scene, or acting as a search unit.
The aim of the MAR-SimNET project was to develop a SAR mission simulator that provided all the interorganisational training for all of the authorities and organisations who might be involved, from the bridge crews of different vessels to helicopter crews and MRCC personnel, whilst also delivering a simulated workplace for the operators of coastal counties and their public-safety response teams.
By evaluating and collating all of the different stakeholder needs into an integrated, interlinked SAR simulator infrastructure, the project has been able to deliver comprehensive training for maritime disaster management and beyond. | <urn:uuid:3bf9505c-3d1f-46b5-a08e-12984ce6189a> | {
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Global Concern for Children's Rights: The World Congress Against Sexual Exploitation
Concern about exploitative sexual practices involving children and adolescents has been rising over the past several years. The media have increased awareness by documenting instances of young women and girls being sold into prostitution or sexual slavery, coerced into child pornography or trafficked across borders into bonded sexual labor.1 The growing perception of these age-old problems as examples of serious human rights abuses culminated in the August 1996 meeting in Stockholm, Sweden, of the World Congress Against the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children, the first global conference convened specifically to address this issue.
First proposed in 1994 by End Child Prostitution in Asian Tourism (ECPAT), a Thailand-based nongovernmental organization, the Congress grew from a collaboration between ECPAT, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and nongovernmental organizations supporting the Convention on the Rights of the Child. With participants from 119 countries, the Congress sought to raise awareness about the global nature of the problem of sexual exploitation of children (defined as all persons under the age of 18) and mobilize international action.2 It resulted in the unanimous adoption by all Congress attendees of the Agenda for Action, a document stipulating concrete measures to foster global cooperation and facilitate the prevention of sexual abuses and the protection of vulnerable youth.3
A number of distinct practices constitute sexually exploitative phenomena. Pedophilia, the selection of a young child as one's preferred object of sexual desire, as well as the production of pornographic materials featuring young children, affect both boys and girls, and are viewed in most societies as deviant. In addition, there are children and adolescents of both sexes who, for any number of reasons, find themselves lacking financial support, and who, therefore, trade sexual "favors" in exchange for food, shelter or other necessities, in much the same way as do their adult counterparts.
But the practices that appear to have an impact on the largest number of young people, and which are of greatest concern to the international human rights community, are those that involve the exploitation of girls and adolescent women who are "given" in marriage or who are expected to produce income for their families through sexual labor. It is these practices, most common in the developing world, in which socially acceptable traditions merge with outright sexual exploitation, that bring to light the concerns of the "girl child." The immediate success of the World Congress has been to focus international attention on the plight of these exploited young people and to highlight these issues in the context of children's human rights.
Despite the worldwide attention being focused on the issue of sexual exploitation of children, little reliable, methodologically sound research documents its prevalence.4 Indeed, the figures cited by governments, nongovernmental organizations and the media are typically "guestimates" that through frequent repetition have attained the status of fact.5 Regardless of the actual numbers involved, however, the work of the Congress represents a dedicated attempt to grapple with a problem that is defined not by its scale, but rather by "its degree of seriousness as a violation of fundamental [human] rights."6
The Congress was guided in large part by the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the international human rights treaty adopted by the United Nations in 1989 and currently ratified by 187 nations.7 Among its many enumerated rights, the convention states that children have the right to be protected from economic and sexual exploitation, and stipulates that individual nations have the obligation to "take all appropriate legislative, administrative, social and educational measures to protect...child[ren] from all forms of...abuse."8 While the Convention on the Rights of the Child is the first international treaty to specifically address the human rights of children, it joins a long list of international legal instruments addressing sexual exploitation and the related issues of trafficking, forced labor, slavery-like practices and discrimination.9*
Despite such declarations, the sexual exploitation of children appears to be a worldwide phenomenon. News reports documenting the trafficking of young women from Eastern European countries to the West,10 the murder of several girls—allegedly at the hands of child pornographers—in Belgium11 and the hiring of child prostitutes by United Nations peacekeeping troops in Mozambique12 highlight the truly global nature of the problem. These events also attest to the fact that involvement in abusive practices is not limited to either the developed or developing world. The root causes, however, appear to be embedded within the broader socioeconomic and cultural issues facing the developing world, where by all accounts the problem is most widespread and the greatest number of young people are affected.
THE ROOTS OF THE PROBLEM
The literature on the sexual exploitation of children catalogues a host of economic, social and cultural factors believed to underlie the phenomenon. A review of these materials, along with discussions with conference participants and child rights advocates, suggests that no single scenario adequately explains the many forms of exploitation that arise in different world regions. In the developing world, poverty and economic disparity appear to be associated with exploitative conditions such as child labor and trafficking networks, but the significance of poverty is strongly mediated by discriminatory attitudes and traditional practices that may be unique to specific cultures.
GENDER DISCRIMINATION AND INEQUALITY
Discrimination against women and girls and the inequalities they face are chronicled in global statistics documenting the limits placed on women's access to education and financial assets, their lack of power and influence regarding personal decision-making, and the existence of discriminatory practices associated with male preference and traditional attitudes in many societies.13 The devaluation of girls and women and their inferior social status has been repeatedly linked to the development of a climate that encourages and sustains their sexual mistreatment.14 Since these attitudes are culturally linked, their manifestation differs regionally. Although empirical research is sorely lacking in this area, several studies and numerous journalistic accounts describe the relationship between sexual exploitation and practices that are attributed to gender discrimination.
The sexual mores that set the stage for abuse are probably documented best in Thai culture. Visits to prostitutes among Thai men are common and unexceptional occurances.15 Cultural attitudes encouraging sexual experience among men while valuing chastity in women create a demand for the services of prostitutes; indeed, 65% of rural Thai men younger than 20 have visited a prostitute, while nearly 80% of extramarital sexual contacts among urban Thai men are with commercial sex workers.16
But cultural attitudes in Thailand also account for a ready supply of young women. Thai family norms dictate that daughters take substantial responsibility for their family's economic well-being. In rural communities, where there are few opportunities for young women to earn the necessary income, the attraction of commercial sex work and its promise of high wages is strong. In one of the few available quantitative documentations of commercial sex workers, 44-55% of Thai prostitutes indicated that their main reason for entry into prostitution was their parents' financial need. Some 23-43% of sex workers indicated that their first sexual experience was a commercial encounter; indeed, several workers reported that they or their families had received a substantial fee in exchange for the loss of their virginity at a very young age.17
According to another study examining migration and commercial sex in Thailand, more than 80% of prostitutes remitted a portion of their earnings to their families, most often to their parents. Remittances were quite sizable, often enabling rural families to achieve a standard of living far above what they could expect if their daughters worked in the formal sector.18
Early marriage is another practice rooted in gender discrimination that can be an avenue for sexual exploitation. Since legal limits on age at marriage typically apply only to unions sought without parental consent, marriages arranged by parents (and often accompanied by financial transfers such as the paying of a bridal dowry) can involve girls well below a country's legal minimum.19 Rates of teenage marriage continue to be quite high throughout Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia;20 in Bangladesh, for example, the median age at first marriage for women aged 20-24 is 15.21
The tendency for higher rates of marital dissolution when women marry at a young age may itself result in abuse; it may leave a young woman with few viable avenues of economic support other than commercial sex work. Among Ethiopian women, for example, early age at first marriage was found to be a significant predictor of commercial sex work: In a sample of more than 2,000 women, 42% of women working as prostitutes had married before the age of 13, while 9% of women still in their first marriage had done so.22
MIGRATION AND TRAFFICKING
The sexual exploitation of children and adolescent women is also related to labor migration and trafficking networks that develop as an outgrowth of political and economic change. The use of these channels is fueled by poverty, set against a backdrop of economic disparity, discrimination and the often willful disregard by government officials of human rights and the rule of law.
In several reports on the trafficking of girls and young women as sexual commodities across Asian routes, Human Rights Watch has documented the political and economic forces that encourage both the supply and demand side of this trade.23 These reports catalog the unscrupulous behavior of traffickers who capitalize on the poverty and desperation of families living in remote villages with the promise of employment for their children in foreign cities. Impoverished parents confronted with a dearth of local financial opportunity, and enticed by reports of the bounty that awaits in booming urban economies, part with their children in exchange for a fee and a promise that they will be provided with gainful employment. These reports also document the corruption among officials in law enforcement, immigration and the judicial system, who profit from the illegal sex trade and thus have little motivation to enforce the laws.
The World Congress helped bring to public attention the plight of young people caught up in these illicit networks. However, Therese Caoutte, a consultant for Human Rights Watch and author of its report on the trafficking of Burmese women and girls into Thailand, stresses that by focusing on child victims and coercion, Congress attendees avoided grappling with larger issues such as the harsh conditions confronting women, even those who choose commercial sex work: "Even if the women are 18 or 19 and did agree to go, so what? They are still working in brothels surrounded by barbed wire, with debt books and filthy living conditions. The idea of choice really has to be developed; these women may have chosen prostitution, but they didn't chose slavery."24
Moreover, the trafficking of girls and young women across international borders is not only a vehicle for sexual abuse, but one shared by many industries that profit from cheap, readily exploited sources of labor.25 Female workers who are trafficked to foreign soil have no legal status and are often treated as criminals. Unable to speak the native language, and typically with few skills, they can be readily controlled by traffickers and their employers. If they are able to escape, they may face arrest and prosecution at the hands of local immigration officials.26
But more mundane circumstances also create exploitative conditions for girls and young women. The search for employment opportunities among people in impoverished rural communities also leads to voluntary labor migration to urban areas, frequently within a nation's borders. Commercial centers such as Bangkok (where the U.S. military presence in the 1950s, and in later years, the development of the tourist industry, have been implicated in the growth of prostitution27) are frequent destinations for young women from rural areas.28
Indeed, in Thailand, migration networks provide a steady flow of adolescents and young women from villages in the northern and northeastern regions for commercial sex work in Bangkok and areas in Southeast Asia. One study, for example, demonstrated how firmly established certain migration routes were as pathways into commercial sex work: Forty-eight percent of the women who had migrated from one northern Thai village were found to be working as prostitutes in their current place of residence.29 Among nearly 700 prostitutes working in Thai urban centers, 95% originated from northern regions, and 42% percent were 17 or younger when they first entered prostitution.30
Trafficking and migration leading to prostitution and other forms of sexual abuse appear to coincide with a pattern of rapid urban growth and the concomitant deterioration in rural productivity, which creates large gaps in wealth and opportunity between urban and rural communities.31 However, many nations face the challenges of economic disparity without developing the types of entrenched exploitative networks that have been documented in countries such as Thailand and Nepal. What these countries additionally share with other countries where the sexual mistreatment of girls and young women is an increasing concern are ingrained cultural attitudes that tend to devalue women and girls, and exclude them from opportunities to pursue material gain through nonexploitative means.
Reports released in late 1996 by UNICEF and the International Labor Organization (ILO) draw attention to child prostitution as "one of the most intolerable forms of child labor."32 In its most extreme manifestation, children are forced into sexual work through the practice of debt bondage, wherein a young girl's labor in a brothel is promised by an impoverished family for an unspecified amount of time in exchange for cash or credit. While the arrangement is allegedly intended to last only until the debt is paid, repayment is frequently impossible, given the typically limited earning potential of debtors and the illicit and often deceptive practices of lenders (such as excessively high interest rates and additional charges and fines for work-related expenses).33
The sexual mistreatment of young people is also associated with other types of exploitative child labor that are not directly sexual in nature. Domestic service, for example, typically takes young girls from impoverished families to distant homes where they are likely to work long hours under harsh conditions, isolated from their families and with little or no pay.34 Aside from the blatant abuse of such slavery-like conditions, these children are also often vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse.
Work in the tourism and catering industries is often an entry point to commercial sexual activity for children and adolescents. According to ILO studies of tourist communities in Kenya, Mexico, the Philippines and Sri Lanka, girls and young women who fill jobs as waitresses, "bar girls" or receptionists in tourist establishments are frequently exposed to enticements to enhance their income through providing sexual services.35
The recently released ILO report stresses that young children (those younger than 15) are rarely involved in commercial sex-based work, and it emphasizes that when advocates focus on the sexual exploitation of children, they may neglect the many nonsexual abuses and risks that young people face when poverty, lack of adequate parental support and a dearth of alternate opportunities bring them to occupy the most marginal jobs along the economic fringes of society.36 Nonetheless, it is along these fringes where children are apt to engage in work that is shielded from legislation regulating wages, hours of employment and safety conditions, and where they are most likely to fall prey to sexual exploitation.37
Under the guiding principles of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, many international human rights and children's rights organizations have called for the elimination of all forms of child labor and for universal access to education.38 However, efforts to enhance children's lives through the elimination of child labor can have the paradoxical effect of removing children from economically necessary work, thereby compelling youngsters to work in the highly exploitative street economy.39
For example, in 1992, the Child Labor Deterrence Act was introduced in the U.S. Congress. The bill's purpose was to ban the importation into the United States of goods made by children younger than 15. The unanticipated response in Bangladesh was dramatic: Tens of thousands of children employed in Bangladesh's vast, export-oriented garment industry were immediately dismissed from their jobs. With few skills and limited access to education or to other legitimate sources of income, many of these children ended up in the streets, working as prostitutes or involved in other, equally dangerous forms of labor.40
After this situation was discovered by UNICEF and local nongovernmental organizations, the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association subsequently negotiated and signed a Memorandum of Understanding with UNICEF and the ILO to assure that school placements would be arranged for terminated child workers and that children would receive stipends to offset their lost wages. In addition, the agreement stipulated that the factory positions of terminated child workers be offered to other qualified adult family members. The agreement was to be implemented with funds contributed by the three organizations.41 To date, there has been little follow-up from which to judge the success of the agreement. Nonetheless, the situation demonstrates how well-intentioned but short-sighted interventions in child labor may increase vulnerability to sexual exploitation.
THE WORK OF THE CONGRESS
In his final report on the World Congress, United Nations General Rapporteur Vitat Muntarbhorn reiterated the conference's central tenet that the commercial sexual exploitation of children represents a "massive violation" of their human rights, and that its eradication will require sustained efforts at prevention, social mobilization, education, criminalization and law enforcement and the allocation of sufficient resources to accomplish these objectives.42 The unanimous adoption of the Congress' Agenda for Action sends a strong message of international commitment to these aims.
AREAS OF AGREEMENT...
In the spirit of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the World Congress Agenda for Action makes the best interests of children its focus. This is reflected in the Agenda's stipulation that children themselves be actively represented in the development and implementation of programs concerning their welfare, and in the document's emphasis on protection and on recovery procedures (e.g., the reintegration of the victim into the community) that are sensitive to the specific needs of young victims.
The document stresses the necessity for coordination and cooperation among local, national, regional and international bodies in developing strategies and implementing mechanisms to monitor progress and encourage compliance with the mandates of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (including timely reporting to the monitoring Committee) and other international human rights instruments. Moreover, prevention of sexual exploitation is emphasized through educational efforts, particularly those that improve access to schools, strengthen family ties and dissuade communities from continuing discriminatory practices that leave girls (and sometimes boys) vulnerable.
The Agenda for Action, however, is a nonbinding agreement; despite its being, according to Muntarbhorn "tantamount to a commitment from the global community,"43 its potential, like that of many international conventions, lies more in its capacity to provide moral suasion than in its power to mete out legal sanctions. Moral authority, though, can be tremendously powerful as an instrument of change. As Dorian Beyer, general counsel for the National Child Labor Committee, notes, the declaration of the Congress signals that "the world has decided that sexual exploitation of children is an outrage."44 For a state to demonstrate disinterest through inaction in the face of such a statement would be to risk becoming a pariah in the international community.
Conference attendees and other child rights advocates agreed one of the most important outcomes of the conference was its focusing international attention on and raising public awareness about the serious and global nature of the problem. Another frequently mentioned comment, however, was that the Congress highlighted the paucity of reliable data about the prevalence of sexual exploitation and the circumstances in which it occurs. This is a particularly troubling issue, given that the Agenda for Action sets the year 2000 as a goal by which there will be documented progress in "reducing the number of children vulnerable" to these abuses.45 In the past, nongovernmental organizations have had difficulty obtaining funding for projects designed to gather baseline data or evaluate program success. Now, in the wake of the Congress and the agreements obtained from more than 100 governments worldwide, advocates hope that donors will be more willing to fund such projects.46
The subject of age has consistently been one of the most contentious issues in the field of child rights, and it proved to be a subject of formidable controversy at the World Congress as well. Indeed, according to one conference attendee, it was "one of the most avoided issues" at the meeting; it was so controversial, in fact, that it was not even placed on the conference agenda.47
The Convention on the Rights of the Child defines a child as any individual under the age of 18, unless national law stipulates a younger age of majority. In fact, the legal age designated by national laws for marriage and for consent to sexual relations is often lower. Throughout Central and South America, for example, the legal age for marriage among females is typically 16 or younger. (In Ecuador and Paraguay, it is 12.) Throughout Asia and Africa, where 18 is the most common legal age of marriage, the legal age of consent for sexual relations may be as young as 12.48 These age differences become obstacles to the prevention of sexual abuse against children, since in some countries legal protection for children is dependent upon an individual country's legal age of consent.49
The conflict around age and consent to sexual relationships emerges from a debate similar to that surrounding many other human rights documents: How can a set of rights considered universal be reconciled with the prevailing mores of specific cultures? While certain practices involving children might be universally recognized as exploitative, others—such as marriage during early adolescence—may be considered normative in certain localities. Moreover, puberty and its relationship to a person's readiness to enter sexual relationships is based as much in culture as in biology. Pursuing the "best interests of the child" will likely take different forms, depending on the accepted values in a particular culture.
Nonetheless, cultural arguments cannot excuse human rights abuses. As Muntarbhorn asserts in his final Congress report, when it comes to sexual exploitation "the issue of consent...is irrelevant....[S]exual exploitation is a suppression of choice, [an] eradication of free will and [a] decimation of self-determination."50
ACTION AND CHANGE
Congress participants stressed the critical importance of the legal system in the prevention of child exploitation. Most countries where such abuses are a concern are in fact signatories to international conventions addressing the rights of women and children, and are thus obligated to fulfill the mandates of those instruments. Nonetheless, many countries do not have national laws specifically addressing the sexual exploitation of children, while in others, laws exist, but enforcement is lax.
Consequently, the Congress' Agenda for Action stresses the development and enforcement of laws to specifically prohibit the commercial sexual exploitation of children, to penalize those responsible for exploitation at every level of their involvement and to protect exploited children from being further victimized through improper or insensitive law enforcement.
It is unclear to what extent Congress attendees are following up on commitments made at the meeting. According to Marsha Liss, an attorney at the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section of the U.S. Department of Justice and a member of the U.S. delegation to the World Congress, it is impossible to know at this point whether legislative change is underway; the process of drafting and submitting legislation is an extremely slow and, in many developing countries, idiosyncratic process. Furthermore, there is no single body charged with tracking progress on an international basis.51
However, many developed countries are now recognizing the role their citizens play in exacerbating demand for child sexual exploitation, by passing legislation that allows for the prosecution of citizens who engage in sex crimes while traveling abroad, even if their actions are legal in the country of destination.52 The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, passed by the U.S. Congress, established such extraterritorial laws, and the governments of Australia, Belgium, France, Germany and New Zealand have recently done so as well. Canada, Ireland, Italy and the United Kingdom are currently considering similar legislation.53
The Congress emphasized the need for cooperation between governments, nongovernmental organizations and international bodies to help mobilize change and sustain the efforts of individual states. Often, however, change at the local level may require not only the persistent work of concerned individuals, but may depend upon pressures exerted by shifts in global economic realities.
Thailand is a case in point, notes Jim Vermillion, democracy and government policy advisor for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). While Thailand has long been renowned for its lax attitude toward the commercial sex trade, in the past year and a half the government has raised the legal age of consent and improved its efforts at enforcing laws against prostitution. According to Vermillion, the Thai government is now taking the issue of sexual exploitation seriously, as it becomes increasingly interested in attracting foreign investment, and therefore, increasingly concerned about its "national persona."54
Indeed, as developing countries vie for trading partners and investment dollars, the establishment of an accountable legal system based upon human rights principles becomes an important objective. To this end, USAID and the U.S. Department of Justice are working in tandem with nongovernmental organizations and ministries of justice in many countries to enhance the functioning of law enforcement and judicial institutions. USAID's rule of law initiative, for example, provides technical assistance to host countries for police training and court reform, in an attempt to establish adherence to the tenets of due process.
In recognition of the complex relationship between child exploitation and socioeconomic development, one international nongovernmental organization, the World Federation for Mental Health, circulated a resolution at the Congress requesting that the World Bank incorporate into its loan agreements impact studies to determine the consequences to children of Bank-funded projects. The resolution also calls for the Bank to establish loan criteria that specifically address practices relevant to trafficking and child prostitution. The Bank has not agreed to the resolution, but the Federation continues its lobbying efforts. At a working group meeting hosted by the U.S. delegation as a follow-up to the Congress,55 some advocates suggested that the Bank's position indicated a lack of interest in the issue of child exploitation, while a State Department economist observed that in general the World Bank does not stipulate government action when setting up loan agreements.
However, the World Bank does take the position that investing in girls and women is "not only a matter of social justice, it is also a matter of good economics"56 Accordingly, the Bank has attempted to integrate a gender-sensitive approach into its lending activities. While the institution continues to hone its system for rating the strength of the gender component of its programs, it has established a screening process to determine the impact of project implementation on women.
Moreover, in several of its loans for basic education, funds are designated specifically to address the educational needs of girls. For example, the Second Primary Education Project in India selects districts for funding on the basis of low rates of female literacy, while the Primary Education Project in Malawi makes girls' school-enrollment ratio a site-selection criterion, in an effort to increase the number of schools built in areas with low rates of female attendance.57
Some advocates voice concern that despite the importance of the conference's achievements, focusing world attention on the dramatic predicaments of sexually exploited children may obscure some larger and more fundamental issues. They argue that the true challenge lies in mobilizing global action to address the less sensational but more pervasive forms of abuse that can transform the daily lives of women and children worldwide.
In this vein, several organizations have also targeted migration and the trafficking of women and children as a focus for intervention. In conferences specifically devoted to the issue of trafficking, nongovernmental organizations such as the Asia Foundation and the Global Fund for Women have attempted to encourage continued recognition of trafficking as a human rights abuse and to develop networks through which women and girls can find assistance and be returned safely to their homes.58 For example, besides advocating for union reforms among importing and exporting countries and encouraging governments to provide migrants with legal protection, the Asian-American Free Labor Institute furnishes migrant workers with information about their rights and the resources available to them on foreign soil.59
In addition, the United Nations Population Fund recently signed an agreement with the International Organization for Migration (an intergovernmental body) to enhance cooperation and increase the strength of "efforts to combat sexual violence, particularly against migrant women and girls," as well as to promote reproductive health among migrants, and to develop policies to address the needs of "undocumented migrants, particularly...the victims of trafficking."60
The needs of children and adolescents living on the streets are also being targeted through community-based interventions such as the At-Risk Youth Project, which is funded by USAID and currently being implemented in three Brazilian cities. The project seeks to strengthen family ties and provide employment training in skills for which there is an established market. The program also specifically addresses the needs of girls and adolescent women who are at risk of or already involved in prostitution, by fostering linkages with municipal and state councils devoted to children's rights and by advocating for policy changes at both the state and federal level.61 Similar projects are currently underway in El Salvador, Guatemala, Indonesia and Vietnam.62
That Congress attendees were a diverse group, representing not only national governments and international rights organizations but also law enforcement, academia, the health care professions and the media, is testament to the global recognition that an interdisciplinary approach will be required to eliminate sexual exploitation in its many manifestations. Clearly, no single intervention can adequately address the issues involved. Sustained efforts at legal reform and law enforcement, commitment to long-term development that increases access to resources for all members of a community, regardless of gender or social status, and improved adherence to the mandates of international human rights conventions are all strategies critical to achieving the goals of the Congress.
At the same time, those who seek to document the conditions of children and young people vulnerable to exploitation must strive to improve the reliability of their reports. The need for methodologically sound ways to define, measure and record the prevalence of exploitation and the conditions that encourage it is distressingly clear from an examination of the available materials. Moreover, such improvements are essential if changes in the circumstances of vulnerable youths are to be achieved.
Lastly, the pervasiveness of gender discrimination underlies many of the issues highlighted at the Congress. While boys and young men the world over also confront exploitation in their daily lives, it is girls and young women who are most vulnerable to the short- and long-term consequences of sexual exploitation. At Cairo, at Beijing, and now, in Stockholm, the detrimental impact of gender inequality on the human rights of girls and women has been illuminated and reinforced. Ultimately, the message of the World Congress echoes that of the global conferences that have preceded it: If the international community is to succeed in protecting the world's most vulnerable citizens, it must first succeed in valuing them.
*Relevant United Nations treaties currently in force include the 1949 Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and the Exploitation and Prostitution of Others; the 1956 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery; and the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. In addition, two International Labor Organization conventions (numbers 29 and 105) set labor standards and restrict the practice of forced labor (see: reference 7).
1. W. Branigin, "Children for Sale in Thailand," Washington Post, Dec. 28, 1993, p. A1; M. Simons, "The Sex Market: Scourge on the World's Children," New York Times, Apr. 9, 1993, p. A3; ----, "East Europeans Duped into West's Sex Trade," New York Times, June 9, 1994, p. A1; and ----, "The Littlest Prostitutes," New York Times Magazine, Jan. 16, 1994, p. 31.
2. V. Mutarbhorn, "Final Congress Report," World Congress Against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children, Stockholm, Sweden, Aug. 27-31, 1996, <http://www.childhub.ch/webpup/csehome>, accessed Sept. 24, 1996.
4. J. Ennew et al., Children and Prostitution: How Can We Measure and Monitor the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children? Centre for Family Research, Cambridge, U.K., and Childwatch International, Oslo, Norway, 1996.
7. M. O'Briain, "The International Legal Framework and Current Legislative and Enforcement Responses," working document submitted for the World Congress Against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children, Stockholm, Sweden, Aug. 27-31, 1996, <http://www.childhub.ch/webpup/csehome>, accessed Sept. 24, 1996.
14. Save the Children, Kids for Hire, London, 1996; and P. O'Dea, Gender Exploitation and Violence: The Market in Women, Girls and Sex in Nepal; An Overview of the Situation and a Review of the Literature, United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), Nepal, 1993.
21. S.N. Mitra et al., Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey, 1993-1994, National Institute of Population and Training and Mitra and Associates, Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Macro Inc. , International, Calverton, Md., USA, 1994.
22. M.E. Duncan et al., "A Socioeconomic, Clinical and Serological Study in an African City of Prostitutes and Women Still Married to Their First Husband," Social Science and Medicine, 38:323-333, 1994.
23. Human Rights Watch, Rape for Profit: Trafficking of Nepali Girls and Women to India's Brothels, New York, 1995; and ----, A Modern Form of Slavery: Trafficking of Burmese Women and Girls into Brothels in Thailand, New York, 1993.
28. K. Archavanitkul and P. Guest, 1994, op. cit. (see reference 18); and C. Podhista et al., "Socio-Cultural Context of Commercial Sex Workers in Thailand: An Analysis of Their Family, Employer and Client Relations," Health Transition Review, Vol. 4, supplement, 1994, pp. 297-320.
32. UNICEF, "UNICEF Report Demands End to Most Intolerable Forms of Child Labour, Such as Prostitution, Bonded Labour," press release, New York, Dec. 9, 1996; and International Labour Organization (ILO), "ILO Calls for Immediate Action Against Intolerable Forms of Child Labour," press release, Geneva, Nov. 12, 1996.
33. Bureau of International Labor Affairs, By the Sweat and Toil of Children, Volume II: The Use of Child Labor in U.S. Agricultural Imports and Forced and Bonded Labor, U.S. Department of Labor, Washington, D.C., 1995.
34. ILO, 264th Session November 1995 Governing Body Document on Child Labour, Committee on Employment and Social Policy (GB.264/ESP/1), <http://www.ilo.org>, accessed Dec. 10, 1996; and Bureau of International Labor Affairs, 1995, op. cit. (see reference 33).
37. B.N. Shukla and B. Shukla, "Child Labour in the Informal Sector," in B.P. Singh and S. Mahanty, eds., Children at Work: Problems and Policy Options, B.R. Publishing Corp., Delhi, India, 1993; and G. Barker and F. Knaul, Exploited Entrepreneurs: Street and Working Children in Developing Countries, Childhope-USA, New York, 1991.
39. G. Barker and F. Knaul, 1991, op. cit. (see reference 37); J. Boyden, "Childhood and the Policy Makers: A Comparative Perspective on the Globalization of Childhood," in A. James and A. Prout, eds., Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood, Falmer Press, New York and London, 1990; and M. Lyons, Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Association, personal communication, Oct. 21, 1996.
48. L.J. Lederer, "National Legislation on Child Pornography and International Trafficking," unpublished document, Center on Speech, Equality and Harm, University of Minnesota Law School, Minneapolis, Minn., USA, Aug. 1996.
58. M. Reilly, The Asia Foundation, personal communication, Dec. 9, 1996; and The Global Fund for Women, "Sisters and Daughters Betrayed: The Sex Trade of Women and Girls," document presented at the International Conference on the Dynamics of Sexual Coercion, Reno, Nevada, USA, Oct. 7-8, 1996.
60. United Nations Population Fund, "Population Fund and Migration Group Sign Agreement to Address Issues Including Sexual Violence and Trafficking of Children," press release, New York, Dec. 11, 1996.
Karen Mahler is associate editor of International Family Planning Perspectives. The author would like to thank Jacqueline Darroch Forrest, Jeannie Rosoff, Susheela Singh and Mark Connolly for their helpful comments. | <urn:uuid:0ab5f625-fdbb-49d7-8bfe-8e0edbcf372a> | {
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Sen. Byrd and Constitution Day After the death of a prolific Senator, it's time to re-examine his values in today's context.
Senator Robert Byrd (D-W. Va) died at 92 this morning after being admitted to a Fairfax, VA hospital last week for heat exhaustion. Byrd, who was elected to serve a record-breaking nine consecutive terms in the Senate following three terms in the House, is remembered in the many obituaries that appeared today for his unwavering dedication to the needs of the people he represented. His colleagues also characterized him by remembering his impassioned speeches and his love of the Constitution. Reported to have carried a pocket-sized copy of the Constitution around for reference, Byrd devoted himself to the words of this country's founders-and wanted every American to do the same through Constitution Day.
Byrd successfully pushed for legislation in 2004 that deemed September 17th "Constitution Day." According to the law, all federally-funded schools are mandated to teach their students about the U.S. Constitution in some form on that day, from elementary schools to the college level. Initially, the legislation received mixed reviews; while teachers did not appreciate another federal mandate, many legislators wanted students to know more about their country's founding document than they do about television shows.
Six years later, though lesson plans and activities for all ages abound on the Internet, teachers still struggle to find time to fit Constitution Day-based lessons into their curriculum. Furthermore, many teachers feel that the requirement is redundant, as they already teach about the Constitution at other points during the year. In Montgomery County, Maryland, for example, students are required to take a course on national, state, and local government, which includes Constitution lessons in the curriculum, and teachers have told me that singling out one day to focus on it seems superfluous. On the other hand, some colleges, like the Milwaukee School of Engineering, hold special events for a week surrounding Constitution Day. There are plenty of resources available to you if want to celebrate the Constitution in your own schools (see list at the end of this post).
Most educators would agree that the Constitution is something every resident of the U.S. should know and understand, so please take the time to teach it, even if it is in a simple way. FairVote has a particular suggestion relating to our belief that we should prepare our young people to be active participants in our democracy. Knowledge of the law and civic participation (such as how and why to vote) need to be ingrained in the brains of new voters, especially when only 59 percent of eligible voters 18-24 are registered, compared to 71 percent registered of eligible voters overall, according to the FairVote fact sheet. Knowledgeable young voters become voters for life. One talent teenagers are known for is their ability to talk; if one friend knows how to vote, they can tell others, and so on. After Sen. Jamie Raskin's successful legislation in 2007, Maryland law authorizes school systems to specify curricula for their students, but we hope to see more schools and teachers take it one step further. Recognizing Constitution Day is a vital step in this process of getting young people involved and interested in the laws and people that govern them. Democracy cannot function with an indifferent populace.
Links to resources:
FairVote's Learning Democracy curriculum: http://www.fairvote.org/lesson-plans
American Bar Association activities: http://www.abanet.org/publiced/conversations/constitution/lessons.shtml
The Constitution Center's page with resources and events: http://www.constitutioncenter.org/ncc_progs_Constitution_Day.aspx
Center for Civic Education activities for grades K-12: http://www.civiced.org/index.php?page=constitution_day
The American Political Science Association resources:
See a list of what colleges and universities are doing: | <urn:uuid:d5814a7d-d9e1-4dab-bb27-ad029f080dc0> | {
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Get ready fellow math geeks, “Pi Day” is almost here! The day to celebrate the wonderfully simple and yet, at the same time complex, number pi. And of course, a fantastic excuse to PARTY! 🙂 I’m so excited to help you prepare, and want to share a fun resource that can be used with kids of all ages! This Pi Day Sing Along has been recently updated, and now includes two pages of goofy math songs!
*Please Note: This post contains affiliate links which help support the work of this site. Read our full disclosure policy here.*
What is Pi Day, you ask? Well the number pi is a constant which represents the ratio between the circumference and diameter of a circle. The value of this number is often rounded to 3.14.
Therefore, each year Pi Day is celebrated on March 14th (3.14) by learning about circles and ratios and measurement, as well as irrational numbers such as the number pi.
Looking for ways to learn and explore with your kids? I have created a fun and free math lesson for understanding the number pi which is great for middle or high school students.
Reading the book Sir Cumference and the Dragon of Pi is another great way to introduce kids to this fun number! (Plus, get free lessons to use with the book when you subscribe to my email newsletter).
Want even more ideas? Check out my “Pi Day Goodness” page with dozens of links to ideas, games and free resources to explore this super cool number!
Pi Day Sing Along:
And of course, it’s always fun to sing of the wonders of the number pi and the fun of pi day, so here is a Pi Day Sing Along sheet to help you get in the spirit of the day!
This download includes 2 pages of black and white song lyrics to the tunes of familiar songs such as “Jingle Bells,” “Happy Birthday” and more!
So start counting down and get excited! Pi Day will be here before you know it!
Never Run Out of Fun Math Ideas
If you enjoyed this post, you will love being apart of the Math Geek Mama community! Each week I share fun and engaging math ideas, free resources and special offers. Join us as we help every child succeed and thrive in math! | <urn:uuid:0df86f3f-0ea8-43b8-8634-3c66cc0e985a> | {
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Does Breastfeeding Increase Risk of Infant Cavities?
Several studies over the last four decades have pointed to the possibility of late-night, on demand breastfeeding being a contributor to young childhood dental caries. In 2008, Dr. White did a systematic review of these studies in the hopes of clarifying whether they had substantial evidence that negated the other health benefits associated with breastfeeding.
Benefits of Breastfeeding
Cavities can lead to many other health problems, from cardiovascular complications and disease to bone loss. Yet even with this long list of problems, a claim against breastfeeding would have a lot to counterbalance. Exclusive breastfeeding gives the prime ingredients an infant needs to develop correctly, as well as antibodies and other natural immunities passed on from the mother’s body. Additionally, breastfeeding nurtures both the baby’s and mother’s emotional well-being, and mothers get the added bonus of lowered risk of ovarian and breast cancer. Could cavities be enough to discount all these benefits? This is the question White and her colleagues sought to answer.
Weeding Out Inconsistent Studies
The studies mentioned above posed quite the challenge. Many were discounted due to their vagueness of all the infants’ diets. For example, some based their numbers on infants also drinking water or juice as well as breastfeeding. Another complication that made some studies discredited was the lack of specific duration of breastfeeding that was recorded.
The final three studies and single review article became the foundation for getting down to the reality of whether breastfeeding really could be creating an infant dental problem.
The moderate quality data they based their conclusions on determined that breastfeeding for longer than one year and at night were clearly associated with cavities within the child’s first six years of life. Despite the probability, White and her team also knew that among these studies, other important and modern factors such as fluoride exposure and dietary habits weren’t taken into consideration. This influences their conclusion: There wasn’t enough evidence to support the claim, but late-night, on demand breastfeeding could be a risk factor among many.
Risk Factors for Baby Tooth Decay
In addition to breastfeeding, there are many factors that have the potential to cause dental caries in our young children’s teeth. Surprisingly, more recent studies have identified the carbohydrates in infant formulas are a major contributor to infant dental caries. Foods and juices with high sugar content are another factor to consider once your child moves beyond a milk diet. Fluoride in drinking water or the mother’s diet can also contribute to the development of tooth decay early in life.
Conclusions Movement into Current Dentistry
The conclusions above still reflect in modern dentistry. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) states that breast milk is “uniquely superior for infant feeding.” Instead of targeting the obvious oral benefits of breastfeeding (low acid content, and dental defensive chemicals and calcium), doctors and dentists instead focus on teaching new parents the importance of cleaning their infant’s oral cavity and their teeth from the first one that erupts. We’d be happy to be your infant’s dentist, so give us a call to schedule an appointment. We’ll keep their smile healthy from the very first one. | <urn:uuid:bb42dd59-cabd-4dbd-bddd-268b8b6d0c7e> | {
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Human - Leopard Conflict
Decline in prey species
Habitat loss or fragmentation
Increases in livestock and a decrease in natural habitat have inevitably resulted in livestock predation by leopards, and subsequent retaliation by herders. In the summer of 2003 in Mongolia, snow leopard predation caused the death of 20 horses (worth an average of US$100-150 each) in a WWF project area. Between 1996 and 2002 at least 16 snow leopards were reported killed in Zaskar in northern India, eight in one village alone.
The Amur leopard is particularly vulnerable in the Russian Far East, where farmers raise captive deer for human consumption and to produce antlers for the Asian medicine market. Deer are the natural prey preference for leopards, and in absence of wild prey, leopards venture into the deer farms in search of food. Owners of these farms are quick to protect their investment by eliminating leopards attacking their stock. Presently, the Amur leopard’s most immediate threat comes from such retaliatory or preventive killing.
In many countries, conflict killings and the trade in big cat parts go hand in hand; the bones and pelts of leopards killed primarily due to retaliation for livestock losses also enter illegal trade. | <urn:uuid:5441ae7f-e3e3-4241-b5a7-72ff80a1fdc4> | {
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Children who viewed the recent terror attacks on social media could be at risk of post-traumatic stress, health officials are warning.
GPs are being urged to watch out for symptoms which could indicate that patients are struggling to recover from a wave of atrocities. NHS psychiatric advice recommends a period of “watchful waiting” after major incidents, on the basis that offering immediate counselling can traumatise those who would otherwise have recovered.
But today health officials have written to GPs, warning them that now is a crucial time to look out for patients who are struggling to recover from a wave of attacks, starting with the Manchester bombing six weeks ago. In particular, GPs have been warned to look out for signs in children – such as shame, or a loss of self-esteem – which might not be obvious, but could indicate post-traumatic stress disorder.
NHS England said patients could suffer symptoms regardless of whether they themselves were caught up in events, given that so many witnessed the atrocities on social media. Among those directly caught in up in attacks, around one in five are expected to seek help from the NHS. But thousands of more people who watched horrific scenes on social media could also suffer trauma, experts said.
GPs have also been warned that people with pre-existing mental illnesses could be destablised by the wave of attacks, closely followed by the Grenfell fire. The letter from Dr Arvind Madan, the head of NHS primary care asks GPs to work with their communities to identify those in need of support. And it warns GPs to look out for symptoms which could denote a struggle to cope.
Some children who followed social media in the wave of the terror attacks could end up traumatised, experts say. Such symptoms include flashbacks, agitation, nightmares, palpitations and breathing difficulties. Parents are being urged to look out for more subtle symptoms.
“Children and young people experiencing symptoms which may indicate PTSD might think differently about themselves or other people,” the letter warns.
Such signs include lowered self-esteem, self-blame, thinking that they are a bad person or deserve bad things to happen to them, feeling unsafe or showing less trust in other people, the advice notes. Those suffering trauma might also experience overwhelming shame, sadness or fear or avoid situations which remind them of the event, the letter continues. Dr Sandeep Ranote, from the Royal College of Psychiatrists, urged parents to try to protect their children from social media.
He said: “Children will inevitably learn about incidents through news and social media so it is best to be open with them. However, we would not encourage reliving the experience in the immediate aftermath by repeated exposure to news and images.”
While most people affected by traumas would recover, it was important that specialist help was available for those in need, he said.
Claire Murdoch, national clinical director for mental health said: “We must remember that for those people who were affected by these horrific tragedies, the journey is not over and many will continue to face difficulties.”
“From day one of each of these incidents, staff have been working incredibly hard on making sure that mental health support is available for those who need it – we want everyone who has been affected to know that there is always support available and how and when they should access it.
Here in Australia we are subjected to the same amount of social media bombardment and should be mindful of what are children are subjected to. The events around the world are constantly on the news and the events of Britain dominated the news cycle. It is impossible for our young people to avoid as it cycles through TV, Twitter, Facebook and all the social media platforms. Keep a close eye on your young charges and yourself for PTSD warning signs. It is an overwhelming time. For warning signs read PTSD Triggers and Safety Plan. | <urn:uuid:8cf9299c-7de3-4afc-9e10-046b1ef77007> | {
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PEORIA, Ariz. (July
13, 2009) – Most people don’t think much about stormwater in the desert, but
stormwater pollution can be a serious problem in dry climates.
Pollutants build up
over time. When it rains, the drainage gathers up those pollutants and carries
them directly, untreated, to local parks, basins, channels and waterways.
To prevent this
pollution from entering your parks or waterways, there are some things you
should do before the monsoons hit:
• Patrol your yard, driveway, sidewalk, curb and gutter.
• Remove litter, leaves, pet waste and debris.
• Absorb oil or chemicals with cat litter or dirt and then sweep it up for
• If you see a blocked storm drain, report it to the city at 623-773-7456 or
Please remember: “Only
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This article was first published by Asia & The Pacific Policy Society on 18th October 2017. The authors have kindly allowed us to re-publish the piece. For the original please see here.
Since its market reforms in 1978, China has recorded an average annual growth rate of around 10 per cent, the fastest growth rate ever recorded over three decades in human history. From 2003 to 2015, after joining the World Trade Organization, China’s gross domestic product increased from less than USD1.7 trillion to over USD11.1 trillion, and its per capita GDP rose from less than USD1,300 to over USD8,100.
China’s phenomenal economic growth has come with serious environmental costs
This phenomenal economic growth, though, has come with the serious environmental costs of intensive air, water and soil pollution. According to the World Health Organization, China is the world’s deadliest country for air pollution, contributing to more than one million deaths in 2012. Only India (600,000 deaths) comes anywhere close.
Water pollution is also pervasive. In 2014, 15.7 per cent of the country’s groundwater was found to be ‘very poor’, and another 44 per cent ‘relatively poor’. Only 3 per cent of urban groundwater sources are classified as ‘clean. In the North China plain, covering some 400,000 square kilometres, 70 per cent of groundwater is unfit for human contact.
Soil pollution is a hidden problem…
…the area of land contaminated amounts to 250,000km2 – bigger than the entirety of the UK
Air and water pollution are visible. But soil pollution is a hidden problem that has not received proper attention. Heavily contaminated soil can have lush and green vegetation in the same way as healthy soil. Cleaning soil pollution is expensive and takes decades. The removal and cleaning of only 1200 cubic metres of soil, over 6.5 hectares, in Love Canal, USA, took 21 years and millions of dollars.
Chinese National Survey data released in 2014 indicated that 16.1 per cent of all soil and 19.4 per cent of farmland were contaminated by chemical pollutants and dangerous metals like arsenic, cadmium and lead. The area of land contaminated amounts to 250,000 square kilometres – bigger than the entirety of the United Kingdom. Some 35,000 square kilometres of land is so polluted that no food crops can be grown.
With the effects of environmental pollution in China becoming more devastating and visible, the country’s government this year strengthened its Environmental Protection Law. The new law stipulates that local officials who may be complicit in environmental transgressions can be fired or demoted, business leaders who do not comply with the regulatory requirements to control pollution can be detained for 15 days, and violators whose actions can be considered to be criminal can be prosecuted. Companies violating environmental standards may have their utilities cut, equipment confiscated, or could be shut down.
The new laws are much tougher. Previously, pollution fines were so low that it was cheaper for factories to pay the fines than take corrective actions. Equally, enforcement and implementation of the laws were weak and often non-existent.
The main performance indicator for local govt officials until the law change was economic growth
In addition, the central government had limited real power over the local government officials who are on the frontline of implementing environmental compliance. The main performance indicator for those local government officials until the law change was economic growth. As polluting companies were often important to the local economies, government officials had a strong incentive to turn a blind eye to environmental violations.
This laissez-faire attitude started to change when, in 2014, Premier Li Keqiang said: “We will declare war on pollution and fight it with the same determination as we battled poverty,” and environmental pollution has become “nature’s red-light warning against the model of inefficient and blind development.”
In July 2017, President Xi made pollution control one of the country’s top three priorities…
Then, in July 2017, President Xi Jinping informed all the ministers and governors that environmental pollution control would be one of the country’s top three priorities in the coming years along with poverty reduction and managing financial risk.
Shortly thereafter, an army of 5,600 inspectors from the Environment Ministry and Communist Party’s anti-corruption watchdog and personnel unit were dispatched to the provinces to see how the local officials are protecting the environment. The first of four rounds of inspection started last July.
During the first three rounds, some 18,000 polluting industries were fined over USD131 million and more than 12,000 officials were disciplined. The inspection teams included officials from the Party who can punish municipal and provincial officers for not taking their environmental tasks seriously. These punishments would adversely impact on their career prospects because party rules would bar them for promotions for 6-24 months.
By internalising environmental protection measures in party cadres’ performance evaluations, officials hoping for promotion have become especially sensitive towards taking environmental issues seriously.
The courts have also started discussing measures against polluters. In July 2016, a court in Shandong province imposed an unprecedented penalty of USD3.3 million on a glass manufacturer for emitting toxic gases containing 255 tonnes of sulphur dioxide, 589 tonnes of nitrogen oxides, and 19 tonnes of dust particles, between November 2013 and February 2015, one month before the factory was ordered to be closed.
The strong actions of the govt are forcing low-end polluting industries to either become more environmentally efficient or shut down
The strong actions of the Chinese Government are forcing low-end polluting industries to either become more environmentally efficient or shut down.
Because of these new environmental safeguards, there will have to be some policy adjustments. Many of these policy adjustments were outlined in the 13thFive-Year Plan, 2016-2020. These include the introduction of measures to reduce all types of environmental pollution with specific targets, increase efficiencies of use of energy and other resources, and improve access to healthcare and education. These measures may reduce annual growth, but the focus will be on the quality of growth to achieve a “moderately prosperous society” by 2020.
Over the short term, there will undoubtedly be some disruptions to supply chains. However, the emphasis on environmental management will accelerate the establishment of new industries for monitoring, protection and other management services. This, over the medium–term, will more than make-up for any short-term losses in employment and economic activities caused by a rebalancing of the economy.
It should be noted that China really has no other option but to meet the current environmental problems head–on. If business as usual policies continue in coming years, the economic, social and health costs will become prohibitive.
Don’t be surprised if China cleans up at an unparalleled rate
As Western countries have learnt, it is far cheaper, both economically and socially, to live in a clean environment rather than in a polluted one. China grew economically at an unprecedented rate. Don’t be surprised if it also cleans up its environmental pollution at a similar unparalleled rate.
- What ‘Xi’s Thought’ Means For Water - One key message from Xi Jinping at the 19th National Congress was harmony between environment & economic growth, surely this bodes well for water? China Water Risk’s Feng Hu reviews
- Green Development For A Beautiful China - The Minister of Environmental Protection Ganjie Li outlined the MEP’s achievements and future plans at the 19th People’s Congress. What are the key takeaways? China Water Risk’s Yuanchao Xu reviews
- Brand Rankings On China Supply Chain Action - Kate Logan & Helen Ding from the Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs expand on the 4th Annual CITI Evaluation Results. Which sectors are doing best? Which brands are taking the lead?
- Creating Water Abundance From Scarcity - Water stewardship strategies are no longer enough to address water scarcity & quality issues so what can corporates do? Water Foundry’s CEO William Sarni shares his thoughts from innovative approaches to new business models to competitions
- Learning From Singapore’s Circular Water Economy - Hong Kong is facing an imminent water crisis yet Singapore’s novel circular water economy approach may offer solutions from which HK can learn. Utrecht University’s Julian Kirchherr & Circular Economy Academy’s Ralf van Santen explore
- Groundwater Shortage Calls For Urgent Action - China’s groundwater is overextracted and this needs immediate tackling. Prof Asit K Biswas & Kris Hartley from the Lee Kuan Yew School for Public Policy explore solutions, from desalination to sponge cities
- 2016 State of Environment Report Review - The signs are positive for China’s environment in 2016. Groundwater quality improved after 5 years of decline though there is mixed news for rivers & lakes. Is the tide turning in China’s ‘war on pollution’?
- Environmental Law: 2 Years On - China’s new Environmental Protection Law has been in force more than two years now. Has it been enforced? What has the impact been? Who has been hit? Professor Wang Canfa from the University of Political Science and Law in Beijing reviews
- 12FYP Water Quality Report Card - Bao Hang & Deng Tingting from Greenpeace East Asia share key findings from their report on provincial performance in the 12FYP. Which provinces met water quality targets? Which failed?
- Blue Skies & 13FYP Green Development – Air pollution and the battle on “blue skies” was by far the major environmental focus at China’s Two Sessions. Water and soil are no less important but yet softer and more general targets were set for them. See China Water Risk Hongqiao Liu’s review for the key takeaways | <urn:uuid:47e4c46c-8879-4b17-a129-9b7234697bf7> | {
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What is the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)? FOIA establishes the public's right to obtain agency records from the federal government. "Any person" can file a FOIA request—U.S citizens, foreign nationals, organizations, associations, and state/local governments, etc. View the FOIA Overview document to learn more about the FOIA.
: This exemption protects internal agency information that is predecisional or part of the deliberative process, as well as information that contains privilege attorney/agency communications and attorney generated documents. | <urn:uuid:18e709e5-8993-4079-98e7-fa099be3002b> | {
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Title: Urban forest biomass estimates: is it important to use allometric relationships developed specifically for urban trees?
Author: McHale, M.R.; Burke, I.C.; Lefsky, M.A.; Peper, P.J.; McPherson, E.G.;
Source: Urban Ecosystems 12: 95-113
Publication Series: Scientific Journal (JRNL)
Description: Many studies have analyzed the benefits, costs, and carbon storage capacity associated with urban trees. These studies have been limited by a lack of research on urban tree biomass, such that estimates of carbon storage in urban systems have relied upon allometric relationships developed in traditional forests. As urbanization increases globally, it is becoming important to more accurately evaluate carbon dynamics in these systems. Our goal was to understand the variability and range of potential error associated with using allometric relationships developed outside of urban environments. We compared biomass predictions from allometric relationships developed for urban trees in Fort Collins, Colorado to predictions from allometric equations from traditional forests, at both the individual species level and entire communities. A few of the equations from the literature predicted similar biomass to the urban-based predictions, but the range in variability for individual trees was over 300%. This variability declined at increasingly coarse scales, reaching as low as 60% for a street tree community containing 11 tree species and 10, 551 trees. When comparing biomass estimates between cities that implement various allometric relationships, we found that differences could be a function of variability rather than urban forest structure and function. Standardizing the methodology and implementing averaged equations across cities could be one potential solution to reducing variability; however, more accurate quantification of biomass and carbon storage in urban forests may depend on development of allometric relationships specifically for urban trees.
Keywords: Biomass, carbon dioxide, allometric relationships, volume equations, urban
- We recommend that you also print this page and attach it to the printout of the article, to retain the full citation information.
- This article was written and prepared by U.S. Government employees on official time, and is therefore in the public domain.
XML: View XML
McHale, M.R.; Burke, I.C.; Lefsky, M.A.; Peper, P.J.; McPherson, E.G. 2009. Urban forest biomass estimates: is it important to use allometric relationships developed specifically for urban trees? Urban Ecosystems 12(1): 95-113.
Get the latest version of the Adobe Acrobat reader or Acrobat Reader for Windows with Search and Accessibility | <urn:uuid:f3549393-8754-49dd-81c5-2bcf1e7d5918> | {
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Picture coloring activities for the little guy turned out to have many benefits in the development of their physical and mental skills. There are some reasons of ideas coloring pages. Some of the benefits of coloring activities for children include below:
1. Its represents the expression media
Children desperately need a medium of expression to convey his ideas. By coloring pictures of the children were given the freedom to interpret the ability of reason, for example, the child will tend to give color to the object leaves green and blue for the sky.
2. Coloring also provides space for children to express themselves by using his favorite color
It helps children to know the differences of color. The kids were happy coloring will more quickly recognize the names of colors and the difference between the colors of crayons or colored pencils are used.
3. It also holds the child to train true stationery
Many of the children know first crayons or colored pencils before they learn to write. This is very helpful when the child began to learn to write, as he has been accustomed to holding and controlling the stationery.
4. It also trains the capability of children coordination
By coloring a picture, without realizing the child will learn to use the ability of coordination because the coloring is required good coordination between eye and hand. Children who used to dye tend to have a much better work than the first time he did it.
5. It is also developing motor skills
Coloring activities can help improve gross motor skills (gross motors skills) is through arm movements and fine motor skills (fine motors skills) through the movement of the fingers.
6. Coloring improves concentration
Coloring requires concentration in order to obtain satisfactory results. Coloring activity can train children to concentrate on his work and ignore the surrounding atmosphere.
7. Coloring is also coaching kids to know the detail object
When first exposed to colored drawing paper, the child probably will polish crayon or colored pencil on paper without regard to the entire field of image parts. Gradually she began to use the lines of the image as field boundaries that need to be colored, so that the child must understand the details of the object to be colored before dyeing.
Training Children to Make Targets can also be done through this coloring activity. Coloring activities has a target to give color staining the whole object. It encourages children to get the job done completely and with the way carefully to get the best possible results. | <urn:uuid:4beb8dd7-2176-4225-95c3-e736c2dca56d> | {
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Kenya is inching closer to the commercialisation of a drought-tolerant maize variety developed using the controversial genetic modification technology.
Local and international scientists estimate that the maize variety will be ready for farmers’ sampling in three years time.
The Water Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA) has harvested its confined field trials, the fifth since the experiments started in 2010, which impressed scientists.
In such experiments, confined trials are conducted for seven seasons, and then subjected to National Performance Trials for two seasons.
Read the full article HERE | <urn:uuid:6e2228d9-dcc2-46f8-b217-f5ad90f7c07d> | {
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Sea-level rise to drive coastal flooding, regardless of changes in hurricane activity
Clamor about whether climate change will cause increasingly destructive tropical storms may be overshadowing a more unrelenting threat to coastal property — sea-level rise — according to a team of researchers writing in the journal Nature this week.
After reviewing nearly 100 research studies, the scientists say accelerated sea-level rise certainly will increase the flooding and property damage triggered by tropical cyclones — commonly known as hurricanes in the Atlantic and Northern Pacific — but predicting where, how often, and how powerful these storms will be when they make landfall is full of uncertainty.
"The potential for sea-level rise to dramatically change the landscape is an understudied aspect of coastal flooding," said Jennifer Irish, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering with the Virginia Tech College of Engineering. "For example, shoreline erosion, barrier-island degradation, and new tidal inlet formation — these sedimentary changes could lead to catastrophic changes in hurricane flood risk in some areas."
The research team, led by Jonathan D. Woodruff, an assistant professor of sedimentology and coastal processes at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, with Irish and Suzana Camargo, a Lamont research professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, said regardless of changes in storm activity, rising sea levels will become the dominant driver of flooding and coastal damage.
The scientists cited information from the International Disaster Database of the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters that indicates since 1970, more than 60 percent of all economic losses — about $400 billion — occurred in the North Atlantic, even though it is one of the least active basins for hurricanes.
The researchers stressed the importance of a holistic approach to manage coastal systems, especially in the context of almost certain flooding from tropical cyclones because of rising sea levels.
"Sea-level rise, severe storms, changing climate, erosion, and policy issues are just some of the factors to assess in order to understand future risk," Irish said. "We reviewed just three of the physical factors — tropical cyclone climatology, sea-level rise, and shoreline change. If we look at them separately, we don't see how they are interconnected. But if we pull back to look at the whole picture, we stand a better chance of protecting our homes, roadways, energy and water networks, and the most critical and expensive infrastructure along the coastlines."
The review suggested that it is practical to focus on approaches that integrate vertical and landward retreat — meaning planners should consider elevated structures and building further inland — with other engineering and management measures, including sediment management.
Global sea level is expected to rise about one meter by 2100. According to a simulation study the researchers reviewed, floods currently to be considered 100-year events in New York City could become three- to 20-year events.
"It is widely accepted that sea level will rise. We just don't know how much," Irish said. "We need to consider the full range of sea-level estimates and plan our engineering strategies from that, designing for moderate protection now in a way that these designs can be modified in the future if necessary. The Dutch have been dealing with this problem for centuries, so it can be done." | <urn:uuid:366dd5ed-9eb9-4b43-9f50-2896b24db71c> | {
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Libertarianism – people are entitled to intrinsic respect; the fundamental right is the right to liberty.
Free to Choose
With humorous references to Bill Gates and Michael Jordan, Sandel introduces the libertarian notion that redistributive taxation—taxing the rich to give to the poor—is akin to forced labor.
No paternalist legislation – laws that protect people from themselves
No morals legislation – laws that promote virtuous living
No progressive taxation – redistributing income or wealth from the rich to the poor
Am I a libertarian? What do I think of these principles?
Paternalistic and moral laws – a certain minimum amount is required to sustain the stability of society. As little as possible.
Progressive taxation – required, for the same reason. Large inequalities make the society unstable. Aristotle: the poorer 90% only accept that they are poor because thay are convinced that they have a reasonable chance to be rich. Rousseau: the society does you a favour: sustains favourable environment. If you live in a society, the social contract applies.
The moral goal is to provide a prosperous society, where everyone has equal chance and everyone has a large amount of guaranteed freedom. | <urn:uuid:68cb2fc5-725e-49a5-9045-e9e149354efa> | {
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Asymmetric encryption increases the security of the encryption process by utilizing two separate but mathematically related keys known as a public key and a private key. Asymmetric encryption algorithms use a key mathematically related key pair for encryption and decryption. One key of the key pair is is known as the public key and other one is private key.
The private key is possessed only by the user or computer that generates the key pair. The public key can be distributed to any person who wishes to send encrypted data to the private key holder. It is impossible to compute the private key if you know the public key. Hence it is safe to publish the public key.
If the public key is used for encryption, the associated private key is used for decryption.
If the private key is used for encryption, the associated public key is used for decryption
First, the data sender obtains the recipient’s public key. The plaintext is encrypted with asymmetric encryption algorithm, using the recipient’s public key and the ciphertext is created. After the encyprion process, the ciphertext is sent to the recepient through the unsecure network. The recipient decrypts the ciphertext with his private key and now he can access the plaintext from the sender. | <urn:uuid:f303688f-66b2-40a1-981e-8ee13ae075bd> | {
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The globalization of food and public health means the FDA must be everywhere at once.
The FDA has just released a classy new report on Global Engagement, summarizing its efforts to deal with issues raised by the globalization of drugs, medical devices, and foods.
This is a big deal. In 2009, 300,000 foreign facilities in more than 150 countries exported $2 trillion worth of FDA-regulated products to the United States.
Given these numbers alone, the FDA has some challenges.
In 2011, one out of every six FDA-regulated food products in the U.S. came from abroad. Imports of fresh fruits, vegetables, coffee, tea, and cocoa have more than doubled since 2000.
- 80 percent of seafood
- ~50 percent of fresh fruit
- ~20 percent of fresh vegetables
As the report explains,
- Many products entering the United States are made or grown in countries that lack the necessary regulatory oversight to ensure their quality and safety.
- Greater numbers of suppliers, more complex products, and intricate multinational supply chains introduce risks to product safety and quality, including more opportunities for economic adulteration and the spread of contaminated products.
- FDA can only realistically inspect a small percentage (less than three percent) of the enormous volume of food products arriving at U.S. ports of entry, making it crucial that the Agency focus on ensuring that food products meet U.S. standards before they reach the United States.
To deal with this problem, the FDA has opened offices in:
- China: Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou
- India: New Delhi and Mumbai
- Latin America: San Jose, Costa Rica; Santiago, Chile; and Mexico City, Mexico
- Europe: Brussels, Belgium; London, United Kingdom; and Parma, Italy
- Asia-Pacific: FDA headquarters
- Sub-Saharan Africa: Pretoria, South Africa
- Middle East and North Africa: Amman, Jordan
The FDA seems seriously concerned about its global initiatives and the safety problems posed by our globalized food supply.
The volume seems impossible to manage. Let's hope the FDA’s efforts do some good.
This post originally appeared on Food Politics, an Atlantic partner site. | <urn:uuid:dfbb28fc-2b72-4370-8e28-a5e0d35cebfe> | {
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The newest techniques for conserving water in the garden are over 1,000 years old! And if they worked for ancient people around the world, these water-saving ideas are sure to help keep your garden healthy even when it’s dry.
This demonstration waffle garden at the Denver Botanic Gardens is planted with the “three sisters” vegetable combination of corn, beans and squash.
Photo Credit: Jodi Torpey
A sunken, water-filled unglazed clay pot can provide a continuous source of moisture for plants in difficult-to-irrigate areas.
Photo Credit: Jodi Torpey
Native Americans survived for centuries in the desert by harvesting rainwater to grow their crops. Three of their ancient traditions continue to provide lessons in water conservation because the message remains the same: Collect all the moisture you can, and hold onto it for as long as you can.
The Zuni in New Mexico used sunken beds called waffle gardens for growing high-value crops like tobacco and chili peppers. It’s easy to rebuild these prehistoric gardens today and benefit from their water-retaining capacity. Waffle gardens have sunken 2-square-foot planting areas surrounded by ground-level berms. These berms are several inches high and made from unamended soil. Each depression in the waffle catches rainfall and holds water close to plant roots.
Buried clay pot irrigation is another ancient water-saving method used in areas of perennial drought like Mexico, Central America, Asia and Africa. This method is estimated to be two times as effective as drip irrigation and 10 times more efficient than conventional surface irrigation. Large earthen jars were used 2,000 years ago, but unglazed clay pots work just as well today.
If you’d like to try this method in your own garden, here’s how to do it: Select any size clay pot and cover the hole at the bottom with masking tape. Fill in the drainage hole with silicon caulk and let dry. Then bury the pot to its lip in your garden. Next, place plants or seeds near the container. Fill the pot with water and cover with a simple lid, like a planter saucer. Continue to fill the pot with water as needed throughout the season. The water will slowly seep through the pores of the pot, keeping the surrounding soil moist.
Delivering water directly to plant roots like this has two advantages: Plants receive a constant supply of water during the growing season, and weeds are kept to a minimum. You can use this buried clay pot irrigation method to grow annuals, perennials and even container gardens.
Another gardening method borrowed from the ancients is companion planting. For example, Native Americans understood the benefit of planting corn, beans and squash together. This vegetable combination is called the “three sisters” because the plants complement each other. The corn provides tall stalks for the pole beans to climb, and the beans help replenish the soil with important nutrients. The large squash leaves serve as a living mulch to maintain soil moisture and choke out weeds.
You can plant the three sisters in your own garden in the same hill, or try it in a waffle garden. Simply plant the corn in the middle of the hole, with the beans surrounding the corn and the squash planted in one or two corners.
Native Americans survived for centuries in the desert by harvesting rainwater to grow their crops. Today’s smart gardeners can still tap into these ancient strategies to make the most of every drop. | <urn:uuid:b4bb8474-8e06-4853-8807-30c061f7b418> | {
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It's hard to imagine right now but spring is right around the corner and that means blooming flowers.
But a new study by researchers at Harvard and UW-Madison shows that some flowers are blooming much earlier than before, some up to a month early.
Keepers of La Crosse’s friendship garden have noticed a change. They say they've been able to successfully grow plants that you wouldn't normally see in our area.
"We are able to grow some plants that typically, you would not have 15 years ago, you would not have tried zone 5 plants like the tree peonies and the Japanese maples and things like that," said Master Gardener Marilyn Rebarcheck.
Rebarchek says one reason is shorter winters which means an earlier thaw. But she warns mother nature is unpredictable and things could swing back the other way. | <urn:uuid:46d99a3c-d1f0-404e-bc79-035b7f8cd346> | {
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In our workshops and trainings, we have come across some misunderstandings that we wanted to take a minute to clarify. These are only a few- there are more out there, so will be posting at least one more blog about this. Feel free to comment on others you may have come across.
Myth: CFL Are Dangerous and filled with Mercury
Fact: CFLs are JUST AS SAFE as incandescent bulbs. While CFLs do contain a small amount of mercury (the size of a ball point pen tip), this is actually 4 x less* than what is produced in providing the additional electricity for an incandescent bulb over its lifetime.
If a CFL breaks, pick up the pieces with a wet paper towel, seal it in a bag, and place it in an electronic-waste collection space (along with your batteries, inkjet cartridges, CDs, cell phones and chargers).
* Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
When it says it is Biodegradable, it means it is biodegradable
Fact: “Biodegradable” is a label that only means something (in the US) if it is tested in CA– if it decomposes within a year, it is considered biodegradable and can earn the California label. The Biodegradable Products Institute (BPI) is a professional association of key individuals and groups from government, industry and academia, which promotes the use, and recycling of biodegradable polymeric materials (via composting). Together with the US Composting Council, it has developed a label for consumers to look for.
All fish is good for me and the environment.
Fact: Contaminants are commonly found in Fish and Shellfish
Where do they come from?
Industrial and municipal discharges, agricultural practices, and storm water runoff can all deposit harmful substances directly into the water.
Fish can absorb organic chemicals from the water, suspended sediments, and their food.
Specific Contaminants include:
- Mercury: Since methylmercury binds to proteins, it is found throughout fish tissue, including muscle tissue that makes up fish steaks and fillets.
- PCBs: PCBs can build up in the fatty tissues of fish and other animals. High concentrations pose serious health risks to people who frequently eat contaminated fish.
What are the risks?
- Health problems that may result from eating contaminated fish range from small, hard-to-detect changes to birth defects and cancer.
- More info can be found on the EDF site
Do the health benefits of omega-3s outweigh the risks associated with contaminants in seafood? Fish is generally healthy to eat, but there are some types you should eat infrequently, if at all. Consider the following:
- For young children and women of childbearing age, consumption of mercury-contaminated fish can severely impact a child’s development.
- Older women and men may find it an acceptable tradeoff to exceed recommended seafood meal limits to increase their omega-3 intake.
- People at high risk of cardiovascular disease must weigh the cancer risk of eating fish high in PCBs with the benefits of eating fish high in omega-3s, in which case the benefits of omega-3s may outweigh the cancer risk (1 in 100,000 – the level recommended by the EPA). However, these chemicals are known to cause serious health problems besides cancer, so the tradeoffs are not simple.
The good news is that there are several low-contaminant, high-omega-3 seafood options available (see Eco-Best list), so there’s no need to risk eating contaminated fish.
The global catch of wild fish leveled off over 20 years ago and 70 percent of the world’s fisheries are being harvested at capacity or are in decline. Today, half of our seafood comes from farms. People are raising fish, shrimp and oysters like farmers raise cattle and chickens. But the ecological impact of fish farming depends on the species chosen, where the farm is located, and how they are raised. Learn more from the Monterey Bay Aquarium or Oceana. | <urn:uuid:e23feace-510a-4908-a2a8-d7ef118d67dd> | {
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First sentence: Good Morning, Chickens.
Premise/plot: The Great Chicken Escape is inspired by true events. The author while living with 'a small group of monastics on Spruce Island, Alaska' witnesses the great escape. One day the chickens escaped their coop. The author note reads,
"Some of the more timid were caught, but a rogue group successfully eluded the nuns. The nuns decided that there was no real danger, only the possibility of a great chicken adventure. They let the chickens roam, enjoying the freedom of the forest. There was no worry, for the chickens would return home to roost; after all, they are chickens."The illustrations are black and white.
© 2018 Becky Laney of Young Readers | <urn:uuid:dfb6a4b5-96ae-48f2-b379-7d06623eb162> | {
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by John Hallock
May 12, 2005 | With the costs of populating drug pipelines rising sharply, drug companies are exploring new in vivo animal models to guide early pre-clinical drug development. Despite a plethora of available technologies to discern biological mechanisms, the relevance of such technologies is only as good as the physiological models to which they are applied. A complete picture of the biological interactions occurring in drug action and toxicity requires the examination of intact multicellular organisms.
One scientist leading the charge for emerging surrogate in vivo models in drug development is Randall Peterson, assistant professor of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. After obtaining his Ph.D. from Harvard University in the laboratory of Stuart Schreiber, where he first demonstrated the feasibility of small-molecule screens in zebrafish, Peterson joined the lab of Mark Fishman (now the president of NIBR). Peterson is on the Scientific Advisory Board of Montigen Pharmaceuticals, and is a founder of Teleome Labs.
GETTING REAL: Simpler organisms
permit in vivo work prevously
restricted to in vitro says Peterson.
photo by Michael Manning
Peterson’s group is currently using zebrafish for an entirely new application: pre-clinical drug development. This zebrafish model is allowing phenotype-based discovery of lead compounds that can suppress disease phenotypes (see Nature Biotechnology, May 2004), as well as new approaches for testing compound safety. Bio•IT World contributor John Hallock spoke with Peterson about issues surrounding the use of in vivo surrogate models in drug development and safety.
Q. What are some of the emerging in vivo models being used in drug development today?
Peterson: Much of the effort in developing novel in vivo models is focused on the high-end models — increasingly complex and expensive mammals like genetically modified mice, dogs, pigs, etc. These models are clearly very important, but I’m most excited about the low-end models such as the roundworm and the zebrafish that are beginning to enter into the drug development process. They aren’t as sophisticated, but they enable all sorts of previously unimagined applications because they are so inexpensive and easy to use. These models are bringing the advantages of in vivo studies to drug development steps that had been strictly limited to in vitro approaches.
What aspects of drug development do these new in vivo models address?
I think they address two issues: first, the difficulty in identifying optimal therapeutic targets for many diseases and, second, the issue of drug toxicity. [F]or many diseases, we don’t know what the optimal targets are, so it is difficult to use traditional target-based discovery approaches in the absence of a target. One solution is coming in the form of these emerging in vivo models that can be used in high-throughput chemical screens. By modeling diseases in these organisms, one can screen for compounds that reverse the disease phenotype and restore the animal to normal health, even when an effective therapeutic target has not been identified. Compounds discovered by this phenotype-based approach not only make interesting therapeutic lead compounds, but also may help identify and validate novel therapeutic targets.
How do these new models differ from traditional animal models in evaluating drug safety?
The capabilities of the zebrafish, for example, differ from those of the mammalian species in terms of their similarity to humans, but also in terms of cost and scale. Because of their high costs and difficulty, mammalian models are generally reserved for later preclinical stages of drug development. As a result, toxicities are only being discovered after significant time and resources have been invested in a drug candidate. Zebrafish toxicity assays are admittedly less sophisticated than traditional models, but they can be performed quickly, inexpensively, and with miniscule compound quantities. These advantages make it possible to derive preliminary toxicity data from the initial high-throughput screen, to prioritize initial lead compounds, or even to prescreen entire small-molecule libraries to remove potentially problematic compounds. The zebrafish is unlikely to eliminate the need for the more-sophisticated mammalian models, but it could greatly reduce the number of toxic compounds that are tested in mammals by identifying unsafe compounds much earlier.
What are the benefits of the systems biology approach for evaluating drug efficacy and safety?
The direct effect of a drug binding to its target is only a part of a drug’s biological activity. The effect of the drug binding to off-target molecules, the effects of its metabolites, and other pharmacodynamic factors all influence efficacy and safety. These secondary effects can lead to unexpected toxicities or can be beneficial. For example, beyond the cholesterol-lowering power of statins, some of their benefit appears to be due to off-target anti-inflammatory effects. Secondary effects are not easily measured in vitro, so you can’t know a compound’s true efficacy or safety until you test it in an intact animal. That is a strong impetus to involve animal models early in the process.
What are some of the key benefits surrounding the use of zebrafish specifically?
The zebrafish is a vertebrate, so it has most of the organ systems and physiological functions that humans have. Numerous zebrafish disease models have already been developed, the zebrafish genome has been sequenced, and genomic tools like microarrays and cDNA collections are well developed. Zebrafish are prolific and inexpensive to raise, and in embryonic and larval stages fit easily in the wells of 384-well plates. Another advantage is their transparency, which permits organ morphology and function to be monitored in the living organism using rapid, robust imaging tools. Finally, unlike many other model organisms, zebrafish absorb compounds readily from their surrounding environment; treatments can be performed simply by adding compounds to their water.
How consistent are pathologies and pathogenesis across species?
|GLASS HOUSES: Angiograms |
highlighting the vasculature of a
pair of mutant zebrafish. The
defect in the upper fish has
been suppressed by treatment
with the small molecule GS4012.
The background shows human
endothelial cells induced to
assemble into tubules by
treatment with GS4012.
No animal model is a perfect surrogate for human pathogenesis, and one would expect similarities to decrease with phylogenetic distance. Therefore, emerging models like the zebrafish will in most cases be less predictive than mammalian models. That said, [our] data suggest there will be more similarities than differences between zebrafish and mammals. For example, several of the genetic mutations identified in zebrafish cause similar diseases in humans. Most of the drugs that cause cardiotoxicity in humans have a similar effect in zebrafish, and compounds that have been discovered by screening in zebrafish have similar effects in human cells. Time and experience will help us understand the limits of these newer models, but for now the remarkable thing is how much of the biology and pathology is conserved.
What should be done to bring newer models into mainstream drug development? Do you see any early adopters?
As with most technologies, they will only enter mainstream use as early adopters begin to have success with them. Among the large pharmaceutical companies, Novartis seems to be taking the lead, although a couple of the other large players appear to be following suit. Also, small companies like Phylonix, Zygogen, DanioLabs, and Montigen Pharmaceuticals are embracing these emerging in vivo models, either for their own discovery efforts or to provide larger companies with access to models.
How critical is academia in advancing chemical biology and drug discovery?
Academics are becoming increasingly interested in chemical biology and small-molecule discovery as a tool for fundamental biological research. In addition, affordable high-throughput screening technologies and chemical libraries are now available, and the top academic institutions have established core facilities for screening. As a result, large-scale screens that once seemed out of reach are now approachable for many basic and disease-oriented academic researchers. The influx of academics into small-molecule discovery is having two major effects. First, it is spurring new technological developments, especially in the area of phenotype-based screens. Second, it is bringing small-molecule discovery efforts to many diseases and targets that have been neglected by the industry. | <urn:uuid:36da99fa-43c7-445b-8964-7079b7c80805> | {
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Chapter 9 ("Tuning Apache and mod_perl") in mod_perl Developer's Cookbook, by Geoffrey Young, Paul Lindner, and Randy Kobes (Sams Publishing).
The High-Availability Linux Project, the definitive guide to load-balancing techniques: http://www.linux-ha.org/.
lbnamed, a load-balancing name server written in Perl: http://www.stanford.edu/~riepel/lbnamed/, http://www.stanford.edu/~riepel/lbnamed/bof.talk/, or http://www.stanford.edu/~schemers/docs/lbnamed/lbnamed.html.
The Linux Virtual Server Project: http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/.
The latest IPFilter: http://coombs.anu.edu.au/~avalon/.
This filter includes some simple load-balancing code that allows a round-robin distribution onto several machines via ipnat. This may be a simple solution for a few specific load problems.
The lingerd server and all the documentation are available from http://www.iagora.com/about/software/lingerd/.
The mod_proxy_add_forward Apache module, complete with instructions on how to compile it, is available from one of these URLs: http://modules.apache.org/search?id=124 or http://develooper.com/code/mpaf/mod_proxy_add_forward.c .
Apache::Proxy::Info, a friendly mod_perl counterpart to mod_proxy_add_forward.
Solaris 2.x—Tuning Your TCP/IP Stack and More: http://www.sean.de/Solaris/soltune.html.
This page talks about the TCP/IP stack and various tricks of tuning your system to get the most out of it as a web server. While the information is for the Solaris 2.x OS, most of it will be relevant of other Unix flavors. At the end of the page, an extensive list of related literature is presented. | <urn:uuid:b65f1b98-ee34-4766-b319-5ae12c65f4a1> | {
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Google has acquired reCAPTCHA and plans to use the system for digitizing books. Wait… what? CAPTCHA is the method of requiring a user to type in a visually obscured word to prove they are human. How can this digitize books? The answer is a bit obscure and takes some time to discover, but you’ll have fun along the way.
The Google blog links to a Google TechTalk video on Human Computation as an example of how they plan to use their new acquisition. It’s embedded below but at 51 minutes we figure most won’t watch it all so we did it for you. This fascinating discussion looks at how people are already being tricked into solving CAPTCHA challenges, and shows several tested implementations of getting people to input cognitive data computers cannot, under the guise of playing games.
Spammers have to beat the CAPTCHA system in order to get large numbers of free email accounts. There have been examples of software overcoming this test such as the greasemonkey script that beat MegaUpload’s security, or Time Magazine’s poll being hacked. But, for the most part, only humans can pass the test. People seeking to bypass millions of CAPTCHA challenges either pay for sweatshop laborers to solve them or, more creatively, they get you to solve them when cruising for porn. This is the proof of concept; we can use people to interpret words computers cannot if we use the right carrot.
Talked about in the video, the ESP game was written in order to correctly tag photographs. Players are shown pictures and asked to type what they see. The round keeps going until the two have typed the same word. With a lot of players, and proper safeguards, these tags are incredibly accurate. Furthermore, the game has been very popular and has the potential to accomplish herculean feats in short amounts of time (namely, tag every image in Google’s image search in just a few months).
It seems that Google plans to use these methods to digitize books that are otherwise very difficult to scan with Optical Character Recognition. According to the video, 9 billion human hours were spent playing solitaire in 2003. What if a small portion of this time could be diverted over to playing games that added to the digitized knowledge cache? If the right type of verification game can be developed it will allow Google to tap society as their typing minions. It’s an interesting proposition and frankly we hope to see it happen. | <urn:uuid:3e4ba09b-36fa-418a-a41d-06550d8aa161> | {
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Elizabeth Glaser contracts HIV through a blood transfusion during childbirth. Elizabeth and her husband, Paul Glaser, later learn that she unknowingly passed the virus to her children, Ariel and Jake.
The Pediatric AIDS Foundation is created by Elizabeth and her two friends, Susie Zeegen and Susan DeLaurentis, after Ariel loses her battle with AIDS at age 7.
Elizabeth and Paul Glaser ask the U.S. Congress to provide funding to test HIV drugs in children. While AZT, a promising drug treatment, had already been approved by the FDA, its potential impact on children was still unknown due to a lack of research. This, in addition to the Glasers' early wins at securing research funding, set the stage for the Foundation's global leadership in research.
Professional basketball player Earvin “Magic” Johnson announces he has HIV and retires from the NBA. He credits Elizabeth Glaser with giving him the courage to speak out.
Elizabeth Glaser passes away from AIDS-related illnesses. The Foundation is renamed in her memory and rededicates itself to eliminating HIV and AIDS. Almost twenty years later, pediatric AIDS is virtually eliminated in the United States and Elizabeth's legacy lives on in those who are fighting to eliminate this disease around the world.
As a global “go-to” leader, the Foundation committed to achieving the same results in the rest of the world with the Call to Action (CTA) project, supporting successful prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV (PMTCT) services in Cameroon, Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa, Thailand, and Uganda. By 2010, CTA had enabled the Foundation to reach nearly 4 million women with PMTCT services.
The Foundation initiates Project HEART, a public-private partnership to expand access to HIV care and treatment programs in Cote d’Ivoire, South Africa, Tanzania, and Zambia. Project HEART’s original goal was to reach 2 million people with antiretroviral therapy by 2008. The Foundation far surpassed that goal and continues its work in these countries, as well as 12 others around the world.
The Foundation helps renew the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), authorizing $48 billion in global health programs. Initially launched in 2003, PEPFAR revolutionized funding for AIDS programs and allowed the Foundation’s global work and reach to expand dramatically.
The Foundation remains committed to the elimination of pediatric AIDS, working in 16 of the most severely affected countries and more than 5,500 sites around the world. The Foundation has reached nearly 12.2 million women with PMTCT services. Nearly a quarter of all HIV-positive pregnant women worldwide who receive medicines to prevent transmission of HIV to their babies do so through Foundation-supported programs. Still, an urgent need remains. Only 52% of HIV-positive mothers-to-be have access to critical PMTCT services.
2015 marks the goal of ending pediatric AIDS in Zimbabwe, Lesotho, and Swaziland. Announced in 2011, these campaigns notably recognize the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation as a leading implementation partner that will be integral to reaching this milestone.
Jake Glaser was not even two years old when he was diagnosed HIV-positive in 1986. His mother, Elizabeth Glaser, had contracted the virus five years earlier through a contaminated blood transfusion. She unknowingly passed the virus to Jake while pregnant and to his older sister, Ariel, through her breast milk. Today, Jake is 26 years old and healthy. "Thanks to my mom and the work of many others, I am able to lead a normal and productive life," he says. Elizabeth's relentless advocacy made sure that Jake - and other children living with HIV - could have access to lifesaving pediatric HIV treatments and medicines. "But," Jake says, "the truth is there are still so many kids, many of them my close friends, who are not as lucky. The truth is we are far from done in the fight against AIDS, and there are a lot of kids out there who need our help in order to survive."
Dr. Kassaye was an adolescent when the first cases of HIV were diagnosed in her native Ethiopia. She saw the toll the growing epidemic took on friends and loved ones firsthand.“Everyone knew someone who was affected,” she says. “There was a lot of fear and sadness.”Those experiences stayed with Dr. Kassaye after she moved tothe U.S. for college and medical school. “I wanted to focus on research that directly supports HIV/AIDS program implementation,”she says. “I wanted to bring innovations into practice.” Dr. Kassaye’s work at the Foundation allows her to do just that. She works on operations and clinical research, collaborating with staff in the field to identify and solve challenges in the implementation of health programs and to research new tools and technologies that will mean better health for babies and mother around the world. Dr. Kassaye also works in a low-income health clinic in Washington, D.C., a city with one of the highest rates of HIV infection in the U.S. As a mother, this work is especially important to Dr. Kassaye. “I see young pregnant women, and I enjoy working with them one-on-one. I will do anything to make sure their babies are born healthy. To me, even one baby born with HIV is a failure.”
In September 1996, Florence gave birth to her daughter Nomthunzi. Three months later, Florence’s husband died, and Nomthunzi had become ill. Fearing the worst, Florence took Nomthunzi to a local hospital. Both she and Florence tested positive for HIV. Nomthunzi fought the disease for several more weeks, but because antiretroviral treatment was not yet available for children in South Africa, she passed away in February 1997. A few years later, Florence was introduced to the lifesaving treatments and services being offered by clinics supported by the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. Finding “the Foundation, for me, was a highlight of my life,” she says. “I knew that for the first time, there was someone who cared.” Through Foundation-supported prevention of mother-to-child transmission treatments, Florence gave birth to an HIV negative baby. Today, four-year-old Alex remains HIV-free and continues to thrive. Florence is healthy as well, pursuing her degree and speaking out on behalf of women and children with AIDS as a Foundation Ambassador. | <urn:uuid:c3b6d612-0643-40b8-8f75-694620d3c0b8> | {
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Vitamins play an integral part and role in the body. It is possible for human beings more so the adults to produce and maintain their own vitamin nutrients through feeding healthy and balanced diets full of fruits and vegetables. However, human beings have always found this quite a challenge hence demanding and necessitating multivitamins. It is therefore through using vitamin supplements that a person combats nutrition deficiency in the body and embraced a nutritious life. There are benefits that a person get to enjoy when using the supplements but there are also disadvantages as well. This article helps you learn about the advantages and disadvantages of using vitamin supplements,.
Nowadays, many people have issues that relate to nutrition deficiency. There are so many vitamin types and they are acquired from different foods and diets and it’s easier to miss them as one might be a vegetarian and lack to acquire all the vitamins from the dairy products. Basically, taking some multivitamins will ultimately help dispense the deficiency. It is evident that these supplements will help rejuvenate the nutrition value of your body but they don’t have the power to supplement the energy or rather the calories you need. Therefore, they are only to be used after eating a balanced diet.
When a multivitamin is being manufactured, there are special formulations in mind and the purpose is always defined. It is through the manufacturing process that the purpose is defined. For instance, there are those that help in hair growth, depression and even pain and swelling for the arthritis cases. Therefore,. These supplements are overly beneficial to the body. Studies have shown that you need to take one pill a day and this should be after eating a healthy and strong meal. It is recommended that you use a pill per day as a supplement to the healthy and good meal that you eat. This daily pill will be your insurance to good nutrition hence good health.
The last but not the least, vitamin supplements can cause health disorders in your body. For instance, where you have phenylketonuria, you will always suffer severe consequences as these vitamins have aspartame. Therefore, there is more about these supplements that you need to understand through consulting your doctor. Additionally, people with kidney diseases and complications are also affected. Therefore, ensure to have your doctor availing sufficient advice on how to use these vitamin supplements.
There is need to use the right doses. Overdosing will always invite complications. Therefore, you should always have a doctor directing you on how to use these multivitamins to avoid having some elements excessively accumulating in the body. It is where they excessively accumulate that you experience health disorders. Even though the above info shows that vitamin supplements are beneficial and they should be used regularly, it’s wise to seek a doctor opinion on this. | <urn:uuid:9f7d60ac-5bd6-442e-8ff6-a1427b68a8c4> | {
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Possible BPA Link to Tooth Defect Identified
A tooth enamel defect affecting up to 18 percent of children ages 6 to 9 years may be linked to BPA, a recent study concluded.
The enamel defect, MIH or molar incisor hypomineralization, causes white or brown opaque spots on some children's top and bottom middle four teeth. A study of rats that were exposed to the industrial chemical BPA showed defects similar to those of MIH. Teeth exhibiting MIH can become sensitive, painful, and prone to cavities.
BPA is found in many plastic products and food containers. Until recently, it was also found in packages, bottles and cups intended for use by infants and small children. This study is the first to show that BPA affects dental cells and tooth enamel synthesis.
The study was presented at the Endrocrine Society's annual meeting. | <urn:uuid:d7937701-e375-49e5-9f78-e7e01d0ec31f> | {
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The made-up word chrononymy could be applied to the study of the names of geological divisions and their places on the International Stratigraphic Chart. Until 2008 that was something of a slow-burner, as careers go. It all began with Giovanni Arduino and Johann Gotlob Lehman in the mid- to late 18th century, during the informal historic episode known as the Enlightenment. To them we owe the first statements of stratigraphic principles and the beginning of stratigraphic divisions: rocks divided into the major segments of Primitive, Secondary, Tertiary and Quaternary (Arduino). Thus stratigraphy seeks to set up a fundamental scale or chart for expressing Earth’s history as revealed by rocks. The first two divisions bit the dust long ago; Tertiary is now an informal synonym for the Cenozoic Era; only Quaternary clings on as the embattled Period at the end of the Cenozoic. All 11 Systems/Periods of the Phanerozoic, their 37 Series/Epochs and 85 Stages/Ages in the latest version of the International Stratigraphic Chart have been thrashed out since then, much being accomplished in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Curiously, the world body responsible for sharpening up the definition of this system of ‘chrononymy’, the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), seems not to have seen fit to record the history of stratigraphy: a great mystery. Without it geologists would be unable to converse with one another and the world at large.
Yet now an increasing number of scientists are seriously proposing a new entry at the 4th level of division after Eon, Era and Period: a new Epoch that acknowledges the huge global impact of human activity on atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere and even lithosphere. They want it to be called the Anthropocene, and for some its eventual acceptance ought to relegate the current Holocene Epoch, in which humans invented agriculture, a form of economic intercourse and exchange known as capital and all the trappings of modern industry, to the 5th division or Stage. Earth-pages has been muttering about the Anthropocene for the past decade, as charted in a number of the links above, so if you want to know which way its author is leaning and how he came to find the proposal an unnecessary irritation, have a look at them. Last week things became sufficiently serious for another comment. Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin of the Department of Geography at University College London have summarised the scientific grounds alleged to justify an Anthropocene Epoch and its strict definition in a Nature Perspective (Lewis, S.J. & Maslin, M.A. 2015. Defining the Anthropocene. Nature, v. 519, p. 171-180).-=, which is interestingly discussed in the same Issue by Richard Monastersky.
Lewis and Maslin present two dates that their arguments and accepted stratigraphic protocols suggest as candidates for the start of the Anthropocene: 1610 and 1964 CE, both of which relate to features that are expressed by geological records that should last indefinitely. The first is a decline and eventual recovery in the atmospheric CO2 level recorded in high-resolution Antarctic ice core records between 1570 and 1620 CE that can be ascribed to the decline in the population of the Americas’ native peoples from an estimated 60 to 6 million. This result of the impact of European first colonisation – disease, slaughter, enslavement and famine – reduced agriculture and fire use and saw the regeneration of 5 x 107 hectares of forest, which drew down CO2 globally. It also coincides with the coolest part of the Little Ice Age from 1594-1677 CE. They caution against the start of the Industrial Revolution as an alternative for a ‘Golden Spike’ since it was a diachronous event, beginning in Europe. Instead, they show that the second proposal for a start in 1964 has a good basis in the record of global anthropogenic effects on the Earth marked by the peak fallout of radioactive isotopes generated by atomic weapons tests during the Cold War, principally 14C with a 5730 year half life, together with others more long-lived. The year 1964 is also roughly when growth in all aspects of human activity really took off, which some dub in a slightly Tolkienesque manner the ‘Great Acceleration’. [There is a growing taste for this kind of hyperbole, e.g. the ‘Great Oxygenation Event’ around 2.4 Ga and the ‘Great Dying’ for the end-Permian mass extinction]. Yet they neglect to note that the geochronological origin point for times past has been defined as 1950 CE when nucleogenic 14C contaminated later materials as regards radiocarbon dating, which had just become feasible. Lewis and Maslin conclude their Perspective as follows:
To a large extent the future of the only place where life is known to exist is being determined by the actions of humans. Yet, the power that humans wield is unlike any other force of nature, because it is reflexive and therefore can be used, withdrawn or modified. More widespread recognition that human actions are driving far-reaching changes to the life-supporting infrastructure of Earth may well have increasing philosophical, social, economic and political implications over the coming decades.
So the Anthropocene adds the future to the stratigraphic column, which seems more than slightly odd. As Richard Monastersky notes, it is in fact a political entity: part of some kind of agenda or manifesto; a sort of environmental agitprop from the ‘geos’. As if there were not dozens of rational reasons to change human impacts to haul society back from catastrophe, which many people outside the scientific community have good reason to see as hot air on which there is never any concrete action by ‘the great and the good’. Monastersky also notes that the present Anthropocene record in naturally deposited geological materials accounts for less than a millimetre at the top of ocean-floor sediments. How long might the proposed Epoch last? If action to halt anthropogenic environmental change does eventually work, the Anthropocene will be very short in historic terms let alone those which form the currency of geology. If it doesn’t, there will be nobody around able to document, let alone understand, the epochal events recorded in rocks. At its worst, for some alien, visiting planetary scientists, far in the future, an Anthropocene Epoch will almost certainly be far shorter than the 104 to 105 years represented by the hugely more important Palaeozoic-Mesozoic and Mesozoic-Cenozoic boundary sequences; but with no Wikipedia entry.
Not everybody gets a vote on these kinds of thing, such is the way that science is administered, but all is not lost. The final arbiter is the Executive Committee of the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS), but first the Anthropocene’s status as a new Epoch has to be approved by 60% of the ICS Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, if put to a vote. Then such a ‘supermajority’ would be needed from the chairs of all 16 of the ICS subcommissions that study Earth’s major time divisions. But first, the 37 members of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy’s ‘Anthropocene’ working group have to decide whether or not to submit a proposal: things may drag on at an appropriately stratigraphic pace. Yet the real point is that the effect of human activity on Earth-system processes has been documented and discussed at length. I’ll give Marx the last word in this ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it’. A new stratigraphic Epoch doesn’t really seem to measure up to that… | <urn:uuid:775c54d9-c0ed-44ca-bb6f-a04a778d0060> | {
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A study by an environmental group is analyzing the vulnerability to climate change of more than 500 species of birds across the Midwest. The Environmental Defense Fund is working with teams of biologists in Nebraska, Illinois and Iowa.
Alicia Hardin, an administrator with the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission, says some birds are becoming more scarce across the region. Hardin says, “We have seen quite a decline in some of our grassland species, especially birds that really depend on larger blocks of grassland.”
The report is finding between one-fifth and one-third of the bird species across the three states are vulnerable to climate change and some of them are beginning to thin in numbers. “Some of those species would be the greater prairie chicken, another one would be the Henslow sparrow,” Hardin says. “There’s also the long-billed cerlew which is a really unique looking bird. It also really enjoys bigger blocks of grassland.”
Farmers and ranchers can take pro-active steps to keep species off the endangered list, or to keep them from sliding further into decline. Hardin says many ag producers are already taking those important steps. “Maybe some of the areas that are on borders or buffers, we would look to see if there’s a way we can take that out of cropland production because maybe it’s not as productive as far as inputs and what they get out of it,” Hardin says. “Instead, maybe put it into perennial vegetation like grasses that might be more appealing to some of these grassland birds.”
Officials with the Environmental Defense Fund say strong, positive incentives are needed for farmers and ranchers to manage and restore habitat in ways that can help offset the ecological and agricultural impact of drought and floods. It can include restoring wetlands, floodplains and grasslands, the use of cover crops, no-till agriculture, and buffers to provide shade and improve water quality.
In other parts of the country, the IDF is developing “habitat exchanges” to help farmers earn revenue for growing wildlife habitat alongside crops and improving drought conditions. | <urn:uuid:7ddd7863-86f6-4c2b-93e4-ec6371eef79f> | {
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There are two types of messages that differ by purpose and application:
- Alert – a static message displayed on a particular page. It informs the user about the changes happening in the system independently from the user, for example, license expiration information, notification about new options or limitations, etc.
- Toaster – a short non-modal message that notifies a user of the results of their action's execution.
To show information about an error, it is possible to use either an alert or a toast. An alert should be used on modal windows – dialog windows and drawers. A toast should be used in non-modal cases.
Toasts should be used:
- There is no way to show the user the results (or any kind of reaction or feedback) of the operation they are performing in the same area of the user interface that has the user's attention focus.
- A critical operation has just been completed, or an event has occurred that influences the operability and performance of the entire system or a web site or other users' resources, etc. For example, the user is shown a toast when the user successfully removes an extension (can only be hidden manually).
Toasts should not be used:
- A new object has been created – the correct way is to update the page and position the focus on the newly created object.
- Confirmation of an action (deletion, saving, transition) that completes obviously, without the need to supplement it with a toast.
Note: Toasts are not substitute for validation.
Use discretion, do not show toasts for every user's action. | <urn:uuid:2e8e0145-96d0-47e3-a047-35c6a4719d99> | {
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Watercolor Pencil Art Lesson
This fun watercolor pencil art lesson shows you how to create colorful abstract art using watercolor pencils, watercolors and watercolor masking fluid!
In this detailed step-by-step art lesson, you'll be both drawing and painting - but don't worry, it's not hard at all! Because you'll be creating an abstract, anything goes in terms of color choices, shapes and designs, and the placement of those designs (in art terms, this is referred to as "composition").
Even if you've never used watercolor pencils before, you'll find that the techniques described here are easy to follow, providing you with a basis for further exploration and experimentation. Consider this a primer in how to use watercolor pencils!
You'll also learn how to use watercolor masking fluid. If you've never used masking fluid before, you'll discover what a wonderful tool it can be to create special effects in your watercolor art.
I've provided links below to the relevant products so that you can easily find them on Blick Art Materials, my favorite online art supplier. I'm a member of Blick's affiliate program, which means if you make a purchase after clicking on one of these links, I'll receive a small commission (at no extra cost to you). Your purchase helps support this site and keeps it free of ads. Click here for more info.
- Watercolor pencils - A set of 12 should be enough to get you going in this lesson. I have 2 sets of watercolor pencils - a set of 24 Prismacolor Watercolor Pencils and a set of 24 Staedtler Karat Watercolor Pencils, so I used colors from both sets in this tutorial.
- Watercolors - Any basic set of watercolors will do. For this tutorial I used a set by Sennelier (the Sennelier Watercolor Travel Set with 14 Half Pans. In the past I have used student watercolor sets by Loew-Cornell. You can use either pan watercolors or tube watercolors, whichever you prefer.
- Watercolor masking fluid - I used Winsor & Newton's Colorless Art Masking Fluid.
- Painting surface - I used an 8 inch by 10 inch Ampersand Aquabord because it is a strong, sturdy surface that doesn't require any preparation before use. Your painting surface can be any size you want and you can also use watercolor paper if you prefer.
- 2 small, round paintbrushes - For this painting, I used 2 small round watercolor paintbrushes: an old, inexpensive one for use with the masking fluid, and a newer nicer brush for painting both the bottom background layer and for wetting the watercolor pencil marks. When using watercolor masking fluid, you should always use an inexpensive brush, because if the fluid dries on your brush, the bristles can quickly get damaged beyond repair.
- Bar of soap - For clean-up and also to protect the bristles of the brush you'll be dipping in the masking fluid (more on this in the tutorial).
- Cup of water
The Recommended Products below are there to help you browse for art supplies, and if you make a purchase I get a small commission that supports this site and keeps it FREE! Thanks in advance.
Step 1: Using masking fluid
The first step of this Watercolor Pencil Art Lesson is to create abstract designs using watercolor masking fluid.
Before you start using your masking fluid, there are some things you need to be aware of:
First - and this is very important! - masking fluid dries quickly. This means that once you put it on your paintbrush, you need to move quickly to put the fluid onto your paper or board, before it starts to dry on the bristles. If masking fluid does dry on the bristles, it can be very difficult (often impossible!) to remove - and if you do manage to remove the dried masking fluid, your brush may be a stiff, unusable shadow of its former self. This is why you should use an old brush or an inexpensive brush when using masking fluid.
With that said, here's a tip that can help prevent your brush bristles from drying out while using masking fluid:
Rub the bristles over a bar of damp soap, working the soap into the bristles. Alternatively, you can add a drop of dishwashing liquid to a small cup of water, and dip the brush in that. Both techniques will help protect the brush against the quick-drying masking fluid. Then, without rinsing the brush, dip the brush into your masking fluid, and apply the masking fluid to your paper.
Be sure to apply the masking fluid to dry paper. If your paper is wet or damp, the fluid won't adhere properly.
When I use masking fluid, I clean the brush as soon as the bristles start to feel stiff, even if I'm not done applying the masking fluid everywhere I want it. This means I usually clean the brush several times before I've finished applying the fluid.
How to clean masking fluid from your brushes
To clean the paintbrush, hold it under running water and rub soap through the bristles until the bristles start to feel pliant and soft. If you still need to apply more masking fluid to your painting, rub soap into the bristles and leave it there (as described above). If you're done with the brush, rinse out all the soap and let the brush dry.
Paint designs with masking fluid
So now that you know all the technical stuff about using masking fluid, your next step is to use the masking fluid to paint whimsical abstract shapes and designs on your paper or board, like so:
Step 2: Paint your background wash
After the masking fluid dries (which won't take long at all - just a minute or two!), your next step is paint a wash of watercolor over the entire surface of your paper or board.
To do this, you'll paint right over the masking fluid, as you can see below:
Sometimes the paint "beads up" on top of the masking fluid, as in the example above, but that's okay! Just let it be. You don't need to try to wipe it off, because the masking fluid will resist the paint.
For my background, I used blues, yellows and greens. I let the colors overlap and blend into each other:
Here's how the painting looks all covered with a background watercolor wash:
Remember that this is just the background layer, and you'll be adding a lot of color and more designs on top of this, so don't worry about making your background "perfect". The point is basically to get a layer of color down, and then build from there!
Step 3: Remove the masking fluid
Once the paint is totally dry, you can remove the masking fluid. You'll want to be sure that any paint that has stayed on top of the masking fluid is dry too, otherwise it might smear when you try to remove the masking fluid.
Don't leave the masking fluid on too long - a week at most - because it gets harder to remove the longer you leave it on.
Some people use erasers to remove masking fluid, but I find it just as easy to use my fingers, like so:
To remove the masking fluid, put your finger on the edge of the dried fluid and rub:
The masking fluid will start to peel off and bunch up, as shown above.
Once you've removed enough masking fluid to grip it, you can pinch it between your fingers and pull, like so:
Then the masking fluid just peels off! Removing masking fluid can actually be kind of fun!
It's especially cool to see how your painting looks once all the masking fluid has been removed:
Step 4: Using watercolor pencils
After the masking fluid has been totally removed, now it's time to add colorful designs using your watercolor pencils!
If you're not sure how to get started, one approach is to pick a color and trace around one of your masking fluid designs. Let's see what I did...
In the example below, I used a blue watercolor pencil to trace around the circle and part of the curve. Next I used green watercolor pencil to add light green around and below the circle. To the above right of that, I used an orange watercolor pencil to add color underneath the curve. Then I added 3 red dots:
Step 5: Use a paintbrush to add water
Once you've added a bit of color with your watercolor pencils, you can put your pencils down and add water to turn the pencil marks into paint!
Side note: For me, adding water is the really fun part. Rather than draw with watercolor pencils over the entire surface and then add water, I like to draw a bit with the watercolor pencils, then add water to what I just drew, then draw some more with the watercolor pencils, then add water to the new stuff I just drew - and so on until the artwork is finished. I just think it's more fun that way! But if you prefer to draw all over with the watercolor pencils first and then add water as the very last step, go for it!
To add water to the watercolor pencil marks:
- Dip your clean paintbrush in a container of clean water.
- Shake off and/or squeeze off any excess water.
- Put the brush directly on top of the areas you colored with watercolor pencil, and work the water into the color.
- The color will moisten and the pigment will spread, like watercolors!
In the photo above, you can see what happens to the watercolor pencil when water is added.
Tip: Be sure to rinse your brush in between colors, or else the pigment from one color will stick to the brush and transfer onto the other color. For example, after I applied water to the blue and green parts above, I rinsed my brush with clean water before wetting the orange and red parts. I didn't want the blue or green pigment to muddy the orange and red parts.
Now let's step back and take a look at the painting at this stage:
A good beginning!
Step 6: Add more designs until the painting is finished
Now it's time to add more designs with watercolor pencil:
We're on a roll!
More designs are added and watered:
I basically work on one section at a time, drawing designs and adding water.
You don't have to water all the watercolor pencil areas if you don't want to. For instance, you might like the grainy, textured look of the watercolor pencil. Maybe leaving a few designs as-is will add another dimension to your painting. It's something to keep in mind as you work, anyway!
Below you can see a close-up showing how a specific area (the blue triangles) look after adding water. In the set of blue triangles below, on the left are 2 triangles to which I've already added water. On the right are 5 triangles that haven't been watered yet. It looks really different after water is added, doesn't it?
As I add more designs, I try to come up with new patterns. I also strive to balance the colors so that no single color dominates the composition. I'm basically trying to create a harmonious variety of shapes and colors that cause the viewer's eyes to bounce around the painting.
You can also experiment with putting different colors next to each other, so that they blend together when water is added.
For instance, below I drew light pink shapes surrounded by a darker pink:
After adding water, the shape has a light center that blends into a darker border. Here's how it looks when one of them is watered:
And here's how it looks after water has been added to all of them:
In this painting, I decided to keep all the areas I had originally masked white, to make them stand out. But if you want, you can color in your white designs or draw patterns within the white areas. You'll see some examples at the end of this tutorial of previous artwork I created using these techniques, except in those paintings, I chose to draw over the white areas with watercolor pencil.
After more shapes and designs are added...
...the painting is done!
Here's the finished artwork:
Here's a close-up so you can see how some of the textured graininess of the watercolor pencil can show through, even after water has been added:
To refresh your memory and show you all the steps in a nutshell, here's a quick visual overview of the main steps we took in this watercolor pencil art lesson:
Step 7: Varnish your finished artwork
When you finish your piece and you're completely sure you don't want to add anything else to it, consider giving the artwork a coat of spray varnish. This will protect the painting from dirt, smudges, and UV rays - but most importantly, it will protect your painting if it happens to get wet again.
If an artwork containing watercolor paint or watercolor pencils gets wet, chances are it will smear or the colors could run. Watercolors and watercolor pencils aren't truly "sealed" unless they've been coated with a spray varnish, so until then, they are very vulnerable.
I like to use either Lascaux UV Protect or Krylon Crystal Clear (this links to Blick Art Materials, and if you make a purchase I get a small commission that helps support this site). Be sure to spray varnish your painting in a well-ventilated area, preferably outside, and follow all the instructions on the container.
Applying spray varnish can sometimes deepen the colors of your artwork, so if this is a concern you may want to do a test spray first. I personally like how the spray varnish deepens the colors and gives the piece a finished look.
Examples of other watercolor pencil abstract paintings
I hope this watercolor pencil art lesson sparks a plethora of ideas for you! The fun thing about this style and technique is that you can follow the same basic procedure and create a very different painting each time, depending on your choices of color, shape, design, and placement.
You could also try combining this media with ink or colored pencils. There are tons of possibilities!
To get the ideas flowing, here are several other abstract paintings I created using masking fluid, watercolors and watercolor pencils, mostly following the same process I outlined here:
This was the first painting I did in this style, using the techniques demonstrated in this watercolor pencil art lesson. This is a 12 inch x16 inch painting on Ampersand Claybord Textured (now called Aquabord). In addition to using watercolor pencils and watercolors, I also used black ink to add whimsical wispy lines in the background. In this painting, I drew colored designs over the white areas that I had masked with the masking fluid, so it's a bit harder to tell which areas had been masked.
This painting is 12 inches by 16 inches on Ampersand Claybord Textured (now called Aquabord). To create this piece I also used the same techniques I described above.
This is an 8 inch by 10 inch painting on hardboard panel - similar to Ampersand Aquabord, but without texture, so it was more smooth. The smoothness created more of a challenge to apply the watercolor pencils, because they didn't adhere as smoothly as they did to the Aquabord. I also used black ink in this piece, this time to draw whimsical abstract designs inside the white circles that had been masked with masking fluid. Like in the previous 2 pieces, I added colored designs over the other masked abstract designs.
This piece is 5 inches by 7 inches, on watercolor paper. The other paintings I did in this style involve lots of blues, so this example shows you how it can look with a warmer color palette. First I masked the areas that you see as white, and then I used black ink to draw whimsical abstract designs all over the paper (including over the masked areas). Then I painted the background washes with yellows and oranges. Next I added some details using tube watercolors. After removing the masking fluid, I finished the piece with watercolor pencils.
This is a 5 inch by 7 inch artwork on Ampersand Claybord Textured (now called Aquabord). It's different than the other examples because I used the masking fluid to create images that are representative symbols, rather than purely abstract. While the masking fluid was still on, I carefully drew with watercolor pencils around the masked areas to create a soft patchwork background, with I then watered to spread the pigment. Then I drew more symbols over top using watercolor pencils.
Selling or publicly displaying art based on this tutorial
This watercolor pencil art lesson shows you how I make colorful, whimsical abstract art in my signature style. I truly enjoy sharing my techniques so that others may also enjoy the process of making art, rather than keep my processes a "trade secret" like many artists do. I figure, if making art makes me happy, I'd love for it to make you happy too!
Selling the art you make from this tutorial is fine if you are a hobbyist and you created one or two pieces in this style. As long as you made the painting "your own" and didn't copy my art directly, then I'm fine with that. But if you create several paintings based on this tutorial and you want to sell them, then you really need to think about how that will impact your art career.
If you are trying to make a name for yourself in the art world then it's very important that you develop your own style. The art world is smaller than you might think (thanks to the Internet) and trust me, people will notice if you copy another artist's style without crediting them. Developing your own style is one of the most important things you can do for yourself if you seek an artistic career.
I ask that if you plan to publicly display or sell your paintings that you made based on this lesson, please give proper credit, such as "Title of artwork, based on a tutorial by Thaneeya McArdle" or "Title of artwork, inspired by the work of Thaneeya McArdle". I thank you in advance!
If you make a purchase via the links below I receive a small commission, which helps support this site. | <urn:uuid:53347cd3-45e2-4622-9744-87b4e6c5dba4> | {
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Individual differences |
Methods | Statistics | Clinical | Educational | Industrial | Professional items | World psychology |
Biological: Behavioural genetics · Evolutionary psychology · Neuroanatomy · Neurochemistry · Neuroendocrinology · Neuroscience · Psychoneuroimmunology · Physiological Psychology · Psychopharmacology (Index, Outline)
Leukoaraiosis is a term for changes in the cerebral white matter that can be detected with high frequency by CT and MRI in aged individuals. It is a descriptive term for rarefaction of the white matter. It is also commonly referred to as white matter hyperintensities (WMH) due to its bright white appearance on T2 MRI scans. Underlying vascular mechanisms are suspected. Hypertension, tobacco smoking, diabetes, and heart disease are all risk factors for leukoaraiosis. This white matter pathology is inconsistently associated with cognitive impairment, motor dysfunction, and gait disturbances. Slowed cognitive speed of processing and frontal executive abilities are also common. It may indicate a poorer prognosis and increased risk of stroke and brain hemorrhage.
- See
- Pantoni L, Garcia JH. The significance of cerebral white matter abnormalities 100 years after Binswanger's report: a review. Stroke. 1995;26:1293–1301
- New Clinical Relevance of Leukoaraiosis : For the European Task Force on Age-Related White Matter Changes1; Leonardo Pantoni, MD; Domenico Inzitari, MD Department of Neurological and Psychiatric Sciences, University of Florence, Florence, Italy
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This video shows ways we can help each other and spread caring and compassion by observing someone needing help and acting on it. Follow up viewing the video by creating a list of all the small things people did for each other in the video.
After watching the video create an I Care chart. Any time someone sees someone helping another they can add it to the chart. Keep a count and graph the results by the different types of helping or kindness. Periodically review and discuss which types of helping are easier and which are harder and why.
Wall of Caring
Collect photographs and clippings showing participants or people in the community doing kind things for others. Display the pictures on a bulletin board, wall or other public place. | <urn:uuid:ea5e4588-ddcf-4ea6-be5c-3354e35b2480> | {
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1. Marty has never had a pet before Shiloh comes along. He quickly realizes that owning a pet involves responsibility. Using the library or the Internet, research pet care and pet ownership. What would you need to know about having a pet in order to be a responsible pet owner? List your findings.
2. Marty was determined to keep Shiloh. If Marty had not seen Judd shoot the deer, what would he have said to Judd? Rewrite the last three chapters of the novel as if Judd had not shot the deer.
3. Create a three-dimensional map of Marty's house, the woods and hills that surround his house, the pen he built for Shiloh, and the barn.
4. Write a persuasive letter to the editor of the local Friendly newspaper in which you support either more restrictive hunting laws or less restrictive hunting laws. | <urn:uuid:adb28486-a329-4f99-b050-dd342bff2b40> | {
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Part of the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., the Hamilton Project works to advance our country’s promise of opportunity, prosperity, and growth. It recently released 14 Economic Facts On Education and Economic Opportunity. Over the next several days, we will examine each of the 14 facts.
Fact 1. Both cognitive and soft skills—such as perseverance, tenacity, and social skills—play an important role in shaping economic outcomes.
Skills are an important determinant of workers’ earnings and employment opportunities. No test perfectly measures the skills relevant to economic success, but tests designed to measure analytical ability often correlate with outcomes in the labor market.
For example, the left panel of Figure 1 shows a correlation between scores on the Armed Forces Qualification Test and earnings in middle-age. Stronger analytical skills correspond to higher wages, as shown in the figure. A similar relationship holds for measures of a range of analytical skills, such as verbal reasoning and problem solving.
Skills measured as early as kindergarten have a positive impact on adult earnings. Employment outcomes also depend on soft skills—character attributes that include motivation, perseverance, tenacity, creativity, self-control, and the ability to work productively in groups.
The right panel of Figure 1 shows a combined index of three scales that measure social skills, self-esteem, and the extent to which a person believes that his or her own actions, as opposed to forces outside of his or her control, determine rewards and success in life. It indicates that, by this measure, those with higher noncognitive skills also earn more, on average.
Emerging research has found that both cognitive and soft skills can be taught. It is important to note, however, that both cognitive and soft skills are correlated with other factors that influence employment outcomes, such as educational attainment, parents’ income, and the neighborhood environment. This makes it difficult to measure precisely the relative importance of these other factors.
Compounding this difficulty is the fact that skill formation is cumulative: Early success at learning not only makes later skill-building easier, but also shows that effort yields rewards.
Impediments to early learning can also negatively affect later skill development. The effects of skills on economic outcomes reach far beyond earnings: Early childhood test scores are correlated with high school graduation rates (see Fact 12), college attendance, marriage, homeownership, and retirement savings.
Bottom line: Do everything to develop your children’s verbal reasoning and problem solving abilities. Encourage their motivation and ability to persevere, and develop their social skills by exposing them to a variety of people and experiences. | <urn:uuid:b86aa882-a813-488b-888e-29e6d0c398de> | {
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I first learned about Hugo Liu's research around three years ago when I was looking into NLP, commonsense data, artifical intelligence code and theory. His work, and others at MIT, is debatably the latest and greatest in today's research and very useful, at least informative, for any program designer. Most of the projects available from MIT are not written in Microsoft Visual Studio .Net and I am attempting to make use of ConceptNet for educational, research purposes, and just to have fun with the technology involved.
What is ConceptNet?
ConceptNet¹ is a commonsense knowledgebase, composed mainly from the Open Mind Project, written and put together by Hugo Liu and Push Singh (Media Laboratory Massachusetts Institute of Technology). ConceptNet 2.1 (current version at the time of this composition) also includes MontyLingua, a natural-language-processing package. ConceptNet is written in Python but it's commonsense knowledgebase is stored in text files. To read more specific details about the complete overview of ConceptNet, read Liu and Singh's outstanding paper (pdf).
What is so Unique about ConceptNet?
Unlike other projects like WordNet or Cyc, ConceptNet is based more on Context. ConceptNet makes it possible, within the limit's of it's knowledgebase, to allow a computer to understand new concepts or even unknown concepts by using conceptual correlations called Knowledge-Lines (K-Lines: a term introduced by Minsky, cf. The Society of Mind (1987)). K-Lines may be thought of a list of previous knowledge about a subject or task. ConceptNet actually puts these K-Lines together using it's twenty relationship types that fall into eight categories (including K-Lines)to form a network of data to simulate conceptual reasoning. What really makes all this possible is ConceptNet's Relational Ontology (the eight categories and twenty relationship types).
ConceptNet is structured around MIT's Open Mind Common Sense Project knowledge base. ConceptNet uses it's data in two processes: The Normalization Process and the Relaxation Process. The Normalization Process involves all the predicate to get filtered and undergo lexical distillation (Verbs and Nouns are reduced to their basic baseforms). Also ConceptNet removes determiners("a", "the", etc.) and modals("may", "could", "will", etc) in this stage. It also uses Parts Of Speech Tagging to validate well structured word orders. (The Normalization Process is not demonstrated in this demo. Please feel free to use your own POS Taggers with this Class Library) The Relaxation Process raises or "Lifts" heavily weighted common sense predicate nodes (one line from the predicate file(s)) and duplicate nodes are merged. This is reflected in each predicate's "f" and "i" metadata tags. Where f equals the number of utterances and i equals the number of of times inferred.
ConceptNet's Relational Ontology
ConceptNet's power of linking subjects together is attributed to twenty relationship types defined by it's Relational Ontology. Here is 2.1's twenty relationship types and eight categories:
(Courtesy Hugo Liu and Push Singh, ConceptNet: A Practical Commonsense Reasoning Toolkit)
• K-Lines: ConceptuallyRelatedTo, ThematicKLine, SuperThematicKLine
• Things: IsA, PartOf, PropertyOf, De.nedAs, MadeOf
• Spatial: LocationOf
• Events: SubeventOf, PrerequisiteEventOf, First-SubeventOf, LastSubeventOf
• Causal: EffectOf, DesirousEffectOf
• Affective: MotivationOf, DesireOf
• Functional: CapableOfReceivingAction, UsedFor
• Agents: CapableOf
Example lines from ConceptNet's 2.1 predicate files:
(UsedFor "ball" "throw" "f=4;i=0;")
(LocationOf "popcorn" "at movie" "f=7;i=0;")
(CapableOfReceivingAction "film" "place on reel" "f=2;i=0;")
(IsA "guitar" "musical instrument with string" "f=2;i=0;")
(SubeventOf "talk" "debate" "f=2;i=0;")
(CapableOf "person" "write book" "f=11;i=1;")
(MotivationOf "audition for part" "act in play" "f=2;i=0;")
(PropertyOf "bacteria" "small" "f=2;i=0;")
Let's get started and get the fun rolling!
What is Needed and Where to download it...
Again, please remember that ConceptNet 2.1 is written in the Python programming language and not C# but it's commonsense knowledgebase data is in text file format totalling around 96mb when uncompressed. You must download the ConceptNet text files by agreeing to it's user agreement (this of course goes for all of the projects listed below for download) and then downloading the entire ConceptNet Python Project.
My VS.Net C# ConceptNet Class Library
This is a very simple No-Fills Class Library written in MS VS.Net. I have quickly thrown it together mostly because I just downloaded ConceptNet for the first time yesterday and noticed a shortage of VS.Net friendly code. For some reason, I don't remember there being a public download of ConceptNet before, which I may be mistaken, however I have known about this project for some time. It's papers have been available via MIT.
There are two projects in the solution ConceptNet Demo App and ConceptNetUtils. ConceptNetUtils is the ConceptNet Class Library and consists of three Classes: FoundList, Misc, Search.
Holds search result data in an index format.
Base Classes: Object
protected string LineFound static public int size = 999; public string this Count() Reset() public int get_f(int index) public int get_i(int index)
Created for Misc Methods
Base Classes: Object
public string RemoveCategoryString(string R_TYPE)
public string XMLGetNode(string path_xmlfilename,
public string XMLGetAttribute(string path_xmlfilename,
string elementname, string attributename)
Takes care of Searching ConceptNet text files.
Base Classes: Object
public bool CreateTextFile(string fullfilename)
public string GetFoundListLine(int index)
public int GetTotalLineCount()
public void SearchFor(string fullpathfilename,
public static string Predicatefile1;
public static string Predicatefile2;
public static string Predicatefile3;
public static string Predicatefile4;
public static string Predicatefile5;
public void SearchFor(int index,
public void XMLSearchForChecked(string path_xmlfilename,
public static string GetPredicatePathtoFilename(int index)
public void XMLLoadFilePaths(string settingsxmlfile)
public static int getnode_f(string node)
public static int getnode_i(string node)
public void Sort_f(ArrayList inList, out ArrayList rankedList)
public void Sort_i(ArrayList inList, out ArrayList rankedList)
public class Compare_f : IComparer
public class Compare_i : IComparer
How to Run the Demo
1.) Make sure you have downloaded and installed ConceptNet 2.1. (I installed it into path ...\My Documents\Python Projects\conceptnet2.1\)
2.) Download and unzip this article's .Net Solution and project files.
3.) Navigate to the location "...\ConceptNet Demo App\bin\Release" and run the ConceptNet Demo App.exe. It will automaticly open the "Set Location of Knowledgebase Files" dialogbox and, on it's first run, you must click the browse button to a predicate file (ConceptNet or other) then click ok. Following runs will remember the location of checked predicate files you wish to search.
4.) You are now ready to a)Enter a word, b)Choose a relationship (ConceptNet looks at IsA, then PropertyOf), c)Click the Search button to display found nodes. You may then sort them by clicking the "Sort by f" or "Sort by i".
Automate the demo's process of locating the concept2.1 files.
Add combobox to choose which predicate files to search.
- Add MSBNx
COM (or some other BN) for creating, assessing, and evaluating Bayesian Networks, and to easily output to XML format.
- Add more methods to the class library.
- Create some more Lifting methods.
ConceptNet 2.1 can be a tool to create personalized commonsense knowledgebase networks. Hopefully this MS VS.Net Class Library project can be informational, useful, and fun.
The 0.x version posted on this article will no longer be under development. I am working on an updated version using Microsoft Visual C# Express 2005 with .Net 2.0 framework and will serve as the latest version of the ConceptNet Class Library in C# that I am working on. It will probably make use of the IronPython library. If you are interested, here is a small peek into getting ConceptNet Mini-Browser (written in Natural Python code) to execute using IronPython:
My wdevs blog post with some code.
I am just working on it whenever I have free time.
¹ Liu, H. & Singh, P. (2004) ConceptNet: A Practical Commonsense Reasoning Toolkit. BT Technology Journal, To Appear. Volume 22, forthcoming issue. Kluwer Academic Publishers.
ConceptNet: A Practical Commonsense Reasoning Toolkit, Hugo Liu and Push Singh Media Laboratory Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Investigating ConceptNet, Dustin Smith; Advisor: Stan Thomas, Ph.D. December 2004
Open Mind Common Sense Project
Hugo Liu website
- Added Method in Form1.cs to change the word to lowercase on leaving the textbox. Searches must be performed in lowercase.
- ConceptNetUtils.Search.SearchFor automatically changes incoming SubjectWord to lowercase.
- Fixed minor drawing problem with Combobox. (Please email me if you experience this bug.)
- Added To Do section.
- Uploaded ConceptNet Demo App version 0.01032006.2rc1 - Uploaded ConceptNetUtils binary version 0.01032006.2b1
- For the Demo, the loading of the predicate files are now xml stored and automated. They are no longer hardcoded. I added FileOptionsForm.cs to take care of this. I also added an ImageList.
- For the ConceptNetUtils Class Library, I added XML capability. The demo creates a Settings.xml file to hold the locations of the predicate files and now the class library can read xml files.
- Search.cs: Added SearchFor() overload, XMLSearchForChecked(), GetPredicatePathtoFilename(), XMLLoadFilePaths().
- Misc.cs: Added XMLGetNode(), XMLGetAttribute()
- Uploaded ConceptNet Demo App version 0.01092006.0rc2 - Uploaded ConceptNetUtils binary version 0.01092006.0b2
- Added some details about ConceptNet's Normalization and Relaxation Processes in the "What is so Unique about ConceptNet?" section.
- For the Demo, I added two new buttons "Sort by f" and "Sort by i", this demonstrates "The Relaxation Process" of the ConceptNet project.
- For the ConceptNetUtils Class Library, I added some methods needed to accomplish the "The Relaxation Process" of ConceptNet. I also fixed some problems when it had to search more than one predicate file.
- Search.cs: Added getnode_f(), getnode_i(), Sort_f(), Sort_i(). Two IComparer Classes were also added to assist with the sorting/Lifting of the knowledge, Compare_f : IComparer, Compare_i : IComparer.
- FoundList.cs: Added get_f(), get_i().
- Notified MIT's ConceptNet team of this article via email.
- Emptied \doc folder with VS generated documentation from project.
- Uploaded ConceptNet Demo App version 0.01142006.0rc4 - Uploaded ConceptNetUtils binary version 0.01142006.0b3
- Edited Introduction section.
- Edited Search.cs XMLSearchForChecked method documentation.
- Modified ConceptNetUtils.Search.SearchFor() to only return word only results. For example, a search for "eat" was also returning "theater" etc.
- Uploaded ConceptNet Demo App version 0.01152006.0rc5 (build 2206.41738) - Uploaded ConceptNetUtils binary version 0.01152006.0b4 (build 2206.41736)
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- Edited the link to IronPython-1.0-Beta3 in the "What is Needed and Where to download it..." section (was Beta 1).
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Susan M. Wolfe, Ph.D.
CEO, Susan Wolfe and Associates, LLC
Nobody wants to read, hear, or think about babies dying. Yet, in the United States, the estimated infant mortality rate for 2011 is 6.06 per 1,000 births. In comparison, the infant mortality rate in Japan is 2.78, in the Czech Republic it is 3.73, and in the United Kingdom it is 4.62 per 1,000 babies born.1 These rates are not the same for everyone in the United States and there are large disparities in racial and ethnic groups, with rates for Black infants more than twice those of White infants.
Perinatal Periods of Risk (PPOR) is an analytic framework that provides urban communities with valuable tools to investigate and develop prevention and intervention strategies to combat feto-infant mortality and other adverse birth outcomes.2 This framework uses a 2-phase approach. Phase 1 estimates the excess mortality for specific groups compared to a reference group with optimal outcomes. Phase 2 consists of a more in-depth community investigation of risk and preventive factors that contribute to the excess mortality rates. I recently had the opportunity to participate in Phase 1 of this process in one community and Phase 2 in another, and I am continuing participation in efforts to engage and mobilize the communities to address the identified disparities.
During Phase I analyses are performed to determine at which stage the rates are highest using the framework presented below. Each cell in this model represents a different age of infant and birth weight, and each is associated with different implications for prevention and/or intervention. For example, the "Maternal Care" cell consists of infants that weighed at least 1500 grams that died prior to birth. Intervention to reduce this rate would focus on prenatal care.
(24 + weeks)
(28 + days)
1500 + grams
We recently presented the rates for each of these periods and birth weights at a community forum with approximately 300 social service, education, and health care professionals in the audience.3 The audience size was approximately the same number as the total number of potentially preventable infant deaths during a five year period. When the speaker asked everyone to stand and look around, and then pointed out that the number of infants that died unnecessarily was the same as the number of people standing in the room, the data were humanized. Each loss of life is not just a single infant, but a loss of potential talent and of potential significant contributions to society. The follow-up to this presentation is a scheduled meeting to engage community based organizations to begin developing community wide strategies to address these disparities.
I attended another forum in a different community a few days later where results of Phase 2 analyses were presented, pointing out the specific maternal and social factors that predicted very low birth weight (which is associated with infant mortality). They included race (Black), low maternal education, inadequate prenatal care, previous preterm birth, previous infant death, and maternal chronic health conditions. When analyses were performed specifically for Black women, community economic disadvantage was also a predictor, although marginally.4 In this community, these data are being used to develop a Local Health Systems Action Plan specifically targeting infant mortality, low birth weight and very low birth weight. A community wide consortium is in place to facilitate implementation of this plan.
These are examples of how data can be presented to communities to mobilize them and to guide their actions. Phase 1 data were useful in demonstrating that there is a problem, and specifically where that problem resides. Phase 2 provided the detailed information needed to show the community where to start to target prevention and interventions. The level of the data speaks not only to individual interventions, but suggests avenues for more systemic changes, such as improving access to prenatal care and developing strategies to reduce community economic disadvantage.
ADDENDUM: An hour after I wrote and submitted this blog I learned that the State of Texas issued a request for applications for communities to utilize PPOR data to develop or enhance local coalitions to implement evidence-based interventions to reduce the incidence of preterm birth and infant mortality.
1 Central Intelligence Agency (2011). The World Factbook. Accessed at: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2091rank.html on October 15, 2011.
2 Sappenfield, W.M., Peck, M.G., Gilbert, C.S., Haynatzka, V.R., & Bryant, T. (2010). Perinatal Periods of Risk: Analytic Preparation and Phase 1 Analytic Methods for Investigating Feto-Infant Mortality. Maternal Child Health Journal, Published online 20 June 2010.
3 Bellinger, K., & Wolfe, S.M. (2011, September). The State of Infant Mortality. Presented at the Voices for Children of San Antonio 13th annual Congress on Children. San Antonio, TX | <urn:uuid:37ad0eaa-ab1f-4852-a8a3-69fb0dc9f96b> | {
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Women who drink four or more cups of coffee a day can lower their risk of depression, a U.S. study out Tuesday showed.
Researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, found that women who drink four or more coffees a day had a 20 percent lower risk of developing clinical depression than those who consumed one cup of coffee per week or less.
Women who consumed two to three cups per day had a 15 percent decreased risk of developing depression, according to the study.
The benefits only seem to be associated with drinking caffeinated coffees. There were no similar trends found with decaffeinated coffee, or other caffeinated drinks such as tea or soda.
"Our results support a possible protective effect of caffeine, mainly from coffee consumption, on risk of depression," lead author Michel Lucas said. "Further investigations are needed to confirm this finding and to determine whether usual caffeinated coffee consumption may contribute to prevention or treatment of depression."
The research, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine journal, was based on a 10-year study of 50,739 American women who took part in the Nurses' Health Study, a major health and lifestyle investigation. | <urn:uuid:818b0ac0-b031-47a8-8bda-5ef63e96caf0> | {
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The main difference between Abraham Maslow's and Frederick Herzberg's theories is that the former assumed all human needs were motivators while the latter did not. The two were contemporaries and developed their theories in the 1950s.Continue Reading
Maslow's theory is often presented as a pyramid in five layers, with the lowest or widest layer being the most basic of needs and the peak the highest need. When the lowest has been satisfied, human beings will then look to achieve the next.
Herzberg was a psychologist, and he divided human needs into two groups based around workplace factors. The first he called "hygiene needs." These include Maslow's first three tiers, specifically pay, job security and working conditions. He did not believe these factors motivated workers.
He believed what he called "satisfiers" motivated employees, including achievement, recognition, job growth and other factors related to Maslow's top two tiers.Learn more about Psychology | <urn:uuid:b3eaac10-75a6-45a7-9cac-8a68ff0b6698> | {
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15 Feb Learning Technology Moves Students into New Curriculum
The Learning Technology Section is working with eighth and ninth grade students in the University Laboratory School to develop a new curriculum in computer literacy.
The course goal is to question, embrace, and challenge what students already know about computers while developing a strong sense of computer ethics, etiquette, safety, and responsibility. At the completion of the new curriculum students should have developed a clear understanding of the importance of computer literacy in modern society and of the ethics involved in using this technology in an information-rich society. Students must also demonstrate proficiency in
- identifying types of hardware components and their functions,
- identifying the differences in system and application software,
- using discussion boards and email, • understanding the importance of the Internet and the World Wide Web for information dissemination,
- effectively researching a topic, and
- effectively using word-processing tools, different formats of presentation, and Web authoring.
Data drawn from the Laboratory School students’ assessments of their current computer skills and perceptions together with the National Education Technology Standards for Students provided the basis of the new curriculum, which reflects the recognition of the importance of computer technology in the future of students in school, workplace, and home. By working closely with Laboratory School students and continuing to align their needs with Hawai‘i, national, and international standards and trends, the Learning Technology staff is shaping the evolving computer literacy curriculum into something that meets the students’ needs now and in the future. | <urn:uuid:1bc0355b-dd66-48c5-874c-ed23f7be2f18> | {
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Ginger comes from the grated root of the ginger plant, Zingiber officinale, according to the University of Maryland Medical Center. This aromatic root has been used for thousands of years as both a medicinal ingredient and a cooking spice. It is referenced as a prized medicinal and culinary plant in ancient Indian and Chinese texts, and is regarded in the Koran as "an Aromatic of Paradise," according to Asian Cook. Ginger imparts a slightly sweet, spicy taste and a pungent aroma to a variety of foods.
Chinese Stir Fry Dishes
Ginger is a prized spice in China, and is used in a variety of stir fries in Chinese cuisine. Most often, the ginger is finely grated, according to the Asian Cook website. It is then cooked briefly in oil (typically for about one minute) and then added to a stir fry dish. The brief cooking softens the ginger, but still allows it to retain a fresh, spicy taste.
According to Asian Cook, ginger is widely used in Thai curry dishes. Small pieces of fresh ginger root are combined with other spices and ground into a paste. The paste is then combined with coconut milk to create a pungent sauce for meat, fish and vegetables.
In India, chefs use ginger to spice a variety of curries and other regional dishes. This is most common in Northern India, where meats commonly accompany vegetables and legumes. Ginger is typically minced and fried with garlic. This gives the spice a milder taste than in Chinese cuisine, according to Asian Cook.
Gingerbread is a common holiday treat in the United States and other Western countries. While most people use dried ginger when making gingerbread, you can obtain much better results with fresh ginger, says Whole Living. Using 1/2 cup of fresh ginger gives gingerbread a zesty taste while imparting the herb's anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer properties. | <urn:uuid:e1b76bd4-2182-4b02-bc88-08afd7eee387> | {
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John Han-Chih Chang, MD and Kenneth Blank, MD
Ultima Vez Modificado: 1 de noviembre del 2001
My sister is 49 years old and has breast cancer. She underwent quadrantectomy and they found cancer cells in three lymph nodes. She is scheduled for chemotherapy and then radiation. Someone in her support group referred to a drug called a "rescue" drug. Is there any information you can provide on that drug? Does it have to do with the blood cells and the effect that chemotherapy has on them?
John Han-Chih Chang, MD and Kenneth Blank, MD, OncoLink Editorial Assistants, responds:
Thank you for your interest and question.
The drug or chemotherapeutic agent to which they were referring is leucovorin. To explain what it is attempting to "rescue," we have to understand the other chemotherapeutic agents' mechanisms of action. The types of chemotherapy agents with which leucovorin are utilized are methotrexate (MTX) and 5-fluorouracil (5-FU). They are classified as anti-metabolites.
Methotrexate is an inhibitor of dihydrofolate reductase (DHFR), which maintains intracellular folates in the reduced form. Reduced folates in cells are used for production of DNA building blocks (bases). Thus, if there is lack of reduced folates in cells, they would not be able to repair and create more DNA resulting in DNA strand breaks and fragmentation leading to dying cells. Because the rapidly dividing and growing cells in the body require more production and repair of DNA, they seem to be most affected by chemotherapy. Cancer, bone marrow, hair follicles and gastrointestinal lining cells are just a few of the cell types that are rapidly proliferating and seem to be most affected by the anti-cancer drugs (basis of chemotherapy).
5-FU is phosphorylated into metabolites, which inhibit thymidylate synthetase (TS) by forming a complex with covalent bonds to TS. TS also functions in preparing bases to be utilized for DNA synthesis. Thus, 5-FU disrupts DNA repair and production of rapidly proliferating cells also. Of note, in times of low reduced folate levels, the complex dissociates much quicker.
With that background being given, leucovorin is a reduced folate that is utilized with the two aforementioned chemotherapeutics. With high-dose MTX, leucovorin is given to "rescue" the gastrointestinal lining and bone marrow cells from MTX toxicity. Usually, the blood level of MTX is measured and an appropriated dose of leucovorin is given to benefit the gastrointestinal lining and bone marrow and not effect MTX's toxic effect on the cancer. For 5-FU, having a reduced folate actually prolongs the binding of 5-FU's metabolites to the TS enzyme. Thus, using leucovorin actually increases the duration of 5-FU's cytotoxic function.
Dec 7, 2010 - Rituximab may be a better option than watchful waiting in some lymphoma patients, and a new treatment option appears effective for relapsed or refractory Hodgkin's lymphoma, according to two studies being presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology, held from Dec. 4 to 7 in Orlando, Fla. Other research being presented will highlight new options for the standard treatment of advanced asymptomatic follicular lymphoma; mantle cell lymphoma; and early, unfavorable Hodgkin's disease.
Jul 9, 2010
Apr 24, 2014
Jun 17, 2011
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What Katniss Everdeen Can Teach You About Happiness
Even when surrounded by misery, the heroine of The Hunger Games finds ways to rise above it. When your life gets you down, you can do the same.
-Matthew D. Della Porta , Ph.D., YouBeauty.com
The recent DVD release of The Hunger Games reacquaints us with an admirable female hero: Katniss Everdeen.
Although this best-selling book and major motion picture portrays a dystopian future filled with tyranny and young people forced into savage competition, there is nonetheless a positive role model to be found in Katniss. Indeed, having a role model, even a fictional one, gives us an example to follow and helps us to improve.
This person need not be perfect, but she ought to embody many virtues that are worth striving for. Let’s examine the qualities that make Katniss a good role model and consider how aiming to embody them can improve our everyday lives.
Katniss did not have an easy childhood. She was born into an oppressive world filled with starvation and her father died in a sudden mining accident. Nevertheless, Katniss still managed to carry on with her life and make the best of things. We should all expect to go through difficult times at one point or another. When things get hard, it’s important to stand tough and not give up. Although it might be nearly impossible to imagine, the financial or relationship problems that cause so much suffering today will eventually get better in the future.
How to be more resilient: During trying times, use positive emotions to undo the effects of negative ones. Feel the comfort and joy of watching your favorite movie to counter feelings of depression or anxiety. Make an effort to spend a lot of time around funny and exciting people to deal with stress and dread. This strategy will help you endure the hard times until things get better.
The ability to hunt game and gather edible and medicinal plants made Katniss more than capable of caring for herself. She also taught herself how to trade and bargain with others for maximum profit. To be sure, we’re more likely to feel comfortable being alone if we know we can handle our basic needs.
How to be more self-reliant: Identify and cultivate your strengths to become self-sufficient in a few important areas of your life, such as maintaining a functional home, cooking or furthering your career. Although you may not be an expert in everything, you’ll be glad that you are competent in a few key domains.
More life lessons from Katniss, up next! | <urn:uuid:594ec056-101f-41e2-86b4-dfccf42a4b97> | {
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The process of aging is inevitable for everyone and there is not much we can do to stop it. Slowing down the process and maintaining our overall health is something that we can do to control it. Not only is our physical health important but our mental health is something that we should keep strong and sharp as well.
There are a few suggestions that many doctors would recommend to help maintain your health as you age. The first suggestion would be your diet. Eating well helps us to maintain a healthy heart and weight. Studies show that the foods that we eat either have a negative or positive affect on our bodies. The elderly population today is suffering from malnutrition and because they have not taken care of their diet they have high blood pressure, heart issues, and weight problems. As far as a healthy diet goes it’s been proven that the Mediterranean diet helps the process of aging. It focuses on protein, fruits, whole grains, and healthy fats.
The next suggestion to maintain your health is by taking supplements. The older we get we lose many crucial micronutrients that keep our bodies healthy and working properly. Our bones will also become brittle and weaken the older we get. Drink plenty of water daily and make sure your are fueling your body with the right supplements it needs.
As we work on our diet and make sure to take the right supplements we should keep in mind that exercising is key to staying healthy and living longer. Going for a walk for 30 minutes, light weighted exercises, yoga, or even swimming can have massive impacts on your health and well being. Just keep moving and stay active. Studies have shown that the more active you are the better chance you have at a longer life and fighting off diseases like Dementia, Alzheimer’s, depression and anxiety and arthritis.
Finally don’t forget to rest! During the night try and get as much sleep as possible and stay on routine. This will help improve your concentration, helps refreshen your immune system, and helps your memory as well. Staying on top of these suggestions could help you live longer and maintain a healthy lifestyle as you age.
If you or someone you love would like more information on Long Term Care Insurance be sure to visit: LTC TREE for more information | <urn:uuid:a76e1fa6-7a44-4ba6-a6ea-bc5fe27fa5a7> | {
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So what is an appropriate portion size? Well, it depends on the person eating, but as a rule, most people don't choose the correct portion sizes when they are just guessing. Here are some great ways to familiarize yourself with the ideal portion sizes:
- 3oz chicken (average portion) = about the size of a deck of cards
- 1 cup rice = about the size of a tennis ball
- 1 medium piece of fruit = about the size of a baseball
- 1 small baked potato = about the size of a computer mouse
- 1 oz chocolate = about the size of a package of dental floss
Another great idea is to try using a digital food scale. These scales allow you to “zero out,” any bowls, plates, or measuring instruments so you are only getting the weight of the actual food items. Try using a food scale for a few weeks or until you feel like you can determine appropriate portions without its help. You will be surprised at how quickly you pick up on these nutritional tips!
And, as always, bentos are a great help for portion sizes. Boxes are sized for adults and children. A tightly packed, appropriately sized box (packed with nutritious food, of course) is typically a good measure of calories for that meal. Choose the right box, though, for an adult versus a child, if you try this method. Filling an adult box for a 6 year old might be entirely too much food for them!
Disclosure: I have received product and information from Hormel Foods in exchange for being a Hormel Foods Extended Family Blogger. All opinions expressed within the post are my own. | <urn:uuid:8e872f7c-21e9-462c-aba0-f8f0fe6836ef> | {
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What are the steps of the order of operations? Why is it important that you follow the steps rather than solve the problem from left to right?
Write an expression for your classmates to simplify using at least three of the following:
o Groupings: Parenthesis, brackets, or braces
o Multiplication or division
o Addition or subtraction
Consider participating in the discussion by simplifying a classmate’s expression, showing how the expression would be incorrectly simplified if computed from left to right, or challenging the class with a complicated expression. Respond to your initial post and provide your classmates with the answer to your expression.
o What is the difference between an equation and an expression? Include an example of each.
o Can you solve for a variable in an expression? Explain your answer.
o Can you solve for a variable in an equation? Explain your answer.
o Write a mathematical phrase or sentence for your classmates to translate.
What resources are available to help you do well in this course? Which resources do you think will help you the most? Why? How do you plan to use the resources available to optimize your learning over the next 8 weeks?
If the cost of a cell phone has decreased 400% during the past 10 years, does that correspond to a cost decrease of four times? Explain your answer as though you were talking to someone who has never taken algebra.
What are the four steps for solving an equation? Should any other factors be accounted for when solving an equation? Should any factors be accounted for when explaining how to solve an equation? Explain your answer.
How do you know if a value is a solution for an inequality? How is this different from determining if a value is a solution to an equation?
If you replace the equal sign of an equation with an inequality sign, is there ever a time when the same value will be a solution for both the equation and the inequality?
Write an inequality and provide a value that is, or is not, a solution to the inequality.
Respond to a classmate and determine whether or not the solution provided is a solution to the inequality. If the value he or she provides is a solution, provide a value that is not a solution. If the value is not a solution, provide a value that is a solution.
Why does the inequality sign change when both sides are multiplied or divided by a negative number? Does this happen with equations? Why or why not?
Write an inequality for your classmates to solve. In your inequality, use both the multiplication and addition properties of inequalities.
Describe in your own words how to solve a linear equation using the equality properties. Demonstrate the process with an example. Next, replace the equal sign in your example with an inequality by using the less than or greater than sign. Then solve the inequality.
How do you know if a value is a solution for an inequality?
How is this different from determining if a value is a solution to an equation?
If you replace the equal sign of an equation with an inequality sign, is there ever a time when the same value will be solution to both the equation and the inequality?
Write an inequality and provide a value that may or may not be a solution to the inequality.
If a line has no y-intercept, what can you say about the line? What if a line has no x-intercept? Think of a real-life situation where a graph would have no x– or y-intercept. Will what you say about the line always be true in that situation?
Provide an example of at least five ordered pairs that do not model a function. The domain will be any five integers between 0 and 20. The range will be any five integers between -10 and 10. Your example must not be the same as those of other students or the textbook. Why does your example not model a function?
What similarities and differences do you see between functions and linear equations studied in Ch. 3? Are all linear equations functions? Is there an instance when a linear equation is not a function? Support your answer. Create an equation of a nonlinear function and provide two inputs for your classmates to evaluate.
Systems of equations can be solved by graphing, using substitution, or elimination. What are the pros and cons of each method? Which method do you like best? Why? What circumstances would cause you to use a different method?
Respond to your classmates by indicating pros and cons they may not have considered. If you chose different methods, try to persuade them to see the value of the method you like best. Describe situations in which you might use their methods of solving equations.
After taking this college algebra course, choose two of the following prompts (in two separate posts) to express your feelings or attitude about algebra:
· Explain how you feel about mathematics now as compared to before you took this class.
· My best kept secret about math is…
· If math could be a color, shape, sound, etc., it would be…because…
· When it comes to math, I find it difficult to…
· I want to become better at math so that I…
Has the content in this course allowed you to think of math as a useful tool? If so, how? What concepts investigated in this course can apply to your personal and professional life? In what ways did you use Adaptive Math Practice (AMP) for extra support? | <urn:uuid:f2589ef2-3dd7-4ff0-adfe-b53052e3a547> | {
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we've got signatures, help us get to 10,000 by August 23, 2014
Sharks are endangered and/or threatened because of shark finning, a painful and cruel practice where fishermen catch sharks and cut off their fins only to throw them back into the water to die slow deaths. So why is this still happening?
Shark finning is very profitable, as these fishermen only have to worry about processing and moving the fins -- the most useful part of the shark -- to contribute to industries where shark fins are demanded.
Right now, India has a major problem with shark finning, as even foreigners are coming to Indian waters to do this. India needs to adopt a naturally attached policy and to provide greater protection for shark populations in and near its waters.
Please tell India to do just that -- ban shark finning in India!
Dear India Department of Animal Husbandry, Dairying, & Fisheries,
Shark finning is a major problem in India, with people coming from all over to participate in this practice in and near Indian waters.
Shark finning creates unnecessary suffering and pain for animals, as fishermen cut off the sharks' fins only to throw them back into the water leading to slow and painful deaths. This is wrong.
India needs to adopt a naturally attached policy and protect these populations that are now threatened and/or endangered because of this practice.
Please ban shark finning in India. Thank you for your time. | <urn:uuid:cd9893ea-7f21-4f7e-98aa-21458fc0631e> | {
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Cambridge Instruments Temperature Meter 0-300 degrees Fahrenheit. meter movement 118.3 Ω, 2.9 Ω external, 450 μA to give FSD. Cambridge Instrument Company Ltd, UK, date unknown but meters of this construction were being advertised in the 1960's.
This is one of many instruments collected by Jack Davidson C Eng FIEE which I have been given by Dr Graham Winbolt
This relies upon the thermoelectric effect first discovered in 1821 by T J Seebeck. He found that a current would flow in a circuit comprising junctions of dissimilar metals at different temperatures. Today we would call these junctions thermocouples.
The following pictures and description refer to an earlier model of the instrument that pictured above.
The thermo-couple takes the form of a thin strip consisting of pieces of two dissimilar metals welded together end to end. This strip is flexible and, if pressed lightly upon a hot surface such as a heated roller, it conforms to the shape of the latter and makes intimate contact with it.
The E.M.F. may be measured either directly by a galvanometer, or by a potentiometer like this one. The former is the more convenient for most practical purposes, since the galvanometer may be calibrated-for a given temperature of the cold junction-to give temperatures directly. The diagram shows the construction of an indicator manufactured by the Cambridge Instrument Co. for use with their thermo-electric pyrometers. The moving coil H of the indicator is suspended magnetically in the field of the magnet of which D is the pole block. A and A1 are iron discs, B is an iron core, G and G1 are control springs, and H and HI pivots. The magnetic suspension ensures resilience and protects the pivots against the effects of vibration.
The automatic compensator devised by Charles R Darling consisting of a spiral bi-metal strip which is attached to the needle provides an offset corresponding to the internal or cold junction temperature. This system was first incorporated in Pyrometers manufactured by Robert W. Paul Instrument Company in about 1910. Subsequently became The Cambridge and Paul Instrument Company Ltd in 1919 then Cambridge Instrument Co Ltd in 1924.
"Pyrometers and Pyrometry" Darling, Charles. R, Spon, London, 1911
"Electrical Measurements and Measuring Instruments" 2nd Edition. Golding,E.W, Pitman, London, 1935 | <urn:uuid:134a8a2a-7805-497b-9e85-0be2d6305874> | {
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DEMOCRACIES? ± Freedoms and Right? S/g missining?
You are watching Democracy at work in this thread!
September 3: Summary of the major barriers to democracy (Not necessarily in the order shown), as given by participants so far:
1. Fear, personal, and externally induced.
2. Propaganda, conditioning: People have concepts which they think true, assumed through repetition of advertising for given ideas.
3. Lack of Education, or inadequate education. This probably goes hand in hand with number 2, since governments control school curricula, and thus control what must be taught and often, how it must be taught. Some of the requirements carry over as requirements to private school for their accreditation to be accepted.
4. Lack of Economic Democracy, induces the inequities in the political systems themselves. To this I would personally add, economic illiteracy of extraordinary proportions.
5. Complacency of majorities, and sort of "always look out for number 1" (self). If I'm doing fine, I'm not worrying about other who are not.
6. Corruptions and lack of transparency.
7. The force of law. Some democracies do not work because, while the constitution or laws are in favor of the said protection of individual rights, the lack of enforcement renders democracy a farce.
8. (Lazaros P20) Lack of individual representation. I think this means, when policies are followed without consideration to people who are personally adversely affected; such people do not have easy recourse. They have to go to court, or some protracted way of trying to get justice.
Obviously these points are interconnected in various ways, but I will leave that up to the panel to sort out, and elucidate points which so require it!
I would further ask for ideas on how to overcome these barriers. And don't be afraid to get into mischief!
1. What, if any, is the most critical pin, which once handled, it would precipitate major changes towards real democracy?
2. What could be the most effective methods of handling that critical pin?
August 20, Protected content What one thing is the greatest barrier to achieving or restoring greater democracy?
Aug 16, Protected content conversation by this time seems to suggest that Democracy does not fully guarantee the human rights and freedoms it purports to foster. There are degrees of freedoms, and rights, and the personal satisfaction of individuals with the given system, depends ± on perception and conditioning...
-------------------------------------------- Protected content
Aug 10, Protected content guess my last comment crowned the discussion under the heading: "Exporting DEMOCRACY to the World." Note the refinement of what appeared to be a common thread about Democracy...
Many people think there is no real democracy, and we are really not that free... maybe a little free-er than in many parts of the world, but even in the US and perhaps in Europe we are losing ground.
Aug 8, Protected content exchange between Torben and Jean-Baptiste.
------------------------------------------- Protected content
Started: August 5, Protected content another thread, there is a discussion about whether only Democratic countries should be allowed to participate in the Olympics.
Democracy by definitions means rule by the people. Many definitions are given through the thread. To be sure, most people don't think there is a totally functioning democracy in the world, and there's needed improvements.
In the US, there is what is called a representative Democracy; in practice, you get something that is like "Majority Rule" where the interests of the other side get ignored to some extent.
What is Democracy? How does it work? Why should we have it? Why should we not have it? How does it work in your country? What is the level of democracy in your country, if any? What is the prevalent system in your country? What are your personal aspirations for your country and the world? | <urn:uuid:61610b20-e4f9-4c3d-8555-6140fc9ed2d9> | {
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As a nation state, Italy has emerged only in 1871. Until then the country was politically divided into a large number of independant cities, provinces and islands. The currently available evidences point out to a dominant Etruscan, Greek and Roman cultural influence on today's Italians.
I have been told by my uncle that my grandfather who came from Arsie, Belluno, Veneto, Italy...only attended school through the 3rd grade. I think they were very poor and he possibly had to work - not sure as I don't know what kind of work they did, except they did have cattle they tended.
I'm wondering what the school customs were of that area and time frame(1895 - 1905), or if you know of any books or web sites that may give me some clues.
I'm wondering what age they started school and how many years did they normally go through.
Back in those days the majority of the kids belonging to the lower classes did not attend school but were forced to go to work due to the fact that times were very rough and an extra hand was always welcomed in field labors.
A kid from 6 till 11 yrs old was lucky if he finished grade school (elementary school from 1st to 5th grade). Only kids from well to do families or from families that could afford it, like artisans and alikes, went beyond 5th grade.
In southern Italy, a lot of kids from poor families decided to become priests so that they could have a change to receive a good education.
I can add some more information about school in that period of time.
Firstly: in 1877 the Legge Coppino introduced free and compulsory education (the two first years of elementary) and added to the previous legislation -Legge Casati- some kind of economic penalty for those who didn't accomplish the required years. Before that, education relyed upon catholic institutions. Unfortunately the expenses to maintain schools and teachers depended on comuni and so very often the poorer weren't able to afford them and so the catholic one remained the only kind of school (and not a free one) until 1904. Legge Orlando stated that school expenses were to be paid by the state. It also extended compulsory education until the age of 12 altough real obligation ended at 10.
So from this year there were 5 years of elementary school.
There was an exam at the end of third grade and another one at the end of the 5th. After that, if you had money you could go to the Ginnasio (5 years) which used to prepare for Liceo and then University. Only families with high income could afford a Ginnasio. Otherwise a very skilled boy (never a girl) could go to the technical school ending sometimes at university.
Peasants, who were the very large majority of population, used to quit school after 3 or 5 maximum years. The only chance that they eventually had (if they were talented) to go further, was to enter the seminary. Not necessarily to become a priest ending secondary school without taking orders.
My grandparents were from a very small village on the Appenini in northern Italy and they all ended school at age 8. Every day, since the school wasn't in their village but in a "near" one 7 km away, they had to walk all the way up and down the mountains, so you can imagine that with snow and rain it was really difficult to reach school. I can presume that situation in Belluno, near the Alps, was very much the same and so the only chance for your ancestor to study was enter a seminar. I heard a lot of old people talking about someone else from the same age saying "he was due to become a priest" but then didn't, just because this was the only way to study.
I'm sorry I've been so long and boring. Hope it might be of some interest anyway. | <urn:uuid:7ab9c803-0b23-49a5-9666-05a5707d8018> | {
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The subject of grading is rarely discussed among faculty members, except perhaps for the occasional debate about grade inflation. But many teachers privately confess that grading is one of the most difficult and least understood elements of their job. Often, professors have little confidence that their grading systems accurately discriminate between different levels of achievement and they differ widely on the components that should constitute a final grade. As a result, grading standards and criteria are so idiosyncratic that an “A” from one teacher may be the equivalent of a “C” from another.
Part of the problem with grading arises from the fallibility of the tests and assignments used to measure student performance. The three previous FYC’s focused on ways to improve assessment techniques; in this article, we will survey several different methods for calculating final grades and point out their strengths and weaknesses.
Grading and Feedback
First, it helps to make a distinction between grading and other forms of feedback. A grade is a “certification of competence” that should reflect, as accurately as possible, a student’s performance in a course. If this goal is achieved, then grades will have the same value from semester to semester and from year to year.
Trouble arises when we include grading components that are difficult to measure accurately (such as effort or participation) because these elements reduce the strength of the relationship between grades and academic achievement. Furthermore, when we use grades for reward or punishment, give extra credit for additional work, or grade on attendance, we contaminate the meaning of grades and reinforce the students’ belief that a course grade has less to do with academic performance than with fulfillment of arbitrary requirements.
Of course, we must give students feedback in many of these areas of behavior, but using the grading system to convey this assessment is inappropriate. Moreover, we often complain that students are excessively grade-oriented, but by attaching a grade value to every aspect of student performance we actually reinforce our students’ preoccupation with grades. Teachers should avoid using grades as incentives for performance and seek out non-graded methods for motivating students. For example, verbal “rewards” in class, individual conferences, and written critiques can provide positive and negative feedback without contaminating the grading system.
Elements of a Grading System
A good grading system must meet three criteria: (1) it should accurately reflect differences in student performance, (2) it should be clear to students so they can chart their own progress, and (3) it should be fair. Performance can be defined either in relative or absolute terms (comparing students with each other or measuring their achievement against a set scale), and each system has its defenders. But whichever grading scheme you use, students should be able to calculate (at least roughly) how they are doing in the course at any point in the semester. Some relative grading schemes make it impossible for students to estimate their final grades because the cutoff points in the final distribution
are not determined until the end of the course.
A complete description of the grading system should appear in the course syllabus, including the amount of credit for each assignment, how the final grades will be calculated, and the grade equivalents for the final scores. Also, students should perceive the grading system as fair and equitable, rewarding them proportionately for their achievements. From the standpoint of measurement, many different kinds of assignments, spread over the entire semester provide a fairer estimate of student learning than one or two large tests or papers. | <urn:uuid:3fbef264-f5b6-4d1f-b2af-19ce48a8421b> | {
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Are you a sinner or a searcher or both? You are probably wondering what that means? We have been doing some research on the word Sin and Sinner. It has revealed much about the real meaning of the word and how the interpretation of the word Sin has ended up today in favour of religious institutions and conflicts with much earlier adaptions of the word and it’s real true meaning. If you look up the Oxford Dictionary meaning of the word Sin, it spells this out >
Sin, 1. Transgression, a transgression, against a divine law or principles of morality ~ kills the soul or is fatal to salvation.
If you Google the the meaning of the word Sin and go to Wikipedia it defines the word as this >
“In Abrahamic contexts, sin is the act of violating God’s will. Sin can also be viewed as anything that violates the ideal relationship between an individual and God; or as any diversion from the ideal order for human living. To sin has been defined as “to miss the mark”.
Now if we go back much further in time we will discover that the Greek word for “sin” is hamartia (ham-ar-tee-ah), and it literally means “to miss the mark”.
If you dig a little deeper you will also find this excerpt from The Nazerene Way >” Kadesh in the wilderness of Sin near Mt. Sin-ai (the Arabic feminine form of Sin) is where Moses, Miriam, Aaron and the Nazarites spent thirty-eight of the forty years “wandering.”
The Sumerian god in Mesopotamian mythology was called Sin, which means “God of Wisdom.” (He was also called Nanna-Sin; Nanna is Sumerian for Illuminator.”) Anyone who lived in “The Wilderness of Sin” near Mount Sin-ai would have been called “a Sinner.”
“[The god Sin] was known as the father, or source, of the Goddess. Sin…as father of both the Sun (Utu or Shamash) and of Inanna (Ishtar) the Queen of Heaven was the central astral deity.”
“The name Sin is the Semitic form of Sumerian Enzu meaning lord of knowledge. The Mesopotamians ascribed very great importance to him. It was he who governed the passing of the months through his waxing and waning. … The unvarying lunar cycle gave Sin a special connection with order and wisdom and with immortality.” Excerpts from The Nazerene Way
How the word Sin has ended up being interpreted today is quite extraordinary and makes you consider that the Oxford Dictionary might be “missing the mark” on quite a few word definitions and meanings. Also does the new King James version of the Bible written some time after the Mesopatamians come under question? All food for thought.
Like a lot if things in life they are not always what they appear to be. So are you a sinner or a searcher or both?
DONATE TO MALENIRVANA.COM | <urn:uuid:3663637c-167d-4f6e-8f4d-d10c2c502704> | {
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You are hereHome ›
The greenhouse effect is explained in this series of related questions and answers. This lesson is part of the Climate Kids website, a NASA education resource featuring articles, videos, images and games focused on the science of climate change.
NASA JPLLast modified 2013
Access Restrictions: Free access | <urn:uuid:d1f1b98c-be2a-4b3c-a0f3-6182d7a16190> | {
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S: Hernando Cortes
FC: The Rise of Hernando Cortes By Sophie Stark
1: Dedicated To Me And Everybody Who Helped Me Make This.
2: Hernando's life span was from 1482 to 1547.
3: Hernando was born in Medellin, Extremadura, Spain.
4: Hernando attended the University of Salamanca.
5: Hernando failed at law and left the university.
6: Hernando's parents were Martin Cortes De Monroy and Catalina Pizarro Altamirano.
7: Cortes had heard stories of the new world and he joined the expedition to the West Indies.
8: Hernando conquered 5 million Aztecs with about 1000 soldiers. | Hernando Cortes is now the leader of the Aztec Empire.
9: Thanks For Reading!
10: Hi! I'm Sophie. I'm eleven years old and I love to draw. My favorite sport is baseball and I live in PA. I hope you liked my book! | <urn:uuid:805c77a1-6032-49a4-9778-2c5399cb22e5> | {
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