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Nova Scotia Essay, Research Paper
Nova Scotia, one of the three Maritime and one of the four Atlantic provinces of
Canada, bordered on the north by the Bay of Fundy, the province of New Brunswick,
Northumberland Strait, and the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and on the east, south, and west
by the Atlantic Ocean. Nova Scotia consists primarily of a mainland section, linked to
New Brunswick by the Isthmus of Chignecto, and Cape Breton Island, separated from the
mainland by the Strait of Canso.
On July 1, 1867, Nova Scotia became one of the founding members of the Canadian
Confederation. The province’s name, which is Latin for New Scotland, was first applied
to the region in the 1620s by settlers from Scotland.
Nova Scotia can be divided into four major geographical regions-the Atlantic
Uplands, the Nova Scotia Highlands, the Annapolis Lowland, and the Maritime Plain.
The Atlantic Uplands, which occupy most of the southern part of the province, are made
up of ancient resistant rocks largely overlain by rocky glacial deposits. The Nova Scotia
Highlands are composed of three separate areas of uplands. The western section includes
North Mountain, a long ridge of traprock along the Bay of Fundy; the central section
takes in the Cobequid Mountains, which rise to 367 m (1204 ft) atop Nuttby Mountain;
and the eastern section contains the Cape Breton Highlands, with the province’s highest
point. The Annapolis Lowland, in the west, is a small area with considerable fertile soil.
Nova Scotia’s fourth region, the Maritime Plain, occupies a small region fronting on
Northumberland Strait. The plain is characterized by a low, undulating landscape and
substantial areas of fertile soil.
The area now known as Nova Scotia was originally inhabited by tribes of
Abenaki and Micmac peoples. The Venetian explorer John Cabot, sailing under the
English flag, may have reached Cape Breton Island in 1497.
The first settlers of the area were the French, who called it Acadia and founded
Port Royal in 1605. Acadia included present-day New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and
Prince Edward Island. The English, rivals of the French in Europe and the New World,
refused to recognize French claims to Acadia, which they called Nova Scotia (New
Scotland) and granted to the Scottish poet and courtier Sir William Alexander in 1621.
This act initiated nearly a century of Anglo-French conflict, resolved by the British
capture of Port Royal (now Annapolis Royal) in 1710 and the French cession of mainland
Acadia to the British by the Peace of Utrecht in 1713. Thus, the bulk of the Roman
Catholic French-Acadians came under Protestant British rule. In order to awe their new
subjects, the British founded the town of Halifax as naval base and capital in 1749.
Distrusting the Acadians’ loyalty in the French and Indian War, however, in 1755 the
British deported them. This ruthless action was described by the American poet Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow in Evangeline (1847). The British replaced the Acadians with
settlers from New England and, later, from Scotland and northern England. In 1758 the
British conquered the French fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton, which was joined to
Nova Scotia and ceded to them in 1763.
During the American Revolution, the British colony of Nova Scotia was a refuge
for thousands of Americans loyal to Britain, including many blacks. In 1784 the colony
of New Brunswick was carved out of mainland Nova Scotia to accommodate these
United Empire Loyalists. Cape Breton also became separate. The remaining Nova
Scotians, augmented by some returned Acadians and many Scots and Irish immigrants,
lived by fishing, lumbering, shipbuilding, and trade. Some attained great wealth as
privateers during the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812.
After prolonged political struggle, Britain granted Nova Scotia (which included
Cape Breton after 1820) local autonomy, or responsible government, in 1848. Economic
uncertainty and political unease at the time of the American Civil War stimulated some
interest in associating with the other British North American provinces, but many
tradition-minded Nova Scotians distrusted the Canadians of Ontario and Q?ebec. In
1867, without consulting the electorate, the Nova Scotia government took its reluctant
people into the Canadian Confederation.
Although joining the union failed to arrest Nova Scotia’s economic decline, it
resulted in rail connections to the west and a federal tariff that encouraged local
manufacturing. An iron and steel industry developed in Pictou County and on Cape
Breton, near extensive coal mines. Agricultural areas found export markets, especially
for apples. From the end of World War I through the depression of the 1930s, Nova
Scotia suffered industrial decline and accompanying unemployment and labor unrest.
Thousands migrated to central and western Canada or immigrated to the United States.
The Maritime Rights movement of the 1920s, protesting Nova Scotia’s unfavorable
economic position in relation to the rest of Canada, accomplished little.
After a revival of shipbuilding in World War II, Nova Scotian industry faced
problems of obsolete equipment, heavy freight costs, and dwindling resources. Local
government attempts to reverse the trend through investment and diversification were
disappointing. In 1956 the electorate ended 26 years of Liberal rule by returning the
Conservatives to power. Although the government subsidized industrial development to
rejuvenate the local economy, the initiatives were unsuccessful, and failures in the
electronics and nuclear energy industries proved to be very expensive. In 1967 the
government took over a failing steel plant in Sydney, which added steadily to the
provincial debt. Later governments-first Liberal (from 1970-1978) and then Conservative
(since 1978)-have been unable to bring the local economy up to parity with the rest of
Canada. Despite a rate of economic growth that exceeded the national average from the
mid-1980s through the early 1990s, Nova Scotia, like other Maritime provinces, remains
one of the less advantaged areas in the Canadian union.
Nova Scotia has preserved or reconstructed a number of historical sites. These
include Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Park, in Baddeck, with exhibits
relating to Bell’s inventions while he lived here; Fort Anne National Historic Site, in
Annapolis Royal, including the remains of a French fort built from 1695 to 1708; Fort
Edward National Historic Site, in Windsor, containing the remains of a mid-18th-century
earthen fortification; and Fortress of Louisbourg National Historic Site, near Louisbourg,
including a partial reconstruction of a large French fort (built 1720-45; destroyed by the
English, 1760). Grand Pr? National Historic Site, near Grand Pr?, encompasses the site of
a former Acadian village; York Redoubt National Historic Site includes a defense battery
(begun 1790s) guarding Halifax Harbour; and Halifax Citadel National Historic Site, in
Halifax, contains a massive 19th-century stone fortress. Also of interest is Sherbrooke
Village Restoration, in the Sherbrooke area, a restoration of a lumbering and mining
community of the 1860s.
Government and Politics
Nova Scotia has a parliamentary form of government.
The nominal chief executive of Nova Scotia is a lieutenant governor appointed by
the Canadian governor-general in council to a term of five years. The lieutenant
governor, representing the British sovereign, holds a position that is largely honorary.
The premier, who is responsible to the provincial legislature, is the actual head of
government and presides over the executive council, or cabinet, which also includes the
attorney general, minister of finance, minister of education, and about 15 other officials.
The unicameral Nova Scotia Legislative Assembly is made up of 52 members,
each popularly elected to a term of up to five years. The lieutenant governor, on the
advice of the premier, may call for an election before the 5-year term has been
Nova Scotia’s highest tribunal, the supreme court, is composed of an appeal
division with eight justices (including the chief justice) and a trial division with 15
justices. Supreme court justices are appointed by the Canadian governor-general in
council and serve until the age of 75.
Nova Scotia is divided into 18 counties. Other units of local government include
3 incorporated cities and 39 incorporated towns, most of which are governed by a mayor
Nova Scotia is represented in the Canadian Parliament by 10 senators appointed
by the Canadian governor-general in council and by 11 members of the House of
Commons popularly elected to terms of up to five years.
Since Nova Scotia became a province in 1867, the Liberal party has been most
successful in obtaining control of the provincial government. From 1956 to 1970,
however, the Progressive Conservative party held a majority in the Legislative Assembly,
and it regained this position in 1978.
In the 19th century Nova Scotia was known for trading, shipbuilding, and fishing.
During the 20th century the province’s economy was expanded and diversified, in part
through the establishment of war-related industries in the two world wars. In the early
1990s services constituted the leading economic activity; manufacturing, fishing, mining,
and farming were also important.
About 8 percent of Nova Scotia’s land area is devoted to crops and pasture, with
some of the best farmland located on the Isthmus of Chignecto (connecting the province
with New Brunswick) and the Annapolis Lowland. The province has about 4000 farms,
which have an average size of some 100 hectares (247 acres). Annual cash receipts from
sale of crops and of livestock and livestock products totaled nearly Can.$300 million in
the early 1990s, with livestock and livestock products accounting for about three-fourths
of the income. The leading farm commodities are dairy products, poultry, hogs, beef
cattle, eggs, fruit (especially apples grown in the Annapolis Lowland), greenhouse
products, potatoes and other vegetables, and wheat.
Nova Scotia has a substantial forestry industry, with about 4.2 million cu m
(about 148 million cu ft) of wood harvested per year. Most of the wood is used for
making paper, and the rest is chiefly sawed into lumber. In addition, many trees are cut
for use as Christmas trees.
Nova Scotia and British Columbia have the largest fishing industries in Canada.
In Nova Scotia the yearly fish catch in the early 1990s exceeded Can.$500 million, with
most of the income derived from sales of shellfish, especially scallop and lobster. Next in
value was cod; herring, shrimp, haddock, pollock, hake, flounder, crab, and redfish also
were important. Leading fishing ports include Digby, Liverpool, Lunenburg, Shelburne,
Coal, the most important material mined in Nova Scotia, had a total yearly value
in the early 1990s of Can.$238 million, some 12 percent of the Canadian total. The main
coal mines are on Cape Breton Island. Approximately three-fourths of the gypsum mined
annually in Canada is produced in the province. Other important mineral products of
Nova Scotia include tin, stone, salt, sand and gravel, clay, peat, lead, zinc, and barite.
A leading sector of Nova Scotia’s economy, manufacturing employs about 49,000
persons. The annual value of shipments by manufacturing establishments in the province
is some Can.$5.3 billion. Principal manufactures include processed food (notably fish
products), paper and paper items, transportation equipment (especially ships, aerospace
supplies, and motor vehicles), printed materials, wood products, iron and steel,
nonmetallic minerals, and chemical products. Halifax and the Sydney area are important
The sea moderates the climate of Nova Scotia, which has mild winters compared
to the interior of Canada and slightly cooler summers than many other areas in the
southern part of the nation. Halifax, which is fairly typical of the province, has a mean
January temperature of -3.2? C (26.2? F) and a mean July temperature of 18.3? C (65? F)
and annually receives some 1320 mm (some 52 in) of precipitation, including about 210
mm (about 8.3 in) of snow. The recorded temperature of Nova Scotia has ranged from -
41.1? C (-42? F), in 1920 at Upper Stewiacke, to 38.3? C (100.9? F), in 1935 at
Collegeville, near Sherbrooke. Fog is common along the southern coast of the province in
spring and early summer.
According to the 1991 census, Nova Scotia had 899,942 inhabitants, an increase
of 3.1% over 1986. In 1991 the overall population density was about 16 persons per sq
km (42 per sq mi). English was the lone mother tongue of some 93% of the people; about
4 percent had French as their sole first language. More than 13,000 Native Americans
lived in Nova Scotia. The churches with the largest membership in the province were the
Roman Catholic church, the United Church of Canada, and the Anglican Church of
Canada. About 54 percent of all Nova Scotians lived in areas defined as urban, and the
rest lived in rural areas. Halifax was the biggest city and capital of the province; other
major communities were Dartmouth, Sydney, Glace Bay, and Truro.
Land and Resources
Nova Scotia, with an area of 55,490 sq km (21,425 sq mi), is the smallest
Canadian province except for Prince Edward Island; about 3% of its land area is owned
by the federal government. The province has an extreme length of about 600 km (about
375 mi) and an extreme breadth of about 160 km (about 100 mi); almost 5% of its area
consists of inland water surface. Elevations range from sea level, along the coast, to 532
m (1745 ft), in Cape Breton Highlands National Park. The coastline of Nova Scotia is
7578 km (4709 mi) long. Sable Island is situated about 160 km (about 100 mi) offshore
in the Atlantic.
Nova Scotia contains large deposits of coal, gypsum, and salt. Other mineral
deposits include barite, clay, copper, peat, sand and gravel, stone, and zinc. Some
petroleum and natural gas have been found under the Atlantic near Nova Scotia.
Education and Cultural Heritage
Nova Scotia has a number of notable educational and cultural institutions. Its
scenic landscape offers a wide variety of opportunities for outdoor sports and recreation.
Nova Scotia’s first education act, in 1766, provided for public schools, but not
until 1811 did nondenominational, free public education begin here. In the early 1990s
there were 527 elementary and secondary schools with a combined annual enrollment of
approximately 168,800 students. In the same period the province’s 22 institutions of
higher education enrolled about 32,750 students. The institutions included Dalhousie
University (1818), Mount Saint Vincent University (1925), Saint Mary’s University
(1802), the Technical University of Nova Scotia (1907), and the Nova Scotia College of
Art and Design (1887), all in Halifax; Acadia University (1838), in Wolfville; Saint
Francis Xavier University (1853), in Antigonish; Universit? Sainte-Anne (1890), in
Church Point; the University College of Cape Breton (1951), in Sydney; and Nova Scotia
Agricultural College (1905), in Truro.
Many of Nova Scotia’s foremost museums and other cultural facilities are located
in Halifax. Among them are the Nova Scotia Museum, with exhibits covering historical
themes; the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, displaying memorabilia from the Titanic
and other marine artifacts; the Public Archives of Nova Scotia, featuring displays of
documents, paintings, and artifacts of regional historical significance; and the Dalhousie
Arts Centre, which includes an auditorium and the Dalhousie Art Gallery. Also of note
are the Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic, in Lunenburg; and the DesBrisay Museum, in
Bridgewater, with historical collections. Halifax is the home of Symphony Nova Scotia.
Sports and Recreation
Nova Scotia’s national and provincial parks, its lengthy shoreline, and its rivers
and lakes offer ideal conditions for boating, swimming, fishing, hiking, camping, and
hunting. Golf, tennis, skiing, and ice hockey are also popular sports in the province.
In the late 1980s Nova Scotia had 16 commercial AM radio stations, 8
commercial FM stations, and 5 commercial television stations. The first radio station in
the province, CHNS in Halifax, began operation in 1922. CJCB-TV in Sydney, Nova
Scotia’s first commercial television station, went on the air in 1954. The Halifax Gazette,
the first newspaper published in Canada, was initially printed in Halifax in 1752. In the
early 1990s Nova Scotia had seven daily newspapers with a total daily circulation of
about 218,700. Influential newspapers included the Mail-Star of Halifax and the Cape
Breton Post of Sydney.
Each year Nova Scotia attracts more than one million travelers; receipts from
tourism totaled almost Can.$800 million annually in the early 1990s. Tourists are lured
by the province’s lovely scenery (especially on Cape Breton Island) and its many
opportunities for outdoor-recreation activities. Popular tourist areas include Cape Breton
Highlands and Kejimkujik national parks, 14 national historic sites, and 122 provincial
parks, recreation areas, and wildlife preserves. Many people also visit Halifax.
Most coastal areas of Nova Scotia are well served by transportation facilities, but
many places in the interior have poor transport connections. There are 25,740 km (15,994
mi) of roads and highways. The Trans-Canada Highway extends from the New
Brunswick border, near Amherst, to Sydney Mines, on Cape Breton Island, by way of the
Canso Causeway (completed 1955) between the island and the mainland. Nova Scotia is
also served by 705 km (438 mi) of mainline railroad track. Halifax is a major seaport
with modern facilities for handling containerized shipping. Ferries link the province with
New Brunswick, Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, and Maine. Nova Scotia’s busiest
air terminal is Halifax International Airport.
Nova Scotia’s electricity generating capacity is about 2.2 million kw (about 2.1
percent of total Canadian capacity). The province annually produces about 9.4 billion
kwh, or some 1.9 percent of the country’s total electricity. Hydroelectric facilities
represent about one-sixth of the capacity, with the rest largely accounted for by thermal
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Let's begin our discussion of Turkoman jewelry by looking at a piece that carries so much obvious symbolism that it can be called an important expression of the totem or amuletic properties in the jewelry of that tribe's culture.
Messrs. Schletzer write in the work noted above that "The two main features of Turkoman mythological consciousness until well into the 19th century were an undifferentiated, sacral belief in passive nature gods and the ancestor cult. "
The floral and ram's horns motifs on the piece in the photo reflect that spirituality, especially fitting for a container for prayers - an amulet.
The diagonal cross that divides the ram's horns on this piece is also a powerful symbol used over and over again in their jewelry as an expression of the seasonal cycle and mankind's life cycle.
The Western Yomud tribe had some gifted silversmiths and we will discuss the craft later, but for the moment, we will be discussing the symbolism and providing examples.
For more information on this particular piece, see
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Sunless plot? Make shade work for you
Most people think it’s the end of the world if they have a garden that’s in shade and give up on the idea of gardening at all.
However, more and more of us in urban or suburban homes have this to contend with – sunlight not blocked by trees but by other buildings.
You can have a successful, beautiful, lush garden in semi-shade or shade – to use that well-worn phrase, ‘right plant, right place’.
You may have to forego sunflowers and a productive vegetable garden but here’s a list of plants and conditions they will tolerate.
Hostas are the obvious choice when shade is mentioned, which is true – they thrive in light-medium shade but will not tolerate dry conditions – and there’s always the slug/snail problem, so I haven’t listed them below.
How much shade will they have to cope with?
It’s no good saying ‘my garden is shady’ – unless you’re referring to a basement that gets no direct sunlight at any time of the year, the amount of sun/shade will change with the seasons.
When the sun is highest in the sky in May-July, rays may penetrate areas in deep shade at other times. Really examine where the sunshine hits as the days wear on. Don’t just examine ground level – are any walls in sunlight?
Bear in mind if your shade is cast by deciduous trees and hedges, they will get more sun in winter/spring (as is the case with some of my garden).
In the gallery above, you can see late winter and spring flowering plants and bulbs (species tulips, daffodils, bluebells, Pulmonaria, Heuchera, Oxalis) naturally found in the understorey of woodlands – which have done their thing by the time the whitebeam tree and beech hedge come into full leaf.
Definitions of shade
We see ‘full sun’, ‘partial sun/shade’, ‘dappled sun/shade’ and full shade on plant labels but what do they actually mean? These definitions are based on time in the sun, along with shade density.
- Full sun: six full hours or more of direct sunlight at any time of the day and can be split up say three in the morning, three in the evening. In nature, meadows, prairies, and other open country; farmland growing crops requiring direct summer sun.
- Partial sun/shade: Three-six hours of sunlight each day. However, partial shade usually refers to morning and early afternoon sun, while a plant listed as partial sun needs protection from intense late afternoon rays. In nature, open woods, and small clearings with up to 50 per cent canopy.
- Dappled sun: Similar to partial shade, only the light is filtered through a deciduous tree, as in a natural woodland setting. Natural environment – Deciduous woodlands with filtered or dappled light throughout all or part of the day.
- Light shade: Shadow cast by a building, wall, hedge, or tree on a site exposed to the sky and open to light. In nature, similar to the edges of woodlands and in savannahs where trees provide up to 25 per cent canopy.
- Full shade: Full shade means less than three hours of direct sunlight, best if it’s morning light. Even in the absence of direct sunlight, full shade can be a bright light. Forests and woodlands with complete canopy closure.
- Deep shade: Dense kind of shade found under evergreens or shrubs that do not allow any direct light to penetrate. Coniferous forests, or in gardens where walls or building overhangs block out the sun.
Don’t forget the strength of the sun’s rays, which vary with the time of day, season and the latitude. Early afternoon sun is the most intense, especially from June to September.
As this is about plants for shade and there are loads of plants for full and partial sun, I’m only concentrating on deeper levels of shade. I’ve included plants for dry shade, one of the most difficult aspects a gardener can face, and damp shade.
Light and dappled shade: Campanula, Stachys, goldenrod, Aquilegia, foxglove, bleeding heart, Pulmonaria, Brunnera, Ajuga, Tiarella, forget-me-nots.
Full shade: Pachysandra terminalis, box, ivy, ferns, Hebe rakaiensis, Phillyrea angustifolia, Ajuga, Bergenia x schmidtii. Griselinia littoralis, Hydrangea quercifolia, Mahonia, Pittosporum tenuifolium, Sambucus, Epimedium, Galium odoratum, Luzula, Euonymus fortunei Emerald Gaiety, x Fatshedera lizei Variegata, Lonicera nitida Baggesen’s Gold, Hydrangea seemannii, Lonicera henryi, Pileostegia viburnoides, Schizophragma integrifolium.
Deep shade: Butcher’s broom, Iris foetidissima, wood spurge, spring bulbs, snowdrops, winter aconites, Vinca.
Dry shade: Alchemilla mollis, barrenwort, cranesbill geraniums, Hellebores, masterwort, Astrantia, ivy, Cyclamen, Viola labradorica, sweet rocket, Convallaria, Pulmonaria, Rubus tricolor, Symphytum, Vinca, Waldsteinia ternata, ferns such as Dryopteris filix-mas, Polypodium vulgare or Polystichum setiferum, Fatsia japonica.
Damp shade: Bleeding heart, Monarda, Astilbe, Actaea, Solomon’s seal, toad lily, Himalayan blue poppy, Heuchera, Deinanthe caerulea, Maianthemum racemosum (American spikenard), Saxifraga stolonifera (strawberry saxifrage), Gentiana asclepiadea (willow gentian), Rheum, Rodgersia. | <urn:uuid:87a5dc85-56fc-4222-987e-efe6b24391f4> | {
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I love this quote from our elementary Flat Classroom teachers Erica Barclay and Kevin Crouch:
"What does it mean to flatten your classroom? How does this impact the learning experience for you and your students? The most profound impact is the ability to take learning outside the walls of your classroom. Though this has always been possible with the occasional field trip, in theory, now kids have the ability to take a field trip every day with access to the right technology. Furthermore, all kids don’t have to go to the same place on these virtual trips; they can learn from different people in different fields related to their interests. Flattening these walls means letting kids out of the factory model of education and into a world of differentiated instruction. The world is our classroom now, not just the physical room they may meet their teacher in." | <urn:uuid:305478b6-f686-4875-bd1e-ed8a85b532c1> | {
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You slather on the sunscreen and never take a trip to the beach without a hat, but sometimes, sunburns happen. Lessen the pain by eating a diet full of these foods that help prevent sunburn from occurring in the first place!
- Berries: Blueberries and raspberries contain high levels of ellagic acid, which may help protect your skin from sun damage, while strawberries are high in skin-protecting Vitamin C.
- Citrus fruits: Besides being high in Vitamin C, fruits like oranges, lemons, and limes contain limonene, a nutrient that may have skin-protecting properties.
- Green tea: The catechins in green tea can almost do it all — besides their disease-preventing properties, they have also been shown to protect against sunburn inflammation and longterm UV radiation damage.
- Lovage: The stalks of this uncommon herb resemble celery, while its leaves can also be used in salads. Grab some if you see it at your farmers market, since lovage contains high levels of quercitrin, a flavonoid that has shown to reduce UVB skin damage.
- Pomegranates: A 2006 study found that the ellagic acid in pomegranate extract had a protective effect on sunburns when participants took it orally for four weeks.
- Red grapes: These are also high in quercitrin, so pop some in your freezer and enjoy them as an icy treat on a hot Summer day.
- Tomatoes: Time for pasta night — a German study found that participants who ate a quarter cup of tomato paste every day for 10 weeks (along with about two teaspoons of olive oil) had 35 percent less skin reddening when exposed to UV radiation than those who didn't follow the tomato-paste diet. Tomatoes are high in lycopene, a carotenoid that is being studied for its ability to protect against sun damage.
- Watermelon: The Summer staple is high also in lycopene, so enjoy watermelon as much as possible during your outdoor festivities. | <urn:uuid:f907e92a-3086-4990-8dd5-cf879a246e48> | {
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Signed in an English meadow 800 years ago, the ‘Great Charter’ is often credited as the foundation for rule of law.
Signed in an English meadow 800 years ago, the ‘Great Charter’ is often credited as the foundation for rule of law. Robert Sibley examines whether it deserves its mythic status or is an irrelevant ‘scrap of paper’ in the Age of Terrorism.
In the Year of Our Lord, twelve hundred and fifteen, they came — the king, the barons, priests, knights and free men — to the green meadow of Runnymede on the banks of Thames River to settle their differences and avoid civil war.
It didn’t work, as it happened. War came anyway. Nevertheless, what did happen at Runnymede still resonates eight centuries later, especially in the West. Out of that meeting between a king and his subjects came a document, the Magna Carta, that some scholars regard as the foundation for the rule of law in much of the modern world. Political theorist Samuel Huntington, for one, refers to the Great Charter as “the essence of Western civilization.”
That “essence” is being celebrated this year. June 15 marks the 800th anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta and its companion document, the Charter of the Forest. Celebrations are planned around the world, particularly in Great Britain, Canada and other Commonwealth countries. In this country, the federal government has arranged for one of the four extant copies of Great Charter (the Durham Castle version, as it’s known) and the Charter of the Forest to tour four cities — Ottawa, Toronto, Winnipeg and Edmonton — from June 12 to December 29. In Ottawa, the documents will be on display at the Canadian Museum of History from June 12 to July 26. The document has already toured the United States as part of a Library of Congress exhibition.
King John should not be unfamiliar to anyone. As children in the English-speaking world once learned in history class — or, at least, from Walt Disney — Robin Hood and his band of Merry Men preyed on the rich and gave to the poor, far-fetched as that might sound. Robin’s arch-enemy was the Sheriff of Nottingham. The Sheriff, however, took his marching orders from the dastardly Prince John.
Robin Hood is a figment of imagination, of course. John, on the other hand, was all too real. He became king of England after his much-beloved brother, King Richard the Lionhearted, died in 1199. Unlike his brother, King John was not much liked. Richard had spent much of his 10-year reign fighting Muslims in the Crusades and imposing heavy taxes on his subjects to pay for his campaigns. But his heroic stature ensured that he remained popular. John, too, enjoyed fighting, but he had a habit of losing crucial battles — his nickname was Softsword — and then hiking taxes to fund his attempts to regain what he’d lost.
Historians acknowledge that John was a “hard-working administrator” and, on occasion, an “able general.” But he was also prone to what historian Ralph Turner describes as “distasteful, even dangerous, personality traits” — cruelty and petty spite among them — that made him widely despised.
In January 1215, a well-armed party representing many of England’s nobles confronted John and presented him with a list of demands for reform. The king, no doubt aware of the swords surrounding him, tried to buy some time to ponder matters, reportedly saying: “Why, among these unjust demands, did the barons not ask for my kingdom as well? Their demands are vain, foolish, and utterly unreasonable.”
Vain, perhaps, but unreasonable? History has judged otherwise. King John met with the barons in mid-June on the grounds of Runnymede, half way between his castle at Windsor and London, which the barons controlled after Londoners, fed up with the king’s taxes, opened the city gates to them.
It was June 10, and for five days the two sides bickered and negotiated. Finally, on June 15, a draft document — The Articles of the Barons — emerged, listing a string of demands the king reluctantly accepted. Over the next few days the articles were redrafted, expanded and cast in the legalese of a royal charter. King John put his seal on what we now know as Magna Carta, or, translated from the Latin, Great Charter. The barons, for their part, swore fealty to John. The threat of civil war receded, at least for the moment.
Thus, the principle that even a king’s will is not above the law received its first expression in English jurisprudence. Over time, according to scholars, that idea developed into our modern notions regarding the rule of law, freedom from unlawful detention (known as habeas corpus) and the right of a citizen to trial by jury. It can even be argued that the Charter’s provision that women could not be forced into marriage and lose their property was an early overture in the struggle for women’s rights.
From such fundamental notions the Magna Carta acquired mythic status over the centuries as the founding document of western political ideals of individual freedom, democratic governance and the rule of law. At the core of the Magna Carta is the idea that political power must be restrained by principles and laws accepted by both the governor and the governed.
But does the Magna Carta really have any significance in the Age of Terrorism when, as recent events attest, international order is breaking down and anarchy encircles the West? Does the Great Charter still reflect ideals to inspire westerners to the defence of their civilization? Or is the celebration of this “scrap of paper” merely an expression of nostalgia?
Scholars still debate these questions, with some arguing the document deserves its reputation as a crucial development in western political evolution and others claiming its status is more mythic than meaningful.
Kent Worcester, an American political scientist, describes the Great Charter as not simply a cultural icon but a durable political document. “The Magna Carta text and reputation have informed the development of common law and modern politics,” he writes in a 2010 essay. “The Magna Carta was the product of times very different from our own, yet it continues to be cited by jurists and human rights activists around the globe.”
Others acknowledge the document’s historical reputation, but point out that, in many ways, it was little more than a list of demands by a special-interest group, the barons, aided and abetted by equally self-serving clergymen, to maintain their privileges against the political power of the monarchy. The peasants’ lack of privileges was not much of a concern to the one-percenters of 13th Century England.
Indeed, as some scholars point out, the Charter affirms the various social distinctions — nobles, clergy, townspeople, free men, peasants — of the era. There was no suggestion of overhauling England’s medieval political and social institutions to better provide for the peasantry. In that sense the Magna Carta merely maintained the “ancient liberties and free customs” enjoyed by the nobility and others recognized as “free men,” who formed only a small portion of medieval England’s population.
“Nearly eight centuries of popular history have managed to transform this essentially reactionary document having no initial legality into the foundation-stone of progressive law and liberty,” says Fred Edwords, a director with the American Humanist Association. “In truth, it is little more than a special-interest list of demands issued by perhaps a third of the English barons to their sovereign in the midst of a civil war between them.”
British historian Peter Linebaugh argues that the Magna Carta “expressed a deal between church and state, barons and king, city merchants and royalty, wives and husbands, commoners and nobles.”
In its original form, the Charter covered a lot of territory in its 63 chapters, or articles. Some deal with feudal laws pertaining to church freedoms, criminal justice, property rights, taxation, public administration and royal abuses. Others address the prerogatives of Jews, children, town dwellers, merchants, and even widows. Still others address the nitty-gritty of economics and trade.
Consider Article 8, for example: “No widow shall be forced to marry so long as she wishes to live without a husband.” Article 35 requires fair and proper measurement of alcohol and foodstuffs. “Let there be one measure of wine throughout our kingdom and one measure of ale and one measure of corn.”
It’s no surprise that, like any political document, the Magna Carta also reflects the self-interest of the parties involved. As Worcester says, “the document’s most striking aspect is its bold assertion of baronial privilege. In effect, it describes the role of the upper nobility as a kind of safeguard against the irresponsible or tyrannical use of monarchical power.”
In Article 61, for instance, the barons effectively set themselves up with the right “to observe, maintain and cause to be observed the peace and liberties which we have [remember, this came out under the king’s seal] granted to them by this our present charter.” If the barons’ liberties were “offended” they reserved the right to seize even the king’s “castles, lands, and possessions …”
If anything, such an article betrays the upheavals of the period. For a king to accede to such demands suggests just how unpopular the monarchy had become under John’s watch. As James Holt, a pre-eminent English scholar of the period, remarks: “The Charter and its associated documents are complex records which bear the imprint of nearly three years of political crisis and protracted, discontinuous negotiation. They cannot be properly understood apart from this crisis.”
In this light, the most revolutionary chapter — the one that later generations would turn to in promoting notions of universal human rights — is Article 39. “No free man shall be taken or imprisoned, or dispossessed or outlawed or exiled or in any way ruined, nor will we go or send against him except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.”
With this statement we have the basis for what we now refer to as habeas corpus, or freedom from unlawful detention — even though, at the time, the barons had no notion of extending this promise beyond the nobility.
Still, setting aside the mundane and self-serving articles, the Magna Carta contains nuggets of near transcendent note, ideas that have served, in Worcester’s words, as one of the “deep sources of law and politics in the Anglophone world.”
“The men in our land shall have and hold all the aforementioned liberties, rights and concessions well and peacefully, freely and quietly, fully and completely for them and their heirs of us and our heirs in all things and places forever,” reads the last demand, Article 63.
As political ideals go, that’s a pretty good one, but it was only subsequent developments that made it possible for us to recognize such statements as a nascent assertion of universal human rights.
At the time of its signing, the Great Charter wasn’t worth much more than the parchment it was written on (in Latin, of course). As James Holt comments: “In 1215 Magna Carta was a failure. It was intended as a peace and it provoked a war. It pretended to state customary law and it promoted disagreement and contention. It was legally valid for no more than three months, and even within that period its terms were never properly executed.”
Indeed, neither the barons nor the king lived up to their commitments. King John renounced the document he’d signed as soon as he could, again aided and abetted by the Church. Pope Innocent III approved the renunciation beforehand after receiving a secret letter from the king. He released John from his oath on the grounds that his promises had been made under duress — all those barons with their armies hovering around Runnymede — that was “as unlawful and unjust as it is base and shameful.” The barons, for their part, quickly abandoned their sworn oaths of loyalty and reneged on their promise to surrender London.
By late 1215, King John was attacking the barons’ castles. The barons turned to French king Philip Augustus, asking him to send his son Louis — the future Louis VIII — to lead them against the royal forces. The English crown would be the French prince’s reward.
This was not treason on the part of the barons. The Norman invasion — 1066 and all that — had taken place barely a century and a half earlier and the English relationship with France was not so, well, anti-French as it would become. The barons felt no contradiction in calling on a French prince to save England.
A year of bloody civil war — the First Barons’ War — ensued. By the summer of 1215, Louis had conquered a good half of England. What had started as a conflict over the Magna Carta became a struggle for control of the English throne. As one Gerald of Wales remarked at the time: “The madness of slavery is over, the time of liberty has been granted, English necks are free from the yoke.”
The fighting might have gone on longer but King John died in October of 1216 — dysentery brought on by a bout of heavy eating and drinking was blamed. But it wasn’t Prince Louis who became king. The crown went to John’s nine-year-old son, the future Henry III.
Henry’s guardians, desperate to ensure their charge’s survival into manhood, quickly reinstated a modified version of the Great Charter to show “the desire of the new royal regime to rule differently from King John.” The revamped Charter was no longer an assault on royal prerogative, but, as British historian Nicholas Vincent describes it, “a manifesto of future good government by the King.”
Many of the barons were agreeable to this new arrangement. They had no quarrel with the boy. Some had come to regard Louis as the greater threat to their positions when he gained control of London. After promising to rule according to the Great Charter, Henry’s regents won the barons’ support to attack Louis. It helped that the Pope had excommunicated him.
Louis didn’t give up without a fight. But with most of barons turned against him, and after several defeats on land and sea, he eventually gave up his claim to the English crown and retreated to France.
Thus in dying John had done the one thing he couldn’t do in life: save England.
The Magna Carta, too, was saved. Certainly, neither the barons nor Henry’s regents thought they were revamping a document of world-historical significance. As Holt says, the Great Charter was at most “a practical solution to political problems.”
But history regularly demonstrates that seemingly minor events often have unintended consequences of great import for later generations. In the case of the Magna Carta, a cabal of self-serving nobles and churchmen struck a power-sharing agreement with an equally self-serving monarch.
Yet, out of such unsavoury circumstances came, in the words of a former British MP David Davis, “the underpinning of the greatest history of freedom in the history of the world.”
That is no exaggeration. The document to which King John so reluctantly set his seal became, over the ensuing centuries, the touchstone for much of what the West regards as sacrosanct in its political orders.
The Magna Carta would be revised and reissued several times during the reigns of Henry III and his son, Edward I. Clauses were removed that pertained only to the limited circumstances of 1215. By 1300, says University of Toronto historian Carolyn Harris, the document had “transcended its times and developed into a foundation document for the rule of law, trial by peers and freedom from arbitrary rule.” In fact, Henry reissued the Magna Carta several times, reducing the original 63 articles to 37 that “transcended the political circumstances of any one year or reign,” says Harris.
Edward also issued public statements demonstrating his commitment to the rule of law. “Edward I took measures to ensure the terms of both Charters were accessible to his subjects and rigorously enforced as part of the legal fabric of his kingdom,” Harris says.
Today, the historian notes, only three articles from Edward’s 1297 Magna Carta remain on England’s law books: freedom for the Church, freedom for the City of London, and, most famously, Article 39 with its provisions against unlawful imprisonment and seizure of property.
It is this article and its concept of the rule of law — a concept, as political theorists point out, that requires the existence of some centralized power to ensure the law’s authority — that has proven so inspiring, both within Great Britain and around the world.
In the 1620s, Edward Coke, who served variously as Speaker of the British House of Commons, attorney general and chief justice, drew on the Magna Carta in drafting another crucial English constitutional document, the Petition of Right, that articulates the rights of a subject upon which a British monarch cannot infringe.
“For Coke, Magna Carta was an affirmation of fundamental law and the liberty of the subject,” says Holt.
In 1689, in the aftermath of the English civil war and the Glorious Revolution, a bill of rights was drafted that drew on the Magna Carta’s articles related to fair justice.
Almost a century later, in 1759, William Blackstone, an Oxford University law professor, provided the scholarship on the Magna Carta that, in the words of historian Peter Linebaugh, “helped prepare the mind for the American revolution of the 1770s.”
Indeed, America’s revolutionary founding fathers turned to the “Great Charters of the Liberties of England” as authoritative instruments of law in drafting the U.S. Constitution.
Even today, the Magna Carta is still proving to be an influence. Scholars like Linebaugh have looked to the Magna Carta’s more obscure references regarding the protection of England’s forest 800 years ago to argue for modern-day environmental protections against corporate degradation of the land.
It has even been dragged into the war on terror. Several legal scholars have drawn on the principles of Article 39 to attack the Bush administration’s policies in dealing with Islamist terrorists. Moreover, the U.S. Supreme Court in recent years referred to the Great Charter and its implicit principle of habeas corpus in hearing cases pertaining to the rights of Guantanamo detainees.
“Magna Carta established that any person is entitled to due process of law,” says legal scholar Larry May. “Guantanamo and Bagram stand for the idea that certain prisoners can be denied due process if they fall through the cracks in various extant legal regimes.”
In 1994, a U.S. federal district judge even cited the Magna Carta in a sexual harassment case against former president Bill Clinton. “It is contrary to our form of government, which asserts as did the English in the Magna Carta and the Petition of Right, that even the sovereign is subject to God and the law.”
The Magna Carta also has a special place in Canada, having had a “unique influence” on the country’s history and common law,” says Carolyn Harris. “Its legacy includes some of the nation’s fundamental laws and defining relationships.”
So it seems. Canada’s Supreme Court justices have over the years made regular references to the Great Charter in their legal rulings. In 2000, for example, Justice Louis LeBel referred to Article 40 in a particular case, saying the principle that “justice delayed is justice denied reaches back to the mists of time.”
Former Speaker of the Senate Noel Kinsella once made the case that the Magna Carta is not only a precursor to legal systems in the English-speaking world, but also to human rights documents such as the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. “No single document has had such a profound influence on the establishment of constitutional and human rights instruments around the world.”
There’s even a bit a stone from Runnymede that serves as the cornerstone of the Canadian Museum of Human Rights in Winnipeg.
Not bad for an eight-century-old piece of parchment. Certainly the Magna Carta can be regarded as a document initially devised to serve the interests of a small group of England’s feudal aristocracy. But its longevity, the fact that scholars, lawyers and politicians still invoke it, demonstrates an old philosophical dictum: What something once meant is not necessarily what it comes to mean. Indeed, the Magna Carta Memorial at Runnymede — funded and built by the American Bar Association in the late 1950s — sums up the Great Charter’s modern meaning quite neatly, describing it as a “symbol of freedom under law.”
Dated though the Magna Carta may be, literally, it still possesses a powerful symbolic impact that should remind Westerners of the essence of their civilization and the ideals it represents in the world.
Perhaps, though, the last word should go to a former justice of the Ontario Supreme Court. In 1917, at the height of the First World War, in an address to the Law Academy of Philadelphia, William Renwick Riddell uttered this sentiment: “As in the past, so in the future, God grant that these nations (be) filled with the spirit of the Magna Carta.”
Robert Sibley is a senior writer with the Citizen.
Brian Bethune, “Under the influence: 800 years of the Magna Carta,” Maclean’s, Jan. 3, 2015.
David Davis, “The Assault on Liberty,” http://magnacarta800th.com/
Fred Edwords, “The Advance of Human Rights,” The Humanist, Nov./Dec., 1998.
Carolyn Harris, “Magna Carta and its Gifts to Canada: Democracy, Law and Human Rights,” 2015; and “The Magna Carta,” http://www.magnacartacanada.ca/
James Holt, Magna Carta, second edition, 1992.
Peter Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All, 2008.
Larry May, “Magna Carta, the Interstices of Procedure, and Guantanamo,” Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law, 2009.
Edward Miller, “The Background of Magna Carta,” Past & Present, 23, (Nov. 1962).
William Renwick Riddell, Magna Carta: An Address before the Law Academy of Philadelphia, 1917.
Ralph Turner, “The Meaning of Magna Carta since 1215,” History Today, Sept. 2003.
Nicholas Vincent, Magna Carta: Foundation of Freedom 1215-2015, and Magna Carta: A Very Short Introduction, 2012.
Kent Worcester, “The Meaning and Legacy of the Magna Carta,” 2010. | <urn:uuid:800bf074-19ca-4a12-8396-33d779c4827e> | {
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is the standard method used by scientists to determine the
age of certain fossilized remains. As scientists will often
claim something to be millions or billions of years old
(ages that do not conform to the Biblical account of the age
of the earth), Christians are often left wondering about the
accuracy of the carbon-14 method. The truth is, carbon-14
dating (or radiocarbon dating, as it’s also called) is not a
precise dating method in many cases, due to faulty
assumptions and other limitations on this method.
has a weight of twelve atomic mass units (AMU’s), and is the
building block of all organic matter (plants and animals).
A small percentage of carbon atoms have an atomic weight of
14 AMU’s. This is carbon-14. Carbon-14 is an unstable,
radioactive isotope of carbon 12. As with any radioactive
isotope, carbon-14 decays over time. The half-life of
carbon 14 is approximate 5,730 years. That means if you
took one pound of 100 percent carbon-14, in 5,730 years, you
would only have half a pound left.
created in the upper atmosphere as nitrogen atoms are
bombarded by cosmic radiation. For every one trillion
carbon-12 atoms, you will find one carbon-14 atoms. The
carbon-14 that results from the reaction caused by cosmic
radiation quickly changes to carbon dioxide, just like
normal carbon-12 would. Plants utilize, or “breath in”
carbon dioxide, then ultimately release oxygen for animals
to inhale. The carbon-14 dioxide is utilized by plants in
the same way normal carbon dioxide is. This carbon-14
dioxide then ends up in humans and other animals as it moves
up the food chain.
There is then a
ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 in the bodies of plants,
humans, and other animals that can fluctuate, but will be
fixed at the time of death. After death, the carbon-14
would begin to decay at the rate stated above. In 1948, Dr.
W.F. Libby introduced the carbon-14 dating method at the
University of Chicago. The premise behind the method is to
determine the ratio of carbon-14 left in organic matter, and
by doing so, estimate how long ago death occurred by running
the ratio backwards. The accuracy of this method, however,
relies on several faulty assumptions.
carbon-14 dating to be accurate, one must assume the rate of
decay of carbon-14 has remained constant over the years.
However, evidence indicates that the opposite is true.
Experiments have been performed using the radioactive
isotopes of uranium-238 and iron-57, and have shown that
rates can and do vary. In fact, changing the environments
surrounding the samples can alter decay rates.
The second faulty
assumption is that the rate of carbon-14 formation has
remained constant over the years. There are a few reasons
to believe this assumption is erroneous. The industrial
revolution greatly increased the amount of carbon-12
released into the atmosphere through the burning of coal.
Also, the atomic bomb testing around 1950 caused a rise in
neutrons, which increased carbon-14 concentrations. The
great flood which Noah and family survived would have
uprooted and/or buried entire forests. This would decrease
the release of carbon-12 to the atmosphere through the decay
carbon-14 dating to be accurate, the concentrations of
carbon-14 and carbon-12 must have remained constant in the
atmosphere. In addition to the reasons mentioned in the
previous paragraph, the flood provides another evidence that
this is a faulty assumption. During the flood, subterranean
water chambers that were under great pressure would have
been breached. This would have resulted in an enormous
amount of carbon-12 being released into the oceans and
atmosphere. The effect would be not unlike opening a can of
soda and having the carbon dioxide fizzing out. The water
in these subterranean chambers would not have contained
carbon-14, as the water was shielded from cosmic radiation.
This would have upset the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12.
To make carbon-14
dating work, Dr. Libby also assumed that the amount of
carbon-14 being presently produced had equaled the amount of
carbon-12 – he assumed that they had reached a balance. The
formation of carbon-14 increases with time, and at the time
of creation was probably at or near zero. Since carbon-14
is radioactive, it begins to decay immediately as it’s
formed. If you start with no carbon-14 in the atmosphere,
it would take over 50,000 years for the amount being
produced to reach equilibrium with the amount decaying. One
of the reasons we know that the earth is less than 50,000
years old is because of the biblical record. Another reason
we can know this is because the amount of carbon-14 in the
atmosphere is only 78% what it would be if the earth were
Libby and the evolutionist crowd have assumed that all plant
and animal life utilize carbon-14 equally as they do
carbon-12. To be grammatically crass, this ain’t
necessarily so. Live mollusks off the Hawaiian coast have
had their shells dated with the carbon-14 method. These
test showed that the shells died 2000 years ago! This news
came as quite a shock to the mollusks that had been using
those shells until just recently.
We’ve listed five
faulty assumptions here that have caused overestimates of
age using the carbon-14 method. The list of non-compliant
dates from this method is endless. Most evolutionists today
would conclude that carbon-14 dating is – at best – reliable
for only the last 3000 to 3500 years. There is another
reason that carbon-14 dating has yielded questionable
results – human bias.
If you’ve ever
been part of a medical study, you’re probably familiar with
the terms “blind study” and “double-blind study”. In a
blind study, using carbon-14 dating for example, a person
would send in a few quality control samples along with the
actual sample to the laboratory. The laboratory analyst
should not know which sample is the one of interest. In
this way, the analyst could not introduce bias into the
dating of the actual sample. In a double-blind study (using
an experimental drug study as an example), some patients
will be given the experimental drug, while others will be
given a placebo (a harmless sugar pill). Neither the
patients nor the doctors while know who gets what. This
provides an added layer of protection against bias.
that do not fit a desired theory are often excluded by
alleging cross-contamination of the sample. In this manner,
an evolutionist can present a sample for analysis, and tell
the laboratory that he assumes the sample to be somewhere
between 50,000 years old and 100,000 years old. Dates that
do not conform to this estimate are thrown out. Repeated
testing of the sample may show nine tests that indicate an
age of 5000 to 10,000 years old, and one test that shows an
age of 65,000 years old. The nine results showing ages that
do not conform to the pre-supposed theory are excluded.
This is bad science, and it is practiced all the time to fit
with the evolutionary model.
The Shroud of
Turin, claimed to be the burial cloth of Christ, was
supposedly dated by a blind test. Actually, the control
specimens were so dissimilar that the technicians at the
three laboratories making the measurements could easily tell
which specimen was from the Shroud. This would be like
taking a piece of wood and two marbles and submitting them
to the lab with the instructions that “one of these is from
an ancient ponderosa pine, guess which.” The test would
have been blind if the specimens had been reduced to carbon
powder before they were given to the testing laboratories.
Humans are naturally biased. We tend to see what we want to
see, and explain away unwanted data.
Perhaps the best
description of the problem in attempting to use the
Carbon-14 dating method is to be found in the words of Dr.
Robert Lee. In 1981, he wrote an article for the
Anthropological Journal of Canada, in which stated:
troubles of the radiocarbon dating method are undeniably
deep and serious. Despite 35 years of technological
refinement and better understanding, the underlying
assumptions have been strongly challenged, and warnings
are out that radiocarbon may soon find itself in a crisis
situation. Continuing use of the method depends on a
fix-it-as-we-go approach, allowing for contamination here,
fractionation there, and calibration whenever possible. It
should be no surprise then, that fully half of the dates
are rejected. The wonder is, surely, that the remaining
half has come to be accepted…. No matter how useful it
is, though, the radiocarbon method is still not capable of
yielding accurate and reliable results. There are gross
discrepancies, the chronology is uneven and relative, and
the accepted dates are actually the selected dates.”
accuracy of carbon-14 dating relies on faulty assumptions,
and is subject to human bias. At best, radiocarbon dating
is only accurate for the past few thousand years. As we’ve
seen though, even relatively youthful samples are often
dated incorrectly. The Biblical record gives us an
indication of an earth that is relatively young. The most
reliable use of radiocarbon dating supports that position.
This method of dating, overall, tends to be as faulty and
ill conceived as the evolutionary model that is was designed
TO EVOLUTION MAIN PAGE | <urn:uuid:7d4420ef-da3e-4c61-885f-478078194d0d> | {
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Op-Ed: Confusing The World With the Facts on "Palestine"
The Arabs invented a special national entity in the 1960s called the Palestinians, specifically for political gain. They brand Israelis as invaders and claim the geographic area called Palestine belongs exclusively to the Arabs.
The word Palestine is not even Arabic. It is a word coined by the Romans around 135 CE from the name of a seagoing Aegean people who settled on the coast of Canaan in antiquity – the Philistines. The name was chosen to replace Judea, as a sign that Jewish sovereignty had been eradicated following the Jewish revolts against Rome at that time.
In the course of time, the Latin name Philistia was further bastardized into Palistina or Palestine. During the next 2,000 years, What had been renamed Palestine was never an independent state belonging to any people, nor did a Palestinian people, distinct from other Arabs, appear during 1,300 years of Muslim hegemony in Palestine under Arab and Ottoman rule.
Palestine was and is solely a geographic name. Therefore, it is not surprising that in modern times the name ‘Palestine’ or ‘Palestinian’ was applied as an adjective to all inhabitants of the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River – Palestine Jews and Palestine Arabs alike. In fact, until the 1960s, most Arabs in Palestine preferred to identify themselves merely as part of the great Arab nation or citizens of “southern Syria.”
The term ‘Palestinian’ as a noun was usurped and co-opted by the Arabs in the 1960s as a tactic initiated by Yasser Arafat to brand Jews as intruders on someone else’s turf. He mendaciously presented Arab residents of Israel and the "Territories" as indigenous inhabitants since time immemorial. This fabrication of peoplehood allowed Palestinian Arabs to gain parity with the Jewish people as a nation deserving of an independent state.
Historically, Before the Arabs Fabricated the Palestinian People as an Exclusively Arab Phenomenon, No Such Group Existed
Countless official British Mandate-vintage documents speak of ‘the Jews’ and ‘the Arabs’ of Palestine – not ‘Jews and Palestinians.’
Ironically, before local Jews began calling themselves Israelis in 1948 (the name ‘Israel’ was chosen for the newly-established Jewish state), the term ‘Palestine’ applied almost exclusively to Jews and the institutions founded by new Jewish immigrants in the first half of the 20th century, before independence.
Some examples include*:
• The Jerusalem Post, founded in 1932, was called the Palestine Post until 1948.
• Bank Leumi L’Israel was called the “Anglo-Palestine Bank, a Jewish Company.”
• The Jewish Agency – an arm of the Zionist movement engaged in Jewish settlement since 1929 – was called the Jewish Agency for Palestine.
• The house organ of American Zionism in the 1930s was called New Palestine.
• Today’s Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, founded in 1936 by German Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Germany, was called the “Palestine Symphony Orchestra, composed of some 70 Palestinian Jews.”
• The United Jewish Appeal (UJA) was established in 1939 as a merger of the United Palestine Appeal and the fundraising arm of the Joint Distribution Committee.
Encouraged by their success at historical revisionism and brainwashing the world with the ‘Big Lie’ of a Palestinian people, Palestinian Arabs have more recently begun to claim they are the descendants of the Philistines and even the Stone Age Canaanites.
Based on that myth, they can claim to have been ‘victimized’ twice by the Jews: In the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites and by the Israelis in modern times – a total fabrication.
Archaeologists explain that the Philistines were a Mediterranean people who settled along the coast of Canaan in 1100 BCE. They have no connection to the Arab nation, a desert people who emerged from the Arabian Peninsula.
Contradictions abound, Palestinian leaders claim to be descended from the Canaanites, the Philistines, the Jebusites and the first Christians. They also co-opt Jesus and ignore his Jewishness, at the same time claiming the Jews never were a people and never built the Holy Temples in Jerusalem.
There Has Never Been a Sovereign Arab State in Palestine
The artificiality of a Palestinian identity is reflected in the attitudes and actions of neighboring Arab nations who never established a Palestinian state. It also is expressed in the utterances and loyalties of so-called Palestinians.
Only twice in Jerusalem’s history has it served as a national capital. The first time was as the capital of the two Jewish Commonwealths during the First and Second Temple periods, as described in the Bible, reinforced by archaeological evidence and numerous ancient documents.
The second time is in modern times as the capital of the State of Israel. It has never served as an Arab capital for the simple reason that there has never been a Palestinian Arab state.
The rhetoric by Arab leaders on behalf of the Palestinian Arabs rings hollow, for the Arabs in neighboring lands, who control 99.9 percent of the Middle East land, have never recognized as a Palestinian entity. They have always considered Palestine and its Arab inhabitants part of the great ‘Arab nation,’ historically and politically as an integral part of Greater Syria.
The Arabs never established a Palestinian Arab state when the UN offered a partition plan in 1947 to establish “an Arab and a Jewish state” (they did not term it a Palestinian state, it should be noted). Nor did the Arabs recognize or establish a Palestinian Arab state during the two decades prior to the Six-Day War when area of Judea and Samaria ("West Bank") was under Jordanian control and Gaza was under Egyptian control; nor did the Palestinian Arabs clamor for autonomy or independence during those years under Jordanian and Egyptian rule.
Well before the 1967 decision to create a new Arab people called ‘Palestinians,’ when the word ‘Palestinian’ was associated with Jewish endeavors, Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, a local Arab leader, testified in 1937 before a British investigative body – the Peel Commission – saying: “There is no such country [as Palestine]! Palestine is a term the Zionists invented! There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries, part of Syria.”
*Ed. Note: P.E.F., originally the Palestine Endowment Fund established in 1922 by Justice Brandeis and other prominent Jews whose site declares it was established to facilitate grants to approved Israeli charities, is based in New York and is now called P.E.F., Israel Endowment Funds. | <urn:uuid:82723f33-ab93-44d1-bac4-2443b94ab643> | {
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Math should no longer be a challenge for you, at least not in this age and time. To be precise, when you have some math homework to do, there is every good reason for you to make sure that you pay attention to some simple details that will make it easier for you to do this task properly and do it to the best of your knowledge.
With the right approach you should be in a good position to get your homework done so fast. Most of the time students who struggle with math will do so because they have no one to assist them, no one to help them get the right perspective. This is what makes things all the more difficult for lots of students. However, you are in the right place. We will share with you a number of ideas that will help you ease into your assignments, and figure out how to break the deadlock very easily. The following are some brilliant ideas that have worked well for a lot of students in the past, and they can work well for you too:
This is supposed to be common sense at the moment, but a lot of students do not take it as seriously as they should. If you are able to start working on the task as early as possible, it will be a lot easier for you to finish it ahead of time.
Most of the time we have students who really do struggle to get things done, just because they do not have what it takes to proceed in the most appropriate manner. You can either start off in school and finish the work at home, or get home early and start right away.
Focus is one of the most important things about doing and finishing an assignment with really good quality to boot. You should ensure that you are easy, relaxed and clear in your mind before you start working on this task.
One of the key elements of clearing your math assignment with ease is to know that you might not always be able to do it all on your own. For this reason, you should be open to getting someone to assist you whenever necessary. | <urn:uuid:541b32d0-9b67-46a2-a210-e9c7d203f1c7> | {
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All foods lose quality and shelf life during distribution by virtue of microbiological growth, enzymatic activity, physical damage, and biochemical reactions, most of which are product interaction with the oxygen in the air and dissolved and entrained in the product. The kinetics of oxidation suggest that reduction of oxygen to near zero levels would exert profound effects on the biochemical quality, which is the major effect after biological stability has been achieved.
Action of Oxygen
Oxygen allows growth of aerobic microorganisms, and it is responsible for oxidation of lipids, color, and flavors, and loss of nutritional value (ascorbic acid degradation, vitamin E losses, and oxidation of polyunsaturated fats such as omega-3 and omega-6)—hence the importance of reducing oxygen in and around foods in order to prolong safe shelf life. Oxygen in the package headspace, oxygen entrained or dissolved in the food, and that which migrates from package exterior to the inside through the package structure are the principal sources of oxygen availability in the food product. Some food products that are especially sensitive to oxidative reactions are bakery goods, oils, dry milk, meats, beer, juices, coffee, nuts, cereals, and many fruits and vegetables.
Several methods to reduce oxygen in foods have been developed, including the use of oxygen scavengers, vacuum, oxygen-barrier packaging, and flushing with inert gases, among others. Current processing and packaging technologies are capable of decreasing oxygen concentration to up to 0.01%.
Micro-Oxygen: Definitions and Parameters
A new processing and packaging method is being proposed in this column: the use of micro-oxygen processing to extend shelf life of foods. Micro-oxygen processing is defined as the use of oxygen levels in both the product and the processing environment that would reduce biochemical reactions to levels that are too low to be measured by conventional methods as in beer or juice beverage preservation. University of Georgia Dept. of Food Science and Technology faculty and graduate students have hypothesized the existence of bound oxygen (as it has been demonstrated for water) that cannot be removed and that therefore may be available for food biochemical reactions. Since there is equilibrium between the oxygen present in the headspace and the oxygen dissolved or occluded in the food, if micro-oxygen levels are achieved in the processing environment, therefore the same levels of oxygen would be present in the food. The oxygen concentration necessary to be achieved for micro-oxygen processing has been targeted as 30 ppm, with lower levels hypothesized in future research.
Rationale for Micro-Oxygen Processing
Several factors, such as microbial growth, enzymatic activity, moisture, and oxidative and non-oxidative reactions, affect the quality of food. Even though foods such as canned goods may be microbiologically sterile due to heat treatment, for example, they still undergo biochemical deteriorative reactions in which oxygen generally acts as a co-substrate. Therefore, reducing oxygen would retard those reactions and would help extend quality and shelf life.
The objective is to produce foods that are shelf stable for a significantly longer time than is necessary to go through regular distribution channels or even for prolonged voyages to space. Previous information indicates that if shelf life is extended far beyond conventional commercial practice, the quality at any shorter time frame will be significantly better.
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• Lipid oxidation. Environmental oxygen causes chemical deteriorative reactions of lipids. Unsaturated fatty acids react with molecular oxygen through a free radical chain mechanism, forming fatty acid hydroperoxide. The resulting compounds are those that impart rancid characteristics with strong flavors and odors caused by acids, alcohols, carbonyls, aldehydes, esters, and ketone formation.
Oxygen reduction may retard the auto-oxidation reaction by reducing peroxyl free radical formation. The fried potato chip industry uses nitrogen flushing in the packaging process to displace most of the environmental oxygen and retard deteriorative reactions that lead to off-flavors. Argon also has been used to extend shelf life and improve product acceptability.
• Nutrient loss. As a result of oxidative reactions, some nutrients are lost. For instance, ascorbic acid can be oxidized, decreasing the nutritional value of citrus products. Vitamin E also oxidizes, donating hydrogen atoms in the presence of oxygen. Also, as mentioned above, polyunsaturated fatty acids such as omega-3 and omega-6 can be degraded.
• Color oxidation. Browning reactions in foods may be either non-enzymatic or enzymatic. Enzymatic browning requires oxygen. This kind of oxidation is seen in fruits such as bananas, apple slices exposed to air, apricots, and strawberries; in vegetables such as potatoes and lettuce; and in seafood. The reaction involves aphenolic substrate and oxygen along with polyphenol oxidase that catalyzes the reaction.
Polyphenol Oxidase and Oxidative Reactions
The fruit and vegetable industries suffer economic losses every year due to browning. Polyphenol oxidase (PPO) is a copper-containing enzyme that catalyzes the browning reaction, and, therefore, is important in determining quality of the food. PPO may be specific toward monophenolic and diphenolic substrates. The reaction consists of the hydroxylation of monophenols to o-diphenols by monophenolase or the hydroxylation of o-diphenols to produce o-quinones that are rapidly, non-enzymatically polymerized to brown pigments.
Several methods have been implemented to reduce PPO. Among them are inactivation by heating to destroy oxidative enzymes, application of ascorbic acid as an oxygen interceptor, reduction of oxygen, for instance, by vacuum or by inert gas flushing in the juice and wine industries, and use of cyclodextrin or polyvinylpyrrolidone for polyphenol (base color component) removal.
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The two substrates of the reaction are phenolic compounds and oxygen. It has been proposed that oxygen is the first substrate that binds to PPO. If foods are processed and packaged under very low oxygen levels, one of the substrates is limiting. Therefore, it may be considered as a first order reaction. However, the order of the reaction is not fully understood, since PPO can still be active at low oxygen concentrations.
Low-Oxygen Processing of Beer and Citrus Products
Oxygen is necessary in some steps of the brewing process, but when the beer is finished and distributed, oxygen becomes a problem. As indicated previously in this column, based on 2005 research by University of Georgia graduate student Lynn Kuchel, oxidation reactions affect flavor, aroma, and color, decreasing the shelf life of the product by oxidation of fatty acids, alcohols, and iso-alpha acids. In the presence of oxygen, carbonyl compounds are formed, developing stale characteristics in beer.
Numerous efforts have been made to keep the total package oxygen as low as possible. For example, there is a BP Corporation patent for a plastic bottle that allows just 1 ppm of oxygen to ingress the package through the use of an oxygen scavenger, extending the beer’s shelf life for up to 6 months. Improvements in packaging have brought the total package oxygen to less than 50 ppb, but it is thought than even levels of 0.1 ppb are enough to cause oxidative damage.
Loss of ascorbic acid due to oxidation is extremely important in orange juice since it decreases its nutritional value. Vitamin C, or ascorbic acid, may be present in the form of L-ascorbic acid, or L-dehydroascorbic acid, a product of the oxidation and dissociation of hydrogen. The oxidation process of ascorbic acid to dehydroascorbic acid is reversible; however, the hydrolytic ring cleavage that produces 2,3-diketogulonic acid is irreversible; 2,3-diketogulonic acid undergoes oxidation, dehydration, and polymerization.
Micro-Oxygen Processing of Bananas and Orange Juice
A team at the University of Georgia has conducted research to measure the effects of micro-oxygen on two products, bananas and orange juice.
The team included graduate student Solandre Perez working under the supervision of Louise Wicker, Jake Mulligan, and Aaron Brody.
• Bananas. The effect of micro-oxygen on PPO activity was evaluated at atmospheric and ppm oxygen concentrations. PPO activity decreased nonlinearly with decreasing oxygen concentration from 198 units/mL to about 45 units/mL at atmospheric and micro-oxygen (8 ppm), respectively. The decrease in PPO with oxygen followed a second order polynomial regression (R2 > 0.9). This study shows that micro-oxygen levels as low as 8 ppm decrease PPO activity but do not eliminate it. It has been suggested that dissolved oxygen on the banana tissue as well as mechanisms of reaction of the enzyme may play a role in PPO activity, with 8 ppm oxygen enough to initiate the oxidation reaction. (See Figure 1.)
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• Orange juice. In orange juice processing, the cells of fruit break, allowing air to come into the mix, along with the release of substrates and enzymes that were previously in compartment within the cells. Micro-oxygen processing decreases dissolved oxygen to 48 ppb at the moment of processing compared to 660 ppb of dissolved oxygen in orange juice processed at atmospheric conditions, which may result in extension of shelf life in addition to better retention of ascorbic acid content. (See Figure 2.)
Results from the University of Georgia research are clearly in the direction of demonstrating the positive quality retention benefits of reducing oxygen to micro levels for orange juice and suggest that more fresh-like orange juice and analogs are commercially feasible.
Aaron L. Brody, Ph.D.,
President and CEO, Packaging/Brody Inc., Duluth, Ga., and Adjunct Professor, University of Georgia | <urn:uuid:5a71b4fe-c73d-4194-95f2-bc430f23c577> | {
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Unfortunately for producers on the Plains, 2013 started exactly how 2012 ended – dry. Though minimal, conditions improved by less than 1 percentage point across the "Lower 48" thanks to a wet New Year’s Eve storm system that passed through the central Plains.
Even with the storm, however, 61 percent of the contiguous United States is in moderate or worse drought, according to the latest Drought Monitor released on Thursday.
The worst drought conditions in the nation stretch from Texas (35 percent in extreme or worse drought) to South Dakota (63 percent in extreme or worse drought). Kansas, Nebraska and South Dakota have been notorious for the past few months. In both Kansas and Nebraska, at least 50 percent of the states have remained in extreme to exceptional drought since early mid-July.
The Midwest first escaped the vicious grips of the drought after the remnants of Hurricane Isaac drenched many of the region’s states in early September, but spotty precipitation has pushed some states back into drought. Moderate, severe and, in some cases, extreme drought have now returned to Missouri, Iowa and Minnesota.
Other areas in the Midwest, including Ohio, Illinois, Indiana and Michigan, have seen more winter storms. USA Today reports that though 15 inches of snow have been dumped on parts of the Midwest and East, it would take at least 8 feet of snow to return soil moisture to pre-drought levels in time for spring planting.
On the Plains, even more snow will be needed to quench the drought’s impact. David Pearson, a hydrologist with the National Weather Service, told USA Today that the amount of snow needed to make up for the drought this winter would be astronomical. According to Pearson, it’s “an amount nobody would wish on their worst enemy.”
"It's so out of this world it wouldn't make much scientific sense (to guess). It would take a record-breaking snowfall for the season to get us back on track," Pearson said.
That would mean more upwards of 150 inches of snow, four times the average winter snowfall in Chicago. Read more USA Today.
For nervous producers questioning the impact the possibility of another long year of drought, Scott Irwin and Darrel Good from the University of Illinois point out that corn and soybean yields are “overwhelmingly” determined by summer weather conditions rather than late winter or early spring.
"Preseason moisture deficits can impact yield for the upcoming crop but this impact is typically quite small relative to the impact of precipitation and temperature during the reproductive periods for corn and soybeans, a fact that should be all too obvious after the "flash drought" of summer 2012,” Irwin and Good wrote in an article available here. | <urn:uuid:090ced20-a82e-417f-8a70-91f7d741c881> | {
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Paul structured Romans a bit like a Socratic dialogue with himself taking the role of the main character and a hypothetical reader being assigned the role of foil or student. Paul anticipates and articulates the reader's objections to his arguments so that he can address them. It would likely have been a well-known genre to a Roman audience since Cicero reintroduced the form.
The text that caused the "reader" to object was:
And not only so, but also when Rebekah had conceived children by one man, our forefather Isaac, though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad—in order that God's purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of him who calls—she was told, “The older will serve the younger.” As it is written, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.”—Romans 9:10-13 (ESV)
(It's difficult to isolate quotes in Romans since Paul's argument flows from one idea to another so fluidly.)
A reader could object to the idea of God choosing one brother (and by implication, one people group) over another when there was no particular reason to prefer one over the other. Both "had done nothing either good or bad", so how can God justly love one and hate the other? The broader question, as seen in the new topic Paul starts at the beginning of the chapter, is how can God chose the Jewish people to receive His inheritance to the exclusion of other groups?
Paul's answer is that God can chose who He will show mercy to:
For he says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy. For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, “For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I might show my power in you, and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.” So then he has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills.—Romans 9:15-18 (ESV)
This raises another question about whether we can fault anyone since nobody can resist His will. A series of questions in chapter 9 lead up to the point Paul wants to make in chapter 10: that it is imperative that the message of the gospel be carried to all people. All of this serves the purpose Paul sets out for himself at the start of the letter:
For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”—Romans 1:16-17 (ESV)
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Definitions for encanto
This page provides all possible meanings and translations of the word encanto
Encanto is a hilly neighborhood located in the southeastern part of San Diego, California. The neighborhood of Encanto is split into two sections, North Encanto, and South Encanto. The name Encanto usually refers to the neighborhood of Encanto, but it can also refer to the Encanto Neighborhoods planning area, which consists of Chollas View, Lincoln Park, Emerald Hills, Valencia Park, Encanto, South Encanto, Broadway Heights, and Alta Vista. Encanto is a predominantly a low-density residential community, with commercial and industrial businesses located near major streets. Encanto and the adjacent neighborhoods are going through revitalization with such programs as the Chollas Creek Enhancement Program, which focuses on open space and restoring native vegetation.
Find a translation for the encanto definition in other languages:
Select another language: | <urn:uuid:bc516fff-a8c4-4808-a4ba-ba97a231bdcf> | {
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At 9500+ feet elevation, Albion Basin above Alta, Utah in Little Cottonwood Canyon offers a beautiful respite from the summer heat in the Salt Lake Valley below the canyon. In late summer, when the snows clear, the wildflowers put on a colorful display. In August of 2011, following the record snowfall of the previous winter, the wildflower bloom was one of the most spectacular in years.
Here in a meadow along the trail to Cecret Lake, you can see the red paintbrush, purple lupine, blue forget-me-not, brown coneflower, and white yarrow just to name a few. Lower on the trail, yellow balsamroot blankets the hillside. Colorado Columbine cluster among the white pines. Bluebells grow along boggy snow-melt streams. Over 120 species of wildflower attract bees and hikers alike for a summertime show.
Utah is a state located in the westcentral region of the United States of America. Utah is the 13th largest state by area, ranks 34th by population and 10th by population density of the 50 United States. Utah was the 45th state to be admitted into the Union, on January 4, 1896. Utah is landlocked, being bordered by the states of Idaho to the north, Wyoming to the northeast, Nevada on the west, Colorado on the east and Arizona to the south. Utah is very mountainous and is a popular outing destination of the outdoorsman. The state population is about 2.82M with 95% being Caucasian, 2.4% Asian, 1.7% Native American and 1.3% Black. The state capital and largest city is Salt Lake City.Source: wikipedia | <urn:uuid:0189164a-9d4a-4cdf-ad0c-d465cde4238d> | {
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When you’re reading through recipe instructions, particularly for baked goods, you probably come across the phrase “do not overmix” fairly often. The notion of “overmixing” can be confusing if you’re just getting into baking – after all, cookie dough is either mixed, or it isn’t, right?
The final stage of making a cookie dough or cake batter often involves stirring flour, or a flour mixture, into wet ingredients. When the flour is exposed to liquids and stirred around, the gluten (protein) in the flour starts to develop into a network that will hold whatever you’re baking together, giving cookies, cakes, etc. their structure. Gluten can also make baked goods tough if there is too much of it in the dough/batter, and excessive mixing of the dough can develop the gluten to this point.
So when a recipe instructs you not to overmix, what it means is that you should just do the minimum amount of mixing necessary to make a uniform dough. A good rule of thumb is to stop mixing when no streaks of flour remain in your mixing bowl, or if you’re going to be adding chocolate chips or fruit into your mix, you can stop when a few small streaks of flour remain, since you’re going to give the mixture a few extra turns when you stir in your add-ins. | <urn:uuid:35e8a827-ff08-4df6-a237-c8710c6aaee3> | {
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for National Geographic News
A prolonged lull in solar activity has astrophysicists glued to their telescopes waiting to see what the sun will do next—and how Earth's climate might respond.
The sun is the least active it's been in decades and the dimmest in a hundred years. The lull is causing some scientists to recall the Little Ice Age, an unusual cold spell in Europe and North America, which lasted from about 1300 to 1850.
The coldest period of the Little Ice Age, between 1645 and 1715, has been linked to a deep dip in solar storms known as the Maunder Minimum.
During that time, access to Greenland was largely cut off by ice, and canals in Holland routinely froze solid. Glaciers in the Alps engulfed whole villages, and sea ice increased so much that no open water flowed around Iceland in the year 1695.
But researchers are on guard against their concerns about a new cold snap being misinterpreted.
"[Global warming] skeptics tend to leap forward," said Mike Lockwood, a solar terrestrial physicist at the University of Southampton in the U.K. (Get the facts about global warming.)
He and other researchers are therefore engaged in what they call "preemptive denial" of a solar minimum leading to global cooling.
Even if the current solar lull is the beginning of a prolonged quiet, the scientists say, the star's effects on climate will pale in contrast with the influence of human-made greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2).
"I think you have to bear in mind that the CO2 is a good 50 to 60 percent higher than normal, whereas the decline in solar output is a few hundredths of one percent down," Lockwood said. "I think that helps keep it in perspective."
Even so, Lockwood added, small variations in the sun's brightness are more powerful than changes in greenhouse gas contributions. For example, a 50 percent variation in solar brightness would mean the end of life on Earth.
SOURCES AND RELATED WEB SITES | <urn:uuid:a4d84220-2a04-46ce-959c-bc56721e0291> | {
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Artificial intelligence (AI) is the fodder of science fiction past, but reality may be creeping up. It is a big subject of research in today's universities and corporations. Some AI systems are designed to handle specific problems and tasks. Others take a more general approach. General intelligence, sometimes known as strong AI, usually involves research in reasoning, planning, learning, communication, perception, and movement. Integrating these areas creates what we know as AI systems.
However, an MIT Media Lab research team led by Catherine Havasi is looking to add another area of significance into the mix.
The researchers have developed a database called ConceptNet for common sense. Many AI systems currently use methods based on keywords and statistics; computer systems could pick up and understand basic facts using these methods but will have a difficult time understanding basic human communication. For example, if someone says, "I want some chips right now," humans will often interpret "chips" as meaning potato chips. But "chips" may easily confuse a computer system. Are we talking about potato chips? Computer chips? Poker chips?
The idea behind ConceptNet is to give systems and technical devices a better understanding of the human language. The researchers wrote in a paper that they formed a crowdsourced database meant to give ConceptNet an optimized approach for making "context-based inferences over real-world texts." It also helps computers grasp "unknown or novel concepts by employing structural analogies to situate them within what is already known" by the computer.
Robert Sloan and Stellan Ohlsson of the University of Illinois at Chicago recently tested the system. They used the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence, a test commonly used to measure a child's IQ. The test focused on the verbal categories, including information, vocabulary, and word reasoning. For a question such as, "What would you wear on your feet?," ConceptNet will search its database for the words must commonly associated with "wear" and "feet." Overall, ConceptNet's verbal IQ was equal to that of a 4-year-old child.
The MIT researchers said in a press release that they can improve ConceptNet's performance by using better algorithms. Furthermore, they think the latest version, which includes 17 million statements (the one tested by UIC had 1 million) can achieve an even higher score.
A system like ConceptNet could help engineers create extremely beneficial applications that would otherwise be impossible. | <urn:uuid:ee896a7d-8585-4207-b57b-c230faf7a2c0> | {
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If you click on the icon in the upper left of an application (at the beginning of the title bar), a little menu opens, which is called the System menu:
The keyboard method of opening this menu is Alt+Spacebar. Then you can press N to Minimize the application, or X to Maximize, or any of the other underlined letters.
So, to minimize any application: Press Alt+Spacebar then N.
Quick, press the Alt key by itself. Chances are you now see the “File” menu become selected. Now you can use the left and right arrow keys to move from menu to menu, and the up and down arrow keys to open a menu and select different menu items.
Once you’ve mastered that, here’s the next step: You can press Alt plus an underlined letter in the name of the menu to open the menu. For example, the File menu has the letter F underlined, so pressing Alt+F opens the File menu.
Menus do vary from program to program, but almost every application has the File, Edit, and Help menus. Here are some of the most common menus and the key that usually opens that menu:
- Alt+F: Open the File menu
- Alt+E: Open the Edit menu
- Alt+V: Open the View menu (if there is one)
- Alt+I: Open the Insert menu (if there is one)
- Alt+O: Open the Format menu (if there is one) — F is already used for File, so the next letter, o, is used.
- Alt+T: Open the Tools menu (if there is one)
- Alt+W: Open the Windows menu (if there is one)
- Alt+H: Open the Help menu
For other menus, just look at which letter is underlined. For example, in Excel, Alt+D opens its Data menu:
Once a menu is opened, you can choose menu commands by pressing the underlined letter of the command you want (just the letter by itself, no Alt key).
For example, in Microsoft Word, once the File menu is opened, you can press the c key to “Close” the current document, or the a key to use the “Save As” command:
Tip: If a menu item has a “…” after it, then a dialog box will open. If not, then the menu command will be carried out immediately, usually with feedback only if something goes wrong.
We’ll break up navigation tips with a more general purpose tip: How to use the keyboard to open a shortcut menu (also known as context menu) — the menu you get when you right-click somewhere.
The most general way to do this is press Shift+F10. (Remember, F10 is a function key, probably across the top of your keyboard.) Try it! Point your mouse somewhere and right-click. (You can press the Esc key to close the menu.) Then try pressing Shift+F10. (And again, Esc to close it.)
The other choice is to use a dedicated key. Chances are your keyboard has a “menu key,” which usually looks like this:
On most keyboards that have this key, it’s down by the Spacebar, to the right (near the Alt and Ctrl keys). On some keyboards, such as Dell laptops, it’s at the top center, near the power key.
If you have that key and it’s in a convenient location, spend today trying to practice using it to open shortcut menus for Windows and most applications you use. If you don’t have that key, practice Shift+F10 instead. | <urn:uuid:67cb08c3-8be1-4e84-b18e-cbac32baa211> | {
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Young people who use indoor tanning beds almost double their risk of getting melanoma, the most deadly form of skin cancer, according to major new European study.
Researchers at the International Prevention Research Institute in Lyon, France estimate there are 3,438 new cases of melanoma and 794 related deaths in Europe annually because of sunbed use. Indoor tanning has been widely practiced in northern Europe and the United States since the 1980’s, and has gained popularity in sunnier countries, such as Australia, since 2000.
“Indoor tanning has a plethora of negative health effects, many of which are involved in cancerous processes,” says the study, published online in the BMJ. “The burden of cancer attributable to sunbed use could further increase in the next 20 years because the recent, high usage levels observed in many countries have not yet achieved their full carcinogenic effect and because usage levels of teenagers and young adults remain high in many countries.”
Director of Research Mathieu Boniol and his colleagues reviewed 27 studies and over 11-thousand cases of melanoma in western and northern Europe. They found that sunbed users had a 20 percent higher risk of melanoma compared to those who had never used one. When indoor tanning began before the age of 35, the risk of cancer nearly doubled (87%)
The researchers cited Iceland’s experience as evidence that use of sunbeds as a cause of melanoma is not just a “proxy for sun exposure.” In that country, where there are few sunny days, an epidemic of melanoma which began in 1990 began to decline 10 years later, when regulatory authorities cracked down on tanning facilities.
There are three different types of skin cancer: melanoma, squamous cell and basal cell cancer. Of the three, melanoma is the most serious and if not caught early can quickly spread to the lymph nodes and to other parts of the body.
Ultraviolet light is a known risk factor for skin cancer. Sunbeds give out the same type of harmful radiation as sunlight – and researchers say the rays from some tanning units are 10-15 times stronger than the midday sun on the Mediterranean Sea. They criticized the sunbed industry for deceitful practices.
“Generally the sunbed industry has not self regulated effectively and has tended to disseminate non-evidence based information which can deceive consumers,” they said. “A tanning salon operator simply following regulations is an illusory prevention method, as such regulations are unable to turn a carcinogenic agent into a healthy one. Instead the sunbed industry has used the opportunity to claim that properly regulated indoor tanning is safe, and that it might even have health benefits.”
Researchers warned that “if sunbed use by teenagers and young adults does not substantially decrease in the short term,” then health authorities should take more radical actions. They noted that in 2009 the Brazilian National Health Surveillance Agency banned the nationwide public use of tanning devices altogether.
The World Health Organization, the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection, and the European Society of Skin Cancer Prevention recommend that sunbed use be limited to people over age 18. Such restrictions have been implemented inAustralia and in several European countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Portugal, Scotland, and Spain).
California is the only U.S. state that has banned indoor tanning for adolescents younger than 18.
(1) Reader Comment
November 12, 2012
October 08, 2012
September 12, 2012
July 23, 2012
Was touched by your story. Lots of things I never knew. Very insightfu
Thoughtful,insightful and healing for the reader, hopefully as well as
Get your facts straight. Dr.Bartha died 5 days later from the explosio
Wow! What a start! Can't wait for Chapter 2.
Thanks for sharing your stuff. I look forward to more. Hope the writin | <urn:uuid:010844a6-1d1e-41b0-9798-3193cdcc67db> | {
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In the above video, Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee worries that raising the minimum wage will keep teenagers out of the workforce, preventing them from gaining valuable experience:
I remember my first job, when I was working at a retail store, growing up down there in Laurel, Mississippi, I was making like $2.15 an hour. And I was being taught how to responsibly handle those customer interactions, and I appreciated the opportunity.
Travis Waldron crunches the numbers:
[W]hat Blackburn didn’t realize is that she accidentally undermined her own argument, since the value of the dollar has changed immensely since her teenage years. Blackburn was born in 1952, so she likely took that retail job at some point between 1968 and 1970. And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ inflation calculator, the $2.15 an hour Blackburn made then is worth somewhere between $12.72 and $14.18 an hour in today’s dollars, depending on which year she started.
Relatedly, McArdle wonders how indexing the minimum wage for inflation would impact the economy:
Would we see a sharp spike in the unemployment rate? Unlikely. Even if 10% of minimum wage workers were laid off, that would be a fraction of 1% of the overall job market. But I would expect to see higher unemployment among young and low-skilled workers during recessions, when employers are facing a lot of pressure on their margins. If your sales fall by 30%, so does the output of each worker. So that overall, monetary policy would become at least slightly less effective at managing the employment declines during recession. | <urn:uuid:8d12030f-6aa6-4ed2-8880-c2026bbc39b6> | {
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What is a rotator cuff tear?
The rotator cuff refers to a group of four small muscles that run from the shoulder blade to the top of the arm bone. They support and move the shoulder joint. A rotator cuff tear refers to a tear in one or more of these muscles. Physiotherapy can effectively treat rotator cuff tears.
How can a rotator cuff tear happen?
A rotator cuff muscle may be torn when it is forcibly contracted or overstretched.
What are the symptoms of a rotator cuff tear?
A tear of a rotator cuff muscle is usually felt as sudden sharp pain or ‘twinge’ in the shoulder. With minor tears you may be able to continue participating after this pain with minimal hindrance. However, as the muscle cools down the pain often gradually worsens as bleeding and swelling around the injured muscle takes place. In severe tears, pain may be so significant that you are unable to continue participating. Other symptoms may include:
What should I do if I have a rotator cuff tear?
The most important time in the initial treatment of a rotator cuff tear is the first 24–48 hours. This is when bleeding and swelling around the injured muscle is most active. To control the amount of swelling and, therefore, limit the degree of damage, the injured muscle should be rested and iced. Ice should be applied to the injured site for 15–20 minutes every 1–2 hours using crushed ice or a packet of frozen peas wrapped in a moist cloth or towel. You should contact your physiotherapist as soon as possible following your injury.
Physiotherapy treatment for a rotator cuff tear.
Physiotherapy is very important in the treatment of a rotator cuff tear. Initially, your physiotherapist can determine the exact tissue/s damaged and the extent of this damage. From this they can estimate how long the injury should take to heal and develop a specific treatment programme. The latter often involves activity modification, electrotherapies and the use of soft tissue treatment such as massage and stretching, and a series of specific, progressive strengthening exercises. These exercises will help facilitate your return to normal activity, prevent re-injury and reduce your chances of developing longer-term effects.
Other treatments include:
What shouldn’t I do if I have a rotator cuff tear?
In the first few days following rotator cuff tear you shouldn’t undertake activities which increase blood flow to the injured muscle. These include hot showers, shoulder stretching, heat rubs, massage, consuming alcohol and excessive use of your arm. These can prolong muscle bleeding and exaggerate swelling resulting in further pain and an extended recovery.
Could there be any long-term effects from a rotator cuff tear?
Some rotator cuff tears can result in longer-term effects. This usually depends on the severity of the tear. When a rotator cuff muscle is completely torn, surgery is required to repair the muscle. A rotator cuff tear that requires a surgical repair will generally take longer to rehabilitate. In minor tears recovery can be prolonged if the tear is not appropriately managed. This may result in a tight, weak rotator cuff muscle which is prone to reinjury on return to normal activity. This weakened muscle may also predispose you to other shoulder injuries such as rotator cuff tendinopathy
To arrange a physiotherapy assessment call Physio.co.uk on 0330 088 7800 or book online. | <urn:uuid:31876ff4-e183-4415-9fc0-270d495a7243> | {
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A Mayan frieze richly decorated with images of deities and rulers and a long dedicatory inscription has been discovered in Guatemala, and is being described as a "once in a lifetime finding."
The Mayan frieze was discovered by Guatemalan archaeologist Francisco Estrada-Belli, a professor at Tulane University's Anthropology Department, and his team in the northern Province of Peten, the government said in a joint statement with Estrada-Belli on Wednesday.
Urgent: Should Obamacare be Repealed? Vote Here Now
"This is an extraordinary finding that occurs only once in the life of an archaeologist," Estrada-Belli said, according to the Associated Press.
The archaeologists were exploring a Mayan pyramid that dates to A.D. 600 in an area that is home to other classic ruin sites when they came upon the Mayan frieze.
"It's a great work of art that also gives us a lot of information on the role and significance of the building, which was the focus of our research," Estrada-Belli said.
The high-relief stucco sculpture, which measures 26 feet by 6 feet (8 meters by 2 meters), includes three main characters wearing rich ornaments of quetzal feathers and jade sitting on the heads of monsters.
The Mayan frieze, which was found in July, depicts the image of gods and godlike rulers and gives their names.
The dedicatory inscription "opens a window on a very important phase in the history of the classical period," Estrada-Belli said.
The inscription is composed of some 30 glyphs in a band that runs at the base of the structure of the Mayan frieze.
The text, which was difficult to read, was deciphered by Alex Tokovinine, an epigraphist at Harvard University and contributor to the research project at Holmul, the site where the Mayan frieze was found.
Tokovinine said the building was commissioned by Ajwosaj, king of the neighboring city-state of Naranjo, and vassal of the powerful Kaanul dynasty, the statement said.
David Stuart, an expert in Mayan epigraphy at the University of Texas at Austin, called Tokovinine's reading of the text "excellent."
But while the government statement called it "the most spectacular frieze seen to date," Stuart was cautious about using superlatives.
"It's really impressive," Stuart said in an email to The Associated Press. But he added, "I certainly wouldn't say this is the `most spectacular' temple facade."
"There are other buildings in Maya archaeology that are just as magnificent, if not more so," Stuart wrote, pointing out the temple called "Rosalila" at Copan, Honduras, and a building excavated starting last year at the ruins of Xultun, Guatemala, which has not yet been uncovered in full.
Also Wednesday, Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina presented the National Geographic Society with the Order of the Quetzal, Guatemala's highest award, for their research on the Mayan civilization.
Perez Molina thanked National Geographic for its support and said the society has "put on high the cultural heritage of the Mayan civilization."
Estrada-Belli is a National Geographic Explorer. His excavations at Holmul were supported by the Ministry of Culture and Sports of Guatemala and funded by the National Geographic Society.
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Arterial Spin Labeling
- A Little History
- How does ASL work?
- ASL Summary (Generalized)
- ASL techniques
- ASL versus BOLD fMRI
"The subject to be observed lay on a delicately balanced table which could tip downwards either at the head or at the foot if the weight of either end were increased. The moment emotional or intellectual activity began in the subject, down went the balance at the head-end, in consequence of the redistribution of blood in his system." -William James (1890)
Ideally, scientists would like to measure neural activity directly. However, as this is nearly impossible under normal circumstances, most researchers have chosen to observe the changes in the metabolic activity that follow mental work using techniques such as BOLD. Though measuring changes in blood flow as a consequence of neural activity would be the next most direct approach, this was formerly only obtainable through the use of invasive imaging techniques utilizing exogenous contrast agents. Thus, most researchers opted to use the BOLD technique, which though dependent on cerebral blood flow (CBF), does not give a direct measure of it. However, due to recent advances in MR imaging, it is now possible to capture CBF measurements entirely non-invasively.
One technique currently being explored by the UMICH fMRI lab, is arterial spin labeling (ASL), which allows the weighting of the MRI signal by cerebral blood flow.
A Little History
"Perhaps no other organ of the body is less adapted to an experimental study of its circulation than the brain." -Carl Wiggers (1905)
Prior to ASL, the techniques used for determining cerebral blood flow were rather invasive and involved the use of exogenous contrast agents, such as like the 15O H2O radiotracer in Positron Emission Tomography (PET). In this technique, researchers inject a radiotracer (which was essentially radioactively labeled water) into the participant. This radiotracer would then circulate through the body's vascular system, ultimately diffusing freely into brain tissue along with the blood. The radioactive tracer would begin to decay almost immediately, emitting tiny positively charged particles (called positrons) which could then be detected using specialized equipment. As the radiotracer travels with the blood, the amount of radioactvity detected reflects blood flow. That is to say, areas which received a lot of blood should also have received a lot of radioactively labeled water and consequently shown higher levels of radioactive positron emissions. Thus, in for each region of brain tissue, uptake of the radiotracer would be proportional to blood flow.
The principles behind ASL are quite similar to those utilizing exogenous contrast agents. However, ASL is completely non-invasive (no injections) and the tracer used is not radioactively labeled water, but magnetically labeled water.
How does ASL work?
"Aristotle taught that the brain exists merely to cool the blood and is not involved in the process of thinking. This is true only of certain persons." -Will Cuppy
Similar to PET techniques, ASL utilizes a tracer of sorts. In ASL, arterial blood water is magnetically labeled then imaged. First, arterial blood water is magnetically labeled just below the region (slice) of interest by applying a 180 degree radiofrequency (RF) inversion pulse. The result of this pulse is inversion of the net magnetization of the blood water. In other words, the water molecules within the arterial blood are labeled magnetically. After a period of time (called the transit time), this 'paramagnetic tracer’ flows into slice of interest where it exchanges with tissue water. The inflowing inverted spins within the blood water alter total tissue magnetization, reducing it and, consequently, the MR signal & image intensity. During this time, an image is taken (called the tag image).
The experiment is then repeated without labeling the arterial blood to create another image (called the control image). The control image and the tag image are subtracted to produce a perfusion image. This image will reflect the amount of arterial blood delivered to each voxel within the slice within the transit time.
ASL Summary (Generalized)
Tag inflowing arterial blood by magnetic inversion
Acquire the Tag Image
Repeat experiment without tag
Acquire the Control Image
Subtract: Control Image - Tag Image
The Difference in magnetization between control and tag conditions is proportional to regional cerebral blood flow.
There are several approaches to ASL perfusion imaging:
CASL, or continous ASL, where the inversion of the arterial blood occurs continuously through the application of a continuous RF pulse. During the acquisition of the control image, an RF pulse is supplied above the image slice to account for magnetic distortions caused by the pulse itself, but the pulse itself will not label any blood. This method of inversion is also called flow-driven inversion.
PASL, or pulsed ASL, where the inversion of the arterial blood occurs over a specific area. The RF pulse is applied in a spatially selective manner (slice-specific). Several versions exist, including EPISTAR (echo planar imaging and signal targeting with alternating radiofrequency) and FAIR (flow-sensitive alternating inversion recovery). Please refer to the image on the right. These methods of inversion are also referred to as spatial inversion.
ASL versus BOLD fMRI
How do the results obtained from ASL experiments differ from those obtained with BOLD? How do BOLD and ASL differ?
- ASL noise is a lot whiter than BOLD noise. (Wang 2003)
- ASL does not require contrast agents (that's the whole point).
- Changes in perfusion are more localized to the parenchyma, whereas BOLD changes are tied to the veins and venules (Duong 2002).
- It does take longer to collect a single ASL image, though, but we can go as fast as 2.5 seconds for a subtraction pair with our methods. After sinc subtraction, we end up with an ASL image every 1.2 seconds. With BOLD we can get the images in less than 500 msec.
- We get less slices at a time with ASL, and they tend to be thicker. I hesitate to give numbers about this.
- ...there's more
In addition to the items mentioned above, it also turns out that the change in ASL signal that results from activation is cleaner than what is normally observed in utilizing your average BOLD technique. This is illustrated in the image given on the right which shows the results of an experiment that was first conducted using CASL and then repeated using BOLD.
As you can see, ASL images are intrinsically a lot noisier, in fact, they look awful, you can barely see the white mater... but the change in ASL signal that results from activation is huge (we observe 50%, or even more). | <urn:uuid:ad6b5dca-1b7a-4c3b-92eb-2c0902c45e53> | {
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Why is Victor Hugo’s masterpiece, Les Misérables, known as “the brick”?
Just last summer, I decided to read the unabridged version of the “brick”. The reason why Victor Hugo’s book is called “the brick” is because of the length. The unabridged book is over one thousand pages and seems intimidating at first. The title also seems to lead people away from the book because it means “the miserable”, which indicates that the book is going to be a heartbreaking and tragic book.
But there is way more to the story then heartbreak and tragedy. It takes a lot of work to see beyond that and once you realize what is at the core of the book, it makes the storyline so much better.
I decided to set a goal and told myself I will finish it by the end of the summer. I was inspired to read the unabridged book because of the musical. I was interested in learning more about the book that Les Mis was based off of. Coincidentally, just like the musical, the book was also panned by critics. Victor Hugo once said “I don’t know if everyone will read this book, but it is meant for everyone”. Victor Hugo wrote a book that is about the survival of the human spirit. Les Misérables is one of the greatest stories ever told.
This is a basic summary: a bit lengthy, possible minor spoilers
Its protagonist, Jean Valjean, is one of the most memorable and best characters in the world of literature. Jean Valjean had a terrible background by serving nineteen years in prison just for stealing a loaf of bread in order to provide for his sister and her children. This experience turned him from a good man to a man filled with anger and hatred. After being released, he had to be on parole forever. No one would give him a place to sleep or a place to eat just because he was an ex-convcit. That made him believe society will always hate him. But he was offered mercy, grace, compassion, and forgiveness by the humble bishop. The bishop gave him a meal and a place to sleep.
But Valjean was desperate and stole the bishop’s silver and was caught. But the bishop lied and said that the silver was a gift and gave him the silver candlesticks, which will serve as a reminder of the bishop’s kindness. The bishop was able to forgive him and taught Valjean the ways of the Lord. From that point on, Valjean decided to live by the example of the bishop. On top of that, there are is the love triangle between Marius, Cosette, and Eponine, the tragic tale of Fantine, and the uprising that the students are planning.
This story is about Valjean’s journey from a harsh man filled with anger and hate to a man filled with compassion and goodness to saintlike. He dedicated his life to the Lord and made a promise to the prostitute, Fantine, that he would raise her daughter, Cosette, as his own. Cosette was the first person he ever loved. Cosette and Valjean were both broken and they helped heal each other.
Overall, this book gave me a better glimpse into the time period that these characters lived. Victor Hugo created a book that realistically described early 19th Century, France. He actually created some of his characters based of experience. The love story between Marius and Cosette was based off the love between his first lover and him. He saved a prostitute from being arrested after a customer harassed her, which made him wonder if she had a child and Fantine was created. Hugo actually witnessed the June Rebellion of 1832.
It is hard to give a basic summary of the book. That shows that the storyline line is extremely complex, but very real. It may be heartbreaking, but the book gives you a wonderful glimpse of spirituality. It is ultimately a story of sacrifice, hope, compassion, love, forgiveness, and redemption. That is why Hugo’s story manages to uplift you and why it is so inspirational.
One of the most annoying and frustrating things about the book is that sometimes Victor Hugo interrupts the plot with boring history lessons. He would go into fifty or so pages about the battle of waterloo or twenty pages about the sewers of the Paris, etc. But I did not skip over them because my goal was to finish the entire book. But I understand why he wrote that way. You realize it helps you understand the storyline.
Victor Hugo is so clever with his book. He somehow was able to connect all these different characters though several coincidences. The characters all happened to be at the right place at the right time. For example, the Thenardiers and Marius ended up being neighbors at the same place Valjean and Cosette once lived. Cosette also seems to link the characters together. She is Fantine’s daughter, was adopted by Valjean, part of a love triangle with Eponine and Marius. Because she was Valjean’s adopted daughter, she was always on the run to stay away from Javert and because Marius was a reluctant revolutionary, she connected to the students.
I was aware when I read the unabridged book that characterizations were going to be different, but that wasn’t going to stop me from loving the characters from the stage show. The Thenardier family was one of the most obvious difference in the book. Monsieur and Madame Thenardier were more wicked in the book and did not serve as comic relief.
You get a better glimpse into the poverty that the family faced. You become aware that Gavroche was indeed a Thenardier, which is not referenced in the musical. Eponine, one of my favorite characters in the musical, was slightly different as well. She was less loving in the book and she lives a more darker life in the book. She wasn’t that pretty in the book either. At times, she does become jealous between the love between Marius and Cosette, which makes her act in selfish and self-destructive ways at times.
This book gets you a better glimpse into the bishop. The bishop plays a small, but crucial role in the story. Without him, you technically don’t really have a story. Without him, Valjean’s journey would not have been wonderful. The bishop helped Valjean raise above from where he came from.
Other characters include the obsessed Javert, the wicked and abusive Thenardiers’, the streetwise and tough Eponine, the self-sacrificing and tragic Fantine, the revolutionary and lover Marius, and the innocent and angelic Cosette and passionate and revolutionary Enjolras.
I may have read the unabridged book last summer, but had a lasting impact on the powerful, epic, and inspirational musical. This book helped make me appreciate the musical even more and it made the spirituality become more alive in the musical. The musical faithfully reflects the book despite all of the characterization differences, but those differences are for the show’s benefit. The book is so powerful and covered in several emotions. It spans over seventeen years.
You become more impressed at how the over one thousand page book was condensed into a three hour musical. I used my knowledge of the musical to understand the book. I was able to mark up major characters and write in song names. In a lot of ways, I find this story to be more inspirational then heartbreaking. These characters feel so real to you and you truly can care about every one of these characters even if you don’t like them.
Hint: if anyone wants to read the unabridged version of this book, make sure to have a dictionary at hand and mark up things that will help you understand the story. If you are a fan of the musical, I suggest you use your knowledge of the musical to read this book. I know it helped me. | <urn:uuid:5852a8b0-04e1-46b4-9593-c38aadd8fb93> | {
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from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
- adj. well-watered
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English
- adj. Watered; watery; moist; dewy.
- adj. Gently penetrating or pervading.
from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Watered; watery; moist.
- Of such a nature as to irrigate; affording irrigation.
Sorry, no etymologies found.
Perhaps Mr. Mazzocco's inventive use of the English language is the source of the confusion, with his "irriguous" organ and "banausic" muse which go "havocking" about the western world.
These delightful spots of ground become more numerous and extensive as the stream progresses on its rapid and irriguous way, until, where it finally emerges from the gorge of the mountain, it meanders through a rich plain, containing many acres, and at last loses itself in French Broad River.
You look full upon the house, which appears to be in the most beautiful situation in the world, on the side of a mountain, half-way between its bare top and an irriguous vale at its foot.
Chatnesse in Lancashire (says Camden) the low mossie ground was no very long time since, carried away by an impetuous flood, and in that place now lies a low irriguous vale, where many prostrate trees have been digged out: And from another I receive, that in the moors of
Atiifted by Aloeus 'offspring, near The ftreams of Helicon's irriguous feet.
And this activity, which we stolid beef-eaters, before we had been taught by modern science that we were no better than baboons ourselves, were wont discourteously to liken to that of the livelier tribes of Monkey, did in fact so much impress the Hollanders, when first the irriguous Franks gave motion and current to their marshes, that the earliest heraldry in which we find the Frank power blazoned seems to be founded on a Dutch endeavour to give some distantly satirical presentment of it.
This hill, or rather cluster of hills, is surrounded on one side by a reach of Cork Harbour, over which it looks in the most advantageous manner; and on the other by an irriguous vale, through which flows the river Glanmire; the opposite shore of that river has every variety that can unite to form pleasing landscapes for the views from Dunkettle grounds; in some places narrow glens, the bottoms of which are quite filled with water, and the steep banks covered with thick woods that spread a deep shade; in others the vale opens to form the site of a pretty cheerful village, overhung by hill and wood: here the shore rises gradually into large inclosures, which spread over the hills, stretching beyond each other; and there the vale melts again into a milder variety of fields. | <urn:uuid:e8f599ed-7527-4cfd-8ad7-3a4df59f8055> | {
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1. The Sailor
Most inmate art logically depicts the artist’s feeling toward the very concept of incarceration. Perhaps dreaming of an escape, this inmate hand-painted an idyllic sailing scene on an administration-building window at the Montana State Prison.
2. The Courtyard Mural
Sometimes prison artwork is a collaborative effort. Several inmates contributed to transforming a wall of Australia’s Fremantle Prison courtyard into a beautiful mural.3. The Fiery Horizon
Shortly before it closed in 1990, Fremantle allowed prisoners to decorate the walls of their cells. This inmate mainly used black, yellow and red for a fiery sunset effect.4. The Micro Cell
Using popsicle sticks and other odd items found within the prison walls, this inmate created a miniature cell. The attention to detail is stunning, from the tiny bunk beds to the miniature toilet.
5. The Makeshift Postcard
Because they have limited access to art supplies, prisoners often have to get creative with the materials they use to create their work. Even a mailing envelope can serve as a blank canvas.6. The Pin-Up
It helps to have an artistic eye when your resources are limited. Using pre-existing cracks in his cell wall, this prisoner created a detailed portrait of a woman.7. Dinner And A Mural
At quick glance, it may look like someone hung a painting, but this landscape portrait was actually scrawled over the tiles in the cafeteria of the West Virginia State Penitentiary in Moundsville.8. The Wall Bible
Many inmates use their time behind bars to grow spiritually. This illustration from a cell in a New Mexico state prison is evidence that, even when a hard copy of the Bible is not available, a cell wall can become one.9. The Spanish Lady
It takes a lot of talent to draw on just about any surface, but the attention to detail in the illustration scrawled onto this rough surface in a Madrid prison is particularly impressive.10. A Car On Crack
Where most people would only see a cracked wall, some inmates see a blank canvas. Here, prisoners from Costa Rica’s San Lucas Island Prison made innovative use of the cracks in a wall to create a surprisingly realistic illustration of a car.11. Stained Glass, Prison Style
Most prison chapels lack the ornamentation of a more traditional church. But inmates of a prison on the coast
of French Guiana took matters into their own hands, painting this beautiful mural on the wall of theirs.12. The Cavity Search
This wall illustration, found in the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp in WWII Germany, has more than one meaning. Cartoon vegetables represent the kitchen in which the painting resided, but also depicted is the humiliating cavity search that all incoming inmates had to endure.13. Mini Log Cabin
The most ideal art projects for prisoners are those that will help pass time. This miniature log cabin, built by an inmate in Louisiana’s notorious Angola Prison, undoubtedly fits that bill; it must have been quite labor-intensive.14. The Wood Train
Renato Norelli made this train during a “lockdown,” and his cellmate did all the painting and chose the color scheme. Knowing how limited inmate artists are, this astoundingly detailed train is all the more impressive.15. The Wood Chopper
Miniature versions of large-scale objects certainly seem to be a trend among artistic prisoners due to extra down time and limited materials. Using only wood, Larry Sabo crafted a finely detailed miniature motorcycle. It’s going for $240 at prisonart.org. | <urn:uuid:80277ebd-c359-402f-94a1-8e872edfc8db> | {
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edenpictures / flickr
Poor Pip, a child on one of the whaling boats, is thrown into the ocean by accident and is only found sometime later once the sailors returned from chasing a whale. It wasn't the expectation of drowning that got to him, it was the terror of the deep. In Chapter 93, Melville gives us the perspective of the abandoned boy. The image of the calm, infinite sea is contrasted with Pip's sudden sense of isolation:
When the whale started to run Pip was left behind on the sea, like a hurried traveller's trunk. It was a beautiful, bounteous, blue day; the spangled sea calm and cool, and flatly stretching away, all round, to the horizon, like gold-beater's skin hammered out to the extremest. Bobbing up and down in that sea, Pip's ebon head showed like a head of cloves. In three minutes, a whole mile of shoreless ocean was between Pip and Stubb. Out from the centre of the sea, poor Pip turned his crisp, curling, black head to the sun, another lonely castaway.... The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it?Once rescued, Pip was thereafter a mute idiot. Why? The narrator explains that Pip was terrorized by what appeared to him below the surface:
The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad.Melville evokes a wonder-world of alien creatures and abstractions, and we see poor Pip the passive, astounded audience to a primal world for which he, and we, are not fit. "Gobsmacked" or perhaps "god smacked," Pip answered the inscrutable he viewed with a permanent silence.
Isolation can lead to terror, but so can sights for which our eyes or minds are unprepared, wondrous though they may be. (This seems to me to be relevant to the idea of the sublime and terror that my student, Erin McMullin, is exploring. I note she recently found a sea-related example of someone else overwhelmed upon being rescued, Captain Phillips in the recent movie of the same name...) | <urn:uuid:0682dd57-5703-4254-98a6-71c7e8c696db> | {
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The Cloud computing is a New style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. With Opera 10, the introduction of a new technology called Opera Unite, radically extending what you are able to do online. Opera Unite harnesses the power of today’s fast connections and hardware, allowing all of us to help define the future landscape of the Web, one computer at a time.
Opera Unite allows you to easily share your data: photos, music, notes and other files. You can even run chat rooms and host entire Web sites with Opera Unite. It puts the power of a Web server in your browser, giving you greater privacy and flexibility than other online services.
Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the “cloud” that supports them.
The term cloud is used as a metaphor for the Internet, based on how the Internet is depicted in computer network diagrams and is an abstraction for the complex infrastructure it conceals.
This new technique that uses infrared light brain imaging to decode preference with the goal of ultimately opening the world of choice to children who can’t speak or move.
Bloorview scientists demonstrate the ability to decode a person’s preference for one of two drinks with 80 per cent accuracy by measuring the intensity of near infrared light absorbed in brain tissue.
“This is the first system that decodes preference naturally from spontaneous thoughts,”
After teaching the computer to recognize the unique pattern of brain activity associated with preference for each subject, the researchers accurately predicted which drink the participants liked best 80 per cent of the time.
Most brain-computer interfaces designed to read thoughts require training.
Wearing a headband fitted with fibre-optics that emit light into the pre-frontal cortex of the brain, they were shown two drinks on a computer monitor, one after the other, and asked to make a mental decision about which they liked more. “When your brain is active, the oxygen in your blood increases and depending on the concentration, it absorbs more or less light.”
Luu says. “In some people, their brains are more active when they don’t like something, and in some people they’re more active when they do like something.”
Luu says. The brain is too complex to ever allow decoding of a person’s random thoughts. “However, if we limit the context limit the question and available answers, as we have with predicting preference – then mind-reading becomes possible.“
In the word, love can be explained in thousands of ways, but the only word that comes to my mind is you. I think we dream so we don’t have to be away from one another. If we are in each other’s dreams, we will always be together.
Life’s greatest happiness is, to be convinced that we are loved.
Happy Valentines Day!
26th January 1950 is one of the most important days in Indian history. In this day India became a totally republican unit. on this day dream of Mahatma Gandhi come true. The numerous freedom fighters who, fought for and sacrificed their lives for the Independence of their country. So, the 26th of January was decreed a national holiday and has been recognized and celebrated as the Republic Day of India, ever since.
Today, the Republic Day is celebrated with much enthusiasm all over the country. The patriotic fervor of the people on this day brings the whole country together. which makes the Republic Day the most popular.
Vettaikaran is the first project under the AVM banner where vijay play a lead role. this films is directed by Debutant Babu Sivan, who worked with Dharani in gilli. The Music is scored by Vijay Antony who storm the kollywood by “nakka mokka” song. Anushka will do the female lead role.
This unit plans to begins their shooting on next month.. They also plan to release this movie in Deepavali 2009.
Is it exciting ? ->ReadMore
Villu is Prabhu Deva’s version of the Hindi box office hit Soldier. if Prabhu Deva made a good adaptation of Soldier things would’ve been any better. Prabhu Deva has successfully made the army operations appear as if it were a one man attempt.
Vadivelu’s unimaginative comedy track has absolutely no connection with the movie’s main plot.but, it serves as a saving grace for the movie in many instances.
Nayan’s presence serves the purpose of eye candy. Villu’s story is reminiscent of the pre-historic Tamil cinema formulas such as son taking revenge over his father’s killers to satiate his mother’s wishes. And of course, there is time for love, double crossing, comedy and some sentiments . Ravi Varman’s cinematography appear hazed even in the foreign locales. but vijay’s stylish new look help a lot.
For More Info Visit Here
Verdict : Not so worth don’t risk your patience
Movie : Padikathavan
Year : 2009
Cast : Dhanush, Tamanna Bhatia, Suman, Vivek, Sayaji Shinde and Others
Music : Mani Sharma
Director : Suraj | <urn:uuid:cdc63b3b-93b0-49ca-9b76-d7a051b2b150> | {
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COLUMBUS, Ohio, June 9 (UPI) -- U.S. computer scientists say they might have developed a method of combating the most dangerous form of computer virus -- the worm.
Ohio State University researcher Ness Shroff and colleagues say their technique can automatically detect, within minutes, when an Internet worm has infected a computer network, allowing administrators to isolate the infected machines and hold them in quarantine for repairs.
"These worms spread very quickly," Shroff said. "They flood the 'Net with junk traffic and, at their most benign, they overload computer networks and shut them down."
The researchers said the key to the new technique is for software to monitor the number of scans that machines on a network send out. When a machine starts sending out too many scans -- a sign that it has been infected -- administrators should take it offline and check for viruses.
In simulations they were able to prevent the spread of worm infections to less than 150 hosts on the whole Internet, 95 percent of the time.
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Cloud computing is broadly defined as an IT model that grants specific users both the permission and the ability to request a certain amount of computing resources through an automated interface. The resources are then expected to be delivered shortly thereafter through an automated provisioning process.
Details and constraints of this definition of cloud computing — whether in the location, quantity, or specific composition of these resources — have been debated for months in the industry, even while the model continues to gain traction and market popularity. However, a few features of this concept remain clear:
- To the user, the quantity of resources available appears to be limitless. While that’s clearly not true, the size of the cloud so far exceeds the needs of each individual user that it is “effectively limitless,” gated only by the permissions given to that individual.
- The request is immediately fulfilled, within a short window of minutes or hours, relative to the weeks or months required in the past.
- The user can leverage more — or fewer — resources over time, according to the capacity management expertise of the cloud administrators and their own workloads’ needs.
- The cost to the user of consuming cloud resources, in place of traditional physical resources, is greatly reduced.
- There are some tradeoffs in exchange for the benefits. For example, the user may no longer have knowledge of (or control over) the precise physical location, neighboring workloads, hardware, hypervisor, and various other components that are now optimized by the cloud management environment.
The benefits, particularly for a large swath of reasonably low-risk and intermittent workloads, are clearly beneficial to all concerned. The user gets what he or she needs, and IT has the freedom to manage the aggregate of all cloud services to best optimize their environment.
Users get what they need
Most depictions of the quintessential cloud user paint him or her ambiguously enough to allow for every role or function — from a researcher needing to run an immediate, complex statistical calculation, to a developer who routinely tests her code on fresh instances of an environment, and even to a marketing team member who needs to provision enough “Web site capacity” to support another 1,000 concurrent users.
While this seems fanciful in a world of primarily infrastructure-as-a-service clouds, even the most basic clouds, such as those supporting development efforts, still have a diverse set of users. Some developers, when writing code, might need a Software Development Environment (SDE) linked to a runtime environment that supports multi-tier applications (say, an application server and a database).
Other people in QA might need a single instance of an application, rapidly reconstructed. Scalability testers would need simulation environments to test thousands of users and transactions.
Add to this same cloud a group of research-and-development (R&D) users who require a few advanced statistical packages on top of an operating system, or financial analysts who need to run simulations, and you’re already up to half a dozen different cloud service configurations.
That doesn’t even begin to account for differences in size of instances, monitoring and service level agreement (SLA) requirements, or security and compliance options.
However, even in these simple cases, it is clear to see that a “useful” cloud service to each of these different theoretical users varies wildly. It would do no good to provide each of them with a nice, clean instance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 and send them on their way. The users each need a very specific cloud service to truly meet their needs.
Serving the masses
What might have been untrue for countless architectural efforts throughout time is actually true for the cloud: If you build it, they will come. And with them, will come tremendous diversity in requests. You have three major options for addressing this diversity:
- Take it or leave it — Give users a basic, standard cloud service with no customization, regardless of what they want.
- A thousand shades of cloud — Give users precisely what they want, creating a library of images to meet each need.
- The modular cloud service — Construct a modular way of giving each user what they want by piecing together component parts on demand.
Option 1: Take it or leave it
If you commit to the admittedly beautiful dream of standard images, you will realize some pleasant benefits. If these images include only an operating system, configured to your company’s standards, then you have significantly lowered the diversity in your environment and simplified its management. If you manage to build a handful of standard, full-stack images, then these small library images might be relatively easy to manage.
The downsides are clear. By shifting the burden of conformity to the user, IT basically requires the user to meet its needs, not the other way around. What’s more, users, who are now often application administrators, are left with the burden of installation and configuration post-provisioning to put together the proper cloud service they need.
A large chunk of users will turn away, knowing the cloud environment doesn’t fulfill their requirements. Many of the benefits of cloud, which are achieved through scale and consolidation, are less forthcoming when fewer users patronize the environment. They may find other ways to achieve their ends, through public clouds or by maintaining physical environments.
As the population of users grows and diversifies, pressure will increase to expand the library of images — which brings us to option 2.
Option 2: A thousand shades of cloud
One request begets another, and users begin to ask for tweaks and changes to make the cloud service better for them. While a hard line on customization might be easy to describe in principle, it is much harder to implement in practice. There are always urgent or high-priority exceptions or high-profile requests that cannot be denied.
Once that image has been tweaked, why not make it available to the next fellow who wants the same modification? Rapidly, the numbers balloon. The users are getting what they want — but at what expense?
Image libraries are not trivial to manage. Patches need to be applied and updates managed. Effectively, these hundreds of images become a whole new set of software stacks that needs to be managed on an ongoing basis, alongside the very instances of themselves that fill the cloud infrastructure. It’s a challenge most IT groups are loathe to undertake — and for good reason.
Option 3: The modular cloud service
The third option enables the greatest user customizability — and interestingly, the greatest administrator customizability, as well. If all cloud services can be constructed of many component parts — operating systems, applications, middleware, databases, monitoring tools, and so on — then a system can be created by which each part can be independently selected by the user and then put together, on demand, by the cloud provisioning system.
A frivolous analogy might be a trip to the ice cream shop. The customer can select one, two, or three scoops of ice cream, a topping flavor (hot fudge or caramel), some dry toppings (chocolate chips or peanuts), whipped cream, and a cherry. Each customer builds the sundae that appeals to his or her individual requirements, whether that person wants a chocolate explosion or a fruity treat.
On the other hand, the ice cream shop proprietor decides what ice cream flavors to stock, what sizes to sell, what toppings to offer, and so on. She can even create arbitrary requirements such as “every sundae gets two cherries” or “no more than one topping per scoop of ice cream.”
The ice cream shop owner has control over what she offers her customers, so they cannot just barge in and demand gummy bears on their treat. However, those customers, within preset boundaries, have freedom of choice. In the cloud, the same is true.
Through a service catalog — the menu of options of the cloud world — IT can set the choices, role-based permissions, and hard-and-fast rules of the environment. And, through the portal, users can configure their own services to meet their needs.
As no images exist, there is no image management problem. But the trick lies in having a robust, automated provisioning engine, a modular way of describing cloud services, and a service catalog in which to translate these descriptions into offerings for each user. | <urn:uuid:4a18dc82-44d1-45e9-bf9b-2852591f654e> | {
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Tatiana first presented the history and growth of Mexico City to the students, including a written statement, an excerpt of which is shown below.
“Xochimilco is the last visual remnant of la Ciudad Lacustre, the lake city. Mexico City was established in 1325 as Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec Empire. Where the once vast Lake Tecoco lay, over time the Aztecs were able to reclaim the lake and expand the city surface through chinampas, artificial islands built atop the shallow waters. As more and more of Lake Texcoco disappeared, the landscape of the city evolved from a city which grew atop a lake to a continually decreasing lake that existed along the city’s periphery. Xochimilco is the last area were aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems meet…This is what also piqued the interest of Felix Candela who in 1958 was asked to build what would become one of his most famous works (Los Manantiales) beside the idyllic waterways of Xochimilco…”
Tatiana has asked students “…to give Xochimilco the urban direction it sorely lacks in the form of a master plan. You are to use Los Manantiales as an incubator for responsible urban regeneration, which can maintain the area’s historic legacy as a place of farming and recreation while adapting it to develop a symbiotic relationship with the encroaching urban tissue, through the captivating visual means of a large format collage.”
Donghia students (Billal Ashai, Erim Ayhan, Michael Chen, Juan Febres-Cordero, Josselin Garcia, Ibrahim Ghulam, Pinky Lam, Sally Park, and Wei Qiu) began working with Tatiana on Thursday, March 16 and will present their collages to a jury on Wednesday, March 22, 2017.
March 16, 2017
top left and right: Tatiana Bilbao presenting the history and physical growth of Mexico City to Donghia students
March 17-18, 2017
middle left: Tatiana Bilbao working with junior Pinky Lam
middle right: Pinky’s initial sketches
bottom left: junior Juan Febres-Cordero sketching his ideas
bottom right: Tatiana Bilbao working with senior Erim Ayhan
2017 Año de México en Los Angeles | <urn:uuid:e92d95e0-b6b5-4f2d-8226-4951c1929116> | {
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recycling rinse water through ion exchangers
This method can be used to recycle water after cations and anions are removed via ion exchange, with the exception of water that has to be sent for detoxification because it contains cyanides and/or high levels of grease or hydrocarbons.
Figure 62 covers the main closed system options.
Exchangers can be installed in a fixed position, with in situ regeneration, a technique that is viable for larger plants; alternately exchangers can be “mobile” and sent to an approved center for regeneration. This approach is most applicable for small plants (maximum volume of resin = 200 L) and requires constant availability of a spare set of regenerated exchangers.
Regardless of the layout used, recycling plays two roles: water recovery (reuse) and contaminant concentration. Therefore, it needs to be systematically supplemented with a detoxification treatment.
The advantages of recycling using ion exchange are as follows:
- significant reduction in water consumption;
- production of extremely pure water, at low cost, with improved rinsing quality;
- pollution concentration (reduction in final treatment capacity);
- recovery of some costly products (gold, silver, chromate);
- chrome plating bath stabilisation.
The recovery of noble metals or those that are extremely toxic, can also be undertaken by continuous electrolysis in a "dead" rinsing bath. This technique applies more specifically to gold, silver, cadmium, copper and nickel.
degreasing bath maintenance
These baths become rapidly polluted by oil removed from the surface of treated components. Beyond a few % concentration of oil and grease, the degreasing quality becomes unacceptable and the bath has to be renewed.
Ultrafiltration can be used to recover these free oils and thus extend the bath’s service life, achieving savings on chemical products.
This technique is used, for example, in steel mills (major consumer of degreasing agents) in cold rolling, on degreasing baths before continuous annealing, or before metal coating baths.
It is also used in the automotive industry.
When this type of system is used (figure 63), the service life of the baths can be tripled. | <urn:uuid:fd7864bf-d599-46d1-a907-0911a6b0be9f> | {
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Typically the job of a web browser is to download and display content– establishing a network connection, sending HTTP requests, retrieving the web page, and downloading and running all of its content. These operations pose non-trivial challenges, and as such, web-browsers are among the most complicated software that most of us routinely use. However, there’s a whole separate (higher level!) challenge around selectively not running (filtering) content.
Today, different browsers offer many different mechanisms for selectively filtering content. This post is a survey of how these mechanisms work, and the subtle and sometimes not so subtle differences between them.
Examples and Motivations
Different users have shown an interest in myriad different types of Content Blocking, and not all users have similar goals.
Certain types of blockers are over a decade old and extremely commonly used (e.g. popup-blockers) while others are less often used or only of interest to a small niche audience. Just reading the comments on this blog, it’s clear that some users want to be able to block cookies, plugins or ActiveX controls, certain types of content (e.g. malware, adult content), privacy-impactful “trackers” (e.g. “web beacons”), advertisements, file downloads, or content they consider “annoying” (e.g. popups, flashing content). Individual consumers may have many different reasons for wanting to block particular content: faster performance, improved security, increased reliability and stability, enhanced privacy, increased battery life, preference about user-experience, legal or supervisory requirements (e.g. parental controls) lower bandwidth charges, as well as many others.
However, on the other end of the internet connection, a website provider may or may not want content blocked, for any of any number of reasons: revenue (direct or indirect), site analytics and understanding customers and markets, predictability and reliability of the user experience, malicious intent, and many others.
In some scenarios, site publishers and developers are just fine with content blocking and modification. For instance, a site owner whose legitimate site was compromised to serve malware probably wants that malware content blocked to keep his visitors safe until the site can be cleaned. Accessibility tools are crucial for some people to use the web and websites. Some sites and networks may offer users a way for to opt-out of analytics or other tracking.
With hundreds of millions of unique browser users, billions of webpages, and myriad different stakeholders in any given webpage visit, the complexity of this topic is clear.
This blog post offers an engineering point of view on the technical aspects of content blocking to help inform the broader discussion. There are many, many other points of view on these issues around the web in general and on this topic.
One trend that is clear is that over time we see demand for browsers to integrate functionality that used to be available via add-ons. Back in 2002, I released a moderately successful IE add-on popup-blocker. PopupPopper remained popular for a few years until Windows XP SP2’s IE6 included an integrated popup blocker.
Mechanisms for Blocking Content
Before we dive in, let’s distinguish between two different approaches for identifying content to block. A heuristic blocker relies on “rules” (heuristics) or other computer-generated information to determine what content to block. A curated blocker relies upon a human being (somewhere) to make that determination.
Heuristics can tell a cookie from an image from some web page content, but they can’t determine the intent or use of any of these. Was the “ps” cookie set so that I don’t have to remember my login, or is it a cookie used to track me… or both? Is an image on the webpage a photo of my brother’s new car, or is it an advertisement, or is it a web beacon used to track me? At best, heuristics can take a guess. The advantage of a heuristic blocker is that it can block things it hasn’t seen before as long as it is similar to other content the user is trying to block; the disadvantage is that heuristics can misfire.
In contrast, a curated blocker uses a person’s judgment to determine what to block. The advantage is improved accuracy, with the disadvantage of a lot of work to keep the list up-to-date with the new content available on the web.
With that distinction in place, let’s look at heuristic and curated blockers as they’re implemented today.
There are three major categories of content blockers: Network-level blockers, Browser reconfiguration/filtering, and Browser Content Blocking add-ons.
Each has its strengths and limitations, outlined in the sections below.
Blocking at the Network Level
There are several common ways to block content at the network level—the most common are by using the HOSTS file, or by filtering content with a proxy. There are a number of other, less-common network-level approaches, including using a router to block particular content (most Linksys routers can be configured to block Java, ActiveX installers, and cookies, for example). Large organizations or networks with restricted bandwidth, for instance, may block content at the gateway:
Blocking content at the network has a number of advantages, including the fact that it will work regardless of which browser you use, and does not require browser-specific add-ons. Network blocking also has a number of disadvantages, primarily because download requests do not contain much context about how the content being requested will be used.
The HOSTS File
Blocking via the HOSTS file works by altering how your computer maps web addresses to actual web sites. Specifically, requests for information to particular addresses (hostnames) like “www.example.com” are directed to other addresses, perhaps on your local computer (aka “127.0.0.1”). When your browser dutifully tries to download particular content, the browser attempts to retrieve it from a location that won’t respond. Because the request is effectively to “a wrong number” (to use a telephone analogy), it fails to return any web content and effectively blocks the content.
By definition, the HOSTS file is a curated block list that cannot easily be computer-generated. However, many organizations publish HOSTS files to block particular sites; one of the most popular such files is here.
There are a number of downsides to this approach, including:
- It’s non-trivial for most users. Updating the HOSTS file on Vista and above requires elevating to admin and editing a hidden system file in the windows\system32\drivers\etc folder.
- It’s non-granular. You cannot block a specific path, you can only block all files from a given hostname.
- It doesn’t work if your connection to the internet goes through a proxy server (e.g. at a school or many businesses). When you are behind a proxy, the proxy performs DNS lookups on your behalf, and the local HOSTS file is ignored.
- Your machine configuration matters. If you happen to be running a web server locally (or have an unusual firewall configuration), performance may be impaired.
Filtering with a Proxy
When you configure your browser to use a content-filtering proxy, the proxy can simply decline to return that specific content, or return a replacement file instead of the server’s content. Because the proxy sees the full URL of the content, a proxy can easily block a file named “tracker.js” on every server, or return a blank image for any requests for “/adult/*.gif.” This granularity can be useful when blocking content, because it allows for heuristics that work across multiple hostnames, and it allows blocking subsets of content from a given host in the case that a site serves both wanted and unwanted content.
There are a number of downsides to this approach, including:
- Browser configuration. Browsers must be configured to use a proxy; most browsers adopt WinINET/IE’s proxy settings, but not all do.
- Performance. Proxying traffic incurs some overhead, particularly because browsers limit the number of simultaneous connections to a proxy.
- Most don’t work with HTTPS. Only proxies configured to decrypt HTTPS traffic can block individual files delivered over HTTPS. Other proxies can only entirely prevent HTTPS connections to target servers.
There are a number of content-filtering proxies available. Two of the most popular, the Internet JunkBuster Proxy and Proxomitron are no longer developed. Privoxy and others are still under development, and do-it-yourselfers can experiment with or build upon the trivial Content-Block extension for Fiddler.
Proxy-based blockers can use either heuristics or a curated block list, or even a combination of both strategies.
Blocking via Browser Configuration
One of the simplest ways to block unwanted content is to use existing features built-in to the browser. Most browsers offer the ability to disable certain features altogether, and some offer the ability to control certain features on a per-site basis. Internet Explorer offers the following features that allow the user to block unwanted content:
- Zones Configuration
- Per-Site ActiveX
- InPrivate Filtering
- Cookie Controls
- InPrivate Browsing / Delete Browsing History
- The Popup-Blocker
These features offer differing levels of control and granularity, and each blocks only certain types of content. Some of the features are based on heuristics (e.g. the contents of a P3P file or configuration setting) while others require the user or another curator to determine the desired policy.
Internet Explorer uses the concept of Security Zones to decide what privileges content from a given site may use. By adjusting the privileges on a per-zone basis, and by selecting which Zone a given site runs in, the user has a powerful level of control over what the site may do.
There are myriad possible configurations that may be used, but the simplest is to place sites from which to block content in the Restricted Sites Zone. Content from the Restricted Sites zone runs with very few permissions, and may not send or store cookies, serve script, run script from other sites, load ActiveX controls, or download files. For instance, if you place *.google-analytics.com in the Restricted Sites zone, script from that server may not run on any other page, and cookies are not sent or stored from that server.
The user-interface for adding sites to the Restricted Zone is simple to use, and can even be controlled by Group Policy.
However, using Zones to restrict unwanted content has a number of downsides:
- Network Performance. Because content is still downloaded even if it is not used, using the Restricted Zone does not fully recoup the performance impact of unwanted content
- Content is restricted, not necessarily blocked. For instance, script from a site in the Restricted Zone is not run, but images from that zone will still be shown. A sufficiently dedicated tracking technology could associate an HTTP request from the user event though no cookies are sent.
- Scale is limited. The Restricted Zone UI and data structures were designed for a personal scale, not internet-scale lists of sites. Listing more than a few hundred sites will begin to slow down browser startup performance. For instance, one product automatically injects 10000 sites in the Restricted Zone, which significantly impacts Internet Explorer’s performance.
We commonly get requests to convert the Restricted Sites zone into a “blackhole zone” that has no permissions, including permission to make network requests. That won’t work, because Security-Restricted IFRAMES, for instance, use the Restricted Zone settings and they must be able to render content (or they become ineffective for what developers expect them to do). Another suggestion is to create a new Zone solely for content-blocking, but unfortunately this would be difficult because many programs and frameworks are hardcoded to the current set of Zones and behave very poorly if a new Zone appears.
Per-Site ActiveX Configuration
Users who wish to control Flash, Silverlight, Java, or other plug-ins in Internet Explorer can use the Per-Site ActiveX feature of IE8 to control which sites may display such content. By removing the * from the list of allowed sites for an add-on, the user will receive a prompt on any site that attempts to use the add-on. Unless the user adds the site to the approved list, the add-on will not run on that site.
There are a number of weaknesses to using Per-Site ActiveX to block content:
- UI Annoyance – Because the Information Bar lacks a “Never for this site” option, users will always see this prompt on any site for which the add-on is not approved
- Manageability – The user-interface for the Allow List is buried deep within Manage Add-ons, and also does not offer a “Never” option. The UI does not allow users to remove individual sites from the Allow list; the only option is to clear the entire list.
Nevertheless, this can be a powerful feature for restricting which sites may use a given browser add-on with more granularity than the legacy “Enable / Disable” option that controls whether an ActiveX control could run at all.
Internet Explorer’s InPrivate Filtering feature detects and optionally blocks 3rd party content to help consumers exercise control over their browsing information. The feature can operate in either a heuristic or curated mode at the user’s choice.
Third-party content that appears across multiple sites is presented for the user’s review, and the user may choose to allow or block such content. When the user chooses to block that content, Internet Explorer will no longer make requests to the target URL when it is third-party content on the page. Unless the user visits that URL directly, IE will not visit that URL to get content from it. This is an effective mitigation for people concerned about the risk of sharing information with potential tracking sites. By default, InPrivate Filtering is off, and users need to explicitly choose to turn it on each time they run the browser.
InPrivate Filtering offers the ability to import lists of sites to block, which appears to be a popular feature in some circles.
The user may further configure InPrivate Filtering to “Automatically block” content from a 3rd party context when a certain threshold number of uses is reached. So, for instance, the user can configure IE to block third-party content which is used by 5 or more unrelated sites.
The downsides of the heruistic or “Automatically block” mechanism are clear:
- No way to determine intent. There’s no way for a browser to know whether or not a given piece of content (e.g. a “share this link!” widget) is being used to track you, or is used for a harmless purpose. Hence, content may be blocked as a “possible tracker” unnecessarily.
The InPrivate Filtering feature is controlled on a per-Zone basis, when opted-in the filtering is applied to the Internet and Restricted Zones only.
As I blogged back in June, Internet Explorer offers an extremely rich set of controls for cookies that allow users to specify simple options like “Block all cookies from example.com” to advanced options like “Discard all 3rd party cookies at the end of the browser session.” Cookies are also controlled by Zone privileges. By default, cookies are unconditionally permitted in the Local Computer and Intranet zones, subjected to cookie controls in the Internet and Trusted Zones, and blocked entirely in the Restricted Zone.
InPrivate Browsing / Delete Browsing History
The InPrivate Browsing and Delete Browser History features can be used to prevent storage of unwanted cookies or other information. The new “Delete browsing history on exit” checkbox in IE8 allows the user to delete unwanted content at the end of each browser session. The “Preserve Favorites website data” option allows preservation of desired content while wiping everything else.
The Popup Blocker
Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP SP2 introduced the popup blocker. The popup blocker includes a number of configuration options which can be found inside the Tools > Internet Options > Privacy settings dialog. The configuration settings for the Popup Blocker are stored inside the HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\New Windows\ registry key, including the list of sites that are permitted to launch popup windows. The Popup Blocker is enabled on a per-Zone basis, and applies (by default) to pages in the Internet, Trusted, and Restricted Zones.
Blocking via Add-ons
In some cases, enthusiasts are not satisfied with the options provided by built-in browser controls and have built a variety of different add-ons to block content. Some add-ons automatically block content (using either heuristics or a curated block list) before it is downloaded, while other add-ons simply remove unwanted content after it has been loaded.
Automatic blockers tend to inject themselves into the browser’s download subsystem and watch for requests to unwanted content; such requests are then terminated or a locally-generated placeholder is returned. Less commonly, such add-ons will scan the DOM of the currently loaded document and remove content which matches some pattern (e.g. images within a DIV named “adultcontent”).
Content blocking add-ons for IE include: Simple Ad-Block, IE7Pro, AdBlockIE, Adblock Pro, as well as many others. The downside of these add-ons is the downside of add-ons across all browsers: performance and reliability. Many of these add-ons use mechanisms that do not follow the IE Add-on Guidelines and Requirements and depend upon unsupported and fragile “thunking” of private browser APIs.
In contrast to the Automatic Blockers, Manual Blockers allow the user to remove unwanted content from the current page after it has been loaded. These blockers are often simpler to develop although their capabilities are usually limited—often they simply serve as a streamlined user-interface that configures existing browser features.
- Toggle Flash and dozens of variants simply toggles the “Enabled/Disabled” setting for the Flash object.
- You can configure a script for Ralph Hare’s Mouse Gestures add-on such that waggling the mouse will remove images and ActiveX controls from the current page.
- Similar scripts exist as Context-Menu extensions or bookmarklets.
The advantage of Manual Blockers is that they typically only do work when invoked, and thus tend to be faster and more reliable. The disadvantage is that, because they tend to run after the content is loaded, users still pay the penalty of initially downloading the unwanted content.
Evaluation of Blocking Mechanisms
Each of the blocking mechanisms listed above has one or more downsides.
Perhaps the biggest risk is to the user’s experience when interacting with a site whose content is blocked. Commonly, browsing enthusiasts may configure a blocking mechanism and generally enjoy its benefits, but then later waste a great deal of time trying to figure out why some site they care about isn’t working correctly. In some cases, the user experiences a “doh!” moment, guesses that blocked content may be causing a problem, and subsequently adjusts the blocking mechanism to fix the site. In other cases, the user may never suspect that content-blocking has caused a problem, and the resultant breakage may lead the user to abandon using the site or the web browser thinking that one or the other is “buggy.”
Carefully curated blocking mechanisms are somewhat less likely to cause site-compatibility problems than heuristic approaches because software cannot readily determine intent in the same way that a human can. Curated lists can be burdensome for the author and user to maintain.
As websites evolve, both curated and heuristic blocking mechanisms may become less effective.
Content Blocking and Site Evolution: A Case Study
Let’s look at how sites and one particular mechanism for content blocking (popup blockers) evolved over time in practice on the web. The history of popups and popup-blockers is a great case to study, because while popups are now somewhat rare, they used to be everywhere.
Back in the early days of popup blockers, I once visited a small tech news site. After a popup from the site was blocked, I saw the following alert:
At the time, I didn’t think much of this warning. Thirty seconds later, the site attempted to show another popup, and upon failure, it embarked on a primitive denial of service attack. An endless stream of alert dialogs was presented, preventing further use of the browser window:
Now, this sort of site response certainly isn’t common today, but nevertheless many sites will detect when content they insist upon delivering is not delivered. The site may have any of a number of reasons – perhaps artistic integrity of their content or a contractual obligation. As with most issues on the web, there are many points of view: consumer, site, security, accessibility, IT, and more.
This gets back to the point above about what software can recognize: data types and patterns, not intent. So, if you as a user configure blocking of content through one of the above mechanisms, understand that sites, historically, have responded, and we are still living with back and forth on something as old as popup blockers. Here’s another example.
Sometimes you want a click on a web page to result in a new window. For example, when you click on the “Reply” button in your web mail application, you may expect that to open a new window to allow you to compose a message. However, some sites use (or co-opt) that click in order to launch a popup, bypassing the popup blocker.
Similarly, some sites have responded to content blockers that focus on advertisements. For instance, one of the top five web mail sites will detect if an advertisement has been blocked, and if so, it will simply try loading a different advertisement from a different ad-server, rotating between five or more different advertising providers hoping to find an unblocked host. Similarly, one of the most popular online advertisers will detect when in-page advertisements have been blocked, and rather than taking the user to the next page when reading a multi-page story, the site will instead present a full-page interstitial advertisement with a count-down timer. While this advertisement too can be blocked, the page itself typically is not, leading to a degraded user-experience. Some smaller sites were so incensed by the use of ad-blockers in Firefox that they simply banned all Firefox users, redirecting to a lengthy tirade. In a recent development, one firm now delivers ads as a part of a CAPTCHA test—blocking the ad means you cannot use the site.
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Facing ethical conflicts and moral dilemmas are an everyday reality in nursing profession. Examples of ethical conflicts and moral dilemmas in health care are euthanasia confidentiality. These bioethical dilemmas are affecting health care professionals, specifically the nurses. The term Euthanasia is from a Greek word for “good death” and in English it means an “easy death” or the “painless inducement of quick death”. Easy death is divided into two categories; passive euthanasia, which involves doing nothing to preserve life and active euthanasia, which requires actions that speed the process of dying.
Dilemmas on euthanasia are terribly hunting the nurses as a profession. Ending a patient’s life by way of active or passive euthanasia is an issue relating the patient’s autonomy in choosing what’s best for himself. For the individuals has the dignity that attaches to personhood by reason of the freedom to take one’s own life. Euthanasia is such a difficult task of decision making with regards to the nursing profession. For the major purpose of nursing care delivery is the pursuit of health, with the prevention of death and alleviation of sufferings as a secondary goal.
The American Hospital Associations Patients Bill of Rights rules 5 and 6 outline the individual’s right to privacy in health care. 5. The patient has the right to every consideration of his privacy concerning his own medical care program. Case discussion, consultation, examination and treatment are confidential and should be conducted discreetly. Those not directly involved in his care must have permission of the patient to be present. 6. The patient has the right to expect that all communications and records pertaining to his care should be treated as confidential.
Confidentiality is an important health care ethics of trust that patients place on nurses. A great barrier between nursing practitioners and patient would exist if the patient felt that information in regard to his or her body condition was the subject of release to publications. Fear of disclosure has in the past led minors with sexually transmitted diseases to suffer without care rather than to seek aid, knowing that the system required by the health care system is to notify their parents.
But before nurses will engage or participate in decision making concerning bioethical dilemmas, they should be competent enough in clinical ethics. For without clinical ethics competence, nurses will not be viewed as participants in clinical ethics and discussion and will not be valued by patient’s families and other health care professionals when discussing ethical discussion. That’s why they should be more knowledgeable about the interaction of ethical and moral issues that affect the institution and public policy decisions.
A sense of powerlessness and moral distress in nursing often leads to inaction rather than the leadership necessary to meet the patient’s needs for nursing and health care. Nurses have an ethical and legal obligation to be competent practitioners. Moral thinking and ethical awareness are aspects of competent nursing practice. Thus, if nurses are to be excellent nurses and participants in decision making, it is important that nurses should gain ethics and laws. | <urn:uuid:58c7a41b-96fa-4dcc-94e1-71fe989fcf98> | {
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Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) and the Canadian Government made an exciting announcement on June 8th, World Oceans Day, on the finalisation of the official boundaries of the St. Ann’s Bank Marine Protected Area (MPA). This 4,364 km2 MPA is found off the coast of Nova Scotia, and is an important feeding ground for endangered species such as the leatherback sea turtles, and is an key area in migration of blue whales and Atlantic cod.
This is an exciting announcement as this area was designated as an ‘Area of Interest’ for preservation back in 2011, and after consultation with local fishing industries, the public and NGOs a final decision for an area to protect has been established.
Another important feature of this MPA is that this area is now completely off limits for oil and gas exploration and exploitation as well as bottom trawling. The MPA is divided into four zones, the largest, zone one is completely off limits to commercial fishing, and only research, and aboriginal fishing will be permitted. After the consultation, the area of zone two was expanded which will allow for more lobster and halibut fishing area. International marine protection standards require that all oil and gas development are forbidden within a protected area, but there have been some exceptions to this rule in recently proposed Canadian MPAs. It is good to see that the St Ann’s Bank MPA will have a complete moratorium on oil and gas exploration and exploitation.
What are Marine Protected Areas you might ask, and why are they important? They are specific areas of a national’s ocean which are designated for protection and monitored by the Canadian Government and Fisheries and Oceans Canada. They are – similar to parks on land – places important sites for conservation and maintaining biodiversity in certain ecosystems as they protect them from human activities. In fully protected areas, species and ecosystems have the space to recover from exploitation in that area, and they provide the necessary conditions for growth of endangered and at-risk populations. In the long term, they allow for sustainable fisheries, significant and efficient carbon storage and shoreline protection, as well as pristine areas for ecotourism and recreation.
The announcement of the finalization of the St Ann’s Bank MPA last week was significant as it shown further motivation of our current government in its game of catch up the conserve and protect marine and terrestrial areas. Canada made the commitment to establishing protection for 17 % of land and 10 % of marine and coastal areas by 2020 as part its commitments to the Nagoya Protocol which came out of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in 2010. Currently, about 1 % of Canada’s oceans are protected. Though the St Ann’s Bank MPA only accounts for 0.08% of this target, the current government is moving on these targets significantly more than the previous government. Another recent announcement coming at the end of May 2017 from the opposite coast, is for new area of interest for creation of a MPA off the west coast of Vancouver Island which is 140 000 km2. This would account for 2.57 % of Canada’s target. With an intermediary target of 5 % of marine and coastal areas protected by the end of 2017, the government is making good progress, but still has work to do!
I learned a lot about the importance of creations of both marine and terrestrial protected areas last summer when I delved into the SNAP Quebec’s (Societé pour la nature et les parc/ Canadian Parks and Wilderness Foundation) Nagoya + report which accessed whether Quebec was keeping up with CBD commitments. However, from growing up on the east coast, playing as a kid in the forests and Ottawa river where my dad grew up when we visited and in finally getting to see the west coast rainforests and pacific landscape last year, I also know in my heart the importance of conserving Canada’s wild spaces.
Too see the full story on the this MPA and some impacts on the Nova Scotia fishing industry, see full article published on CBC.
For more information on the importance of the designation of this particular area see comments on the announcement by Chris Miller, National Conservation Biologist of Nova Scotia’s branch of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society.
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- The New Local – A St-Laurent IGA is Growing Crops on its Roof - August 3, 2017 | <urn:uuid:791f93e3-5ecd-4558-8509-930e2cb3727e> | {
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Girlshealth.gov Teen Survival Guide: Health Tips for On-the-go Girls
The girlshealth.gov Teen Survival Guide is an all-in-one publication on key topics for girls.
Have you ever had a question that you were too shy to ask? Maybe something like:
- “Does chocolate cause pimples?”
- “What do I do if the kids at school make fun of me?”
- “Can I get a sexually transmitted disease from kissing?”
Don’t worry — you’re not the only one! Every young woman has questions like these. Everyone can use some advice.
Having questions is a sign that you are growing up. It shows that you want to take care of yourself. Don’t be afraid to go to a parent or guardian, school nurse, or other trusted adult for honest and straight answers. They were young once, too!
You can also look to this guide for helpful information. It offers:
- Fun quizzes
- A glossary of new words
- Questions from young women
And, if you want to learn more, you can check out www.girlshealth.gov or the other websites listed throughout the guide.
Get the info you need to make healthy choices for a strong future!You can download a PDF of the girlshealth.gov Teen Survival Guide: Health Tips for On-the-go Girls (19MB).
Content last reviewed July 24, 2013
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We've come a long way in acceptance of LGBTQ people in the last decade, right? Marriage equality passed, and up until a couple of weeks ago transgender students were legally able to use the bathrooms appropriate for their gender in public schools.
As much as it may seem that things have gotten better for LGBTQ people, though, new research shared with Refinery29 shows that we still face as much discrimination and risk for violence as we did in the 1990s. Going out in public as a visibly queer person is still risky, and that's not okay.
For LGBTQ students, though, things are actually getting worse.
"The going idea is that we need to keep young people safe and that that involves preventing runaways and homelessness and preventing school drop outs," Tasseli McKay, social science researcher at the Center for Justice, Safety & Resilience, RTI International and lead author on the research told Refinery29. "But the research is seeing that home and school are two of the most risky places for LGBTQ teens."
McKay and her team were inspired to do this research because of the rhetoric around the transgender bathroom debate. Much of the argument in North Carolina (McKay's home state), as well as other states that were considering laws that would require everyone use the bathroom based on the sex marked on their birth certificates, is that these laws protect women from using the bathroom with "biological males," who would put these women at risk.
To see whether straight women were really at risk from transgender women using the same bathroom, McKay and her team examined 20 years of research about violence and the LGBTQ community as well as talking to a series of focus groups of LGBTQ people in San Francisco, New York City, Durham, North Carolina, and in rural Wyoming.
In many ways, things have gotten better for LGBTQ people over the last several years. Part of that is the fact that there is greater, and better, representation of queer people in television and the media.
Because they see healthy relationships between queer people on TV and at least a few representations of transgender or gender non-conforming people (such as Jazz Jennings), LGBTQ teenagers are more likely to come out earlier and to present as gender non-conforming. That's incredible, and we're happy to know that young people feel free to be open about who they are, but McKay says this could be one reason violence and discrimination has not waned.
"They're getting this tremendous backlash and mixed messages," McKay said. "In the media they learn that it’s okay to be out, but then are being taunted and bullied by their peers."
The victimization they face at school and at home (parents and other family members were also likely to bully LGBTQ youths), can have long-lasting affects on these students' health and wellbeing, McKay and her team found. Many of the studies they looked at saw that discrimination correlated with suicide risk, sexual risk-taking and HIV status, as well as "other long-term physical health issues, and decreased school involvement and achievement."
It's important to note that queer students who have intersections with other marginalized identities are at greatest risk of violence or discrimination. So while a well-off white gay man certainly faces some discrimination in his lifetime, a gender non-conforming person of color probably will face even more risk of violence.
In one of the Durham, North Carolina focus groups, a transgender participant said, “Once you’ve been read as being a trans person, you check out, they check out. For us it’s safety. For them, it’s discomfort. It’s a heightened stigmatization,” according to McKay.
This may be why it's hard for so many of us in privileged positions to realize how prevalent discrimination of the LGBTQ community still is. We often don't see it. All we see is that television shows are showing more queer characters now than ever, and that newspapers and magazines and websites are telling queer stories. But greater visibility doesn't mean that discrimination has disappeared.
And it's up to us to make a difference, McKay said.
There's a lot of research about bystander intervention and sexual assault, she said, and that research carries some weight for the LGBTQ community, too.
"We’re all bystanders in creating a social climate about whether it's okay for our peers to discriminate against the LGBTQ community," she said. "We choose who gets to be safe and protected." | <urn:uuid:b26992cd-38a5-44ed-a259-774a25369375> | {
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Many of us tend to take our health and wellbeing for granted until we become unwell. So, when we receive an invitation to participate in bowel cancer screening the temptation is to ignore it. It’s vital that you don’t though. It is also worth considering testing before the routine screening age, particularly if you are…Read more
Screening for any kind of cancer means testing for early signs of the disease before any symptoms develop. For screening to work well it must be reliable, straightforward, and not harmful to participants.
Having a digestive disorder can be a double whammy. Not only do you feel unwell but you can also feel uncomfortable discussing your symptoms. But we’re here to tell you that digestive disorders are very common and there are treatments available that can help.
One of the factors that makes bowel cancer diagnosis so challenging for us as gastrointestinal specialists is that people sometimes feel too embarrassed to get their symptom checked out until the disease is well advanced. This can make it much harder to treat and the chances of survival are lower.
Statistics show that one in 14 men and one in 19 women in the UK will be diagnosed with some form of colorectal cancer during their lifetime. Just over half – 57% will survive for 10 years or more.
To mark World Cancer Day on 4 February 2018, we’re turning our thoughts to an area of our body that most of us would, if we’re honest, probably prefer to ignore.
Someone dies from bowel cancer every half an hour. But it is a treatable, beatable disease. So, what’s the problem? There are a number of problems… Lack of awareness of the symptoms. Embarrassment about visiting the GP. Putting things off until it’s too late…
Men die, on average, six years younger than women for reasons that are believed to be largely preventable. Through the course of their lifetime, men experience worse long-term health than women despite enjoying a more privileged position in many societies.
Colon cancer and rectal cancer are two of the lower gastroenterology cancers. What is the difference between them? What are the risk factors?
In the UK, the NHS have for many years promoted their “5-a-day” message when it comes to the recommended consumption of fresh fruit and vegetables needed to maintain optimum health and help prevent disease. Earlier this year, a study showed the 10 is better than 5 in reducing many types of disease, including cancer. However,…Read more | <urn:uuid:d9152e2b-4d8e-4bb7-8527-de3aaf0829a9> | {
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Humor - Session A
E.B.White once wrote, “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies.” Read the below articles and watch the embedded video in the first article.
“The Revenge of Lardass Hogan:”
Transcript of the story: http://www.vaiden.net/barfarama.html
Questions for discussion:
- What is your emotional response to this scene? Laughter? Disgust? Both?
- Comment on the stereotypical characters in this story; do stereotypes lend themselves to humor? Are they disrespectful?
- Discuss the performance of storytelling when delivering a joke. Make connections between stories you’ve told or heard about your emergency medicine experiences. Why were they told? Did you augment details to make them funnier. Did you feel guilty telling it though you knew it was funny? Did you learn anything by telling the funny story, get any insight into your behavior or that of others? If the people involved heard the story, would they think it funny, too?
Exercise: Consider a time when you told a story that you thought was funny but was not received as such. Write out a defense for why you considered it funny. What the source of the humor? And when you told it, why do you suspect it was misinterpreted. Do you stand by your original instinct about the story? Have you gained insight into the situation by telling the story?
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Bigger than all of Brazil, among the harshest ecosystems on Earth, and largely undeveloped, one would expect that the Sahara desert would be a haven for desert wildlife. One would anticipate that big African animals—which are facing poaching and habitat loss in other parts of the world—would thrive in this vast wilderness. But a new landmark study in Diversity and Distributions finds that the megafauna of the Sahara desert are on the verge of total collapse.
“While global attention has been focused on [biodiversity] hotspots, the world’s largest tropical desert, the Sahara, has suffered a catastrophic decline in megafauna,” the researchers write.
Looking at 14 large-bodied animals, the study found that 86 percent of them (ten of the species) were either extinct or endangered. Four of them (28 percent) are already extinct in the region. The Bubal hartebeest (Alcelaphus buselaphus buselaphus) is gone forever while the scimitar-horned oryx (Oryx dammah) is extinct in the wild, although there are efforts to re-introduce it. Meanwhile, two of the Sahara’s once top predators are gone: the African wild dog (Lycaon pictus) and the African lion (Panthera leo).
Herd of wild addax in Termit and Tin Toumma National Nature Reserve in Niger. Photo by: Copyright Thomas Rabeil and Sahara Conservation Fund.
Megafauna that are still around aren’t doing much better. The dama gazelle (Nanger dama), the addax (Addax nasomaculatus), and the Saharan cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus hecki) are all on the razor-edge of extinction with each one listed as Critically Endangered by the IUCN Red List. The dama gazelle and the addax are absent from 99 percent of their historic range; less than 500 dama gazelles survive, while the addax is down to less than 300 animals. Meanwhile the Saharan cheetah is only found in 10 percent of its range with only 250 left. Another top predator—the leopard—is only found in 3 percent of its range. Even the North African ostrich (Struthio camelus camelus)—the world’s biggest—has lost 99.8 percent of its range.
“Greater conservation support and scientific attention for the region might have helped to avert these catastrophic declines,” the researchers write. “The Sahara serves as an example of a wider historical neglect of deserts and the human communities who depend on them.”
Of the 14 species, only one species is found in over half of its historical range: the Nubian ibex (Capra nubiana). Still even this ibex is currently listed as Vulnerable due to overhunting.
The researchers say that there are likely a number of reasons for the catastrophic declines. Hunting is widespread across the region and has likely decimated populations of prey and the predators who depend on them. In addition, the notoriously extreme environment coupled with political instability in many Saharan countries has likely hampered conservation efforts.
Scimitar-horned oryx in Marwell Zoo in the UK. Photo by: The Land/Creative Commons 3.0.
“However, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that lack of financial support and scientific attention have also played a role,” the researchers note.
Climate change is also a rising threat in the region, both to wildlife and local communities.
“The velocity of climate change in desert biomes is predicted to be among the fastest, while that in tropical forests comparatively low,” the researchers contend. “Adaptation to the impacts of climate change in deserts is thus likely to be particularly urgent.”
The scientists say the plight of the Sahara’s big species is mirrored by that of the region’s local communities, which have long been neglected by the international community.
Captive addax in Israel. This antelope is Critically Endangered. Photo by: Math Knight.
“As with desert biodiversity, the plight of desert-dwelling people has gained little global attention,” the write. “The UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), a convention specifically designed to address the needs of such communities, remains one of the weakest of the UN conventions. Lack of funding and political will have meant that progress towards the UNCCD’s goal of reversing land degradation and desertification has been elusive. Meanwhile the people living in these environments continue to be perceived as peripheral and unimportant and are neglected by political and business communities.”
Not all the news out of the Sahara is bleak, however. Niger recently established the Termit and Tin Toumma National Nature Reserve, home to addax, dama gazelle, and even Saharan cheetah. The new protected area is larger than Portugal. Meanwhile, Chad has proposed to reintroduce scimitar-horned oryx into the wild in its Ouadi Rimé-Ouadi Achim Game Reserve.
“Given low human densities and that over 90 percent of tropical arid and hyperarid lands remain uncultivated, management of natural resources in desert ecosystems may be substantially cheaper than maintaining or restoring tropical forest habitats,” the researchers write.
Contrary to popular belief, the world’s deserts host surprising biodiversity, even if found in lower abundance than other ecosystems. Many desert species have adapted specifically to the harsh conditions and are found no-where else.
“Deserts are home to 25 percent of terrestrial vertebrate species and, combined with xeric shrublands, are among the top three richest biomes for terrestrial vertebrates,” the authors write.
- Durant et al. (2013) Fiddling in biodiversity hotspots while
deserts burn? Collapse of the Sahara’s megafauna. Diversity and Distributions. 1-9. DOI: 10.1111/ddi.12157
(06/04/2012) Severely affected by recent turmoil across its northern frontiers, Nigerien tourism pins hope on river valley attractions to play a major role in rebuilding its tourism industry in the upcoming years. Even though the river itself is threatened. Located in the heart of the Sahel Region, the vast desert lands of Niger have captivated European tourists seeking a taste of its immensely varied natural landscapes.
(03/07/2012) Yesterday, the Niger government formally created the Termit and Tin Toumma National Nature and Cultural Reserve in the Sahara Desert, reports the Sahara Conservation Fund. The reserve, now one of the largest in Africa, expands existing protected areas to 100,000 square kilometers (38,610 sq. miles), an area bigger than Hungary and nearly twice the size of Costa Rica.
(02/28/2011) Spanning the entire continent of Africa, including 11 nations, the Great Green Wall (GGW) is an ambitious plan to halt desertification at the Sahara’s southern fringe by employing the low-tech solution of tree planting. While the Great Green Wall was first proposed in the 1980s, the grand eco-scheme is closer to becoming a reality after being approved at an international summit last week in Germany as reported by the Guardian. | <urn:uuid:7ef8a005-8e51-4738-8098-0185b4a30a7e> | {
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This subject will be treated under seven heads:
VI. Small Objects Found in the Catacombs;
VII. Catacombs outside Rome.
The soil on which the city of Rome is built, as well as that of the surrounding district, is of volcanic origin; alluvial deposits are found only on the right bank of the Tiber, on the downward course of the stream, below the Vatican. Wherever the volcanic deposits occur three strata appear, one above the other: the uppermost is the so-called pozzolano, earth from which the Romans, by an admixture of lime, prepared their excellent cement; next is a stratum of tufa, made up half of earth and half of stone; the lowest stratum is composed of stone. From the earliest times the lowest layer was worked as a stone quarry, and, both in the lowest and uppermost strata, irregularly hewn galleries are discovered everywhere, as in the Capitoline Hill and in the suburbs of the city.
It was formerly believed that the early Christians used these galleries as places of burial for their dead. But all the catacombs are laid out in the middle stratum of tufa, from which no building-material was obtained. It is only necessary to compare the irregular galleries of the sand-pits and stone-quarries with the narrow straight passages and vertical walls of the catacombs in order to recognize the difference. In some cases an arenaria, or sand-pit, forms the starting-point for the laying out of a catacomb; in other spots the catacombs are connected by a gallery with the arenariae so that entrance could be gained into the Christian city of the dead, in times of persecution, without exciting notice. The catacombs are, therefore, entirely of Christian construction. As a rule a stairway leads below the surface to a depth of from thirty-three to forty-nine feet or even more; from this point diverge the galleries, which are from ten to thirteen feet in height, and seldom broader than would be necessary for two grave-diggers, one behind the other, to carry a bier. Side galleries branch off from the main galleries, intersecting other passages. From this level or story steps lead to lower levels where there is a second network of galleries; there are catacombs which have three or even four stories, as, for example, the Catacomb of St. Sebastian. The labyrinth of galleries is incalculable. It has been asserted that if placed in a straight line they would extend the length of Italy. Along the passages burial chambers (cubicula) open to the right and left, also hewn out of the tufa rock. In the side walls of the galleries horizontal tiers of graves rise from the floor to the ceiling; the number of graves in the Roman catacombs is estimated at two millions. The graves, or loculi, are cut out of the rock sides of the gallery, so that the length of the bodies can be judged from the length of the graves. When the body, wrapped in cloth, without a sarcophagus, was laid in the spot excavated for it, the excavation was closed by a marble slab or sometimes by large tiles set in mortar. For the wealthy and for martyrs there were also more imposing graves, known as arcosolia. An arcosolium was a space excavated in the wall above which a semicircular recess was hewn out, in which a sarcophagus was sometimes placed; in the excavation below, the body was laid and covered with a flat marble slab. It was not common to bury the dead beneath the floor of the passages or burial chambers. At the present day the majority of the graves are found open, the slabs which once sealed them having vanished; often nothing remains of the ashes and bones. The rock and broken material loosened by the constant digging in the innumerable passages were piled up in the sand-pits nearby, or brought to the surface in baskets, or were heaped up in the passages which were no longer visited because the families of the dead had passed away. In order to obtain light, and above all fresh air, shafts called luminaria, somewhat like chimneys, were cut through the soil to the surface of the ground. These luminaria, however, are seldom found before the fourth century, when the great numbers of the faithful who attended religious services in the catacombs on the feast days of the martyrs rendered such precautions for health a necessity. At this date also wider and easier stairways were made, leading from the surface of the ground into the depths below.
The early Christian name for these places of burial was koimeterion, coemeterium, place of rest. When, in the Middle Ages, the recollection of the catacombs passed away, the monks attached to the church of St. Sebastian on the Via Appia kept the coemeterium ad catacumbas on this road accessible for pilgrims. After the rediscovery and opening of the other coemeteria, the name belonging to this one coemeterium was applied to all. The catacombs awaken astonishment on account of the remarkable work of construction which, in the course of three hundred years, the piety of the early Christians and their love for the dead produced. In estimating the enormous sum of money required for the catacombs, it must also be taken into consideration that the early Christians, by voluntary contributions, supported the clergy, aided the poor, widows, and orphans, assisted those sent to prison or the mines on account of their faith, and bought from the executioners at a large price the bodies of the martyrs.
The Romans cremated their dead and deposited the ashes in a family tomb (sepulcrum, memoria), or in a vault or common sepulchre (columbarium); but the Jews living in Rome retained their native method of burial, and imitated the rock-graves of Palestine by laying out cemeteries in the stone-like stratum of tufa around Rome. In this manner Jewish catacombs were laid out and developed before Christianity appeared in Rome. Connected with the two chief Jewish colonies, one in the quarter of the city across the Tiber, and the other by the Porta Capena, were two large Jewish catacombs, one on the Via Portuensis and one on the Via Appia, as well as some smaller ones; all are recognizable by the seven-branched candlestick, which repeatedly appears on gravestones and lamps.
Until after the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus (A.D. 70) the Christians were regarded as a sect of the Jews; hence those Jews who were converted by the Apostles at Rome were buried in the catacombs of their fellow-countrymen. The question arises as to where those converted from heathenism by the Apostles found their last resting-place. It is a fact to which Tacitus, Suetonius, Dio Cassius, and other pagan historians bear witness, that as early as the days of the Apostles members of the higher and of even of the highest ranks of the nobility had become Christians. These converts of rank from heathenism had their own tombs, and permitted their brethren in the Faith to construct, in connection with these family tombs, places of burial modelled on the Jewish catacombs. This is the origin of the Christian catacombs. The catacombs of the Apostolic Era are: on the Via Ardeatina, the catacomb of Domitilla, niece of the Emperor Domitian and a member of the Flavian family; on the Via Salaria, that of Priscilla, who was probably the wife of the Consul Acilius Glabrio; on the Via Appia, that of Lucina, a member of the Pomponian family; on the Via Ostiensis, that of Commodilla, connected with the grave of St. Paul. At a later date other catacombs were constructed, nearly all of them having their origin in a family vault; among them are those of Caecelia, Prætextatus, Hermes, etc., which still bear the names of their founders. Again, the grave of a venerated martyr would be another nucleus of a catacomb, e.g. that of St. Laurence, St. Valentine, or St. Castulus; such a coemeterium would bear the name of the martyr. Coemeteria occasionally owed their names to some external feature as the one ad duas lauros (the two laurel trees); this title is still added to the names of the two martyrs, Peter and Marcellinus, resting there. Thus in the course of three hundred years some fifty catacombs, large and small, formed a wide circle around the city, the majority being about half an hour's walk from the city gate.
The question, however, arises as to whether the Christians were able to construct these subterranean cemeteries without molestation from the heathens. Undoubtedly the Romans had knowledge of the spots where the Christians buried their dead; but according to old laws every spot where a body lay was under the protection of Roman law and custom that guaranteed the inviolability of burial places. It is true that the Emperors Decius and Diocletian, at a later date, declared the ground covering the catacombs to be the property of the State, thus making it impossible to enter the catacombs by the ordinary ways. But the successors of Decius and Diocletian repealed these laws as contrary to the entire spirit of the Roman State. Even though the Christians felt themselves secure in the catacombs, yet the laying out of the galleries, the burying of the bodies, the odour of decay, and the pestilential air in summer, made the lives of the fossores, or excavators, one of the greatest self-sacrifice, while visiting the graves of the departed became much more difficult for the surviving members of families. Therefore, after the Emperor Constantine had granted freedom to the Church, and had set an example for the erection of churches and chapels over the graves of martyrs by building a basilica over the burial-place of St. Peter and Paul, it became customary to lay out cemeteries above ground, preferably in the neighbourhood of such holy spots. At the same time, however, burial in the catacombs did not fall into disuse, especially as the piety of the popes and the faithful of the fourth century led to the adorning of the resting-places of the early martyrs with marbles, paintings, and inscriptions (see POPE SAINT DAMASUS). Furthermore, by enlarging the burial chambers, by opening shafts for light, and by the construction of broader stairways, access was made easier for the faithful of Rome and for pilgrims. Just as, in the course of the fourth century, the veneration of the martyrs, especially at their graves and on the anniversaries of their death, became more widespread, so the confidence in their intercession found its expression in the endeavour to secure burial in the vicinity of a martyr's tomb.
Then came that year of misfortune, 410, when the Goths laid siege to Rome for months, devastated the surrounding country, and plundered the city itself. This naturally put an end to burial in the catacombs. In the following centuries Goths, Vandals, and Lombards repeatedly besieged and plundered Rome; plague and pestilence depopulated the region around the city; both the churches over the graves of the martyrs and the catacombs sank into decay, and shepherds of the campagna even turned the deserted sanctuaries into sheepfolds. For this reason Pope Paul I (757-67) began to transfer the remains of the martyrs to the churches of the city; the work was continued by Paschal I (817-24) and Leo IV (847-55). As a result the catacombs lost their attraction for the faithful, and by the twelfth century they were completely forgotten.
In 1578 a catacomb on the Via Salaria was accidentally rediscovered. It was not, however, until the publication in 1632, after the author's death, of the "Roma Sotteranea" of Antonio Bosio, that attention was once more called to the catacombs. For nearly forty years, from the year 1593, Antonio Bosio had devoted himself to finding and exploring the early Christian cemeteries. The real "Columbus of the catacombs", however, is Giovanni Battista de Rossi. De Rossi's labours and publications have led to the wide diffusion of a knowledge of archaeology and an increased veneration for the catacombs. Among his works are: "Roma Sotterranea" in three volumes; "Inscriptiones christianae" in two volumes, and numerous scattered pamphlets and articles; he also founded and edited the "Bullettino de archeologia christiana" (since 1863). The Holy See gives between three and four thousand dollars (18,000 lire) annually for the work in the catacombs, and the excavations are superintended by a special commission (see THE COMMISSION OF SACRED ARCHAEOLOGY). De Rossi died 20 September, 1894, after devoting nearly fifty years, from his earliest youth, to the exploration of the catacombs and the study of Christian antiquity. His work was and is carried on by his pupils, among them Armellini, Stevenson, Marucchi, Wilpert, and others. The publications annually issued by Catholic and non-Catholic investigators bear witness to the self-sacrificing zeal and devotion as well as to the sound scholarship with which the science of Christian antiquities is pursued. In addition to this the Collegium Cultorum Martyrum, by holding religious services followed by popular addresses on the feast days of the martyrs, in the various catacombs, endeavours to stimulate the reverence of Romans and strangers for these noble memorials of the Early Church and to diffuse the knowledge of them. In all quarters the example of Rome acted as a stimulus to the study of Christian antiquity and led to exploration and excavations; unexpected treasures of the first Christian centuries have been rescued from oblivion in other parts of Italy, in France, Illyria, Greece, North Africa, Egypt, Palestine, and Asia Minor.
At Rome, during the last half-century, excavations were undertaken in the following catacombs on the outskirts of the city; the catacombs of Thecla and Commodilla on the Via Ostiensis; the catacomb of Domitilla on the Via Ardeatina; those of Callistus, Praetextatus, and Sebastian on the Via Appia; Sts. Peter and Marcellinus on the Via Labicana; Laurentius and Hippolytus on the Via Tiburtina; Nicomedes, St. Agnes, and the coemeterium majus on the Via Nomentana; Felicitas, Thraso, and Priscilla on the Via Salaria Nova; Hermes on the Via Salaria Vetus; Valentinus on the Via Flaminia. On the right bank of the Tiber the catacombs explored were those of Pontianus and Generosa on the Via Portuensis. The most thorough explorations were carried out in the catacombs of Callistus, Domitilla, and Priscilla. In a large number of cases the graves of the martyrs mentioned in the old authorities (martyrologies, itineraries, the "Liber pontificalis", and the legendary accounts of the martyrs) were rediscovered. At the same time there was dug up a treasure, valuable beyond expectation, of early Christian epitaphs and paintings, which gave much unlooked-for information concerning the faith of the early Christians, their concepts of life, hopes of eternity, family relations, and many other matters.
Although thousands of inscriptions on the graves of the early Christians have been lost, and many more contain nothing of importance, there is still a valuable remainder that yields more information than any other source concerning the first Christian centuries. That Christianity as early as the days of the Apostles found entrance into distinguished families of the Eternal City, and that, as time went on, it gradually won over the nobility of Rome is evident from the epitaphs containing the titles clarissimi, clarissimae (of senatorial rank), as well as from epitaphs in which appear the names of noted clans (gentes). The change wrought by Christianity in the social relations of master and slave is plain from the exceedingly small number of inscriptions containing the words servus (slave), or libertus (freedman), words which are constantly seen on pagan gravestones; the often recurring expression alumnus (foster-child) characterizes the new relation between the owner and the owned. Many of the epitaphs give eloquent voice to the love of married couples, dwelling on the fact that man and wife had lived chastely (virginius, virginia) before entering the married state, on the virtues of the dead companion and the faithfulness to the departed observed through long years of solitary life in order that, lying side by side in the same grave, they might rise together at the Resurrection. Others record the love of parents for a dead child and conversely. Reference to the virgin state, which seldom appears in heathen epitaphs, is often met with in the Christian inscriptions; from the fourth century on mention is made of a virginity specially dedicated to God, virgo Deo dicata, famula Dei. Besides allusions in the inscriptions to the various ecclesiastical ranks of bishop, priest, deacon, lector, and excavator (fossor), there are references to physicians, bakers, smiths, and joiners, often with emblems of the respective instruments. Especially interesting are inscriptions which throw light on the religious conceptions of the time, which speak not only of the hope of eternity, but also of the means of grace on which that hope rests—above all, of the faith in the one God, and Christ, his Son. They also dwell on membership in the Church through baptism, and on the relations with the dead through prayer. Naturally, the older the epitaphs referring to dogma the greater their importance.
Next comes the question as to how the age of an inscription can be ascertained. In the first place the inscriptions are limited to the first four centuries of the Christian Era, since, after the invasion of the Goths (410), burial in the catacombs occurred only in isolated incidences and soon ceased altogether. The later Roman inscriptions and all the inscriptions of Gaul, Africa, and the Orient, however such additional information they may give in regard to dogma, cannot here be taken into consideration. The most natural and certain method of determining the age of an inscription, i.e. through the reference it usually contains to the annual consul, can scarcely be used a dozen times in the epitaphs of the first two centuries. There are, however, many auxiliary means of determining the question, as: the names, the form of the letters, the style, the place of discovery, the pictorial emblems (varying from the anchor and the fish to the monogram of Christ); these permit, with a reasonable degree of certainty, the assignment of inscriptions to the fourth century, to the time before Constantine, to the beginning of the third or the end of the second century, or even to an earlier period. The Roman gravestones of the first four centuries furnish numerous proofs not only for the fundamental dogmas of the Catholic Church but also for a large additional number of its doctrines and usages, so that the epitaphs could be employed to illustrate and enforce nearly every page of a modern Catholic catechism. Some inscriptions are here given as examples.
Catacomb of Callistus, second century (text somewhat restored):
PHRONTON epoiesen SEPTIMIOS PRAItextATOS kAIKilianos
O LOYLOS TOY theoY AXIOS BIOsas
OY METENOESA KAN ODE SOI YPERSTESA
KAI EYKArisTESO TO ONOMATI SOY PAredoke
TEN psYCHen TO THEO TRIANTA TRIOn eton
. . . . . EX MENON PETEILos . . . laMPRotatos
ETon . . . paredOKE ten psychen to theo
PRo . . . septEMBRION
This inscription was found in a fragmentary condition along with other inscriptions of the Caecilian family, near the grave of St. Cecilia. Phronton made the grave. The epitaph mentions two dead, Septimius Praetextatus Caecilianus and Petilius, the latter with the additional statement Lamprotatos, clarissimus, signifying one of senatorial rank. Septimius is called a "servant of God" and is then represented as speaking: "If I have lived virtuously I have not repented of it and if I have served Thee [O Lord] I will give thanks to Thy Name." He "gave up his soul to God" at the age of thirty-three years and six months. The same expression, "he gave up his soul to God", is used for Petilius, the date of whose death is given as before 1 September.
Catacomb of Domitilla, second century:
C. IVLIA. AGRIPPINA
SIMPLICI. DVLCIS IN
"Sweet Simplicius, live in eternity" is the wish which Caia Julia Agrippina, whose aristocratic name indicates a very early imperial date, sends after the departed.
Catacomb of Domitilla, third century:
. . . . SPIRITVS
TVVS IN REFRIGERIO
The beginning of the inscription, containing the name, has disappeared. "May thy spirit be in refreshment". The very ancient prayer in the Canon of the Mass entreats for the dead locum refrigerii, lucis et pacis (a place of refreshment, light, and peace).
Catacomb of Pontianus, beginning of the fourth century:
EVTYCHIANO FILIO DVLCISSIMO
EVTYCHIUS PATER [Chi-Rho symbol] V.A.I.M.
II.D IIII DEI SERVS ICHTHYS
i.e. "Eutychius, the father [has erected] the gravestone to his sweetest little son, Eutychianus. The child who lived one year, two months, and four days the servant of God." The Greek monogram of the name of Christ Chi-Rho, and the "ICHTHYS" scratched on the gravestone, shows that the child had, through baptism, died a Christian and had been received into heaven by "Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Saviour". (See ANIMALS IN CHRISTIAN ART.)
Catacomb of Priscilla, third century (in verse):
VOS PRECOR O FRATRES. ORARE. HVC QVANDO VENITIS
ET PRECIBVS. TOTIS. PATREM. NATVMQVE ROGATIS
SIT. VESTRÆ. MENTIS. AGAPES. CARÆ. MEMINISSE
VT DEVS. OMNIPOTENS. AGAPEN IN SÆCVLA SERVET
i.e. "I beg you, brethren, whenever ye come hither [to the service of God] and call in united prayer on the Father and the Son, that ye remember to think on your loved Agape, that Almighty God may preserve Agape in eternity." A second, fragmentary, piece of the inscription recalls the sentence of death pronounced in Paradise, de terra sumptus terrae traderis (thou wast taken from the earth and unto the earth shalt thou return). Agape lived twenty-seven years; so had it been appointed to her by Christ. The mother, Eucharis, and the father, Pius, erected the gravestone to her.
Catacomb of Commodilla, inscription of A.D. 377:
CINNAMIVS OPAS LECTOR TITVLI FASCIOLE AMICVS PAVPERVM
QVI VIXIT ANN. XLVI. MENS. VII. D. VIIII DEPOSIT
IN PACE KAL MART
GRATIANO IIII ET MEROBAVDE COSS
i.e. Cinnamius Opas, lector of the title [church] of Fasciola, a friend of the poor, who lived forty-six years, seven months, and nine days, and was buried in peace on 1 March, when Gratian was consul for the fourth time and with him Merobaudus.
Catacomb of Commodilla, A.D. 394:
DEP III IDVS MAII OSIMVS QVI
VIXIT ANNVS XXVIII QVI FECIT
CVM CONPARE SVA ANNVS SEPTE
MENSIS VIII BENEMERENTI IN PACE. CON
SVLATV NICOMACI. FLABIANI. LOCV MAR
i.e. Buried on 13 May, Osimus who lived twenty-eight years, who was united to his wife seven years and nine months. May the well-deserving rest in peace. He died during the consulate of Nicomachus Flavianus. Grave of the stone-mason for four bodies.
Catacomb of Callistus, third century:
PETRONIÆ AVXENTIÆ. C.F. QUÆ VIXIT
ANN. XXX. LIBERTI. FECERUNT. BENEMERENTI IN. PACE
The freedmen of Petronia Auxentia, the highly born lady (clarissimae feminae), who died at the age of thirty, made the grave where she rests in peace. She seems to have had neither children, brothers or sisters, nor, at the time of her death, parents.
Catacomb of Callistus, fourth century:
DASVMIA QVIRIACE BONE FEMINE PALVMBRA SENe FELlE . . .
QVÆ VIXIT ANNOS LXVI DEPOSITA IIII KAL MARTIAS IN PACE
Catacomb of Callistus, about A.D. 300:
With the permission of his Pope Marcellinus (296-304) Severus the Deacon made in the level of the cemetery of Callistus directly under that of the pope a family vault, consisting of a double burial chamber (cubiculum duplex) with arched tombs (arcosolia) and a shaft for air and light, as a quiet resting-place for himself and his family, where his bones might be preserved in long sleep for his Maker and Judge. The first body to be laid in the new family vault was his sweet little daughter Severa, beloved by her parents and servants. At her birth God had endowed her for this earthly life with wonderful talents. Her body rests here in peace until it shall rise again in God, Who took away her soul, chaste, modest, and ever inviolate in His Holy Spirit; He, the Lord, will reclothe her at some time with spiritual glory. She lived a virgin nine years, eleven months and fifteen days. Thus was she translated out of this world.
Besides the text of the epitaphs, on many of the tombstones the ideas are also conveyed by pictures; in this manner expression is given, above all, to the hope of eternal life for the dead. First come symbolic pictures and signs: the anchor, the palm, the dove with the olive-branch, are allegorical symbols of hope, victory, and everlasting peace; from the third century on appears the fish, the symbol of Christ. The Good Shepherd carrying the lamb on His shoulders, and the Orante, both often depicted together, were well-known and favourite allusions to the joy of heaven. The carving on the tombstone also copied those paintings on the catacombs that represent Biblical scenes, e.g. the awakening of Lazarus, the adoration of the Wise Men. Carvings of an entirely secular character are also found on the tombstones, namely representations of characteristic tools to indicate the rank in life or trade of the dead, e.g. for a baker, a grain measure; for a joiner, a plane; for a smith, an anvil and hammer. If the dead had borne in life the name of an animal, Leo (lion), Equitius (from equus, a horse), a picture of the particular animal was also cut on the tombstone. From the time of Constantine the monogram of Christ was a favourite symbol for use on gravestones.
The paintings of the catacombs conveyed pictorially the same ideas as the inscriptions. These frescoes adorn the spaces between the single graves, ornament the arched niches above the arcosolia, and are employed to decorate the walls and ceilings of entire burial chambers. It is true that the paintings are not so easily understood as the inscriptions or epitaphs, but while the oldest epitaphs afford little instruction, since they are limited simply to the names of the dead, the paintings, of which the number is very large, give information concerning the beginnings of Christianity. Certain fixed types are repeated in manifold forms, so that one explains another. In the course of time new types of pictures and new conceptions were developed which throw a steadily increasing light on the belief and the hope of the primitive Christians in regard to death.
The heathen "who have no hope" might stand disconsolate by the grave of the departed, they might adorn the oeterna domus (the eternal home) of the dead with gay pictures of ordinary life. The Christians in these paintings of the catacombs conceived the souls of the dead as Oranti, or praying female figures, in the bliss of heaven. The Good Shepherd Who lovingly carries the lamb on His shoulders to the flock that are pastured in Paradise signified to the Christian the reason for his hope in eternity. The representations of baptism and of the miraculous multiplication of the loaves are allusions to the means of grace by which heaven is attained. After favourable judgment is pronounced, the saints, the advocates or intercessors, lead the souls into the joys of heaven. To depict the belief of the early Christians in a future life the art of the catacombs generally chose episodes from the Old and New Testaments, episodes to which many allusions still occur in the prayers for the dying. If death is represented as having entered the world through the sin of Adam and Eve, the escape from death is indicated in pictures from the Old Testament showing the rescue of Noah from the Deluge, the preservation of Isaac from the sacrificial knife of his father Abraham, the rescue of the Tree Hebrew Children from the fiery furnace, the escape of Jonas from the belly of the great fish, Susanna's deliverance with the aid of Daniel from false accusation. From the New Testament the raising of Lazarus is used as the type of the resurrection from the dead; the miracles of the Saviour, the healing of the blind, the cure of the palsied man, are all taken as proofs of the omnipotent power of the Son of God over sickness and death. The Wise Men from the East having been the first called out of heathenism, were regarded by the Christians of the catacombs as their predecessors in the Faith, as security for the hope that they too might, at some time, adore the Son of God above. The Mother of God is never separated from the Divine Child; one of the oldest paintings of the catacombs, painted under the eyes of the pupils of the Apostles and found in the cemetery of Priscilla, represents the Virgin holding the Child on her lap, while the Prophet Isaias, who stands before her, points to the star above the head of the Mother and Child. In the frequent pictures of the Wise Men the Virgin is seated on a throne accepting in the name of her Child the gifts which the Magi bring. A fresco of the third century in the cemetery of Priscilla represents the annunciation; a painting of the fourth century in the coemeterium majus shows the Virgin as an Orante, before her the Divine child, who is clearly indicated to be Christ by the monogram of the name Christ painted to the right and left of the figure. The enthroned Saviour surrounded by the Apostles, the dead, who are being led by the saints before the Judge to receive a gracious verdict, the Wise Virgins at the heavenly wedding feast, all these form the last links in the chain of heavenly hopes that bind together earth and heaven, time and eternity.
The themes depicted in the purely decorative painting of the burial chambers, especially that of the ceilings, are largely taken from concepts peculiar to Christianity: the dove with the olive-branch of peace, the peacock that in springtime renews its gay plumage, the lamb, taken as a symbol of the soul, all these continually reappear as allusions to the consoling hopes cherished in this place of death. When the artist paints family life, e.g. a picture of a husband, wife, and child, who occupy a common grave, he represents the three as Oranti standing with raised hands absorbed in the contemplation of God. There are some purely secular paintings in the catacombs, e.g. a fresco in the cemetery of Priscilla representing vine-dressers carrying away a large cask; in the cemetery of Domitilla, corn-merchants superintending the unloading of sacks of grain from ships; and in the cemetery of Callistus, a market-woman selling vegetables.
Special reference should be made to the representations of the Eucharist in connection with the multiplication of the bread when the Lord fed the multitude with the loaves and fishes. Since the second century the Early Church regarded the five letters of the Greek word for fish "ICHTHYS" as the first letters of the words making up the phrase "IESOUS CHRISTOS THEOU YIOS SOTER" (Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Saviour), bread and fish, the food with which Christ had fed the multitude, were in themselves an allusion to the Eucharistic meal. Thus in the catacomb of Domitilla a man and his wife are represented reclining on a cushion, before them a small table holding loaves of bread and fish; in the cemetery of Priscilla the presiding officer at the semi-circular table breaks for the guests the round loaves of bread; the wine-cup with handles stands ready near bread and fish; baskets on either side holding the miraculously multiplied loaves and fishes indicate the deeper meaning of the scene. Both paintings belong to the earliest Christian art. There is in the catacomb of Callistus a painting of a large fish; close before or above the fish is a woven basket on the top of which lie round loaves of bread; the front part of the basket has a square opening in which is seen a glass containing red wine. In the six so-called Chapels of the Sacraments of the same catacomb various representations of the Eucharist appear in combination with pictures of baptism, the raising of Lazarus, a ship, etc. Bread and fish are shown lying on a table; on one side stands Christ, Who stretches a hand in blessing over the food; on the other side is an Orante, the symbol of the soul, which in this meal receives the pledge of the heavenly one. The opposite picture represents the sacrifice of Isaac. In a third picture, placed between these two, guests sit around a table on which are bread and fish; in the foreground stand the baskets holding the miraculously multiplied loaves. These and similar pictures, all belonging to the first half of the third century, are based upon the thought that the Eucharistic meal has been prepared for us by the Saviour as the pledge and type of the heavenly one.
Catholic writer have at times found a richer dogmatic content in the pictures of the catacombs than a strict examination is able to prove; but Protestant scholars go to the other extreme when they claim that the "dogmatic results" obtained from the early Christian pictures are exceedingly small. Although it is willingly acknowledged that non-Catholic writers have occasionally placed a picture in a proper light, it is nevertheless necessary to protest against the attempt to eliminate from the early Christian memorials all dogmatic proof for the faith of the Catholic Church.
Just as it is of importance to settle the dates of inscriptions, so also it is essential to determine as nearly as possible when paintings were executed; there are for the paintings, as for the inscriptions, indications which serve as clues. The artistic value of the pictures increases the closer they approach the golden age of profane art. In the second and third centuries the pictures were lightly sketched and painted in transparent colours on a carefully prepared background of plaster. During this period the artist did not follow set patterns, but was under the necessity at first of devising forms in which to express his new Christian ideas. As secular art fell into decay Christian art experienced the same decline. Another aid in determining the age of a fresco is given by the site in a catacomb where a picture has been painted, whether in the oldest part or in a later addition. As time went on the painter's range of artistic conceptions enlarged; thus in the third and fourth centuries scenes were depicted which were foreign to earlier Christian art. When in the fourth century the newly-erected basilicas were ornamented with mosaics, the same form of decoration was also introduced into the catacombs; this is shown in a mosaic depicting as an Orante a person who had died. The ornamentation of the places of interment came to an end with the above-mentioned cessation of burial in the catacombs; in lieu of this the graves of the martyrs were now decorated, generally with pictures of the saints, who are represented grouped around the Saviour. These paintings form a class apart from the other pictures of the catacombs on account of the constant decline in the artistic execution and because of the subjects of the composition. The last pictures painted in the catacombs are some executed in the ninth century in the crypt of St. Cecilia. St. Cecilia herself is represented as an Orante in the garden of heaven; there is also preserved in this crypt a bust-fresco of Christ in a niche, next to which is a picture of Pope St. Urban who buried the martyr, St. Cecilia.
In ancient Rome citizens of rank built for themselves family tombs on the great military roads; the structure above ground (monumentum) was adorned with statues and inscriptions, while the bodies were deposited in stone coffins (sarcophagi) or, when cremated, in funerary urns in a subterranean vault or hypogoeum. The freedmen and clients of the noble family to whom the tomb belonged were buried in graves made in the upper stratum of the earth of the area monumenti, or plot of ground or garden in which the tomb stood. These graves were indicated by stelae, or stone slabs, which gave the names of the dead. Those who were first converted from heathenism to Christianity were interred in a similar manner. This is evident both from the hypogoeum of the Flavian family, which has horizontal niches to the right and left for the sarcophagi, and from the stelae with symbols or inscriptions that are Christian in character, although, as is easily understood, such telae are not numerous. The example of the Jews, however, led very early to the excavation, in the enclosure of the area monumenti, of subterranean galleries or passage ways, the walls of which offered ample space for single graves or loculi. From the beginning burial in sarcophagi was, on account of the expense, a privilege of the rich and of people in rank; this is also one reason why Christian sculpture developed later than Christian painting. As the Christians were obliged at first to buy sarcophagi from heathen stone-masons they avoided purchasing those with mythological scenes. They preferred such as were ornamented with carvings of scenes from pastoral life, the harvest and vintage; at times they selected sarcophagi merely ornamented on the front with wave lines (strigili), as for example, the sarcophagus of Petronilla, a relative of the imperial Flavian family, which was found in the catacomb of Domitilla. The only decoration of this sarcophagus, outside of the wave lines, were figures of lions at the corners; on the upper edge of the sarcophagus was the inscription:
AVRELIAE. PETRONILLAE. FILIAE. DVLCISSIMAE.
It was not until towards the end of the third century that Christian sarcophagi were ornamented with sculpture; at first the carvings were small figures of the Good Shepherd or an Orante placed where the strigili came together, or else Christians symbols were carved on the tabella inscriptionis, i.e. the flat slab closing the grave in which the epitaph was cut. A Christian stone-mason, probably, cut these Christian emblems on sarcophagi made in heathen workshops. The oldest sarcophagus showing Christian emblems carved in relief is one found in the Vatican quarter and now in the Lateran Museum; it has in excellent work, between two scenes of family life, an Orante, symbolical of the person buried, and the Good Shepherd. Another sarcophagus, also belonging to the time before Constantine and in the same museum, has as its chief decoration the story of Jonas; around this scene are grouped representations of Noah, the raising of Lazarus, Moses smiting the rock in the wilderness, a pastoral scene, and purely secular fishing scenes.
Christian sculpture on sarcophagi was not fully developed until about the middle of the fourth century; two sarcophagi of this period, that of Junius Bassus in the crypt of St. Peter's, and another similar in style, in the Lateran Museum, are the finest examples of early Christian carving. When it became customary, in the vicinity of the great basilicas, to build mausoleums or mortuary chapels, in which the sarcophagi were either sunk in the ground or exposed along the walls, sculpture as a Christian art developed rapidly. The growth was perhaps too rapid, for the comparatively small number of Christian sculptors could only meet the constantly increasing demand by over-hasty or half-finished work. To this period which extended from the second half of the fourth into the first decades of the fifth century belong by far the greater part of the sarcophagi found, most of which are in the Lateran Museum. The terrible misfortunes that befell Rome after it had been conquered and plundered by the Goths in 410 checked and finally put an end to carved decoration on Christian sarcophagi.
Naturally, the reliefs of the sarcophagi show the same fundamental ideas as are expressed in the paintings of the catacombs, and they are conveyed by the presentation of the same Biblical scenes. Plastic art, however, followed its own course in the development of the themes. This is evident from the large number of figures employed for the scenes, and still more from the great variety of new subjects which were introduced into the domain of Christian art. When Adam and Eve are shown, it is not, as in the frescoes, merely with the tree and the serpent; in sculpture the second Adam, Christ, is represented standing between the first pair, offering to Adam a sheaf of grain and to Eve a goat, symbols of labour in the field and household occupations. While in the frescoes Moses stands alone when he smites the rock with his staff that the water may gush out, the sculptured relief includes the Jews quenching their thirst. The same difference is evident in the representation of the raising of Lazarus; whereas in sculpture the two sisters and some witnesses of the miracle fill out the scene, in the frescoes the figures are limited to the chief personages. The range of subjects is increased by the addition of other incidents from the Old Testament, e.g. the passage of the Israelites through the Red Sea, symbolic of baptism, and the vision of Ezechiel, intended an as allusion to the resurrection of the body; more especially, however, by fresh scenes from the life of Christ. The carvings representing the manger, the scenes from the Passion, and the prominence given to the position and office of Peter in the Christian scheme of salvation, have no parallel in the paintings of the catacombs. Only once in the catacombs is the birth of Christ taken as a subject of a painting, and this is a fresco of a very late date in the catacomb of St. Sebastian. The reliefs on the sarcophagi show the little Child lying in the manger with the Virgin sitting near by on a knoll; behind her stands Joseph while the ox and ass are placed to one side, and above shines the star that guides the Wise Men. The Virgin is often represented sitting on a throne and holding the Child forward on her hands to receive the adoration of the Magi. As regards scenes from the Passion, Christians preferred, during the centuries of persecution, to represent the Saviour as the Son of God, full of miraculous power, as the conqueror of death and surrounded by His heavenly glory, rather than in His sufferings and death on the Cross. As Christianity advanced, however, in its conquest of heathenism, the faithful turned their attention more to the sufferings of Christ. Still, although sculpture ventured to present scenes from Christ's Passion, His humiliation was always accompanied by an allusion to His glory; at the foot of the empty Cross sleep the watchers by the grave, above the Cross is the monogram of Christ enclosed in a victor's wreath; or Christ is represented seated on the throne of His heavenly glory in the midst of scenes from His Passion. The subjects chosen from the Passion are the prediction of the denial of Peter, the washing of the feet, the crowning with thorns, Pilate's judgment, with the Old Testament prototype of the sacrifice of Isaac as contrasting relief. The manner in which the Church of the fourth century regarded the office of Peter is plain from the preference shown for representations of the traditio legis in which Peter, as the Moses of the New Covenant, receives from the hand of Christ (Dominum legem dat), the New Testament, the Lex or law that he was to proclaim and explain to Christians. The different scenes of the reliefs were separated from one another by arcades, or perhaps by trees, or, frequently they followed one another directly; the numerous incidents carved on large sarcophagi were often arranged in two rows, one over the other. In this disposition plastic art followed the model set by the mosaics in the great basilicas.
Although single scenes carved on the sarcophagi are not difficult to explain, yet where the composition is more complicated it is often not easy to discover the leading thought, as the artist was apt to run scenes together. An example will make this clear. On a sarcophagus in the Lateran Museum the following scenes succeed one another from left to right: the sacrifices of Cain and Abel; Peter led to execution; the triumph of the Cross; the beheading of Paul; Job. The question arises as to why the figures are thus arranged. In the death of Abel the judgment pronounced on the whole human race in Paradise was executed for the first time, while Job is the great herald of the Resurrection: "I know that my Redeemer liveth, and in the last day I shall rise out of the earth. And I shall be clothed again with my skin, and in my flesh I shall see my God" (xix, 25). The fulfilment of this hope is shown by the two Apostles and the glory of the risen Saviour. On many of the sarcophagi, however, especially those belonging to the period of the decline of Rome, the compositions lack a central thought and are arranged either according to the fancy of the sculptor or according to the command and desire of the purchaser.
Outside of the sarcophagi the most important early Christian sculpture is the life-size statue of St. Hippolytus, bishop and martyr, in the Lateran Museum, which was dug up near the catacomb bearing his name. The statue, of which only the lower half has been preserved, belongs to the middle of the third century. The figure of the Good Shepherd, also in the Lateran Museum, belongs probably to the time before Constantine; there are, besides, some other statuettes of the Good Shepherd, which are assigned to the second half of the fourth century. Of the work of the stone-masons and sculptors in the cubicula of the martyrs, and in the ornamentation of the altars, choir-screens, pulpits, Easter candlesticks, etc., of the great basilicas only scanty remains have been preserved. Early Christian sculpture reached its zenith in the first half of the fourth century when it joined in the triumph of the Christian religion as it emerged from the catacombs. Sculpture was employed at this period chiefly to ornament Christian graves with symbols of religious hope in the risen Christ.
The ornaments which the early Christians put in the graves, the lamps and perfume bottles that they placed outside, the coins, pieces of glass, and rings, that were pressed, to distinguish the spot, into the fresh plaster that sealed the opening, all these remains of early Christianity are often of artistic and scientific value. Both the coins and the factory stamps on the tiles that sealed the grave are in many instances important clues to the age of a gallery in a catacomb, as well as to the date of the inscriptions and paintings that may be found in it.
Earthen lamps were set in the fresh plaster sealing the slab which closed the grave, or were placed on projecting mouldings in the cubicula, and these lamps in the early period were very simple. It was not before the middle of the fourth century that Christian potters began to ornament lamps with Christian pictures and symbols; these consisted mainly of the Biblical scenes already noted in the frescoes, e.g. Jonas, the Good Shepherd, Oranti, the Three Hebrew Children in the fiery furnace. In addition to these, other Biblical characters were introduced, e.g. Josue and Caleb carrying the great bunch of grapes, the three angels visiting Abraham, Christ carrying the Cross and adored by angels. A large number of the lamps of this period are ornamented with pictures of animals (the lion, peacock, cock, hare, fish), shells, trees, geometrical designs, for both Christian and heathen potters chose ornaments without a religious character in order to offend neither Christian nor pagan customers. A number of bronze lamps have also been preserved, many with three small chains for hanging; but metal lamps were more used in the homes than in the catacombs. The most important group of these small objects of early Christian times is that of the so-called "gilded glasses", or the bases of glass drinking-vessels with Biblical incidents, pictures of saints, or family scenes, designed in gold-leaf and laid between two layers of glass; most of these glasses belong to the fourth century. Such drinking cups or glass mugs were popular as presents at baptisms and wedding anniversaries; they were also probably used at the love-feasts, or agapæ, which, on the great feast days of the saints, were spread for the poor in the porticoes of the porches. This explains the great number of gilded glasses ornamented with the portraits of the two chief Apostles. The designs shown by such glasses vary greatly; they throw valuable light on the paintings, the ornamentation of the lamps, the carvings of the sarcophagi, and in many ways are of dogmatic importance. Thus the design of Moses smiting the rock in the wilderness and the water gushing forth bears the inscription "Petrus", a proof that the early Christians saw in the leader of the Israelites the prototype of Peter, who in this case is regarded as the mediator for the Christian springs of grace, and in the pictures of the Transmission of the Law (Dominus legem dat), as the mediator of the truths of salvation. When these gilded glass mugs or cups were broken, the bases containing in gold-leaf the religious pictures were set in the mortar sealing the grave. No whole glasses have been preserved, and these bases are only found in the catacombs.
Much discussion has arisen over the ampullae said to contain blood. These are small earthen pots or phials and vessels of glass containing a reddish-brown deposit on the inner side, that have been found secured in the outer surface of the mortar seal of large numbers of graves. This incrustation was held to be the blood of the martyrs, and each grave where such a phial was found was believed to be the burial place of a martyr; accordingly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the bones discovered in these graves were presented, as the remains of martyrs, to the churches of Italy and beyond the Alps. This assumption was not shaken by the fact that many of these vessels were found on the graves of children, and that the statements as to the consul given in the epitaphs showed dates at the end of the fourth century when martyrdom was no longer suffered. It is now universally held by scholars that these vessels contained pungent essences intended to counteract the odour of the decay perceptible in the galleries of the catacombs. In the same way folded linen has been found inside the graves, which when burned still gives out a strong and agreeable scent; this linen must have been soaked with essences to attain the same end, i.e. to overcome the smell of decay. While in the last few decades the places of Christian burial of the fifth and sixth centuries in Egypt have yielded a large amount of well-preserved materials and woven fabrics, the garments and cloths in which the bodies in the Romans catacombs were wrapped have all mouldered away. It is only where the dead were enveloped in cloth worked with gold threads that the threads have been partially preserved, as in the case of St. Hyacinth. De Rossi found a body in the catacomb of St. Callistus that had been wrapped in cloth with gold threads. Within recent years a grave was discovered in the catacomb of Priscilla where the cloths are still preserved in which the bones lie, but it is rightly feared that they will fall to dust when brought into the air. Once a year at St. Peter's a large carpet is exhibited that has sewn into it the so-called coltre, or cloth, in which, it is supposed, martyrs were buried. Taking its genuineness for granted, this cloth is the only woven fabric now existing at Rome which has been preserved from the time of the primitive Roman Church.
It was impossible to lay out subterranean passages in the Mons Vaticanus because the soil there is not of volcanic formation, but consists of alluvial deposits. Consequently there is no catacomb around the grave of St. Peter; the faithful who wished to have their last resting-place near the tomb of the Apostle were buried close to the surface of the ground. Such cemeteries were probably laid out wherever the formation was not suitable for the excavation of subterranean passages, at the same time such areae or cemeteries of the Christians had no protection against desecration by a maddened mob. Where the soil allowed it, therefore, underground cemeteries were excavated. A number of small catacombs lay at a short distance from Rome, e.g. those of St. Alexander on the Via Nomentana, and St. Senator at Albano; the former has some importance on account of its epitaphs, the latter on account of its paintings. The town of Chiusi in central Italy has a catacomb called St. Mustiola, Bolsena that of St. Christina. At Naples the catacombs of St. Januarius preserve paintings, e.g. of Adam and Eve, belonging to the best period of early Christian art. Sicily has numerous catacombs, especially in the neighbourhood of Syracuse; the museum of Syracuse, besides epitaphs, lamps, and other objects, contains a very beautiful early Christian sarcophagus. There are also several small catacombs on the Island of Malta, and others in Sardinia, the latter having beautiful frescoes of the fourth century. In 1905 a large catacomb was discovered in North Africa near Hadrumetum in which the graves as a rule had not been opened, but unfortunately they are poor in epitaphs, paintings, and small objects. In all these the objects most frequently found are lamps, without ornamentation of importance. The Greek monogram of Christ, so often found on the Roman lamps of the fourth century, is also met on the lamps in the catacombs outside Rome, and in some places is the only sure proof of the Christian character of the burial place.
APA citation. (1908). Roman Catacombs. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03417b.htm
MLA citation. "Roman Catacombs." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 3. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1908. <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03417b.htm>.
Transcription. This article was transcribed for New Advent by Sean Hyland.
Ecclesiastical approbation. Nihil Obstat. November 1, 1908. Remy Lafort, S.T.D., Censor. Imprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York.
Contact information. The editor of New Advent is Kevin Knight. My email address is webmaster at newadvent.org. Regrettably, I can't reply to every letter, but I greatly appreciate your feedback — especially notifications about typographical errors and inappropriate ads. | <urn:uuid:e8ad52fa-7160-4d84-8c5a-2a59668714ef> | {
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Our educated guess is that Dr. Theodore Thaddeus Dominic O’Kelly came to Guatemala around 1696. He might be a surgeon from the ranks of the Jacobite Army that fought in Aughrim. According to his account, he was an Ulsterman born in Loughgall (County Armagh) around 1658.
In 1699, Dr. O’Kelly participated in the campaign against the last Mayan Kingdom of Itzá, located on the Island of Flores of Lake Petén Itzá. Two columns of Guatemaltecos advanced from the south, and another column of Yucatecos from the north, and converged on the lake. The Mayans managed to destroy one of the southern columns, only to allow the Yucatecos to build barges and attack their capital on the island. At the sound of the first gun it is reported that the islanders swam to safety on the mainland, abandoning the city. The Guatemalans came days after this skirmish.
Right then, the trouble started for the rookie conquerors. They had the city, but no food. They were 300 leagues away from any supporting city either north or south of them. They were surrounded by a dense tropical forest swarming with angry Mayan forces. Their lines of supply were broken, and new diseases started to erupt among the soldiers. General Melchior de Mencos asked Berrospe, the Guatemalan Governor, to send farmers, so the available land could be tilled. Berrospe sent more soldiers, only adding more mouths to the already dwindling supplies. In this context, surgeon O’Kelly writes the following appeal.
Surgeon Master’s Appeal
I, Theodore O’Kelly, surgeon to the troops that came from Guatemala, that are lodged with the garrison of Petén Itzá, hereby declare that I have 88 sick soldiers. Furthermore, two soldiers died due to both the hardships of the expedition, and lack of proper nourishment. Also, the medicines brought here were only for Itzá, and the soldiers are dying without any help. There are not supplies for the sick men. Further, both the general D. Melchior de Mencos and I have fallen ill. Then, the master purveyor has not brought back enough supplies for so many sick persons. Even the officers are dying, a second lieutenant and a corporal died some days back, and captain Mario Avalos is in a truly sorrowful state.
Hence, I affirm and declare to the acquittal of my conscience that the infantry cannot possibly be nourished only with boiled corn and beans. The sick persons are lucky if they get their hands on a corn tortilla, because there is no troop bread. Therefore, I ask license to transfer [the sick men] to another garrison to find proper nourishment and healing. Also, the able troops should go out to look for the supplies to the place where the master purveyor says they were left, otherwise, everyone will die due to the scarcity of food. Thus, I declare, and your lordships should decide promptly on the matter.
The above request comes without a date, but between two documents from Petén Itzá, one from the 26th and the other from the 28th of April, 1699. This last document is a decree from general Melchior de Mencos ordering to proceed according to the surgeon’s request. [General Archive of the Indies, Seville, Guatemala 151bis, fo. 168v-169r.]
Not surprisingly, Dr. O’Kelly became involved in local politics against Berrospe, the fumbling Governor of Guatemala. The party supporting the Governor were called “Berrospistas”, and the party supporting Gomez de la Madriz, the King’s envoy, were called “Tequelíes”, from the signature of T. Kelly, or allowing for Spanish spelling, “T. Quelí”.
The last notice we have on Dr. O’Kelly comes at the turn of the 18th. century. A bill from the archdiocese of Guatemala pays to Dr. O’Kelly the dues for embalming the late Mons. Andres de las Navas, the archbishop. Mons. Navas was Dr. O’Kelly mentor and political ally.
Dr. O’Kelly is remembered as one of the leading medical authorities in Guatemala at the end of the 17th. century. His colleagues were to build the medical school of the Guatemalan University in the early 18th. century. | <urn:uuid:1213b7ff-30ec-4cb6-83a5-67180386635a> | {
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WWI: Internment camp
Thousands of miles from home
Let’s pretend. You are traveling in another country. That country's government declares war on your government, and you are held prisoner against your will until the war is over, thousands of miles from home. How would you feel? Lonely? Homesick? Scared? Something like this happened to many German people on ships in American ports in 1917.
How did this happen? When war began in 1914, America remained neutral. Ninety-four German cargo and passenger ships stayed in United States ports for safety. Their captains were afraid that British warships would sink them, causing the loss of cargo, crew, and passengers. At first the stranded Germans moved freely around the country, but once America declared war against Germany in 1917, they became enemies of the United States.
The presence of these Germans and their ships was both a problem and a solution for the United States. Many Americans were afraid the ships’ officers and crews were spying for Germany, but the American government could not send them back on the ships—the British would sink them. Something had to be done with the German passengers and crew. Since they were not in the military, they could not be considered prisoners of war and had to be treated differently. They had to be treated as internees.
And something had to be done with the ships—what would happen to them? The American government decided that they could be used to help to solve another problem the government had. Soldiers and war supplies had to be carried overseas to the war in Europe, but there were not enough American merchant ships to get the job done. So, ships needed to be built, but there was not much time or money available. In the end, American leaders decided to use the German ships to carry American soldiers and supplies overseas. This saved months of time that would have been spent building new ships and saved millions of dollars in building costs.
President Wilson decided to look for an internment camp to hold the internees. The ideal site had to have a mild climate, had to be isolated, and had to have buildings and sewer, water, and electrical services. The site also needed to be close to railroad lines for transportation but away from large cities and out of the public eye. Officials investigated sites in New England, New York, and North Carolina. They decided on the Mountain Park Hotel in Hot Springs, North Carolina.
Located in Madison County in the mountains north of Asheville, Hot Springs is beside the French Broad River. It was chosen for its lack of mosquitoes and its mild climate. The hotel had been built for 300 guests, but the American government planned to place about 700 German ships’ officers in it. Another thirty-six buildings had to be built, including barracks for the remaining 1,600 crewmen from the ships, a dining room and kitchen, a camp hospital, showers, lavatories, and guardhouses for civilian guards. Most of the structures were built by the Germans, but the YMCA built a recreation room and a school building.
The Germans spent their time swimming and playing golf, tennis, and croquet. Others tended flower and vegetable gardens. Some were paid by the government for labor in the camp. Many attended classes to learn English, math, and navigation, and some even built a small village with buildings that looked like those in Germany.
There were many different reactions to having the “enemy” so close to an American town. Some townspeople were jealous that the Germans were being paid for labor inside the camp. Others felt that the Germans received too much to eat, especially since Americans were having meatless days to conserve food. On the other hand, some local residents welcomed the Germans because they brought new jobs to the area. Most guards were citizens of Hot Springs and the surrounding county. Families of the officers and crews came and lived in town to be near their men, and they brought money to the town’s economy. Local businesses benefited from the orders for lumber and plumbing supplies needed to build the camp.
After only fourteen months, the American government decided to close the camp and to make the Mountain Park Hotel a hospital for wounded American soldiers. Some of the detainees were placed in jobs outside the camp. On August 30, 1918, the remainder were sent to Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, where new barracks were being built. They all were eventually sent home in September 1919.
John Lee Bumgarner is a former editor of Tar Heel Junior Historian magazine.
Jackson, William Henry. 1902. "Mountain Park Hotel, Hot Springs, N.C." Library of Congress. Call no. LC-D4-14336. Online at http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/det.4a09533.
1 May 1993 | Bumgarner, John Lee | <urn:uuid:615fd3cb-a52c-4574-a24b-7ec3e80e0fb4> | {
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On December 10, 1675, in a blinding snowstorm, the thousand soldiers, armed with four-foot long muskets and carrying 20 bullets each, reached their destination an hour or two after noon. Church warned Winslow against a frontal attack, but was ignored. Winslow and his men were ambushed and suffered heavy casualties when they tried to storm the fort. The Indians later told Church that the English were so close together "it was like shooting at a house...you couldn't miss."
The "reformadoes," who had gone into the woods to find an indirect approach to the fort, found a place where the wall around the fort hadn't been completed. Led by their captain, they attacked here. Church was hit by three bullets but managed to stay on his feet. Once inside the fort they inflicted heavy damage on the defenders. This was enough of a diversion to enable the regular troops to break through.
Church, bleeding profusely, for one of the bullets entered his thigh and nearly severed his leg, saw with alarm that the regulars were setting fire to the wigwams. As Indian women, clutching their babies, fled from the burning death traps they were shot down in cold blood. Church tried to stop the burning, not so much out of pity as he realized the English would need shelter and snow was over two feet in depth. He was ignored and all the huts were burned. In the confusion that followed, Canonchet escaped, hoping to join Philip in New York. Five hundred Indian men and a similar number of women and children were dead. The Narragansetts who escaped destroyed all the white settlement in Warwick and most of Providence in retaliation for the massacre at the “Great Swamp.”
The severely wounded Benjamin Church was taken to Aquidneck to recuperate. As he mended he kept getting reports of Indian attacks in Providence, Lancaster, Medfield, Rehoboth and Plymouth. Within four months he was able to pursue Philip again. Canonchet had been captured, executed and quartered, and only Philip carried on the war. This time Plymouth gave in to Church's demands and gave him 60 Englishmen and allowed him to recruit 140 "friendly" Indians. To get these Indians he once again went to Queen Awashonks. He approached the camp with just three unarmed men and was quickly surrounded by warriors.
Many of the Indians had offered the loss of friends and relatives in the war and wanted to seek revenge on the captain. Church calmly reminded them that he came in peace and offered them strongwater (rum). They refused, fearing poison, until Church drank some himself. Still suspicious, they drank and listened to the white warrior as he told them of the many English who would come across the sea and punish those who fought against them. When he completed his speech many of the tribe agreed to join him in tracking down Philip.
Once again Church was able to find Philip, this time in a swamp in Bridgewater. Using Indian tactics, Church was able to get so close that Philip was at such a disadvantage that he lost 150 of his warriors. Many Indian warriors and Philip's squaw and son were captured. This was in July 1676. Instead of mistreating his captives, Church fed them well and treated them with respect. These followers of Philip had been on the run for over a year and were half-starved. For many, this was the first decent food they had in months, and they were so impressed with Church's manner and generosity that many agreed to join him. On August 6 Philip was nearly captured again. Weetamoe, his friend and ally, was drowned trying to escape, because of this and because Philip, realizing that some of his own warriors had helped Church, he began to lose heart.
He was convinced that Church was an evil spirit sent to punish him. In desperation he fled back to his old headquarters at Mount Hope. Again Church guessed correctly as to where he was. Church was so confident of victory that he decided to go to Aquidneck and visit his wife that he had left five months earlier. Alice was so shocked at seeing her husband that she fainted as she had believed him dead.
While Church was at Aquidneck, a messenger came with good news. An Indian named Alderman came to volunteer his services and to tell his strange story. Philip, he said, was so depressed he was unable to sleep for fear that Church would get him and had become more and more difficult to reason with. When one of his trusted advisors and closest friends suggested that Philip surrender, the chief flew into a rage and cut the man's head off. That man was Alderman's brother, and now Alderman wanted revenge. He offered to lead Church to Philip. Alice begged her husband not to as she feared a trap, but Church had made up his mind.
The story of Captain Church will be continued. | <urn:uuid:4b15f690-6dc2-48b3-8c84-bb7815babcc5> | {
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The municipality of Sagada is classified as a fifth-class municipality in Mountain Province under the Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR). It was in 1847 that the place was established as a political unit, but it was only on the 25th of June 1963 that the Municipality of Sagada came into existence under Executive Order Number 42.
The Spaniards first came in contact with the people of Sagada during the period of 1625-1700s. The expedition in the area was driven by the search for precious metals such as gold and copper to name a few. It was only during the 1830s when the name “Sagada” came about. It came from a group of Spanish soldiers who came from Besao. They met a man who was carrying a rattan basket for catching fish near Danum Lake. The soldiers asked the man what the name of the municipality was. Thinking that they were asking what he was carrying, he replied, “Sagada”. From then on, the settlement founded by Biag went down on Spanish record as Sagada (Cordillera Almanac, 1999).
The people of Sagada belong to the Northern Kankana-ey ethnolinguistic group, but they commonly identify themselves as Igorots, which means “people of the mountains”. Igorot people are known to be industrious and famous for their work in reference to construction of rice terraces, irrigation canals, vegetable production, cloth weaving, and their use of iron implements. With reference to the Bontocs occupying the eastern part of Mountain Province, the iSagada, together with the other Northern kankana-ey communities on the western section of the Mt. Province, are classified as Applai by the Office of the Northern Cultural Communities (ONCC).
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Richardson, John T. E.
|Google Scholar:||Look up in Google Scholar|
From at least the time of Leonardo da Vinci, artists and scholars have described the imaginative interpretation of naturally occurring phenomena such as rocks or cloud formations. Many early psychologists devised their own materials to investigate these processes in the form of inkblots. The use of inkblots is often associated with the psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach, but its origins lie in children’s games, experiments on visual perception, studies of the effects of hashish, the testing of immigrants at Ellis Island and the work of Frederic Bartlett.
|Item Type:||Journal Article|
|Academic Unit/Department:||Institute of Educational Technology|
|Interdisciplinary Research Centre:||Centre for Research in Education and Educational Technology (CREET)|
|Depositing User:||Users 12 not found.|
|Date Deposited:||26 May 2006|
|Last Modified:||02 Dec 2010 19:45|
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How do I use the Equation Editor (Math Symbols)
The equation editor allows you to easily build nice-looking mathematical equations. It is designed to work very similarly to the Equation Editor in Microsoft Office 2007, so if you’ve used that, this should be simple to understand. Note that it does not actually do any calculations, it is purely for display only.
The Equation Editor is a plug-in. To open it, in a Vyew Room, goto the EDIT menu > Insert Plug-in (or use the Plugin shortcut along the top toolbar that looks like a puzzle-piece icon).
- Click the ‘Pencil’ icon to edit
- The buttons across the top open different symbol palettes
- Click on a symbol to add that symbol to your current equation
- You can also type on your keyboard to add to your equation
- Blue rectangles are placeholders. Click on them, and then add symbols by typing or selecting symbols from the toolbar
- You can select a portion of your equation and then use the buttons across the botton to Copy, Cut, or Paste.
- IMPORTANT: You MUST click ‘SAVE’ or your equation will not be saved! Also, nobody else can see what you’ve entered until you save it.
When you are done editing, either click ‘HIDE’ or click the red X, to hide the editor, and only display the equation.
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Making new sections for the Lutyens model
Many important parts of the model's exterior had been lost or damaged, including spires, belfries and the intricate lantern that had surmounted the dome. These have been recreated by conservators using traditional techniques. Conservators decided to make the entirely new sections distinctive by leaving them unpainted. Only where new wood or plaster has been added to originally painted facades have these parts been coloured to harmonise. The dark and light contrasting wood of the interior shows clearly the extent of the work at the close of the project in 1934, the lighter wood being our completion of the work seventy years later.
Have a look at photos taken of some of the new sections being made and details showing where new sections have been added to original pieces of the model, in the image gallery. | <urn:uuid:44c04d89-8139-458d-badf-23b36fda5f74> | {
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After considerable discussion as to the best form and principle of the proposed instrument
the work was finally commenced.
He gave me the names and descriptions of all the musical instruments
, and the general terms of art in playing on each of them.
is a "measure" of a set of stimuli which are serially ordered when its responses, in all cases where they are relevantly different, are arranged in a series in the same order.
And these other instruments
, the use of which I cannot guess?
Indeed, we know that the instrument
mounted by Lord Rosse at Parsonstown, which magnifies 6,500 times, brings the moon to within an apparent distance of sixteen leagues.
He has not even a suspicion that the real point is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments
I found him in the act of destroying the reserve instruments
, and when I would have interfered to protect them he fell upon me and beat me.
She must know as well as her father, how acceptable an instrument
would be; and perhaps the mode of it, the mystery, the surprize, is more like a young woman's scheme than an elderly man's.
It seemed to her as though she beheld advancing from all quarters towards her, with the intention of crawling up her body and biting and pinching her, all those hideous implements of torture, which as compared to the instruments
of all sorts she had hitherto seen, were like what bats, centipedes, and spiders are among insects and birds.
That it was a French military instrument
was my first guess; but really there didn't seem much likelihood that this was the correct explanation, when one took into account the loneliness and remoteness of the spot.
Collins has no instrument
, she is very welcome, as I have often told her, to come to Rosings every day, and play on the pianoforte in Mrs.
An anchor is a forged piece of iron, admirably adapted to its end, and technical language is an instrument
wrought into perfection by ages of experience, a flawless thing for its purpose. | <urn:uuid:9f5daa6e-6799-4cc4-b38c-c1073d83f990> | {
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Mao Zedong: Liberator or Oppressor of China?
Michael Lynch introduces the controversial career of a gargantuan figure in Chinese and modern world history.
The setting is Tiananmen Square in Beijing, the capital of China. The date is August 1966. The Square is packed with a vast throng of young people. In unison, their faces a picture of ecstasy, they wave their little red books of the sayings of Chairman Mao and repeatedly scream and chant his name. The object of their adoration, who stands on the balcony of the South Gate overlooking the Square, is a drug addicted 73-year-old womaniser. He is also the ruler of a quarter of the world's population.
Such scenes remain one of the most powerful images of twentieth-century China. The worship of Chairman Mao Zedong was extreme, but it was not wholly irrational. It was a recognition of what he had achieved for China. Those many millions of Chinese who ritualistically intoned 'Mao, Mao, Mao Zedong' saw him as the supreme hero who had freed their country from a century of humiliation at the hands of the foreigner. One of the titles given him was 'the red sun rising in the east', an apt metaphor for the man who, having led a momentous social and political revolution in China, went on to make his country a nuclear Superpower, defying the USA, displacing the Soviet Union as the leader of international socialism, and becoming the model for the struggle against colonialism. | <urn:uuid:afffde91-ac86-49e1-836d-b3f875debf25> | {
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1) First, the grades are converted to the U.S. equivalent for countries other than the U.S.
2) The GPA converter converts each U.S. grade equivalent to points using the following scale:
3) The points for each class are multiplied by the number of credits or hours for that class, added together, and divided by the total number of credits or hours.
The scale above is the most common GPA conversion scale used by high schools and universities in the United States. Some universities use .67 and .33 steps for more precision, but this
difference does not significantly affect the resulting GPA. A few schools use .5 steps. For example, both A- and B+ are converted to 3.5. This type of conversion is less accurate because
A- and B+ are rarely considered the same grade. A+ is sometimes converted to 4.3 (or 4.33) points, but many universities do not have an A+.
It is also common for high schools to give an extra point for AP (Advanced Placement) classes, so the GPA can
be as high as 5.0. However, this GPA is known as a weighted GPA. An unweighted GPA is still calculated out of 4 points and is indicated on the transcript next to the weighted GPA.
D is a passing grade in most public schools (primary and secondary schools) in the U.S., but usually not in college. College courses with a grade of D cannot be transferred, but can be re-taken. Most high schools require a minimum 1.0 GPA to graduate. Most undergraduate programs require
a minimum 2.0 GPA. Most graduate programs require 3.0 or above.
Foreign Credits' GPA calculator analyses about 300 grading scales from over 150 countries and calculates an unweighted GPA on a 4.0 point scale. | <urn:uuid:9b48965f-2bed-4fd0-b232-8f0003461fc0> | {
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BARBARA KLEIN: This is SCIENCE IN THE NEWS in VOA Special English. I’m Barbara Klein.
CHRISTOPHER CRUISE: And I’m Christopher Cruise. Today we tell about the deadly disease anthrax.
Have an e-reader? Download this story as a PDF
BARBARA KLEIN: Ten years have passed since letters containing anthrax bacteria passed through the mail in the United States. The anthrax particles looked like harmless white powder. But the bacteria killed five people.
No one knew who mailed the letters. News organizations and congressional offices were the main targets. And, the anthrax particles also found their way to the home of a ninety-four-year-old woman.
The letter containing anthrax that was sent to the office of the Senate majority leader
Years later, federal investigators named a scientist, Bruce Edwards Ivins, as the only suspect in the murders. He was an anthrax expert who worked at the biological defense center in Maryland, where the bacteria was kept. The government was preparing to charge him when he killed himself in two thousand eight.
CHRISTOPHER CRUISE: Recently, an investigation requested by Congress suggested that Bruce Ivins may have been falsely suspected. Other investigators and news organizations also have studied the case and questioned the evidence against Mr. Ivins.
Government lawyers say there is no reason for debate. The lawyers say they know they found the right person. But questions about the case have caused concern among some people. They believe that if Bruce Ivins was innocent, the person who sent the letters containing anthrax might still be free.
BARBARA KLEIN: Anthrax also is the subject of another current debate. An expert advisory committee has proposed testing a vaccine against anthrax on children. Currently, medical workers are giving the vaccine to some adults. But it has not been tested on children. The goal of the possible testing would be to learn if children could be protected from the disease in the event of a terrorist attack.
The National Biodefense Science Board proposed the testing to the United States Department of Health and Human Services. The board noted the ethical questions involved. But it said it would suggest approval of the tests if those questions could be settled.
Some health-activist groups and others immediately protested the possible tests. The Obama Administration has said the issue will remain under study.
CHRISTOPHER CRUISE: The anthrax vaccine has been available for years on a limited basis. It is given mainly to members of the armed forces. More than two million armed forces members have had the vaccine. It is generally considered safe. But there have been protests about unexpected side effects. People who work with animals also can be vaccinated against anthrax.
Anthrax cannot be passed from one person to another. However, anthrax affects cattle and other creatures that eat plants. It also can affect people who deal with infected animals or animal products.
A microscopic view of stained anthrax bacteria
Anthrax is found naturally in the environment. It is caused by the bacterium Bacillus anthracis. The bacteria have spores or protective coverings. Spores are like seeds. They can live for hundreds of years in the soil. They can survive through severe heat, dry weather, and other extreme conditions.
BARBARA KLEIN: Anthrax can be found anywhere in the world. It is most common in developing countries. Animals can get the bacteria while eating plants. That can loosen anthrax spores in the soil. The animal eats or breathes in the spores and may become infected. But a vaccine can protect animals.
In people, the disease can appear in three forms: cutaneous anthrax, intestinal anthrax and inhalation anthrax.
Cutaneous anthrax is the most common kind of infection. People can become infected this way if the bacteria enter through a cut in the skin. The disease is most often found among people who work with infected animals or animal products. Cutaneous anthrax causes a painful, black area on the skin. However, it rarely causes death.
CHRISTOPHER CRUISE: Intestinal anthrax results from eating infected meat. It can cause high body temperature, stomach pain and expulsion of food from the stomach. It often can be cured.
The most severe form of the disease is inhalation anthrax. This happens when a person breathes the spores into the lungs. Inhalation anthrax is most often found among people who work with animal hair and wool in areas where the disease affects animals.
Inhalation anthrax is deadly if a person breathes in thousands of extremely small spores. Large spores may get caught in the nose or throat, where they are less dangerous. But the small spores can travel to the lungs.
BARBARA KLEIN: The body’s natural defenses against disease attack some spores. But they carry others to the lymph nodes in the chest. Once there, the spores change into a deadly form. The bacteria grow and spread to the rest of the body.
This may take a day, a week or up to two months. As infection spreads to the rest of the body, the bacteria produce poisons that enter the blood. These poisons can cause a build-up of fluids in the lung, tissue destruction and death.
CHRISTOPHER CRUISE: Doctors treat infected people with antibiotic medicines. Antibiotics have proven effective in fighting the disease in most cases. They can treat the disease if it is discovered early. The antibiotics ciprofloxacin penicillin and doxycycline are all effective treatments.
An anthrax infection is especially dangerous because people do not know they have been infected until symptoms appear. Signs of the disease usually appear within a few days. Chest X-rays can help doctors tell if a person has inhaled anthrax.
Early symptoms are similar to the disease influenza. They may include high body temperature, muscle pain and a cough. These are usually followed by severe breathing problems and death if the disease is not treated.
BARBARA KLEIN: Anthrax spores are hard to kill. Antibiotics halt the development of the disease by fighting the bacteria as they grow from the spores. However, antibiotics do not fight the poisons that the bacteria produce.
To work best, the antibiotics need to be active in the blood for as long as spores might be present in the lungs or in other places in the body. Health officials say people should take antibiotics for an extended period to treat or protect against anthrax infection.
CHRISTOPHER CRUISE: Anthrax is considered a major threat because of its ability to be used as a biological weapon. Biological weapons are living microorganisms. Biological and chemical agents are most effective when they are spread into the air. These agents are often placed in bombs or artillery shells that are designed to explode into the air and spread poisons over an enemy.
Many biological and chemical agents have no color, smell or taste. So an attack could take place without the victims knowing it.
Experts say anthrax is one of the easiest biological agents to manufacture. It can be grown in a laboratory. It spreads easily through the air over a large area. It can be made into a form that is easily inhaled. It is easily stored and is dangerous for a long period of time. It also costs very little to make.
BARBARA KLEIN: Anthrax has been used in laboratory experiments for more than one-hundred years. Many scientists have used anthrax for traditional research purposes. The bacteria also have been genetically changed for biological weapons research. The United States and countries of the former Soviet Union have experimented with anthrax in their biological weapons programs.
Anthrax spores in nature stick together in particles too large to be breathed in. Experts say that the individual anthrax spore is extremely small, about one micron wide. For example, two-thousand spores lined up would measure only two millimeters. Particles that are five microns or bigger are usually trapped in the upper part of the respiratory system.
To be an effective weapon, anthrax spores are reproduced to be smaller than five microns. Experts say making such anthrax spores requires special laboratory equipment and a great deal of skill. And to many people, that is a very good thing.
CHRISTOPHER CRUISE: This SCIENCE IN THE NEWS program was written by Cynthia Kirk and Jerilyn Watson. I’m Christopher Cruise.
BARBARA KLEIN: And I’m Barbara Klein. You can find transcripts, MP3s and podcasts of our programs at voaspecialenglish.com. And you can find us on Twitter and YouTube at VOA Learning English. Join us again next week for more news about science in Special English on the Voice of America. | <urn:uuid:7beefc00-d2b8-422f-a023-8deb4ddce616> | {
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Coreopsis tinctoria Nutt.
Plains coreopsis, Golden tickseed, Goldenwave, Coreopsis, Calliopsis
Asteraceae (Aster Family)
USDA Symbol: coti3
A slender, 1-2 ft. annual with pinnately-compound foliage, tickseed is known for its small but abundant yellow flowers, painted maroon near the center. Numerous smooth, slightly angled branches bearing showy, daisy-like flower heads with yellow rays surrounding a reddish-purple central disk. The yellow petals are notch-tipped. Flower heads occur on long stalks from the multi-branching stems.
This prevailingly western annual has escaped from cultivation in the East. It is widespread in the West and the South in disturbed areas, such as moist ditches. Because of its showiness, the flower is cultivated extensively, hence its common name.
From the Image Gallery
Plant CharacteristicsDuration: Annual
Size Notes: 1-2
Size Class: 1-3 ft.
Bloom InformationBloom Color: Yellow , Brown
Bloom Time: Apr , May , Jun
DistributionUSA: AL , AR , AZ , CA , CO , CT , DC , DE , FL , GA , HI , IA , ID , IL , IN , KS , KY , LA , MA , MD , ME , MI , MN , MO , MS , MT , NC , ND , NE , NJ , NM , NY , OH , OK , OR , PA , RI , SC , SD , TN , TX , VA , VT , WA , WI , WV , WY
Canada: AB , BC , MB , ON , QC , SK
Native Distribution: Plains of c. U.S.; naturalized elsewhere
Native Habitat: Prairie, Plains, Meadows, Pastures, Savannahs, Roadsides, pond banks
Growing ConditionsWater Use: High
Light Requirement: Sun , Part Shade
Soil Moisture: Moist
CaCO3 Tolerance: Medium
Soil Description: Prefers moist, sandy soil.
Conditions Comments: Coreopsis tinctoria produces showy masses of red-highlighted yellow flowers. It does well in wildflower meadows and predominates in wet years. Though considered an annual, it may bloom two to three years before dying.
BenefitUse Ornamental: This species is widely cultivated as an ornamental and is escaping. It is sometimes known in the horticultural trade as calliopsis.
Use Wildlife: Nectar-Bees Nectar-Butterflies, Nectar-insects, Seeds-Granivorous birds
Use Food: Flowers boiled in water makes a red liquid used as a beverage.
Use Medicinal: Amerindians used root tea for diarrhea and as an emetic. Dried tops in a tea to strengthen blood. Boiled plant to make a drink for internal pains and bleeding.
Use Other: Was used for a source of yellow and red dyes.
Conspicuous Flowers: yes
Nectar Source: yes
Deer Resistant: High
PropagationPropagation Material: Clump Division , Seeds
Description: Seeds may be sown outside in late fall or the following spring without any cold treatment. Seedlings grow rapidly. This plant can be increased by separating outer rosettes from the clump in the fall.
Seed Collection: Nutlets are mature and ready for collection about four weeks after the flowers wither. Watch the inner series of bracts; when they begin to darken, it is time to collect. Remove chaff and store in sealed, refrigerated containers. Storage life is at least three years.
Seed Treatment: Seeds of this genus generally germinate without pretreatment. Several studies have indicated that light increases germination. From this observation, we suggest not covering the soil.
Commercially Avail: yes
Maintenance: Since C. tinctoria is an annual, be sure to allow the seed to mature completely before mowing or collecting seed to plant in a new area. Again, it is essential it is allowed to reseed for an abundant display the following year.
Find Seed or Plants
Order seed of this species from Native American Seed and help support the Wildflower Center.
Find seed sources for this species at the Native Seed Network.
View propagation protocol from Native Plants Network.
Mr. Smarty Plants says
Attracting butterflies in Tennessee
July 03, 2009
What flowers and plants do the caterpillars in Tennessee eat? And do you know what butterflies live in Tipton Co. Tennessee?
view the full question and answer
Native plants for seasonal poor drainage
May 16, 2006
I have an area in my front yard that has a drainage ditch running through it. When it rains, that area stays very wet. What kind of plants available for sale will work in this situation?
view the full question and answer
National Wetland Indicator Status
From the National Suppliers DirectoryAccording to the inventory provided by Associate Suppliers, this plant is available at the following locations:
Ohio Prairie Nursery - Hiram, OH
Toadshade Wildflower Farm - Frenchtown, NJ
From the National Organizations DirectoryAccording to the species list provided by Affiliate Organizations, this plant is on display at the following locations:
Fredericksburg Nature Center - Fredericksburg, TX
Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center - Austin, TX
Texas Discovery Gardens - Dallas, TX
Sibley Nature Center - Midland, TX
Brackenridge Field Laboratory - Austin, TX
Nueces River Authority - Uvalde, TX
Stengl Biological Research Station - Smithville, TX
Texas Parks and Wildlife Department - Austin, TX
Native Seed Network - Corvallis, OR
Jacob's Well Natural Area - Wimberley, TX
NPSOT - Williamson County Chapter - Georgetown, TX
Herbarium Specimen(s)NPSOT 0061 Collected May 19, 1990 in Bexar County by Lottie Millsaps
BibliographyBibref 766 - Dale Groom's Texas Gardening Guide (2002) Groom, D.
Bibref 610 - Edible wild plants of the prairie : an ethnobotanical guide (1987) Kindscher, K.
Bibref 417 - Field Guide to Medicinal Plants and Herbs of Eastern and Central North America (2000) Foster, S. & J. A. Duke
Bibref 355 - Landscaping with Native Plants of Texas and the Southwest (1991) Miller, G. O.
Bibref 765 - McMillen's Texas Gardening: Wildflowers (1998) Howard, D.
Bibref 318 - Native Texas Plants: Landscaping Region by Region (2002) Wasowski, S. & A. Wasowski
Bibref 248 - Texas Wildflowers: A Field Guide (1984) Loughmiller, C. & L. Loughmiller
Bibref 328 - Wildflowers of Texas (2003) Ajilvsgi, Geyata.
Bibref 286 - Wildflowers of the Texas Hill Country (1989) Enquist, M.
Search More Titles in Bibliography
Research LiteratureReslit 355 - The flavonoid-rich fraction of Coreopsis tinctoria promotes glucose tolerance regain through pancreatic function recovery in streptozotocin-induced glucose-intolerant rats (2010) T. Dias, M. R. Bronze, P. J. Houghton, H. Mota-Fil...
Reslit 547 - Antagonistic interactions between competition and insect herbivory on plant growth (2004) J. J. Haag, M. D. Coupe and J. F. Cahill
Reslit 1306 - A biosystematic study of Coreopsis tinctoria and C. cardaminefolia (Compositae) (1971) E. B. Smith and H. M. Parker
Reslit 1540 - Antioxidant Activities of Fractions Obtained from Flowers of Coreopsis tinctoria Nutt (2010) J. H. Woo, H. S. Jeong, Y. D. Chang, S. L. Shin an...
Reslit 1933 - Comparative Capitular Morphology and Anatomy of Coreopsis L and Bidens L (Compositae), Including a Review of Generic Boundaries (1995) M. Tadesse, D. J. Crawford and E. B. Smith
Reslit 2562 - Phyletic trends in sections Eublepharis and Calliopsis of the genus Coreopsis (Compositae) (1983) E. B. Smith
Reslit 2564 - A cladistic study of North American Coreopsis (Asteraceae: Heliantheae) (1987) R. K. Jansen, E. B. Smith, D. J. Crawford
Reslit 2566 - Appearance of first generation larvae of the sunflower moth, Homoeosoma electellum (Hulst)(Lepidoptera: Pyralidae), in the central United States (1985) V. H. Beregovoy
Reslit 2567 - Meiotic chromosome numbers in Texas species of the genus Coreopsis (Compositae-Heliantheae) (1960) L. Turner
Reslit 2569 - Leaf flavonoid chemistry of North American Coreopsis (Compositae): intra-and intersectional variation (1983) D. J. Crawford, E. B. Smith
This information was provided by the Florida WIldflower Foundation.
Search More Titles in Research Literature
From the ArchiveWildflower Newsletter 1987 VOL. 4, NO.4 - Wildflower Center Sows Seeds for the Country, Hotline for Texas, New Goals Plans...
Wildflower Newsletter 1992 VOL. 9, NO.6 - Architectural Plans for new Facility Taking Shape, Native Plants Provide Local C...
Additional resourcesUSDA: Find Coreopsis tinctoria in USDA Plants
FNA: Find Coreopsis tinctoria in the Flora of North America (if available)
Google: Search Google for Coreopsis tinctoria
MetadataRecord Modified: 2015-06-25
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The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) says its policy on the use of antibiotics in livestock and poultry hasn’t changed, despite comments to the contrary by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.
Vilsack reportedly said that USDA would like to see antibiotics used in the context of disease control and disease response, and that the agency is working with veterinarians and land-grant universities to ensure antibiotics are used more judiciously.
But Liz Wagstrom, DVM, chief veterinarian for the National Pork Producers Council, says pork producers are already moving in that direction to more responsibly and judiciously use antibiotics in their operations.
“When you look at the Pork Quality Assurance Plus and the We Care programs, pork producers have absolutely been at the forefront of responsible use of antibiotics, including having veterinary involvement in all decision-making,” she says. “Secondly, we always have said that the reason that we believe that growth promotion and disease-prevention antibiotics work is because they are doing just that – preventing diseases. A lot of producers use them postweaning when pigs are most likely to be stressed or exposed to disease.”
“It just makes good economic sense to reevaluate all uses of antibiotics as every producer is looking at ways to minimize inputs, but still take good care of their animals and provide a good product for consumers,” Wagstrom says. | <urn:uuid:ea52ea31-74b5-48e6-aa8c-afbf8ec1b933> | {
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This lesson utilizes the October 29, 2014, statement of the Federal Reserve's Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) to explore the Federal Reserve's twin goals of price stability and full employment. This lesson discusses the recent announcement of the end of the QE3 bond buy-back and the rationale and implications of this decision.
This lesson utilizes the September 17, 2014, statement of the Federal Reserve's Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) to explore the Federal Reserve's twin goals of price stability and full employment. This lesson discusses the tools the FOMC uses to achieve these goals as well as the reasoning behind their use. To begin the academic year, this is a basic lesson which will be built upon as the year progresses.
Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on the Consumer Price Index (CPI), students investigate the latest release for October 2014. Students will explore the difference between seasonally unadjusted and adjusted data are and the role of each.
The following lessons come from the Council for Economic Education's library of publications. Clicking the publication title or image will take you to the Council for Economic Education Store for more detailed information.
This publication helps students analyze energy and environment issues from an economics perspective.
4 out of 10 lessons from this publication relate to this EconEdLink lesson.
Teaching Financial Crises is an eight lesson resource that provides an organizing framework in which to contextualize all of the media attention that has been paid to the recent financial crisis, as well as put it in a historical context. The current events stories, opinion pieces, and other popular media pieces that are today in great supply have generally not connected to educational objectives, historical analysis, and economic processes and concepts that are used in the high school classroom. In Teaching Financial Crises, teachers will find a non-partisan and non-ideological resource to help them simplify and offer balanced perspectives on this challenging subject matter.
2 out of 9 lessons from this publication relate to this EconEdLink lesson. | <urn:uuid:782b8d52-faf3-4682-8d55-bf65b941119a> | {
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Panamic Flashlightfish, Phthanophaneron harveyi: The Panamic Flashlightfish is a member of the Anomalopidae Family which includes flashlight and lantern-eyed fish, with seven species found in five genera. They all have a unique luminous organ under the eye which at night is used to attract planktonic food. First reported in the scientific literature in 1976, the Panamic Flashlightfish is extremely rare.
The Panamic Flashlightfish has an overall blackish-brown coloration, a large, bony, spine-laden head, and a prominent pearly white luminous organ under each of the blue eyes. It has a strange little flap of skin below the eye which can be raised and lowered, thus causing the appearance of a light “blinking” on and off.
The body is covered with small rough scales. Below the lateral line, these scales are enlarged with some blue spots. There are two separate dorsal fins, pelvic fins with spines, and a deeply forked caudal fin.
The Panamic Flashlightfish is active nocturnally, hiding in rocky caves and crevices during the daytime.
In Mexican fishing waters , it is present south of Magdalena Bay on the Pacific side of the Baja California Peninsula. Dr. John McCosker, California Academy of Science, knows of only one other flashlightfish that was caught by hook and line.
This occurred on the Thetis Bank (24°48'N, 112°9'W). In the Sea of Cortez, Panamic Flashlightfish is thought to be found south of Loreto and around Guaymas. It is believed to reach a maximum length of 10 inches and to be found in the first 100 feet of the water column. The collection pictured below confirms the size, approximately 10 inches, but increases the depth range (catch made at 310 feet) and the distribution northward to Santa Rosalia (27°18'N, 112°52'W). Description courtesy John Snow. | <urn:uuid:ec8f17df-3d93-4ff8-9a8f-6a3e8ed34a7b> | {
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Evolutionary paths to new therapeutic drugs, as well as a wide assortment of other enzyme products, have been created through, of all things, intelligent design. A team of researchers with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California at Berkeley have developed a technique in which the evolution of an important class of proteins is steered towards a desired outcome.
The Grand fir, largest of all the fir trees, produces the ultimate in "promiscuous enzymes," a sesquiterpene synthase capable of producing as many as 52 different enzyme products.
“We’ve taken enzymes that are promiscuous, meaning they have the capacity to evolve along many different functional lines, and trained them to become specialists,” said chemical engineer Jay Keasling, who led this study.
“This technology could be used by pharmaceutical manufacturers in the future to create specific enzyme products.”
Lynn Yarris | EurekAlert!
Transport of molecular motors into cilia
28.03.2017 | Aarhus University
Asian dust providing key nutrients for California's giant sequoias
28.03.2017 | University of California - Riverside
The Institute of Semiconductor Technology and the Institute of Physical and Theoretical Chemistry, both members of the Laboratory for Emerging Nanometrology (LENA), at Technische Universität Braunschweig are partners in a new European research project entitled ChipScope, which aims to develop a completely new and extremely small optical microscope capable of observing the interior of living cells in real time. A consortium of 7 partners from 5 countries will tackle this issue with very ambitious objectives during a four-year research program.
To demonstrate the usefulness of this new scientific tool, at the end of the project the developed chip-sized microscope will be used to observe in real-time...
Astronomers from Bonn and Tautenburg in Thuringia (Germany) used the 100-m radio telescope at Effelsberg to observe several galaxy clusters. At the edges of these large accumulations of dark matter, stellar systems (galaxies), hot gas, and charged particles, they found magnetic fields that are exceptionally ordered over distances of many million light years. This makes them the most extended magnetic fields in the universe known so far.
The results will be published on March 22 in the journal „Astronomy & Astrophysics“.
Galaxy clusters are the largest gravitationally bound structures in the universe. With a typical extent of about 10 million light years, i.e. 100 times the...
Researchers at the Goethe University Frankfurt, together with partners from the University of Tübingen in Germany and Queen Mary University as well as Francis Crick Institute from London (UK) have developed a novel technology to decipher the secret ubiquitin code.
Ubiquitin is a small protein that can be linked to other cellular proteins, thereby controlling and modulating their functions. The attachment occurs in many...
In the eternal search for next generation high-efficiency solar cells and LEDs, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory and their partners are creating...
Silicon nanosheets are thin, two-dimensional layers with exceptional optoelectronic properties very similar to those of graphene. Albeit, the nanosheets are less stable. Now researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have, for the first time ever, produced a composite material combining silicon nanosheets and a polymer that is both UV-resistant and easy to process. This brings the scientists a significant step closer to industrial applications like flexible displays and photosensors.
Silicon nanosheets are thin, two-dimensional layers with exceptional optoelectronic properties very similar to those of graphene. Albeit, the nanosheets are...
20.03.2017 | Event News
14.03.2017 | Event News
07.03.2017 | Event News
29.03.2017 | Materials Sciences
29.03.2017 | Physics and Astronomy
29.03.2017 | Earth Sciences | <urn:uuid:d0206123-537b-4569-beb2-e0d8bca94a7f> | {
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A wedding is a ceremony where two people are united in marriage. Wedding traditions and customs vary greatly between cultures, ethnic groups, religions, countries, and social classes. Most wedding ceremonies involve an exchange of marriage vows by the couple, presentation of a gift (offering, rings, symbolic item, flowers, money), and a public proclamation of marriage by an authority figure or celebrant. Special wedding garments are often worn, and the ceremony is sometimes followed by a wedding reception. Music, poetry, prayers or readings from religious texts or literature are also commonly incorporated into the ceremony, as well as superstitious customs originating in Ancient Rome.
The use of a wedding ring has long been part of religious weddings in Europe and America, but the origin of the tradition is unclear. One possibility is the Roman belief in the Vena amoris, which was believed to be a blood vessel that ran from the fourth finger (ring finger) directly to the heart. Thus, when a couple wore rings on this finger, their hearts were connected. Historian Vicki Howard points out that the belief in the "ancient" quality of the practice is most likely a modern invention. "Double ring" ceremonies are also a modern practice, a groom's wedding band not appearing in the United States until the early 20th century.
Many Christian faiths emphasize the raising of children as a priority in a marriage. In Judaism, marriage is so important that remaining unmarried is deemed unnatural. Islam also recommends marriage highly; among other things, it helps in the pursuit of spiritual perfection. The Baha'i Faith sees marriage as a foundation of the structure of society, and considers it both a physical and spiritual bond that endures into the afterlife. Hinduism sees marriage as a sacred duty that entails both religious and social obligations. By contrast, Buddhism does not encourage or discourage marriage, although it does teach how one might live a happily married life and emphasizes that marital vows are not to be taken lightly.
"The Order for the Service of Marriage" in the Methodist Book of Worship for Church and Home (1965) specifies the importance of premarital counseling, stating that the "minister is enjoined diligently to instruct those requesting his offices for their prospective marriage in the Christian significance of the holy estate into which they seek to enter". In the Free Methodist Church and African Methodist Episcopal Church, both apart of the World Methodist Council, contain a rubric for the reading of the banns. The Service of Christian Marriage (Rite I) includes the elements found in a standard liturgy celebrated on the Lord's Day as well as other elements unique to this Mass: the Entrance, Opening Prayer, Old Testament Reading, Psalm, New Testament Reading, Alleluia, Gospel Reading, Sermon, Recitation of one of the ecumenical creeds, prayers of the faithful, Offertory, the Declaration by the Man and the Woman, Response of the Families and the People, Exchange of Vows, Blessing and Exchange of Rings, Declaration of Marriage and celebration of the Eucharist, and Benediction.
A wedding is typically a happy time for families to celebrate. In the Muslim world, there are colorful, cultural variations from place to place.
All Muslim marriages have to be declared publicly and are never to be undertaken in secret. For many Muslims, it is the ceremony that counts as the actual wedding alongside a confirmation of that wedding in a registry office according to fiqh, in Islam a wedding is also viewed as a legal contract particularly in Islamic jurisprudences. However, most Muslim cultures separate both the institutions of the mosque and marriage, no religious official is necessary, but very often an Imam presides and performs the ceremony, he may deliver a short sermon. Celebrations may differ from country to country depending on their culture but the main ceremony is followed by a Walima (the marriage banquet).
At traditional Chinese weddings, the tea ceremony is the equivalent of an exchange of vows at a Western wedding ceremony. This ritual is still practiced widely among rural Chinese; however, young people in larger cities, as well as in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore, tend to practice a combination of Western style of marriage together with the tea ceremony.
The tea ceremony is an official ritual to introduce the newlyweds to each other's family, and a way for newlyweds to show respect and appreciation to their parents. The newlyweds kneel in front of their parents, serving tea to both sides of parents, as well as elder close relatives. Parents give their words of blessing and gifts to the newlyweds.
Many traditions and rituals have origins in religions and are still performed by religious leaders. Those having a secular wedding often want to maintain the symbolic meaning of some customs since they have become an essential part of the culture independent of religion. In order to satisfy these needs, secular ceremonies have started to be carried out by humanist officiants worldwide. Since the early 1980s, the Humanist Society Scotland (HSS) has been carrying out secular ceremonies in the country. In 1987, the BBC Scotland TV series "High Spirits" for the first time aired a humanist wedding on national TV. The demand for humanist wedding has been growing since then and in 2005 HSS won a legal battle and their ceremonies are now authorized by the Registrar General of Scotland.
A civil wedding is a ceremony presided over by a local civil authority, such as an elected or appointed judge, Justice of the peace or the mayor of a locality. Civil wedding ceremonies may use references to God or a deity (except in UK law where readings and music are also restricted), but generally no references to a particular religion or denomination. They can be either elaborate or simple. Many civil wedding ceremonies take place in local town or city halls or courthouses in judges' chambers. | <urn:uuid:75ca9f91-cd73-44a7-b8cd-ce1cd58a4b4f> | {
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- 4 updates
The move to commemorate the centenary of the start of the First World War may prove useful as a reminder to a large number of Britons who remain decidely sketchy about the conflict.
A survey suggests many people's knowledge of the war blurs easily with World War Two.
More responders apparently thought Germany invaded Poland - as was the case in 1939 - than Belgium in August 1914.
Nine percent of people thought Winston Churchill was prime minister at the start of the conflict - the same number than correctly knew it was Herbert Asquith.
Embarrassingly, 1% of the 1,955 adults quizzed by YouGov for thinktank British Future thought Margaret Thatcher was PM in 1918 and 3% believed Britain and Germany fought the war on the same side.
A national competition will be held to design the centenary paving stones which will be placed in areas of the UK where Victoria Cross recipients of the First World War were born.
There will be 28 stones unveiled next year to commemorate medals awarded in 1914, and other stones will be unveiled each year up until 2018.
Communities Secretary Eric Pickles, announcing the competition, said: "Laying paving stones to mark these Victoria Cross heroes will ensure that there is a permanent memorial to all the fallen who fought for our country."
He added the stones would "help residents understand how their area played its part in the Great War, and ensure memories of that sacrifice for British freedom and liberty are kept alive for generations to come."
The centenary of Britain's entry into the First World War will be marked with a series of special events on August 4 next year, including:
- A service of commemoration will be held at Glasgow Cathedral for Commonwealth leaders (a day after the closing ceremony of the Commonwealth Games).as
- A ceremony will be held at a cemetery in Mons, Belgium, where men believed to be the first and last Commonwealth casualties of the war are buried.
- A candlelit vigil will be held at Westminster Abbey at the end of the day with the last candle extinguished at 11pm - the moment war was declared.
Other events include a programme allowing two pupils and one teacher from every state-funded secondary school in England to visit the battlefields of the Western Front.
First World War heroes will be honoured with paving stones as part of plans to the mark the centenary of the conflict on this day next year.
Special commemorative stones will be laid in the home towns of every soldier awarded the Victoria Cross for valour "in the face of the enemy" during the four-year war.
War memorials across the country will also be restored ahead of August 4 2014, while candlelit vigils and a service of commemoration attended by Commonwealth leaders will also be held. | <urn:uuid:82df4dd1-08ef-4566-82bc-b1d6429b815b> | {
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As reported in the New Public Health blog (from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation), the U.S.:
…is being outpaced by most other developed countries when it comes to improvements in health outcomes, according to a new analysis by a researcher at the University Of Washington School Of Public Health. The researcher, Dr. Stephen Bezruchka, a senior lecturer in global health, says the decline comes despite increased U.S. spending on health care services.
In a published study titled “The Hurrider I Go the Behinder I Get: The Deteriorating International Ranking of U.S. Health Status,” Bezruchka looked at statistics on Infant and child mortality, maternal mortality, life expectancy at birth and at age 50, and adult mortality as mortality measures that reflect health over the course of one’s life, comparing them across developed countries. This study offers a succinct summary of its findings as follows:
- Around 1950, the United States had among the best health outcomes measured by mortality indicators, but 60 years later, it ranked behind the other rich countries and a number of poorer ones.
- The differences in mortality outcomes between the United States and the healthiest nations today represent substantial inequalities in health.
- Reasons for this relative decline are likely due to structural changes related to societal determinants of population health stemming from high economic inequality and lack of attention to early life issues.
- Public awareness of deteriorating health rankings in the United States is limited, so the next steps to improving health require major communication strategies.
Why do you think we have fallen so far behind in health outcomes compared to the rest of the developed world? What can or should we do to change it? Tell us! | <urn:uuid:cddf0ca1-ed37-4e04-bb24-e945801201fe> | {
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Tonight's story focuses on a report from the Framingham Heart Study that suggests that obesity – and thinness – can spread through social ties. And it's not just that obese people tend to hang out together. If one of a pair of mutual friends BECOMES obese (defined as Body Mass Index, or BMI>= 30) then the risk of the other becoming obese increases by 171%! And social closeness is much more important than geographic closeness. There was no effect for next door neighbors who weren't friends. But a friend 1,000 miles away influences you as much as a friend next door.
One of the most surprising findings was that the effect extends out three levels of friendship. Not only are you affected by your friend, but by your friend's friend and your friend's friend's friend. If everybody is connected by six degrees of separation, think how many people might be influenced by three degrees of separation!
I spoke to James Fowler, Ph.D., an author of the study appearing in July 26th's edition of the The New England Journal of Medicine. He is excited about the public health implications of this study. Think how many people might be helped by one person's healthy lifestyle. The same effect that can cause an obese friend to increase a friend's risk of obesity by 171% works the other way too. As Dr. Fowler told me, "When your obese friend loses weight and becomes either overweight or a normal weight, it reduces your risk of obesity by 63%."
Harnessing the power of friendships may well be the new new thing in medicine. | <urn:uuid:18dac138-bba2-40c4-bfb6-530db73338a7> | {
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The body's natural response to a wound--sending specialized cells to the transplant site to initiate the development of scar tissue--might be a major contributor to chronic kidney rejection following transplant.
This is the first demonstration that kidney rejection is actually caused by the recipient's own cells' normal reaction to a wound, rather than by the donor organ cells, said Paul Grimm, M.D., UCSD School of Medicine associate clinic professor of pediatric and the lead author of the study, which appears in the July 12 New England Journal of Medicine.
Grimm and colleagues at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada and University of Pennsylvania, report that chronic kidney rejection appears to be caused by the organ recipient's own cells - specifically, the mesenchymal cells - traveling to the transplant site and colonizing the area, creating an environment in which the donor organ cannot survive. Scarring of an organ, which occurs during the post-surgical healing process, is actually quite damaging, constricting blood vessels leading to the organ and causing it to fail prematurely.
According to Grimm, the mesenchymal cells act as "wandering carpenters" circulating through the blood stream, constantly on the lookout for damaged tissue.
"Have hammer, will travel" is the motto of the cells, Grimm said, and their mission is to repair damaged areas. But sometimes these cells can harm rather than heal.
"We don't know why on some occasions the repair leads to perfect healing, but other times the repair is imperfect leading to the chronic scarring that is part of rejection," Grimm said.
Grimm and colleagues are hopeful of what developments could come from this finding, suggesting that it might be possible to mitigate or prevent kidney rejection by developing methods of blocking these scar-promoting cells.
For this study, the team analyzed tissue samples from 14 patients who had experienced kidney rejection. Through chromosomal tracking, the team determined that the cells causing scarring and rejection in each patient had actually migrated to the organ site through the recipient's blood stream.
"These findings open the door to a room of transplant medicine we've never seen before," Dr. Grimm said. "We can now possibly find ways to block these scar-causing cells by shutting down the signals that activate them in the first place."
This study was funded by the Baxter Extramural Grant Program of the National Institutes of Health (National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases), UCSD School of Medicine Department of Pediatrics, and the Children's Hospital of Winnipeg Research Foundation.
Collaborators with Dr. Grimm on the research include David N. Rush, M.D., Peter Nickerson, M.D., John Jeffery, M.D., Rachel M. McKenna, Ph.D, Elzbieta Stern, M.Sc., and James Gough, M.D., all from the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada; and Rashmin C. Savani, M.B., CH.B., from the University of Pennsylvania.
The above story is based on materials provided by University Of California - San Diego. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
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The Zagreb Cathedral stands on Kaptol as the tallest building in Croatia! Its spires can be seen from many locations in the city. This particular shot was taken from Lotrščak Tower on an autumn night.
This, typically Gothic cathedral, is dedicated to the Assumption of Mary and to kings Saint Stephen and Saint Ladislaus.
Construction of this monument started in 1093. Few hundred years later, in 1242, Tatars destroyed it. Another few hundred years later, in 15th century, the Ottoman Empire invaded Bosnia and Croatia, triggering the construction of fortification walls around the cathedral, some of which are still intact. Fast forward couple more centuries later (17th), a fortified renaissance watchtower was erected on the south side, and was used as a military observation point, because of the Ottoman threat.
Cathedral was again severely damaged in 1880. This time due to natural causes, earthquake...
The main nave collapsed and the tower was damaged beyond repair. The restoration in the Neo-Gothic style was led by Hermann Bollé, bringing the cathedral to its present form.
As part of that restoration, two spires were raised 108 m (354 ft) high on the western side. You can see one of them still being restored.
Let's say the cathedral had its ups and downs with both, people and nature being against it.
It's still standing tall, awaiting next disaster trying to bring it to the knees...
So far it has no knees so I don't see that happening any time soon ;) | <urn:uuid:2d548704-232c-4601-81f3-79d68a9029f4> | {
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Despite the fact that the Civil War began over 150 years ago, it remains one of the most widely discussed topics in America today. Americans argue over its causes, reenact its famous battles, and debate which general was better than the others. Americans continue to be fascinated by the Civil War icons who made the difference between victory and defeat in the war's great battles.
The most famous attack of the Civil War was also one of its most fateful and fatal. Pickett's Charge, the climactic assault on the final day of the Battle of Gettysburg, has become the American version of the Charge of the Light Brigade. It is one of the most famous events of the entire Civil War.
Having been unable to break the Army of the Potomac's lines on the left and right flank during day two of the Battle of Gettysburg, Confederate Army of Northern Virginia commander Robert E. Lee decided to make a thrust at the center of the Union's line with about 15,000 men spread out over three divisions. The charge required marching across an open field for about a mile, with the Union artillery holding high ground on all sides of the incoming Confederates.
Though it is now known as Pickett's Charge, named after division commander George Pickett, the assignment for the charge was given to General James Longstreet.
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Bad pronunciation but good content
- jose "Engineer in St Louis, Missouri, United States"
worth a listen
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(1902-1972) became interested in the native people of the
Eastern Sierra as a
student at Deep Springs College.
He spent much of his life studying them and recording this
information. By talking to older members of the tribal
community and observing their lives, Steward learned what
people ate, where they camped, and how they interacted
before Europeans arrived.
He used this information to reconstruct the traditional lifeway that had disappeared two generations before.
Steward, Indian life in the
Owens Valley of the Eastern
Sierra was different from neighboring places. Populations
were bigger and denser because there was more to eat in this
rich environment. As a result, people lived in permanent
villages with as many as 200 people. Each of these villages
controlled a particular part of the valley and the rights to
hunt and gather food there.
In fact, some pine nut areas may have been “owned” by
individual families, like land is today. Some villages also
flooded plots of land to increase the growth of seed and nut
Irrigation and other village
managed by a headman, who served a little like a mayor, but
inherited the office from his father or other relative.
The life that
Steward described for
Owens Valley is more complex than
other parts of the Great Basin and many hunter-gatherer
Anthropologists have debated the reason for this
since Steward wrote it in the 1930s. Archaeological work at
sites has also provided evidence that some of the things
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The early modern Atlantic World was an interconnected place. Some of its citizens, such as Samuel Champlain, made dozens of crossings. For others, including hundreds of Indigenous peoples, thousands of settlers, and many more slaves, the voyage was one way. Yet in a pre-national era it was the Atlantic that linked residents in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. This class will explore the nature of the Atlantic World from its beginnings in the fifteenth century to the dawn of a more "global" age around 1850. Exploration, cultural interaction, trade, concepts of sex and gender, slavery, war, and revolutions were Atlantic phenomena. Ideas, like currents, circulated from one shore to the next. Critical reading of academic articles and primary sources will enable us to explore the Atlantic Ocean as a highway (for administrators), a goldmine (for pirates), a death sentence (for slaves), and much more. | <urn:uuid:e9b6f80a-4730-4eb6-b857-5a5e5e54609a> | {
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This paper outlines a system for arm rehabilitation for children with upper-limb hemiplegia resulting from cerebral palsy. Our research team designed a two-player, interactive (competitive or collaborative) computer play therapy system that provided powered assistance to children while they played specially designed games that promoted arm exercises. We designed the system for a school environment. To assess the feasibility of deploying the system in a school environment, the research team enlisted the help of teachers and staff in nine schools. Once the system was set up, it was used to deliver therapy without supervision from the research team. Ultimately, the system was found to be suitable for use in schools. However, the overriding need for schools to focus on academic activities meant that children could not use the system enough to achieve the amount of use desired for therapeutic benefit. In this paper, we identify the key challenges encountered during this study. For example, there was a marked reluctance to report system issues (which could have been fixed) that prevented children from using the system. We also discuss future implications of deploying similar studies with this type of system.
Tips for Usability Practitioners
Schools present a challenging environment for doing research, particularly where the system must be left unattended. We recommend that any usability practitioners intending to carry out a similar field study should consider the following:
- Keep feedback requirements to a minimum. Teachers already have very demanding jobs, so the effort required for their participation beyond the use of the system being tested—such as providing feedback or returning data—should be kept to a minimum.
- Use the system to gather data, when possible, to minimize the teachers/staff feedback responsibility and to simplify the logistics of data collection.
- Include remote error tracking for unsupervised systems to alleviate the reluctance to report faults during deployment.
- Discuss advanced planning needs so that all staff that are using the system are aware of the basic requirements of the system, including delivery and collection requirements.
- Understand that a negative outcome of a study can be just as valuable as a positive one. Taking a hands-off approach allowed us to find that schools are not an effective environment for rehabilitation. That finding allows us to seek more promising environments and will help other researchers avoid expending resources that can be more useful applied elsewhere.
Cerebral palsy (CP) is the most common cause of severe disability among children in Europe, affecting 2.1/1,000 live births (Johnson, 2002). CP is an umbrella term covering a range of permanent movement and postural disorders arising from non-progressive brain injury prior to birth or during infancy. The effects can vary greatly between individuals, depending in part on which parts of the brain have been affected (Rosenbaum, Paneth, Leviton, Goldstein, & Bax, 2007). Effects may be restricted to a single limb, several limbs, or the entire body. Effects can also include hypertonia (muscle stiffness causing restricted movement), involuntary movement, impaired coordination, and sensory deficits (such as impaired vision or hearing). While CP is not progressive, the impairments it causes can adversely affect the trajectory of child development by restricting opportunities to develop social and motor skills. CP can create problems in later life as strategies used to compensate for impairments can place undue strain on other parts of the body (Cox, Weze, & Lewis, 2005). There are a range of organizations whose aim is to support people with CP, such as Scope in the UK (www.scope.org.uk) or United Cerebral Palsy in the US (www.ucp.org). These organizations provide a good range of resources on the condition and its varied effects and support available to address them.
Where the condition affects one or both upper limbs, the ability to reach and manipulate objects is affected. Movements in an arm affected by CP exhibit slower and more variable movements (Jaspers et al., 2011; Utley & Sugden, 1998), which combined with weakness and sensory deficits, can significantly impair the ability of individuals with CP to carry out daily activities and can create significant social barriers (Imms, 2008). It is clearly desirable to improve upper limb function in children with CP, but the best strategy remains an open question, with many proposed treatment modalities demonstrating improvements in upper limb function (Boyd, Morris, & Graham, 2001). A common adjunct to all of these treatment modalities is the recommendation that children practice appropriate arm exercises. Use of the affected limbs has been shown to significantly offset the impact of CP (Kluzik, Fetters, & Coryell, 1990). However, a lack of physiotherapy resources means that such exercise is often delivered through a self-managed home exercise program with only occasional expert supervision. Exercises are frequently dull and repetitive, and children often lack the motivation to carry out these regimes, leading to poor compliance with the prescribed plan (Chappell & Williams, 2002).
There has been little research on how much exercise is required for therapeutic benefits to show, but it is generally agreed that the affected limb needs to be pushed to the point of fatigue for this to happen. Successful programs have required children to exercise for 20 to 45 minute sessions three times a week (McBurney, Taylor, Dodd, & Graham, 2003) and 75 minute sessions three times a week (Knox & Evans, 2002), representing a significant time commitment.
One solution to the problem of a lack of motivation is the use of interactive computer play-based therapy (Sandlund, McDonough, & Hager-Ross, 2009), where therapy is delivered as a game through a computer interface. This approach has been growing in popularity due to the increased popularity of video gaming as a pastime in the last few decades. The development of consoles that use movement-based interaction with videogames, most notably the Nintendo WiiTM, has led to great interest in their use as a means of encouraging physical activity among children and making rehabilitation enjoyable (Anderson, Annett, & Bischof, 2010; Chang, Chen, & Huang, 2011; Deutsch, Borbely, Filler, Huhn, & Guarrera-Bowlby, 2008). The use of off-the-shelf videogame consoles in rehabilitation has many benefits: The consoles are mass produced and do not require specialist development, and the games are designed first and foremost to be enjoyable. However, the game systems have some limitations that reduce their effectiveness as therapeutic devices. First, such systems may be unusable and frustrating for individuals with significant arm impairments. Some systems do not verify whether the actions performed are therapeutically useful, and while one could argue that any use of an affected limb is potentially beneficial, systems such as the Wii are easily operated with small sharp movements rather than the smooth coordinated movements required for therapy (Levac et al, 2012). Second, hands-on therapy from a physiotherapist provides support to push reaching motions to their limit and extend reach beyond that which the individual could achieve on their own, compensating for the weight of the individual’s arm.
An alternative to the existing commercial, unassisted technologies are assisted movement devices (AMDs), a term that encompasses any rehabilitation technology that applies assistive force while promoting therapeutically beneficial movements. Such treatment devices offer benefits not only to children with CP, but also to stroke patients (Jackson et al., 2007) and children with developmental coordination disorder (Snapp-Childs, Mon-Williams, & Bingham, 2013). While this requires the development of more complex specialist devices than existing games consoles, the devices are able to promote adherence to desirable trajectories—controlling both spatial and temporal components through the application of force (at either an endpoint or around the upper and lower limbs to control joint position). A conventional force-feedback joystick (i.e., those available commercially) is not appropriate for this purpose, as its control is based around fine wrist movements rather than the wide workspace needed for these sort of exercises (ensuring full arm movement). Moreover, the force-feedback available in commercial joysticks is not sufficient to provide the forces needed by an AMD. Such systems also require knowledge of target points to be reached in order to calculate the appropriate force and trajectory, and it is important to ensure that the ordering of these target points (and the motions required to reach them) are therapeutically appropriate. Accordingly, this means developing not only specialist hardware, but also specialist games that reflect these characteristics rather than using existing commercial games.
Such technology has been utilized in clinical settings (Fluet et al., 2010, Jackson et al., 2007; Krebs, Ladenheim, Hippolyte, Monterroso, & Mast, 2009) and home environments (Weightman et al., 2011). In response to feedback gathered from the Weightman et al. (2011) project, we developed a two-player system with the aim of deploying it in a school environment. Social interaction (such as cooperation and competition) in games has long been identified as a motivator for playing (Malone & Lepper, 1987) and continues to be recognized as an important aspect of making games enjoyable (Sweetser & Wyeth, 2005). However, it does raise significant challenges in computer play-based therapy, as different players will have different levels of impairment (and in some cases, none at all), making it difficult to create a level playing field. It also means deploying a system in an environment where time and space are constrained, and where teachers supervising the use of the system have little expertise in therapy and robotics. The goal of the research presented here was to determine whether such a complex system could be deployed under the “real life” conditions of a school environment. This paper represents the first reported deployment of such a system. In this paper we discuss the results of deploying the system in terms of the usage it received and the barriers encountered during its use.
The goal of the research was not to assess the clinical efficacy of the AMD approach but to determine whether it was feasible to utilize a dual-player system in a school environment, and if not, what prevented this from taking place. This section outlines the hardware and software that made up the system as deployed, the process used to deploy it in both single- and two-player modes, and the data gathering plan to evaluate its usage.
Our research group designed 4 two-user AMD computer game systems. The systems were designed and manufactured to provide safe physical assistance to children with arm impairments while undertaking therapeutic exercises. We developed these systems to be an extension of the single-user technology that had been previously deployed for home use (Weightman et al., 2011). We designed the original system using a MicrosoftTM Force-Feedback Sidewinder II joystick that was modified to provide the required assistive forces and that would fit in an appropriate workspace. The system was connected to a PC via USB. We loaded specially designed therapeutic games onto the PC. Originally, we envisioned that the new two-player system would take a similar form, with up to six joysticks plugging into a school PC to allow multiplayer gaming, which would have the benefit of being portable and easy to store. However, several factors made this approach not feasible. On a technical front, the Sidewinder joystick was not able to provide as much force as desired. This required a move toward a new design with larger motors and customized control software developed in LabVIEWTM and delivered via a National InstrumentsTM compact Reconfigurable Input-Output (cRIO) controller. However, the move from a home to a school environment also entailed a number of significant alterations to the design.
To ensure that the system was acceptable to the school staff supervising the students’ activity with the system, we held group meetings at three different schools, with a total of seven teachers in attendance. At the meetings, we wanted to address teachers’ concerns and questions and to obtain feedback on the design concepts. It quickly became apparent that while portability and ease of storage were considered important, this was secondary compared to ease of use and a quick setup. Teachers felt that they couldn’t accommodate any system that took more than a minute or two to set up during break times. A longer setup time would leave too little time for the system to be used and would be disruptive while students waited for the teacher to get the system organized. The teachers were enthusiastic about the system and felt that time could be made in the school day for its use, through a combination of lunchtime clubs and afterschool sessions. One teacher suggested that for it to be included in the classroom environment, the games would need to have an educational angle.
Accordingly, we designed the system as a self-contained unit with two joysticks, two monitors, a PC, and cRIO controllers as shown in Figure 1. Figure 2 shows a close-up of the joystick component. We designed the system to be portable in a school environment. To ensure an acceptable footprint before we built the system, we measured doorways and aisles in a range of schools. The deployed system had a footprint of 135 cm x 67 cm (53 in. x 26 in.) and was 116 cm (45 in.) tall. We put wheels on the system so that it could be easily moved between classrooms or out of the way as needed. The cRIO and PC had separate power supplies that needed to plug into the main power supply. All system components, including the monitors, were connected to a four-way power extension so that only a single external socket was required to power the system. In case of emergency, a large safety push button (not illustrated in Figure 1) that disconnected the power from the assistive haptic interfaces was located on the front top of the system. Each haptic interface incorporated a handgrip sensor such that no assistive forces could be applied when a user was not holding the handgrip. The system included another handgrip with a push button that was used to access some of the game functions to ensure that the game was bimanual. In this way, the children with CP had something to do with their unimpaired arm, reducing the temptation to use it (rather than their impaired arm) to operate the joystick.
Figure 1. The AMD system as deployed
Figure 2. Close-up of the joystick used in the system
The monitors and cRIO would turn on automatically once power was supplied. A single press of the PC power button is all that was required to turn the PC on. This done, the system would boot up and the teacher could launch its initialization process by selecting an icon from the desktop, after which the system was ready to launch the games. In this first version of the system, initialization entailed the teacher following a short series of onscreen prompts to make sure that the joysticks were in a central position. To register that the joystick position was acceptable, the teacher pressed the trigger button for each joystick. This ensured that the system was not starting near the edge of its working range.
We developed a suite of games that required therapeutically appropriate movements to play and permitted a combination of competitive/collaborative multiplayer and single player experiences. All games were based on the same outward and inward movement from the body. The goal of the movement was to follow a defined path between targets so that the assistive force controller could identify how to assist the movement. Furthermore, all of the games were based on the same scenario delivered by a cutscene when the system first loaded. The cutscene showed the players adopting the role of “monkeys whose friends have been kidnapped by a hungry crocodile and are being taken to his lair as dinner.” The premise of each game is based on the monkeys trying to rescue their friends, which is in line with Malone and Lepper’s (1987) recommendations of the use of fantasy as a motivator in playing games. We designed each of the games such that they could be operated in a single user mode. The multiplayer aspect of each game varied depending on whether it was sequential (players taking turns to move their characters) or simultaneous (both players’ characters moving at the same time), and whether it was cooperative (either both players win or both players lose against the computer) or competitive (one of the players wins and the other loses). The following are descriptions of the four games:
- Sequential Cooperative Play—The Puzzle Game. The players work together to navigate their way across a series of islands, taking turns to follow bridges and pressing buttons to make new bridges appear. The goal is to reach a trapped monkey.
- Sequential Competitive Play—The Chase Game. The players take turns to race across a series of islands and bridges to reach a trapped monkey. The entire maze is navigable from the start, and time penalties are invoked for touching the water. The player with the quickest time wins.
- Simultaneous Competitive Play—The River Race Game. The players travel along a winding river at a constant rate, collecting their own color bananas to score points as they go. Players can leave the confines of the river, but lose points for doing so.
- Simultaneous Cooperative Play—The Van Chase Game. The players play simultaneously collecting their own color bananas and firing them at the van to achieve the common goal of stopping the evil crocodile as it races away with the captured monkeys. Once enough bananas have been fired, the van is destroyed and the game ends. Scoring is based on a collaborative effort of hitting the van.
We developed the four games with input from a user group of children with cerebral palsy who had participated in the previous home-based project (Weightman et al., 2011). This group was recruited because their prior knowledge of the system meant that they would not be participating in the upcoming school-based trial, and consequently, there was no concern that their exposure to the games might confound later stages of the study. Meetings took place at the University of Leeds. This gave the children the opportunity to offer feedback and make comments on early iterations, to evaluate the initial concepts and game-play proposals, to give feedback on early prototypes, and to carry out informal usability testing to help identify bugs and check the clarity of instructions. Sample screens from each game are shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3. Screenshots of the four game types, clockwise from top left: the Puzzle Game, the Chase Game, the River Race Game, and the Van Chase Game
In addition to the games, software was required to manage the amount of assistance the joystick provided each player. We called this the Adaptation to Player Performance Algorithm (APPA), and it served two purposes. From a therapeutic perspective, the goal is to gradually reduce the amount of assistance provided as players’ motor skills improve—but such a change has to be based on therapeutic progress, rather than simply based on the amount of time played. In addition, there is the problem of creating a level-playing field between players who have different levels of impairment; scaling the amount of assistance provided to a player’s abilities provided a convenient way of doing this. To assess players’ abilities during the field deployment, every time the system started, each player completed an assessment task in which each player had to collect as many bananas as possible in a minute. This unassisted task was used to determine how much assistance a child would receive during the play session. Each child using the system performed this assessment, regardless of whether they had CP, although the system only provided assistance for the children with CP.
In addition to the assessment routine, a child’s score on a given day was compared with his or her score on this task for previous days. Where the performance scores increased by more than 10% of the previous mean score, the assistance was reduced. Where the performance score decreased by more than 10% of the previous mean score, assistance was increased. In this way, the APPA fine-tuned the assistance to the most appropriate level for a given player on a given day.
Our goal was to create the most realistic test possible for the system, not to assess the clinical efficacy of the system. We wanted to see whether it could be deployed in a school environment and whether it would sustain usage over an extended period of time. This section outlines the participants in this study, the process used to deploy the system, and type of evaluation data that we wanted to gather.
There were 11 children with upper limb impairments due to cerebral palsy at the schools (one at each school, except for two schools with two such children each); they were the target users for the system. These comprised eight males and three females, with a mean age of nine years (SD = 1 year 11 months). Given the two-player nature of the system, other children, without CP, at the participating schools also played the games. But for this study, we were only interested in how much therapeutic exercise the children with CP received via the system. It is these children’s usage data that we discuss in this paper.
We asked all children recruited for the study to provide written consent after we presented an age appropriate explanation of the study. All children were told that they were free to withdraw from the study at any time. The children all received age appropriate information sheets as did the parent(s)/guardians of the children. Ethical approval was granted by Leeds (East) Research Ethics Committee (REC reference 09/H1307/48).
We deployed the four systems in the following three stages:
- Stage 1. Four schools received the system. Five children with CP used the system.
- Stage 2. Three schools received the system. Three children with CP used the system.
- Stage 3. Two schools received the system. Three children with CP used the system.
Each school received one system during each deployment. The spare systems in Stages 2 and 3 remained at the University. Each stage comprised two 4-week phases separated by a minimum of three weeks to ensure that therapeutic effects from the first deployment did not influence performance on the second deployment. In one of two phases, we deployed the system in single-player mode; in the other phase, we deployed the system in two-player mode. The phases were counterbalanced such that five of the schools received the system in the two-player mode first, and the other four schools received the system in the single-player mode first.
Our goal was for the children to use the system approximately 30 minutes a day. This was an important target. We discussed this goal with the head teacher of each school before the school agreed to participate in the project. We also discussed it with school staff on two occasions: once when they first agreed to participate in the project and again upon delivery of the system. We provided participating staff with a copy of the information sheet supplied to parents when consenting for their children to participate in the study. This information sheet stated that children would use the system for up to an hour a day. Initially this was met with some disbelief by school staff, but we explained that the hour was a maximum (included to avoid problems with ethics compliance should sessions inadvertently exceed 30 minutes), and that 30 minutes was the target. The staff accepted this with some relief. It is worth noting, however, that we did not provide the staff with any written indication of the 30-minute target, and with hindsight, including this in the written information may have been beneficial.
On delivery of the system to the school, we asked each school to designate a teacher to supervise the system (except in School H, see Table 1, where the designated staff member was the Special Educational Needs Coordinator, rather than a teacher). We showed the supervising teacher how to use the system: plug in the system to the power supply, start the PC, start the real-time sub-system software (icon on the desktop), move the haptic interface joints to set positions, and then start the game sub-system (icon on the desktop) software. After this initial setup, the onscreen software instructions guided the users. We demonstrated the emergency shutdown procedure, and then demonstrated how to restart the system if it did not initialize. We left an instruction manual with the system. The instruction manual included contact numbers to reach project team members if any problems occurred. We pointed this out to the supervising teacher or staff member as part of the initial briefing when we delivered the system. This represented some conflict with the desire to deploy the system without any input from our team, but we felt that this represented the kind of technical support that a school might receive in practice. It was better for problems to be fixed and noted and to identify any other barriers to using the system rather than have the system sit unused for four weeks because of a straightforward technical problem.
We gathered evaluation data from three sources: a record of any calls received from the schools to report problems or to request assistance, usage data stored on the systems for each child during each phase of the trial, and feedback questionnaires completed by the participating children and their teachers. As a result of difficulties in getting time in teachers’ schedules for interviews in the early phases of the project, we agreed with the participating staff that the most effective way of gathering information was to provide feedback questionnaires on paper. We provided a stamped, self-addressed envelope so that the school could return the questionnaires to the researchers at their convenience, rather than attempting to arrange face-to-face feedback interviews.
This section reports the results of three sources of data collected: the error logs and callouts that indicated problems that occurred during system deployment, the amount of usage the systems received, and the qualitative feedback from participating staff and children.
Errors and Callouts
No calls were received from the schools during any of the deployments. However, when we collected the systems after the first deployment, teachers from all four schools reported that the systems were prone to crashing when first being initialized and that this cut into the amount of therapeutic time available. Teachers had struggled to remedy the situation—even turning the PC off and back on again did not correct the problem. Because of these issues, in some cases, there was insufficient time to carry out the required sessions. On other occasions, the systems appeared to work without difficulty. Analysis of the error logs confirmed this, with a large number of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) errors, indicating that the PC was not communicating with the cRIO properly. The same problem was reported by all four schools in the first deployment, though the systems continued to be used and no schools contacted the team for technical support during this period. This situation caused us some frustration, as the systems could have received greater usage during this deployment had the schools contacted us for assistance when problems first arose. However, we were also conscious that the staff participating in the project received no direct benefit from their participation and were doing us a great service by taking the time to use the system at all. Time taken to report problems would be over and above this, and we felt that it was important to be sensitive to the demands we were making on teacher’s time, particularly given the need to maintain good relationships with them for this and future projects. For this reason we did not take issue with the staff for the lack of contact, but simply reminded them at the start of the second deployment that they could contact us if problems persisted.
We eventually identified the problem as being the system timing out during initialization if the trigger buttons for the joysticks were not pressed within 30 seconds of the system starting up. As the cRIO was powered separately to the PC, turning the PC off would not correct this problem because the cRIO would continue to report an initialization error. Turning the system off at the main power supply, however, would cause the cRIO to reset the next time it was turned on so the system could initialize properly. This explained the intermittent nature of the problem: If a teacher initialized the system within 30 seconds of it first being turned on, it would run without difficulty; if not, it wouldn’t run again until it had been switched off and back on at the main power supply, which often wasn’t until the next day when the system was due to be used again.
After the first phase of the first deployment, we addressed this problem by extending the time-out period to two minutes and offering more explicit instructions on the importance of initializing the joysticks within this period. But the problem still persisted into the second phase of the first deployment—though this was again only reported at the end of the deployment. Accordingly, we changed the time-out period to infinite so that teachers could initialize the joystick at their leisure. This solution resolved the problem for the rest of the study.
The system was able to log the length of each game and the date and time on which it took place. We only analyzed data for children with CP, as these were the target users of the system. The system recorded the raw amount of therapeutic play that the children received. The numbers presented here do not include time for setting up or waiting between games.
No allowance was made for days where the schools were closed due to, for example, bad weather, teacher training, public holidays, or where class activities such as school visits might have rendered it impossible or impractical to use the system. The aim was to provide a realistic snapshot of how the system would be used, and these are all factors that would affect the system in real usage. However, one issue worth noting is that Child 9 and 10 (both at School H) did not use the system at all in their second phase. The participating teachers reported that this was due to pressure in preparing for Standard Assessment Test (SAT) exams and was therefore a function of the time of year at which the deployment took place, rather than any disinclination towards the single-player mode. While this represents a genuine usage pattern, it is important to bear this in mind when comparing overall usage in single versus multiplayer modes, as it will make the gap between the two appear larger than it might have been had the deployment occurred at a different time of year. It is also worth noting that in Schools C and H, which each had two children participating in the study, the children with CP did not play against each other in two-player mode, but instead they played with other friends. Because the combination of frequency and intensity of exercise is important, rather than the raw amount of exercise undertaken, Table 1 reports the number of days on which the system was used in its single player and two player deployments (from a possible 20 days in each case, as no allowance was made for school closures due to, for example, bad weather or teacher training days). Table 1 also reports the mean length of sessions when it was used in each deployment. Note that where the system was used multiple times in the same day, the session was counted as usage for one day, with session lengths treated separately because multiple short sessions in a day do not equate to a single full-length session. Session length therefore covers the total time spent carrying out therapeutic play in a single sitting with the system.
Table 1. Amount of Usage per Child
Taken across both single and multiplayer deployments, the system was used on a mean of 22.4 days (SD=8.49 days) of a possible 40 (the sum of the 20 possible days in the single-player deployment and the 20 possible days in the two-player deployment). The mean session length was 11.0 minutes (SD=6.76 minutes). Table 1 shows how the session lengths varied dramatically from child to child, for example, Child 3, 4, and 6 used the system more than other children. When looking at all of the children, there was little difference between single- and two-player usage. The system was used on a mean of 9.55 days (SD=5.68 days) in single-player mode compared with a mean of 12.8 days (SD=4.47 days) in two-player mode, both from a possible 20 days. The mean session lengths were 12.0 minutes (SD=7.51 min) for the single-player mode and 10.4 minutes (SD=6.09 min) for the two-player mode. If the results for Child 9 and 10 are excluded on the basis that their lack of play in single-player mode is an artifact of timetabling problems rather than a disinclination towards the mode itself, this becomes a mean of 11.6 days (SD = 3.53 days) in single-player mode and 13.67 days (SD = 4.27 days) in two-player mode, with mean session lengths of 12.0 minutes (SD=7.51 min) in single-player mode and 10.4 minutes (SD =6.09 min) in two-player mode. Such small differences are not meaningful in a therapeutic sense, but do indicate that providing a two-player option did not present a barrier to using the system, despite the requirement for children who did not need therapy taking the time to participate.
In all cases, the average times were substantially below the target 30 minutes per day. In fact, 30 minute sessions were only ever achieved on seven occasions and then only by three of the children (three times by Child 3, three times by Child 8, and once by Child 1). The lowest target that might be considered acceptable (twenty minutes, three times a week) was not achieved by any of the children.
The most common time for usage was during the morning registration period (the first 15 minutes of the 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. slot) and then afternoon registration (the last 15 minutes of the 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. slot). It is worth noting that the children whose usage was concentrated around lesson times (Children 3, 4, and 11) or lunchtime (Child 6) were those who achieved the longest sessions.
As scheduling interviews with staff at the participating schools was difficult, given the huge demands already existing on their time, to gather teacher and child feedback we used questionnaires that were comprised of open questions on the system’s usage. Through these questionnaires we asked if there were any barriers to its use and asked for suggestions for future improvements. However, getting staff to complete and return the questionnaires and ensuring that the children returned the feedback questionnaires proved extremely problematic.
We sent the questionnaires by mail one week before the end of the deployment. All children who used the system and any staff who supervised their use were instructed to complete the questionnaires and leave them with the system for collection. We telephoned the schools to explain this process when the questionnaires were mailed to the school. We telephoned again the day before the systems and questionnaires were to be collected, as a reminder to complete the questionnaires. However, it was rarely possible to speak with the teachers themselves, and we were obliged to leave messages with secretarial staff to be passed on to the teachers.
Despite our prompt and original information letters and briefing sessions emphasizing the importance of this feedback to evaluating the system, very few schools provided any of the questionnaires when we collected the system. We made follow up phone calls and sent additional copies of the questionnaires with pre-paid, self-addressed envelopes to the schools that had not completed them. We received a total of 21 questionnaires from the staff through a combination of direct collection and by mail with at least one from each school and in some cases two or three. It was not always clear which school each questionnaire came from, particularly when the questionnaires were returned by mail. We received 14 questionnaires from the children, although the usage data recorded on the systems showed that at least 38 children used the system during the deployment. Because the questionnaires were often not labeled correctly (such as not including a name or not including their surname), we were not always able to determine which questionnaire came from children with CP. As the original questionnaires had been intended to be left with the system, we assumed that we would know which school they had come from and could label them accordingly. This problem would have been prevented if the questionnaires had been pre-labeled with the participating school. Similarly, asking children to provide forename and surname would at least have allowed us to identify the children with CP. Initial return rates might also have been higher if a simple set of closed questions had been used (open answer questions require significantly longer to complete). Although the value of this would have been limited—we had already gathered usage data from the system, and our interest was in what had facilitated or prevented that usage.
Feedback comments from the school staff responsible for the system focused consistently on the size of the system and ease of setup. One school indicated that maneuverability was not important, as the size of the system meant that it could not be moved anywhere else. The other schools indicated that being able to move the system around easily was very important, as it needed to be used in different classrooms or moved out of the way when not in use. Every school was able to find space for the system. No school felt it was too big, but all agreed that a system any larger than this would be untenable.
Ease of setup was also an issue. While all schools praised the ease with which the system could be plugged in and booted up, those in the first deployment reported that the system sometimes failed to initialize properly the first time it was switched on each day—as had already been identified through the callouts made during the deployments. While they were always able to resolve this by restarting the system, School B in particular pointed out that this cut significantly into the short periods of time that they were able to find for use.
All schools indicated that the major problem in the systems’ usage was in relation to timetabling. Only School C took regular time out of lessons to utilize the system. For the other schools, the most convenient time for using the system was during morning or afternoon registration. This immediately restricted playing sessions to no more than 10 or 15 minutes, allowing for time to let the children settle down to their task. Other schools took time out of lessons only where it could be conveniently accommodated, such as during times where a story was being read to the whole class. Schools E, F, G, and H, in particular, all indicated that exam preparation cut into the amount of time available for therapy, particularly in the second phase of deployment (the multiplayer phase for Schools E and F and single players for School G and H). Of these, only School H failed to find any time for the system’s use during this phase, as indicated by their usage data.
Finally, several respondents mentioned the need for more games to maintain interest, citing the concern that a small library of games might maintain interest for a limited deployment (such as the eight total weeks of this study), but beyond that boredom may become an issue.
These comments confirmed our initial findings from working with teachers when developing the system. Maneuverability, ease of setup, and a small footprint are all important for a school environment. This demonstrates the merit of the revised concept of a self-contained unit over the initial notion of up to six independent joysticks, but also the importance of engaging with users to properly understand their needs. Nevertheless, it also demonstrates the inherent difficulty in finding time for utilizing such a system in the school day. There was a fundamental mismatch between the schools’ goal of educational achievement and our goal of delivering the required therapy. Participating teachers were all sympathetic to the need for children to undertake therapeutic exercise, but as they will ultimately be assessed on the academic performance of their pupils, there was an active disincentive to make class time available for therapeutic use.
The system deployment was successful insofar as it was usable by school staff and children without direct intervention from the research team. The early problems with setup and initialization may have impacted the amount of use, but the system was still used. When these problems were resolved in later deployments, there was not a marked increase in the amount of usage. The major barrier to use of the system was not its technical complexity, but finding sufficient time in the school day for children to use it. None of the children came close to the target level of usage, and the tendency to use registration periods inevitably limited the amount of therapy that could be delivered in one session. Those children making greatest use of the system were those where dedicated lesson time or the lunchtime of the school day was given over to use of the system. The lack of system use was most pronounced around the time leading up to exams, which is not unreasonable on the part of the schools. It is worth noting that the therapy here is intended to replace or supplement a home exercise plan, rather than replace existing time with a physiotherapist and is therefore moving therapy that would otherwise have taken place at home (if at all) into the school environment.
Despite this limitation, the two-player version of the system was used slightly more frequently than the single-player version, albeit for slightly shorter sessions than in single player. Some of the reduction in therapeutic exercise time was caused by the need to set up a second player and carry out the assessment task to determine the level of assistance twice. The system may have value in schools as an adjunct to a home exercise plan—though whether this would be worth the cost (especially if only one or two children in the school were to use it for therapeutic purposes) is another matter. Our future research will focus on home deployments of the system.
Working with schools presents a range of significant practical challenges, not least the fact that rehabilitation research will inevitably be secondary to children’s education. Several issues were raised in this deployment that are worth bearing in mind for future research, particularly where a system is to be deployed unsupervised.
Firstly, schools demonstrated a marked reluctance to contact the research team and report problems. They only mentioned these problems at the end of the deployment, despite the fact that the problems interrupted use. While this was consistent with our aim to leave the system without direct intervention, it did mean that a problem that could have been corrected in the field went unaddressed for several weeks. In this case, the impact does not appear to have been serious, but it does demonstrate the value of maintaining an error log on the system to keep track of problems for review post-deployment, rather than simply relying on self-report from users in the field. In future deployments, we suggest that it would be worth having the system relay its usage and error logs back to the research team via wireless Internet on a regular basis so that problems could be identified and corrected quickly. Better that than finding that a four-week deployment had been wasted because of an unreported technical problem.
Secondly, obtaining feedback was particularly challenging. While staff were generally enthusiastic and happy to cooperate with the project, any involvement was inevitably over and above their already demanding job. As schools are busy, the systems often had to be delivered and collected either before children arrived in the morning or after they had left in the evening. In many cases, the participating staff were not present when the system was collected at the end of the deployment. This schedule meant that the only feedback available were the completed questionnaires, which often were not completed when we collected the system. It is important to note, that completing a questionnaire after a significant amount of time has passed may affect the accuracy of one’s recall. With hindsight, it would have been better to deliver the questionnaires upon collecting the system to ensure that they were labeled or coded correctly so responses could be tied to a particular school even if they were not fully completed.
Finally, having multiple teachers involved in using the same system (or using the space in which the system was located) did sometimes present a problem in terms of delivery and collection. We only gave system and study instructions to the selected supervising staff member; not all staff members that would be using the system were given instructions. Because the system was used by multiple staff members at different times (and/or the system was housed in an area used by multiple classes), this sometimes led to confusion when the system was being delivered or collected, i.e., some staff members did not have the benefit of knowing what we needed from them because they were not debriefed by us or the supervising staff member.
Recommendations and Conclusions
The deployment described here has demonstrated that the system may be feasible for use without supervision in some contexts, but that the need to emphasize academic performance means that schools are not an appropriate environment for delivering this therapy. Accordingly, the next steps in developing this system are the following:
- Develop a single-player version of the self-contained system to be more suitable for deployment in a home environment.
- Evaluate the clinical efficacy of a home system through a randomized control trial.
- Develop additional games to extend interest and to appeal to more adult audiences, such as stroke patients.
- Anderson, F., Annett, M., & Bischof, W. F. (2010). Lean on Wii: Physical rehabilitation with virtual realist Wii peripherals. Studies in Health Technologies and Informatics, 154, 229-34.
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- Chang, Y.-J., Chen, S.-F., & Huang, J.-D. (2011). A Kinect-based system for physical rehabilitation: A pilot study for young adults with motor disabilities. Research in Developmental Disabilities, 32(6), 2566-70.
- Chappell, F., & Williams, B. (2002). Rates and reasons for non-adherence to home physiotherapy in pediatrics. Physiotherapy, 88(3), 2-11
- Cox, D., Weze, C., & Lewis C. (2005). Cerebral palsy and ageing: A systematic review. Scope. Available from http://www.scope.org.uk/help-and-information/cerebral-palsy/ageing-and-cerebral-palsy.
- Deutsch, J. E., Borbely, M., Filler, J., Huhn, K., & Guarrera-Bowlby, P. (2008). Use of a low-cost, commercially available gaming console (Wii) for rehabilitation of an adolescent with cerebral palsy. Physical Therapy, 88(10), 1196-1207.
- Fluet, G. G., Qiu, Q., Kelly, D., Parikh, H. D., Ramirez, D., & Adamovich, S. V. (2010). Interfacing a haptic robotic system with complex virtual environments to treat impaired upper extremity motor function in children with cerebral palsy. Developmental Neuro-rehabilitation, 13(5), 335-345.
- Imms, C. (2008). Children with cerebral palsy participate: A review of the literature. Disability and Rehabilitation, 30(24), 1867-1884.
- Jackson, A. E., Holt, R. J., Culmer, P. R., Makower, S. G., Levesley, M. C., Richardson, R. C., Cozens, J.A., Mon-Williams, M., & Bhakta, B.B. (2007). Dual robot system for upper limb rehabilitation after stroke: The design process. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers Part C: Journal of Mechanical Engineering Science, 221(7), 845-857.
- Jaspers, E., Desloovere, K., Bruyninckx, H., Klingels, K., Molenaers, G., Aertbelien, E., Gestel, L.V., & Feys, H. (2011). Three-dimensional upper limb movement characteristics in children with hemiplegic cerebral palsy and typically developing children. Research in Developmental Disabilities, 32, 2283-2294.
- Johnson, A. (2002). Prevalence and characteristics of children with cerebral palsy in Europe. Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology, 44, 633-640.
- Kluzik, J., Fetters, L., & Coryell, J. (1990). Quantification of control: A preliminary study of effects of neurodevelopmental treatment on reaching in children with spastic cerebral palsy. Physical Therapy, 70, 65–76.
- Knox, V., Evans, A. L. (2002) Evaluation of the functional effects of a course of Bobath therapy in children with cerebral palsy: a preliminary study. Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology, 44, 447–460.
- Krebs, H. I., Ladenheim, B., Hippolyte, C., Monterroso, L., & Mast, J. (2009). Robot-assisted task-specific training in cerebral palsy. Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology, 51(4), 140-145.
- Levac, D., Pierrynowski, M. R., Canestraro, M., Gurr, L., Leonard, L., & Neeley, C. (2012). Exploring children’s movement characteristics during virtual reality video game play. Human Movement Science, 29(6), 1023-38.
- Malone, T.W., & Lepper, M.R. (1987). Making learning fun: A taxonomy of intrinsic motivations for learning. In R.E. Snow & M.J. Farr (Eds.), Aptitude, learning and instructions: Cognitive and affective process analyses (Vol. 3, pp. 223-253). Hillsdale, NJ, US: Laurence Erlbaum Associates.
- McBurney, H., Taylor, N.F., Dodd, K. J., & Graham, H.K. (2003). A qualitative analysis of the benefits of strength training for young people with cerebral palsy. Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology, 45 (10), 658-663.
- Rosenbaum, P., Paneth, N., Leviton, A., Goldstein, M., & Bax, M. (2007). A Report: The definition and classification of cerebral palsy April 2006. Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology Journal Supplement, 49, 8-14. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-8749.2007.tb12610.x
- Sandlund, M., McDonough, S., & Hager-Ross, C. (2009). Interactive computer play in rehabilitation of children with sensorimotor disorders: A systematic review. Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology, 51(3), 173-179.
- Snapp-Childs, W., Mon-Williams, M., & Bingham, G. P. (2013). A sensorimotor approach to the training of manual actions in children with developmental coordination disorder. Journal of Child Neurology, 28(2), 204-12.
- Sweetser, S., & Wyeth, P. (2005). Gameflow: A model for evaluating player enjoyment in games. ACM Computers in Entertainment, 3(3), 3A.
- Utley, A., & Sugden, D. (1998). Interlimb coupling in children with hemiplegic cerebral palsy during reaching and grasping at speed. Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology, 40, 396-404.
- Weightman, A. P. H., Preston, N., Levesley, M. C., Holt, R. J., Mon-Williams, M., Clarke, M., Cozens, A. J., & Bhakta, B. B. (2011). Home based computer-assisted upper limb exercise for young children with cerebral palsy: A feasibility study investigating impact on motor control and functional outcome. Journal of Rehabilitation Medicine, 43(4), 359-363. | <urn:uuid:9d1e47b6-6bdb-4906-84ab-862d849f1c98> | {
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Every homeowner knows that cleaning gutters is a pain, but did you know that it can be hazardous to your health? According to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, hospital emergency rooms treat more than 164,000 ladder-related injuries each year -- and 17,124 of those were head injuries in 2007. [Source: Department of Health and Human Services.] It's hard to clean gutters without getting on a ladder, so it's no surprise that inventors are constantly trying to come up with better, safer ways to do the job.
In September of 2006, iRobot (creators of the Roomba, a robotic vacuum) sponsored an internal design competition to generate new product ideas. Jim Lynch, an electrical engineer with the company, decided to tackle the "dumb, dirty, and dangerous" job of gutter cleaning [Source: BNet]. He began tinkering with an electric screwdriver and toy truck, and the resulting design won the competition. One year later, iRobot released the Looj, a remote-controlled robot that's designed to motor through gutters and pitch out any debris in its path.
At 2 1/4 inches high and 31/4 inches wide (5.72 by 8.26 centimeters), the Looj is slim enough to travel through a standard gutter. Two treads run the entire length of the Looj, which helps it tackle uneven ground. At the front of the Looj is a replaceable three-stage auger -- that's the part that's actually supposed to shovel the leaves out of your gutter. Topping it all off is a removable handle that doubles as a remote control, allowing the operator to stay in one place while driving the Looj up and down the gutter. With the remote you can change the direction of the auger so that you don't end up with leaves all over your roof. You can also reverse the Looj if it runs into an impassable clog, or if you simply need to bring it back to you.
Now that you know the story, let's find out what makes the Looj tick. | <urn:uuid:71ba7b09-26a5-4fac-af94-e8e5787e2557> | {
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During 1975, the U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with other Federal and State agencies, university groups, and private companies, continued its program to augment and refine information on the composition of coal in the United States. This report includes all analytical data on 799 channel samples of coal beds from major operating mines and core holes in 28 States, collected mainly by State Geological Surveys under a cooperative program funded largely by the U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration.
For each sample, the U.S. Geological Survey has quantitatively determined the amounts of 24 major, minor, and trace elements (including AI, As, Cd, Cu, F, Hg, Mn, Na, Pb, Se, U, and Zn), and has semiquantitatively determined the concentrations of 15 to 20 additional trace elements (including B, Be, Cr, Ge, Mo, Ni, and V). In addition, the U.S. Bureau of Mines has provided proximate and ultimate analyses, and Btu and forms-of-sulfur determinations on 488 of the samples.
Statistical summaries of the data are given for all coal samples in the United States, for coal divided by rank (53 anthracite, 509 bituminous coal, 183 subbituminous coal, and 54 lignite samples), and the arithmetic means, ranges, and geometric means and deviations are given for the coal in each of seven different major coal areas in the United States. For example, the average coal in the United States contains 11.3 percent ash, 10.0 percent moisture, 2.0 percent sulfur, and has 11,180 Btu per pound; of the 10 major oxides determined on the 525?C ash, the average SiO2 content is 38 percent, Al2O3 20 percent, and Na2O 0.67 percent; the average Cd content is 7.3 ppm, Pb 114 ppm, and Zn 151 ppm (range 1 ppm to 6.0 percent). As determined on the raw coal, the average Hg content is 0.18 ppm (range <0.01 to 63.0 ppm), the Se content 4.1 ppm (range <0.1 to 150 ppm), and the U content 1.8 ppm (range <0.2 to 42.9 ppm).
Additional Publication Details
USGS Numbered Series
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One night a group of hooligans from the next town stopped at our village pub then reeled out at closing time, joined by a local Catholic lad who shinnied up a post and tore down a flag displaying the Red Hand of Ulster.
When they disappeared around the corner, a Protestant fellow who had been watching climbed the pole to retie the flag. But the drunks returned and attacked the Protestant, beating him to death with a hammer.
The next morning, feelings of disgust, anger, and shock hung in the air. Tempers flared and accusations flew. When the case finally went to trial, the judge declared there was not enough evidence to determine who had perpetrated the crime, so all were freed. Resentment seethed.
Just before Christmas, the victims best friend, H, could bear the injustice no longer. Egged on by other angry young men, he made a crude explosive device to plant on the doorstep of the Catholic who had reportedly been the ringleader in the murder. But the bomb detonated too soon, and H lost his right hand in the explosion, devastating his staunch Presbyterian parents who never dreamed their son could harbor such hatred. For months, they hid from friends and neighbors in shame. The Catholic man and his pregnant girlfriend hibernated too, fearing further attempts at retaliation. A community that had once prided itself on peaceful coexistence began to question the extent of the bigotry in their young people.
To outsiders, sectarianism is founded on religious intolerance, but in Ireland the issue is rooted in politics and the traditional need for a solemn public ceremony on the anniversary of any major historical tragedy or victory. Marching season includes dignified Orange order parades in tribute to the regiment of Irish soldiers (Protestant and Catholic) slaughtered in the first war at the Battle of the Somme. The Presbyterians march to celebrate the 1798 victory of the United Irishmen (of all faiths). On Ascension Day and St. Patricks Day, members of the Catholic parish in our area march throughout the village with no disturbance from the Protestant community.
After the Troubles crept into the village, a special service was organized in the Unitarian church for women of all faiths to come and pray for peace. We joined our voices in song, our hearts in prayer, and our spirits in hope that the children in war-torn Bosnia and Africa, as well as youngsters in our own Irish glen, might face a better future. The mother, aunt, and grandmother of the Catholic assailant attended the service, anxious to heal the rift dividing the village. We shed a few tears and extended hands in friendship.
The Presbyterian mother of the lad with the hook (where his hand used to be) explained privately that she felt too embarrassed to attend, but the family has made their own commitment towards a new tomorrow. For the first time in four generations, they have decided to send their youngest daughter to an integrated school this fall, a bold step for members of the fundamentalist Presbyterian church.
In July, despite the support of 71 percent of the population, the Good Friday peace agreement was ravaged by small bands of hate mongers who have disrupted commerce and transportation.
At the height of the recent crisis, a trio of policemen in bulletproof vests walked the village streets after a group of insensitive young louts, emboldened by drink, threatened violence. As is often the case here in the heathered glens, a torrential downpour dampened the plans, and conflict was averted.
But on the following Sunday morning, we awoke to learn that in another town, 25 miles north, the extremists had succeeded. In our respective churches and chapels, Catholics and Protestants mourned the horrific loss of three little boys. This years marching season is over, and normalcy has returned, but every household is tinged with sadness.
So we scramble to find a spark that will rekindle the candle of peace that will last through many marching seasons. The village festival committee, local business leaders, educators, craftspeople and the elderly are resolved to find a way for residents to display allegiances and cultural differences in mutual respect. Once more we join hands to weave the ribbon of harmony that links the diverse corners of this ancient coastal community in a bond of tranquility and friendship.
Sandy Watson is an author of childrens books and marketing director for Glenarm Castle in Northern Ireland.
That means, we rely on support from our readers.
Independent. Nonprofit. Subscriber-supported. | <urn:uuid:74312ec1-0aa2-410d-9cc7-9aa3863151ba> | {
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People often face the problem of loose teeth, either when they get old or when kids lose their first set of teeth or milk teeth. With loose teeth, particularly in old age, it gets difficult to eat all kinds of food. If accidentally, one bites on something hard, then it may cause excruciating pain and swelling in the gums.
It is important to keep in mind nutritional needs of people with loose teeth and try to give them all kinds of foods in some soft and chewy form through which they may get a varied palate, adequate for their nutritional needs. Ways to prepare meals for people with loose teeth are given below.
How to Prepare Meals For People With Loose Teeth
Chop Food In Very Small Pieces
This is the best way to serve salads and fruits to people with loose teeth. You can give fruits like apples, pears, water melons, musk melon and vegetables like radish, carrot, cucumber chopped in small pieces.
This will save the effort of biting big pieces into small pieces and will make it easier for people to eat, if there canines are particularly lose.
Whatever food you cook, ensure that it is well cooked. Well cooked food is easy on teeth and easy on digestion. Make the vegetables curries and other foods well cooked so that the person may mash it on his or her own when eating. Such foods can be easily mashed in the plate and can be eaten well.
Grate Raw Foods
If the person suffering from loose teeth still finds it hard to chew on finely chopped foods then grating raw vegetables and fruits is another way of serving them such foods.
When my daughter had some loose teeth, I used to grate carrots and apples for her and used to mix it in yogurt for additional taste and texture. She really used to enjoy this high fiber snack. You can also add salt or sugar for taste.
Another easy to do way is to mash foods. Some fruits like custard apple, banana, and avocados can be easily served in mashed form. Make sure that you mash them well otherwise it may lead to choking, especially in young kids. You can also mash chapattis or breads.
Soak them in little water and mash them well to make a puree kind of consistency. You can add curries, dal, milk, curd or any other food in mashed breads and chapattis. You can also add boiled and mashed vegetables to the pureed bread for a healthy and balanced diet.
Porridge And Rice
Another interesting way to serve food for people with loose teeth is to cook porridge and rice with lots of vegetables. This will provide them a healthy balance of vital nutrients without compromising with taste or texture. Rice and porridge can be easily swallowed. Make sure to add finely chopped pieces of vegetables in the dish and cook them well.
The idea is to provide different kinds of foods in soft form which the person suffering from lose teeth may eat properly and enjoy the taste also. So go innovative and make different dishes in new avatars. You never know, other people and kids in the family may also like the new form of various foods. | <urn:uuid:5b264295-ffeb-44fa-9c69-95a99329341e> | {
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When professors assign analytical papers, they want more than a summary of information – they want students to delve deeper and form new conclusions about the material. Here are some steps to get started:
1. Read the material carefully, and take notes on anything that stands out. If something already provokes your opinion on the first reading, it might be a good starting point.
2. Read the material again to make sure you understand it thoroughly, paying special attention to the parts that stood out before.
3. Form an opinion about the material. Think about what the material is implying rather than just saying, and see if you can draw any new conclusions from the material – especially if you can draw on previous knowledge or outside sources to help make a case.
4. Answer the question, “So what?” Once you've formed an opinion, take it one step further by thinking about why it matters and how it can be applied to something larger.
Now all you have to do is write... | <urn:uuid:f0af7cf6-9e22-4952-9d1c-508bed0784f9> | {
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There was a lot of soul searching and anger around the time of the Paris massacre in November 2015 because the Paris massacre got so much attention whereas the Beirut bombing the previous day did not. Maybe Construal Level Theory explains it:
Construal level theory (CLT) is a theory in social psychology that describes the relation between psychological distance and the extent to which people’s thinking (e.g., about objects and events) is abstract or concrete. The general idea is that the more distant an object is from the individual, the more abstract it will be thought of, while the closer the object is, the more concretely it will be thought of. In CLT, psychological distance is defined on several dimensions — temporal, spatial, social and hypothetical distance being considered most important, though there is some debate among social psychologists about further dimensions like informational, experiential or affective distance.
An example of construal level effects would be that although planning one’s next summer vacation one year in advance (in the distant future) will cause one to focus on broad, decontextualized features of the situation (e.g., anticipating fun and relaxation), while the very same vacation planned to occur very soon will cause one to focus on specific features of the present situation (e.g. what restaurants to make reservations for, going for a trip in an off-road vehicle). | <urn:uuid:1e049a82-c61e-4974-b009-22388edf3ff7> | {
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Standards 1 through 3 address the preparation experiences of candidates, their developing knowledge and skills, and their abilities at the point of program completion. Candidate progress and provider conclusions about the readiness of completers at exit are direct outcomes of the provider’s efforts. By contrast, Standard 4 addresses the results of preparation at the point where they most matter—in classrooms and schools. Educator preparation providers must attend to candidate mastery of the knowledge and skills necessary for effective teaching, but that judgment is finally dependent on the impact the completers have on-the-job with P-12 student learning and development.
The paramount goal of providers is to prepare candidates who will have a positive impact on P-12 students. Impact can be measured in many ways. Component 4.1 enumerates some of these approaches. The Commission underscores here what also is said in the Recommendations on Evidence section, below, that multiple measures are needed for these and other accreditation evidence. One approach being adopted by several states and districts is known as “value-added modeling” (VAM). A large research effort supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project, provides useful guidance about the circumstances under which this model can most validly be used. These findings are consistent with those noted in Preparing Teachers: Building Evidence for Sound Policy (NRC, 2010): “Value-added models may provide valuable information about effective teacher preparation, but not definitive conclusions and are best considered together with other evidence from a variety of perspectives.”1
The Commission recommends that CAEP encourage research on the validity and reliability of VAM for program evaluation purposes.2 Because members expect that methodologies for measuring teacher impact on P-12 student learning and development will continue to evolve and hopefully improve, the Commission recommends that CAEP also make certain that its standards and processes reflect the profession’s best current thinking on appropriate use of evidence for program improvement and accreditation decisions. In this regard, providers should refer to the Data Task Force, the American Psychological Association guidance on preparation measures, and the University of Wisconsin Madison Value-Added Research Center reports regarding use of multiple sources of data, including value-added data, for program evaluation.3
Multiple types of surveys can serve as indicators of teaching effectiveness (Component 4.2), satisfaction of employers (Component 4.3), and satisfaction of completers (Component 4.4). Research by Ferguson, for example, shows that K-12 student surveys are a valid means for understanding aspects of teaching effectiveness.4 The Commission recommends that CAEP consider the development of common survey items and instruments for employers and completers. CAEP also should participate in the validation of student survey instruments for use in teacher pre-service programs.
2University of Wisconsin, Value Added Research Center (2013), Student Growth and Value-Added Information as Evidence of Educator Preparation Program Effectiveness: A Review, Draft prepared for CAEP.
3Ewell, P. (2013). Report of the data task force to the CAEP Commission on Standards and Performance Reporting, CAEP. American Psychological Association (2013). Applying Psychological Science to Using Data for continuous Teacher Preparation Program Improvement, Draft, Report of a Board of Educational Affairs Task Force. University of Wisconsin, Value Added Research Center (2013).
4Ferguson, Ronald F. (2012). Can student surveys measure teaching quality? Phi Delta Kappan, 94:3, 24-28. | <urn:uuid:40e63b1f-d01c-4d9b-9545-e77cd81c217a> | {
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Christmas is a time of year when many people confront the issue of government endorsing a faith. Can city hall put up a crche? Should the school choir sing about baby Jesus? Why did my legislator send out Christmas cards?
This is all part of America's innovative and ever-changing experiment to keep the state from imposing upon an individual's spiritual beliefs.
One spiritual leader, Marianne Williamson, tells in a piece on today's opinion page how Congress considered her in choosing its chaplain.
The tradition of a legislative chaplain was endorsed in 1983 by the Supreme Court, which said: "To invoke divine guidance on a public body entrusted with making the laws ... is simply a tolerable acknowledgment of beliefs widely held among the people of this country." Next year, the court will decide if students can lead prayers before public-school games.
Making such decisions - either by government or individually - requires a humble kindness in not intruding on another's basic beliefs. And that's the best kind of religion - in action.
(c) Copyright 1999. The Christian Science Publishing Society | <urn:uuid:1127ff4e-d142-4d22-a6f8-22ac63c67585> | {
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Carbon dioxide levels and ventilation strategies in 'green' office buildings
Davies, Hilary 2006, Carbon dioxide levels and ventilation strategies in 'green' office buildings, in BEAR 2006, construction sustainability and innovation : CIB W89 International Conference on Building Education and Research : 10-13 April 2006 : book of abstracts, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, pp. 1-10.
(Some files may be inaccessible until you login with your Deakin Research Online credentials)
Energy efficient office buildings are intended to provide a comfortable and healthy environment for their occupants as well as reducing the energy consumption of the building. They are often designed as "showcase" buildings illustrating the potential for savings through some innovative design technology. But do such buildings actually deliver the desired energy savings and satisfactory comfort conditions for occupants? Measurements of a "green" University campus building in Victoria, Australia, designed with an innovative fabric energy storage system, demonstrate that the ventilation system is not providing acceptable indoor air quality conditions. The design strategies used to reduce energy consumption have had negative consequences on the air quality of the building. Insufficient fresh air is being drawn into the building leading to an excessive build up of carbon dioxide. It is recommended that monitoring systems need to use a wider range of measurements than temperature alone to guarantee good quality indoor air and working conditions and that commissioning of buildings should include adequate monitoring of the operational performance of the building. Designers need to be made aware of the potential consequences of their decisions when attempting innovative energy-efficient designs.
Field of Research
120202 Building Science and Techniques
Socio Economic Objective
970112 Expanding Knowledge in Built Environment and Design
Unless expressly stated otherwise, the copyright for items in Deakin Research Online is owned by the author, with all rights reserved.
Every reasonable effort has been made to ensure that permission has been obtained for items included in DRO.
If you believe that your rights have been infringed by this repository, please contact [email protected]. | <urn:uuid:4fc1d1e5-6d16-4862-be0a-7dd3c896eea2> | {
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February is Black History Month. It is a time to recognize strong leadership and significant contributions from American history of black citizens. It is a time to celebrate the achievements and notable accomplishments that bettered our world. But there were many organizations that enriched the lives of Americans. Take a moment to consider the many, many groups and organizations that worked so hard to make change happen.
One such organization is SNCC. Below are some frequently asked questions and answers about this important, yet not so widely known organization during the Civil Rights Movement. Share them with your students. Make a trivia game out of the facts below. Create a webquest or scavenger hunt for facts about this group for your students. But mostly, let them be enlightened by the existence of this organization and their push for freedom.
Q: What does SNCC stand for?
A: SNCC stands for Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.*
Q: When was this group established?
A: It was founded in April 1960 by young people who had emerged as leaders of the sit-in protest movement initiated on February 1 of that year by four black college students in Greensboro, North Carolina.*
Q: Why was it formed?
A: SNCC’s emergence as a force in the southern civil rights movement came largely through the involvement of students in the 1961 Freedom Rides, designed to test a 1960 Supreme Court ruling that declared segregation in interstate travel facilities unconstitutional. By the time the Interstate Commerce Commission began enforcing the ruling mandating equal treatment in interstate travel in November 1961, SNCC was immersed in voter registration efforts in McComb, Mississippi, and a desegregation campaign in Albany, Georgia, known as the Albany Movement.*
Q: What do they stand for?
A: The statement of purpose of the organization is : “We affirm the philosophical or religious ideal of nonviolence as the foundation of our purpose, the presupposition of our faith, and the manner of our action. Nonviolence as it grows from Judaic-Christian traditions seeks a social order of justice permeated by love.”*
Q: What type of ways did they use to get their messages out?
A: SNCC primarily used demonstrations, protest groups, and sit-ins to get their messages out and let their voices be heard.*
Check out these websites for further study on SNCC!
* (n.d.). Retrieved 2 3, 2013, from Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute: http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/encyclopedia/enc_student_nonviolent_coordinating_committee_sncc/
Explore the free resources and lessons | <urn:uuid:30643b27-ac58-4337-938e-4b3f7ee42758> | {
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(8) Economies of Scale II: Causes & Interplay with Market Size
Economies of Scale, Diseconomies of Scale, Constant Returns to Scale, Shape of Long Run Average Cost Curve, Scale and Market Size
This explores and explains possible causes or sources of economies of scale. Then the interplay between scale and overall market size is discussed as a way of explaining the number and size distribution of firms in a market.
Crane, Steven E., "(8) Economies of Scale II: Causes & Interplay with Market Size" (2011). Principles of Microeconomics. Paper 54.
Ability to identify and explain possible causes of Scale Economies. Ability to predict size distribution of firms in a market based upon information about Scale and the overall size of the market.
Previous Cost Videos | <urn:uuid:30f2a47c-b299-4f58-9d5d-192a8147e30f> | {
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I was reading the social studies board earlier today about the use of interactive notebooks. I was intrigued since I'd never heard of these. The posts about them made them sound like something I would be very interested in doing with my kids.
The reason I'm calling you out is because I opened the following link you suggested had a good student sample.
(BTW, this was from 2006.)
Not only was there a good sample (I'm very visual. I needed to see one.), but I found the entire site extremely useful! Mr. Saunders has a similar social studies curriculum, so I found many of his attachments are ones I could use in my class. I can absolutely see myself using this for the upcoming school year. I'm excited! The processing activities/writings the kids do will be very beneficial for them, and it will help me in assessing their understanding of the content/units we cover.
I do have a question for you (and/or for anyone else who reads this): Do you think it wise, since I'm an interactive notebook virgin , to do this with science at the same time or will that be too much?
Last edited by trexteach; 06-13-2009 at 03:33 PM..
I am in the same boat. I will be teaching 7th grade Science and World History next year. I had already planned on using notebooks in Science...not sure how they will be set up. Originally it wasn't going to be an interactive notebook, but now that I have discovered them... I might be using them.
Either way... I am doing notebooks for the first time in both classes. I know that it will be a lot of work. I just feel like they are a great tool and that a little extra work in the beginning will make the entire year better.
I used them for the first time this year in 4th in both science and s.s. I thought they were beneficial and did not feel it was too much, in fact students knew the basics, organization & purpose and applied them in both subjects.
I did not use contents pages like some do, instead we had the standards/indicators typed up and glued into the beginning of each unit. We simply checked off when it was covered.
I know next year I'll use them again and model more and make sure I emphasize this is such a good study guide if they've taken good notes and personalized as a way to remember important material.
Is'nt Mr. Saunder's site great? His is one of the best!
IMO, doing it for the first time in two different classes could be a bit of a challenge, but certainly not an impossibility as Linda has indicated. You may want to consider setting up model notebooks this summer. In the beginning you have to model a lot and have suggestions for the students to choose from for the student portion of the notebook. The younger they are I found, the longer it takes before the majority of the class can work on thier own.
What I love about the ISNs is you can actually set them up in any way that fits your teaching style and the needs of your class. I like the idea of the indicators being glued to the front of the notebook. One year I went sequentially in my notebook for one of my classes because the "flippy pages" were a real pain for most of my students and a frustration for me. I liked it so well I converted to that for all of my classes.
I was reading through this and was very intrigued so I did some searches on the net because I wanted to know more.
I came across this wiki that on the surface looks wonderful.
You that know more about them would be able to offer a better opinion.
Here is the site
That is the site i started. I was trying to gather all suggestions for ISNs in one place. Many have added to it since then. It was a public wiki until some of the links posted were porn. So it is protected - meaning you have to ask to be a member. I always say yes, but at least if porn is posted I have a way to trace it and report it. As a member you can add links also, or if you do not know how, you can send a message through the wiki to me if you would like me to post it.
The links on the home page are all ISN links. On the side under content is something with stars that I do not quite understand and was posted by a member who asked to become an organizer. I think it may have something to do with her school because there was an increase in traffic at that time.
Well just write a big DUH on my forehead!!!!!
I apologize. I have been reading and reading. I would like to use these in my social studies class. You have a great site. Thank you for compiling all of these resources.
How on earth do I actually get this started - what I mean is, from the teacher side of things.
We implemented a new curriculum in Soc St. 2 yrs ago and my colleagues and i are still struggling with the way our govt wants it taught. It is very inquiry based with critical thinking and our gr 4 classes seem to struggle with this approach (perhaps its us oldies who just don't get it and can't teach it the way it's meant to be taught).
I am thinking that this may give us (or particularly me - (the others in my team really resist change) some direction.
Any advice would really be appreciated.
I teach older grades, so some of what I do may mot be appropriate for 4th graders. For teacher input, I may use that for teaching outlining and summarizing of the material in the book, guided notes, vocabulary, informative handouts, etc. For student output they do one or more of the following: Ven Diagrams, Word Gram, maps, illustrated timelines, charts/graphs, Cause/Effect Charts, cartoons, flow charts, illustrated definitions, pictwords, poems, anagrams, foldables, brocures,etc.
When I first introduce ISNs, I model different ways of responding, and they all respond the same way. Once I have modeled many different ways of responding, then we move on to suggesting ways of responding to a specific lesson. They do not have to use the ways suggested, but it helps those who have no clue what to do.
Thanks, Wig, for the suggestion to make a model notebook this summer. That's probably a good idea. I would like to do this in soc. studies and science, but maybe I'll hold off a bit with science, or begin it later in the 1st quarter, once I feel I have a good grasp on the soc. studies notebooks.
Mr. Saunders does have a great site. I emailed him to make sure it was okay to use some of his work for my class. He had no problem with it.
Thanks, all, for your additional suggestions/info. I'm ready to "dig in".
I love notebooks. I found a math interactive notebook recommended from a PT member about 4 years ago and have used it in my classroom ever since. The first year was skeletal but the next years it's gotten better and easier to implement.
Unfortunately the site that I got it from stopped posting their book. I emailed the ladies and they said they were creating a professional one to sell. Haven't seen it yet.
I was going to start using them in math this year. We use some Fosnot units- they are mainly investigations and the notebook seemed like a great place to write about the strategies they use to solve the problems.
Groovy Gal- is the site you were talking about one that was 2 6th grade teachers posted? I have looked several times for that site- when I found it originally 2 years ago I got some good stuff - cowboy method of dividing & Dr. Pepper method of converting decimals to percents made me smile.
ancientciv posed good questions and mentioned +/- to choosing the medium as well as deciding how to attach handouts, but aren't handouts too big for comp books and even spiral notebooks? Don't they hang out over the edges and get all crumply? And what about 2 sided or multipage handouts? I was thinking I could print the reverse side so it could be seen if glued across the top and flipped up? It also seems like a binder would be better if I decide to combine the writer's notebook, reading journal, and grammar all into one ISN and need sections. I do love the idea of a small, compact spiral versus a clunky binder. Especially if they are kept in the room, I would have to store over 120 binders and spirals would be sooo much better. Thanks for any help. Maybe I just need to spend the time to study all the online resources which have been provided.
Wig, you're too kind! You know I say the same thing about you!
choosing the medium as well as deciding how to attach handouts, but aren't handouts too big for comp books and even spiral notebooks
There are tricks to handouts in the composition notebooks - my favorite is to either reduce (using a copier, or printer options) so that you can get two handouts to a page. This not only saves paper, but fits nicely in a comp. book.
For two sided handouts you can format a word document as "book fold" and get up to 3 side easily. You can also glue across just the top, and the handout can be flipped.
The Mead Spiral notebook is the "holy grail" as full size handouts will fit in it and they are darn near indestructable, but they are pretty pricey. Regular spirals can handle handouts with just a little trimming, or folding.
The reason I like notebooks versus binders is the whole tearing out and being lost thing. In a notebook, if page 100 isn't done its there - blank and beckoning. In a binder, page 100 could just be not there.
That being said, I know people who swear by binders.
I also have used composition book ISNs for three years. I tried spirals for two years, and they're not for me. I agree with ancientciv regarding binders, but it's a personal choice.
As for handouts being too big, I frequently will edit a word document to be landscape with two columns. Then I put one copy of the handout (with slightly smaller font) in one column and a second copy in the other column. Then I print it and copy half as many full pages as I need, cut them in half with a paper cutter, and voila! They fit perfectly in the composition book this way. Also, you can reduce a full size page on the copier to about 70% and it will also fit. I do this for handouts I do not have a digital copy of.
Another idea I use for putting handouts in the ISN is envelopes. I have envelope templates that I copy for the students, they cut them out and put them together, then glue them to the page and tuck in their handout/assignment.
With two-sided pages, I have the students fold the page "hamburger" and put a strip of glue at the top on the back of the page. Then they glue it down and are able to life up the page to see underneath.
This summer, I've been teaching Summer School math and I have been experimenting with a math ISN (I normally teach social studies). I will try to upload a few of the pages we've done in there to the wiki. There are some neat examples of putting handouts in creatively that are hard to describe in words.
Attached I have an example of one of my handouts that are edited to be two-to-a-page.
Ancientciv and Swtogirl:
Wow thanks so much for the detailed explanations, examples and attachments! I am still in a quandary, vacillating back and forth, but believe me this helped so much to understand how a comp book would be workable. I did explore all of the resources on the wikispace. I am ready to launch the concept, no matter what medium I settle on. I even emailed some excerpts and links to the 6th and 7th grade social and science teachers I work with and one SS teacher already responded with enthusiasm. If they buy in, this will be the first interdisciplinary activity we embark upon. Yahoo! I am indebted. | <urn:uuid:6cf080d1-e352-43ee-8576-0aaf42bdabf9> | {
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Get the comprehensive, compassionate care you deserve for all of your acute or chronic gastroenterological needs.
Gastro Esophageal Reflux Disease
Irritable Bowel Syndrome
Peptic Ulcer Disease
Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) poses something of a dilemma: Physicians readily recognize when a person has it, but describing a consistent pattern of symptoms is nearly impossible. People with an irritable bowel may complain of cramping pain in any part of the abdomen, feeling bloated, gas, constipation, as well as diarrhea and excessive mucus in the stool. Often, the same person may complain of either constipation or diarrhea, later experience another symptom, and then alternate again. The symptom(s) that occurs most frequently also will vary from individual to individual.
Worldwide, IBS affects about one in seven to 10 people. Over 22 million Americans suffer from this condition, which is second only to the common cold as a cause of absenteeism from work. Reports indicate that three times as many women as men are afflicted with irritable bowel syndrome. Researchers speculate that the fluctuation of reproductive hormones during menstrual cycles may increase the occurrence of these symptoms. The truth is that the cause or causes of IBS are not well understood at all. It is very likely that multiple factors are involved.
You can guess at the number of disorders that researchers thought produced IBS by ticking off the names given to this problem over the years. Irritable bowel syndrome has been called psychogenic colitis, mucous colitis, or just plain colitis – suggesting that there is inflammation (or “-itis”) of the lining of the colon. This is a misnomer because no inflammation is present.
Perhaps, as some have suggested, if there is an inflammation it is due to a bowel infection. Nowadays, most physicians do not believe infection is a factor, though they do think that some irritation of the small or large intestine is involved. At one time intolerance to certain foods and food allergies were considered major factors in IBS. While we know that this is a cause, it is unlikely to be the only cause.
Irritable bowel syndrome has also been called psychogenic colitis, or the nervous gut, in the belief that psychologic distress – nerves, depression, or anxiety – causes the onset of symptoms.
Another name for IBS was spastic colitis or spastic colon. This referred to the painful contractions a sufferer would feel inside his or her lower gut. These abnormal, uncoordinated contractions, or dysmotility, may be linked to a change in the firing of electrical signals that control muscular activity. This pacemaker mechanism is similar to the system controlling the contraction of heart muscle. And as with the heart, an abnormal pattern or rhythm—a dysrhythmia—may develop.
Recent research has strongly suggested a central role for abnormal gut sensitivity. According to this view, motility in the gut is normal. However, the nerve endings in the lining of the small and large intestines are unusually sensitive and will react abnormally to even ordinary events such as eating. For example, when ingested food reaches the bowel, the gut wall expands (or distends), causing the nerves to trigger exaggerated patterns of muscular activity. As a result, sometimes, a meal may be followed almost immediately by cramps, and soon after by a bowel movement. Other stimuli that can cause this over-reacting include stressful events, taking certain medications, drinking milk or swallowing too much air.
In any person with irritable bowel syndrome, it is difficult to pin down the cause because each time, the underlying disorder, or combination of contributing disorders, will probably be different. Thus, there is no specific test you can take that will tell whether or not you have IBS — and no procedure that will allow the physician to see what is wrong. In technical language, that means IBS is a functional disorder.
Nevertheless, your physician will frequently order tests because your symptoms might suggest the presence of another, more serious disease. He or she will be particularly alert to this possibility if you have rectal bleeding, weight loss, or severe and/or persistent pain. After analyzing the results of appropriate tests, the physician will be able to reassure you, for example, that you do not have cancer.
Even though we do not fully understand the causes of irritable bowel syndrome, dietary recommendations and techniques for reducing stress, along with the use of medications for specific symptoms have been shown to work for a substantial number of people. Both diet and stress can be managed quite well. For example, adding more fiber, drinking lots of water, and following a moderate exercise program may do the trick for some. Others may need to keep a food diary for a few days to target problem foods, or learn to deal with stress situations through counseling.
Fat seems to be a major offender in exacerbating IBS, because in any form it is a strong stimulus of colonic contractions. So, foods such as cream, cheese, vegetable oils, shortening of any kind, avocados, whipped toppings and meat will need a reevaluation. It’s not necessary to eliminate any of them altogether. However, it is helpful to know exactly how much of each item you’re eating. With that information in hand, you can begin to make some small modifications. Start by reducing portion sizes, using less rich sauces with main dishes and having more high-fiber foods at meals and as snacks.
Chocolate, caffeine, alcohol and milk products are also frequent offenders. Yogurt and other cultured products may not give any distress at all.
For a while, you’ll have to keep a journal noting the foods that seem to cause the most problems. The latest research indicates that fructose (a sugar found in fruit) and sorbitol (an artificial sweetener) may aggravate IBS symptoms. That may be why apple, grape and pear juices are linked with diarrhea and abdominal pain. Excessive intake of magnesium-containing antacids also can cause diarrhea.
In many people with IBS who predominantly have constipation, dietary fiber seems to offer relief. Increase your fiber intake gradually and eat just enough so that you have a soft and easily passed bowel movement. Fruits, vegetables, whole-grain cereals and breads, lentils and beans all are good sources of dietary fiber. Six to 11 servings of breads, cereals and grains; three to five servings of vegetables; and two to four servings of fruits are the recommendations in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans and the Food Guide Pyramid. In addition, you might want to include about three tablespoons of bran each day with meals. Start with one tablespoon of bran once or twice a day and work your way up from there.
Reduce or eliminate any foods that you already know cause distress for you. Beans, for instance, are usually not well tolerated by people with IBS. Other gas-producing foods such as cabbage or grapes may also be a problem.
Strange as it may seem, high-fiber diets can also help when diarrhea is the major symptom. The basic water-holding ability of fiber helps to absorb excess fluids and also to increase the bulk of the stool. Those two actions are beneficial in regulating colonic motility. That regulation, or adjustment, means a stabilizing effect for both constipation and diarrhea.
On the other hand, there are a few individuals in whom fiber may intensify constipation or diarrhea. For them, high-fiber foods should be eliminated from the diet. It’s a good idea to talk to your doctor or dietitian first. Even if you’re not one of these individuals, it’s possible you may have added too much fiber too soon; your system may not have yet had the opportunity to adjust to the presence of extra fiber.
Cramping and diarrhea can be brought on by large meals. Try to eat smaller meals throughout the day, or reduce the total amount you eat. In addition, select foods that are low in fat and high in fiber. While you’re at it, chew your food thoroughly and allow enough time to eat your meals slowly and in a relaxed way.
Make sure to drink plenty of water as you begin to increase your fiber intake. Six to eight glasses of water a day should be the goal. The extra fluid will also keep you well hydrated and feeling better throughout the day. You’ll want to avoid carbonated water (or other drinks), especially with meals. These can produce gas and lead to discomfort.
In fact, you may even want to avoid sipping plain water during meals because it facilitates the swallowing of air which can increase gas. Make a habit of drinking water in the early and mid morning and afternoon.
You may want to identify foods that you suspect you’re allergic to or don’t tolerate well. In some people, citrus fruits, gluten, eggs, or chocolate may produce reactions. Note, lactose is less often an offender than is commonly believed. A person with true intolerance can readily find low-lactose dairy products, as well as lactase supplements which will facilitate the digestion of lactose in food.
Stress, whether it be related to business, career, marriage, family, or friends, seems to increase colonic spasms; especially in people with IBS. A true cause-and-effect relationship has yet to be demonstrated, but the evidence in support of a connection is strong. Certainly, irritable bowel symptoms increase during periods of anxiety, depression or panic. Fortunately, stress-reducing techniques are available. The bonus is that these methods also can help enhance your daily life.
Biofeedback, hypnosis, meditation and psychological counseling are the most common stress-reducing techniques to help you cope with IBS. The first is a system that trains patients to monitor and improve their health by learning to recognize signals from their own bodies. It is also quite helpful in teaching people how to relax. Initially, biofeedback involves the use of equipment that picks up electrical signals in the muscles. It also requires the services of a certified biofeedback therapist who may also be a physician or a psychotherapist.
Hypnosis is a centuries-old practice that is receiving new attention. The American Medical Association has approved hypnosis training since 1958 and today many health care professionals use this approach to help people with weight problems, cigarette smoking and chronic stress. Because hypnosis is a state of heightened suggestibility brought on by increased relaxation, people can learn a variety of ways to deal with stress-related behavioral patterns.
Hypnosis seems to hold great potential for those suffering from IBS. One study showed a clinical improvement in 85 percent of patients under 50 years of age. Be sure you’re working with a well-trained, licensed hypnotherapist. Again, he or she may be a physician, a psychologist, or a nurse-practitioner. Most important of all, have a positive attitude. Self-motivation is helpful in changing any behavior.
Daily exercise is a great way to reduce stress, and it makes people feel better psychologically as well as physically. Allow enough time for regular bowel movements. Trying to postpone a movement rather than rushing it, which will only cause more anxiety and aggravate your symptoms. Relaxation is an important key to the successful management of irritable bowel syndrome.
Sometimes drugs can help provide symptomatic relief. However, know that no one medication will be effective in everyone with IBS. If an individual mostly has diarrhea, his or her physician may recommend loperamide (Imodium), or, on rare occasions cholestyramine (Questran). If severe constipation is the primary problem, consider taking natural vegetable fiber like bran or psyllium. Try food sources of fiber before buying an over-the-counter fiber supplement.
To treat debilitating pain, the physician may consider a tricyclic antidepressant (Elavil). For chronic abdominal pain that presents after meals, part of the treatment may be administration beforehand of an anticholinergic agent (e.g. Levsin) – a drug that inhibits the nerves regulating intestinal contractions.
Some women with constipation predominate IBS may be a candidate for tegaserod (Zelnorm) which can relieve painful bloating and increase frequency of bowel movements.
Finally, bear in mind that treatments for irritable bowel syndrome are personal and depend entirely on the individual. Spend some time identifying what is irritating your individual system. Then develop an approach that can effect lifestyle changes – diet, exercise, and stress reduction – on a gradual basis. Modifications that can be adopted step by step in a comfortable manner are the ones that are most effective and long-lasting.
It is helpful to know a few quick tricks that can help keep fat out of your meal while maintaining good flavor:
Choose low-fat cuts of meat and chicken in the supermarket.
Try to roast, broil, poach, stir-fry, or microwave when cooking at home. Look for some terms like roasted or broiled in restaurants instead of ordering foods that are sauteed or fried.
Use broths, juices, water, and/or wine to steam vegetables, poultry, and fish instead of sauteing in oil.
In restaurants, ask the server whether the fish or meat is marinated in oil before it is grilled. If it is, request that it be cooked with little or no oil.
Select low and nonfat dairy products. Use the higher fat cheeses like gorgonzola, or an aged cheddar in small quantities to perk up the flavor in a grain or pasta dish.
Invest in a new microwave oven, high quality pressure cooker, or nonstick wok. All of these devices cook food fast and with little fat and oil.
Cook quantities of rice, beans, and grains; then freeze in small portions (use zip-lock bags or plastic bowls). These foods defrost quickly or they can be tossed (while still frozen) into soups and sauces.
Puree leftover beans or vegetables with a bit of salt and your favorite herb (basil, perhaps) to use as a tasty replacement for butter or cream cheese.
Read labels. The new food label format makes it easier than ever to know exactly how much fat is in one portion of that food. Consider how may portions you’ll really be eating. However, don’t automatically pass up an item if it appears to have a large percentage of fat calories. Consider what else you’re eating throughout the day. Balance is the key.
How Much Fat?
The recommendations of the U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans and a number of other health organizations are quite consistent. Fat should represent 30 percent, or less, of your total daily calories. For most people that concept doesn’t mean too much. However, if you consider that most adults consume between 1,500 and 2,400 calories a day, the range for fat should be 50 to 80 grams for the day. Once you choose your number of total fat grams, then try to keep the amount of saturated fat, the kind that comes from animal products, to a third or less of the total amount. For example, if 60 grams is your total fat allowance, keep saturated fat to 20 grams or less per day.
You can be the judge of how many total grams to have each day. Part of that may depend on how severe your IBS is, and what your weight goals are. A registered dietitian can help you plan a menu that is best suited to your lifestyle and personal needs. There is also some flexibility here. Most dietitians today will have you look at a weekly pattern, rather than one day or one meal. In other words, unless you are suffering intense distress, a little more fat on one day can be balanced out with less the next. This is another situation in which a food diary can come in handy. Keeping a record of several days of normal eating will give a clearer picture of how much fat you’re currently eating. That makes it easier to make any adjustments if they’re necessary.
Food labels are quite clear about the number of grams contained in one serving. Just be sure to calculate properly if you’re actually eating several servings. There are also a number of nifty little fat-counter books around. They list a wide variety of all the food categories with the amounts of fat in specific items; frequently they include calorie and cholesterol information as well. They’re a good way to start getting acquainted with the amount of fat that’s in your favorite foods.
People with irritable bowel syndrome are particularly bothered by the pain, discomfort and embarrassment of gas. Whether that gas is coming from above the belt or below, it’s still a nuisance. Knowing more about gas can help make its management easier. In most cases it should be possible to reduce its occurrence considerably.
Basically there are three sources of intestinal gas. Every day each one of us produces about 10 liters of gas. Normally, most of the gas is absorbed through the bowel wall into the bloodstream. People with irritable bowel syndrome don’t produce more gas than others, the discomfort may make it feel the way, but actually the amount of gas produced in people doesn’t vary considerably. It probably feels more painful to someone with IBS because that person is more sensitive to normal degrees of abdominal distention and because there may be abnormal intestinal motility.
Room air is another source of gas. Most of the time, too much air is swallowed (“aerophagia”) while eating or drinking. Aerophagia may be a nervous habit related to anxiety. Gulping food, chewing gum, chewing with your mouth open and drinking carbonated beverages are other means by which too much air gets into the stomach. The result is belching, the most common symptom of gas. Excess air can cause further discomfort if you wear tight clothes or lie down soon after a meal. If the air isn’t released through belching, then bloating and abdominal discomfort result.
Gas expelled through the rectum (flatulence) is usually caused by fermentation of food by friendly bacteria normally present in the intestine. These bacteria frequently act on indigestible carbohydrates like those found in beans, dried peas and lentils. Fruits and grains, which are also high in fiber, can have the same effect. Other food sources that may cause flatulence include milk and other dairy products; fructose, a fruit sugar which is used as a sweetener in foods and beverages and which may be incompletely digested; and sorbitol and mannitol, two artificial sweeteners. Flatulence also can be caused by certain medicines like colestipol (Colestid), which is used to lower blood cholesterol levels.
Avoid gas-producing foods. Once again, the food diary becomes a handy tool for identifying offending foods. Remember, what bothers one person may not bother another. The quantity of food or beverage ingested may be a factor. For instance, someone may experience pain after eating two cups of beans yet be fine with a half-cup serving.
For nutrition’s sake, don’t just randomly eliminate foods from your diet. Take some care to find alternative solutions as well. For instance, if beans are irritating, consider using Beano, a nonprescription product containing alpha-galactosidase, an enzyme which breaks down the carbohydrates in beans that most people find bothersome. Note: this is added to foods as well as swallowed or chewed. Another possible solution for reducing intestinal gas is to soak the beans overnight and discard the soaking water before cooking. Adding fiber slowly to the diet and drinking plenty of water along the way are the best means of avoiding excess flatulence. Though not systematically studied, regular exercise has been reported to aid in relieving or preventing gas.
Relaxation techniques may be helpful in reducing the amount of air swallowed if the problem is related to stress. Other remedies include eating fewer hard candies, reducing the amount of carbonated beverages you drink, and even talking less when you eat. Finally, over-the-counter products like simethicone (Mylicon) and simethicone-containing antacid preparations may be effective in breaking-up trapped gas.
Possible Gas Producing Foods
The real list of problem foods is potentially endless because everyone’s body responds to food differently. Here’s a list of the foods that most commonly cause distress.
• Apples (raw)
• Apple juice
• Hard candy
• Beans (kidney, lima, navy)
• Split peas
• Brussels sprouts
• Peppers, green
Cereals and Grains:
• Bran Cereals
• Excessive quantities of wheat products
• Carbonated beverages
• Chewing gum
• Mannitol and Sorbitol
• Fats and high fat foods
• Rich sauces and gravies
Learn more at www.aboutibs.org | <urn:uuid:e6eeee04-9005-4d9c-9002-712657bf87fc> | {
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The climate in India
For the most of India, April to June as whole are the hottest months: 35-40 °C. Then the temperature drops a few degrees with the monsoon, which lasts until September. Then heavy rains and high humidity cause lots of problems. After the monsoon the peace returns and from October to May it is dry. In the tropical south, on the Indian Ocean, it is remains wet until December. There it is warm all year round. For the rest of the country December to February are the coolest months, with daytime temperatures between 20 and 30 °C, depending on elevation and latitude. This is the best travel period. The Himalayas, in the north, can best be climbed in the summer months. | <urn:uuid:b0c6267f-6da8-4f6c-9ff8-703a6e056913> | {
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Clan Paterson History
Paterson, or Patterson, is the Scottish version of ‘Patrick’s son’ or Patrickson’, and is a very common surname in Scotland.
Clan Pheadirean’s (Paterson) native lands were traditionally on Loch Fyne’s north side where many people by this name could be found.
Patterdale in Westmoreland (now modern day Cumbria, north west England) was once called Patrickdale, meaning ‘the dale or valley of Patrick’, and was once part of the ancient Scottish kingdom of Strathclyde.
In Aberdeen, in 1446, William Patrison and John Patonson were ‘gentillmen’ witnesses.
Donald Patyrson, in 1494, was made burgess of Aberdeen, and letters were issued against Patrick Patersoune in 1524 for defrauding the king’s customs.
A Robert Patersoun was recoded in 1544 as being ‘captaine of ane were schip of Dundee’, and there was a John Patersoune who reported owned land in Glasgow during the year of 1553.
Fyndlay Patersoune, in 1557, had a tack of the lands of Owar Elrick from Cupar Abbey.
Also in 1557, John Patersoun, custumar of Cupar, and David Petirsoun rendered to the Exchequer the burgh of Cupar’s accounts.
Burgess of Northberwyk (North Berwick) in 1562 was a John Patersoune, and a George was a monk in 1569 at Culross monastery in Fife.
The sheriff-depute of Inverness in 1530, James Patirsone, may be the same person as the James Patirsoun who was provost of Inverness, forty-three years later, in 1573.
One of the most famous Patersons in history is Sir William Paterson (April, 1658 – 22 January, 1719). Born in Tinwald in Dunfries and Galloway, he was the founder of the Bank of England in 1694, influential in the creation of the Bank of Scotland the following year, and was the man who conceived the ill-fated Darien Scheme.
According to one of the genealogies by the Farquharsons, “the Patersons in the North” are descendants of Patrick, the grandson of Ferquhard, and from whom the Farquharson clan take their name.
Clan Paterson Posts | <urn:uuid:c76c65f1-985e-4674-a101-110c54c6d352> | {
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|FEC, Forward Error Correction|
This is the means by which repair data is added to a media stream, such that packet loss can be repaired by the receiver of that stream with no further reference to the sender. There are two classes of repair data which may be added to a stream: those which are independent of the contents of the stream, and those which use knowledge of the stream to improve the repair process.
[RFC 3453] The Use of Forward Error Correction (FEC) in Reliable Multicast.
[RFC 5445] Basic Forward Error Correction (FEC) Schemes.
[RFC 3452] Forward Error Correction (FEC) Building Block.
[RFC 3695] Compact Forward Error Correction (FEC) Schemes. | <urn:uuid:41e0b860-253f-469c-b086-4e2cb084c4dc> | {
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Question: What is dementia?
Answer: The word dementia describes a set of symptoms caused by diseases or conditions which affect the brain. These include gradual memory loss, the ability to make decisions, solve problems or care for oneself.
Alzheimer's is the most common form of dementia affecting more than half a million people in the UK.
An early sign is memory loss followed by disorientation and changes in normal behaviour.
Some sufferers become emotionally disturbed and may wander, suffer hallucinations or become agitated and aggressive.
Most sufferers are over 65, but it can strike people in their 30s, 40s and 50s.
The disease shortens the life-span and is due to nerve cells in the brain slowly dying, although it is not known what causes this.
Vascular dementia is the second most common cause of dementia and is fatal due to diseased blood vessels in the brain.
It can be difficult for a doctor to differentiate between vascular dementia and Alzheimer's as a symptom of both is damaged vessels in the brain.
Walking problems are more likely to be due to vascular dementia. There are many subtypes of this form of dementia, including multi-infarct dementia due to mini strokes. Many patients have both Alzheimer's disease and vascular dementia.
Information supplied by the Alzheimer's Research Trust, tel: 01223 843899.
* If you know the answer to this question, or have a question of your own, write to Julie Cush, Evening Chronicle, Groat Market, Newcastle NE1 1ED. | <urn:uuid:f750bf74-224b-4ff5-9072-320eb51e0749> | {
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“Prevent Kitchen Fires” is the theme for this year’s Fire Prevention Week, which runs from Oct. 6th to the 12th. Safe Kids is joining the National Fire Protection Association to urge families to focus on smoke alarms, as well as take active measures to help prevent fires in their homes. Approximately 80 percent of all fire-related deaths and injuries occur in the home, and young children are at a higher risk because they lack the ability to escape a life-threatening fire situation.
Having a working smoke alarm reduces a person’s chances of dying in a fire by nearly half. We recommend that all parents and caregivers make sure they have a working smoke alarm on every level of the home, outside every sleeping area and in each bedroom. Installing these important safety devices could save the life of a loved one in case of an emergency.
- Keep matches, gasoline, lighters and all other flammable materials locked away, out of children’s reach.
- Keep children away from cooking and heating appliances, and never leave the kitchen while you are cooking. Use back burners and turn pot handles to the back of the stove when cooking.
- Never leave a burning candle unattended. Place candles in a safe location away from combustible materials and where children or pets cannot tip them over.
- Place space heaters at least 3 feet from curtains, papers, furniture and other flammable materials. Always turn space heaters off when leaving the room or going to bed.
- Test all smoke alarms every month and change the batteries once a year, even if they are hard-wired. Smoke alarms are also available with 10-year lithium batteries.
- Consider a home sprinkler system. The combination of smoke alarms and sprinklers can reduce your chances of dying in a fire by 82 percent.
- Set your water heater thermostat to 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Consider installing water faucets and shower heads containing anti-scald technology.
In an average lifetime, one in ten households will have a person injured in a fire. To prepare for an emergency, parents should plan several escape routes out of their home and then designate a safe place to meet. Then practice with your kids so they know exactly what to do. Also, teach children never to go back into a burning building, and to call the fire department from a neighbor’s home or a cell phone outside.
NFPA has organized National Fire Prevention Week annually since 1922. For more details visit www.firepreventionweek.org.
For more information about fire safety for children and families, contact Safe Kids Grand Forks at [email protected]. Altru Health System is proud to serve as the lead agency for Safe Kids Grand Forks. | <urn:uuid:cf61e4f8-6f97-47d0-84cf-2aec57c4ebbd> | {
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The 800,000 euro (1.2-million-dollar) Millennium Technology Prize has been awarded to an American professor, who is responsible for inventing controlled drug release.
Robert Langer, 59, is a chemical engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
He used controlled drug release for the first time in 1986, when he and neurosurgeon Henry Brem devised chemotherapy wafers used to treat brain cancer.
The wafer, the size of a small coin, releases the cancer drug slowly in the area from which a tumour has been removed, killing any remaining cancer cells on the spot and causing fewer side effects on other organs than traditional drugs.
This so-called intelligent drug release is also used to treat heart disease and other diseases.
Over 100 million people a year use advanced drug delivery systems, a number that is rising rapidly, according to the prize committee.
Langer has also made innovations in tissue engineering, including synthetic replacement for biological tissues such as artificial skin.
In the future, tissue engineering could revolutionise medical treatment that could affect millions of people, the jury said.
"Langer's innovations have saved human lives and improved the lives of millions of patients," Maria Makarow, chairwoman of the international selection committee said in a statement.
The Millennium Technology Prize was created in 2002 and is awarded every two years to celebrate "an outstanding innovation that directly promotes people's quality of life, is based on humane values and encourages sustainable economic development," according to its founding charter.
Funded by the Finnish state and several companies, it was first awarded in 2004 to Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, and in 2006 it was given to Shuji Nakamura, for his invention of LED light sources and the "blue laser." | <urn:uuid:d58b9387-56f4-4c24-9054-0b966a6a8141> | {
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Authorities in Beijing have pledged to improve the way they measure air quality amid accusations they massively underestimate pollution in the Chinese capital, state media said Wednesday.
Thick smog that blanketed the city on Monday and Tuesday highlighted a huge discrepancy between official data ranking the pollution at the time as "slight" and US embassy measurements ranking Beijing's air quality as "hazardous".
With growing numbers of Beijing residents trusting the American figures over their own government, the popular state-run Global Times newspaper said city authorities were considering overhauling their own measuring system.
"The Beijing bureau applies the current national standard, which is undergoing an amendment," the Global Times quoted Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau's Du Shaozhong as saying.
The discrepancy is because China currently only measures large particles that pollute the air, while the US system also includes the smaller particles that make up much of the pollution in Beijing, the paper said.
China currently measures particulate matter between 2.5 and 10 micrometres (393.7 microinches) in diameter, known as PM10.
Scientists say Beijing's pollution is mostly caused by fine particulates smaller than 2.5 micrometres, or PM2.5, which are considered more dangerous to human health.
"Technically we are ready to adopt the PM2.5 standard," Du said on his microblog site.
International organisations including the United Nations list Beijing as one of the most polluted cities in the world, mainly due to its growing energy consumption, much of which is still fuelled by coal.
The discrepancy between the two sets of figures has sparked a debate in Chinese media and among web users, with some saying they suffered from headaches and nausea and disputing the government's assessment of the pollution as "slight".
The Global Times on Monday urged the government to "be cooperative in avoiding confusing information" about air pollution.
"Figures by some local governments show the air pollution index is dropping in some cities, such as Beijing... But some Beijing citizens complain the figures do not match their experience," it said in an editorial.
Explore further: Pipeline that leaked wasn't equipped with auto shut-off | <urn:uuid:e6bb74db-3093-4106-9af5-cb4f99321adb> | {
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Challenge children to create a picture using only one shape. Watch their brains and artwork get into shape as they think creatively.
Pick one shape to use in your drawing such as triangle, square, rectangle, circle, diamond, oval, or octagon.
With Crayola® Crayons, outline a picture using only that one shape to form the objects and scene. Think creatively!
Complete your picture by coloring it.
Create lively designs just by folding paper! Fill in the shapes on creased paper with lots of color.
Long and short. Wavy and zigzag. Straight and curved. Wide and narrow. How many kinds of lines can you draw? Lots!
Experiment with dramatic geometric shapes! Create cool patterns with Crayola Twistables® Slick Stix™ super-bright colors
Children dive into this easy but fun ripple project without splashing a drop of water. They create an eye-catching pictu
Unleash your creativity with a blizzard of snowflakes, great for decorating the classroom or house.
Pixels! On computers and digital photos you don’t want to see them. With this lots-of-dots project, you create them---wi
Combine stacks of your favorite colors for some eye-popping art.
Art builds children's confidence and coordination. With these no-sew quilts kids discover the importance of patterns, co
Be sure to visit the all new CrayolaTeachers.ca online community for Canadian Educators with access to free lesson plans, educator resources and online shopping!
Visit us » | <urn:uuid:9db8cec4-874e-4df9-a952-9634996b2e04> | {
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Why do the planets rotate? What force cause them to rotate?
There is no force that causes the planets to rotate. Most of the rotation comes about from the conservation of angular momentum. Angular momentum is given by L=m*w*r2 where m is the mass, w is the angular velocity in radians per second, and r is the radius of the circular motion. Due to conservation of angular momentum, if the radius of the orbit decreases, then its angular velocity must increase (as the mass is constant).
All planetary and stellar systems are born from the collapse of dense interstellar clouds. The clouds may originally be very large (even thousands of light years across). Consider a portion of the cloud the collapses from a size of a light year or so to the size of the solar system. That is a huge change in the size of the system. So, the very slight rotation that the cloud has in the beginning is increased dramatically when the collapse takes place. In fact, this is one of the barriers in star formation: there is excess angular momentum and there has to be a way of losing angular momentum before you can form a star.
Anyway, the bottom line is that stars like the Sun spin from the original angular momentum that was there in the solar nebula from which it formed. Not only that, all orbital motion of the planets (including the spin) is due to this orginal angular momentum.
You are saying that original angular momentum of the cloud causes orbital motions and rotations of the planets(mostly). But in the case of orbital motions we have gravitational force that gives us some restrictions of movement(Kepler laws,for example).
What I am saying is that there will be no planets if there was no initial angular momentum in the primordial solar nebula. If a nebula with absolutely no rotation collapses, then there will only be a central non-rotating star and there will not be any planets. Planets form out of a protostellar disk, which itself forms only because of the initial angular momentum of the cloud. The dynamics of a rotating body is of course controlled by forces like gravity. Kepler's laws are a direct consequence of gravity.
Are there some laws also in the case of rotations?
The only thing that has to be kept in mind in rotation is that it results in a centrifugal acceleration that points radially from the center of motion. Hence, there has to be some force that conteracts this acceleration; otherwise the body will fly away (in case of orbital motion) or will disintegrate (in case of spinning). In the case of orbital motion, the counteracting force is gravity; gravity causes the body to continually fall towards the center, and this exactly conteracts the force resulting from the centripetal acceleration. In the case of a spinning object, it is the self-adhesion of the body itself that keeps it together. This results in a limit for how fast an object can rotate and still keep itself together. If it rotates too fast, the outward acceleration felt by the elements in the body may be more than the force that keeps them bonded together, and if this happens, the body breaks up. Other than this, there is no real law concerning rotations. (Note that rotational motion involves conservation of angular momentum just like linear motion conserves linear momentum).
This page updated on July 18, 2015. | <urn:uuid:6d6637c0-f193-487a-b652-1707c92c6b29> | {
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An eclipse is defined as the partial or total blocking of the light from one celestial body to another celestial body by an intervening body. This definition fits both solar and lunar eclipses. In a solar eclipse the intervening body, the Moon, passes between Earth observers and the sun. In a lunar eclipse the intervening body, the Earth, prevents light of the sun from reaching the Moon. Earth observers are in the middle during a lunar eclipse. In contrast, Earth observers are positioned at one end during a solar eclipse.
Eclipses are rather common in planetary systems with moons. Our Solar System has several intriguing planets with moon systems. Earth possesses perhaps the most fascinating satellite—one unusually large moon. Among planet/moon systems, it is an anomaly. It is the largest moon in the Solar System relative to the size of its planet. It is just over one fourth the diameter of Earth and about 1/80 the mass of Earth.
The Moon orbits the Earth in a plane similar to the plane of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. Their orbits are only about 5º from being coplanar. If the orbits of the bodies were precisely coplanar there would be either a solar or lunar eclipse with each Moon revolution. Many factors affect frequencies and types of eclipses. On average there is a total solar eclipse somewhere on earth every eighteen months. Including the more common partial or annular eclipses, 224 solar eclipses occur on Planet Earth in the 21st century. Only 68 total solar eclipses occur on Earth during this century. There are 230 lunar eclipses during this century with only 85 total lunar eclipses observable from Earth.
Multiple factors affect the frequency of both types of eclipses. The orbits of both the Moon and the Earth are elliptical, not perfect circles. Consequently, distances from the body around which they revolve are constantly changing, along with their orbital configurations, speeds, and apparent sizes. In turn, eclipse frequency, type of eclipse, duration, and other factors are impacted in numerous ways. We marvel at the skill of modern mathematicians who are able to predict future astronomical events accurately to fractions of a second years in advance, taking into account all the known motions of planets and their satellites. Even before the wonders of modern computing, the achievement of ancient mathematicians was astonishing. Encyclopedia Britannica claims “…the successful prediction of eclipses constitutes one of the earliest achievements of the scientific investigation of nature.”
The August 21, 2017 total solar eclipse is exceptional for United States residents. The shadow of the Moon crossing the entire US mainland has not occurred since 1918. A total eclipse of the Moon is many thousands of times more common than a total eclipse of the Sun at any Earth location. Total lunar eclipses occur about once per year and are generally visible to residents on half of the Earth’s surface. In sharp contrast, a total solar eclipse is visible at any given location on Earth only once in 300-400 years on average. Only people within a very narrow band of Earth’s surface are able to view it because by the time it reaches Earth’s surface the moon’s umbra (total shadow) is exceedingly tiny in relation to the size of the planetary sphere. On August 21, 2017 the shadow racing across the US is only about 70 miles wide. The shadow crosses the lower 48 states from the coast of Oregon to the coast of South Carolina in 91 minutes at an average speed of 1691 mph. At no point in this shadow will the spectacular totality last longer than 2 minutes 41 seconds. At the outer edge of the shadow the time of totality diminishes. Twelve million US residents live within this strip. On that day many additional millions who reside outside the path of totality may opt to journey up to a day’s automobile ride in order to view the spectacle. If they remain outside the narrow strip of total darkness they will observe a partial solar eclipse—a much more common event. All US residents located outside the narrow strip on August 21 will observe various degrees of partiality but they miss the “main event.”
Syzygy is an interesting term, not only because of its meaning, but also because of its unique spelling. All of these eclipse phenomena occur because of the alignment of three bodies in space: the Sun, the Earth, and the Moon. Now and again, these three bodies experience syzygy, a colinear configuration. In short, these bodies are directly in line. They are, therefore, joined together to produce an event of emotional and spiritual impact.
A popular animated NASA graphic shows the tiny shadow of the earth like a small dot (the umbra) zooming west to east across the entire United States along with the very wide path of partiality (the penumbra) encompassing all 50 states. Viewers of the partial solar eclipse are unable to see the sun’s corona, Baily’s beads, or the diamond ring effect. Partial eclipse viewers do not observe a dark, star-filled sky at mid-day, birds singing their evening sunset song, or their morning songs a few minutes later. These events call attention to the glory of the Creator. Total eclipse events “move us deeply and existentially.” We are able to appreciate where we are in the Solar System. | <urn:uuid:295e19ba-1239-4c36-b9dc-2d349aea4f8d> | {
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A new report from the Legacy Foundation highlights the lack of structural support within the public health community to combat the disproportionately high rates of smoking among LGBT individuals. Despite the fact that members of the LGBT community are abouttwice as likely to smoke as their heterosexual counterparts — largely due to minority stress, but also because the tobacco industry hasspecifically targeted LGBT Americans in their marketing campaigns over the past decade — Legacy notes that mainstream anti-smoking campaigns still tend to lack adequate LGBT representation to ensure their messages are having an impact on that population.
And the LGBT community itself doesn’t have enough infrastructure and capacity to address issues of tobacco use either, partly because LGBT leaders often don’t cite smoking as a pressing health concern for the members of their community. But high rates of smoking — and the subsequent increased risks of asthma attacks, lung cancer, and heart disease — is putting a strain on the well-being of LGBT Americans. According to some estimates, tobacco use causes at least 30,000 gay and lesbian deaths each year (PDF).
“It’s very likely that smoking is the single greatest health issue stealing years off the lives of LGBT people,” Dr. Scout, the director of the Network for LGBT Health Equity, explains in video that Legacy produced to accompany the report. “More LGBT civil rights leaders’ voices have been silenced by tobacco disparities than any other single thing. For me, tobacco is one of the biggest social justice issues.” Read More | <urn:uuid:ae6deb97-0368-4ade-a65b-ae1542289f59> | {
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This fun and easy superhero themed activity allows students to move around the room and work at their own pace identifying and performing various rhythms.
This game includes 10 rhythms using quarter rests. Students will walk around the room finding the hidden superhero rhythm cards. Students will then copy down the rhythm exactly from the card practicing writing the rhythms correctly. When all of their rhythms are completed, they may practice performing their rhythms. This game makes a great quick assessment for performance as well!
This download includes one pdf with:
-blank student worksheet
-10 rhythm cards (half page each)
This activity is also included in the "Superhero Write the Room Mega Pack" | <urn:uuid:5f667c03-cf4d-461e-91ac-d8ac04174704> | {
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The U.S. Department of Education (ED) has released guidelines on how schools can use Title I Part A funds to build or support preschool programs.
Schools or local education authorities can use their Title I monies to implement a preschool program or complement existing Head Start or child care programs. The latest guidelines do not impose new regulations on the use of the funds, but instead outline major tenets of successful preschool programs, including requirements for preschool teachers and paraprofessionals, and allowable uses of the funds, such as professional development for staff.
Strengthening the coordination between preschool and elementary schools is critical, as is providing high-quality early education opportunities for all students. NAESP applauds ED for providing this much-needed guidance.
To read more about NAESP’s efforts to strengthen P-3 alignment, click here.
-By Emily Rohlffs | <urn:uuid:14d76307-db38-4cc8-bb7b-0da8b119732c> | {
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About The Charts and Nutrition Facts
- For accuracy, the calorie chart and fat chart are based on the biggest serving size available.
- These nutrition facts came directly from the USDA or manufacturer/restaurant.
- If you're using a calorie counter, remember that Fat, Carbs, and Protein calories are just close estimations based on the Atwater factors:
Fat: 9 cal/g Carb: 4 cal/g Protein: 4 cal/g
- Percent Daily Values are based on a 2,000 calorie diet. Please remember this when using this information to make healthy food choices for your diet.
Calories - Total Calorie count at this serving size: 650 Calories. The calorie chart below shows the breakdown for Fat, Carbs, and Protein. In this case, Calories from Fat = 369, Calories from Protein = 144, and Calories from Carbohydrate = 124.
Fat - The Total Fat grams for one serving is 41 grams. Of this, 7 grams are from Saturated Fat and unfortunately Trans Fat is unknown. The remaining 34 grams are unaccounted for.
Cholesterol - Unfortunately, the amount of Cholesterol was not provided to us.
Carbohydrates - Total Carb count for one serving: 31 grams. Sugar: Unknown, Fiber: 4 grams, and Net Carbs: 27 grams (helpful to know if you're counting carbs).
Protein - At this serving size you'll get 36 grams of Protein per serving.
Minerals - Both Calcium and Iron content for this food is unknown.There are 1540 mg of Sodium in this food.
Vitamins - This food may contain unknown quantities of Vitamin A and Vitamin C -- we could not obtain the values in this case. | <urn:uuid:eefd6fb3-11b9-4f8f-8729-5c6d0051d10a> | {
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The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has awarded a team of researchers $5.08 million to study the potential of oilseed camelina as a biofuel feedstock.
According to USDA, the crop has shown good potential as an environmentally friendly commercial biofuel feedstock, particularly for biodiesel and jet fuel.
The goal of the project is to make oilseed camelina a cost-effective bioenergy and bio-based product feedstock, said lead researcher Xiuzhi “Susan” Sun.
“This project will generate substantial information that will build a foundation to make nonfood oilseeds a better resource for biofuels, chemicals and bioproducts, with minimal negative impact on food crop systems or the environment," said Sun, who is co-director of the Center for Biobased Polymers By Design and a professor at Kansas State University.
The funding is part of a $25 million effort by USDA's National Institute of Food and Agriculture to fund research and development of next-generation energy and high-value bio-based products from a variety of biomass (plant) sources.
RELATED: USDA awards payments to support producers of advanced biofuels
Previous studies indicated camelina-based jet fuel reduces net carbon emissions by about 80 percent, compared with jet fuels currently in use. It has been tested by the U.S. Navy and Air Force and the results have been promising, but Sun said that producing fuels from camelina is currently not economically viable. Obstacles include the fact that camelina production is not sufficiently efficient per unit resource used and camelina oil processing generates about 65 percent solid meal by-product, mainly proteins and carbohydrates that is currently under-utilized. The technology has not been developed to produce high-value co-products from camelina bioenergy varieties.
With an eye on those challenges, the researchers Chengci Chen of Montana State and Augustine Obour of the University of Wyoming will look for ways to enhance camelina production by optimizing cropping systems within wheat-based crop rotations in Montana and Wyoming, where preliminary work has already been done, Sun said.
Once harvested and processed, Sun will develop new technologies to chemically convert camelina oil and meal to a variety of adhesives, coatings and composites, thus adding value to the co-product.
She will work with Kansas State University's Donghai Wang, professor in the university's Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering, who will conduct fractionation and processing optimization research in collaboration with industries for commercialization potentials.
"Although camelina is currently grown in Montana and Wyoming, it will expand to the Northern Great Plains area, and it's possible that agricultural producers in Kansas might be interested in incorporating the crop into their cropping systems in the future," Sun said. | <urn:uuid:743fa1e8-b367-4757-abf8-b300ef87fa24> | {
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The Denisova Cave in Siberia’s Altai Mountains is known for being a unique place, where three different groups of humans lived in the last 100 K years: Denisovans, Neandertals and Modern Humans.
A finger phalanx (Denisova 3) and a molar (Denisova 4) from that site were published in 2010. Fortunately the genetic materials were preserved, allowing the Max Planck Institute to analyse the DNA. They resulted to be a new species, cousin of the Neandertals, named the ‘Denisovans’. Both species share a common ancestor, which in turn shares a common ancestor with Homo sapiens. Moreover, 0.5% of the genome of Denisova 3 was derived from a Neandertal population, probably related to the Neandertals that lived in the Denisova Cave.
Denisovans also interbred with some populations of Homo sapiens, contributing about 5% of the genome of some today’s Oceania people and 0.2% of the genome of Native Americans and main-land Asians.
Denisova 3 was a young girl and Denisova 4 was an adult male. A second molar was found in 2010 – thought to belong to a cave bear given its size and huge, splayed roots. This was later reconsidered to be a human tooth. Its DNA was analysed by the Max Planck Institute and published in 2015. It turned out to be another adult male Denisovan specimen (Denisovan 8), the third one we know so far.
What do we know about the Denisovan DNA?
- Nuclear DNA sequences from the two molars form a clade with the one of the finger phalanx. The three specimens were a single biological group.
- The mitocondrial DNA of Denisova 8 has accumulated fewer substitutions than the other two specimens. This means that he was present in the region aprox. 60 K years before the other two (c. 110 KYA). The Denisovans either occupied the region at least 110 to 50 KYA, or came into the region at least twice.
- The nuclear DNA sequence diversity among the three Denisovans is comparable to that among the Neandertals, but lower than that among today’s humans.
- The new genetic analysis shows less relationship to Neandertals than the analysis from 2010.
- Although the morphology of third molars is generally variable, both molars Denisova 4 and Denisova 8 are very large and lack traits typical of Neandertals and modern humans.
- The length of Denisova 8 is comparable to Pliocene hominins. Only two other Late Pleistocene third molars are comparable in size. The size of the two molars may suggest that large teeth is a Denisovan feature.
- The Denisovan molars also have massively flaring roots and relatively large and complex crowns. They show similarities with the Xujiayao teeth recently described by Xing S., Martinón-Torres M. et al. Large teeth and massive roots are indicative of massive jaws. Could this be the first clue of the Denisovan morphology?
- As resulted from the 2010 DNA analysis, the Denisova 3 phalanx carries a component derived from an unknown hominin who diverged 1–4 MYA from the lineage leading to Neandertals, Denisovans and today’s humans. That hominin could be Homo erectus, or another ancestor we have not found any fossil yet. This new study has no clear output concerning this component, which seems to differ among the three Denisovan individuals.
In March 2018 a new technique was applied to 5,639 whole-genome sequences from Eurasia and Oceania. This study concludes:
- There was Denisovan introgression in the specimens from East and South Asia and Papuans.
- At least two distinct instances of Denisovan admixture into modern humans occurred.
- There is a much closer Denisovan match among Han Chinese, Chinese Dai, and Japanese DNA sequences. | <urn:uuid:cf35ac18-cadc-4775-9ca8-9c703f427914> | {
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Gandhi’s birthday, or Gandhi Jayanti, is celebrated every year as the International Day of Non-Violence. The Mahatma, who was born on 2 October 1869, would have turned 140 this year.
"The America of today has its roots in the India of Mahatma Gandhi and the nonviolent social action movement for Indian independence which he led.
"We must renew our commitment to live his ideals and to celebrate the dignity of all human beings."
The praise comes a month after Mr Obama said that Gandhi would be his ideal dinner guest. Speaking to pupils at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia, he was asked what person, alive or dead, he would like to dine with.
He said: “I think it might be (Mahatma) Gandhi, who’s a real hero of mine.
“It would probably be a really small meal because he didn’t eat a lot.”
The President has been given a book of Gandhi quotes to mark the anniversary. The author of Quotes of Gandhi, Shalu Bhalla, had a copy of the book delivered to Mr Obama after she heard about his comments at Wakefield. | <urn:uuid:9d201a07-6cef-40fe-8a09-d28b02acbac1> | {
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How many times growing up did you hear, “Sit up straight!”
Your parents were right to be concerned about your posture!
Poor posture can be defined as when our spine is held in an unnatural position. When we think of our spine, it’s important to remember:
Your spine houses your nerves.
Your nerves control every aspect of your body.
According to the American Journal of Pain Management, posture affects and moderates every physiological function from breathing to hormone production.
Good or bad, posture affects:
- Lung capacity
- Blood pressure
- Hormone regulation
- Muscle and skeletal function
- Homeostasis and autonomic regulation (your body’s normal healthy state controlled without conscious effort)
When you have good posture, your body’s muscles, joints and ligaments work more efficiently, allowing your organs and nervous systems to function properly and as intended.
Physical symptoms of poor posture
- Upper or lower back pain
- Neck or shoulder pain
- Tension headaches
- Limb pain or numbness
Common causes of poor posture
- Past injuries or pain
- Mental and physcial stress
- Excess weight and/or a sedentary lifestyle
- Muscle weakness, tightness, weak core muscles
- Work demands and lifestyle choices
- Limited range of motion (muscle or joint)
- High heels and restrictive clothing
Help for poor posture
Make a habit to be mindful of your posture several times a day and work towards improvement.
- Pull your shoulders back and down your spine, bringing them in line with your neck
- Straighten and lengthen your spine
- Bring your shoulders and hips in line and engage your stomach muscles
- Be sure your head is positioned straight up from your neck
Helpful treatments to improve your posture
- Chiropractic adjustment
- Soft tissue manipulation – massage therapy
- Stretching to help with flexibility and range of motion
- Strengthening exercises
- Chiropractic advice for improved ergonomics in your home, work and active life
Your chiropractor can assess and diagnose your posture and determine the best methods, exercises and actions to help you improve your posture and spinal health. For more information or to book your chiropractic appointment for your postural assessment, please call our office: 519-258-8544 | <urn:uuid:21163788-26b1-479c-819e-b75022dc04a0> | {
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OCCUPATIONAL RESPIRATORY DISEASE SURVEILLANCE
Coal Workers' Health Surveillance Program (CWHSP) Resource List
What is Coal Workers’ Pneumoconiosis?
Coal Workers’ Pneumoconiosis is a lung disease caused by inhaling coal mine dust. Although some miners never develop the disease, others may develop the early signs after less than 10 years of mining experience. According to recent studies by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), about one of every 20 miners participating in our program has X-ray evidence of some pneumoconiosis.
In its early stages, called simple pneumoconiosis, the disease may not prevent you from working or carrying on most normal activities. In some miners, the disease progresses from simple to complicated pneumoconiosis, a condition called progressive massive fibrosis.
Unfortunately, there is no cure for the damage that the dust has already done to your lungs. However, preventing Coal Workers’ Pneumoconiosis is among the highest priorities in protecting the health of the coal miner. It is an effort that requires the commitment of you, the miner, as well as the coal mine operator.
How can I know whether I have Black Lung?
Pneumoconiosis may be detected on chest x-rays. The Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969, as amended by the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act of 1977, has created two x-ray programs.
The first program is for new coal miners and requires that when you begin working in underground coal mining, you must be offered a chest X-ray, either as part of a pre-placement physical examination or within six months after being hired. Three years later you must be offered a second chest X-ray. If this second examination reveals evidence of pneumoconiosis, you must be offered a third chest X-ray two years after the second.
The second program is for all miners working in an underground coal mine. You must be offered a chest X-ray approximately every five years during a six-month time period arranged by the coal mine and approved by NIOSH.
What else might the X-ray examination tell me?
In addition to providing an indication of whether or not you have pneumoconiosis, the X-ray examination may also reveal evidence of other medical disorders. Heart problems and certain other diseases such as tuberculosis and lung cancer may be detected through a chest X-ray.
To whom does NIOSH send the medical report?
No one will be notified of the results without your written permission.
How can I learn more about my transfer options?
If your chest X-ray indicates definite evidence of “BLACK LUNG,” you will receive a letter offering you a transfer option. The transfer option gives you the right to work at a job in the mine where the dust concentration is not more than 1.0 milligram per cubic meter of air. It is possible that the dust exposure on your current job already meets that level and you would not be entitled to a transfer.
If you exercise this transfer option, the coal company that you work for will be notified by MSHA. Before you exercise your transfer option, we recommend that you contact the MSHA District Office nearest you to discuss specifics and details about transfer options (see enclosed resource list).
What if I have any symptoms or health concerns?
If you have shortness of breath, cough or any other health concerns, we suggest you ask your doctor about them right away. Also, contact your doctor if the X-ray report mentions a health condition that requires medical follow-up, testing or treatment.
If you don’t have a regular doctor, you can find a doctor who knows about mining-related health problems at one of the U.S. Government-supported Black Lung Clinics. These clinics typically offer benefits counseling, treatment and testing, including chest X-rays, laboratory services, pulmonary function testing and education about respiratory diseases for miners and their families. Active, inactive and retired coal miners who suffer from chronic respiratory diseases are eligible for such services. Services vary from clinic to clinic, so check with your nearest Black Lung Clinic for specifics.
How can I learn about Federal disability benefits or compensation?
If you have been told by a physician that you have pneumoconiosis or other lung problems, you may have questions about whether you are eligible for any compensation from the Federal Government.
The Federal Black Lung Benefits Program is completely separate from the State Workers’ Compensation programs. Some miners may qualify for one program and not the other. The Federal program provides payments and medical treatment to coal miners who are totally disabled from pneumoconiosis (Black Lung) arising from their employment in or around the nation’s coal mines. In select cases, payments may be paid to eligible surviving dependents.
To find out about your eligibility for Federal Black Lung Benefits, contact the nearest Black Lung Benefits Office.
How can I learn about State disability benefits or compensation?
If you have been told by a physician that you have pneumoconiosis or other lung problems, you may have questions about whether you are eligible for any compensation from the State Government. Workers’ Compensation programs are different in every state, so you should contact your State Office of Workers’ Compensation.
Call now- if you don’t apply in time, you could lose your benefits forever.
How can I get a copy of my X-ray or find out more about my X-ray report?
NIOSH arranges for experts to review you chest X-ray and stores the film for future comparisons. If you need a copy or want more information about your chest X-ray, contact NIOSH.
National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
Coal Workers' Health Surveillance Program
1095 Willowdale Road- M/S LB208
Morgantown, WV 26505-2888
Toll Free: 1-888-480-4042
MSHA District Offices
|District 1 (Anthracite coal mining in PA)||Wilkes-Barre, PA||(570)826-6321|
|District 2 (Bituminous coal mining in PA)||Hunker, PA||(724)925-5150|
|District 3 (MD, OH, & Northern WV)||Morgantown, WV||(304)225-6800|
|District 4 (Southern WV)||Mt. Hope, WV||(304)877-3900|
|District 5 (VA)||Norton, VA||(276)679-0230|
|District 6 (Eastern KY)||Pikeville, KY||(606)432-0944|
|District 7 (Central KY, NC, SC, TN, Northeastern corner of AL & Northern GA)||Barbourville, KY||(606)546-5123|
|District 8 (IL, IN, IA, IN, MN, Northern MO & WI)||Vincennes, IN||(812)882-7617|
|District 9 (States West of Mississippi River, except for MN, IA & NORTHERN MO)||Denver, CO||(303)231-5458|
|District 10 (Western KY)||Madisonville, KY||(270)821-4180|
|District 11 (Central & Southern GA, FL, MS, PR & VI)||Birmingham, AL||(205)290-7300|
|District 12 (Southern WV)||Pineville WV||(304)253-5237|
Black Lung Benefits Offices
|Black Lung Office||PhoneNumber|
|NATIONAL OFFICE, U.S. Department of Labor-OWCP/DCMWC Washington, DC||(202)693-0824|
|Charleston, West Virginia||(800)347-3753|
|Mount Sterling, Kentucky||(800)366-4628|
|Parkersburg, West Virginia||(800)347-3751|
Black Lung Clinics
|PENNSYLVANIA||Altoona Regional Health System||Altoona, Pennsylvania||(814)889-2853|
|PENNSYLVANIA||Alveoli, Inc.- Lungs at Work||McMurray, Pennsylvania||(724)941-1650|
|PENNSYLVANIA||Centerville Clinics, Inc.||Fredericktown, Pennsylvania||(724)632-6801 x2258|
|TENNESSEE||Community Health of East Tennessee||Jacksboro, Tennessee||(423)563-1009|
|VIRGINIA||St. Charles Health Council||Pennington Gap, Virginia||(276)546-5310 x3103|
|WEST VIRGINIA||Black Lung Clinics Program, West Virginia Department of Health||Charleston, West Virginia||(304)558-7127|
|ALABAMA||Birmingham Health Care, Inc.||Birmingham, Alabama||(205)212-5653|
|COLORADO||National Jewish Health||Denver, Colorado||(303)398-1867|
|ILLINOIS||J. H. Stroger Hospital Black Lung Clinics Program||Chicago, Illinois||(312)864-2901|
|ILLINOIS||Shawnee Health Services & Development Corporation||Carterville, Illinois||(618)985-8221|
|KENTUCKY||Mountain Comprehensive Health Corporation||Whitesburg, Kentucky||(606)633-4823|
|KENTUCKY||Coal Miner Respiratory Clinic||Greenville, Kentucky||(270)338-8000 x301|
|NEW MEXICO||Miners’ Colfax Medical Center||Raton, New Mexico||(575)445-4585|
|OHIO||Ohio Black Lung Clinics Program, Ohio Department of Health||Columbus, Ohio||(614)644-8063|
State Offices of Workers’ Compensation
|ALABAMA||Workers’ Compensation Division||Montgomery, Alabama||(334)242-2868||(800)528-5166|
|ALASKA||Division Workers’ Compensation||Juneau, Alaska||(877)783-4980|
|ARIZONA||Industrial Commission||Phoenix, Arizona||(602)542-4661|
|ARKANSAS||Workers’ Compensation Commission||Little Rock, Arkansas||(501)682-3930||(800)622-4472|
|CALIFORNIA||Division of Workers’ Compensation||San Francisco, California||(415)703-5011||(800)736-7401|
|COLORADO||Division of Workers’ Compensation||Denver, Colorado||(303)318-8700||(888)390-7936|
|CONNECTICUT||Workers’ Compensation Commission||Hartford, Connecticut||(860)493-1500||(800)223-9675|
|DELAWARE||Office of Workers’ Compensation||Wilmington, Delaware||(302)761-8200|
|DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA||Office of Workers’ Compensation||Washington, District of Columbia||(202)671-1000|
|FLORIDA||Division of Workers’ Compensation||Tallahassee, Florida||(800)342-1741|
|GEORGIA||Board of Workers’ Compensation||Atlanta, Georgia||(404)656-3818||(800)533-0682|
|HAWAII||Disability Compensation Division||Honolulu, Hawaii||(808)586-9161|
|IDAHO||Industrial Commission||Boise, Idaho||(208)334-6000||(800)950-2110|
|ILLINOIS||Workers’ Compensation Commission||Chicago, Illinois||(312)814-6611||(866)352-3033|
|INDIANA||Workers’ Compensation Board||Indianapolis, Indiana||(317)232-3808||(800)824-2667|
|IOWA||Division of Workers’ Compensation||Des Moines, Iowa||(515)281-5387||(800)562-4692|
|KANSAS||Division of Workers’ Compensation||Topeka, Kansas||(785)296-2996||(800)322-0353|
|KENTUCKY||Office of Workers’ Claims||Frankfort, Kentucky||(502)564-5550||(800)554-8601|
|LOUISIANA||Office of Workers’ Compensation||Baton Rouge, Louisiana||(225)342-7555|
|MAINE||Workers’ Compensation Board||Augusta, Maine||(207)287-3751||(888)801-9087|
|MARYLAND||Workers’ Compensation Commission||Baltimore, Maryland||(410)864-5100||(800)492-0479|
|MASSACHUSETTS||Department of Industrial Accidents||Boston, Massachusetts||(617)727-4900||(800)323-3249|
|MICHIGAN||Workers’ Compensation Agency||Lansing, Michigan||(888)396-5041|
|MINNESOTA||Workers’ Compensation Division||St. Paul, Minnesota||(651)284-5005||(800)342-5354|
|MISSISSIPPI||Workers’ Compensation Commission||Jackson, Mississippi||(601)987-4200||(866)473-6922|
|MISSOURI||Division of Workers’ Compensation||Jefferson City, Missouri||(573)751-4231||(800)775-2667|
|MONTANA||Employment Relations Division||Helena, Montana||(406)444-6543|
|NEBRASKA||Workers’ Compensation Court||Lincoln, Nebraska||(402)471-6468||(800)599-5155|
|NEVADA||Division of Industrial Relations||Carson City, Nevada||(775)684-7260|
|NEW HAMPHSHIRE||Workers’ Compensation Division||Concord, New Hampshire||(603)271-3176||(800)272-4353|
|NEW JERSEY||Division of Workers’ Compensation||Trenton, New Jersey||(609)292-2515|
|NEW MEXICO||Workers’ Compensation Administration||Albuquerque, New Mexico||(505)841-6000||(800)255-7965|
|NEW YORK||Workers’ Compensation Board||Albany, New York||(518)462-8880||(877)632-4996|
|NORTH CAROLINA||Industrial Commission||Raleigh, North Carolina||(919)807-2501||(800)688-8349|
|NORTH DAKOTA||Workforce Safety and Insurance||Bismarck, North Dakota||(701)328-3800||(800)777-5033|
|OHIO||Bureau of Workers’ Compensation||Columbus, Ohio||(800)644-6292|
|OKLAHOMA||Workers’ Compensation Court||Oklahoma City, Oklahoma||(405)522-8600||(800)522-8210|
|OREGON||Workers’ Compensation Division||Salem, Oregon||(503)947-7810||(800)452-0288|
|PENNSYLVANIA||Bureau of Workers’ Compensation||Harrisburg, Pennsylvania||(717)783-5421||(800)482-2383|
|PUERTO RICO||Industrial Commission||San Juan, Puerto Rico||(787)781-0545|
|RHODE ISLAND||Division of Workers’ Compensation||Cranston, Rhode Island||(401)462-8100|
|SOUTH CAROLINA||Workers’ Compensation Commission||Columbia, South Carolina||(803)737-5700|
|SOUTH DAKOTA||Division of Labor & Management||Pierre, South Dakota||(605)773-3681|
|TENNESSEE||Division of Workers’ Compensation||Nashville, Tennessee||(615)741-2395||(800)332-2667|
|TEXAS||Division of Workers’ Compensation||Austin, Texas||(512)804-4000||(800)252-7031|
|UTAH||Labor Commission, Division of Industrial Accidents||Salt Lake City, Utah||(801)530-6800||(800)530-5090|
|VERMONT||Workers’ Compensation Division||Montpelier, Vermont||(802)828-2286||(800)734-2286|
|VIRGINIA||Workers’ Compensation Commission||Richmond, Virginia||(877)664-2566|
|VIRGIN ISLANDS||Workers’ Compensation Administration||St. Thomas, Virgin Islands||(340)776-3700||(800)809-8477|
|WASHINGTON||Insurance Services Division||Tumwater, Washington||(360)902-5800||(800)547-8367|
|WEST VIRGINIA||OFFICES OF INSURANCE COMMISSION||Charleston, West Virginia||(304)558-3386||(888)879-9842|
|WISCONSIN||Workers’ Compensation Division||Madison, Wisconsin||(608)266-1340|
|WYOMING||Workers’ Compensation Division||Cheyenne, Wyoming||(307)777-5476|
- National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
TTY: (888) 232-6348
- New Hours of Operation
- Contact CDC-INFO | <urn:uuid:1709956b-fd5b-47ff-885b-b45de5c7c316> | {
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Combat Capability [42%], Role and Missions, Structure of the Navy, in-service ships, surface ships, submarines, chronology.
|Tell a friend||Print version|
Russian Marines Took Beirut and Paris
Guards Company in Paris in 1814. Painting by Ivan Rozen, 1911.
When creating his Navy, Tsar Peter I knew that at sea, besides seamen, one also needed soldiers for assault action on shore. The scattered former boarding teams were not suitable for the new tasks. With his typical grandeur, Peter charged the General Admiral Fedor Golovin with creating a unified marine regiment. The latter gave the respective order to the Vice Admiral Kruys on November 16, 1705. This date marks the beginning for the count of the glorious years of the Russian Naval Infantry.
GLORIOUS BEGINNINGEven the great past cannot consist of only victories and successes. One can also learn from mistakes of the past days. The first years of the marines’ existence were far from rosy. The responsibility for the marines was split half-and-half between the land and the naval military departments. As a result, each of the departments strived to avoid their responsibilities, and soldiers were missing basic necessities. Not only was the salary not paid in time – even the military uniforms were not provided. Had it not been for the Tsar Peter’s efforts, the marines would have ended up stuck somewhere between the land and the sea.
The Tsar’s efforts paid off in the battle of Gangut on July 27, 1714. The regular Russian Naval Infantry was “baptized by fire.” With participation of the Galley Squadron battalion, 9 Swedish flotilla vessels were captured, including the flagship, the 18-cannon pram Elephant. On May 24, 1719, the first battle of the Russian sailing fleet in the open sea took place. Captain of the 2nd Rank Naum Senyavin’s squadron attacked the Swedish ship, the frigate, and the Captain Commodore Wrangel’s brigantine, and forced them to surrender. The outcome of the battle was decided by skillful maneuvering and well-aimed cannon fire, but the marines played their role, losing three people.
In 1720, the Navy Regulations came out, defining the seamen’s and the marines’ position in the Navy. This fundamental document, developed under the guidance of Peter I, turned out to be so successful that it was used, with a small interruption, for more than a hundred years. In general, Peter’s reforms were many years ahead of the Army and Navy’s development. For the first time in 1719, the regular Naval Infantry received special color uniforms, made of cornflower blue cloth. However, these were worn on special occasions only, and the regular sailor’s tunic was still the everyday’s uniform.
The Russian Naval Infantry made its first appearance in the Black Sea basin in the spring of 1736. The free battalion, recruited from two regiments, together with the Don Army of General Pyotr Lacy, went to fight the Turks to regain Azov. The mission stretched over several years. The year after taking the fortress, the Don Army undertook an unprecedented march to Crimea following the narrow Arabat Spit.
In 1738, the battalion, together with the ships of the Don Flotilla, sailed out on boats. But this time, the Turks were prepared to meet them. Their fleet blocked the Russian boats by the Fedotova Spit. In two days, the soldiers dug out a canal 8.5 m wide, dragged 119 boats over and re-buried the canal, blocking themselves from the enemy’s ships. But in a week, Turkish fleet rounded the Spit. The soldiers then grounded the boats, built batteries, and prepared for defense. For a month they exchanged fire with the Turkish ships. Since there was no way to break through by water, on June 15 the boats were burned, cannons sank in the sea, and the army headed for Azov by land. On August 8, 1738, having passed through low water steppes, the marines arrived at the fortress. They made part of its garrison until 1741, then returned to Petersburg.
The marines also had other uses. They were sent in mass to defend ports, wharves, and articles of war. Even the Kamchatka expedition of Vitus Bering included more than 40 soldiers and grenadiers. 7 of them died of exhaustion…
CATHERINE’S GOLDEN AGEAs a result, by the commencement of the Russo-Swedish War of 1741-1743, the marines fell into decline. Moreover, the most experienced ones, the “battle-seasoned naval veterans,” were transferred to serve as seamen. As a result, the ships had to carry regular infantry soldiers. This is what happens when the army is not used as intended. Only with the help of field infantry was it possible to carry out successful campaigns against the Swedes in the years 1742 and 1743.
For a long time the Navy had no luck; it was almost forgotten. However, the marines took part in the siege of the Prussian fortress Kolberg during the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763). Kolberg surrendered on December 5, 1761 and the way to Prussia was open, but Peter III, who ascended the throne, did not turn out to be a worthy successor of his eminent grandfather’s glorious deeds. Russia returned all that it conquered back to the Prussians…
However, as a result of a palace coup, Catherine II, a pure blood German, who, in contrast to her German-loving husband was a patriot of Russia, gained the throne. This marked the beginning of the Catherine’s Golden Age.
As is the tradition for the Russian Nation, beginning of a new rule was marked by yet more reforms. Yet another committee for setting order to the “Russian fleets and the Admiralty” was formed. On March 22, 1764, the Empress approved new staff positions for the Baltic Fleet. From now on, the marines’ purpose was to serve on ships only; the Galley fleet, in case of war, was supposed to be staffed by the soldiers of the Army regiments. As a result, the numbers of the marines grew to 8,100 people.
By this time, the new Russo-Trukish War had started (1769 – 1774), and the Russian marines, for the first time, sailed out into the deep seas. As part of the Admiral Spiridonov’s squadron, 1,006 marines (soldiers and officers), reinforced by three hundred men from the Keksholm Infantry, headed for the Mediterranean. The voyage from Kronstadt to Greece took the Russian squadron seven months. Over this time, disease claimed the lives of 400 seamen, soldiers, and gunmen. After gaining Port Vitilo, two Spartan Legions were formed with the local inhabitants. While some fortresses were seized, somewhere else a retreat had to be made under the pressure of the superior Turkish forces.
A marines’s company, equipped with four cannons and two “unicorns,” was formed for seizing the Modon fortress. They were joined by the “Spartans,” 800 Greeks and 100 Albanians, under the command of the Prince Yuriy Dolgorukiy. But once the mighty Turkish corps had arrived, the “legioners” took flight. 500 marines remained, face to face with 8 thousand Turks. Fighting, they began to break through to their own in Navarino. 150 soldiers and a captain were killed, 250 – wounded. One former service corps officer, Polyansky, demoted to common soldier “for inadvertence," distinguished himself in battle. He hid two banners on his chest, continued fighting and was wounded in his leg. Not able to walk, he passed the banners to the General Dolgorukiy and to the Second Major of the 1st Naval Battalion. For his heroic deed he was returned to his former officer rank.
The principal events of the campaign of 1773 were the battle by the Sirian coast and the two-month long siege of the Beirut fortress. From June 23 to September 29 of 1773, a large Russian landing party (around 1,000 people) engaged in military action on what is today the Lebanese coast. After the surrender of the fortress, the marines stayed in Beirut until January of 1774. During this campaign that lasted for years and was marked with quite a number of battles, all the marines were awarded with silver medals inscribed “To the Victors.” This was the first soldier award on a ribbon of the just established military Order of Saint George.
THE ARNAUTSThe Mediterranean expedition had one unexpected consequence. Thousands of local volunteers, Greeks, Albanians, Serbs, Montenegrins, joined the ships. In the beginning, they were all called the Albanians, or as Turks called them, the Arnauts. But later the Greeks insisted to be called according to their nationality. After the conclusion of the Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainarji in 1774, the sons of Hellas, together with their families, were brought to Russia. The Tsarina allotted them residence in the Crimean fortresses of Kerch and Yenikale. Hence, the naval fleet was reinforced with experienced fighters, although, in the peace time, they could not be used “outside their scope.” Later, Greeks were also allocated a place near Taganrog.
In 1777, the Crimean Tatars started an internecine war. Russia supported the Khan ?ahin Giray in his struggle with the pro-Turkish opposition. Here, too, the Albanian army showed their worth. The Greeks and the Arnauts showed they deserved the privileges and the benefits they were given. Later on, they were formed into a Greek Infantry Regiment. In 1788, the wives of the regiment’s officers formed an Amazon Company, the first female unit in the Russian Army. This was one of Potemkin’s surprises for Catherine II, who visited Taurida and the Crimea.
With the beginning of the Russo-Turkish War (1787-1791), the Greeks again found themselves in the zone of military action. A company of volunteers successfully attacked the Turkish merchant ships and accomplished other heroic acts. The following year, a full-fledged corsair flotilla was formed in Taganrog. Potemkin wrote to the Empress: “The cruising Greeks join bravely and readily. It would be good if our marines were like them.” But they didn’t just cruise, they also acted as landing forces, for instance, on 22 of April, 1778, in Constan?a, which they burned considerably.
England and France were not the only nations to have privateer ships. Lieutenant Lambro Dmitrievich Kachioni (Lambros Katsionis), commissioned officer for his valor, received in 1788 a “privateer license,” outfitted a ship using the money of the Greek community of the Austrian Trieste, put a team together and went to fight the Turks in the Archipelago. In October he came back to pass the winter, already having 9 ships and around 500 volunteers. He named his captured ships Velikiy Knyaz Konstantin (Great Duke Konstantin), Knyaz Potemkin-Tavricheskiy (Duke Potenkin-Tavricheksiy), Graf Aleksandr Bezborodko (Count Alexander Bezborodko), and so forth. Kachioni fought the Turkish Navy, the Algerians and their allies, and captured fortresses and islands. Only the superior forces of the Turks and the Algerians, attacking one day apart, robbed the Russian Corsair of 5 out of 7 ships. He was wounded himself. The Empress promoted the brave Greek to General and awarded him with the Order of Saint George of the 4th Degree.
His war was not finished with the conclusion of armistice. He continued to act in the Mediterranean with a squadron of 22 vessels. Only a powerful Turkish fleet, with the support of French ships, could break his resistance. For three days, the enemy stormed his base Porto-Kayo with superior forces. The Greeks scattered. In the night, Kachioni slipped out on a skiff and continued his service already in Petersburg. He is regarded a national hero in his historical homeland. Incidentally, 300 Greeks from his flotilla settled in Odessa.
The Greek battalions that included the settlers took part in battles more than once. Thus, the Balaklava Battalion took part in all the landing party operations of the Russo-Turkish War of 1806-1812. The battalion Commander Revelioti reached the rank of Major General. In the summer of 1812, he, still a Lieutenant Colonel, scattered the insurgent Tatars who rebelled after Napoleon’s invasion.
Even in 1842, two companies of the Balaklava Battalion took part in Caucasian expeditions, while regularly serving in Novorossiysk. The Balaklava fighters distinguished themselves in the Crimean War as well, when literally a handful of Greeks, 80 soldiers and 30 retirees, stood up to protect their city against the English divisions with an artillery and 20 ships, who were bombarding the ruins of the old Genoese fortress where the brave men had their stronghold. They fulfilled their duty to the end. An 18-year old non-commissioned officer Georgiy Bambuka was later on awarded three Crosses of St. George for valor in combat. The Battalion was dismissed in 1859 by Alexander II, and the Greeks became peaceful residents…
AGAINST NAPOLEONOne of the most outstanding heroic deeds of the Russian marines was the storm of the Corfu fortress. This story is well known; it’s only worth noting that the Russian losses (the Turkish allies refused to participate in the storm) in the furious fight amounted to: 1 lieutenant, 2 non-commissioned officers, 7 grenadiers, and 15 fusiliers. There were a little over 40 wounded. Nevertheless, in the Soviet movie about the Admiral Ushakov’s squadron’s campaign, “Ships Storm the Bastions,” Russian blood literally flows like water and the killed fall by dozens. The Russian marines' distinction was that they fought bravely and skillfully, and therefore sustained much less casualty than the opponent. Altogether, the squadron’s ships carried 2,056 servicemen of the Black Sea Fleet battalions.
On June 3, 1799, Lieutenant Commander Belli’s landing forces attacked the Saint Magdalene Bridge in Italy, and, losing three wounded, captured a 6-cannon battery. Pursuing the French, the marines entered Naples. In the meantime, an enemy’s 1000-men strong column approached the Russians from the rear. Belli sent Lieutenant Alexander to meet it, with 100 soldiers, 30 seamen, and 2 weapons. After several gun shots had been fired, the party charged with the bayonets. In the course of a four hour battle, the non-commissioned officer Roman Linev "had the fortune of taking from the enemy’s crowding army their banner,” for which act he was later made Lieutenant by Pavel I. 300 Frenchmen were killed in the bayonet fight by the marines, 60 men and 5 cannons were captured. The marines lost 3 people and 8 were wounded.
A company with barely 500 fighters liberated the entire kingdom of Naples. Emperor Pavel at once conferred the rank of Captain of the 2nd Rank on the Lieutenant Commander Belli and awarded him with the Order of St. Anna of the 1st Degree, in status – a general's award, a unique case in the history of the imperial award system. 7 non-commissioned officers of his company were made lieutenants.
Yet another reform of the naval department resulted in creation on February 16, 1810, of a Guards Company. The following year, in wait of the war with Napoleon, the marine regiments were included in the infantry divisions to prepare them for combat activity on land. During the Great Patriotic War of 1812, seamen of the Guards Company took care of water crossings, destroyed stores of provision and watermills. They also built crossings over the numerous rivers by Borodino, then, under the enemy fire, destroyed the bridges over Koloch, preventing the French from attacking in this sector.
When the invaders were chased away past Berezina River, the bridges had to be built again, with the seamen often working in ice-cold water. Seamen were getting cold, sick, and dying. Throughout the war, 22 men of the Guards Company were killed and 31died of wounds and disease. After crossing the Niemen, 170 people had to be left in the hospitals. On may 9, 1813, the day of their company celebrations, the guardsmen fought stoically by Bautzen. Then there was the battle of Kulm, at the end of which, the commanding officer of the French, the General Vandamme, surrendered to the Captain of the 2nd Rank Kolzakov, else he would not be able to save himself from the Cossacks. At Kulm, 75% of officers and 38% of low rank men of the Guards Company were wounded or killed. The Guards Company was the first of the Russian Navy to receive the St. George’s Flag. The Prussian king also awarded all the guardsmen with the decoration of the Iron Cross. In 1910, the Iron Cross became the basis of the regimental badge of the Guards Company.
The marine regiments were involved in action in various battlefront sectors, took part in many battles, besieged Danzig, and seized Paris.
THE KAMCHATKA HEROESIn the course of the Eastern War, which in Russia is habitually called the Crimean War, the Russian seamen had to face the enemy’s marines for the first time. This battle did not take place in Crimea by Sevastopol, but in the distant Kamchatka. In France it was deemed the “defeat that shamed the flag.” In Great Britain – “an ineffaceable stain in history.”
The book describes in detail, how the seamen of the 47th Company and the frigate Aurora prepared for defense of the city, built batteries and trained clerks for gunnery (due to a shortage of people). Part of the garrison consisted of recruits from infantry regiments who had already served for four years and many of whom used to be Siberian hunters. The first bombardment of Petropavlovsk was done by six Anglo-French ships that had just arrived, on August 18, 1854.
On August 20, several hundred allies landed on the shores, and soon the French were occupying the battery abandoned by the Russians. But at this moment, they were mistakenly hit by well-aimed fire from the English steamship, followed by an even better-aimed gun fire from the Aurora and the transport ship Dvina. Seeing the approaching forces of the garrison, the landing party quickly returned to the ships. After the exchange of artillery fire, having sustained some damage, the enemy ships were about to retreat, but then managed to capture two seamen from the American vessel on the shore not far from the city. The seamen told them about a convenient road, leading to Petropavlovsk from the rear.
At the dawn of August 24, 676 people landed on the shores. The English straddled the Nikolskaya Hill, from where all of Petropavlovsk lay open to eye. They had to be counterattacked. One of the enemy’s (French) units swooped around the flanks but was met by the clerk-gunners and a group of Cossacks. Due to the shortage of cannonballs and case shots, the cannons were loaded even with nails. The maneuver failed and the English on the hill, lacking support, ended up hostages of the situation. Another group of Frenchmen moving along the shore came under fire. Losing several people, it ascended the hill, joining the English. Gradually, the Russian units were also flowing in, gathering 267 people against 500 allies on the eastern slope of the mountain. A small unit under the Sub-Officer Mikhailov ascended the northern slope, unnoticed, and found itself in the very midst of the enemy. Recruit Suntsov killed an officer with his very first shot, who turned out to be the landing party commanding officer Parker. A vehement hand-to-hand combat broke out in the thick bushes.
Detailed descriptions of the battle and names of those who distinguished themselves are preserved in the reports: Stepanov, Yakovlev, Kislov, Non-Commissioned Officer Abubakirov, Seaman Biknei Dindubaev, Seaman of the 1st Rank Khalit Saitov who killed three enemy men with his bayonet. Not familiar with the area, the allies were falling to death from the steep slopes. When trying to evacuate, they ended up in plain site and sustained losses from well-aimed small arms fire. 16 local volunteers Kamchadals, who “typically aim to hit beavers in the head to avoid damaging the fur,” did an especially good job selectively hitting officers and sergeants. Lieutenant Burasse, commander of the landing troop vessels, was killed. The five-hour battle ended in total defeat of the aggressors.
The victory came at a high cost. 31 lower rank men were killed. In another communal grave, 38 allies were buried. They managed to transfer some of the killed onto the ships. The Kamchatka expedition cost the English and the French 210 men – 59 killed or dead of wounds and 151 wounded. Four were captured. But most importantly, the British marines’ banner remained on shore. On August 27, the squadron got under way, back to where it came from…
The Petropavlovsk victory became that rare case of a victory not disputed abroad. And no one tries to come up with deceitful excuses for failure. | <urn:uuid:d3856b26-1240-4990-b564-940ce92db06b> | {
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