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DNA Is Indicator in Effort to Lower Cholesterol
It has long been understood that when trying to lower cholesterol genetics make it easy for some and difficult for others. That is because the two main factors that contribute to how your body manufactures and stores cholesterol are family history and diet. You can control your diet by eating a low cholesterol, low fat menu, but you can’t help your genetic make up. Scientists are now able to explain why some people are genetically disposed to having high cholesterol, no matter how well they eat.
Researchers working together from Yale and Syracuse Universities have been able to find a direct link between a mutation in mitochondrial DNA and high cholesterol and high blood pressure. What was not known until recently was the connection between these mutations and the risk for high cholesterol. Metabolic syndrome, which is defined loosely as having several risk factors for heart disease – 5 or more, may be caused by the malfunctioning of mitochondrial DNA. If you have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes, are obese, AND have high triglycerides, then you have metabolic syndrome.
To make the connection between genetics and mitochondrial mutation, four generations of the same family were evaluated which included 142 people. The findings were that the mutations did not cause all of the individuals in the family to have the same symptoms.
Understanding that mitochondrial DNA mutation has a direct impact on cholesterol levels gives nutritionist and doctors one more fact to use in helping people lower cholesterol. If one family member has high blood pressure and triglycerides because of the mutation, then they are perhaps at greater risk for high cholesterol and can take action now to prevent it from causing irreversible damage to their arteries.
To lower cholesterol naturally, without prescription drugs, and to keep your cholesterol levels in check even if you have a family history you can begin with the right diet and exercise. The plan is described in detail in The 60-Day Prescription Free Cholesterol Cure by Frank Mangano.
“Discover How To Lower Cholesterol Naturally, Eliminate Harmful Prescription Drugs, And Maintain A Healthy, Stress-Free Life. A Simple But Incredibly Powerful Plan You Can Begin Using Today To Achieve Optimum Cholesterol Health! Click Here Now!”
Copyright Notice - The above article is the copyrighted property of 60DaysToLowerCholesterol.com. This article may not be reproduced on another website, book, or publication without express written permission from Frank Mangano. Any reproduction of this article without the explicit written permission of Frank Mangano and 60DaysToLowerCholesterol.com is strictly prohibited.
© Mangano Publishing Corporation. All Rights Reserved
Understanding Cholesterol Articles
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Changes in ocean circulation cause largest freshening event in NE Atlantic in 120 years
A change in the routing of fresh water coming from the Arctic has led to a remarkable reduction in salinity in the North Atlantic Ocean west of the UK, according to research published this week in Nature Communications.
An enormous area between UK and Iceland had record-breaking low salinity at the surface by 2016 – the lowest since records began in 1895.
Lead author, Professor Penny Holliday from the National Oceanography Centre (NOC), said “This is the first time the physical process causing this reduction in salinity has been identified. This helps us build a picture of the factors influencing environmental conditions, including looking to see whether existing models can reproduce it.”
“We care about the environmental conditions because they can impact ecosystem health, and knowing how things are changing is a key step towards managing our marine resources sustainably.”
Led by NOC scientists and co-authored by the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS), this study shows that in 2012 to 2016 unusual wind patterns forced Arctic fresh water carried by the Labrador Current away from the eastern North American continental shelf. The cold, fresh water was directed into the North Atlantic Current which carried it towards the UK and Iceland.
An unexpected and rapid decrease in salinity, known as the ‘North Atlantic fresh blob’ developed while the region was also cooling and developing a feature known as the ‘North Atlantic cold blob’.
Recent research has suggested that the ‘cold blob’ was caused by a combination of high heat loss from the ocean surface to the atmosphere and by a slow-down of a large-scale system of ocean currents carrying heat northwards, referred to the Atlantic Ocean Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).
This new study emphasises the importance of changes in the local currents of the subpolar region, and in particular in the pathways of fresh water from the Arctic, in changing the environmental conditions of the North-East Atlantic Ocean.
The change in the pathway of the Arctic water carried by the Labrador Current has implications for the North West Atlantic too; the regions that were receiving the cold, fresh and nutrient-rich Arctic water before 2012 include the Gulf of Maine, which has experienced damaging marine heatwaves and high salinity in recent years.
Professor Penny Holliday explains “Changes in environmental conditions in the eastern North Atlantic and in the Gulf of Maine have recently been attributed to changes in the AMOC and local heat loss. This new study shows the importance of winter wind patterns and local ocean circulation changes in determining the fate of Arctic waters and the subsequent environmental change.”
This research forms part of the Blue-Action project, which aims to understand and simulate links between the Arctic and the global climate system, and the Arctic’s role in generating weather patterns associated with hazardous conditions and climatic extremes.
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Here is the beginning of his post, which is actually quite long and informative, so go read the whole article.
Read the whole article.
The other day I was preparing for the fifth session of a six-week Introduction to Meditation and Buddhism class I’m teaching at Aryaloka, my local dharma center. I’d been running through the Buddha’s Eightfold Path, which of course is a key teaching, and in glancing over some of the suttas (scriptures) that deal with mindfulness — the seventh aspect of the Eightfold Path — I had a series of thoughts about the Four Foundations of Mindfulness (cattāro satipaṭṭhāna), which are the standard explanation of “Right Mindfulness.”
The Problematic Satipaṭṭhānas
The Four Foundations of Mindfulness are a crucial teaching in the Buddhist tradition. As well as constituting the definition of Right Mindfulness in the Eightfold Path, they feature in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta (MN 10) and the Mahā-Satipatthana Sutta (DN 22). The four Satipaṭṭhānas form an important part of the Ānāpānasati Sutta, which is itself a key teaching. Additionally there is whole section on the satipaṭṭhānas in the Saṃyutta Nikāya, containing 104 discourses. The satipaṭṭhānas are of course frequently referred to by many teachers, and entire books have been based around them. Lastly, the practice of the four satipaṭṭhānas is described in the canon as the “direct path” to Nibbāna, emphasizing their importance.
We might expect that such a key teaching would be clearly and consistently understood, but despite their central importance in Buddhist practice, the four satipaṭṭhānas are problematic. One only has to look at the variety of translations of the four terms kāya, vedanā, cittā, and dhammā, in various accounts of this teaching. The following are chosen more-or-less randomly:
- Bhikkhu Thanissaro has Body, Feelings, Mind, and Mental Qualities
- Joseph Goldstein (One Dharma): Body, Feelings, Mind & Mental States, and Dharma
- Bhikkhu Bodhi (Middle Length Discourses): Body, Feeling, Mind, and Mind Objects
- Bhikkhu Bodhi (A Comprehensive Manual of Abhidhamma): Body, Feelings, States of Consciousness, and Mental Objects
- Sangharakshita (Know Your Mind): Body, Feelings & Emotions, Thoughts, and Ultimate Reality
Even one author will not be consistent in their explanations. Bhikkhu Bodhi has two subtly different version above, and Sangharakshita has also parsed the Four Foundations as Body, Feelings, Thoughts, and Objects of the Mind’s Attention.
The only one of the satipaṭṭhānas that is universally straightforward is the first: the body (kāya). While I’ll describe each of the four satipaṭṭhānas in more detail later, we can note that the second, vedanā, is best described as “feeling” and not as “sensation” (as is sometimes seen) or (with the greatest respect to Sangharakshita) “feelings and emotions.” The third satipaṭṭhāna, cittā, means “mind” and of course this involves both thought and emotion. It’s the last term, dhammā, that causes most confusion. For one thing, the word dhammā is famously broad. For example, it can refer to “reality,” or it can refer to the system of paths and practices that lead to the perception of that reality, or it can refer to something more like “things” or “phenomena.” Some interpreters (Goldstein, Sangharakshita) have chosen to go with the interpretation of “dhammā” as meaning “reality.” Others (Thanissaro, Bodhi) have gone with the interpretation of dhammā-s as being mental phenomena. Some writers leave it untranslated, which may or may not be helpful.
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According to a new report in the journal Science, the aggressive ladybug’s dominance is being assisted by parasites being carried within its own bloodstream that are highly lethal to other species.
“They keep them inactive in their own blood, we don’t understand how they do it yet,” co-author Heiko Vogel from the Max Planck Institute (MPI CE) for Chemical Ecology told BBC News. “But when the other [ladybugs] start to attack the invader’s eggs and larvae, they become active and kill the native ones.”
When the German biologists looked at the Asian lady beetle’s haemolymph, or blood, under a microscope, they were able to identify the tiny parasites: fungi called microsporidia. While the fungi are present in the eggs and larvae of the invasive species, they appear to exist in a dormant and harmless state.
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We have been working since 2009 to re-establish a bay scallop population to seaside bays where they have been functionally extinct since 1933.
Scientists at the Eastern Shore Lab study the winter foraging ecology of two sea duck species: Surf Scoters and Long-tailed Ducks. This is one of the first research projects to examine both species simultaneously in Chesapeake Bay and in coastal bays along the Atlantic margin of the Delmarva Peninsula.
This study will explore whether certain species of macroalgae, or seaweeds, could be integrated effectively into local oyster aquaculture industries.
Live water quality monitoring from the ESL Pier at Wachapreague.
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March 4, 2002 12:35 PM PST
Scripting flaw ripe for Web worm
As previously reported by CNET News.com, the flaws occur in server modules using the PHP Web scripting language. PHP originally stood for Personal Homepage, but as the language's functionality increased, the name was changed to PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor to better reflect its general usage. The language is widely used among sites built on open-source software and allows such sites to create Web pages on the fly.
David Dittrich, senior security engineer at the University of Washington, stressed that while the technical nature of the flaws would make creating a worm more difficult, the Net is rife with groups that have the wherewithal and knowledge to pull off the job.
"It's just a matter of time before someone does a worm," Dittrich said, adding that systems administrators who have Web sites running a flawed version of PHP should patch their version as soon as possible.
Last Wednesday, a member of the PHP Group posted details of a handful of flaws that could be exploited to take over Web servers that use version 3.0.10 to version 4.1.1 of the PHP software. By gaining control of the Web server software, attackers could deface any sites hosted by that server or take advantage of their position to issue system commands to the server.
Two days later, U.K.-based Internet research group Netcraft released its monthly survey of Web sites, indicating that nearly 8.4 million sites were hosted by servers that use a vulnerable version of PHP. One million of those sites are vulnerable to attack, the survey said.
Based on that data alone, the PHP flaws could be as dangerous as the indexing server ISAPI filter flaw in Microsoft's Internet Information Server that made the Code Red worm possible, said Marc Maiffret, chief hacking officer for network protection company eEye Digital Security.
"This could easily turn out to be a Code Red or bigger if someone is so inclined," Maiffret said. eEye initially identified the indexing server flaw in April and notified Microsoft. When the software giant announced the flaw in June 2000, Netcraft's survey indicated that nearly 6 million sites on the Internet could be vulnerable. Sites do not directly correspond to servers, however, and it's not known how many of those sites were actually vulnerable.
What is known is that on July 19, 2000, nearly 360,000 servers were compromised by a modified version of Code Red, according to the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis. Evidence at the time indicated that the worm saturated the Internet, infecting almost every server that was vulnerable and accessible.
There may be hints that just such a worm is already under development in the Internet underground, Maiffret said.
A program that makes use of the vulnerability to compromise systems, a tool known as an exploit, has been circulated among security professionals and hackers on the Internet. One part of the code includes a function to generate random Internet addresses, useful to a worm program or automated scanner for selecting the next victim from the Internet at large, Maiffret said.
The actual exploit apparently doesn't use the function, leaving some security experts speculating that it could be part of an unfinished program.
"Right now, we're waiting to see what happens," Maiffret said. "Nothing so far, but everybody is watching for it."
Online vandals intent on building such a worm will not find the job easy. Where the index server ISAPI flaw could easily be exploited by a simple program, an online vandal looking to create a PHP worm would have a lot more work to do, said Rasmus Lerdorf, a PHP project member.
Because different versions of the software are susceptible to a different subset of the flaws, a worm would have to be programmed to detect the configuration of each host and attack with the right piece of code.
"They would have to write four or five exploits," Lerdorf said. "They would need to know a lot more. All you had to do with the (Code Red flaw) is put colon-colon after a URL, and poof, you screw up the Web server."
In addition, Web servers typically run with limited privileges, not in "super user" mode, which allows nearly unlimited privileges to those with access. On properly secured servers, that difference could make it much more difficult to control the infected computer.
That may play in the favor of PHP-enabled Web site administrators, said Stefan Esser, another member of the PHP Group and the author of the advisory on the scripting flaws.
"PHP is an open-source project, and users of open-source products are often--in my experience--more aware of security issues than users of Microsoft products," Esser said. "I am pretty sure open-source users will upgrade faster than Microsoft users. The most important sites all have upgraded by now."
Still, to stop potential worms from affecting the Internet, more than just the major Web sites need to upgrade.
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It’s a parenting tip echoed from one generation to the next: “Don’t fight in front of the kids.” But many parenting experts believe it's not the actual fighting that upsets kids: it's the way in which parents argue. So how does inter-parental conflict affect children? Is it ever okay for parents to argue in front of the kids?
Warren Cann, CEO of Parenting Research Centre, says the impact of parental conflict on kids depends on the severity and frequency of the conflict, and the way it is resolved. “Severe parental conflict is very damaging to children,” he says. “Ongoing, high level conflict can lead to emotional and behavioural disorders in children and there is evidence that the effects can be long-lasting.”
The parents’ relationship creates the emotional climate for a home, explains Cann. “If that climate is stressed and hostile, then it can affect a child’s development.” It doesn’t have to be the loud fighting variety either, Cann points out. Even when there’s no arguing, unspoken hostility can cause distress. “It can be those long periods of stony, frosty silence,” he explains, adding that if these periods become extended it can have a serious impact.
Conflict increases with parenting
Whilst conflict is a part of any relationship, it increases when you become a parent. “Research shows that stress levels rise significantly after the birth of the baby,” says Cann. “Conflict increases with stress and stress increases with parenting - it’s how parents manage conflict that can either be helpful or harmful to kids.”
“What inevitably happens when you have a baby is the relationship goes on the backburner,” explains Cann. He has this important message: Attending to your relationship is as important for your children as it is for you. “It’s not a selfish thing to be keeping an eye on that relationship. It’s extremely good for your children.”
Is it ever okay to argue in front of kids?
There is research that shows that there can be advantages to children being exposed to parental disagreements, particularly when they get a chance to see their parents work through issues.
A recent Cardiff University study claims that there’s no need go out of earshot when having an argument with your partner. Rather, the psychologists at Cardiff University believe it’s good for children to be exposed to constructive arguments as it sets a good example for the children.
Psychologist and Director of Parent Wellbeing, Jodie Benveniste, agrees that it isn’t always a bad thing for children to be exposed to parental disagreements, particularly when they see their parents discussing issues respectfully. “There are ways to discuss issues which strengthen relationships rather than pull them apart.”
“Children can actually benefit from witnessing disagreements if parents listen to each other, and are willing to give and take,” says Benveniste. “It shows kids how to negotiate and find solutions to problems.”
In other words, it's fine - even healthy - for kids to witness your arguments. But there are caveats. “If you’re shouting and name calling, that’s not setting a good example at all”. Parents need to be aware that their kids are watching, and feeling the emotion in the room, explains Benveniste.
Cann agrees, adding that low emotional arguing is not damaging for kids. “All couples argue from time to time and it’s inevitable this will happen in front of the kids,” he says. “Children tune into high emotion – that’s the harmful stuff.”
He suggests that any discussion that could lead to high emotion should take place away from the kids, adding that it can be particularly damaging if children witness arguments that are about them. “Always avoid arguments about the kids in front of them,” advises Cann.
How are children affected by parental conflict?
It’s not the occasional bickering that harms kids, says Cann. This is a normal part of life and children are robust enough to deal with it. “An environment of chronic friction and hostility is what harms kids the most.”
Interestingly, the effects of parental conflict do not appear to be experienced equally by all children. New research by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) found that the impact of everyday parental conflict on children’s behaviour is driven by how the children understand the problems in the relationship as well as the nature of the conflict itself. Children were more likely to experience behaviour, such as depression, if they blamed themselves for the conflict, or emotional problems if they felt threatened.
Factors such as temperament and age also make a difference. Younger kids will often think that they have done something wrong, explains Cann. Older children will worry that their parents are going to break up. “Some children are very sensitive to toxic elements in their environments; some are more robust and more resilient.”
Some research suggests that gender plays a role in how kids respond to conflict. “Boys are more likely to act up or become more aggressive, whereas girls tend to internalise conflict more and become withdrawn,” explains Cann.
Healthy Conflict Resolution
If you’ve fought with your partner in front of your children, don’t panic, urges Cann. “Don’t beat yourself up about it if it happens; there’s no benefit in guilt. The most important thing for a child is to see their parents really trying to work it out,” he says. “If that’s absent, that’s most worrying”. Benveniste agrees, adding that if there are ongoing issues, it’s a good idea to seek professional help.
Children don’t need to know the ins and outs of the issue, explains Cann. What they need most, he says, is reassurance. “Be clear with your children that they are not the cause of your disagreements and reassure them that you are working on a solution to the problem.“
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Microbes are everywhere—even inside us. But because so many of these bugs won't grow in the lab, scientists have had a tough time figuring out just who they are and how they live. That may soon change. By sequencing the DNA in individual cells, researchers have gotten to know 200 new microbes—and they may be able to characterize many more. The more researchers are able to fill out the microbial tree of life, the better able they will be to understand the role that microbes play in the environment and to harness microbial proteins for practical applications.
The approach "steps off into a whole world that up to now has been pretty inaccessible," says Norman Pace, a microbiologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who was not involved with the work. "It's a world we knew was there but we couldn't get to it."
Almost 400 years ago, the microscope opened a new vista on invisible life. Yet only in the 20th century did researchers become aware of how diverse the microbial world is. At that time, molecular biology made it possible for researchers to compare the same piece of DNA in a variety of organisms. That DNA, which coded for a piece of the ribosome, the cell's protein-producing factory, revealed vast differences in microbes and led researchers to divide them into two groups, bacteria and archaea, which includes organisms that live in extreme environments such as hot springs. Once researchers began sampling this piece of DNA from many different environments, they were shocked by just how many kinds of microbes existed. It seems that every time researchers test samples from the soil, the ocean, or even the bodies of organisms, they detect dozens if not hundreds of unknown microbes.
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Navigators calculated longitude by measuring the difference between their local noon and noon in Greenwich, England. So to stay on course they needed precise timekeeping. In the second half of the 18th century, ships began carrying chronometers, which kept time very accurately. Captain James Cook carried four on his second voyage to New Zealand in 1772–75. This example in the Museum of Wellington City and Sea is dated from about 1820.
Te whakamahi i tēnei tūemi
Museum of Wellington City and Sea
Photograph by Melanie Lovell-Smith
This item has been provided for private study purposes (such as school projects, family and local history research) and any published reproduction (print or electronic) may infringe copyright law. It is the responsibility of the user of any material to obtain clearance from the copyright holder.
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Sudan stands at a crossroads with the people of the south set to vote in January on whether to become an independent state. This referendum is part of a 2005 peace deal which brought to an end a devastating 22-year civil war which left two million people dead and the same number homeless. Now, with the south likely to secede, Sudan's borders and history may have to be rewritten.
Al Jazeera looks at the racial issues behind the split, the impact of Sudan's rich resources and the challenge of development ahead.
After 54 years in existence - the majority of those in civil war - the splitting of Sudan is all but inevitable with the upcoming referendum that will most likely see the south going its own way.
But creating a nation state will be a huge struggle after decades of neglect. When Sudan splits, it will create two intertwined, but very different countries.
There is the barren north, part of the Sahara desert, where the average salary is just $3 a day despite the incredible oil-wealth and the booming capital Khartoum. But more than two-thirds of people can read and write.
The green south on the other hand, with an area of 640,000 square km, suffers from an absence of infrastructure and huge developmental problems.
The past five years witnessed the failure of the south Sudanese government to really change living conditions, with half of the south's population living on less than $1 per day. The same amount - more than four million - needed food aid in 2010.
Less than one-quarter of people in the south are literate. Ninety-two per cent of women cannot read or write, and less than two per cent of children who enroll in primary school complete their studies.
Three-quarters of the population have no access to basic healthcare, with an infant mortality rate of 112 per 1,000, and a maternal mortality rate of over 2,000 per 100,000.
The south might be rich in oil and full of fertile farmland, but most benefits have gone north, especially to Khartoum, in the form of infrastructure. How those riches are shared in a secession scenario is still to be decided.
As the resource-rich south of Sudan is poised to break away, its northern capital Khartoum is beginning to boom. After a secession, the two Sudans may become bitter rivals seeking investment and development.
Because of its actions in Darfur, and because Sudan is still said to be supporting international terrorism, the US has put Sudan under sanctions, which is blocking many companies who are keen to capture the country's oil and minerals.
Nevertheless, some progress has been made in the fields of agriculture and mining. Investments in the economy of the south have increased, especially from Arab countries. There are plans to build dams along the White Nile for irrigation and hydroelectric power. There are also plans to grant oil concessions to Western companies to end the Chinese monopoly over oil production in the south.
What role will the US, Qatar and UN play in a divided Sudan? What does the future hold for a resource-rich but underdeveloped south, and a barren but educated north?
Lam Akol, the leader of the southern breakaway movement, joins us to share his views about the state of the nation. And with memories of past wars fresh in their minds we will take a closer look at the groups armed and ready for more conflict.
Crossroads Sudan: Sudan's path to development can be seen from Monday, January 3, at 1730GMT, with repeats at 2230GMT, and the next day at 0430GMT and 1030GMT.
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Q. Back in 2005, you responded to a question regarding the reporting of sulfuric acid in lead/acid batteries for SARA 302/311/312 reporting. You had estimated that sulfuric acid would be about 18% of the weight of the battery. Is this still a good estimate? G.M.
A. You are referring to reporting requirements under the Superfund Authorization and Reauthorization Act (SARA) and the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA) that require facilities to report hazardous and toxic chemicals if the amounts on site exceed applicable thresholds. There are two categories of chemicals: extremely hazardous substances (EHS) which typically have low thresholds; and OSHA hazard communication (hazcom) chemicals, which have a 10,000-lb threshold. For lead/acid batteries, sulfuric acid is an EHS and lead is a hazcom chemical.
Since OSHA has determined that lead/acid batteries typically used in fork trucks and for emergency lighting are not article exempted, you need to consider their constituents when evaluating your facility for chemical reporting. If you have Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) for the batteries, you can use that data to estimate the amount of sulfuric acid and lead the batteries contain.
However, if this data is not available, you will need to depend upon other sources. Based on our experience and a few guidance documents, the weight of electrolyte can range from 10–45% of the battery and sulfuric acid weight can be 20–40% of the electrolyte; per USEPA guidance to use the maximum percentages of a range when dealing with unknowns, this yields 18% by weight. Our experience also shows the weight of lead in batteries can range from 60–70%, so we use 70% if an MSDS is not available.
So, if the maximum total amount of sulfuric acid, including that in lead/acid batteries, exceeds the threshold of 500 lb, then sulfuric acid needs to be reported as an EHS. If the amount of lead in the lead/acid batteries exceeds 10,000 lb, then lead has to be reported.
If you do have to report (most states require the infamous “Tier II” report form), you have several options. If you are just reporting sulfuric acid, you can do so by itself (we typically use a description like “Sulfuric battery acid” or “Sulfuric acid–lead/acid battery”) or you can report “lead/acid batteries” and list sulfuric acid as a component of the mixture.
If you are reporting both sulfuric acid and lead, you can report “lead/acid batteries” and include a copy of MSDS. Alternatively, you can list each separately using above descriptions for sulfuric acid and “lead–batteries” as a component.
For EHS chemicals, you are required to report to your State Emergency Response Commission (SERC) and Local Emergency Planning Committee (LEPC) within 60 days and to your local fire department within three months of exceeding threshold. For hazcom chemicals, you are required to report to the above agencies within three months of exceeding threshold. There is also an annual report that is due March 1 of each year.
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<urn:uuid:134f8628-c122-4af5-938e-65a1c36409fe>
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Rethinking Home Audio
Tangible interaction is a subset of general interaction design practice that focuses on the physical embodiment of new behaviours and experiences that are driven by capabilities of digital media and embedded computing. It draws upon skills, tools and practices from traditional industrial design, electronics, software programming and product development. It is an young and emerging area that is a powerful combination and can shape the future of how people use and perceive technology applied in their everyday lives.
The role of audio in the home context is going through a great transformation. From the context of playing music, phone calls to watching television. There are also new forms of interaction that involve audio e.g skype/VOIP, appliances, alarms and a range of other devices at home. Infact the number of sound reproduction devices at home are so many and they are often hidden inside other objects e.g cell phone, toys, washing machine etc.
What’s interesting in this cacophony of modern sounds is that the role of music is going through sea-change. Music used to be played at home via fixed device or installation typically a record/tape/CD player. Today this has been taken over by streaming services and other forms of wireless transmission making it almost a virtual experience.
More importantly it has moved from a fixed set-up to a mobile and all pervasive presence. It’s never been easier to take music along, play it anywhere or discover new interpretations and genres. The interfaces for playback and music consumption have moved from buttons and dials to touch and clicks.
This course looked at interpreting these transformations from social, technical and personal behavioural change. This was an opportunity to explore these emergent behaviours and create new paradigm for products that don’t just address new trends but also set new benchmarks for future audio experiences.
Students were expected to deliver a prototype of an audio experience concept as a physical product. The physicality could manifest itself as a tabletop device, wearable, piece of furniture or other interpretations.
The focus was on developing artifacts that behave, react, and interact with people in a novel and meaningful way. Our focus was equally on computation or embedded intelligence as well as on human behaviour and experience that guides the design of physical form and establishes the roles an artifact will play in everyday situations.
Course dates: May 29th to June 22nd, 2012
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On Friday, October 2, Parks Canada and the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada will be designating the Grasslands National Park as a Dark Sky Preserve (DSP).
The ceremony, to be held at 2 pm at the Larson Prairie Dog Town in Grasslands National Park West Block, near Val Marie, Saskatchewan will celebrate our continued commitment to protecting natural areas from the adverse effects of artificial lighting.
For event information, see the Parks Canada Media Room at: http://www.pc.gc.ca/eng/agen/ne/index.aspx.
The RASC and Parks Canada, the provinces and others have worked together to establish eleven Dark Sky Preserves across Canada. The Grasslands National Park, located approximately 100 kilometres south of Swift Current, Saskatchewan, near the Saskatchewan-Montana border, will be the largest Dark Sky Preserve in the world with a current area of 527 square kilometres. Over time, land acquisitions by the Park will expand the DSP to 921 square kilometres (92,100 hectares).
The Dark Sky Preserve Program of the RASC helps protect the ecology of large areas from the impact of ever-encroaching artificial lighting. The light from bright, unshielded, fixtures disrupts the natural nocturnal behaviour and biochemistry of wildlife and it can even affect human health. Light pollution also overwhelms the faint light from stars and the Milky Way.
By protecting the Grasslands National Park from excessive artificial light, Parks Canada and the RASC are preserving the natural environment into the future so that visitors can enjoy the vitality of the nighttime wildlife and the awesome spectacle of a remarkably dark star-filled sky.
For more information on the Grasslands Dark Sky Preserve and RASC partnership, contact Richard Huziak, RASC Saskatoon Centre, 1-306-665-3392, e-mail: rickhuziak @ shaw . ca Mr. Huziak will be in attendance at the Grasslands DSP ceremony.
For more information on the RASC Dark Sky Preserve Program and scotobiology, contact Robert Dick, 1-800-278-2032, e-mail: rdick @ carleton . ca
For more information on the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada and other DSPs, see:
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Stepwells—often hidden in plain sight in India’s arid regions—are ancient, indigenous water structures. Typically, they are open subterranean constructions, with steps leading deep into the ground, where water can be collected and stored for use the year round.
Stepwells were particularly useful in dry Indian states like Gujarat and Rajasthan, where the water table can be buried “ten storeys or more underground.”
Born out of sheer necessity, the most basic stepwells were innovated and constructed first between the 2nd and 4th centuries A.D. Through centuries, however, the designs became increasingly sophisticated and aesthetically elaborate.
But these deep, often decrepit, structures are now disappearing.
Thirty years ago, when Chicago-based journalist Victoria Lautman travelled across several Indian states with a dozen architects and designers, she encountered one such structure.
Just outside Ahmedabad, in the western Indian state of Gujarat, she saw “the ground opened up,” Lautman recalled. She was at Rudabai Vav (vav in Gujarati means stepwell), in the village of Adalaj.
Lautman visited India several times, but it was not until 2011 when she decided to pinpoint on a map India’s obscure stepwells—and visit them. “They don’t announce themselves,” she told Quartz. “Today, they could be next to a shopping mall or at a popular tourist spot, and you wouldn’t know about them.”
For instance, a stepwell, called Agrasen Ki Baoli (baoli in Hindi means stepwell), is located right off New Delhi’s commercial district of Connaught Place. The stepwell is 60-meter long and 15-meter wide, and has as many as 103 steps.
“In the last four years, I have seen 120 of them in seven different states,” Lautman said. Her goal now is to publish a book and a map of India’s disappearing architectural marvel.
Here are some of the photographs of stepwells around India, sourced from Lautman’s personal collection.
We welcome your comments at [email protected].
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Nitric oxide tests to diagnose and treat asthma
8th November 2013 - New draft guidance recommending the use of simple, non-invasive tests to help diagnose and treat asthma have been produced by NICE, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence.
The draft guidance, which is now available for public consultation, recommends three devices used for measuring the concentration of nitric oxide in a person’s breath. They work by analysing a breath sample using an electrochemical sensor.
Asthma is a chronic inflammatory condition which affects the lungs and causes shortness of breath, coughing, chest tightness and wheezing. It's estimated at least 5.4 million people in the UK have the condition.
Levels of nitric oxide, a gas produced as a result of inflammation in the lungs, are higher in people with asthma.
The draft NICE guidance recommends the tests NIOX MINO, NIOX VERO and NObreath to assist with the diagnosis of a type of asthma called eosinophilic asthma, caused by airway inflammation with an accumulation of eosinophils, a type of white blood cell.
The tests are also recommended to support the management of asthma in people whose symptoms are being treated with inhaled corticosteroids.
Exhaled nitric oxide
Exhaled nitric oxide concentration (called fractional exhaled nitric oxide or “FeNO”) has been shown to be elevated in patients with eosinophilic asthma and effective treatment with corticosteroids reduces symptoms and the level of FeNO.
In people already diagnosed with asthma, changes in FeNO levels can indicate how well they are responding to treatment with corticosteroids, and whether they are taking their medication as prescribed.
Research suggests that as many as 30% of people do not take their medication to control their asthma.
Professor Carole Longson, NICE Health Technology Evaluation Centre director, says in a press release that NICE "heard from a patient expert that FeNO-guided management could result in the patients better understanding their own disease and disease progression and make them more willing to accept the need for anti-inflammatory treatment to control their asthma."
Emily Humphreys, Asthma UK Head of Policy & Public Affairs told us via email: "Measuring the concentration of nitric oxide in someone’s breath has been shown to help ensure people with asthma are taking the right treatments. We hope that monitoring fractional exhaled nitric oxide (FeNO) will give healthcare professionals another useful tool to provide people with asthma the right medicines and advice.
"We are pleased with this draft NICE guidance and its positive recommendation, and we are keen to see it finalised and put into practice soon."
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MINOT, N.D. — Only two United States Presidents have ever been impeached.
The House of Representatives impeached Democratic President Andrew Johnson in 1868 amid a squabble over the cabinet in the wake of President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.
About 130 years later the House impeached Democratic President Bill Clinton for lying under oath and obstructing justice during the investigation of the Monica Lewinsky affair.
The Senate convicted neither man.
Yes, both of them were Democrats. Before anyone on the right begins crowing about that, remember Republican President Richard Nixon was headed to impeachment, yes, but resigned before the ball could get rolling.
Also, Republican Warren Harding was likely saved from impeachment by death. The scandals uncovered once he was in the ground were certainly worthy of it.
Anyway, that’s the total of Congress’ exercise of its impeachment powers in the first 243 years of our nation.
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The structure pictured above may not look like much but it is, in fact, a National Historic Site and was once the heart of African-American social and religious life on Johns Island. Moving Star Hall, on River Road opposite Fields Farms, was built just after the First World War as a "praise house" for Black farming families, one of the few surviving such houses in the southeast. Before the Civil War, white plantation owners allowed their enslaved workers to build such houses at a time when few Blacks had the resources to build their own churches or were not allowed to travel to services elsewhere.
Moving Star Hall, built by Blacks who managed to raise seven dollars to buy the materials, was a relative latecomer to the dozens of praise houses that once dotted Johns Island. It was built well after Emancipation and just as Johns Island was being connected to the mainland by the first Limehouse Bridge over the Stono River - a wood-and-creosote swing bridge that stood just to the west of today's soaring concrete affair.
Moving Star Hall was the headquarters of the Moving Star Association, a mutual benefit society that helped raise money for families who couldn't afford to treat their sick, who were struggling to feed themselves after a bad harvest, or who couldn't pay for funeral and burial services for their dead. Meetings of the Association were held three evenings a week. And on Sundays, rollicking, foot-stomping "ring shout" gospel singing filled the air. "That hall be full of people. Every Sunday," one surviving community member told historians in the 1960's. "It give me strength, spirit to carry on."
The Hall became most famous for the Moving Star Hall Singers, who came to national attention during the folk music revival of the 1960's and who were first recorded by the musicologist Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress. The group performed all over the United States during the 1970's and 1980's, including at the White House, and recorded several albums of traditional African-American gospel music. The names of some of the singers still appear in street names along River Road in honor of Janie Hunter, Ruth and Benjamin Bligen, James Mackey, and other singers.
(View a brief clip of the Moving Star Singers here.)
By the late 1960's, much of the Association's social outreach had been transferred to the Progressive Club a mile or so south on River Road, founded by Esau Jenkins, who was a frequent preacher at Moving Star Hall. But gospel study classes and worship services still take place at Moving Star, with all invited. "Whether you are white, whether you are dark like myself," John Smalls said back in the 1970's, "or a different color, come in. Anytime you come, you is in. So sing, shout, get happy."
(** Quotes from "Ain't You Got A Right To The Tree Of Life?", Simon & Schuster, 1966)
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Stunt performers work in film and television studios and on-location on film sets. They work in a range of climatic conditions, including extreme heat and cold. They may be required to work in wet conditions, or to work in or around areas rigged with explosives or other hazardous materials. They may be required to work at heights, sometimes without safety harnesses. They may work long hours depending on the requirements of a shoot, and may be required to travel long distances to get to the set.
Actors, dancers and performers, which include stunt performers, can expect to earn up to $1,143 per week, with an average weekly income of $732*.
*ABS Census (2006)
The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance is responsible for setting the minimum award wages for performers in entertainment productions. Check the MEAA website for further details of the rates for stunt performers as pertains to different production types and daily and per episode award rates.
Stunt performers work with stunt equipment such as flying harnesses, air-rams, airbags and stunt rigging. They often wear protective equipment such as back protectors, knee and elbow guards and rehearsal pads, and are also often required to wear make-up and other costuming. They may use props such as weapons, and may also drive stunt cars and other vehicles.
There are no qualification requirements to become a stunt performer. However, all stunt performers must be graded by the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance and deemed competent in four out of five categories. These are: body control, heights, vehicles, animals and water.
In order to be considered for work as a stunt action person (SAP or Performer Grade 1) you must display competency in four of the five above categories. It is compulsory to display competency in one of three body-control categories - physical, fighting or stunt training.
Applications to become a licenced stunt performer need to be submitted to the MEAA's National Stunt Committee. Applications are approved on the basis of the quality and type of stunt or training that has been carried by the applicant, their qualifications and achievements, their attitude towards working in the stunt and safety areas of the entertainment industry, their ability to communicate effectively, both verbally and in written materials, the individual's aptitude and potential for work in the industry, and any written recommendations or references.
Stunt performers often start as assistants before taking on higher-risk stunt work. Once they have become established as a stunt performer they may move into the roll of stunt co-ordinator or safety supervisor.
A range of stunt performer courses are offered by various Registered Training Organisations around the country. For further information visit the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance website.
Apprenticeships and traineeships
As an apprentice or trainee, you enter into a formal training contract with an employer. You spend most of your time working and learning practical skills on the job and you spend some time undertaking structured training with a registered training provider of your choice. They will assess your skills and when you are competent in all areas, you will be awarded a nationally recognised qualification.
If you are still at school you can access an apprenticeship through your school. You generally start your school based apprenticeship by attending school three days a week, spending one day at a registered training organisation and one day at work. Talk to your school's VET Co-ordinator to start your training now through VET in Schools. If you get a full-time apprenticeship you can apply to leave school before reaching the school leaving age.
If you are no longer at school you can apply for an apprenticeship or traineeship and get paid while you learn and work.
Back to top
If you think you already have some of the skills or competencies, obtained either through non-formal or informal learning, you may be able to gain credit through recognition of prior learning.
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Scientists in Uganda have dismissed reports that an HIV vaccine has been found.
The reports follow the US-based Food and Drug Administration's approval of the anti-retroviral drug Truvada as a preventive measure against the transmission of HIV. Prof Pontiano Kaleebu, director of the Uganda Virus Research Institute in Entebbe, says Truvada is not an HIV vaccine but an anti-retroviral drug.
"No HIV vaccine has yet been discovered. There are, however, ongoing studies and efforts to discover a vaccine," Kaleebu said.
Truvada has been shown to reduce risk of infection by up to 42% in gay and bisexual men and 75% in heterosexual couples according to the AIDS Research Alliance. Dr Patrick Ndase, the Ugandan HIV prevention research expert at the University of Washington, says Truvada is an anti-retroviral agent that has been in use for HIV treatment since 2004. It is one of the first line of drugs for HIV treatment in several countries in Africa.
"It most certainly is not a vaccine. The concept studied is the use of an anti-retroviral drug for HIV prevention similar to the approach used for prevention of mother-to-child transmission," he said.
"There is no vaccine and clearly no clear timeframe can even be put to hopes of ever getting a vaccine against HIV, but the hope is alive."
The scientists say that Truvada does not offer 100% protection against HIV and may encourage risky behaviour. For Truvada to give some measure of protection, an HIV negative person would have to take it daily, something that is difficult even for people who take part in vaccine and drug trials.
Since it was first detected, HIV/ Aids has killed more than a million Ugandans, with an estimated 2.3 million living with the virus, according to the Uganda AIDS Indicator Survey released this year by the ministry of Health. Only anti-retroviral drugs are available for people living with HIV/Aids but of the 570,000 people eligible, only 320,000 access them.
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Leadership is all about communicating within a team to move towards a specific goal.
Leadership is the ability to share a vision and influence others to achieve results.
What kind of leader are you? Here are 12 articles addressing the subject:
“I am reminded how hollow the label of leadership sometimes is and how heroic followership can be.” — Warren Bennis
“Men make history and not the other way around. In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better.”— Harry Truman
“Leadership is intentional influence.”— Michael McKinney
“The leader is one who mobilizes others toward a goal shared by leaders and followers. … Leaders, followers and goals make up the three equally necessary supports for leadership.”— Gary Wills, Certain Trumpets: The Call of Leaders
“Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.”— Henry Peter Brougham, The Present State of Law, 1828
“A leader is one who influences a specific group of people to move in a God-given direction.”— J. Robert Clinton
“All Leadership is influence.”— John C. Maxwell, Injoy, Inc.
“You cannot be a leader, and ask other people to follow you, unless you know how to follow, too.”— Sam Rayburn
“The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men, the conviction and the will to carry on.”— Walter Lippmann
“The function of a leader within any institution: to provide that regulation through his or her non-anxious, self-defined presence.”— Edwin H. Friedman, A Failure of Nerve
“People ask the difference between a leader and a boss. The leader leads, and the boss drives.”— Theodore Roosevelt
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Abstract: Owing to the existence of cable heat capacity, the temperature of cable alters gradually as the time passes when applying the step current. The temperature achieves the steady state after a certain time. The speed of temperature change of cable conductor is reflected by thermal time constant. Hence, the single-cable cable is taken as an object of study and thermal time constant of cable is introduced. The transient thermal circuit models of cable body and ambient media are established and simplified; thermal time constant of single-core cables in air and buried in ground is calculated; the temperature rise test of single-core cable is conducted on site at step current. The actual thermal time constant of cables is obtained by curve fitting of real transient process of conductor temperature, which proves the correctness of theoretical calculation. The thermal time constant of cable can be used to estimate the transient response of conductor temperature and to determine the needed time of achieving highest allowable conductor temperature of cables when step current is applied. That provides theoretical support for cable condition monitoring and early fault warning during cable operation.
Key words: Conductor temperature, thermal time constant, single-core cable, transient thermal circuit model, calculation, test, temperature rise time
The conductor temperature of cables in operation is the decisive factor in affecting the lifespan of insulation material. The status of cables in operation can be monitored via the temperature of cable conductor. However, due to technical restrictions, it is difficult to measure the temperature of operating cable conductor accurately. Hence, it is common practice to use theoretical calculation to obtain the conductor temperature. When the single-core cable works continuously at rated carrying capacity, its components including conductor, insulation and metal sheath will produce losses, forming the steady-state temperature field. The temperature of conductor can be calculated via steady-state thermal circuit and its calculation method is given by IEC60287 standard.
HIMALAYAL provides innovative products that comprise high voltage test equipment, full-set high voltage test instruments, on-site test systems and on-line monitoring systems, and services regarding tests, diagnostics and asset monitoring for clients in power industry. We help to ensure safety and reliability in the power generation, transmission and distribution.
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Psychiatric disorders manifest themselves in different ways thus, these infirmities are classified into subtypes. Among the different mood disorders, there are various anxiety disorders and types of depression that can greatly reduce the quality of life for an individual. Ketamine can play a crucial role in the treatment of these different mood disorders. Thankfully, ketamine is a miraculous drug that has exceptional benefits in the following conditions:
Anxiety is a normal and natural response to stressful conditions. However, if this feeling of fear and insecurity persists for long periods of time, then it’s referred to as anxiety disorder. The prevalence of anxiety disorders is estimated to be between 10.3-19.1% in the US.
Anxiety is a natural process and is triggered by stressful events in life when one becomes fearful and insecure. However, experiencing high levels of anxiety on a daily basis is not a normal finding and indicates an underlying disease. If the symptoms of anxiety persist for more than 6 months then it must be referred to a mental health specialist and treated as generalized anxiety disorder.
Patients suffering from anxiety disorders find it difficult to get through the day. The abruptions in brain chemistry lead to destruction of interpersonal relationships and sleepless nights. Therefore, this disease affects not only the patient but their loved ones too.
Signs And Symptoms
Stressful conditions trigger the body's response towards the stimulus. The anxiety that develops as a result of some danger or stress activates the sympathetic nervous system of the body.
The sympathetic system is a part of your Central Nervous System (CNS) that prepares your body for a fight-or-flight situation. The activation of this system lasts monetarily in normal people, however, the feeling persists chronically in patients with anxiety disorders.
The most common symptoms of anxiety disorders include:
- Increased heartbeat (tachycardia)
- Heart palpitations
- Fearful thoughts and panic
- Shortness of breath
- Dry mouth
- Raised blood pressure
- Difficulty sleeping
Types Of Anxiety Disorders
There are different types of anxiety disorders identified by researchers:
Generalized Anxiety Disorder
The generalized disorder is a common finding and affects a number of people across the globe. It has a genetic predisposition and may also be triggered by stressful events such as childbirth, a study suggests.
Social Anxiety Disorder
This type of anxiety disorder affects around 13% of the US population. Social anxiety disorder makes patients susceptible to substance abuse. In this disorder, patients feel uncomfortable in social settings and constantly face the fear of being judged by others.
Panic disorder is characterized by sudden, intense bouts or episodes of fear. The patient experiences short of breath, with increased heartbeat and blood pressure.
Ketamine's Impact On Anxiety Disorders
Ketamine usage is directly linked to a reduction in anxiety disorders. According to research, ketamine alleviates symptoms in anxiety disorders.
The research investigated the effect of ketamine on both Generalized and social anxiety disorders by analyzing the brain's neuronal activity (via EEG). It was found that ketamine administration is effective for the management of anxiety disorders.
The rapid effect of ketamine in alleviating symptoms of anxiety disorders is so great that it is considered a therapeutic agent in their treatment.
A review declares that ketamine can be efficacious in the management of refractory anxiety disorders.
According to a 2020 study, ketamine rapidly provides relief of symptoms for psychiatric anxiety disorders. The study also found that the drug can help treat various phobias.
How Does Ketamine Work?
Glutamate abnormality is frequently seen in anxiety disorders. A raised glutamate to creatinine ratio was found in social anxiety patients. The rise in the ratio was directly proportional to the severity of psychiatric symptoms.
Ketamine is a potent antagonist of glutamate receptors in the brain (N-methyl-D-aspartate receptors). By binding to the receptor, ketamine decreases the activity of the glutamate receptor. Thus, alleviation of symptoms is seen. The pathophysiology of ketamine is the same for all types of mood disorders, therefore, it is not discussed further in the article.
If you suffer from anxiety, please call (310) 928-6863 to schedule a free consulation to see whether you’re a good candidate for Ketamine Infusions!
Bipolar mood disorders are characterized by cycling and swinging between extremes moods (i.e. extremely elevated and depressed moods). Patients suffering from bipolar disorder often cycle between a manic stage, chracterized by overwhelming happiness and excitment, and a depressed stage, characterized by sadness, gloom, and depression. The cycling between the two extreme moods affects the patient’s relationship with others and their activities of daily living.
Patients also show altered levels of energy, activity, and concentration. Modifications in thought and sleep patterns are also seen. Such patients variate between feelings of overwhelming happiness and utter sluggishness and hopelessness. Patients with bipolar disorder appear as maniacs.
Some bipolar disorder patients show mild symptoms and are termed hypomanics. The wavering moods do not interfere in daily life to a great extent.
Signs And Symptoms
The typical presentation of a bipolar patient is the manifestation of two extremes of moods. The mental level of the patient is at two "poles", thus, the term bipolar. When the patient is in “high pole” he feels the following:
- Immense confidence accompanied by feelings of hope and excitement
- Brisk transitions from very happy state to angry and relentless condition
- Decreased sleeping time (patients don't want to sleep)
- Loss of appetite
- Alcohol/drug abuse
When the patient is in the “low pole” the following symptoms are seen:
- Depression and sadness
Types Of Bipolar Disorder
There are three commonly encountered types of bipolar disorder.
People suffering from type 1 bipolar disorder have extreme manic periods and need medical care. The hyper excited states may last for days or even weeks (at least a couple of weeks).
In this particular type, there are erratic highs and lows in the patient's mood but the severity of the condition is lesser than type 1 cases.
Type 3: Cyclothymic Disorder
Like the other two, this type is also characterized by periods of depression and excitement. This type is not permanent and lasts for a couple of years in adults.
Ketamine For Bipolar Disorder
Ketamine infusions can aid in curing the undulations of the disorder. According to a study, ketamine is a potent NMDA antagonist that allows for rapid antidepressant effects in bipolar disorder patients.
A review published in the Journal of Psychiatric Practice found that ketamine infusion is an effective treatment modality in treating treatment resistant bipolar disorder with suicidal ideation. Another study found out that only a single dose of ketamine was sufficient in calming down the anxious type 1 bipolar disorder patients.
According to a 2020 review, ketamine infusions are completely safe to be used in the management of bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder. Analysis of rigorous testing revealed that ketamine is well tolerated by adult patients.
During the depressive mode, bipolar patients experience anhedonia. This is a state in which the patient doesn’t feel pleasure. The previously rewarding activities now have no effect on the patient. A study based on randomized controlled trials, suggests that a single ketamine infusion can improve symptoms of anhedonia in patients. The 36 participants of the study reported improvements in mood and reduction in anhedonia.
Therefore, ketamine not only works for the excited state but also provides improvements in the depressed state of bipolar disorder.
If you suffer from Bipolar Disorders, please call (310) 928-6863 to schedule a free consulation to see whether you’re a good candidate for Ketamine Infusions!
Major Depressive Disorders
In the medical world, clinical depression is known as Major depressive disorder (MDD). It is one of the many mood disorders that affect the individual’s quality of life. Patients experience issues with mood, appetite, sleep, and even day-to-day activities. In severe cases, physical functions may get compromised. There is a persistent feeling of sadness and loss of interest in worldly matters that follows the patient. This mental health disorder takes away the will to interact and carry out day-to-day activities. Some even lose the will to live.
Treating major depressive disorder is an uphill task for both the doctor and the patient. Despite the fact that disease affects almost 7% of US adults (as per an analysis of the year 2017), there is a relatively small number of people who seek medical treatment.
Signs And Symptoms
It is important for the symptoms to persist for more than 2 weeks to be classified as clinical depression. Sadness is a part of life and can last for a few days, however, clinical depression is a mental health disorder. Several clinicians follow the criteria provided by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) which includes:
- Mood/behavior changes observed by the patient
- Symptoms last for a couple of weeks or more
- Loss of interest or depressed feel is a must
Patients with MDD usually report being tired and restless. Feelings of guilt, worthlessness, and lack of self-confidence have also been reported with indivuduals suffering with MDD.
Ketamine For Major Depressive Disorder
Ketamine is a glutamatergic receptor antagonist that is efficacious in alleviating symptoms of clinical depression. In a randomized controlled trial, 20 patients suffering from major depressive disorder were given intranasal ketamine for 2 days. When compared with the placebo 8 patients showed remarkable improvements after 24 hours of ketamine administration. This indicated that ketamine is a safe, well-tolerated, and rapid-acting antidepressant even when given intranasally.
In another study, doctors discovered the anti-depressant role played by ketamine while they treated the pain with sub-anesthetic ketamine infusions. Ketamine showed promising and long-lasting results in the management of the major depressive disorder. Ketamine resets the hyperactive NMDA receptors to normal.
A meta-analysis confirms that ketamine is very efficacious in the management of depressive disorders (and bipolar disorder too). The patients showed no evident side effects.
Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is a common procedure followed in the management of depression and mental health issues. A comparative analysis of the efficacy of ECT and ketamine administration was done in 2013. The study highlighted the rapid antidepressant effect of ketamine. The NMDA receptor antagonist proved to have the same effect as ECT and that too quickly.
As per a review of different studies, it can safely be concluded that ketamine can be justly used for treating treatment-resistant depression. Another meta-analysis reveals that ketamine has mid-term as well as long-term positive effects in the treatment of major depressive disorders (MDD).
Ketamine administration has proven to be effective when it comes to alleviating depressive symptoms and enhancing cognition in depression patients. In a study of ketamine vs thiopental, ketamine was proven to be the more effective drug to be given with ECT.
Neurocognitive performance increases in major depressive disorder patients with ketamine infusions, a study suggests. Another study also suggests that ketamine can be used as a reliable treatment option in the management of MDD.
If you suffer from Major Depressive Disorder, please call (310) 928-6863 to schedule a free consulation to see whether you’re a good candidate for Ketamine Infusions!
OCD or Obsessive-compulsive disorder is a type of anxiety disorder where an individual is compelled to do something repetitively. This is a chronic disorder characterized by uncontrolled thoughts (obsessions) and behaviors (compulsions) to repeat the same tasks over and over again.
In this disorder, there are a myriad of recurring thoughts and obsessions that keep the patient anxious and wanting to respond to the ideas and thoughts with compulsive behavior. However, once the compulsive task is performed, there is a temporary feeling of relief. Some patients are found having an obsession of lining things up symmetrically while others are seen cleaning up stuff repeatedly.
Such patients are distressed at not being able to perform the tasks. In some cases, there is the self-realization that the thoughts and actions do not make sense but they can’t stop them.
Signs And Symptoms
The disorder interferes with daily life and presents as obsessions and compulsions.
Obsessions refer to repetitive, negative, and upsetting thoughts that the patient cannot control. The anxiety-inducing thoughts include:
- Aggressive thoughts (that are directed towards oneself)
- Most patients have a fear of contamination with germs
- Abnormal thoughts regarding sex or religion are also reported
Compulsions are the behaviors that a patient does repetitively as a result of obsessive thoughts. The most evident compulsions include:
- Constantly cleaning oneself (bathing, washing hands, etc.)
- Washing home, utensils, clothes, etc.
- Consistently putting things in a precise order
- Compulsive counting
Ketamine For Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
This form of mood disorder can effectively be treated with ketamine. One of the advantages of ketamine infusions is the rapid alleviation of symptoms of OCD. According to a study, the use of NMDA receptor modulators is an efficacious step. The study found out that ketamine and rapastinel can be used in the treatment of OCD if the benefits outweigh the risks.
Serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SRIs) are the medicine of choice in the management of mental health problems (especially depression). Some cases do not seem to respond to the routine medications. For such cases, therapists can use ketamine because as per the latest study, repeated intravenous ketamine administration is advantageous in curing treatment-resistant OCD.
The effects of intranasal ketamine therapy on refractory Obsessive-compulsive disorder were analyzed. Intranasal ketamine, when given with Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), leads to significant improvements in symptoms of OCD.
Ketamine offers superior results to the commonly used antidepressants (SRIs). A study claims that ketamine provided both immediate and delayed improvements in OCD patients. Therefore, ketamine can safely be used for immediate relief as well as a long-term treatment.
IV administration of ketamine is a beneficial step in treating different psychiatric disorders including major depressive disorders, bipolar disorders, and obsessive convulsive disorder, etc.
The latest 2020 study praised the quick relieving effect of ketamine when given for alleviating symptoms of Obsessive-compulsive disorder. This very drug is capable of initiating a quick response and therefore, is more effective than serotonin/norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs/SNRIs).
If you suffer from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, please call (310) 928-6863 to schedule a free consulation to see whether you’re a good candidate for Ketamine Infusions!
Childbirth is a lifechanging process involving a lot different emotions for a mother to endure. Among many of the feelings that a woman experiences during childbirth, many feel an overwhelming amount of happiness and joy, however, others experience more complex emotions.
The hormonal changes associated with childbirth (or miscarriage) can trigger postpartum depression. The occurrence of this disease turns the joyous days into miserable nights. The mother is faced with issues like mood swings, excessive crying, and insomnia which interferes with her ability to nurture the newborn. There is a difference between postpartum depression and baby blues. Baby blues is a normal state found in new mothers and is found to resolve over time, whereas postpartum depression is a prolonged depressive state that requires medical attention.
Most mothers experience a variety of moods which are collectively referred to as baby blues. This transient phase is filled with sad feelings and mood swings in the initial few days after delivering a baby.
Mothers experiencing baby blues report feelings of sadness, mood swings, and sleep disturbance. Baby blues only last for a couple weeks and do not need any medical attention. However, studies suggest that postpartum depression is a severe disorder that can last for 1 week to 4 months after the birth of the child.
Postpartum depression is a true form of depression that needs medications and/or therapy to be treated.
Signs And Symptoms
- Mood alterations and swings
- Irritability and anger
- Staying away from friends and family
- Appetite issues
- Sleeping issues
- Wanting to cry (and crying)
- Feeling overwhelmed
- Energy loss
Ketamine For Postpartum Depression
IV infusions of ketamine can help new mothers to get out of the gloom and despair. The drug with its glutamatergic antagonist response is capable of relieving symptoms such as loss of appetite and mood swings in mothers.
Some patients may suffer from a severe form of depression that is characterized by suicidal ideation. A study suggests that ketamine can be used as a prophylactic agent for postpartum depression. The randomized controlled study was carried out on 650+ women who gave birth by cesarean section. The administration of ketamine 10 minutes after birth proved to provide analgesia as well as significantly reduced baby blues and postpartum depression.
Another study found out that operative IV ketamine (0.25mh/kg) was able to reduce symptoms of postpartum depression for a week. As the cesarean section is a surgical procedure, many individuals also face depression associated with surgery. A study claims that ketamine should be used as a sub-anesthetic to prevent the development of post-operative depression.
Ketamine proved to be a safe drug for child-bearing mothers. Thus, it can be concluded that ketamine infusions should be employed prophylactically (as a sub-anesthetic) to prevent aggravation of baby blues and for the prevention of postpartum depression.
If you suffer from Postpartum Depression, please call (310) 928-6863 to schedule a free consulation to see whether you’re a good candidate for Ketamine Infusions!
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Commonly known as PTSD, Post-traumatic stress disorder is the altered mental health condition that arises after exposure to trauma. Experiencing or witnessing any terrifying event can trigger post-traumatic stress disorder that has symptoms similar to other psychiatric disorders.
Patients suffering from this disorder are living in constant fear. Patients may start experiencing symptoms of PTSD within a month after the traumatic experience and these symptoms may last for many years.
Signs And Symptoms
The diagnosis is done on the basis of symptoms which are usually divided into 4 groups:
The patient avoids discussing the stressful traumatic event and goes on to avoid people and activities that remind him of the incident.
Patients with PTSD complain of having flashbacks and nightmares of the past traumatic event. The intrusive memories put the patient in a condition similar to what they experienced in the first place.
A change in thinking patterns are seen. PTSD patients become hopeless about the future and lose interest in activities they once enjoyed. This puts them far from their friends and family as they become emotionally numb.
Having passed through a trauma, these get frightened very easily. The inability to cope with constant fear makes them self-destructive and a lot of cases are seen putting their lives at stake. Patients have issues sleeping or waking and concentrating.
Ketamine For Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
According to a well respected study published in the United States Army Institute of Surgical Research, ketamine was remarkably effective in preventing PTSD in burned patients. The prevalence of PTSD in burned soldiers receiving ketamine was 27% while in those that didn't get ketamine was 46%.
Another study claims that PTSD may be the result of synaptic disconnection following a trauma. Ketamine has emerged as a potent drug in the management of PTSD and therefore, it can be used for rapid relief of symptoms.
A 2019 review declared ketamine to be effective as a novel treatment modality for PTSD. Therefore, ketamine can be employed in the management of treatment-resistant PTSD (that doesn't respond to benzodiazepines and SSRIs).
A randomized controlled trial states that rapid reduction of symptoms is seen with IV infusions of ketamine.
Another study concludes that ketamine administration alleviates PTSD-like effects by altering the BDNF signaling pathways.
If you suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, please call (310) 928-6863 to schedule a free consulation to see whether you’re a good candidate for Ketamine Infusions!
Ketamine can be used in a variety of mood disorders. The N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor antagonist effect of the drug is helpful in providing relief from anxiety disorders and major depressive disorders. Studies have shown that ketamine is a promising therapeutic agent in alleviating symptoms of Anxiety Disorder, Bipolar Disorders, Major Depressive Disorders (MDD), Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), Postpartum Depression, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
If you are interested in learning if Ketamine Infusions are right for you, please call (310) 928-6863 to schedule your free consultation with Dr. Ananth!
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Poland comes to terms with war-time massacres of Jewish citizens
A ceremony in the eastern town of Jedwabne, Poland, on Sunday marked one of the darkest chapters in the nation's history. Leading Polish politicians, the Israeli ambassador to Poland and the country's chief rabbi were joined for the first time by a Polish Roman Catholic bishop on the site where Polish villagers turned on and massacred their Jewish neighbors during the World War II.
The Soviets occupied the area when war broke out in 1939. After the Nazis attacked the USSR two years later, confusion and mayhem gripped Jedwabne. Historians estimate that the massacres of Jews took place in over 50 places in the region, killing thousands.
Jacob Baker survived the massacre and now lives in the US. He can still remember the cries of Jewish villagers being killed by their neighbors.
"It was the most horrible day, because people were dragged out of their houses: men, women, infants, children," Baker said in a film that documents the massacre in Jedwabne....
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Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley addressed a lively audience at Campbell Hall Thursday night. Brinkley dazzled his audience with the remarkable story of how Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and other Presidents protected or renewed most of the wild lands that Americans know today.
He spoke at a moderate clip but threw so much information toward the audience that “oohs” and “awws” were almost ceaseless. While Brinkley’s lecture largely involved how Theodore Roosevelt became one of the world’s most successful conservationists, he added side-notes about key staffers and even the odd anecdote or personal connection.
“Theodore Roosevelt had a bad case of asthma … I did too; so I identified with that,” he quipped.
He also noted that Theodore Roosevelt grew up as a son of an anti-slavery, pro-union Republican father. “Remember, this was the republican party of Lincoln [Theodore belonged to],” Brinkley said. One of the essential points Brinkley made regarding TR was that he used every creative angle to satisfy an obsession with preserving wild creatures and landscapes alike: “The Antiquities Act came about as a means to preserve pottery and dinosaur bones.” The first parks were helping archaeologists who didn’t want their research sites destroyed.
“People were using the act to preserve areas the size of a crime scene,” Brinkley said. “It had a provision within it that the president could declare a monument based on him deeming an area of scientific significance. Theodore Roosevelt protected the whole Grand Canyon and declared that it was the most scientifically notable instance of erosion.” This first national monument precipitated what would lead to more land being set aside for conservation than any other law or policy.
Later, Brinkley discussed the role of FDR for our parks. He spoke as highly of him—as an environmentalist—as the former Roosevelt, because FDR created as many national parks and monuments as he could. Additionally, through the Civilian Conservation Corps, FDR had “over three billion trees planted in the United States.”
Brinkley’s eyes lit up with perhaps an even more extraordinary piece of information regarding FDR. “Franklin Roosevelt created a slogan that ‘conservation is the purveyor of permanent peace,’” he said. FDR intended to make this mantra a central theme at the first United Nations conference and, additionally, to submit international standards for particulate and chemical pollution to preserve the world’s environment. Tragically, Brinkley said, he died and successor Harry Truman had no intention to continue in that direction.
Brinkley held the utmost regard for Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt as environmentalists. This was not the case for others. Brinkley described Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan as lacking an earnest ethic for the stewardship of land or game.
This got me wondering about another president: John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Brinkley didn’t mention JFK, so during the Q & A session I shared my curiosity: “You stated that Truman didn’t have an earnest conversation ethnic but that TR and FDR did. Where do you find President Kennedy in this regard?”
Excited to answer, Brinkley replied, “He signed every conservation bill that came before him in the Senate,” he responded, adding, “After he supported the research of Rachel Carson, [the Kennedy White House became an intellectual hub for conservation.”
Douglas Brinkley fascinated and captivated his audience, clearly demonstrating his expertise. It was a pleasure to hear him speak.
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In honor of World Population Day yesterday, the Population Institute, UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund) and the Communications Consortium Media Center sponsored a panel discussion on "Men as Partners in Maternal Health: Supporting Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies."
The expert scholars and panelists asked and answered questions about the traditional and future roles of men in reproductive health policy-making.
Men, said Lawrence Smith (President of the Population Institute) in his opening statements, are essential to involve in reproductive health. He quoted from the ICPD (International Conference on Population and Development) Programme of Action about male involvement and responsibility:
Men play a key role in bringing about gender equality since, in most societies, men exercise preponderant power in nearly every sphere of life, ranging from personal decisions regarding the size of families to the policy and programme decisions taken at all levels of Government. It is essential to improve communication between men and women on issues of sexuality and reproductive health, and the understanding of their joint responsibilities, so that men and women are equal partners in public and private life.
Reproductive health has been seen as a women's issue, said panelist Nick Danforth, A resident scholar at the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis University; he said that we've been hesitant to engage men in "what has traditionally been a woman's domain."
Essentially, gender stereotypes carry over into matters of maternal health; women nurture and men compete. Women are caregivers, and men are breadwinners.
This gender inequality, said Danforth, creates economic pressures that can endanger women's health. He cited an example of a Ugandan woman who explained that girls in her country don't sleep with older men because they think it's safe—they do it to pay school fees.
A leading cause of maternal mortality around the world is unsafe abortion. In her July 12 article on preventable deaths due to unsafe abortions, Indira Basnet discussed the effect of this reality in Nepal. During the panel discussion, Henry Foster, Jr., a medical doctor and Dean and Vice President for Health Services at Meharry Medical College, pressed the point with an emphasis on men as partners in reproductive health:
Eighteen percent of the 550,000 maternal deaths annually, Foster reported, are caused by unsafe abortion. Access to safe abortion is essential to improve maternal health.
According to Foster, abortion is about health, religion and politics—and the latter, politics, impedes programmatic efforts to improve women's health. He believes that at the national and international level, men have the power to craft policies. So, men must be better public partners in reproductive health.
Men must be actively engaged in making personal and political commitment for positive change to achieve global goals for maternal health, gender equality and combating HIV/AIDS.—(From the event program)
Frances Kissling, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study and former director for Catholics for a Free Choice, spoke on the panel about the public element of responsibility and commitment to women's health.
Joking about celibate monks making rules about sex for married Catholic couples, Kissling analyzed the involvement of men in sexual and reproductive health policies. She asserted that men have always been involved—"some would say, historically, they've been too involved." For the most part, Kissling said, reproductive health decisions have been made by men in traditionally male-dominated settings—in politics and religion.
According to Kissling, the ICPD marked a change in language from population growth (which had political connotations with national security, economics, war and peace) to reproductive health (which is less popular and thought of as a woman-centered issue).
And as men have receded, taking a back seat on policy-making for "women's issues" in reproductive health, they gave the opposition a foothold for driving the issue into a more controversial space.
So what do the experts want done to improve maternal health and men's involvement?
1. Programs must adjust to welcome husbands and educate them on the needs of maternal care.
2. Women and men must work together to achieve equality.
3. Abortion must be safe and accessible.
4. Family planning services must be funded.
5. Gender and sexual violence must be addressed.
6. And, we must continue to raise awareness and engage men in reproductive health issues.
- Nick Danforth, Resident Scholar at Brandeis University
- Frances Kissling, Fellow at Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study
- Henry W. Foster, Jr., M.D., Dean, School of Medicine, Vice President for Health Services at Meharry Medical College
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This post deals with tile layout as a concept. If you are looking for a more How-to, nuts & bolts post then be sure to check out my related post on Bathroom Floor Tile Layout in 5 Easy Steps.
Typical tile layout advice is:
- Measure off of each wall
- Find the center of the room
- Draw intersecting lines
- Start tiling from the center intersection
You’ll find this type of information on many DIY sites that also have tips for cleaning out your gutters, staining your outside deck, and painting your ceiling. But let’s put this advice into practice in the example below:
Why not have a centered tile layout?
A rectangle. Why is a rectangle with a centered tile layout wrong? Let’s see what it looks like here on the right:
Looks great to me! This seems like a worthless post, doesn’t it? But let’s think about this: how many people are tiling rectangles? Perfect rectangles with virtually nothing in the room so everyone can see how perfectly centered the tiles are?
While there are rooms like this let’s take a look at some imperfect rectangles that people are installing tile in, like this one on the left:
This type of rectangular room is in many homes and it’s called a bathroom. Take a look at the layout of the tile. Technically it’s still the same centered layout but most people won’t care to look behind the toilet at the cuts of the tile and notice how centered they are with the wall on the right.
This is why conventional centering advice isn’t always the best way. Once you get real life “stuff” in the room a centered tile layout loses it’s impact. If a centered tile layout isn’t optimal then what is the best way to figure out how to layout your tile before installing?
Tile Layout Principals
Before we get to another diagram let me share a few layout principals that I use when figuring out what will work best:
Principal #1: Centering is best (when it’s noticeable)
I’m not against centering, in fact, I’m all for it when it makes sense to do so. I find that I center walls more than floors. Floors generally have too many obstructions in them to justify a centered tile layout. Walls generally have higher visibility so the back wall of a shower should be centered. A floor? Not necessarily.
Principal #2: Start with a full tile in the entrance way
I tell the other installers that I work with that they are to start with a full tile in the doorway or have a good reason why they didn’t. I would estimate that 90% of the floors that I install have a full tile in the entrance way. Keep in mind that I work almost exclusively in residential homes. The tile in the entrance to the room will always be open and visible and will also be visible from other parts of the house.
Principal #3: Identify one or two focal points in the room
Another word for focal points might be priorities. Try to identify the most visible spots in the room. Sometimes you may feel that in front of the vanity is the best place to have full tile. It may be the longest wall. It may be in front of the tub or shower. It may even be the center. Try to identify these one or two areas and look to start with full tiles at these points.
These aren’t hard and fast rules. Sometimes following these principals may lead to small ugly cuts elsewhere in the room and compromises will have to be made. But typically these are the principals I use when I start to lay out a floor and I’ll see if reasons come up as to why they won’t work.
Now back to our
If I were to layout this bathroom I would start with wholes/halves on the left wall (most visible) and a full tile (and halves) in the doorway and then see what the consequences are of that layout. Behind the toilet doesn’t matter. Underneath the vanity doesn’t matter. There’s often a mat in front of the tub. Every once in a while it won’t work out but I feel that this is the optimal layout for these types of bathrooms.
An alternate way of doing it that I would consider acceptable is to have full tiles directly in front of the toe kick on the vanity. That way, when you’re standing there, you would be standing on full tiles. I would be more inclined to go with this layout if the tiles were set square (not diagonal) and if they were large tiles. It would also depend on the types of cuts it left on the left side wall.
The title is a bit sensational and a centered tile layout isn’t necessarily wrong. I just get irritated with the overly simplistic advice on some of the other DIY sites. Let me know what you guys think in the comments down below.
Be sure to check out this related post: Bathroom Floor Tile Layout in 5 Easy Steps
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LYNCHED FOR NO OFFENSE
Perhaps the most characteristic feature of this record of lynch law for the year 1893, is the remarkable fact that five human beings were lynched and that the matter was considered of so little importance that the powerful press bureaus of the country did not consider the matter of enough importance to ascertain the causes for which they were hanged. It tells the world, with perhaps greater emphasis than any other feature of the record, that Lynch Law has become so common in the United States that the finding of the dead body of a Negro, suspended between heaven and earth to the limb of a tree, is of so slight importance that neither the civil authorities nor press agencies consider the matter worth investigating. July 21, in Shelby County, Tenn., a colored man by the name of Charles Martin was lynched. July 30, at Paris, Mo., a colored man named William Steen shared the same fate. December 28, Mack Segars was announced to have been lynched at Brantley, Alabama. August 31, at Yarborough, Texas, and on September 19, at Houston, a colored man was found lynched, but so little attention was paid to the matter that not only was no record made as to why these last two men were lynched, but even their names were not given. The dispatches simply stated that an unknown Negro was found lynched in each case.
There are friends of humanity who feel their souls shrink from any compromise with murder, but whose deep and abiding reverence for womanhood causes them to hesitate in giving their support to this crusade against Lynch Law, out of fear that they may encourage the miscreants whose deeds are worse than murder. But to these friends it must appear certain that these five men could not have been guilty of any terrible crime. They were simply lynched by parties of men who had it in their power to kill them, and who chose to avenge some fancied wrong by murder, rather than submit their grievances to court.
LYNCHED BECAUSE THEY WERE SAUCY
At Moberly, Mo., February 18 and at Fort Madison, S.C., June 2, both in 1892, a record was made in the line of lynching which should certainly appeal to every humanitarian who has any regard for the sacredness of human life. John Hughes, of Moberly, and Isaac Lincoln, of Fort Madison, and Will Lewis in Tullahoma, Tenn., suffered death for no more serious charge than that they “were saucy to white people.” In the days of slavery it was held to be a very serious matter for a colored person to fail to yield the sidewalk at the demand of a white person, and it will not be surprising to find some evidence of this intolerance existing in the days of freedom. But the most that could be expected as a penalty for acting or speaking saucily to a white person would be a slight physical chastisement to make the Negro “know his place” or an arrest and fine. But Missouri,
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In this book, Adam Rogers examines the late Roman phases of towns in Britain. Critically analysing the archaeological notion of decline, he focuses on public buildings, which played an important role, administrative and symbolic, within urban complexes. Arguing against the interpretation that many of these monumental civic buildings were in decline or abandoned in the later Roman period, he demonstrates that they remained purposeful spaces and important centres of urban life. Through a detailed assessment of the archaeology of late Roman towns, this book argues that the archaeological framework of decline does not permit an adequate and comprehensive understanding of the towns during this period. Moving beyond the idea of decline, this book emphasises a longer-term perspective for understanding the importance of towns in the later Roman period.
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Archaea and The Discovery of the Third Domain of Life
In 1977, Carl Woese overturned one of the major dogmas of biology. Until that time, biologists had taken for granted that all life on Earth belonged to one of two primary lineages, the eukaryotes (which include animals, plants, fungi and certain unicellular organisms such as paramecium) and the prokaryotes (all remaining microscopic organisms). Woese discovered that there were actually three primary lineages. Within what had previously been called prokaryotes, there exist two distinct groups of organisms no more related to one another than they were to eukaryotes. Because of Woese’s work, it is now widely agreed that there are three primary divisions of living systems – the Eukarya, Bacteria, and Archaea, a classification scheme that Woese proposed in 1990.
The new group of organisms – the Archaea – was initially thought to exist only in extreme environments, niches devoid of oxygen and whose temperatures can be near or above the normal boiling point of water. Microbiologists later realized that Archaea are a large and diverse group of organisms that are widely distributed in nature and are common in much less extreme habitats, such as soils and oceans. As such, they are significant contributors to the global carbon and nitrogen cycles.
The method Woese used to identify this “third form of life,” which involved comparing the sequences of a particular molecule central to cellular function, called ribosomal RNA, has become the standard approach used to identify and classify all organisms. These techniques have also revolutionized ecology, because it is now possible to survey an ecosystem by collecting ribosomal DNA from the environment, thus sidestepping the often impossible task of culturing the organisms that are there. These microorganisms and the revolutionary methods that Woese introduced into science can offer insights into the nature and evolution of cells.
In 1996, Woese and colleagues (University of Illinois professor Gary Olsen and researchers from the Institute for Genomic Research) published in the journal Science the first complete genome structure of an archaeon, Methanococcus jannaschii. Based on this work, they concluded that the Archaea are more closely related to humans than to bacteria. “The Archaea are related to us, to the eukaryotes; they are descendants of the microorganisms that gave rise to the eukaryotic cell billions of years ago,” Woese said at the time.
Woese’s experimental discoveries were made in the context of his search for a deep understanding of the process of evolution. As early as the 1970’s Woese was thinking about what sort of theory of evolution one would need in the era before genes as we know them had emerged. At such a time, the standard population genetics theory of evolution would not be applicable. Woese articulated early clear proposals about the nature of what has come to be known as the last universal common ancestor, concluding for a variety of reasons that the universal ancestor was not a single organism, but rather groupings of loosely structured cells that existed together during a time when genetic mutation rates were high and the transfer of genes between cells occurred more frequently than in the present day. The most detailed version of these proposals was put forward on the basis of Woese’s work here at IGB (with University of Illinois professor Nigel Goldenfeld). These groups of primitive cells, called progenotes, evolved together and eventually formed the three ancestral lineages.
“Carl's work, in my view, ranks along with the theory of superconductivity as the most important scientific work ever done on this campus – or indeed anywhere else,” says Dr. Nigel Goldenfeld, leader of the IGB Biocomplexity research theme and long-time colleague of Dr. Woese. “It remains one of the 20th century's landmark achievements in biology, and a rock solid foundation for our growing understanding of the evolution of life.”
Woese passed away in December of 2012 at the age of 84.
Publications and Resources
Read the groundbreaking 1977 publication “Phylogenetic structure of the prokaryotic domain: The primary kingdoms,” by Carl R. Woese and George E. Fox, in which Archaea, the third domain of life, is identified.
Commentaries on the 1977 publication include “Woese and Fox: Life, rearranged,” by Prashant Nair, and “Phylogeny and beyond: Scientific, historical, and conceptual significance of the first tree of life,” by Norman R. Pace, Jan Sapp, and Nigel Goldenfeld.
The first sequenced archaeon, as detailed in Science magazine, “Complete Genome Sequence of the Methanogenic Archaeon, Methanococcus jannaschii,” Bult et al., 1996.
The 30th anniversary of the first report of the discovery of Archaea was celebrated in 2007 at the IGB, with a symposium covering the historical aspects of the discovery and how this knowledge has transformed microbial ecology. The program, including videos of the presentations, is available at archaea.igb.uiuc.edu.
Carl R. Woese Memorial
On January 26, 2013, a memorial was held with a number of speakers sharing their remembrances of their interaction with Carl.
The speakers included IGB Director Gene Robinson, President Robert Easter, University of Illinois (at the 4:20 mark), Professor Larry Gold, University of Colorado (at the 9:15 mark), Professor Nigel Goldenfeld (at the 16:20 mark), Professor Richard Herman (at the 24:10 mark), Professor Gary Olsen (at the 31:15 mark), Professor Norman Pace, University of Colorado (at the 36:10 mark), Professor Emeritus Karl Stetter, Universität Regensburg (at the 37:46 mark), LAS Dean Ruth Watkins (at the 41:08 mark), Chancellor Phyllis Wise (at the 47:05 mark), and Professor Emeritus Ralph Wolfe (at the 49:32 mark). The open mike comments begin at the 54:14 mark.
Carl R. Woese Research Fund
Donations may be made to the Carl R. Woese Research Fund. Dr. Woese approved this fund to support research on evolution, systems biology and ecosystem dynamics at the Institute for Genomic Biology. Gifts may be sent to the “University of Illinois Foundation” in care of the Institute for Genomic Biology, 1206 W. Gregory Drive, Urbana, IL 61801 or via the secure website https://www.uif.uillinois.edu/Gifts/StartGiving.aspx. At the bottom of the page is a section "I would like my donation allocated to the following specific fund(s):" Specify your donation amount, and in the field "Other - Indicate where to direct donation here" please type “Carl R. Woese Research Fund” in the box. Click the continue button on the bottom of the page, and you will be directed to a secure page for contact and credit card information. You will have the chance to review this information before submission. For additional information, please contact Melissa McKillip, IGB Director of Development and Outreach at [email protected] or 217-333-4619.
Carl Woese online guest book
Dr. Woese touched the lives of friends, family and colleagues all over the world. We have created a guest book to share remembrances. If you would like to add a remembrance, please visit our online guest book and share a comment.
About Dr. Woese
Carl Woese was a professor of microbiology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a faculty member of the Institute for Genomic Biology. He was awarded the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “genius” award in 1984, and the National Academy of Sciences elected him to membership in 1988. In 1992 the Dutch Royal Academy of Science gave him the highest honor bestowed upon any microbiologist, the Leeuwenhoek Medal, awarded only once every 10 years. He was given the National Medal of Science in 2000 “for his brilliant and original insights, through molecular studies of RNA sequences, to explore the history of life on Earth.” In 2003 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded Woese the Crafoord Prize in Biosciences for his discovery of the third domain of life. The Crafoord award honors scientists whose work does not fall into any of the categories covered by Nobel Prizes. The Royal Society, the world’s oldest continuously active scientific organization, elected Woese as a foreign member in 2006. He held the Stanley O. Ikenberry Endowed Chair and served as Center for Advanced Study Professor of Microbiology.
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Much mystery surrounds the Knights Templars. After the first crusade in 1099, in which Jerusalem was captured, many Christian pilgrims began traveling to the “Holy Place” as they had referred to Jerusalem.Situated in the Holy Land was the Temple Mount, which was believed to have been built directly above King Solomon’s Temple. Jerusalem was under strict control and thus relatively safe, however much of the land adjourning it was not. Bandits abounded and many times pilgrims were routinely captured, robbed and slaughtered as they journeyed from Jaffa to the Holy Land.
About 1119, two veterans of the First Crusade, Hugues de Payens and a relative, Godfrey de Saint-Omer formed a monastic order for the protection of these loyal travelers.
The crusaders thus took the name “Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon”, or Templar Knights. Being true to their name, the nine knights had very few financial resources, thus they relied on donations to survive. Emphasizing their poverty, their emblem became that of two knights riding on a single horse.
Suddenly, after their first sojourn to the Temple Mount and returning to Europe, the Templars suddenly began gaining wealth and prestige. Within a very short time the Knights Templars had become the wealthiest group in Europe, if not the world. Legend has it they found something in the basement of King Solomon’s Temple, some secret or treasure whereby they gained knowledge that allowed them to acquire this tremendous fortune.
They soon became wealthier than most governments and attracted the envy and wrath of the French pope, who had been henceforth their ally and supporter. The church, having fallen on hard times, needed money. The pope therefore began to scheme a way in which to acquire the fortunes of the knights.
Soon false moral and ethical charges were levied against the Templars, thereby most were rounded up and executed on Friday 13th,1307. Hence Friday 13th has been designated as a day of bad luck ever since.
Some were able to escape to Scotland and points beyond. Legend has it, some may have even found their way to North America and settled in what is now up state New York,and possibly some traveling as far west as Minnesota.
This is entirely possible, as they had knowledge of the world not accessible by the common man and would have been able to make the trek across the Atlantic Ocean. Suppose the most knowledgeable settled in upstate New York and buried their “treasure” somewhere in the forests.
Moving ahead 500 years, there enters a spiritual young man seeking enlightenment. Following directions from his God, this young man, after much prayer and meditation, was found worthy, and thence uncovers some gold plates near Palmyra in the forests of New York. Following directions from God and Jesus, Joseph Smith goes on to found the Mormon Church, joins the Masonic Lodge and becomes one of the great spiritual leaders of modern time.
The gold plates contained the Book of Mormon, which according to Joseph Smith was written in “Reformed Egyptian”. Along with the Book of Mormon were two stones which enabled Smith to decipher the plates.The locals believed the treasure had been buried by Indians whom they thought were one of the lost tribes of Israel.
Perhaps the Knights Templars did actually find this treasure in Temple Mount,used the knowledge to gain their fame and wealth, and in the ensuing years made their way to upper New York and thus buried the plates to only to be discovered in some future generation by one who would be able to carry on the work. The Templars would have actually migrated from Jerusalem, so there could be some credence to the legend.
Many believe the United States is the “City on a Hill”, the “New Jerusalem” That “Bourne” from whence no traveler returns. In the same general area a Jewish Rabbi once attempted to establish a Jewish State in upstate New York, near Niagara Falls.
Who knows, maybe it all ties in together. There are no coincidences in life.
Source by Gary Wonning
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Next time you tell someone, “it’s just a minor cut or scratch,” you may want to think again. If these minor wounds aren’t cleaned up in a timely manner, they can lead to major health issues and sometimes even death.
Twelve-year-old Rory Staunton’s story is one that started out innocent, as he fell and skinned his knee while diving for a basketball during a game at his New York private school.
Following what was thought to be a minor incident, Rory’s teacher covered up the cut with plasters. Little did they know at the time, Rory had suffered from severe septic shock and he died just four days later.
As the leading cause of death in hospitals, Sepsis is a life-threatening condition that is triggered when the body’s immune system goes into overdrive to fight an infection.
Because doctors and those affected fail to recognize the symptoms of Sepsis, the condition is often untreated and undiagnosed, which often results in untimely and unnecessary death. Prior to Rory’s death, there were no protocols put in place to detect sepsis and no awareness for the condition.
Rory’s parents, Orlaith and Ciaran Staunton made it their mission to not only raise awareness but to encourage protocols that would help parents identify and treat Sepsis. They didn’t want any other parent to have to suffer the pain that they have had since Rory passed in 2013, so they founded the Rory Staunton Foundation.
Thanks to the efforts of the Staunton’s, the Sepsis Care Improvement Initiative has been put in place in New York, and earlier detection and treatment have lowered the death rate due to the condition. While the initiative is still new, encouraging improvements have been demonstrated. There have been 4,727 fewer Sepsis deaths in New York since the initiative was launched.
“We have met the people that have been saved by these protocols,” said Ciaran. “We are happy that their parents are not joining us in this miserable life. We want that fighting chance extended to every family in America.
When our son died, there was no awareness, no sepsis protocols, nothing in the A-Z book on sepsis. Now we’ve shown here’s what we can do in New York. We want the US Government to have the same level of anxiety and awareness of Sepsis as they do Ebola.”
According to the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), every year more than one million Americans are affected by Sepsis and several end up dying from it.
Pictured below on the left: Orlaith, Ciaran, Rory and younger sister Kathleen. Right: Rory Staunton
Commenters shared their thoughts on the tragic incident…
“Went to a fundraiser in NYC for this foundation. Glad to see that the foundation is making a difference. Sorry for your loss.”
One commenter shared just how much Sepsis can affect someone’s body…
“I had Septicemia after surgery here in Ireland. It went undiagnosed for days which deteriorated into Toxic Shock Syndrome ( Septic shock). It was only the microbiologist who saved my life eventually. However, I am left with many lifelong after effects e.g., kidney failure. and frequent infections.”
SHARE this with your friends on facebook!
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In honor of World Population Day yesterday, the Population Institute, UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund) and the Communications Consortium Media Center sponsored a panel discussion on "Men as Partners in Maternal Health: Supporting Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies."
The expert scholars and panelists asked and answered questions about the traditional and future roles of men in reproductive health policy-making.
Men, said Lawrence Smith (President of the Population Institute) in his opening statements, are essential to involve in reproductive health. He quoted from the ICPD (International Conference on Population and Development) Programme of Action about male involvement and responsibility:
Men play a key role in bringing about gender equality since, in most societies, men exercise preponderant power in nearly every sphere of life, ranging from personal decisions regarding the size of families to the policy and programme decisions taken at all levels of Government. It is essential to improve communication between men and women on issues of sexuality and reproductive health, and the understanding of their joint responsibilities, so that men and women are equal partners in public and private life.
Reproductive health has been seen as a women's issue, said panelist Nick Danforth, A resident scholar at the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis University; he said that we've been hesitant to engage men in "what has traditionally been a woman's domain."
Essentially, gender stereotypes carry over into matters of maternal health; women nurture and men compete. Women are caregivers, and men are breadwinners.
This gender inequality, said Danforth, creates economic pressures that can endanger women's health. He cited an example of a Ugandan woman who explained that girls in her country don't sleep with older men because they think it's safe—they do it to pay school fees.
A leading cause of maternal mortality around the world is unsafe abortion. In her July 12 article on preventable deaths due to unsafe abortions, Indira Basnet discussed the effect of this reality in Nepal. During the panel discussion, Henry Foster, Jr., a medical doctor and Dean and Vice President for Health Services at Meharry Medical College, pressed the point with an emphasis on men as partners in reproductive health:
Eighteen percent of the 550,000 maternal deaths annually, Foster reported, are caused by unsafe abortion. Access to safe abortion is essential to improve maternal health.
According to Foster, abortion is about health, religion and politics—and the latter, politics, impedes programmatic efforts to improve women's health. He believes that at the national and international level, men have the power to craft policies. So, men must be better public partners in reproductive health.
Men must be actively engaged in making personal and political commitment for positive change to achieve global goals for maternal health, gender equality and combating HIV/AIDS.—(From the event program)
Frances Kissling, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study and former director for Catholics for a Free Choice, spoke on the panel about the public element of responsibility and commitment to women's health.
Joking about celibate monks making rules about sex for married Catholic couples, Kissling analyzed the involvement of men in sexual and reproductive health policies. She asserted that men have always been involved—"some would say, historically, they've been too involved." For the most part, Kissling said, reproductive health decisions have been made by men in traditionally male-dominated settings—in politics and religion.
According to Kissling, the ICPD marked a change in language from population growth (which had political connotations with national security, economics, war and peace) to reproductive health (which is less popular and thought of as a woman-centered issue).
And as men have receded, taking a back seat on policy-making for "women's issues" in reproductive health, they gave the opposition a foothold for driving the issue into a more controversial space.
So what do the experts want done to improve maternal health and men's involvement?
1. Programs must adjust to welcome husbands and educate them on the needs of maternal care.
2. Women and men must work together to achieve equality.
3. Abortion must be safe and accessible.
4. Family planning services must be funded.
5. Gender and sexual violence must be addressed.
6. And, we must continue to raise awareness and engage men in reproductive health issues.
- Nick Danforth, Resident Scholar at Brandeis University
- Frances Kissling, Fellow at Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study
- Henry W. Foster, Jr., M.D., Dean, School of Medicine, Vice President for Health Services at Meharry Medical College
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Known only from small fragmented populations within and adjacent to Ft. Irwin (DOD); where threatened by mining, vehicles, and military activities. Also threatened by prolonged drought. See Leaflets of Western Botany 3:49-80 (1941) for original description.
California Counties and Islands:name (code) San Bernardino (SBD)
Quads:name (DWR code) USGS code Paradise Range (206A) 35116B7, Williams Well (206B) 35116B8, Lane Mountain (206C) 35116A8, Mud Hills (207D) 35117A1, Goldstone (231C) 35116C8, East of Goldstone (231D) 35116C7
Definitions of codes preceding a county and/or quad:
Uncertain about distribution or identity
Uncertain about distribution, but presumed extirpated if once present
Occurrence confirmed, but possibly extirpated
Species may be present in other areas where conditions are favorable.
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[UCP Books]: How We See the Sky
“Entertaining and very readable, How We See the Sky presents an up-to-date approach to what a dedicated visual observer can hope to understand by carefully monitoring the sky. In addition, it provides a wealth of information that informs the reader about celestial phenomena.”
—Jay Holberg, University of Arizona
How We See the Sky
A Naked-Eye Tour of Day and Night
|Publication Date: October 31, 2011||$20.00 • £13.00|
|International publication date: November 14, 2011||978-0-226-34577-2 (cloth)|
In How We See the Sky, Thomas Hockey returns to us our knowledge of the sky, offering a fascinating overview of what can be seen there without the aid of a telescope. Hockey begins by scanning the horizon, explaining how the visible universe rotates through our view as night turns to day and season to season. Subsequent chapters explore the sun’s and moon’s respective motions through the celestial globe, as well as the appearance of solstices, eclipses, and planets, and how these are accounted for in different kinds of calendars. In every chapter, Hockey introduces the common vocabulary of today’s astronomers, uses examples past and present to explain them, and provides conceptual tools to help newcomers understand the topics he discusses.
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On September 13, 2006, Kimveer Gill walked into the cafeteria at Dawson College in Montreal and, without apparent motive, shot 21 people, injuring 19 and killing two, including himself. The same day a judge in West Virginia sent a woman to jail for, among other atrocities, forcing her six children and stepchildren to gorge themselves on food and then eat their own vomit. Also on the 13th, a court in New York sentenced a man for killing his girlfriend by setting her on fire--in front of her 10-year-old son. There was nothing special about that Wednesday. From around the world we hear reports of murder, manslaughter, cruelty and abuse every day. Violence is ubiquitous.
But what drives one person to kill, maim or abuse another, sometimes for little or no obvious reason--and why do so many violent offenders return to crime after serving time in prison? Are these individuals incapable of any other behavior? We have evaluated the results of studies conducted around the world, focusing on acts ranging from fistfights to murder, in search of the psychobiological roots of violence. Our key conclusion is simple: violent behavior never erupts from a single cause. Rather it results from a combination of risk factors--among them inherited tendencies, a traumatic childhood and other negative experiences--that interact and aggravate one another. This realization has a silver lining: positive influences may be able to offset some of those factors that promote violence, possibly offering hope for prevention.
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Vail Law column: What is obstruction of justice?
The latest from Washington, D.C., is that associates of former FBI Director James Comey claim he made a contemporaneous record of a private February conversation with the president whereby Mr. Donald Trump pressured the director to drop the Bureau’s investigation into former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s alleged connections with the Russians.
“I hope you can let this go,” the president is reported to have said, “let Flynn go.”
This, along with the firing of Comey when it appeared he would not play ball with the president, has led whispers of the “I” word to become veritable shouts … at least from some quarters. From the House floor, on May 17, Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, became the first congressman to call for the president’s impeachment.
Impeachment means only that the House of Representatives would bring charges (articles of impeachment) against the president. It does not mean that the president would necessarily be found guilty. Similar to a criminal indictment, culpability or guilt must still be proven.
For example, in December 1998, former President Bill Clinton had to answer to articles of impeachment but survived the ordeal to remain in office. Two charges (or articles) were brought against him, the first for perjury and the second for alleged obstruction of justice.
When articles of impeachment were drawn up against former president Richard Nixon, he faced three charges: abuse of power, contempt of Congress and obstruction of justice. Seeing the writing on the wall — that he would be found guilty and removed from office — the president instead resigned.
In 1868, the U.S. House of Representatives drew up 11 articles of impeachment detailing Andrew Johnson’s “high crimes and misdemeanors” in accordance with Article Two of the U.S. Constitution. Unlike Nixon and Clinton, the charges against Johnson did not include obstruction. Like Clinton, however, Johnson survived to complete what is regarded as his failed presidency. Many rank Johnson among the worst that have served in that office.
So what, then, constitutes obstruction of justice?
“Obstruction” means getting in the way, interfering or blocking. “Justice” means prosecution or administration of the laws. To obstruct justice, one throws up a roadblock or roadblocks to the maintenance or administration of lawful process.
The legal requirements to support a charge of obstruction of justice are more complex.
But a quick detour first.
What is required to convict one of the criminal charge of obstruction of justice ain’t necessarily the same as what may be required to impeach. It is worth attention, too, that a sitting president cannot — or at the least, would not — be charged with the crime of obstruction; if he were to be charged with the crime — given the applicability of presidential immunity — he would first have to be impeached, then removed from office and then potentially charged with the crime.
Thirdly, it is wise to keep the 25th Amendment in sight. That amendment provides, in Section 4, that a president may be removed from office if he is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” so long as “the vice president and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide … their written declaration” to that effect. Lastly, there are “elements” to consider. Elements in this case are the components that make up the alleged offense.
In order to make obstruction a crime, one must act to impede official investigations. While some examples of obstruction are specific — such as killing a witness or destroying evidence — the law also includes broad, catchall prohibitions.
We are a long, long way from impeachment, if that were to occur at all. And we are a much longer way to any potential removal of the president from office and into the nether reaches of the ionosphere before the president would be charged and convicted of a crime.
More than 100 days into the Trump Administration, we can all agree this is very disturbing and unsettling to our democracy.
Will Donald Trump be impeached? He has surprised us before. It would not be the first time a president was brought down owing to alleged obstruction. Trump is nothing if not a showman. Stay tuned — this could be yuuuge.
Rohn K. Robbins is an attorney licensed before the bars of Colorado and California who practices in the Vail Valley with the law firm of Stevens, Littman, Biddison, Tharp & Weinberg LLC. His practice areas include business and commercial transactions, real estate and development, family law, custody and divorce and civil litigation. Robbins may be reached at 970-926-4461 or at his email address, [email protected].
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Vail’s updated plans regarding the state guidelines and isolation housing requirements is one of several pieces of information guests are waiting on heading into the 2020-21 season.
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Through the help of a concerned mother and the power of social media, a Scripps Florida scientist has linked autism traits, and the different processing of pain, to a gene mutation.
The discovery could be a strategy for treating or even curing the genetic causes of autism, and will be part of a scientific conference being held this week at the Jupiter-based research institute.
Scripps is looking to develop potential drugs to bring gene protein levels up to normal, said neuroscientist Gavin Rumbaugh during a Facebook Live event on Monday.
For nearly five years, Rumbaugh has been collaborating with a patient advocacy group formed by Monica Weldon of Cypress, Texas, whose 10-year-old son, Beckett, has never experienced pain the way his fraternal twin sister, or other children, do.
“I knew it at 4 months when he wasn’t keeping up with the milestones with his sister, that something was just not right,” Weldon said. Her son was diagnosed with the mutant gene in 2012.
Weldon took to Facebook and other social media to find people with the same sensory issues,and developed a patient registry that could be used by scientists.
While Beckett had signs of autism, he had other symptoms that were not typical: “His pain threshold was so high,” Weldon said. “He walked around with a broken finger for four days, and we didn’t know it was broken.”
After analysis of patient data and a series of experiments in animals, Scripps research institute discovered a gene mutation that leads to disordered touch and pain processing. The results were recently published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
People usually are born with two of the genes critical to healthy brain development. Children born with only one working gene are known to have symptoms including autistic traits, epilepsy and intellectual disability, according to the article. The gene mutation could explain a paradox where such patients may not be bothered by certain pains, but can react strongly to other stimuli.
While Weldon’s son ignored dog bites or skin burns, the sights and sounds of a simple trip to the grocery store overwhelmed him, Weldon said.
“Nothing could relieve him of the over-stimulation,” she said. “He was constantly screaming in the car. You couldn’t go anywhere because of the screaming. We had ear plugs in the house.”
Morning Update Newsletter
Start your day with the top stories in South Florida.
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By Rebecca Morelle
Science reporter, BBC News
Some of nature's most remarkable and unique treasures are set to dazzle the public when they go on display.
The Vault, a new gallery at London's Natural History Museum, will showcase a collection of gems, crystals, metals and meteorites from around the world.
Museum curator Alan Hart said the specimens were chosen for "their beauty, rarity and history".
They include a hefty gold nugget, a Martian meteorite and 296 coloured diamonds.
Mr Hart described the collection as "the creme de la creme" of the mineral world.
He said: "We designed this exclusive gallery so we could showcase the best of our collections and include in that some dazzling loans."
One of these loans includes the famous Aurora Collection, which consists of hundreds of exceptionally rare diamonds, ranging in colour from blood red to emerald green.
"Gems like these were not meant to be imprisoned in a dark underground safe for the momentary pleasure of a few eyes," said Alan Bronstein, the co-owner of the collection.
The Vault's team said the gallery would reveal some of the fascinating stories behind the treasures, from Heron-Allen's cursed amethyst to the Latrobe gold nugget, which was unearthed during Australia's "gold rush".
Mr Hart told the BBC News website: "Each specimen has a great narrative - whether it is a scientific narrative, cultural dimension or historical fact."
The team also said the array would give an insight into the science behind the specimens.
Displayed next to many of the glittering gems, including a vivid pink beryl from Madagascar, are the crystals or crystalline material from which they were cut.
This will give visitors a better idea of the Earth processes that yield such remarkable items.
Mr Hart said: "We wanted to celebrate some of the rarest and unique gemstones, metals, meteorites and crystals as a natural substance.
"I think many people may have gemstones and they may not realise where the raw materials come from."
He added: "Many of these are like nature's artwork- they are just so spectacular."
The curator said it was impossible to place a value on the Vault's display.
He explained: "Some of the items are so unique; they are literally priceless, especially in terms of their scientific value."
One such item is the Nakhla, a rare Martian meteorite which crashed to Earth in Egypt in 1911.
Mr Hart said: "By studying these meteorites we can find out about the origins of the Solar System and maybe even the origins of life itself."
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As an English teacher – and student, still, I think! – I love novels that engage with the idea of language itself. For me, literature’s how we enter and understand the world, and dystopian novels often bring that to the forefront. They explore communication, memory, story-telling, and the way that language works to soothe, manipulate, warn, and memorialise. In particular, I’ve been studying The Handmaid’s Tale and 1984 with A-Level students, and both novels have some interesting discussions about language’s role in our society.
Setting a novel in the future, as many speculative fictions do, language is a good way to ground a reader in the world. Names, places, common phrases and greetings all create a sense of otherness, the here-but-not-here. Atwood’s entire social hierarchy is created through language. The Commanders carry connotations of the military and Handmaids draw on the religious basis of the society they now live in. The collective Wives and Daughters identify the women in relation to their social relationship to the men, immediately highlighting the extreme patriarchy of Gilead. This, of course, is taken to its extreme conclusion in Offred, the prefix ‘Of’ being affixed to the Commander’s name to name his Handmaid – and the names transferring to the new Handmaid when they are replaced, thoroughly robbing the Handmaid of any individual identity. Atwood’s also more playful with names elsewhere; “Serena Joy”, we learn in the Historical Notes, didn’t exist but is a pseudonym created by Offred with its satirical use of the qualities the Wife should have – serenity and joy at her place in the new order.
What better time to be looking at the way that ideology is promoted through language? There’s been several blog posts lately on the front-page headlines used to report the high court decision that Parliament need to vote on Article 50 – even the language of a headline deserves interrogation, and in propaganda and media, language is used to devastating effect. It would, by the way, make a fantastic English Language investigation -the language of dystopian fiction compared with current tabloids perhaps. Ever noticed how politicians “vow” and describing a problem is often called an “attack”? those words are loaded with meaning, and a novelist of dystopian fiction can use these connotations to their advantage.
Contextually, there’s huge precedent, of course. Consider Nazi Germany’s slogans – One “people, one country, one leader!”, “Work makes you free” or the Soviet union’s “Workers of the world, unite”. Think about some of the newspaper articles or political statements made recently, in the USA and in the UK. There’s a frightening amount of “make our country great”, “take back our country”, and so on. Historical dystopias promise unity and cohesion, but often at the expense of one social group – to begin with. In fictional dystopia, much the same happens. In 1984, Orwell doesn’t spare the Soviet rhetoric – “the party” behaves in unison, as do “the proles”, while party members greet each other as “comrade” rather than by name. Winston’s job revolves around rewriting history, literally destroying previous written records and replacing them with “updated” versions. This is not only propaganda – the updates always portray the Party as victorious and reflect the current war – but is a reminder that history is told by the victorious, and every nation interprets history in their own way: there is no objective version once it has passed. In Gilead, Atwood uses language to present the religious ideologies that permeate the society. The Handmaids routinely greet one another with a pseudo-religious phrase – “Blessed be the fruit”; “May the Lord open”. The shops are named for biblical references, Loaves and Fishes, Soul Scrolls. All Flesh, Milk and Honey. Religious allusion is in everyday language, even Offred’s as she tries to recall the Lord’s Prayer, adheres to the Handmaids’ rituals, and explains herself with biblical references. Once an ideology has so permeated society that its expression is in everyday life, how can it ever be filtered out? A depressing thought, perhaps, when British newspapers are calling its judges “enemies of the people” and using racist rhetoric to describe refugees.
Ensuring the past is prevalent in both 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale, as well as other dystopian fiction. While Winston rewrites History in his state-sanctioned job, Offred is telling her story in order to bear witness to what happens, to make sense of her experience – and her life. With everyone she loves gone, Offred comments at one stage that we’re alive as long as we’re remembered, but there’s nobody left to remember her unless she tells her story. But not simply recounting it. Atwood shows her rewriting, editing, changing story – changing the same story, as when she describes having sex with Nick three different ways, leaving the reader in doubt as to what happened at all.
‘It’s impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances’.” (Ch 25, The Handmaid’s Tale)
Offred often interrupts herself to refocus her storytelling – to tell “a different story, a better story”, and we’re led to believe that this unreliable narrator isn’t telling is everything and is painting herself in a more positive light. In other dystopian fiction, writers use diaries – like P.D. James’ Children of Men which intersperses third person narrative with the protagonist’s diary. Winston in 1984 writes a diary to explore his response to the world he finds himself in. In Atwood’s book In Other Worlds, she describes the narrative techniques as a way for a character to make a journey to the dystopia and back again, their story often the only thing making it back. The dystopian fictions not only bear witness to the societies of the novels but to social anxieties of the writers – the ecological breakdown of Atwood’s Year of the Flood, religious extremism in The Handmaid’s Tale, loss of individual freedom in 1984, atomic destruction in The Road.
The slippery nature of language
Language, then, is explored as both mechanism for control and freedom. If it can control through rewriting history and propaganda and manipulating people’s thoughts, it can also be used to break free – the revolutionaries broadcasting their message, the witnesses telling their tales. Orwell and Atwood make this explicit in their writing. Offred frequently explores the difficulties of language as well as its joys – she plays with language, finds comfort in story-0telling, but also in the paths that different words take her down, for example in chapter 35 when she considers falling in love: “We fell, we were falling women.” Repeatedly, she notes that words have different meanings to different people, and that there’s no way to truly express precisely what you want and have another person understand it in exactly the same way.
More explicitly, both Atwood and Orwell include ‘additions’ to their novels in the form of the Appendix exploring Newspeak and the Historical Notes, from the Gileadean Studies conference. It’s essential to read both of these – several students don’t at first because they feel authentically written by the author and therefore not part of the story. Atwood’s notes from the conference are a further satire on the patriarchal system, this time the ‘gentler’ control that sees the male professor patronising the chair of the conference, making inappropriate jokes about her sexuality and taking credit for reshaping Offred’s narrative into something more ‘suitable – more linear, more ‘sensible. More male. Orwell’s newspeak appendix explores the concept further, the way that the Party have tried to reduce language itself to make thought itself controllable, to ensure that people aren’t able to think non-sanctioned thoughts because they don’t have the language to do so – the ultimate propaganda thought-control. Both these final chapters also fulfil the dystopian trope of the ‘return’ to an apparently better society. The academic nature of both suggests a distance sufficient that the dystopian period can be studied and explained without emotion. Both might suggest a more balanced society – neither dystopia, nor utopia. Just somewhere in between. As Atwood writes in In Other Worlds, “we should probably not try to make things perfect, especially not ourselves, for that path leads to mass graves. We’re stuck with us, imperfect as we are; but we should make the most of us.”
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Charles Darwin pictured evolution as a grand tree, with the world’s living species as its twigs. Scientists identify 10,000 new species a year, but they’ve got a long, long way to go before finding all of Earth’s biodiversity. So far, they have identified 1.5 million species of animals, but there may be 7 million or more in total. Beyond the animal kingdom, our ignorance balloons. Scoop up some sea water or a cup of soil, and there will likely be thousands of new species of microbes lurking there. Fortunately, a lot of the species that scientists discover each year are fairly close relatives to species we already know about. There may be plenty of beetle species left to be discovered, for example, but they will all end up as tufts sprouting from the same beetle branch.
Making matters more complicated is that the tree is, in some ways, more like a web. Genes sometimes slip from one species to another, especially among microbes. There are lots of ways this can happen. Viruses can ferry these genes from species to species; in other cases, microbes may just slurp up naked DNA. In the process, they blur genealogy.
This can be a hard concept to grok, so let me offer a blogger’s analogy. Let’s say that Ed Yong and I meet up at a conference. We shake hands. Little do I know that Ed has perfected his Yong-o-matic Horizontal Gene Transfer Injector. A portion of his genes invade the skin on my hand, slip into my cells, and replace some of my own genes. Later, I decide to pay for a DNA ancestry test, curious to find out exactly where I come from. The tests come back, indicating that my ancestors are not, as I once thought, from Europe, but from China.
It’s not just individual genes that can slip from one species to another, either. On rare occasions, entire cells have merged together, creating entirely new kinds of life (like us). Cell fusions and horizontal gene transfer are probably best portrait by interconnected branches, rather than diverging ones. The base of the tree seems especially tangled, more like a mangrove rather than an oak.
With all those caveats in mind, here’s a rough picture of the tree of life that Norman Pace of the University of Colorado offered in a scientific review he published in 2009. It shows life divided up into three domains: eukaryotes (that’s us), bacteria, and archaea.
There’s a lot of debate about whether eukaryotes actually split off from within the archaea, or just branched off from a common ancestor. Nevertheless, the two forms of life are quite distinct. For one thing, the common ancestor of living eukaryotes acquired oxygen-consuming bacteria that became a permanent part of their cells, called mitochondria. They’re keeping you alive right now.
A lot of scientists wonder how all the new species that scientists are discovering are going to change the shape of this tree. Will its three-part structure endure, with each part simply growing denser with new branches? Or have we been missing entire swaths of the tree of life?
It’s possible–but just possible at this point–that we have missed a big part of it.
One clue came to light in December. A team of French scientists have been studying weird bunch of viruses officially called Nucleocytoplasmic Large DNA Viruses (NCLDV). I’m just going to call them giant viruses, because they are quite huge. Grotesquely so. As I write in my upcoming book, A Planet of Viruses, they were mistaken for years as bacteria. They were a hundred times bigger than any virus known at the time.. Giant viruses are indeed viruses, however. They hijack host cells the way all viruses do, for example.
But giant viruses also explode a lot of conventional ideas of what viruses are supposed to be. Not only are giant viruses monstrously big, but they are overloaded with genes. A flu virus has just ten genes, for example, but a number of giant viruses have well over a thousand. Giant viruses even get infected by viruses of their own.
For years, researchers have been finding that the diversity of genes in viruses is tremendous. It turns out that giant viruses are particularly bizarre, genetically speaking. Didier Raoult and his colleagues compared one set of genes in giant viruses to their counterparts in other lineages. Here’s the evolutionary tree they came up with. (The giant virus genes are shown in red.)
The genes are so different, the scientists argue, that giant viruses represent a fourth domain of life. Here’s an impressionistic figure they created to show how the four domains emerged from the web of gene-trading early on in the history of life (from left to right, archaea, bacteria, eukaryotes, and giant viruses).
Today Jonathan Eisen of UC Davis and his colleagues publish still more evidence for a possible fourth domain. (Some of the evidence can be found in a paper in PLOS One; the rest is in a shorter note at PLOS Currents.) Their evidence comes from a voyage Craig Venter and his colleagues took in his yacht, scooping up sea water along the way. They ripped open the microbes in the water and pulled out all their genes. The advantage of this approach is that it allowed the scientists to amass a database of literally tens of millions of new genes. The downside was that they could only look at the isolated genes, rather than the living microbes from which they came.
Eisen and his colleagues decided to compare the versions of a few genes that are found in all living things and are very useful for reconstructing evolutionary trees of the grandest scale. (The genes are called small subunit rRNA, recA, and rpoB). They found that a lot of the genes they analyzed belonged to species that are closely related to species that scientists already know about.
But some are different. Very different. In fact, they represent some of the oldest branches on the tree of life. In this figure, for example, they compare versions of the RpoB gene in giant viruses (red), bacteria (purple), eukaryotes (blue), and archaea (green). Two branches that turned up in the global ocean survey are in cyan. Unknown 2 seems to be like the giant viruses, but Unknown 1 is just off the map.
Eisen and his colleagues consider it possible that these genes come from a fourth domain. Analyzing the ancient history of genes is notoriously tricky, with lots of opportunities for spurious results to crop up, so this possibility might soon evaporate. But scientists have a number of tools at their disposal to test the results. In this case, the first order of business will be to find more of these exotic genes to see if they continue to fall into a distinct domain of their own. TIf they do, scientists will need to track down the actual organisms that carry them. Are they viruses, or are they true cells? That discovery might show how this possible fourth domain got its start. Did it start out as ordinary cellular life, and then some of its genes ended up in viruses? Or is the fourth domain another sign that life as we know it actually originated as viruses? Answering those questions will be tough. And redrawing the tree of life will probably be even tougher.
[Update: For lots more, go to Eisen's own blog post.]
Links to this Post
- The Sunday Week Link Fest | A Natural Evolution | March 20, 2011
- linkfest – 03/20/11 « hbd* chick | March 20, 2011
- Scientists Discover New Domain of Organism | ICU Online Blog Central | March 20, 2011
- Genetics and the tree of life « The 2011 Harriet-Elliott Lecture Series blog | March 21, 2011
- The largest known virus | Sinting Link | March 23, 2011
- Press release? We don’t need no stinking press release? | March 24, 2011
- Monster Viruses | Sinting Link | March 28, 2011
- Virus as Koosh ball: My favorite image of the day | The Loom | moregoodstuff.info | June 14, 2011
- Trouble in the Fourth Domain? | The Loom | moregoodstuff.info | July 14, 2011
- Visiones del Cuarto Dominio - LibreConocimiento.Com | January 17, 2012
- Invisible aliens: they’re not life as we know it — yet | SmartPlanet | April 17, 2012
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Global AIDS Report Shows Continued Gains in Preventing Mother-to-Child Transmission, Reinforces Momentum Toward Elimination of Pediatric HIV and AIDS
Statement of Nicholas Hellmann, M.D., Executive Vice President of Medical and Scientific Affairs, The Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation
WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The 2010 report on universal access to HIV prevention, care and treatment released today by WHO, UNAIDS, and UNICEF shows continuing progress in scaling up global HIV/AIDS interventions. We are particularly encouraged by increased access to treatment for both pregnant women and children living with the virus, as well as ongoing expansion of programs to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV (PMTCT), which accounts for more than 90% of new infections in children.
In the countries hardest hit by the pandemic, the global health community is together reaching more than half of pregnant women (53%) in need of PMTCT services with antiretroviral drugs. The fact that only 15% of women had access to PMTCT drugs just five years ago shows the clear results of global commitments to scale-up this prevention method, which has been proven to dramatically reduce new infant HIV infections.
The report also shows a dramatic increase in the number of children receiving antiretroviral therapy (ART), with a 29% increase from the previous year. Yet in many countries, children still lag far behind adults in access to treatment – less than a third of children in need of treatment are receiving it, and only a small fraction of HIV-exposed infants are being tested soon after birth. We clearly know that early diagnosis of HIV infection and rapid initiation of treatment are vital to saving young lives – and without treatment, approximately half of infected children will die before the age of two.
The Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation works closely with many governments in sub-Saharan Africa, the region hardest hit by this disease, and we have seen the critical importance of national political commitments in fighting the pandemic. As more countries implement new WHO guidelines for prevention and treatment – such as shifting away from single-dose nevirapine to more efficacious HIV prophylaxis regimens, and starting effective treatment earlier for pregnant women living with HIV – we will continue to see dramatic progress.
Reaching more mothers and children with high quality HIV prevention and treatment services is also vital to improving overall maternal and child health and survival, two important aspects of the UN's Millennium Development Goals. At a time when governments and global health leaders are rallying behind these common goals, this progress report shows that we are on the right path – but without sustained political and financial commitments, we are putting progress at risk.
We welcome the report, and look forward to continuing to work together with WHO, UNAIDS, UNICEF, and other partners to realize the virtual elimination of pediatric AIDS worldwide. We cannot afford to slow our progress or lose momentum toward this achievable goal.
About the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation
The Foundation is a global leader in the fight against pediatric HIV and AIDS, and has reached nearly 10 million women with services to prevent transmission of HIV to their babies. It works at 5,000 sites in 17 countries to implement prevention, care, and treatment; to further advance innovative research; and to execute strategic and targeted global advocacy activities to bring dramatic change to the lives of millions of women, children, and families worldwide.
SOURCE Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation
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Native American History in the House
Mary Peltola's election was a milestone for America's First Peoples.
An odd piece from Jaclyn Diaz at NPR: “For the first time in 230 years, Congress has full U.S. Indigenous representation.”
Rep. Mary Peltola’s election to the U.S. House of Representatives made history in several ways.
With her recent swearing-in, it became official for the first time in more than 230 years: A Native American, an Alaska Native and a Native Hawaiian are all members of the House — fully representing the United States’ Indigenous people for the first time, according to Rep. Kaiali’i Kahele of Hawaii. Now, there are six Indigenous Americans who are representatives in the House.
An interesting enough milestone, to be sure, although “full representation” seems like an odd way of describing this. But the report doubles down:
“It’s a historic moment,” Lani Teves, an associate professor at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa said.
Indigenous peoples in the United States have been disenfranchised on many levels throughout history, Teves told NPR.
“Having different Indigenous communities represented shows the growing power of Native people across the United States and across the world,” she said.
Bringing more Indigenous representation to Congress has been slow-going over the years. Just four years ago, Davids and now-Interior Secretary Deb Haaland became the first two Native American women elected to Congress. Kahele is just the second Native Hawaiian to represent his home state.
It’s undeniable that American Indians have faced extraordinary discrimination over the years that created obstacles to their representation in government. Still, Native Americans—Amerindians, Native Alaskans, Native Hawaiians, and other indigenous groups—are only 1.6% of the population. It’s not shocking that there aren’t a lot of them in Congress.
Further, Alaska only has one Representative and Hawaii only has two; like all states, they have two Senators. And Alaska’s population is overwhelmingly (64.%) white; Alaska Natives and other Native Americans are a mere 17.3%. Hawaii is more diverse but Asians (36.8%) are the largest plurality, Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders combine for another 10.5%, with American Indians and Native Alaskans adding another 0.4%.
So, again the fact that we have six total Natives in Congress and one from each of the major groups is a noteworthy milestone. But it’s not the righting of some great injustice—just evidence that members of minority groups are electable.
Of course, Peltola is extremely likely to lose this seat in November, since she’s a Democrat in a heavily Republican state and only won through a bizarre special election process in which the Republican vote was split. Surely, we’re not going to pretend that, if she does, it’s some giant setback for race relations?
Why “of course”? The last I heard, both of the Republicans were planning on running again. Or did something change?
I agree. Begich and Palin will split the R vote.
Of course we are. Those pearls aren’t going to clutch themselves!
Whoever wrote this must be super fun at parties lol
I keed, I keed.
Rep Peltola seems to be pretty popular in Alaska. And isn’t there a more American looking family than this one? https://senatecircle.org/events/akoct
No. She won because Palin is unpopular in Alaska and would likely have lost to Peltola in a two-person race on a traditional single-choice ballot, as the ranked-choice results indicated since the second round was between Palin and Peltola. What we saw with the ranked-choice results was effectively a speeded-up version of a partisan primary followed by a general election: Palin’s coming out ahead of Begich in the first round was the Republican primary, her losing to Peltola on the second round the general. There was no vote-splitting creating a spoiler effect, and it’s misleading to suggest there was.
It is an “odd piece” but it is normal for NPR these days to run these kinds of stories.
@Kylopod: It’s true that Palin is uniquely unpopular and for good reason. Still, it was Alaska’s first go-round for RCV and the results likely reflect that fact.
Well, all those voters that ranked Peltola above Palin knew what they were doing, I think. I don’t forsee them changing.
The open question is how many of the Palin voters switch to Begich. I can see it, or I can see them feeling resentful.
What exactly do you mean by that? You said Peltola “only won” because the Republican vote was “split,” and as I explained, that is simply not an accurate description of how ranked choice works.
There is nothing impossible about seeing a state defy its normal partisan tendencies due to a bad or disliked candidate, especially during a special election outside the normal time frame. It’s more or less what enabled the victories of Scott Brown in 2010 and Doug Jones in 2017. It happens from time to time. Of course we have no way of knowing for sure how this race would have gone down under traditional, single-choice ballots, but there’s no reason to assume the results are purely a quirk of RCV, given Palin’s known unpopularity and the fact that Peltola did win an absolute majority when it was down to the two of them.
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How are birds affected by hurricanes
Posted 15 Sep 2017
Each year, migratory birds cross the Gulf of Mexico during hurricane season. Most birds wait for favorable winds and weather before starting a migratory flight, so seldom strike out over water during a hurricane, but some birds may be well offshore when a storm begins. Although migrants have enough fat (fuel reserves) to make the 600-mile Gulf crossing in favorable winds, they may not have enough energy to survive if they have to fight against headwinds.
Before and after flights, when migrants have higher than normal food requirements, they may have problems finding safe supplies of food in areas devastated by storms. Resident birds in hurricane areas also suffer when their food supplies, such as fruits and berries, are stripped from trees and shrubs. Like migrants, they may wander to other areas in search of food. Preserving critical coastal habitats is essential for these birds. It’s also crucial for them that we enforce strict regulations to prevent hazardous materials from leaking or spilling during storms and floods.
Large storm systems may drive some birds far off-course. Strong-flying birds often move ahead of the storm, carried by the winds at the forefront of the weather system. Brown Pelicans, Magnificent Frigatebirds, and other oceanic birds have been recorded far inland, sometimes more than a thousand miles from the coast, after hurricanes. Some of these birds may find their way back but others that are unable to deal with the unfamiliar terrain or to find appropriate food in freshwater, may unfortunately die.
Birds and hurricanes have coexisted for millennia, and given the chance, healthy bird populations rebound from the effects of such natural disasters. Unfortunately, humans make this difficult for some birds because we have destroyed so much natural coastal habitat, and so nowadays hurricanes pose greater threats to vulnerable bird populations than they once did. Working to preserve and restore as much coastal habitat as possible, to minimize toxic spills and leaks during storms by enacting and enforcing strict regulations, and to keep bird populations healthy year round are our best strategies for minimizing the long-term effects of hurricanes on birds.
by Simon Byland
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The Chemical Engineering Major
Chemical Engineers Make Stuff!
Chemical engineering is an extremely diverse discipline in which chemical engineers use chemistry, mathematics, physics, biology, and economics to solve technical problems. In short, we design ways to convert raw material into valuable products. Modern day chemical engineers may work on making a chemical process more cost effective, efficient, and environmentally friendly, designing a process that mass produces a pharmaceutical based off a recent drug discovery, turning barley and hops into beer, or maybe even a process that uses bacteria and waste to make biofuel (to name a few examples)!
Chemical Engineers Have Impact
Chemical engineers have impacted all of our lives via the processes and products that they have helped create. Our discipline is well poised to help solve some of the biggest challenges facing society today including making solar energy more economical, developing carbon sequestration methods, and providing access to clean water to name a few examples. What Do Chemical Engineers Do? details the many areas of impact that chemical engineers have, as well as specific job functions of chemical engineers.
Our Graduates Are in Demand
In the chemical engineering program at UC Davis, students are exposed to a rich experience that includes research opportunities with the integration of engineering fundamentals and engineering design to industrial applications. Our graduates work in diverse industries, including the petroleum-based or petrochemical industries (i.e. Chevron, Conoco-Philips, Marathon), the consumer-products industry (i.e. Proctor & Gamble, L'Oréal, Clorox), biotechnology companies (i.e. Genentech, BioMarin, Bayer), the food industry (i.e. General Mills, E.&J. Gallo, Anheuser-Busch, Pepsi), and in state agencies (i.e. California Air Resources Board, California Energy Commission) or attend graduate school at universities such as MIT, Princeton, Stanford, UC Berkeley and other top universities.
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Every time astronomers discover another exoplanet, the first thing we all want to know is “Does it look like Earth?” Finding an Earth-like exoplanet would dramatically increase our chances of finding life as we know it there, and could finally prove that we’re not all alone in this big, cold universe.
But, when we see planets described as Earth-like, we should be skeptical. With our current instruments, it’s hard for us to even find that other planets are out there (although it’s gotten much easier), much less see if there are oceans and atmospheres and trees and Taco Bells. Furthermore, what does it even mean to be “Earth-like?” Does it just need to be in the habitable zone? Or does it need to have liquid water and a similar atmosphere and maybe also be undergoing catastrophic climate change to qualify as being “like” Earth?
Don’t Hold Your Breath
The question likely won’t be resolved anytime soon, because we won’t be able to determine most of these things for quite awhile. While some progress is being made on using the starlight that filters through a planet’s atmosphere to detect what kinds of gases are there, that’s about as precise as we’re going to get for awhile. When, and if, the Breakthrough Starshot mission ever succeeds in reaching Alpha Centauri, we might have a better idea, but even that mission is decades off. So, for now, let’s put off calling planets Earth-like. Unfortunately, we really have no way of knowing exactly how alike they are to our own precious planet.
We are currently limited to just a few solid observations about planets outside of our solar system, and even those can be tough to glean. The three pieces of information we can obtain with any kind of reliability are the mass of the planet, its orbital period, and how far it orbits from its star. These may seem paltry compared with the detailed measurements we’re able to return from Venus or Mars, but astronomers can still derive important information about a planet just by knowing how big and far away it is.
How We Know What We Know
To determine the mass of an exoplanet, astronomers usually look to the star it orbits to measure tiny back-and-forth movements caused by the planet’s gravitational pull as it orbits. We should remember that mass and size are different though, and we have no real way to measure size right now — the best we can do is run an approximation based on the mass. To figure out how fast it rotates, all astronomers have to do is watch and see how often the light of the star dims when the planet passes in front of it. Combining this information with the mass of the star, we can figure out how far away the exoplanet should be, and whether that places it in the habitable zone of a star or not.
Being in the habitable zone, the small ring around a star where temperatures could allow liquid water to exist, is one of the biggest tests we can do right now for astronomers to determine if a planet could support life or not. If a planet lives outside of that thin ring, the chances of finding life there are pretty much zero.
While the habitable zone of a star may be the first hurdle for a planet to overcome on the path to being like Earth, it’s far from the last. Just because liquid water could exist there, doesn’t mean it actually does. The planet could be full of toxic minerals too, or a complete wasteland. It’s core, the internal dynamo that powers our radiation-deflecting magnetic field here on Earth, could be dead, or it could have lost its atmosphere. It could be blasted by waves of powerful radiation from its star, or it could have been assaulted by asteroids. Point is, there are lots of reasons why a potentially exciting exoplanet could be uninhabited, and our methods of observation aren’t refined enough to explore most of those reasons. Calling an exoplanet “Earth-like” is a little too much of a stretch at this point.
There are lots (and lots and lots and lots) of exoplanets out there though, and we’re only to find more. There’s no reason that we won’t find a planet that looks very much like Earth someday. We’re just going to have to wait awhile.
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Scientists invent new way to disarm malaria parasite
A novel technique to "tame" the malaria parasite, by forcing it to depend on an external supply of a vital chemical, has been developed by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine and the University of California-San Francisco. The scientists have, in effect, created a domesticated strain of Plasmodium the one-celled parasite that causes malaria that would no longer cause this dreaded disease.
Their findings not only make it possible to grow large volumes of this modified parasite, but also reveal how the parasite's very survival turns on the production of one chemical isopentenyl pyrophosphate, or IPP. These developments could help to speed up drug development and provide the basis for the first effective vaccine against malaria.
The study, which will be published online Aug. 30 in PLoS Biology, was conducted by Ellen Yeh, MD, PhD, an instructor in Stanford's Department of Pathology, and UCSF professor of biochemistry and biophysics and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Joseph DeRisi, PhD.
At the heart of the paper is a discovery by Yeh and DeRisi: The scientists identified IPP as absolutely essential to the malaria parasite's viability during the stage when it invades blood cells. Normally, Plasmodium's IPP supply is manufactured in a unique structure within the parasite, called the apicoplast. IPP is pivotal to Plasmodium's survival, but the researchers showed that during its blood-infecting stage, the parasite can live without its apicoplast as long it continues to get IPP from another source.
Malaria is one of the Earth's most notorious scourges, accounting for more than 250 million new cases each year, mostly in Africa but also in Southeast Asia, India and Latin America. It is transferred to humans via a mosquito bite, during which one-celled parasites of the genus Plasmodium are injected into the bloodstream. The resulting infection causes some 1 million deaths annually, largely among children under the age of 5.
At present, no effective malaria vaccines exist. What's more, Plasmodium strains usually develop resistance to drugs that have been approved to combat the disease. The World Health Organization, for instance, currently recommends artemesinin in combination with other, older anti-malarials for combating Plasmodium falciparum, the deadliest and most widespread form of the malaria parasite. But while that drug is still believed to be effective, reports of resistance are starting to emerge, said Yeh.
"If resistance becomes widespread, we're in big trouble, because there's little else in the pipeline that's not based on artemesinin," Yeh said.
Malaria is particular crafty and pernicious, changing its outward features like a master criminal undergoing serial plastic surgeries to evade detection. Injected by a mosquito into a person's bloodstream, the organism holes up for a while in the liver, producing no symptoms. After spending some time there, it changes its form and heads for the bloodstream. There, it invades red blood cells, feasting on them and reproducing, only to break them open, swim out into the bloodstream and find new red blood cells to infect. It is in the blood stage that Plasmodium causes visible symptoms. The cycle of red-blood-cell reinfection continues, producing periodic waves of fever, chills, fatigue and sweats.
At each stage in the mosquito, in the liver and in the blood the parasite assumes a new form with different surface features, thus presenting a different face to the immune system, stumping that molecular detective squad's efforts to mount a counterattack.
But down inside, Plasmodium remains the same old pathogen. Although one-celled like a bacterium, it's a protozoan much bigger and more complexly organized than bacteria. Plasmodium, unlike bacteria, contains many of the same intracellular specialized structures and compartments our own cells do: for example, a cell nucleus, and the peewee power-packs called mitochondria.
However, all Plasmodium parasites also sport a cryptic internal feature our cells lack: the apicoplast. Although it's clear that the parasite can't live without it, the apicoplast's role has remained a mystery over the 15 years since its discovery. Yeh and DeRisi figured out that while the apicoplast manufactures many products, only its production of IPP is essential for the parasite's survival during its blood stage.
To achieve this insight, the researchers dosed blood-rich cultures of the parasite with antibiotics. It is known that antibiotics cause Plasmodium to cast off its apicoplast. This eventually causes the organism's death, but too slowly for antibiotics to be of any significant therapeutic use by themselves (although they can be used as prophylactics or in combination with other, faster-acting drugs).
Yeh and DeRisi found that if they added antibiotics to the culture medium along with a single substance, IPP, the apicoplast-lacking parasites could thrive in culture. "This showed that IPP is the only product Plasmodium really needs from its apicoplast during its blood stage," Yeh said.
This first-ever cultivation of an apicoplast-free malaria parasite promises to advance efforts to come up with new drug and vaccine leads.
Mammals, too, need IPP as a starter material for myriad end products (one of the most well known is cholesterol), but they make IPP in a completely different way, using another set of enzymes. So a drug that knocks out this capacity in a Plasmodium apicoplast could wipe out the parasite without necessarily having any deleterious effect on human cells' ability to make this important precursor substance.
"This potential pathway for killing parasites without interfering with human cells is the reason the apicoplast has been a major focus for drug development," Yeh said. "Now we have a way to specifically look for drugs that target its function and discover a whole new class of desperately needed anti-malarials."
The researchers' discovery of how to grow apicoplast-lacking parasites in volume feed antibiotics supplemented with IPP to cultured Plasmodium may also aid vaccine development. "You could, in principle, safely inoculate patients with this version of Plasmodium because it can't survive for long in the human body," said Yeh. It's still alive, and it's the spitting image of the virulent version, so it can train the immune system and therefore stimulate good protection. "But without a supply of IPP, it's only good for one more cycle of reproduction. It soon dies off."
Moreover, she said, you can use the same in-vitro growth method on any Plasmodium strain that happens to be circulating in human populations, and quickly, cheaply and easily cause it to shed its apicoplast, thereby generating an attenuated, or less virulent, version of the strain. Other methods of creating attenuated strains, such as genetically modifying them, are slow, costly and difficult. Moreover, an apicoplast-deficient parasite is unable to mutate back to restored viability, because it has lost its entire seven-enzyme assembly line for manufacturing IPP.
Yeh cautions that it will be many years before this research gets to the clinical stage. "But we're closer now than we were before," she said.
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This video is thoroughly satisfying:
Those are workers in Los Angeles pouring "shade balls" into one of the city's main reservoirs. The black plastic balls help maintain water quality by blocking sunlight, thereby preventing hazardous reactions with the chlorine and bromide in the water. (The shade balls also cut down on evaporation, though this is a relatively minor benefit.)
Yes, shade balls. Fun to say. Fun to watch. But also surprisingly useful!
A brief history of shade balls
Black plastic shade balls have been used for all sorts of purposes over the years. Catherine Kavanaugh of Plastic News reports that they've been deployed to "keep birds out of water near airport runways, control vapors in industrial ammonia tanks, or stop water from evaporating at petroleum operations."
And in recent years, the city of Los Angeles has realized that shade balls can be useful for protecting drinking water. Back in 2007, the LA Department of Water and Power discovered it had a troubling water-quality problem. Its reservoirs contained a fair amount of bromide, which occurs naturally in groundwater. They also contained chlorine, which was being added to disinfect drinking water. When bromide and chlorine react with sunlight, they form bromate, a suspected human carcinogen. Not good. Elevated bromate levels had been detected at the Silver Lake, Ivanhoe, and Elysian reservoirs.
Mulling its options, the city decided it would shield some of its reservoirs from the sun. And shade balls were a low-cost option. Ivanhoe got its balls in 2008. Then, this week, the city finished pouring 96 million plastic balls into the Los Angeles Reservoir at Sylmar, all at the (relatively) low cost of $34.5 million, much cheaper than initial estimates. The balls are weighted with water so that they stay fixed in place, and they're expected to last 10 years before getting recycled.
(By the way, balls are only part of LA's water-quality plan. The city is also building a new indoor reservoir to replace Silver Lake and Ivanhoe — both of which had lots of contamination issues beyond bromate, including birds, runoff, and algae.)
There's also a side bonus. Shade balls help prevent some evaporation, a source of water loss in California's vast reservoir system. "By reducing evaporation, these shade balls will conserve 300 million gallons of water each year, instead of just evaporating into the sky. That's 300 million gallons to fight this drought," LA Mayor Eric Garcetti said at a recent press conference.
To be clear, 300 million gallons a year isn't a ton of water in the grand scheme of things — Los Angeles consumed 13.6 billion gallons of water this past June alone. Still, every little bit helps. And did we mention shade balls are fun to watch?
Update: This post originally had an enjoyable-to-watch video up top of workers pouring shade balls into a reservoir in the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District. I've replaced it with a more recent video of workers putting balls into the Los Angeles Reservoir.
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A balun, if you really want to be precise, is a conversion device that turns a balanced signal into an unbalanced one or vice versa. That’s why it’s called a “bal/un.” (If you speak Spanish you probably thought it had to do with dancing.) What that means is that it converts between two types of electrical circuits: one that has two signals of opposite polarities and one that is just one signal and a ground.
When would you use a balun?
The most common use of a balun for folks who read this blog is to convert from flat antenna lines (300 ohm impedance) to coaxial cable (75 ohm impedance.) Antennas themselves use 300 ohm wiring. Coaxial cables travel from the antenna to the TV, providing better shielding and durability. A balun converts the antenna’s signal so that it travels on a coaxial cable. Less commonly, another balun can be used at the television or audio receiver if that device has a 300 ohm connection point.
Every antenna sold today uses a balun, because coaxial cable is the standard for TVs now. It’s more durable and less likely to suffer from interference. Interestingly most 75-ohm cable isn’t any better at keeping the signal nice and strong. However, all modern amplifiers connect to coaxial cable. It’s practically impossible to find one that doesn’t.
Other types of baluns
Baluns work with network cabling if coaxial cable is used. In this case the balun converts the signal to use the more traditional RJ45 connector. A similar product works with video cameras that send digital data over coaxial cables but need to connect to a DVR requiring a pair of individual cables.
Terms like “balun” tend to grow in popularity and people don’t understand where they come from, so the term has come to mean any device for converting between two fairly different types of signals, for example from VGA to HDMI. Technically VGA and HDMI are both balanced signals. However we don’t refer to the converter as a “balbal.” That’s partially because that’s “balbal” is a really stupid sounding word. The correct term for a wire that converts VGA to HDMI is a “dongle” (admittedly also a stupid-sounding word) but it’s ok to use the term “balun” here as well.
Other than their use in antennas, baluns of all types grow and shrink in popularity. It all dependins on what new technology comes out. Right now for example HDMI is a very stable technology. On the other hand VGA hasn’t really been “a thing” for a long time. So, the need for a converting cable that goes from one to the other is pretty low at the moment. However, if USB-C/Thunderbolt takes over from HDMI, things will change. Suddenly you’ll need some sort of adapter to make new tech work with old tech. It’s very possible in the next several years. That’s where the balun does its best work.
Are you looking for a replacement for a broken antenna balun or something similar? If so, Solid Signal has a wide variety of baluns for all sorts of uses… shop now!
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1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Park
PARK (Fr. parc; Ital. parco; Sp. parque; O.Eng. pearroc; connected with Ger. pferch, fold, and pfarrei, district, translating med. Lat. parochia, parish), a word ordinarily used in two senses: (a) an enclosed tract of ground, consisting of grass-land, planted with trees and shrubs, and surrounding a large country house; (b) a similar space in or near a town, laid out ornamentally, and used by the public as an “open space” for health or recreation.
The term “park” first occurs in English as a term of the forest law of England for a tract of ground enclosed and privileged for beasts of the chase, the distinguishing characteristics of which were “vert,” i.e. the green leaves of trees, “venison,” i.e. deer, and “enclosure.” A “park” was a franchise obtained by prescription or by grant from the crown (see Forest Law; also Deer Park).
The word has had a technical military significance since the early part of the 17th century. Originally meaning the space occupied by the artillery, baggage and supply vehicles of an army when at rest, it came to be used of the mass of vehicles itself. From this mass first of all the artillery, becoming more mobile, separated itself; then as the mobility of armies in general became greater they outpaced their heavy vehicles, with the result that faster moving transport units had to be created to keep up communication. A “park” is thus at the present day a large unit consisting of several hundred vehicles carrying stores; it moves several days' marches in rear of the army, and forms a reservoir from “whence the mobile ammunition and supply columns” draw the supplies and stores required for the army's needs. “Parking” vehicles is massing them for a halt. The word “park” is still used to mean that portion of an artillery or adminstrative troops' camp or bivouac in which the vehicles are placed.
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Hawaiian Homes Commission Act
- Hawaiian Homes Commission Act, 1920, as amended (HHCA)
- Hawaiian Homes Commission Act, 1920, as amended (HHCA) PDF
The legal basis for the establishment of the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands (DHHL) is the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act, 1920, as amended (HHCA). Passed by Congress and signed into law by President Warren Harding on July 9, 1921 (chapter 42, 42 Stat. 108), the HHCA provides for the rehabilitation of the native Hawaiian people through a government-sponsored homesteading program. Native Hawaiians are defined as individuals having at least 50 percent Hawaiian blood.
Pursuant to provisions of the HHCA, the Department provides direct benefits to native Hawaiians in the form of 99-year homestead leases at an annual rental of $1. In 1990, the Legislature authorized the Department to extend leases for an aggregate term not to exceed 199 years (Act 305, Session Laws of Hawaii 1990; section 208, HHCA). Homestead leases are for residential, agricultural, or pastoral purposes. Aquacultural leases are also authorized, but none have been awarded to date. The intent of the homesteading program is to provide for economic self-sufficiency of native Hawaiians through the provision of land.
Other benefits provided by the HHCA include financial assistance through direct loans or loan guarantees for home construction, replacement, or repair, and for the development of farms and ranches; technical assistance to farmers and ranchers; and the operation of water systems.
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[In a weird coincidence, I wrote this post up mere hours before this news story on the same topic came out at JPL.]
With all the stunning images and animations coming from the Cassini probe, it’s easy to forget that some pretty cool stuff can be seen from Earth, too. Amateur astronomer Emil Kraaikamp sent me this animation he made of Saturn taken with his 25 cm (10″) telescope in The Netherlands. Keep your eyes on the upper half of Saturn, above the rings.
See the white spot? That’s actually a huge storm… and by "huge", I mean about the same size as the Earth! I usually think of Jupiter as the stormy planet, but Saturn has its share as well. A lot of the time, these storms are discovered here on Earth by amateur astronomers, who spend more time looking at planets globally, as opposed to professional astronomers who aren’t always observing every planet all the time. Last year, a "storm" seen on Jupiter by an amateur turned out to be the impact cloud from a collision by an asteroid or comet!
Here’s one of the images Emil used in his animation:
You can see two moons, the rings (and the dark Cassini Division, a gap in the rings), banding on the planet itself, and of course the storm. Note that when he took these shots, Saturn was 1.3 billion km (almost 800 million miles) away! Astronomy is one of the very few sciences where amateurs — and by that, I mean people who aren’t paid to do it as a career — still make an incredibly important, and even critical contribution. With observations like Emil’s, you can see why.
Links to this Post
- (SFF) – Lucifer’s Hammer – Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle | October 1, 2010
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National Hispanic Heritage Month
National Hispanic Heritage Month began in 1968 as Hispanic Heritage Week. The celebration expanded in 1988 to span a month-long period beginning on September 15 and ending on October 15. The independence anniversaries of Chile, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and Nicaragua all occur during this time period.
National Hispanic Heritage Month celebrates the cultures, histories, and accomplishments of Americans of Hispanic or Latino ancestry. Across the United States, many communities, businesses, and schools take time to recognize and honor this heritage.
The U.S. Hispanic or Latino population exceeded 50 million in 2010, constituting more than 16 percent of the total U.S. population. In this Spotlight, we take a look at the Hispanic labor force—including labor force participation, employment and unemployment, educational attainment, geographic location, country of birth, earnings, consumer expenditures, time use, workplace injuries, and employment projections.
Men and Women in the Labor Force
In 2011, across all age groups, men of Hispanic or Latino ethnicity had higher labor force participation rates than their female counterparts. (The labor force participation rate is the number of people employed or actively seeking jobs as a percent of the civilian population.) The difference in labor force participation rates for Hispanic men and women was greatest for persons ages 25 to 34; the rate for men was 92 percent, compared with 65 percent for women.
Among women, the highest labor force participation rates occurred in the 45 to 54 age group; the labor force participation rate for all women in this age group (75 percent) was higher than the rate for Hispanic women (70 percent).
Growth in the Hispanic Labor Force
The Hispanic labor force has grown significantly in recent decades—increasing from 9 million in 1988 to 23 million in 2011. Among detailed Hispanic or Latino ethnic groups identified in the BLS Current Population Survey, Mexican Americans comprised 63 percent of the total Hispanic labor force in 2011. Cubans are the smallest detailed ethnic group among Hispanics or Latinos, accounting for about 4 percent of the total Hispanic labor force in 2011.
Hispanic Labor Force by State
In New Mexico, Hispanics or Latinos represented 42 percent of the total labor force in 2011, the highest share of all states and the District of Columbia. Two of New Mexico's bordering states—Arizona and Texas—also had high percentages of Hispanics in the labor force, 29 and 36 percent, respectively. Illinois was the only state along the Mississippi River in which Hispanics composed more than 10 percent of the labor force. Among all states, New Hampshire had the smallest share of Hispanics in the labor force (2 percent).
In 1992, thirty-nine percent of Hispanics or Latinos age 25 and over in the labor force had not graduated from high school. By 2011, that share had declined to 31 percent. About 12 percent of Hispanics or Latinos in the labor force had at least a bachelor's degree or more education in 1992; college graduates accounted for 16 percent of the Hispanic or Latino labor force in 2011.
The education and health services industry employed the largest percentage of Hispanics or Latinos in 2011. Within this industry, 6 percent were employed in educational services and 10 percent were employed in health care and social assistance. Twelve percent of employed Hispanics or Latinos worked in the retail trade industry, and 3 percent worked in wholesale trade.
Eleven percent of employed Hispanics or Latinos worked in accommodation and food services (part of the leisure and hospitality industry). Construction and manufacturing also each employed 11 percent of Hispanic or Latino workers. Agriculture, information, and mining each employed less than three percent of Hispanics in 2011.
Foreign Born - Labor Participation
In 2011, foreign-born Hispanics or Latinos had a higher labor force participation rate (70 percent) than the native born (63 percent). Among non-Hispanics, foreign-born Asians and Blacks or African Americans also had higher labor force participation than their native-born counterparts. The labor force participation rate for Whites, however, was higher for the native born (64 percent) than the foreign born (60 percent).
Foreign Born - Unemployment
Unemployment varied among the foreign- and native-born Hispanic labor force in 2011. For those who had not graduated high school, the unemployment rate for the native born (17.4 percent) was much higher than the rate for the foreign born (10.8 percent). In contrast, native-born Hispanics with a bachelor's degree or more had a lower unemployment rate (5.0 percent) than their foreign-born counterparts (6.7 percent). The unemployment rate for Hispanics or Latinos with some college experience but not a bachelor's degree was about the same for the native and foreign born.
Foreign Born - Earnings
In 2011, foreign-born Hispanics or Latinos who were full-time wage and salary workers earned 77 percent as much as their native-born counterparts. Among Whites, Blacks or African Americans, and Asians, foreign-born and native born workers had similar median weekly earnings.
Unemployment Rates by Age
Unemployment rates are historically highest for those ages 16 to 19. In 2006, the unemployment rate for Hispanic or Latino teens reached a historic low of 15.9 percent (the series began in 1973). Four years later, in 2010, the unemployment rate had doubled to 32.2 percent, the highest rate since the series began. Unemployment rates for other age groups have remained below those of teenagers, but Hispanics or Latinos ages 20 to 24 have higher unemployment rates than those in older age groups.
Unemployment Rates by Ethnic Group
Since 1989, the unemployment rate for Puerto Ricans (those living in the 50 states or the District of Columbia) has remained above the rates for Mexican Americans and Cubans. In 2005, the unemployment rate for Cubans reached a low of 3.3 percent; in 2011, the unemployment rate for Cubans was 11.2 percent, about the same as that of Mexican Americans and the overall rate for Hispanics or Latinos.
The Future of the Labor Force
The Hispanic civilian labor force is projected to reach 30.5 million in 2020. During the 2010—2020 period, the number of Hispanics ages 45 to 54 is projected to increase by 1.9 million, the largest growth in terms of number of people of any age group. Hispanics or Latinos ages 25 to 34 will remain the largest age group, with 8.1 million labor force participants by 2020. Over the 2010—2020 period, the number of workers age 75 and over is projected to increase 164 percent, or 143,000. Among Hispanics or Latinos ages 16 to 19, the labor force is projected to grow 7.4 percent, or 74,000, from 2010 to 2020, the smallest increase among the age groups.
Employment Attachment among Young Workers
Among those born in the early to mid-1980s, Hispanics or Latinos with less than a high school diploma spent an average of 61 percent of all weeks employed from age 18 to age 24. That compares with 42 percent of weeks that non-Hispanic black high school dropouts spent employed and 58 percent of weeks that non-Hispanic white dropouts spent employed. Hispanics or Latinos with some college or an associate degree spent 78 percent of weeks employed, compared with 72 percent of weeks for those who earned a bachelor's degree or higher. Hispanics or Latinos, black non-Hispanics, and white non-Hispanics with a bachelor's degree or higher spent about the same percent of weeks employed.
In 2011, median weekly earnings of Hispanics who worked full time ($549) were lower than those for Blacks or African Americans ($615), Whites ($775), and Asians ($866). Blacks ages 16 to 24 had median weekly earnings of $404, about the same as their Hispanic counterparts ($410). For Hispanics ages 25 to 54 and age 55 and over, median weekly earnings increased slightly from one age group to the next; $580 and $595, respectively. In contrast, median earnings for Asians decreased between the two age groups, from $926 for ages 25 to 54 to $799 for workers age 55 and over.
Most Americans spend the largest share of their annual income on housing, which includes mortgage payments, property taxes, and insurance. Hispanics or Latinos spent 37 percent of their average annual income on housing in 2010. African Americans' expenditure share was 39 percent, higher than the shares for Whites (34 percent) and Asians (35 percent). Hispanics or Latinos have lower median earnings than other race and ethnic groups, and they spent a higher portion of their income on food, 16 percent. Five percent of Hispanics' annual income was spent on apparel, more than the shares of income spent by Whites (3 percent) and Blacks or African Americans (4 percent).
Time Use: Where did the day go?
On the days they worked, employed Hispanics or Latinos spent an average of 8.68 hours per day on work and work-related activities in 2011. That compares with 8.32 hours per day among all employed persons. Employed Hispanics or Latinos spent 2.77 hours per workday on leisure and sports activities in 2011, compared with 3.18 hours for all employed persons.
Fatal Injuries by Industry
In 2010, the construction industry accounted for the largest number of fatal occupational injuries among Hispanic or Latino workers. The 181 construction fatalities were double the number of fatalities in the transportation and warehousing industry. The utilities industry accounted for the fewest fatal work injuries among Hispanics or Latinos, with 3 in 2010.
Fatal Injuries by Foreign-born Status
Each year since 1997, Hispanics or Latinos who were born in the United States suffered fewer fatal work injuries than their foreign-born counterparts. The highest number of fatal work injuries among both native- and foreign-born Hispanics occurred in 2006.
More BLS Data
For additional data relating to persons of Hispanic or Latino ethnicity, please see the following sources:
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Quackery is a type of health fraud that promotes products and services that have questionable and unproven scientific bases. Quackery is short for quack-salver, which is derived from two Middle Dutch terms that mean “healing with unguents.” However, quacken means “to boast,” so a kwakzalver might be a healer who boasts about his power or products.
Garlic is frequently touted as a remedy for high blood pressure, blood sugar imbalances, and arterial plaque. Some advocates even claim that garlic can prevent or cure cancer. But according to the National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine, although garlic may have some health benefits, its reputation as a miracle remedy is not supported by available research. [Octane Photographic. Reproduced by permission.] Garlic is frequently touted as a remedy for high blood pressure, blood sugar imbalances, and arterial plaque. Some advocates even claim that garlic can prevent or cure cancer. But according to the National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine, although garlic may have some health benefits, its reputation as a miracle remedy is not supported by available research. [Octane Photographic. Reproduced by permission.]
Quacks, the people who promote these products, have been around for years. One of the most enduring images of nineteenth-century medicine is the charlatan or quack. These individuals sold primarily patent medicines that promised to cure everything from cancer to the common cold. Patent medicines were concoctions (elixirs, salves, balms, etc.) for which individuals received exclusive rights to sell for a given period of time. Patent medicines were available by mail or over the counter at chemists’ shops, general stores, and even seed stores. Most patent medicines contained alcohol, and many also contained opium or morphine. Virtually none contained the “healing” ingredients they claimed to have, and none healed.
Some quacks were called “snake oil” salesmen. These individuals traveled from town to town, sometimes with a carnival, selling their products. Today, quacks have more sophisticated ways to sell their products. The products are now promoted on the Internet, TV, and radio; in magazines, newspapers, and infomercials; by mail; and even by word-of-mouth. Many consider quackery to be a pejorative term and now use the term alternative medicine. However, this term is used in a variety of ways. The physician Stephen Barrett suggests that “alternative” methods be classified as genuine, experimental, or questionable, whereas quackery refers solely to questionable and unproven methods.
Claims and Promises
Fraudulent products are designed solely to make money. They often use paid actors in the infomercials and advertisements to make their products sound and look convincing. They also may use celebrities to endorse the products. Fraudulent products usually:
* Promise quick, painless cures or results.
* Claim to be effective for a wide range of ailments.
* Promise weight loss without dieting or exercise.
* Claim to be made from a special, secret ingredient.
* Guarantee all results.
* Use testimonials or undocumented case histories from satisfied patients.
* Offer an additional amount of the product as a “special promotion.”
Nutrition quackery is one of the most profitable types of quackery. Dietary supplements, weight loss products, herbal remedies, and “sports” foods are not registered with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Federal law allows certain claims to be made on the labels of food and dietary supplements. These include claims that show a strong scientific link between a food substance and a disease or health condition. These approved claims can state only that the product may reduce the risk of certain health problems, not cure them. The labels of dietary supplements must state that the claim “has not been evaluated by the FDA,” and that the “product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.” Yet, the infomercials and ads for many products do not include these warnings.
One of the basic premises of many dietary supplements is that most individuals have vitamin and mineral deficiencies. In addition, the promoters of supplements often assert that the soil in which food is grown is often nutritionally depleted in vitamins and minerals, and that the food supply cannot, therefore, adequately nourish the population. However, very few individuals in industrially developed countries suffer from specific vitamin and mineral deficiencies. They are more likely to suffer from heart disease, hypertension, obesity, and other chronic diseases. In lesser-developed countries, deficiencies are due to inadequate food intake. Nutritional deficiencies can be corrected with a well-balanced diet. In addition, most manufactured products are fortified with specific vitamins and minerals. The body recognizes and utilizes these nutrients as effectively as the ones sold in health food stores, though processed foods can be lacking in other nutrients, such as fiber.
Another claim is that food additives and pesticide residues are poisoning the food supply. This claim is usually used to promote organic and other “health” foods. The United States government has very strict standards for the use of additives, preservatives, and pesticide residues. The United States Department of Agriculture has approved standards for organic foods, but it makes no claim that organic foods are safer or more nutritious than conventionally grown foods.
Quacks primarily target older adults, the health conscious, the beauty conscious, and those with chronic diseases such as cancer and AIDS. Older people have more chronic illnesses than younger people, so they are likely targets for fraud. Most people are susceptible to quackery because they are frightened, in pain, and desperate for relief. Common products that are targeted to these populations include:
* Anti-aging products. In a youth-oriented society, a wide variety of products are advertised. No product can stop the aging process, however, and any “results” that are seen are temporary.
* Arthritis remedies. There is no cure for most forms of arthritis, but some products can temporarily reduce pain and increase flexibility.
* A 1920s advertisement for weight-loss soap promises quick, painless results and offers a money-back guarantee. Both claims are frequently made by quacks about the fraudulent health products or services they sell. [Bettmann/Corbis. Reproduced by permission.] A 1920s advertisement for weight-loss soap promises quick, painless results and offers a money-back guarantee. Both claims are frequently made by quacks about the fraudulent health products or services they sell. [Bettmann/Corbis. Reproduced by permission.] • Cancer cures. Quacks prey on people’s fear of cancer. Cancer treatment is specific for the type of cancer, and common treatments include surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. Some cancers go into remission and reappear later. No food or supplements have been proven to “cure” cancer.
* HIV/AIDS cures. There is no known cure for this disease. Legitimate scientific treatments can, however, extend life and improve the quality of life for people with AIDS.
Quackery is big business. Individuals spend billions of dollars every year looking for the next miracle cure. Consumers must learn to protect themselves by questioning what they see or hear in ads. The media that promote these products usually do not regularly screen their ads for truth or accuracy. Prescription drugs undergo rigorous testing for safety and effectiveness before they are sold, and over-the-counter medicines also are subject to a drug review process. Dietary supplements are not required to undergo government testing or review before they are marketed, yet these products may have harmful effects that could present risks for people on certain medicines or with certain medical conditions. Individuals who are aware of a questionable health product can contact the Federal Trade Commission or their state attorney general’s office.
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“It’s hard to evaluate the full cost that has been taken from us with their death.”
Jewish Cemetery, Mount of Olives, Jerusalem 2011
© Leslie Hossack
This ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives is the oldest continuously used cemetery in the world; over 150,000 people have been buried here. The steep hillside, looking out over the Valley of Jehoshaphat, is also home to the Tombs of the Prophets: Haggai, Zachariah and Malachi. Jews believe that this is where God will start to redeem the dead when the Messiah returns on the Day of Judgment.
Walking down the path from the top of the Mount of Olives toward the Old City of Jerusalem, one passes many churches, the last one being the Basilica of Agony. Beside it is the beautiful Garden of Gethsemane which contains many of the world’s oldest olive trees, including some that are over 2,000 years old. It is believed that Jesus prayed here the night before his arrest.
This photograph was taken on Memorial Day, shortly before the 11:00 a.m. siren sounded across Israel. At that moment, cars stopped and people stood still to pay their respects to Israel’s fallen soldiers. Memorial Day (officially known as Fallen Soldiers and Victims of Terrorism Remembrance Day) starts the evening before with a ceremony at the Western Wall, and it ends the next evening at 8:00 p.m. when a torch is light at Mount Herzl Cemetery to mark the beginning of Independence Day.
In his speech at the Memorial Day ceremony, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: “22,867 of our sons and daughters fell in Israel’s wars. It’s hard to evaluate the full cost that has been taken from us with their death.” In this photograph, the woman standing alone on the Mount of Olives is one of approximately 176,500 currently active members of the Israeli Defense Forces.
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Ever since the Social Security program was created back in 1935 we have come to accept 65 as the age we can expect to retire. Many companies followed suit, and 65 was typically viewed as the end of the road for corporate careers and the trigger for pensions, gold watches, and retirement parties.
But today, reaching age 65 does not automatically mean it's time to retire. The promise of a relaxing and stress-free retirement has been replaced in many cases by the reality that people are not prepared to retire. Some employees cannot afford to retire or are just plain afraid to retire. Age 65 is now just another year in an ongoing career, and retirement has no set time frame.
The reasons people are extending their work life are varied. For some individuals it is not a matter of choice but rather survival. Many Americans do not have sufficient funds to support a retirement life, and therefore must continue to work. Other workers find the interaction and engagement with co-workers to be a major benefit of continuing their job. Many people experience a feeling of worth and self esteem resulting from the important role they play at the company. Finding such recognition outside of the working world may not be that easy.
Staying in the workforce past traditional retirement age will have broad implications for employers, younger workers, and the economy. Here's a look at how delayed retirement is likely to impact the workplace:
Younger workers may have fewer opportunities. When existing employees stay on the job longer there will be fewer opportunities available for younger workers in search of a career. In an already tight job market this could prove frustrating to younger job candidates who are forced to wait in the wings. In some cases there may be enough space for older and younger workers to work together, and both may benefit from mentoring efforts. But if there is only room for one, employers may be forced to choose between retaining an older worker and hiring a younger one.
Challenges as younger supervisors manage older workers. Not all older workers are comfortable with reporting to someone significantly younger. New bosses tend to come with new ideas and changes that can be met with resistance from the existing staff. It is important that both the older employee and the younger manager work together and learn to communicate effectively if they hope to make this situation a success. Progress will require sensitivity, building trust, and mutual respect.
Corporate culture conflicts. It is not uncommon for companies to have to reinvent themselves due to changes in the competitive landscape or economy. Long-term employees have generally adapted to the existing corporate culture, but how will they fit in if the business needs to go in a different direction? Companies need to be fast on their feet to survive and cannot afford to be slowed down unnecessarily. Older workers set in their ways can make an already difficult situation even more challenging.
In addition, older workers tend to have different motivations in the workforce. While younger employees are driven by money and the ability to rise in the corporate ranks, older workers often want more emotional rewards, such as feeling needed, learning new skills, and contributing to the common good. If you want to get the most out of employees, you need to speak their language and understand what makes them tick.
Additional costs of maintaining older workers. Health care expenses are on the rise, and older employees often cost companies more to provide coverage. But on the flip side, older workers do not have dependents because their families have largely been raised, so that cost is eliminated. But it's still not cheap to provide for the insurance needs of elderly workers.
Dave Bernard is the author of Are You Just Existing and Calling it a Life?, which offers guidelines to discover your personal passion and live a life of purpose. Not yet retired, Dave has begun his due diligence to plan for a fulfilling retirement. With a focus on the non-financial aspects of retiring, he shares his discoveries and insights on his blog Retirement-Only the Beginning.
More From US News & World Report
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Scientists just blasted pottery from an ancient shipwreck with a "ray gun." Besides being totally sci-fi, the X-ray blaster revealed where the pottery came from.
The wreck was a trade ship dating to the 12th or 13th century that was thought to have departed from Quanzhou in southeastern China, with the Indonesian island of Java as its destination. However, it sank in the Java Sea near Java and Sumatra, taking its cargo to a watery grave. Discovered by local fishermen in the 1980s, the ship and its contents were recovered a decade later, and about 7,500 pieces of its cargo are currently in the collection of The Field Museum in Chicago.
In a new study, researchers addressed a long-standing mystery: where the pottery came from. The artifacts' shape and design suggested they originated in southeastern China — in fact, two boxes described in 2018 even included an identifying stamp . But pinpointing the precise locations where they were made was trickier, as kilns that produce this type of pottery are extremely common in the region, scientists wrote in the study. [In Photos: Ancient Shipwreck's Ceramics Traced to Kilns in China]
To find out, scientists looked at 60 pieces of the wreck’s pottery that were glazed with a blue-white coating called qingbai; that kind of porcelain is fired at such high temperatures that it is rendered almost glass-like, enabling it to spend centuries underwater without much degradation or damage, study co-author Lisa Niziolek, a research scientist in Asian anthropology at the Field Museum, told Live Science.
Lead study author Wenpeng Xu, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of Illinois, proposed noninvasive, nondestructive X-ray fluorescence to analyze the composition of the blue-white glaze and uncover the pottery's chemical secrets. Using a hand-held device, similar to a sci-fi ray gun, the researchers collected data from the Java Sea shipwreck pottery, and compared it with pottery debris gathered from four kiln complexes in China, with samples representing several kilns within each complex.
Variations in clay composition or in the ingredients that pottery-makers mix together create differences in finished vessels that can be detected with X-ray technology, by measuring and comparing their energy signatures, according to the study. By blasting the shipwreck ceramics and kiln debris with their ray gun device, the researchers were able to map the once-sunken pottery to the kilns where they were made centuries ago.
They divided the shipwreck pottery into groups and found matches among those groups to kiln complexes in Jingdezhen, Dehua, Shimuling, Huajiashan and Minqing, near the port of Fuzhou.
In fact, their findings suggest that the ship's port of departure was Fuzhou — where most of the shipwreck's pottery originated — and it likely later sailed to Quanzhou to take on porcelain from other kiln complexes, the scientists reported.
The number of kilns linked to the shipwreck's qingbai ceramics suggests that traders and merchants didn't rely on a single manufacturer to satisfy the demand for quality pottery, Xu said. And figuring out the locations where these ceramics came from adds tantalizing details about important trade routes dating to centuries ago.
"We're finding that the scale and complexity of exchange networks is greater than anticipated," Niziolek said. "For people educated to think that large-scale trade networks are only associated with modern Western capitalism, this shipwreck can really challenge those notions."
The findings were published online today (Feb. 8) in the Journal of Archaeological Science.
- Images: Amazing Artifacts from a Java Sea Shipwreck
- Shipwrecks Gallery: Secrets of the Deep
- In Photos: 700-Year-Old Shipwreck Discovered in China
Originally published on Live Science.
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The Early French Immersion Program provides students with the opportunity to acquire fluency in speaking, reading, writing, listening and communicating in French by the end of Grade 12. It is a program in which French is the language of instruction, beginning in Kindergarten or Grade 1 and continuing to Grade 3 when English is introduced. Early French Immersion is designed for non-Francophones and is an effective way for students to become functionally fluent in French while achieving all of the learning outcomes of the regular programs of study.
First developed in Canada in 1965, the French Immersion program is based on decades of research into its effectiveness both in teaching a second language and in achieving the outcomes of the provincial education curriculum.
Who Can Register
- Students entering kindergarten or Grade 1 can register
- Previous French experience is not required and parents do not need to know the language
Late French Immersion for entry in Grade 7
- In the case of an alternate entry point, parents will reach out to the school directly to arrange an appointment for language assessment for suitable placement.
Benefits of Learning French
Learning French offers students significant linguistic, academic and cognitive benefits. It opens doors to knowledge, communication, culture and travel, and gives graduates an edge in the global job market. It also provides the following benefits:
- strengthens English literacy skills
- develops listening and learning skills
- enhances problem-solving abilities
- increases cognitive abilities, making the student a more flexible and creative thinker
- provides graduates with more choices for advanced education and career options
- gives graduates a competitive edge in the job market anywhere in Canada and in many other countries
- broadens students' cultural life through access to literature, art, music and theatre in another language
- helps students to better understand the history, development and government of their country
- offers a gateway to national and international opportunities
- increases a student's feeling of self-esteem and pride
- makes learning a third or fourth language much easier
Benefits of Early French Immersion Program
- It is suitable for children with diverse learning needs, including those for whom English is a second language and students with special needs, where appropriate supports are provided.
- French Immersion begins with a period of concentration on French language development so students can achieve a strong foundation in French.
Subject and Language Breakdown by Grade
- Kindergarten, Grade 1 and 2: All subjects are taught in French
- Grade 3: 80% French, 20% English (English Language Arts is introduced)
- Grades 4-6: 70% French, 30% English
- Grades 7-9: French Language Arts, Mathematics, Science and Social Studies are taught in French; all other subjects are taught in English
- Grades 10-12: French Language Arts, Social Studies and Mathematics are taught in French
The Alberta Education Programs of Study are the same for each subject, regardless of the language of instruction.
In Early French Immersion, reading and writing are first taught in French, but students quickly transfer those skills to English beginning in Grade 3. The program includes a strong English language component in Grades 3-12. Research shows that by Grade 6, the literacy skills of French Immersion students meet or exceed those of their peers in the regular English program.
Find a School
Every child in Calgary has a designated school based on their home address and the program they choose.
Find your designated school with our find a school tool along with the school's contact information and website address. Be sure to use the drop down arrow for 'Program Options' to select Early French Immersion'.
Early French Immersion is offered in all quadrants of the city, and
transportation is available. Please be aware that designations can change.
Please refer to your designated French Immersion school’s website for more information.
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Elton Mayo's Hawthorne Experiments
Early Exploration of Workplace Motivation
What causes workers to be more productive? Researchers have asked this question for years. In fact, pioneering work began in the 1920s as an attempt to discover ways to increase production efficiency – and then led both to the founding of the human relations school of management, and to the development of many of the motivational tools that are used today.
At the center of this work was Elton Mayo, a Harvard researcher. He looked at the results of early motivation experiments and concluded that psychological and social factors played a larger role in productivity than physical elements.
Experiments at Hawthorne
In 1927, researchers were trying to determine the optimal amount of lighting, temperature, and humidity for assembling electronic components at Western Electric's Hawthorne plant. The results showed that lighting had no consistent effect on production. Researchers were frustrated to discover that increasing light increased output, but reducing light also increased output. The common factor, it seemed, was that something in the work environment was changed, and that positive effects were then observed.
After thoroughly examining the results, Elton Mayo and his fellow researchers determined that workers weren't responding to the change in lighting conditions, but instead were reacting to the fact that they were being observed by the experimenters. This phenomenon became known as the Hawthorne effect. The workers' awareness that researchers were measuring their productivity was sufficient to increase productivity.
This idea is similar in philosophy to the Pygmalion effect, which states that high expectations lead to high outcomes.
The identification of the Hawthorne effect led to the recognition of the importance of psychological and social factors at work. Further experiments over the next five years revealed that human factors played a large role in workplace motivation and productivity. Researchers manipulated factors like break times, pay, and the type of supervision. Each time, they found increases in output.
Through the test results and interviews with the workers involved in the experiments, researchers discovered the effects on productivity of worker attitudes, the peer group, and other social forces, as well supervisory style. Interestingly, and contrary to popular belief, the researchers concluded that...
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By Isaac Hopkins
A recent Critical Issue Report from The Organic Center (TOC) focuses on the benefits of eating a healthier diet. The report’s author, Dr. Charles Benbrook, follows “Jane Doe” as she eats her way through two days, first her “before” diet of pizza and apple pie, and then her “after” diet centered on fresh, organic produce.
The report emphasizes that “even relatively modest changes in diet can dramatically alter long-term health outcomes.” By decreasing her daily calorie intake by just ten calories, Jane Doe is able to prevent the 0.8 pounds that the average American adult gains each year. She also more than tripled her intake of fruits and vegetables, while decreasing her consumption of pesticide residues by choosing organic produce.
The report points to the importance of awareness and access to quality information as keys to making healthy choices. Pesticide residues are of particular concern for women who are planning on having children, and the benefits gained by sound decisions now, the report notes, tend to be passed from one generation to the next. To facilitate those decisions, TOC presents two new tools, the Dietary Risk Index (DRI) and the Nutritional Quality Index (TOC-NQI). Both can be used to evaluate individual foods, as well as an entire diet.
“Awareness is growing that more disciplined and data-driven food choices can tip the odds toward sustained, good health,” according to the report. The Organic Center’s “hopeful message” is that Americans now have the tools that they need to make simple adjustments in their diet that will help them, and their children, live healthy, fruitful lives.
Isaac Hopkins is a research intern with the Nourishing the Planet project
- Transforming Unlikely Locations into Lush, Abudant Gardens
- Making Food the Big Issue
- Recipe for a Sustainable Diet
- Creating a Diet for a Healthier Planet
- Forming Groups and Transforming Livelihoods
- World Population Day: Agriculture Offers Huge Opportunities for a Planet of 7 Billion
- Getting to the Root of the Issue
- New UN Report Illustrates the Potential of Agroecology to Feed the Hungry
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Point Nemo is located in the Pacific Ocean at the farthest point from any landmass on Earth. It is used for dumping old satellites, rocket parts and space stations that have finished their purpose.
The technical name for this stretch of water is The ocean point of inaccessibility as it is situated some 2,700 km away from any land. It is the likely destination for the International Space Station that is currently orbiting the Earth. With the reports of cracks in the space station, it is likely in the its final stages of life.
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Perspective - Insights in Nutrition and Metabolism (2022) Volume 6, Issue 5
Childhood obesity its factors of cause, treatment and management
Obesity is a perplexing condition that interweaves natural, developmental, ecological, behavioral, and hereditary variables; it is a huge general medical issue. The most widely recognized reason for obesity throughout childhood and adolescence is an imbalance in energy balance; that is, abundance caloric admission without suitable caloric consumption. Adiposity rebound in early childhood is a risk factor for puberty and adulthood. The rising pervasiveness of young life and juvenile obesity is related with an ascent in comorbidities recently recognized in the adult populace, like Type-2 Diabetes Mellitus, Hypertension, Non-alcoholic Fatty Liver disease, Obstructive Sleep Apnea, and Dyslipidemia. Because of the absence of a solitary treatment choice to address corpulence, clinicians have commonly depended on directing dietary changes and exercise. Due to psychosocial issues that might go with pre-adulthood in regards to body habitus, this approach can have adverse outcomes. Teenagers can foster unfortunate dietary patterns that outcome in Bulimia Nervosa, Binge-Eating Disorder, or Night eating condition. Others can foster Anorexia Nervosa as they endeavor to limit their eating regimen and overshoot their objective of "being sound." until this point in time, way of life mediations affect weight reduction. Arising discoveries from fundamental science as well as interventional drug preliminaries using GLP-1 agonists have shown progress in viable weight reduction in obese adults, teenagers, and pediatric patients. Notwithstanding, there is restricted information on the adequacy and wellbeing of other weight reduction meds in youngsters and teenagers.
Author(s): Nike Anderson
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A few weeks ago, Kyle Rozendo asked a question on the IT Security StackExchange about Cracking a PCI terminal using a trojan based on the card. It caught my attention, so I started digging a little deeper into this matter.
There are some difficulties involved in hacking an ATM:
- Often proprietary software
- Often custom OS or modified embedded Windows
This means a high level of understanding is necessary, as well as access to ATMs to test on. All of the attacks I’ve dug up had some level of inside information before they were constructed.
2009: Diebold gets targeted by Skimer-A Trojan
One of the first serious hacks I came by was a Trojan found in ATMs in eastern Europe around 2009. As reported by Sophos, the attack was aimed at Diebold Opteva ATMs.
The Trojan was named Skimer-A. It’s main goals were:
- Steal information (card numbers and PINs)
- Allow remote access
- Drop more malware
The hack required physical access to the machine. The perpetrators used social engineering, to persuade stores to allow them physical access to the machine after hours, so they could install the virus. After an analysis of the malware, Diebold concluded the attackers also had to have inside information about the systems. A lot of the functions used to extract information were part of the ATMs operation software, but were never documented. They also knew administrative passwords and unlocked the custom Windows CE version Diebold used as well as misconfiguring its firewall. (This was concluded from the security update by Diebold.)
2010: ATM Jackpotting by Barnaby Jack
In 2010, McAfee security expert, Barnaby Jack presented his “ATM Jackpotting” at Blackhat. He was able, after careful analysis with physical access to a few teller machines, to write a tool that could remotely exploit an ATM and patch it so you can call a custom menu with an access code or remotely start emptying the ATM’s money cassettes (hence Jackpotting).
The attack is aimed at standalone and hole-in-the-wall ATMs. The ATMs often run:
- ARM/XSCALE processor
- Windows CE
- TCP/IP, Dial Up or CDMA wireless
- Support for SSL
- 3DES encrypted pin pad
In his research he used 3 different ATMs (he ordered these and got them delivered at home). He started his research by looking at the internal workings and, although there were some security measures in place, once a he had physical access many possibilities started to appear. He started by looking for a way to modify the boot sequence, because the ATM boots into its proprietary software. This means he has to patch the system so he can get access to a shell. He accomplished this by using a JTAG debugger.
Using the JTAG module, he was able to send a break when starting the difference services. After this he could launch a proper shell.
This work was all necessary to reverse engineer the software and develop the actual attacks:
- Walk up attack by “upgrading” the firmware with a flashcard (this required physical access, and a key to open the machine and access the motherboard – such keys are standard, and easy to find on the Internet).
- Remote configuration attack, firmware can be upgraded remotely
The latter is the most interesting attack, but there are some security defenses in place that make a bruteforce attack impossible. However Barnaby Jack was able to find a vulnerability in the authentication mechanism which allowed him to log in to the machine. He wrote a tool to do these attacks, named “Dillinger”. Now the problem he faced was how to find the ATMs on the internet.
Whilst ATMs support TCP/IP, about 95% of all ATMs still connect to the internet using Dial Up. This means War Dialing using a VOIP tool like WarVox, makes it possible to go and find ATMs on the net. Most of the ATMs use a proprietary protocol, so once you identify this protocol you know an ATM is listening on the other side and you can go and try to exploit it. Once you have access to the ATM you can spawn a shell and install a rootkit. You will still need to identify where the ATM is physically located so you can go and collect the money. This is done by reading the configuration file (often the address is present on the receipts).
The rootkit to keep access to the teller is called “Scrooge”. It hides itself on the machine. One difficulty is that the kit needs to be modified for almost every version of ATM software that’s running because of different peripherals and non-standard ways to communicate. After installing the kit you can walk up to the ATM and enter a keys equence on the keypad, this brings up a custom menu that allows you to jackpot the ATM (completely empty it) or give you a specific amount of cash. This can also be done remotely.
Barnaby suggests following countermeasures:
- Better physical locks
- Executable signing at the kernel level
- Implement Trusted Environment
- Put them on a seperate, firewalled network
- Disable the Remote Management System if you aren’t using it
- More and better code auditing
You can find the complete presentation on Vimeo.
2012: MWR InfoSecurity reveals chip and PIN vulnerability
Chip and PIN is a system where one can insert his banking or credit card into a small machine and make an electronic payment. In the U.K. there is a government backed initiative to make these as widespread as possible. MWR InfoSecurity, a Basingstoke (U.K.) based security company, revealed a way to attack these terminals with a custom PIN card. The attacks demonstrated at Blackhat 2012:
- Producing a fake receipt, making a cashier think the payment was successful
- Infect PIN entry devices to collect card data and harvest these with another rogue card
- Network and interface attack
Apparently the exploits involved were present in normal computers more than a decade ago, making you wonder why this problem was ignored or went undetected. Especially when Cambridge University researchers warned banks of the lack of security in these type of machines as early as 2010. Issues included unencrypted and unauthenticated communication between terminal and remote administration server, which makes a man in the middle attack dead easy. At the moment of writing there hasn’t appeared any white paper (I’m aware of or had access to). The devices affected were produced by VeriFone.
If we look at the attacks over time, it becomes clear that they can be deployed faster and faster. The hacks still require a high level of knowledge and understanding of these systems, but because there are some really basic security issues like bad code reviewing, unencrypted/unauthenticated communication and bad physical security, the attacks are seemingly easy to deploy. It’s up to the producers of these machines to start securing them. Companies still rely too much on security through obscurity and do not expect an attack because a hacker would need insider information. Previous articles suggest that it’s not extremely hard to get that information.
- Geoff White,Channel 4,Credit card readers can be hacked for details, 29 July 2012
- Anonymous, Infosecurity, Russians hack Diebold ATM software, 19 March 2009
- Anonymous, Sophos, Troj/Skimer-A, 17 March 2009
- Pat Carroll, Finextra, Protecting Pin Pad Payment, 18 July 2012
- Vanja Svajcer, Naked Security, Credit card skimming malware targeting ATMs, 17 March 2009
- Graham Cluley, Naked Security, Is there malware lurking in your ATM?, 17 March 2009
- Graham Cluley , Naked Security, More details on the Diebold ATM Trojan horse case, 18 March 2009
- Warwick Ashford, Computer Weekly, BlackHat 2012: UK firm MWR InfoSecurity reveals chip and PIN vulnerability, 26 July 2012
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It is estimated that about 14% of couples in middle and high income countries have a difficult time conceiving, and several countries are seeing declines in semen quality that can’t be explained. A relatively new study has published evidence that carrying cell phones in your pocket can negatively affect the semen quality of men.
While many men may not realize it, they might be inadvertently reducing the quality of their semen via consistent exposure to RF-EMR (or “Radio-Frequency Electromagnetic Radiation”). This was suggested by the University of Exeter in the UK, who later went on to post their research in the Environmental International journal.
The study was conducted by Doctor Fiona Mathews, who is an experienced lecturer in the field of mammalian biology. Together with her team, they carried out over 10 studies that had showed how semen quality could be affected due to cell phones being too close to the proximity of the area where semen are produced.
They pooled together over 1,500 semen samples from men attending research centers and fertility clinics. The researchers analyzed three different areas of spear quality:
- Concentration (the number of sperm per unit)
- Viability (the proportion of the sperm)
- Motility (the ability for the sperm to get around and towards an egg)
From the control group, sperm showed between 50 and 85% motility. However, this fell to about 8% on average where there had been a heavy exposure to cell phones. This was according to researchers. The results for overall sperm concentration remained unclear. Nonetheless, there was enough evidence to suggest that there was a correlation between the two.
According to Doctor Mathews, the evidence “strongly suggests” that consistent exposure to radio-frequency electromagnetic radiation in trouser pockets can reduce the overall quality of sperm. More specifically, it can lower sperm motility to only 8%! Whether or not this could actually affect infertility is unclear.
However, it is important to note that the quality of the sperm does go down, which can lead to clinical implications later, although this has yet to be proven in the research. The researchers performed a variety of tests, each of which were consistent with their original hypothesis. They were conducted under controlled conditions, and included men that were in the general population.
The researchers concluded that the evidence from these long-term studies utilized a randomized controlled trial in the general population, and it is for these reasons that one should consider the conclusions being quite strong. Mobile phones are exposing men to a higher risk of infertility in regards to semen quality, which is something that men should start considering as they move forward in today’s cell phone-dominated world.
Other studies have also suggested that being stressed can also reduce semen quality in men. While researchers did not investigate the underlying reasons, they did have good reason to think why this is true – the release of “glucocorticoids”, which is basically a hormone that could negatively affect semen quality. It’s just one more reason to avoid stress in today’s fast-paced society as a man.
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Date: 17 November 2010.
‘A harm reduction approach to drug use is still relevant’, says Professor Gerry Stimson
IHRA’s former Executive Director, Gerry Stimson, defended harm reduction from political revisionism in a lecture given at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine on 17th November 2010.
For a full copy of this lecture entitled ‘Harm Reduction: the Advocacy of Science and the Science of Advocacy’ please click here. (PDF, 344 KB)
The article below is reproduced and available on the Guardian website.
Watch the lecture of Gerry Stimsonin in 4 parts: http://www.ihra.net/contents/816
or in 4 parts on YouTube
A HARM REDUCTION APPROACH TO DRUG USE IS STILL RELEVANT
Harm reduction aims to reduce the risks of drugs, and to mitigate impacts on the individual and the wider society. It is basic good public health and social policy. So, why doesn’t everyone support it? Conservative party ideologues have rewritten the history of harm reduction. They blame it on Labour. But harm reduction has a long history.
One of the commonest measures is the control of product quality and strength. If you drink alcohol in much of Europe you are pretty sure what is in the bottle. Drink driving legislation is also harm reduction, as is smokeless tobaccos. The first controls of drug possession were introduced in the first world war, and in the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1920. Then, prescribing heroin and morphine was regarded as legitimate medical treatment for people who were unable to withdraw; a medical forerunner of the harm reduction we know today – acting cautiously to help the patient lead a useful and fairly normal life.
Margaret Thatcher’s government introduced harm reduction into policy in 1988 in response to the HIV epidemic. A report on Aids and Drug Misuse, from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, stated that “the spread of HIV is a greater danger to individual and public health than drug misuse”. Since then, harm reduction programmes for HIV prevention have been adopted in more than half of the 158 countries where people inject drugs.
In the case of alcohol, 82 countries have maximum legal blood alcohol levels for driving and 104 have minimum age limits for consumption.
Drugs harm reduction programmes were guided by the public health model embodied in the World Health Organisation’s 1986 Ottawa charter for health promotion. It stated that health promotion requires supportive environments, strengthening of community actions, developing personal skills and reorienting health services.
Yet prescribing methadone has been portrayed by the UK media and some treatment providers as “parking people on methadone” and giving up on recovery. In developed democracies, drugs policy has to fit with the political zeitgeist. Under Labour – with the idea of “rights and responsibilities” and of being “tough on crime and the causes of crime” – we had an expanded methadone programme for drug users because they were seen to be criminals. Now, harm reduction is seen by the coalition government as part of a Britain broken by Labour, burdened by debt, and over-dependent on the state.
The advocacy challenge is to fit harm reduction within the political zeitgeist. The coalition will shape drug treatment based on a premise that users are a burden on the state. Most treatment providers have already been busy redefining their work as driven by the goal of abstinent recovery.
We need to influence decision-makers so it becomes risky not to promote harm reduction. For too long, public health advocates have focused on the powerless, trying to get drug users to change their risky behaviour. Our target should be the decision-makers who put politics above evidence and are prepared to take risks with other people’s lives.
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Flu Season is Just Around the Corner. Are You Prepared?
Our Kitchener urgent care Summer’s coming to an end, and you know what that means: crisp Autumn afternoons, pumpkin spiced lattes, and increased incidences of influenza.
Kitchener Flu Shot Clinic
Each year Canada experiences a flu outbreak, with flu season season occuring between October and May. The influenza virus(es) changes every season, so it is very important to get vaccinated every year. For example, this year, the main strain of the virus is completely different than last year, so the antibodies you acquired from last year’s vaccination may not be effective against this year’s strain. Research has shown that resistance (either via natural methods or vaccination) to influenza decreases each year, further supporting yearly vaccinations.
Here’s what you need to know about the flu and how to prepare for the upcoming 2015-2016 flu season at our Kitchener urgent care clinic:
What is Influenza?
Influenza is a common viral infection. Typically, the virus is short-term and can be self-diagnosed and self-treated. Influenza is highly contagious, so it spreads easily.
How Can I Prepare for Flu Season
Each year, it’s recommends that all individuals over the age of six months receive a flu vaccine, available at your local urgent care clinic. Ideally, you should get the vaccine before October, when flu season is said to begin.
As part of your preventative measures, the CDC recommends engaging in healthy actions, such as keeping away from sick people and washing your hands frequently.
What are symptoms of the flu?
Symptoms of influenza include but are not limited to fever, coughs, congestion, fatigue, soreness and headaches.
What if I get the flu?
In most cases, having the flu is common and with proper rest and treatment, symptoms should abate within days. If you feel flu-like symptoms, contact your doctor or our Kitchener urgent care clinic.
At your appointment, your doctor will usually prescribe you antiviral prescription drugs to treat your illness. For high-risk individuals, such as children under the age of two, adults over 65, pregnant women and already sick individuals, anti-viral drugs are an absolute must.
Along with prescription medication, bed rest and an adequate consumption of fluids is essential to a speedy recovery.
Don’t let this flu season make you feel under the weather. For more information, visit the CDC’s website or contact your local urgent care clinic.
Flu season is just around the corner: It typically begins in October or November, peaks in January or February and can continue through May. Given that it takes about two weeks for the vaccination to build the antibodies necessary for protection, what better time than now to get vaccinated?
Certain populations of people are more susceptible to the flu and should be sure to obtain a vaccination each and every year. On the other hand, there are some groups who should not receive a vaccination.
Keep in mind that an influenza infection affects everyone differently; for one person it could just be a fever and achy body, bur for another, it could mean hospitalization or even death. As a general rule, anyone over 6 months of age should get vaccinated.
If you have certain medical conditions (e.g. asthma, lung disease, diabetes), are pregnant, are 65 years or older or live with/care for others who are at a high risk of contracting influenza, you should especially get an influenza vaccination.
If, however, you are allergic to eggs, have had a severe reaction to a previous influenza vaccination, are younger than 6 months, have a history of Guillain-Barre Syndrome or currently have an illness which includes fever, you should not get vaccinated without first consulting your physician.
However, regardless of how well the vaccine corresponds with the circulating strains, it is still important to get vaccinated to help protect yourself and to prevent any flu-related complications. As always, speak with your physician before obtaining a vaccination to ensure it is a safe option for you.
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Researchers are fighting the growing epidemic of electronic waste by using fully recyclable printed electronics.
The research team from Duke University has created the world’s first fully recyclable printed electronics in an attempt to get rid of the growing electronic waste. The team showed a crucial and complex computer component “the transistor” made out of three carbon-based inks and they hope to inspire a new generation of recyclable electronics.
“Silicon-based computer components are probably never going away, and we don’t expect easily recyclable electronics like ours to replace the technology and devices that are already widely used,” said Aaron Franklin, the Addy Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke. “But we hope that by creating new, fully recyclable, easily printed electronics and showing what they can do, that they might become widely used in future applications.”
Almost everyone in today’s world uses multiple electronics on a daily basis and that ratio isn’t to be decreased, rather would drastically increase over the course of time. This leaves the world with a growing pile of unused devices, that are replaced either after becoming dysfunctional or are replaced by a newer variant. And honestly, the recycling facilities are not enough to cater to the growing stash of these “for no good” electronics.
As per United Nations, “less than a quarter of the millions of pounds of electronics thrown away each year is recycled. And the problem is only going to get worse as the world upgrades to 5G devices, and the internet of things (IoT) continues to expand.” This comes with the problem of discarding these electronic devices that is no easy feat. Massive facilities employ hundreds of workers who do this job, for not so much of the outcome.
The new method proposes the use of nanotubes and graphene inks used for the semi-conductors and conductors. These materials are not entirely new in the world of printed electronics, however, the team suggested that “the path to recyclability was opened with the development of a wood-derived insulating dielectric ink called nanocellulose.”
“Nanocellulose is biodegradable and has been used in applications like the packaging for years,” said Franklin. “And while people have long known about its potential applications as an insulator in electronics, nobody has figured out how to use it in a printable ink before. That’s one of the keys to making these fully recyclable devices functional.”
The researchers new found technique obtains crystals of nanocellulose taken from wood fibers that when mixed with table salt shapes into ink good enough for printed transistors. The team then showed that when aerosol jet printers are used with the three inks at room temperature, the left by-product performs as a fit to be used in a variety of applications even after six months of the initial printing.
“Recyclable electronics like this aren’t going to go out and replace an entire half-trillion-dollar industry by any means, and we’re certainly nowhere near printing recyclable computer processors,” said Franklin. “But demonstrating these types of new materials and their functionality is hopefully a stepping stone in the right direction for a new type of electronics life cycle.”
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Resources for Coping with Sexual Harassment/Assault and Reporting
Confusion abounds. Students and families across the country struggle with the devastating impact of sexual harassment and sexual violence. Yet in many cases, victims don’t even acknowledge that they’ve been sexually harassed/assaulted. That’s because victims have come to accept sexual harassment as normal and sexual assault as their fault. In addition, school districts use their considerable power to shut down complaints to avoid being sued after they failed to respond appropriately to reported sexual harassment/assault. Schools typically deny the assault, blame the victim, and frustrate the damaged student, hoping she/he will go away. Whether the harassment/assault occurred at school, on the Internet, or in another location, schools must comply with Title IX, a federal civil rights law guaranteeing every student an equal education free of sexual harassment and gender discrimination.
Shock follows. Parents of victims are shocked when they learn how school districts put liability and reputation ahead of students’ well-being. Families are confused and feel powerless when the district denies the harassment/assault. Review these definitions of sexual harassment/assault, get support from the resources below, learn how to file a complaint, and become an empowered agent for change!
Why and How to Report
Important Reporting Tips:
- Keep good documentation.
- Follow up phone conversations with an email or written summary to those involved (schools, medical providers, law enforcement, etc.).
- Use written communication whenever you can.
- Keep all medical reports, records, and paperwork from any office or person connected with your complaint.
The National Women’s Law Center recommends that you:
- Keep a detailed written record of the harassment.
- Record what happened, when, where, who else was present, and how you reacted.
- Save any notes, pictures, or other documents you receive from the harasser.
- Take screenshots/print out information showing retaliation against the victim.
What To Do Immediately if Assaulted
- Get away from the attacker to a safe place as fast as you can. Then call 911 or the police.
- Call a friend or family member you trust. You also can call a crisis center or a hotline to talk with a counselor. One hotline is RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800-656-HOPE (4673). Feelings of shame, guilt, fear, and shock are normal. It is important to get counseling from a trusted professional.
- Do not wash, comb, or clean any part of your body. Do not change clothes if possible, so the hospital nurse can collect evidence. Do not touch or change anything at the scene of the assault. It is important to collect evidence, even if you don’t believe you will prosecute the assailant.
- Go to your nearest hospital emergency room as soon as possible. You need to be examined, treated for any injuries, and checked for possible sexually transmitted infections (STIs) or pregnancy. The nurse or doctor will collect evidence the attacker may have left behind.
- Collect the evidence even if you are unsure whether you will file a complaint.
While at the hospital:
- Ask the hospital staff to connect you with the local rape crisis center. Many times a crisis center can support you while in the hospital, help you make choices about reporting the attack, and help you find counseling and support groups.
- If you decide to file a police report, you or the hospital staff can call the police from the emergency room.
Recommendations from Culture of Respect:
- Get yourself to a safe place.
- If you intend on filing an official police report, or if you might want to in the future, RAINN recommends for the purposes of evidence collection that you:
- Do not shower
- Do not use the restroom
- Do not change or dispose of clothes worn when the assault occurred
- Do not comb your hair
- Do not clean up the crime scene
- Do not move anything the offender may have touched
- Consider seeking medical attention.
- Talk to someone you trust.
- Decide if you want to report the assault to your school and/or the police.
- Decide if you may want or need legal protection from the perpetrator.
- Consider seeing a counselor.
- Create a safety plan.
- Follow a routine that includes things that make you feel good.
- Again the most important thing is to trust your instincts.
From Title IX on Campus:
From Joyful Heart:
Resources for survivors Call One or More of These National Crisis Hotlines to connect you with a resource in your area. [For persons of all gender identities and orientations]:
- RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline: 1-800-656-HOPE
- National Teen Dating Abuse Hotline: 1-866-331-9474
- National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-SAFE
- Love Is Respect: 1-866-331-9474
- National Suicide Prevention Lifeline 1-800-273-TALK (8255).
- Joyful Heart Foundation Resources, Hotlines, and Information
- Childhelp.org National Child Abuse Hotline 1.800.422.4453 Resources for children, parents, and teachers
Visit Websites that Provide Reliable Information About Sexual Harassment/Assault, Self-Care, Legal Options, etc.
- The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) and its National Sexual Assault Hotline 1-800-656-HOPE (4673), the largest anti-sexual violence organization in the U.S. Its National Sexual Assault Hotline is a partnership of more than 1,100 rape treatment hotlines across the country, providing victims of sexual violence with free, confidential services 24/7. RAINN also offers tips for staying safe on campus and reporting.
- National Teen Dating Abuse Helpline connected with Loveisrespect.org 1-866-331-9474 | TTY 1-800-331-8453 | text “loveis” to 77054 The National Teen Dating Abuse Helpline offers phone, text and chat services targeted at young people involved in abusive relationships. It also offers resources for concerned friends, parents, teachers, clergy, law enforcement and service providers.
- The Joyful Heart Foundation’s advice for survivors. 1-800-273-TALK (8255). The Foundation’s mission is to heal, educate and empower survivors of sexual assault, domestic violence and child abuse.
- 1is2Many. Resources from The White House.
- After Silence online support group | After Silence en Español AfterSilence.org offers moderated online support groups, a message board and a chat room service where survivors can connect, share stories, ask questions and work on healing and recovery.
- Know the laws in your state (from RAINN).
- Legal Resource Kit Sexual Harassment in the Schools (Legal Momentum).
If Someone You Know is Contemplating Suicide
- National Suicide Prevention Lifeline – Hotline 1.800.273.8255 A confidential 24-hour hotline for anyone in suicidal crisis or emotional distress. Calls are routed to the closest of 162 crisis centers across the country.
- Your Life Your Voice 800 448-3000
- The Trevor Project for LGBTQ 866-488-7386
- Teen Line 310-855-4673
- Reachout.com 1-800 448-3000
- Lifeline Crisis Chat (sign-in first)
- BeFrienders Worldwide (multi-lingual)
- Yellow Ribbon 800-273-8255
- National Institute of Mental Health prevention, facts, research, resources
- Suicide Prevention APP
Selected Prevention, Healthy Relationships, Consent, and Essential Resources
- Love is Respect, a comprehensive site for parents and teens
- Culture of Respect, a comprehensive site for parents and teens
- Signs of dating violence for teens from Voices Against Violence
- Take Action Against Abuse–For Parents from the US White House, including recognizing abuse, talking with your teen, role of technology, and questions for schools
- What not to say to a victim of sexual assault from ACASA Arkansas video
- Warning signs of abuse from US White House, with helpful links to date rape and relationship safety
- Not Alone, Official Resources from the US Government
- Essential Information on Sexual Assault from RAINN, a national resource
- Reducing Your Risk of Sexual Assault from RAINN
- How Can I Lower My Risk of Sexual Assault and resources from Women’s Health.gov
- Critics Picks: Definitions of Consent from SAFER
Resources for Male Survivors and Perpetrators of Sexual Harassment and Assault
Resources for LGBTQ+
- Helplines and resources from GLSEN
- Helpline and resources at the Trevor Project (866-488-7386)
- Title IX Protections from Bullying and Harassment in Schools: FAQs for LGBT or Gender Nonconforming Students and Their Families from National Women’s Law Center
- LGBTQ resources from Notalone.org
- National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs LGBTQH (212-714-1141)
Resources for Sexual Assault HazingRead More
Is there a resource you’d like to see here? Contact us.
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It’s no surprise SQL (pronounced ‘sequel’) tops the job list since it can be found far and wide in various flavors. Database technologies such as MySQL, PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL Server power big businesses, small businesses, hospitals, banks, universities. Indeed, just about every computer and person with access to technology eventually touches something SQL. For instance, all Android phones and iPhones have access to a SQL database called SQLite and many mobile apps developed Google, Skype and DropBox use it directly.
The tech community recently celebrated the 20th anniversary of Java. It’s one of the most widely adopted programming languages, used by some 9 million developers and running on 7 billion devices worldwide. It’s also the programming language used to develop all native Android apps. Java’s popularity with developers is due to the fact that the language is grounded in readability and simplicity. Java has staying power since it has long-term compatibility, which makes sure older applications continue to work now into the future. It’s not going anywhere anytime soon and is used to power company websites like LinkedIn.com, Netflix.com and Amazon.com.
Dating from 2000, C# (pronounced C-sharp) is a relatively new programming language designed by Microsoft for a wide range of enterprise applications that run on the .NET Framework. An evolution of C and C++, the C# language is simple, modern, type safe and object oriented.
C++ (pronounced C-plus-plus) is a general purpose object-oriented programming language based on the earlier ‘C’ language. Developed by Bjarne Stroustrup at Bell Labs, C++ was first released in 1983. Stroustrup keeps an extensive list of applications written in C++. The list includes Adobe and Microsoft applications, MongoDB databases, large portions of Mac OS/X and is the best language to learn for performance-critical applications such as “twitch” game development or audio/video processing.
Python is a general purpose programming language that was named after the Monty Python (so you know it’s fun to work with)! Python is simple and incredibly readable since closely resembles the English language. It’s a great language for beginners, all the way up to seasoned professionals. Python recently bumped Java as the language of choice in introductory programming courses with eight of the top 10 computer science departments now using Python to teach coding, as well as 27 of the top 39 schools. Because of Python’s use in the educational realm, there are a lot of libraries created for Python related to mathematics, physics and natural processing. PBS, NASA and Reddit use Python for their websites.
Created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994, PHP was never actually intended to be a new programming language. Instead, it was created to be a set of tools to help Rasmus maintain his Personal Home Page (PHP). Today, PHP (Hypertext Pre-Processor) is a scripting language, running on the server, which can be used to create web pages written in HTML. PHP tends to be a popular languages since its easy-to use by new programmers, but also offers tons of advanced features for more experienced programmers.
8. Ruby on Rails
Like Java or the C language, Ruby is a general purpose programming language, though it is best known for its use in web programming, and Rails serves as a framework for the Ruby Language. Ruby on Rails has many positive qualities including rapid development, you don’t need as much code, and there are a wide variety of 3rd party libraries available. It’s used from companies ranging from small start-ups to large enterprises and everything in-between. Hulu, Twitter, Github and Living Social are using Ruby on Rails for at least one of their web applications.
In 2014, Apple decided to invent their own programming language. The result was Swift – a new programming language for iOS and OS X developers to create their next killer app. Developers will find that many parts of Swift are familiar from their experience of developing in C++ and Objective-C. Companies including American Airlines, LinkedIn, and Duolingo have been quick to adopt Swift, and we’ll see this language on the rise in the coming years.
Any great craftsman has a belt full of tools, each a perfect choice for certain situations. Similarly, there will never be just a single programming language, and each language will evolve and improve over time to keep pace with innovation.
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- Buildings for carrying on industrial labor.
- usage: "they built a large plant to manufacture automobiles"
- Botany) a living organism lacking the power of locomotion.
- An actor situated in the audience whose acting is rehearsed but seems spontaneous to the audience.
- Something planted secretly for discovery by another.
- usage: "the police used a plant to trick the thieves"; "he claimed that the evidence against him was a plant"
- Put or set (seeds, seedlings, or plants) into the ground.
- usage: "Let's plant flowers in the garden"
- synonyms: set
- Fix or set securely or deeply.
- usage: "He planted a knee in the back of his opponent"; "The dentist implanted a tooth in the gum"
- Set up or lay the groundwork for.
- usage: "establish a new department"
- Place into a river.
- usage: "plant fish"
- Place something or someone in a certain position in order to secretly observe or deceive.
- usage: "Plant a spy in Moscow"; "plant bugs in the dissident's apartment"
- Put firmly in the mind.
- usage: "Plant a thought in the students' minds"
- synonyms: implant
WordNet 3.0 © 2006 by Princeton University
|APA||WordNet. (2010). plant. Retrieved February 20, 2017, from http://smartdefine.org/plant/definitions/1188661|
|Chicago||WordNet. 2010. "plant" http://smartdefine.org/plant/definitions/1188661 (accessed February 20, 2017).|
|Harvard||WordNet 2010, plant, Smart Define, viewed 20 February, 2017, <http://smartdefine.org/plant/definitions/1188661>.|
|MLA||WordNet. "plant" 23 October 2010. Web. 20 February 2017. <http://smartdefine.org/plant/definitions/1188661>|
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Free essay: the chocolate war many people often meet different characters in literature a literary analysis of robert cormier's the chocolate war essay.
Learn exactly what happened in this chapter, scene, or section of the chocolate war and what it means perfect for acing essays, tests, and quizzes, as well as.
The chocolate war study guide contains a biography of robert cormier, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. A literary analysis of robert cormier's the chocolate war the chocolate war is a story which takes place in new england in the 1970's most of the events.
Why does the goober pull back and not help jerry during his ordeal with the vigils does archie have an intention of making janza a member of the vigils. Starting an essay on robert cormier's the chocolate war organize your thoughts and more at our handy-dandy shmoop writing lab. The chocolate war is a young adult novel by american author robert cormier first published in 1974, it was adapted into a film in 1988 although it received.
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Speaker: Paula Findlen, Chair, Department of History, Stanford University
In the decade before Francesco Algarotti became internationally known for his Newtonianism for Ladies (1737) he first came to the attention of an international community of experimental philosophers for his role in the successful replication of Newton’s prism experiments during his philosophical studies in Bologna. This talk explores the circumstances that led the teenage Algarotti to become a celebrity experimenter in relation to debates about Newtonian science in Italy in the early eighteenth century. This episode has been studied and explained rather differently by Simon Schaffer and Alan Shapiro, emphasizing different dimensions of why Algarotti and his mentor succeeded with his prisms. Paula Findlen will offer another perspective that emerges from examining Algarotti and his world, and considering the long legacy of the prisms that Algarotti kept among his possessions that still exist today.
This event is free and open to the public.
This event is part of the New York History of Science Lecture Series.
New York University
Gallatin School of Individualized Study
Columbia University in the City of New York
City University of New York
The New York Academy of Sciences
The New York Academy of Medicine
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Intents are the way invoke the activities. Otherwise Intent is a class that lets you specify a run Activity
There are two primary forms of intents you will use.
–Explicit Intents have specified a component (via setComponent(ComponentName) or setClass(Context, Class)), which provides the exact class to be run. Often these will not include any other information, simply being a way for an application to launch various internal activities it has as the user interacts with the application.
–Implicit Intents have not specified a component; instead, they must include enough information for the system to determine which of the available components is best to run for that intent.
A Intent can associate an action, a data and a category.
–category — Gives additional information about the action to execute. For example, CATEGORY_LAUNCHER means it should appear in the Launcher as a top-level application, while CATEGORY_ALTERNATIVE means it should be included in a list of alternative actions the user can perform on a piece of data.
–type — Specifies an explicit type (a MIME type) of the intent data. Normally the type is inferred from the data itself. By setting this attribute, you disable that evaluation and force an explicit type.
–component — Specifies an explicit name of a component class to use for the intent. Normally this is determined by looking at the other information in the intent (the action, data/type, and categories) and matching that with a component that can handle it. If this attribute is set then none of the evaluation is performed, and this component is used exactly as is. By specifying this attribute, all of the other Intent attributes become optional.
–extras — This is a Bundle of any additional information. This can be used to provide extended information to the component. For example, if we have a action to send an e-mail message, we could also include extra pieces of data here to supply a subject, body, etc.
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A dinosaur fit for land and water: Spinosaurus unveiled
Newly unveiled fossils indicate a dinosaur known as Spinosaurus aegyptiacus was built to live part of the time in water, according to a report published online for the journal Science.
Measuring 50 feet, making it larger than the Tyrannosaurus rex, Spinosaurus is so named because of the long spines measuring up to seven feet that run down its back and form one large sail.
The dinosaur had an elongated neck, and its hind limbs were smaller and more solid than those of land dinosaurs like the T. rex. and indicate that the Spinosaurus used them to paddle its massive body through the waters.
“The Spinosaurus story is truly unique, it is an international story of scientists getting together and it stretches across a century,” said Professor Paul C. Sereno of the University of Chicago and one of the scientists who has been working on reconstructing the Spinosaurus and its story.
Spinosaurus fossils were first discovered in the Western Desert of Egypt by German paleontologist Ernst Stromer in 1912. The fossils, housed in a museum in Munich, were destroyed in World War II by an Allied air raid, according to National Geographic magazine’s October cover story.
“We’ve been living with more or less a shadow of this dinosaur all of my life,” Sereno said.
The fossils were unearthed by a nomad in Morocco in 1975, sold into the fossil market and wound up in Milan, Italy.
Nizar Ibrahim, a 2014 National Geographic Emerging Explorer and co-author of the Science journal report, recognized the fossils in Italy.
The entire discovery and rediscovery story of the Spinosaurus is the subject of a National Geographic/NOVA special, “Bigger Than T.rex,” which airs on PBS on Nov. 5.
Currently, a life-size model of the Spinosaurus can be seen in an exhibit at the National Geographic Museum in Washington D.C.
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March 25, 2011 marks the hundred year anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. One hundred forty-six workers perished in a blaze that engulfed the ten story Asch Building in lower Manhattan. Most were young seamstresses who worked six days a week for a pittance. The tragedy unfolded blocks from where, ninety years later, the twin towers were similarly destroyed by fire. In both calamities, trapped individuals had to choose between death by fire or death by jumping to the pavement below. In both 1911 and 2001, onlookers watched in horror as the consequences off that terrifying choice played out.
A shirtwaist was a blouse. The fashion of the day had women wearing shirtwaists with ankle-length skirts. Triangle was a leading manufacturer of shirtwaists, but there was competiton. The firm was founded by Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, who had emigrated from Russia. Since the age of Jackson and Thoreau, Americans had been captivated by a vision of individuals pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. That had worked for Blanck and Harris, as well as many others. But that American Dream—the phrase itself would not be popularized until 1931—had a dark side. It was used not only to motivate those who might embrace America’s opportunity, but also to denigrate weak or exploited people for whom opportunity was less forthcoming. America was the land of freedom where everything was a marketplace, so the thinking went. If the seamstresses of Triangle wanted shorter hours, safer working conditions, or more pay, all they had to do was bargain for it.
What makes the Triangle fire especially poignant is the fact that the seamstresses of Triangle—impoverished young female emigrants, most of them Jewish—had tried and failed to do precisely that. In September 1909, they had organized a strike that 20,000 workers from shirtwaist factories across Manhattan joined. They demanded the right to form a union.
Hit by the strike, factory owners were already under financial pressure. Competition had squeezed profit margins. And demand for shirtwaists was dropping as women turned to wearing more dresses. No matter how much beautiful lace they stitched onto their shirtwaists, the owners’ sales continued a decline. Desperate to cut costs, the owners had squeezed their workers, and now they resisted the strike ferociously.
It became New York’s largest work stoppage to date, dragged on for five ugly months. Striking women were arrested by police for vagrancy or incitement. The owners hired thugs and prostitutes to threaten and assault strikers in the streets. Without income, the strikers and their families faced starvation. For a time, Anne Morgan, the daughter of J. P. Morgan, broke with respectable society and gave the strikers money. This was America’s Progressive Age, so she wasn’t alone. But as strikers pressed their demand to have a union, Anne Morgan decided this smacked of socialism and withdrew her support.
With fashion season approaching, in February 1910, the owners agreed to negotiate. The seamstresses won a number of concessions, but their dream of having a union was quashed. A year later, perhaps caused by a careless smoker, the Triangle fire broke out.
As at Tower One of the World Trade Center, surviving largely depended on what floor someone was on. Workers on the building’s first eight floors received early warning of the fire and evacuated. Blanck and Harris were on the tenth floor. Notified by phone, they climbed to the roof and crossed over to a neighboring building. They did not bother to warn workers on the ninth floor, who continued to work amidst the din of sowing machines.
For those workers, there would be four possible avenues for escape: freight elevators, a fire escape, a front staircase, and a back staircase. The elevators saved some but stopped running after a few trips. Seamstresses crowded onto the fire escape, which collapsed under their weight. The front staircase was engulfed in flames. That left the back staircase. Blanck and Harris had adopted a policy of searching workers as they left the building each day. This was to ensure no one stole merchandise. To prevent anyone from sneaking out the back, the door to the rear staircase had been firmly locked.
Outside, firemen worked gallantly, but their ladders didn’t reach high enough. On the ninth floor, women and a few men crowded at windows with the fire at their backs. They looked down at the people, and those people looked up. But it was more than distance that separated them. The workers were doomed.
In days that followed, smoke cleared and bodies were removed. New York’s response was dramatic. A year before, the city had mostly turned its back on the striking seamstresses. Now, in death, it embraced their cause. A hundred thousand mourners marched in a funeral procession with 250,000 lining the route. An editorial cartoon in the March 18, 1911 New York Evening Journal captured the mood:
Who is responsible? Who is responsible for the murders of one hundred and forty-five young girls and men in the “fire proof” fire trap? On whose head rests the blame for the inadequate, antiquated, criminal stairs and single fire escape, made possible because the building was classed as “fireproof”? These dead girls cry aloud, not for revenge, but for justice. Their flame-racked bodies demand protection for the thousands of sister toilers who have not yet been sacrificed to fire. Their silent lips call, “Who is responsible?”
People demanded reforms. The United States had always been a capitalist nation—and it always would be. But there needed to be rules. New York State lead the nation in reforming labor laws and implementing safety regulations. Fire drills, exit signs and building occupancy limits are all legacies of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. The tragedy propelled the US labor movement and especially the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union.
Blanck and Harris denied knowing the back door was locked and were acquitted of manslaughter. They lost a subsequent civil suit in which plaintiffs received compensation of $75 for each death. This was more than covered by a substantial insurance settlement paid to the pair. In 1913, Blanck was arrested for again locking the door in a factory during working hours. He was fined $20.
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After a long, dreary winter, many people look forward to the signs of spring. The birds start singing, the trees start budding, and the sun warms our faces. However, with spring comes the showers. While rain may not be a problem to other Ontarians, Windsor and Essex County residents dread what has been happening for multiple years: floods, floods and more floods.
Countless news articles are published each season related to flooding and the damage it has done in our city and surrounding county. Just last summer, lake levels in our area were the highest they’ve been in more than 20 years. Let’s not forget the August 2017 storm either, which resulted in immense flooding and was ranked as one of Environment Canada’s Top 10 weather events for that year.
It is clear to most that our area has developed a flooding problem. With climate change, the intensity and frequency of rainfall is only increasing. However, our flooding problem is multi-faceted and unfortunately, not an easy fix. While there may be other issues, a very crucial one is our lack of natural coverage in Windsor and Essex County.
In Essex Region Conservation Authority’s 2018 watershed report card, one of the key issues in our watershed is low natural area cover. Our area is one of the largest regions in the Mixedwood Plains ecozone. Despite this, only 8.5 per cent of our region is covered by natural areas and this is the lowest cover out of all the regions in southern Ontario. Furthermore, 95 per cent of our region’s original wetlands have been lost and 99 per cent of prairie habitat has been lost. More impervious surfaces and less places for water to drain or percolate into the ground results in flooding.
So what if our solution to this issue could be an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone? Increasing the natural cover in our area will reduce flooding, which means more green space and less flooding damage. There are two simple ways to help increase natural coverage in Windsor and Essex County.
The first can be done in your own backyard. This spring, consider building a rain garden on your property. A rain garden is a shallow depression with loose, deep soil that contains native plants, including shrubs, flowers and grasses. These plants can tolerate wet and dry conditions. This type of garden absorbs and naturally filters stormwater, which prevents flooding in your own yard as well as preventing excess water from entering the drainage system. Rain gardens can be any size, are low maintenance, and can attract butterflies and other important pollinators. By having a rain garden, you’re not only beautifying your yard, you’re also protecting it from flooding and contributing to increasing the natural cover in our area.
Another way to increase natural cover in Windsor and Essex County is to participate in local restoration events. ERCA has been diligently planting trees and restoring wetlands and prairie habitat for many years. I have been working as a Habitat Restoration Technician at ERCA for the past three planting seasons and upwards of 80,000 trees are planted each year. We have many community outreach events and the more participation we have from the community, the more natural cover we will have for years to come.
We cannot control the buckets of rain that pour on us each spring, nor can we fix the damage that has already been done. However, we can be resilient and prepare for the future, while also creating more green space for our community and future generations.
Melanie Lefaive holds a B.Sc. in environmental science from the University of Windsor, and is currently studying Ecosystem Management Technology at Sir Sandford Fleming College
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- Summarize understandings of the family as presented by functional, conflict, and social interactionist theories.
Sociological views on today’s families generally fall into the functional, conflict, and social interactionist approaches introduced earlier in this book. Let’s review these views, which are summarized in Table 15.1 “Theory Snapshot”.
Table 15.1 Theory Snapshot
|Theoretical perspective||Major assumptions|
|Functionalism||The family performs several essential functions for society. It socializes children, it provides emotional and practical support for its members, it helps regulate sexual activity and sexual reproduction, and it provides its members with a social identity. In addition, sudden or far-reaching changes in the family’s structure or processes threaten its stability and weaken society.|
|Conflict||The family contributes to social inequality by reinforcing economic inequality and by reinforcing patriarchy. The family can also be a source of conflict, including physical violence and emotional cruelty, for its own members.|
|Symbolic interactionism||The interaction of family members and intimate couples involves shared understandings of their situations. Wives and husbands have different styles of communication, and social class affects the expectations that spouses have of their marriages and of each other. Romantic love is the common basis for American marriages and dating relationships, but it is much less common in several other contemporary nations.|
Social Functions of the Family
Recall that the functional perspective emphasizes that social institutions perform several important functions to help preserve social stability and otherwise keep a society working. A functional understanding of the family thus stresses the ways in which the family as a social institution helps make society possible. As such, the family performs several important functions.
First, the family is the primary unit for socializing children. As previous chapters indicated, no society is possible without adequate socialization of its young. In most societies, the family is the major unit in which socialization happens. Parents, siblings, and, if the family is extended rather than nuclear, other relatives all help socialize children from the time they are born.
One of the most important functions of the family is the socialization of children. In most societies the family is the major unit through which socialization occurs.
Colleen Kelly – Kids Playing Monopoly Chicago – CC BY 2.0.
Second, the family is ideally a major source of practical and emotional support for its members. It provides them food, clothing, shelter, and other essentials, and it also provides them love, comfort, help in times of emotional distress, and other types of intangible support that we all need.
Third, the family helps regulate sexual activity and sexual reproduction. All societies have norms governing with whom and how often a person should have sex. The family is the major unit for teaching these norms and the major unit through which sexual reproduction occurs. One reason for this is to ensure that infants have adequate emotional and practical care when they are born. The incest taboo that most societies have, which prohibits sex between certain relatives, helps minimize conflict within the family if sex occurred among its members and to establish social ties among different families and thus among society as a whole.
Fourth, the family provides its members with a social identity. Children are born into their parents’ social class, race and ethnicity, religion, and so forth. As we have seen in earlier chapters, social identity is important for our life chances. Some children have advantages throughout life because of the social identity they acquire from their parents, while others face many obstacles because the social class or race/ethnicity into which they are born is at the bottom of the social hierarchy.
Beyond discussing the family’s functions, the functional perspective on the family maintains that sudden or far-reaching changes in conventional family structure and processes threaten the family’s stability and thus that of society. For example, most sociology and marriage-and-family textbooks during the 1950s maintained that the male breadwinner–female homemaker nuclear family was the best arrangement for children, as it provided for a family’s economic and child-rearing needs. Any shift in this arrangement, they warned, would harm children and by extension the family as a social institution and even society itself. Textbooks no longer contain this warning, but many conservative observers continue to worry about the impact on children of working mothers and one-parent families. We return to their concerns shortly.
The Family and Conflict
Conflict theorists agree that the family serves the important functions just listed, but they also point to problems within the family that the functional perspective minimizes or overlooks altogether.
First, the family as a social institution contributes to social inequality in several ways. The social identity it gives to its children does affect their life chances, but it also reinforces a society’s system of stratification. Because families pass along their wealth to their children, and because families differ greatly in the amount of wealth they have, the family helps reinforce existing inequality. As it developed through the centuries, and especially during industrialization, the family also became more and more of a patriarchal unit (see earlier discussion), helping to ensure men’s status at the top of the social hierarchy.
Second, the family can also be a source of conflict for its own members. Although the functional perspective assumes the family provides its members emotional comfort and support, many families do just the opposite and are far from the harmonious, happy groups depicted in the 1950s television shows. Instead, and as the news story that began this chapter tragically illustrated, they argue, shout, and use emotional cruelty and physical violence. We return to family violence later in this chapter.
Families and Social Interaction
Social interactionist perspectives on the family examine how family members and intimate couples interact on a daily basis and arrive at shared understandings of their situations. Studies grounded in social interactionism give us a keen understanding of how and why families operate the way they do.
Some studies, for example, focus on how husbands and wives communicate and the degree to which they communicate successfully (Tannen, 2001). A classic study by Mirra Komarovsky (1964) found that wives in blue-collar marriages liked to talk with their husbands about problems they were having, while husbands tended to be quiet when problems occurred. Such gender differences seem less common in middle-class families, where men are better educated and more emotionally expressive than their working-class counterparts. Another classic study by Lillian Rubin (1976) found that wives in middle-class families say that ideal husbands are ones who communicate well and share their feelings, while wives in working-class families are more apt to say that ideal husbands are ones who do not drink too much and who go to work every day.
Other studies explore the role played by romantic love in courtship and marriage. Romantic love, the feeling of deep emotional and sexual passion for someone, is the basis for many American marriages and dating relationships, but it is actually uncommon in many parts of the contemporary world today and in many of the societies anthropologists and historians have studied. In these societies, marriages are arranged by parents and other kin for economic reasons or to build alliances, and young people are simply expected to marry whoever is chosen for them. This is the situation today in parts of India, Pakistan, and other developing nations and was the norm for much of the Western world until the late 18th and early 19th centuries (Lystra, 1989).
- The family ideally serves several functions for society. It socializes children, provides practical and emotional support for its members, regulates sexual reproduction, and provides its members with a social identity.
- Reflecting conflict theory’s emphases, the family may also produce several problems. In particular, it may contribute for several reasons to social inequality, and it may subject its members to violence, arguments, and other forms of conflict.
- Social interactionist understandings of the family emphasize how family members interact on a daily basis. In this regard, several studies find that husbands and wives communicate differently in certain ways that sometimes impede effective communication.
For Your Review
- As you think how best to understand the family, do you favor the views and assumptions of functional theory, conflict theory, or social interactionist theory? Explain your answer.
- Do you think the family continues to serve the function of regulating sexual behavior and sexual reproduction? Why or why not?
Komarovsky, M. (1964). Blue-collar marriage. New York, NY: Random House.
Lystra, K. (1989). Searching the heart: Women, men, and romantic love in nineteenth-century America. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Rubin, L. B. (1976). Worlds of pain: Life in the working-class family. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Tannen, D. (2001). You just don’t understand: Women and men in conversation. New York, NY: Quill.
This is a derivative of Sociology: Understanding and Changing the Social World by a publisher who has requested that they and the original author not receive attribution, which was originally released and is used under CC BY-NC-SA. This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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What is Infant Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL)?
Infant ALL is a relatively uncommon type of leukemia and occurs in children less than 12 months of age. It occurs in approximately 2-4 percent of all childhood ALL cases. Research has shown that infant ALL represents a distinct and unique biological subtype of leukemia. The prognosis for infants with ALL is much less favorable than for older children with ALL.
What are the signs and symptoms of Infant ALL?
Most patients with ALL have too many immature white cells in their blood, and not enough normal white blood cells (help to fight infections), red blood cells (carrying oxygen to tissues) or platelets (help to form a clot and prevent bleeding). Many of the white blood cells will be lymphoblasts, which are immature lymphocytes (leukemia cells) not normally found in the bloodstream. Lymphoblasts do not function like normal mature white blood cells. Patients with ALL are very susceptible to life-threatening infections.
Common symptoms and signs include:
- Fatigue, lethargy, loss of appetite and weight loss
- Bleeding, easy bruising or multiple pinhead-sized red spots on skin
- Bone pain, which may cause older children to limp or make them unable to walk
How is Infant ALL diagnosed?
Complete blood count (CBC) and blood cell exam (peripheral blood smear) are often the first ones done on patients with a suspected blood problem. Those tests that show immature lymphoblasts (leukemia cells) may also show decreased numbers of red cells (anemia) and platelets (thrombocytopenia).
Samples of the bone marrow – red tissues in the bones that produce all cells found in the blood – are obtained by bone marrow aspiration and biopsy – tests that are usually performed to help and diagnose and confirm leukemia. These procedures may also be done again later to inform the physicians if the leukemia is responding to treatment.
What are the treatment options for Infant ALL?
Treatment for infants with ALL is very difficult and remains a significant challenge.
All children with leukemia are treated with aggressive regimens with chemotherapy. Some children may also receive radiation therapy, bone marrow transplant, or a combination of both.
Dr. Hasan Hashem, M.D. Pediatric Heme/Onc Fellow, Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital
Dr. Alex Huang, M.D., Ph.D. Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine
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The laurel forest on the Canary Island of Gomera is a relic of a subtropical landscape that has largely disappeared today. The heart of the national park consists of an evergreen cloud forest with ferns up to 2 m high, long beard lichens hanging from the trees and gnarled branches overgrown with moss. Numerous streams with waterfalls meander between the trees.
Garajonay National Park: Facts
|Official title:||Garajonay National Park (Canary Islands, Gomera Island)|
|Natural monument:||since 1981 consisting of the six national forests of Agulo, Alajero, Hermigua, San Sebastián, Valle Gran Rey and Vallehermoso with an area of 39.84 km 2 and 70% with laurel trees; eroded volcanic plateau with volcanic cones such as Agando, Ojila, La Zarcilla and Las Lajas; subtropical climate with annual rainfall of 600 to 800 mm|
|Country:||Spain, Canary Islands|
|Location:||Center of the island of Gomera, west of the island of Tenerife|
|Meaning:||vegetation that has largely disappeared in Europe|
|Flora and fauna:||Vegetation with 450 plant species, 34 of which only occur on Gomera and 8 only in the national park, including the laurel plants of the species Laurisilva canaria and Laurus azorica as well as Persea indica, shrub layers with 3 to 5 m high tree heather, gale plants such as Myrica faya, which belongs to the strawberry trees Species Arbutus canariensis, the holly species Ilex canariensis, the species Maytenus canariensis, which belongs to the spindle tree family, the juniper species Juniperus cedrus and the elderberry species Sambucus palmensis; 4 species of bat and 27 species of birds such as white-tailed laurel pigeon|
An evergreen subtropical carpet
Although well traveled, the Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom was deeply impressed by Gomera, one of the seven large islands of the Canary Archipelago: »Immediately after San Sebastián you reach a high, stony, forbidding landscape in which nothing can grow. Stone. Only up there, in the Garajonay National Park, does the landscape change (…). Often there is thick fog there during the day, you drive through a Nibelungenland (…) and then through the sharpest hairpin curves that you have mastered in your life (…) and all of a sudden, almost explosively, a bright sun pops you in the face, and you are in the tropics, in a Balinese landscape with palm trees (…). ”
In terms of landscape, Gomera is an island of contrasts that unites several climate zones in a very small space. From the center of the island, the main valleys make their way down to the coast like oversized folds of rock. These deeply cut »Barrancos« are separated by mountain ridges up to a thousand meters high. In such a partly impassable landscape it is not surprising that the Gomeros invented their famous whistling language »El Silbo«, because the way to the next valley is time-consuming and involves great effort. Depending on the wind strength, you can have a chat over several kilometers with »El Silbo«.
At the fishing village of Playa de Santiago, in the barren and arid south of the island, sun and warmth are guaranteed even in winter; Cacti, agaves and milkweed plants line the streets. But the higher the serpentines snake up on the way into the interior of the island, the greener and denser the vegetation becomes, Canarian willow as well as honeysuckle and buckthorn plants spread out. The crowning glory is an evergreen laurel forest, the Bosque El Cedro! The name of this subtropical jungle, nourished by the trade wind, seems misleading today, because due to centuries of overexploitation, there are only very few cedar stocks on Gomera.
According to estatelearning, the most important prerequisite for the diversity of plants is high rainfall. The clouds that have moved over Lanzarote and Fuerteventura rarely rain on the almost 1500 meter high mountain slopes, but the laurel trees and heather “milk” the swirling clouds. The mist settles on their leaves and drips to the ground. A single laurel tree removes more than 2500 liters of condensation from the clouds every year. Botanists estimate that this indirect precipitation exceeds the direct precipitation by a factor of twenty in places.
Forest fires in the summer of 2012 caused great damage in the Garajonay National Park.
Nature thanks in its own way for the life-giving water: the hiker opens up an almost prehistoric landscape with plants and trees that were still at home in the Tertiary in today’s Mediterranean region. Ferns as high as a man grow in the undergrowth, the thick trunks are covered with moss, and long lichen beards hang down from the branches. In places the green is almost impenetrable, and the trees seem to thrash with the damp branches. Clouds move like cotton balls through the gnarled, tangled branches and create a fascinating play of light and shadow. If the fog is too thick, however, you literally cannot see your hand in front of your eyes – a ghostly scene.
In order to preserve the unique vegetation of the laurel forest for posterity, the central highlands of Gomera were declared a national park and named after the highest mountain, the Garajonay; since then, a third of the island’s area has been protected. And this is a good thing, as there are several thousand different plant species on Gomera, 34 of them cannot be found anywhere else in the world.
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Will Keogh wrote:
Sea haar and clouds meet in perfect harmony. Pic taken from Lyle Hill, Greenock towards Gourock in Scotland. The haar occurs when warm air condenses over the cold river creating a fog.
The ‘haar’ is also known as a ‘sea fret.’ It typically lies at a uniform height above the waterline but it is a moving entity, i.e. by the wind.
However, when the haar collides with, for example, a hillside, the haar is displaced from the horizontal.
Thank you, Will Keogh!
BBC meteorologist Gail Pirie agrees that a fret, haar and sea fog are all the same thing. She says these fogs typically occur between April and September, when warm air passes over the North Sea:
The variation in name simply arises from the locale in which you happen to find yourself when the fog rolls in off the sea. On the east coast of Scotland sea fog is known locally as haar or North Sea Haar, and it is often said to plague local residents during the summer. Likewise, it’s English counterpart – Fret or Sea Fret can make summer days on the East coast of England miserable.
Bottom line: These sorts of sea fogs are called haars on the east coast of Scotland and frets on the east coast of England. They’re usually flat, but this photo by Will Keogh shows a haar that’s been pushed horizontally after colliding with a hillside, so that it rises up toward clouds above.
Deborah Byrd created the EarthSky radio series in 1991 and founded EarthSky.org in 1994. Today, she serves as Editor-in-Chief of this website. She has won a galaxy of awards from the broadcasting and science communities, including having an asteroid named 3505 Byrd in her honor. A science communicator and educator since 1976, Byrd believes in science as a force for good in the world and a vital tool for the 21st century. "Being an EarthSky editor is like hosting a big global party for cool nature-lovers," she says.
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A fictional place in the asteroid belt in the Known Space series by Larry Niven.
When the belt was first explored, a roughly cylindrical nickel-iron asteroid, 2 miles by 1 mile, was found, close to Ceres. It was registered as S-2376.
In 2046, a crew of terrans arrived and claimed it for the belt. A hole was drilled down the axis of the asteroid and it was filled with plastic bags of water, then re-sealed. Jets were mounted to spin it on its axis. As it spun, solar mirrors heated it and the expanding water transformed the nickel-iron-composite, turning it into a bubble 12 miles long and 6 wide.
The bubble was set to rotate, generating half a G of gravity. The inside was filled with water, air, meteorite material and bacterial matter, as to make it habitable. In the middle, a special (permeable by certain wavelengths of light) fusion tube was placed, along the axis. Then, a bulge in the middle of Confinement makes a lake/river around the world. Finally, the ends are cooled to make for snow, and thus, water recycling.
Confinement was finished in 2071, freeing the belt from its last dependency on Earth: Women cannot have children in free fall. At any given time, there are roughly 800,000 people on the 200 square miles of land.
Audited July 5, 2002
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Pitch refers to how high or low a sound is on the musical scale, and inflection is change in pitch. This page will introduce you to five basic types of inflection (monotone, upslur, downslur, overslur, and underslur) in both single notes and series.
Listen to this song of the Black-capped Chickadee, which consists of three monotone whistles. You can tell they are monotone (unchanging in pitch) because they are straight horizontal lines on the spectrogram.
You should be able to see and hear that the first note of the chickadee’s song is higher than the others, while the other two are lower, on the same pitch. There is a change in pitch between the first and second notes, but there is no change in pitch within any of the notes. That’s why we call them monotone.
Extra credit: Note the rhythm of this song. The break between the first and second notes is much longer than the break between the second and third notes. In fact, the second break is so brief that some people may not notice it, especially in the field. Those who hear two notes usually transcribe this song as fee-bee. Those who hear three may transcribe it as hey-sweetie.
Extra extra credit: See the faint copy of the sound above the original? That’s the first harmonic. If you look carefully you’ll see that it’s found at precisely twice the frequency of the original sound. You’ll see more harmonics on the spectrograms below. We’ll talk more about them later, but for now you can ignore them, since your ears don’t consider them a separate part of the sound.
An upslurred sound rises in pitch. Upslurs rise on the spectrogram from lower left to upper right, like this Phainopepla call:
A downslurred sound falls in pitch, and also falls on the spectrogram from upper left to lower right, like this Lesser Goldfinch call:
Bird sounds that rise and then fall in pitch are so common that we really need a word to describe them. The word I use is overslur. The call of the Dusky-capped Flycatcher is an overslurred whistle:
The opposite of an overslur is an underslur: a sound that falls and then rises in pitch, like the call of the Eastern Wood-Pewee. (This sound is actually a little more complicated since the spectrogram shows a small initial upslur, but it’s brief enough and faint enough that you probably can’t hear it.)
Inflection of series vs. inflection of notes
Here’s a slightly more complex sound:
This is a downslurred series of downslurred whistles. We say the series is downslurred because each note in the series is slightly lower-pitched than the last. We say each note is downslurred because it descends in pitch from start to finish.
Canyon Wrens always sing a downslurred series, but the inflection of each note is variable. Here’s the same individual Canyon Wren singing another of its songtypes, this one a downslurred series of upslurred whistles:
Extra credit: Note that in the above songtype, the first few notes are much different than the last few notes: they are higher-pitched, shorter, and simpler. As the song nears its finish, the tone quality changes to be a little bit more musical, because the upslurs are not so steep, and also a little bit more rich or mellow, because the pitch is lower. The serpentine shape of the last few notes causes them to sound somewhat disyllabic.
The series can be monotone as well, even if the individual notes are not. Here’s a monotone series of downslurred whistles given by a hybrid titmouse in Texas:
(Next page: Musicality)
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The Appalachian Trail in New Jersey presents one of the most interesting continuous geologic features of the entire trail.
Kittatinny Mountain is a 40-plus mile ridge with several distinct summits stretching from High Point, New Jersey (1803’) to Wind Gap, some 15 miles into Pennsylvania.
Not surprisingly, the name “Kittatinny” derives from a Lenape Native American word meaning “endless hill” or “great mountain”. The range was formed during three geologic episodes. The first (1,000 million years ago), formed peaks as high as today’s Rocky Mountains and trapped sedimentary Paleozoic rocks (including sandstone, shale and limestone) between large blocks of Precambrian rocks (mostly granite), formed by intense heat and compression.
The resulting erosion by streams, wind, and glaciers left the nearly continuous and remarkably consistent in elevation mountain range that we see today. The only major breaks in the range occur at Culvers Gap and Delaware Water Gap. Both of these breaks showcase the power of water. While the range rose, the water continued to cut its way through. In the case of Delaware Water Gap, the Delaware River won. It still cuts through the gap to this day. Culver Gap tells a different story. Here the river successfully cut through the gap for a time but was then “captured” by the Flat Brook system on the west side of the range. The water stopped owing through the gap and this break in the range became known as a “wind gap”.
Pochuck Boardwalk Built for only $36,000 (thanks to an incredible number of donated work hours), the 1.5-mile-long Pochuck Boardwalk and 110-foot suspension bridge took 24 years to plan and seven years to build. In addition to getting the trail off busy area roads and providing a safer hiking experience, the boardwalk provides excellent wildlife viewing. Over 200 species of birds are known to frequent the marsh and it’s filled with endangered and threatened plants as well.
Best Section Hike in New Jersey
High Point, NJ to Fox Gap, PA (N to S) – 49.9 miles
I love this hike. You basically follow the same ridge with little change in elevation for 40-plus miles. The two things to be prepared for are potential lack of water and the fact that this area has one of the highest concentrations of bears in the eastern US. Please take the necessary precautions, including cooking and eating food away from lean-tos, tents or hammocks and storing food correctly.
More about the AT
If you are interested in hiking the trail, you may find my book Appalachian Odyssey: A 28-year hike on America’s trail a useful resource. I section-hiked the AT over nearly three decades with a good friend and we learned a lot!
If you are interested in the history of the Appalachian Trail — how the trail came into existence in the first place and the powerful personalities that got it built — you may enjoy my book, Blazing Ahead: Benton MacKaye, Myron Avery and the Rivalry that Built the Appalachian Trail.
*Based on 2006-2011 data compiled by the Appalachian Trail Conservancy.
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Plants and sound, circuits and visions of the future, greenhouse- and laboratory environments, occultism and science - in a constant movement between the smallest of particles and the infinitely large. Galleri Riis Stockholm is proud to present our first exhibition with Christine Ödlund, Music for Eukaryotes.
Ödlund has with fine-tuned sensibility and poignant accuracy explored and embodied phenomena and worlds that humans, with our limited senses, scarcely can perceive. Her interest in science as well as esoteric knowledge allows for surprising connotations. Through meditation she places herself in a condition she refers to as simulated synaesthesia, in which sensory impressions flow freely; scientific data or audio translates into colours, music transforms into shapes or motions, images become sensations of taste. Aligned with this interdisciplinary thinking Ödlund has followed researchers in organic chemistry at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in their attempts to decipher the chemical language of plants. Transforming scientists' data into notes and sounds, she creates aesthetically evocative musical scores that could potentially bridge the language barrier between plants and human beings.
Studies at KTH have shown that the yellow Admiral butterfly uses its front legs as drumsticks to knock on plants during specific periods of time. The butterfly's favourite is the nettle, which biologically is - like humans - categorized as eukaryotes. Scientists believe that the drumming is performed to extort chemical information from the plant. Ödlund has through her studies of the phenomena identified certain patterns and rhythms, her artistic interpretation being that the butterflies with their drumbeats induce the plant to hypnosis and in this disarmed state it reveals its chemical secrets. These studies have begotten to some of the works in the exhibition including sculptural installations where living plants seem to have taken over the laboratory environment and in which nettles are exposed to sound and music. Here she touches on the controversial scientists Cleve Backster and Dorothy Retallack who in the 1960s and 70s independently performed experiments on plants, which lead them to infer saplings with emotions and communicative abilities. Backster used his polygraph machine, while Retallack conducted experiments exposing seedlings to Indian sitar music and Led Zeppelin (concluding that the latter made them wither and lose their spark of life).
Another theme in the exhibition is the Atlantis myth. In one of the large works on paper Ödlund envisions Atlantis as a result of global warming ultimately making the earth impossible to inhabit - exempting fungi and mold - forcing humans to seek protection in biospheres below sea level. The strange landscape, the furrows and convolutions -similar to the topography of a brain- guides the viewer into the depth of the image.
The encounter between art, science and esotericism makes for a fertile playground wherein the artist can create speculative - yet sincere - scenarios. As with the theosophical protagonists Helena Blavatsky and Annie Besant, whom are both sources of inspiration for Ödlund, she sees the synthesis of philosophy, spirituality, art and science as a holistic method of approaching and understanding the world. The resulting artworks in the exhibition encompasses the fateful, the beautiful and the frightening.
Christine Ödlund (born 1963) lives and works in Stockholm. She graduated from Electro Acoustic Music (EAM course), EMS, Stockholm in 2004 and from the Royal College of Art, Stockholm 1996 and Konstfack, Stockholm 1995. In 2013 she has participated in In the stream at Lunds Konsthall, freq_out 9, Sonic Acts Festival, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Art and Music - Search for New Synesthesia, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. In late August 2013, her public artwork Lindarnas anatomi will be inaugurated in Kista Gårds Park outside Stockholm and later this year her work Atlantis No. 2/2012 will be installed in Statoil Oslo Offices, Fornebu, Oslo. As a sound artist, she has this year released Astral Bells (24 min Single CD), Federation of Swedish Art Associations, 2013.
For further information and images please contact the gallery.
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Click here click here click here click here click here sample mla format essay model mla – the purdue university online writing lab published (see demaree. Sample research paper written following the style guidelines in the mla handbook for writers of research papers, 7th edition. Modern language association (mla) style of referencing the following departments generally use the mla referencing style: english philosophy. Home blog posts how to format a paper in mla 8: the essay is in mla format you can use this model to write essays for any class using mla format. Click here click here click here click here click here model essay mla format research papers made easy | grammarlycom ad detect plagiarism, generate mla or.
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Ancient cemeteries, historic battlefields, and similar sites
give pause and lend themselves to somber reflection. The fragility of life, how short life can be, and thoughts on ones own mortality become manifest at places such as these. Perhaps that is the reason for their importance, and the reverence often shown. They also often lend to reflection on the importance of services provided by caring companies such as Arizona Affordable Funeral Home and Crematory.
During WWI, Ypres in Belgium was the site of some of the most horrific fighting of the war. More than a century later farmers still remove live ordnance from the ground during plowing season, and the surrounding woods cast shadows over trenches and breastworks.
Located at the confluence of a major road network, Ypres occupied a strategic position during WWI. For the German Army the small city was key to the capture of ports on the channel. For the Allied armies, the city was vital for keeping the ports open. As resulted the town was forever remembered as a place of carnage and indescribable carnage. Five major battles were fought here during the war. The British casualties in the Ypres salient are estimated to be more than 300,000 men, of which 90,000 were never found or given a proper funeral. The consensus is that German casualties exceeded those of the British by a large percentage.
In 1921, architect Reginald Blomfield designed a triumphal arch to be built at the site of the city’s historic gate. The arch was more than a passage into the city, it was a barrel vaulted memorial to the missing, the soldiers with no known grave. On stone panels in the Hall of Memory the names on stone of 54,395 British Commonwealth soldiers are etched. On separate memorials are the names of soldiers from New Zealand and Newfoundland.
Following the official dedication of the Menin Gate Memorial in 1927, the citizens of Ypres wanted to express their gratitude towards those who had given their lives for Belgium’s freedom. So, every evening since July 2, 1928, at 20:00, except during WWII, buglers from the Last Post Association close the road through the gate, and sound the Last Post. During extended ceremonies a visiting band, or a parade with military personnel, will be followed by the laying of a wreath.
After the wreath-laying a member of the Last Post Association, or a visiting dignitary will be invited to say the words of the Exhortation, taken from Laurence Binyon’s poem “For the Fallen” (fourth verse). Standing in the centre of the road under the arch of the Hall of Memory the person will say the words:
“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.”
A visit to Ypres, or the Menin Gate, is a somber and memorable experience that does more than give pause. It inspires tremendous reflection that will never be forgotten.
Written by Jim Hinckley of Jim Hinckley’s America.
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The Major Components and Interfaces of Linux and Their Functions
In this section look at the major operating system components: the file system, the help system, and the operating system interface known as the command line.
Home - Table Of Contents - Contact Us
CertiGuide to A+ (A+ 4 Real) (http://www.CertiGuide.com/apfr/) on CertiGuide.com
Version 1.0 - Version Date: March 29, 2005
Adapted with permission from a work created by Tcat Houser et al.
CertiGuide.com Version © Copyright 2005 Charles M. Kozierok. All Rights Reserved.
Not responsible for any loss resulting from the use of this site.
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In the post-World War II period, Washington, DC developed a thriving queer nightlife scene unlike anything the District had witnessed before. Queer Washingtonians continued to frequent the outdoor cruising spots and neighborhood bars that had defined the LGBTQ social experiences in the first half of the century. But this era of visibility brought new venues for queer socializing, including nightclubs, adult film theaters, and bath houses, to nearly every quadrant of the District. Entrepreneurs – many of them gay men – opened nightlife businesses that proudly catered to queer clienteles, permitting and even encouraging drag, same-sex dancing, and same-sex sexual encounters. More importantly, Washington’s queer nightlife scene in the 1970s and 1980s offered patrons a relatively safe space to act on their emotional and erotic desires openly and without fear of judgement.
Much of this scene was clustered into three communities: Capitol Hill, DuPont Circle, and South Capitol Street. So many LGBTQ businesses and organizations lined Capitol Hill’s 8th Street commercial corridor that the Blade dubbed the thoroughfare Washington’s “Gay Way.” Around the same time that queer nightlife was expanding in Capitol Hill, DuPont Circle began to transition from a haven for the 1960s counterculture movement into a gay residential and commercial enclave. With the rise of nightclubs in the mid-1970s, queer nightlife moved south to the warehouse districts bordering South Capitol Street.
This report was written by Amber Bailey, the Historic American Buildings Survey/Society for Architectural Historians Sally Kress Tompkins Fellow for 2016. The Historic American Buildings Survey is a program of the National Park Service.
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Space calling Ocean?
On this day in 1965, astronaut Gordon Cooper talked from Earth orbit with former-astronaut-turned-aquanaut Scott Carpenter, who was 205 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean at the time!
Is this the longest-distance phone call EVER? Apparently it is the only space-ship-to-underwater-ship conversation so far in history.
Cooper was aboard Gemini 5, and Carpenter was setting a world record in underwater work, living for 30 consecutive days on Sealab II. The two had known each other for years, having been among the original seven astronauts in Project Mercury, the first U.S. manned space effort.
The movie “The Right Stuff” is partly about the Mercury 7 and is very interesting!.
Did you know...?
- Sealab II was knicknamed the “Tiltin' Hilton” because the landing site, in the La Jolla Canyon off the coast of California, was sloped.
- The divers tested human ability to withstand the partial-pressure and cramped spaces of the vessel, but also tested new tools and an electrically heated drysuit.
- A bottlenosed dolphin named Tuffy helped carry supplies from the surface to Sealab.
- Another famous phone call from aquanaut Scott Carpenter was made to President Lyndon Baines Johnson. This call was pretty weird because Carpenter was in a decompression chamber filled with helium and oxygen, and his voice was really high, what is known as “helium speak.” The White House phone operator didn't want to connect the call, even though it had been pre-arranged, because she thought Carpenter's voice was “garbled.” It's pretty entertaining to listen to that phone call—but the only copy I could find was about twenty minutes into an NPR tape here. (The first twenty minutes are really good, “voices from space”—President Kennedy calling on Americans to send a man to the moon, and astronaut voices from Gemini and Apollo space missions. I could have done without all the weird space-y music and especially the even-weirder “Third Planet” interlude, but the most of it is really interesting!)
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ACP207 - Practical Approaches to Dramatic Text
Students must have completed two level 1 units
1 x 1 hour Class per week and 1 x 2 hour Workshop per week
This unit provides students with practical strategies for reading and rehearsing dramatic texts for performance. It explicates various approaches to textual analysis with a focus on the relationships between dramatic codes and conventions and their theatrical counterparts. More specifically, the unit will analyze the dramatic elements of plot, story, character, theme and language with reference to different modes of rehearsal and actor/director relationship with reference to systems of rehearsal developed by Stanislavski, Brecht, Grotowski as well as contemporary practitioners such as Robert LePage, Robert Wilson and Tadashi Suzuki. It will also examine the strengths and limitations of these systems for postdramatic and devised performance. Students will also engage with close readings of key realistic and non-realistic dramatic texts of the last 120 years (primarily from the Western tradition of dramatic literature), and participate in workshops exercises designed to develop practical approaches to researching and developing characters for performance. The unit will also focus on the roles of the director and dramaturg in contemporary performance.
Class Presentation, 20%
Research Paper, 1300 words, 30%
Performance Project, 50%
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A waste of space
It is the most expensive piece of technology ever built, supposedly a monument to international cooperation and the spirit of adventure and exploration. But 20 years and $100-billion later, the International Space Station is an embarrassment. The first pieces were launched in December 1998, but it has yet to produce any science worthy of its colossal price tag. And, in recent months, the United States space agency Nasa has all but admitted that the project has been a mistake.
Nasa has hobbled any chance for scientists to do research on board the space station this year. In a bid to plug a $5-billion hole in the agency’s finances, its chief, Mike Griffin, sliced $344-million off the station’s science budget.
“We have adopted a ‘go-as-you-can-pay’ approach toward space exploration, and have set clear priorities and made difficult choices to remain within the budget for exploration,” Griffin told the US House of Representatives’ science committee in November.
“It seemed to me it was setting the cart before the horse to be worrying about money for human or other life sciences when we could not assure ourselves the continued capability to be able to place people in orbit in the first place. My priority became assuring that the United States have as close to a continuous capability to put people in space first, and conducting research after that. Utilisation of [the station] for research or technology will have to be minimised in favour of getting it assembled.”
Work that had been planned, sometimes for decades, into the effects of space radiation on humans, the design of life support systems and advanced environmental controls will all be scrapped.
The sorry tale of the space station begins in the 1980s, when there was still the remnants of a space race. Conceived during the Reagan era, the ISS was seen as a way of responding to Russia’s Mir space station. By the time the iron curtain fell, the plan was being heralded by the then president Bill Clinton as a way to keep Russian space scientists out of the hands of rogue nations. With Europe, Canada and Japan, it would also bring together nations in a common, peaceful purpose. In the 1990s, the ISS was costed at $18-billion and full operation was expected in 2003. It would do invaluable research into the delicate construction of novel materials in microgravity and the search for anti-matter, and give us detailed information on the effects of space life for humans.
Today, the cost of the ISS has risen to $100bn and counting. It sucks almost $2bn from Nasa’s budget every year, essentially to stay mothballed in low Earth orbit. No one expects it to be finished before 2017 and, even then, it will be a mere shell of the plans on the drawing board.
“You’re not going to see the space station in the pretty pictures, there will be pieces missing,” says Dr Keith Cowing, a former Nasa scientist and editor of the Nasa Watch website. “There won’t be as many flights, it won’t be resupplied as often. Nasa is either unwilling or incapable of telling anybody with a straight face what the space station will look like.”
One by one, modules and experiments are being dropped. “Nasa has determined that its exploration research objectives no longer require the centrifuge accommodation module being developed for Nasa by [Japanese space agency] Jaxa,” Griffin also told the House science committee.
The centrifuge experiment was designed to work out the effect of different levels of gravity on humans in space. “We’ve had people and animals in space for a long time and we know what happens but we often don’t know why,” says Cowing. Yet it is research that makes a lot of sense, given Nasa’s plans to send humans to Mars in the next few decades.
Privately, Griffin has admitted that the ISS is an albatross and that he probably would never have built it, given the choice. Still, he is looking for uses. In light of President George Bush’s challenge in January 2004 to get to the moon and Mars, Griffin wants to use the space station as a stopover, a place to launch the big missions. Again, it is clearly an afterthought.
“If your goal was simply to go to the moon, do you need a space station? No,” says Cowing. “But it’s already there so you have to do something with it—it’s almost contrived.”
Having said that, Nasa’s decision to fillet the space station was never meant to happen. “I was in the room when the president made the announcement [on the moon and Mars vision] at Nasa headquarters,” says Cowing. “He never said, dear Nasa administrator, you have my approval to take anything that that agency does and sacrifice it to meet this one goal.”
Thorn in Nasa’s side
Nasa’s international partners are another thorn in Griffin’s side. Treaty level agreements with governments mean that Nasa cannot walk away from these commitments. The Columbus and Kibo modules built by Europe and Japan respectively are complete, but Nasa has set no dates for getting them up to the ISS.
“The easiest way to pacify European and Japanese complaints is to fly their astronauts sooner,” says Cowing. “The possibility is that there will be an international space station with no Americans on board. [Having put up all the money] it’s problematic from a congressional point of view.”
Griffin has already said that the limited number of space shuttle flights remaining before the spacecraft is decommissioned in 2010 would be ordered to launch the international modules first.
Getting Columbus and Kibo into space would placate the Europeans and Japanese, although it would mean problems in the short term. Both modules need power and a crew, meaning launching lots more equipment and more maintenance runs.
Yet the modules also provide a chink of light for the space station’s future.
“The space station could do good science. It could be a platform for astronomy if there was regular access and it was affordable and if the modules Columbus and Kibo were integrated,” says George Fraser, head of the space physics department at Leicester University. “It would be useful for surveying the sky and astroparticle physics—looking for exotic antimatter—where you need a big platform moving in the way the ISS moves.”
But he is not optimistic. “The rumours from the astrophysics community is that they are very fearful that the money will be directed to rectifying the problems with the shuttle,” says Fraser.
And while the European Space Agency (ESA) waits for Nasa to deal with the Columbus problem, scientists get no return on the multimillion-euro investment.
Tim Stephenson, chief engineer at the Space Research Centre at Leicester University, worked for ESA until 2000 in the manned space flight and micro-gravity directorate. He said his bosses spent most of their time arguing with Nasa, trying to get assurances they would respect the agreements upon which the ISS was based. “I’m sure the situation has got worse. I know from my former colleagues that they are beginning to come around to the idea that, within a few years, they and the Russians will be running the space station, the Americans will have buggered off.”
That result is unlikely if only because Nasa dare not pull out of the ISS for credibility reasons. To suggest in its annual budget negotiations with Congress that the $100-billion project has been a complete waste of money will not endear any of the agency’s plans to politicians.
Stephenson says the ISS debacle reflects problems that started in the decades after the staggering success of the Apollo missions to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s. “The risk-taking that was characteristic of the Apollo era is absent nowadays, and therefore Nasa management quickly get bogged down in the amount of money they have to spend to get the risks down to an acceptable level,” says Stephenson. “The acceptable level constantly goes down. You look at the history of the space station programme and you will see the plans for moon and Mars going the same way—[with] the grand objective being watered down.”
Can anything save the space station’s reputation? Could private industry take over the running of the experiments, as has been suggested?
“If some big company walked up to Nasa with hundreds of millions of dollars and said I’d like to do something on your space station, I’m not sure what the response would be,” says Cowing. “After 30 years, industry has not stepped up with their own money. Companies aren’t going to line up to do ‘what if’ science. They’re going to do something they can make a profit from.”
And, as if to rub scientists’ noses in the problem, the only thing that has emerged so far that can make money from space is tourism for the ultra-rich. “In the past five years, the only interest I’ve seen is from companies that either do travel or PR or both,” said Cowing.
The future for science aboard the ISS seems to rest with the Columbus and Kibo modules. “Americans who want to do research are going to have to partner Europeans and the Japanese,” says Cowing. Hardly the grand opportunity American scientists had been promised.
“It is a dramatic departure from what the ISS was sold as in the first place,” says Cowing. “Something we promised our scientists for 20-30 years, we’re now just telling them, never mind, we changed our minds. Why would I take Nasa seriously next time they tried to get a bunch of people involved?” - Guardian Unlimited Â
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Toola, a renowned sea otter at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, recently ended an 11-year career in which she raised 13 orphaned otter pups and inspired a law to help her wild relatives.
After she had been found in the wild, stranded and suffering from a parasitic brain infection spread by cat feces, she began regular treatments at the aquarium for seizures and was likely never to return to her native waters.
But just when things seemed darkest for Toola, an orphaned sea otter pup had arrived at the aquarium. Toola soon became the first otter ever to serve as a surrogate mother for a stranded pup, teaching it valuable sea-otter skills like dissecting crabs and opening clamshells with rocks.
(READ the tribute by Russell McLendon in MNN.com)
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You are here
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Genetic mutation linked to inherited forms of ALS, dementia
NIH-supported researchers’ gene discovery provides clues to cause.
National Institutes of Health scientists and worldwide teams of researchers have identified the most common genetic cause known to date for two neurological diseases, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD). The discovery offers clues to underlying mechanisms of these diseases, and may eventually contribute to the design and testing of possible therapies. The research results appeared online in Neuron on Sept. 21, 2011.
Researchers found that a mutation on a single gene, C9ORF72 on the short arm of chromosome 9, accounts for nearly 50 percent of the directly inherited, familial ALS and FTD in the Finnish population, and more than a third of familial ALS in other groups of European ancestry. The mutation, called a hexanucleotide repeat expansion, is an unusual one that involves repeating a DNA sequence over and over again. The researchers also found these mutations in Finnish people with the more common, sporadic form of ALS.
Bryan Traynor, M.D., of the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the NIH’s National Institute on Aging (NIA), led the NIH work with support from NIH's National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). NIA and NINDS also funded work by a team from the Mayo Clinic in Florida, reported by Mayo investigator Rosa Rademakers, Ph.D., and colleagues, which independently identified the same repeat DNA sequence as a genetic cause of FTD/ALS.
"Identifying this defective gene common to both the inherited forms of ALS and FTD and the sporadic form of ALS provides important new insights into the development of these neurodegenerative diseases," said NIA Director Richard J. Hodes, M.D. "We still have much to learn about the complex interplay between genetic risk for a disorder and the other factors that determine disease onset and progression. But finding these types of mutations is critically important to a better understanding of disease mechanisms so that we can ultimately target disease biology to develop therapeutics."
"This finding highlights the importance of studying isolated populations with high rates of a specific disease. Finland has the highest rates of ALS in the world. By collecting virtually every case within the Finnish population, Traynor and colleagues were able to definitively show that this particular gene mutation plays a role in ALS development—a discovery relevant not just to that population, but critical to our basic understanding of the disorder," said NINDS Director Story Landis, Ph.D.
Both ALS, often referred to as Lou Gehrig's disease, and FTD are rapidly progressive, fatal neurological disorders that attack and kill brain cells, or neurons. People with ALS lose strength and the ability to move their arms, legs, and body, and eventually, the ability to breathe without support. About 5 percent of people with ALS have the directly inherited form of the disease. People with FTD develop erratic behavior, emotional problems, trouble communicating, or difficulty with walking and other basic movements. About 20 to 40 percent of those with FTD have a family history of the disorder. ALS and FTD can sometimes occur together in the same individual, but they also occur independently of each other.
There is growing scientific evidence that the pathologies of ALS and FTD somehow overlap. To date, a number of mutated genes have been identified as playing a role in the development of familial FTD and ALS, but not to the level of significance as the discovery of the 9p21 gene mutation. The five major genes previously identified for ALS account for approximately 25 percent of familial cases. The new discovery increases this figure to around 65 percent.
"Until now, the gene alteration responsible for the chromosome 9p-linked inherited forms of these diseases remained elusive," said Traynor. "Investigators around the world worked together to identify a common genetic cause of these fatal disorders. At NIH, our state of the art DNA sequencing facilities enabled us to rapidly generate the data needed to identify this repeat expansion."
The findings reported by Traynor and the team resulted from an international collaboration involving scientists in the United States, Canada and Europe. In the United States, participating institutions included the University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle; Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore; Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.; and the Miller School of Medicine, University of Miami. The European collaborators included Cardiff University School of Medicine, Wales; VU University Medical Centre, Amsterdam, and Erasmus MC - University Medical Center, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; University of Manchester and University College London, England; University of Oulu and University of Helsinki, Finland; the University of Toronto; University of Würzburg, Germany; and the University of Turin, Catholic University Rome, and the University of Modena Cagliari, Italy.
The NIA leads the federal government effort conducting and supporting research on aging and the health and well-being of older people. The Institute’s broad scientific program seeks to understand the nature of aging and to extend the healthy, active years of life. For more information on research and aging, go to www.nia.nih.gov.
NINDS is the nation's leading funder of research on the brain and nervous system. The NINDS mission is to reduce the burden of neurological disease — a burden borne by every age group, by every segment of society, by people all over the world.
About the National Institutes of Health (NIH): NIH, the nation's medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit www.nih.gov.
NIH…Turning Discovery Into Health®
Renton, A.E., et al. A hexanucleotide repeat expansion in C9ORF72 is the cause of chromosome 9p21-linked FTD/ALS, Neuron, 10.1016/j.neuron.2011.09.010. Published online September 21, 2011.
Rademakers, R., et al. Expanded GGGGCC hexanucleotide repeat in non-coding region of C9ORF72 causes chromosome 9p-linked frontotemporal dementia and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.DOI 10.1016/j.neuron.2011.09.011. Published online September 21, 2011.
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The expansion of renewable energies in Africa is far too low given the favourable conditions such as good solar radiation. It is arguable whether Fair Grid is the most appropriate means of securing power and disseminating renewable energy. However, in the age of accelerated climate change, it should be clear to anyone that there is an urgent need for some kind of (EEG) or other incentives for renewable energy sources in Africa and other regions around the world. If the promotion of renewable energies is necessary in Europe, how can the energy transition succeed in Africa without funding?
The Fair Grid idea is based on a long-term, cooperative partnership between local universities and German universities. Thus, from the beginning, the success of the project can be observed and scientifically monitored. Local universities set fair shutdown criteria, develop cost-effective tariffs, clarify local issues, provide information on ways to save energy, and act as intermediaries between electricity customers and local utilities. Finally, the involvement of local universities should promote the acceptance of Fair Grid in African countries.
Fair boxes work autonomously and therefore do not require complex central controls. This allows them to be used in small isolated networks, but also in national power grids. Small supply islands can be connected to larger networks. Expensive long-distance power lines are unnecessary. The Fair Boxes are compatible with existing power generators. Fair Grid can also enable the energy transition in remote areas and countries with unstable governments. Fair grid does not even need a compulsion to use:
It relies solely on agreements with the national power grid operator. There is no obligation to connect to FairGrid. A customer that refuses to sign a contract with the FairGrid operator will continue to be served by the national grid operator. However, he will receive a new electricity meter (FairBox) as well as a new shielded connection cable. He will not enjoy the advantages of a permanent power supply but will have to accept frequent power outages characteristic for the national grid.
Fair grids "only" secure a basic power supply for everyone. Due to the wide frequency band from 51 to 49 Hz it hardly needs load buffer; and the possibility of dropping additional load at under frequency reduces generation capacity. Thus, Fair Grids are less expensive than conventional power grids. As a result, they are predestined for developing and emerging countries as well as for grids with fluctuating renewable energies.
In addition FairGrid require less storage than conventional power grids:
Normally, the frequency-forming power generator in the FairGrid is adjusted to just below 51 Hz. If the load suddenly rises or the feed-in power from solar or wind power plants drops, the frequency will initially drop a little, the motor load will decrease, and thus the balance between power generation and consumption will be adjusted. In the frequency range between 51 Hz and 49 Hz there is 4% free and quickly available load buffer, which does not have to be compensated in the short term. As a result, FairGrid requires less short-term load buffer.
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The Northern saw-whet owl is a common owl that is hard to spot in the wild. Saw-whets are one of the smallest owls in North America.It is comparable in size to an American robin.
On Saturday, June 21st from 8:30pm to 9:30pm at Chapman State Park, John Fedak will lead an interpretive wildlife monitoring program on Saw-whet owl banding. Bird banding is important to conservation efforts. Banding allows researchers to study a bird’s habits and identify them from long distances. Bands can be made of plastic or metal.
Participants will meet at the park amphitheater at 8:30 pm. This event is free and open to the public.For more information please call the Chapman State Park office (814)-723-0250
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Entering into a section 9 agreement
A section 9 agreement allows students to enrol in a special school or regional health school. It also allows students to enrol outside the legal age in exceptional circumstances. The name ‘section 9’ refers to a part of the Education Act 1989 that deals with special education (learning support) services.
What section 9 agreements are for
A section 9 agreement is for:
- students who wish to be enrolled in a special school
- students who wish to have a regional health school as their base school
- students who are under 5 or over 14 and whose exceptional needs mean that a primary school is the best place for their education
- students who are over 19 and whose exceptional needs mean that a secondary school is the best place for their education (if not ORS verified).
A section 9 agreement is a formal agreement between the Ministry and the parent or guardian of the child.
The difference between section 9 and the Ongoing Resourcing Scheme (ORS)
The Ongoing Resourcing Scheme (ORS) is one form of agreement under section 9 of the Education Act. If a student is in the ORS, they still need a section 9 agreement for enrolment in a special school. If a student is not part of ORS, parents can still apply for a section 9 agreement. To be successful, an application needs to be supported by the school and the Ministry.
For children starting school before they are 5
The Ministry will agree to this only in special circumstances. It must be proven that it’s in the child’s best educational interests.
For students staying at school longer
Sometimes the parents, the school and the Ministry agree that it would benefit a student’s education if they stay longer at their regular school. A section 9 agreement is needed to allow them to stay in a primary school beyond the year they turn 14 or in a secondary school beyond the year they turn 19.
For students enrolling in special schools
Before a student is enrolled in a special school, a conversation with the Ministry, the parents and the school takes place. After this, a decision is jointly made about whether to apply for a section 9 agreement.
Things to think about when entering into a section 9 agreement
All parties need to think about:
- what’s best for the student’s education
- any health and safety issues
- what kind of specialist teaching the student needs
- what therapy the student needs
- the location of the child’s home and the location of the school
- the transport options to and from the school – Specialised School Transport Assistance (SESTA) needs to be applied for separately
- whether the school has capacity for the student
- the length of the enrolment and the date the agreement ends or is reviewed.
Transport and the section 9 agreement
Specialised School Transport Assistance (SESTA) is not included as part of a section 9 agreement.
Parents need to apply for this separately.
To apply or to find out more, go to the school transport assistance (external link) .
Applying for a section 9 agreement
If a section 9 agreement is declined
If a section 9 request is declined the Manager Learning Support or the Intensive Wraparound Service (IWS) team will support access to other learning support options.
Parents can also ask for a review of a section 9 agreement decision. To request a review contact the Manager Learning Support in your local Ministry office. They will provide information about the review process.
When a student with a section 9 agreement leaves the school
When a student leaves their special school or class, the section 9 agreement ends. A new section 9 agreement is needed each time a student wants to enrol at another special school or class.
Last reviewed: Has this been useful? Give us your feedback
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Saturn's clouds are full of raw beauty, but they also represent a playground for a branch of physics called fluid dynamics, which seeks to understand the motion of gases and liquids. This image is from NASA's Cassini spacecraft.
NASA's Cassini spacecraft looks down at the rings of Saturn from above the planet's nightside. The darkened globe of Saturn is seen here at lower right, along with the shadow it casts across the rings.
NASA's Cassini spacecraft looks toward the brilliant disk of Saturn, surrounded by the icy lanes of its rings. Faint wisps of cloud are visible in the atmosphere. At bottom, ring shadows trace delicate, curving lines across the planet.
This frame from a movie is one of many exposures taken by NASA's Cassnii spacecraft. Cassini stared at Saturn for nearly 44 hours on April 25 to 27, 2016, to obtain exposures showing just over four Saturn days. A movie is available at the Photojournal.
This view captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft shows Saturn's northern hemisphere in 2016, as that part of the planet nears its northern hemisphere summer solstice in May 2017. Saturn's year is nearly 30 Earth years long.
Saturn's shadow stretched beyond the edge of its rings for many years after NASA's Cassini first arrived at Saturn, casting an ever-lengthening shadow that reached its maximum extent at the planet's 2009 equinox. This image was captured in 2015.
An ethereal, glowing spot appears on Saturn's B ring in this view from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. The glowing effect is an example of an 'opposition surge' making that area on the rings appear extra bright.
NASA's Cassini spacecraft captured this image of Saturn as it views the planet and its expansive rings from all sorts of angles. Here, a half-lit Saturn sits askew as tiny Dione looks on from lower left.
Saturn's moon Tethys appears to float between two sets of rings in this view from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, but it's just a trick of geometry. The rings, which are seen nearly edge-on, are the dark bands above Tethys.
NASA's Cassini spacecraft captured this view of Saturn's moon Atlas (30 kilometers, or 19 miles across), with its smooth equatorial ridge, during a moderately close flyby on Dec. 6, 2015. The view offers one of Cassini's best glimpses of Atlas.
Tethys, dwarfed by the scale of Saturn and its rings, appears as an elegant crescent in this image taken by NASA's Cassini Spacecraft. Views like this are impossible from Earth, where we only see Saturn's moons as (more or less) fully illuminated disks.
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WASHINGTON — A limited supply chain and the demands of the Artemis program will prevent the use of the Space Launch System for alternative roles, such as launching science missions, until at least late this decade.
In a briefing about the SLS to the steering committee of the planetary science decadal survey July 7, Robert Stough of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center said that if scientists are contemplating missions that require the use of the SLS, they should be talking with NASA now to secure manifest slots no earlier than the late 2020s or early 2030s.
“Given the demands of the Artemis program between now and the late 2020s,” he said, “it’s going to be very difficult to squeeze a science mission in that time frame.”
While NASA has a goal of being able to launch three SLS missions in a 24-month period, and two in 12 months, the supply chain is currently limited to one SLS per year. That will change by the early 2030s, he said, growing to two per year and thus creating opportunities for additional SLS missions beyond the Artemis program. That will be enabled by changes to at the Michoud Assembly Facility to increase core stage production and a “block upgrade” to the RS-25 engine used on that core stage that will be cheaper and faster to produce.
NASA also expects to shift to the Block 2 versions of the SLS by the late 2020s. The Block 2 will be based on the Block 1B version, with the larger Exploration Upper Stage, to be introduced on the fourth SLS mission, but will replace the existing five-segment solid rocket boosters with a new design that will further increase the vehicle’s performance.
The performance of the SLS is of interest to scientists proposing missions to the outer solar system in particular. The SLS Block 2 will be able to send payloads of nearly 10 tons directly to Jupiter, and nearly as much to Saturn with a Jupiter gravity assist. The use of additional stages, such as versions of the Centaur, can double that payload, as well as enable direct missions to Uranus and Neptune.
NASA is continuing to study various SLS upper stage configuration options to support such missions, he said, along with what would be needed to certify the SLS for carrying the radioisotope power sources required for missions in the outer solar system. However, Stough said that if proposed missions wanted to use SLS, they needed to start discussions with the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate (HEOMD) now to secure a spot on the manifest in roughly a decade.
“While the manifest for SLS is not fully established for the 2030s or the late 2020s, I would say right now is the optimal time to engage with HEOMD to make sure that these missions get on the docket,” he said.
That may be difficult since it’s not clear what missions NASA will pursue that would require, or could benefit from, an SLS launch. The ongoing planetary science decadal, which will provide recommendations on the highest priority missions for the next decade, won’t be completed until the spring of 2022, and NASA will take some time to decide which recommended missions to implement and when.
Stough said NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has shown an interest for using SLS for the Mars Sample Return campaign, but the next mission in that effort, the Sample Retrieval Lander, is scheduled for launch as soon as 2026.
The experience of Europa Clipper offers a cautionary tale for those seeking to launch missions on SLS. Congress for several years directed NASA to use SLS for the mission, allowing the spacecraft to get to Jupiter several years faster than if launched on alternative vehicles. NASA fought that directive, arguing that using a commercially procured launch vehicle would be less expensive and free up the SLS for the early Artemis missions.
Congress relented in the fiscal year 2021 appropriations bill, but only after NASA warned of a potential torsional loading issue if the Europa Clipper spacecraft was launched on SLS. NASA is now in the process of buying a commercial launch for Europa Clipper.
That issue came up during the steering committee meeting, particularly after Stough emphasized the “benign launch loads” of the SLS. He said later that, because of work already underway to analyze the initial Artemis missions, engineers decided to use “very conservative” limits when examining Europa Clipper to streamline the analysis.
“We didn’t understand that that was going to cause a problem for Europa Clipper,” he said, but could have been corrected. “It really was a nonissue at the end of the day.”
Another issue for those considering SLS is the cost of the vehicle. Stough took issue with some cost estimates for the vehicle. “The cost numbers you hear in the media are typically inflated,” he said, by taking into account fixed costs. He didn’t give specific examples, but some estimates assume an SLS cost of $2 billion each, based on the program’s annual budget and flight rate.
Asked for his estimate of SLS costs, he said “we are close to $1 billion per launch right now.” He projected that to decrease by 20 to 30% by the early 2030s as the flight rate increases.
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(this post is about the New Zealand education system. I wanted to say more than Twitter made easy)
NZ has an amazing education system. We went through the “Tomorrow’s Schools” revolution in the 1990s, which devolved governance of schools to the communities in which those schools sit. A Remuera school will teach and value different things than an Otara school, despite being only a few km away from each other, and that’s okay. But in a world of devolution, how does the state ensure that schools don’t suck?
They set out expectations then monitor and enforce them. The expectations for “what gets taught” is the New Zealand Curriculum (NZC). It talks about subjects (“learning areas”), competencies and values for the NZ educational system. It’s deliberately vague, though, and schools must spend time unpacking the NZC for their local context.
Show an increasing understanding of how language features are used for effect within and across texts.
- identifies oral, written, and visual features used and recognises and describes their effects
- uses an increasing vocabulary to make meaning
- shows an increasing knowledge of how a range of text conventions can be used appropriately and effectively
- knows that authors have different voices and styles and can identify and describe some of these differences.
This forms a progression through the material: a kid at level 2 can do these things and will have to do these other things to get to level 3. Schools would sometimes report on the level that kids were at, sometimes not.
Notice that nowhere in here are expectations about what kids should be able to do by when. Levels aren’t tied to years in school. Enter National Standards. National Standards are expectations that in (some year) students should be working towards (some year). Schools must report to parents in plain English about where their kids sit against these national standards.
The implementation of National Standards was a shitfight for at least two reasons: (a) it was done to rather than with the teachers and principals and boards; (b) they pulled the levels largely out of thin air (or, rather, “were arbitrary and didn’t reflect enough research”); (c) and they required schools to label kids “below National Standards for the age” which isn’t something educators were comfortable doing. Now we have them, and parents get to see how their kids measure up.
School-wide summary statistics of variations of “how many kids are at, below, or above National Standards level for their age” are what get reported to the Ministry of Ed, and which are “ropey” (to use our Prime Minister’s word). They’re ropey because National Standards isn’t a national exam: there’s no standardised testing to determine whether a child is at a particular level or not, one day upon which the child must perform or else be ruled to have failed. America is driven by these standardised tests, to the detriment of their educational system.
So, kudos NZ for not having standardised tests!
But that still leaves us wondering how to decide whether a child is at, below, or above the expectations according to National Standards. Teachers look at the achievement objectives (those broad statements about “can identify different voices and styles”) for the appropriate level (as determined by the National Standards) and then try to find examples of this in the student’s work, or use the many and various STAR, PAT, e-asttle, etc. testing systems to elicit evidence to indicate whether the kid does it.
This bit is messy. It’s called an Overall Teacher Judgement (OTJ). It’s awesome that teachers have this flexibility to find evidence and make their decision, but it’s time-consuming and not at all standardised. By which I mean, teachers in two adjacent schools might be making very different interpretations of what kind of work meets the achievement objectives. A child might be ruled “below” at one school and “at” at the next. Schools are currently working around this by trying to “moderate” their judgements, namely have teachers from different schools sit down and agree on what they see is “at”, “above”, or “below” for each of the levels.
Enter Progress and Consistency Tool (PaCT).
This is a web-based tool chock full of examples of work illustrating aspects of what achievement looks like at a particular level. As a teacher, you indicate what year and subject you’re looking at, and you’ll get a bunch of exemplars to look at. One by one you go “yup”, “no”, “no”, “no”, “yup”, “no” and eventually it’ll say “sounds like a no to me”. You (the teacher) can still disagree but you’ll have to defend your judgement.
This obviously replaces moderation and opens the question: how were the examplars come up with? My understanding is that they’ve had a reference group of teachers working on this. I took notes at a workshop at the NZ School Trustees Association conference last year. One of my notes:
PaCT org is Ministry driven. Technical development (IT guy), Psychometric development (NZCER), Rubric development, Teacher Advisory Group, Ministry Personnel. Psychometry used to manage presentation and use of statistics to ensure people understand them when they make a decision.
This might go some way to answering $6M for checkboxes?! (Ben Gracewood’s words).
You might ask “why, if it’s so good, is there such a shitfight going on around its introduction?”. You probably didn’t have to ask that: it could easily be interpreted as a lack of faith in the ability of teachers to make consistent and accurate judgements. Furthermore, the National Standards ropiness is partially because every school reports numbers in a different table and format which hinders their compilation and analysis. The National Standards roll-out timeline includes PaCT and it is very much seen as a facilitator for building and gathering the information which will permit ranking of schools by achievement and those whose students have low achievement against National Standards will be deemed to be “failing”. Not every teacher agrees with the research showing socioeconomic status and home life are way down the list of effects on educational achievement.
PaCT will integrate with the School Management Systems which hold data on students. PaCT will be run by the Ministry and although it is intended to save teachers time that’s been lost by National Standards overheads (yay!), the teachers who use it don’t feel a sense of ownership of the exemplars (meaning they feel as disempowered as they did when NatStds was rolled out). And, of course, the Ministry of Education is widely seen as a pack of overworked bureaucratic and politically-driven fuckwits by the educational sector (“politically-driven” is, of course, the nature of the beast for a Ministry) and so any tool that is used to gather data is likely to also be Trojaned to give that data to the Ministry and suddenly the act of assessing a child is political and not purely educational. Furthermore, once the Ministry holds National Standards assessments broken down by teacher, there’s the data necessary to start cocking around with performance pay and other things that the profession is highly allergic to.
Why did it cost $6M? In the words of the PaCT site:
The PaCT tool is being developed in consultation with the sector, and will be trialled within schools. The project has established a Teacher Advisory Group, comprised of teachers and principals, to provide advice to the project team regarding the development of PaCT.
The development is being undertaken by a number of external providers, drawing on the specialist expertise of various curriculum, psychometric, and technology groups. Each group is actively working with the sector in developing and testing the tool in regard to these areas. The project expects to engage and seek feedback from schools in over 500 interactions throughout the development process.
Consultation + external providers + expertise + 500 interactions = time + money + money + time = money * 4. My understanding is they’ve used an agile-like process, not the Novopay Mongolian Clusterfuck(tm) process. It’s due to be rolled out starting next year, and my sense is that the headlines are around turf protection and not IT project management (“They say PaCT amounts to a national test and are concerned about how the data will be used.”)
Hope this context helps! Any questions? I’m @gnat on Twitter.
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to Biochemistry Group Members________________________
Final Examination - Group Part
Friday, 25 May 2001
5:15 - 6:30 PM
H. B. White - Instructor
Important - Please read this before you turn the page.
Each group member must sign his or her name on this page
to receive the group grade.
If you cannot come to consensus, you may submit separate
answers for a separate grade that would be substituted for the group grade.
In that case, do not sign the group exam.
You may refer to your notes, course reader, handouts, textbook,
or graded homework assignments. Reference books in the course library may
be consulted briefly and returned.
Please read the questions carefully and make sure that you
have thought them through with everyone=s
input before converging on a solution.
1. On the last page, there
is a representation of the amino acid sequences of the alpha and beta globin
chains of rabbit hemoglobin.
A. (3 points) If Zinoffsky had used rabbit
hemoglobin instead of horse hemoglobin for his determination of the iron
and sulfur content of hemoglobin, what stoichiometry of Fe to S would he
B. (2 points) Explain your answer.
2. (Someone in your group read this
aloud.) Around 1960, biochemists knew from the amino acid sequences of
a few small proteins that proteins were linear polymers. They also knew
that there was a linear correspondence between genetic maps (e.g. DNA)
and protein sequence and that ribosomes catalyzed the synthesis of proteins.
However, they had no idea of how the polymerization occurred. Messenger
RNA and the Genetic Code were not yet known.
Howard M. Dintzis [Proc.
Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 47, 247-261 (1961)] designed an experiment to
determine whether proteins were polymerized from their amino terminus to
their carboxyl terminus, vice versa, or in some less orderly way.
He knew that animals like rabbits produce large numbers
of reticulocytes when exposed to phenylhydrazine. Unlike the mature erythrocytes,
these immature red blood cells are making hemoglobin and, at any given
moment, all stages of synthesis are present. When incubated with radioactive
amino acids, reticulocytes will incorporate the amino acids into hemoglobin.
In order to make the system experimentally manageable, Dintzis slowed down
the process of protein synthesis by lowering the incubation temperature
to 15ºC. He reasoned that, if synthesis proceeded from one end to
the other, successive peptides in the amino acid sequence should display
a gradient of labeling at short time periods. His experiment was designed
A. At the time Dintzis did
his experiment, he did not know the amino acid sequences of rabbit hemoglobin
alpha and beta chains. He inferred the order of the peptides by the gradient
of labeling. Later Naughton & Dintzis [Proc.
Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 48, 1822-1830 (1962)] determined the order of
the peptides by comparison to the known human hemoglobin sequences and
plotted their data as shown below.
B. (12 points) Which direction of protein synthesis
do these data support?
(You may know the answer, but credit will be
given only for an answer that clearly and unambiguously explains
how the data support the conclusion. Diagrams are welcome.)
B. (8 points) Several leucine-containing
tryptic peptides have more than one leucine and would be expected to contain
correspondingly more radioactivity, yet there are no "spikes" in the data.
The numbers increase regularly. How did Dintzisí experimental design take
into account the possibility of multiple leucines in a single peptide?
(Note: Dintzis did not analyze every leucine-containing peptide.)
C. Bonus Question (5 points) The rate of protein synthesis
at 15ºC is about 1/6th of the rate at 37ºC. Based
on the data provided, make a reasonable, rough estimate of the time in
seconds that it takes for a ribosome to make a single peptide bond in hemoglobin.
Describe your reasoning.
Rabbit Hemoglobin alpha chain
Rabbit Hemoglobin beta chain
The single-letter abbreviations
for the 20 amino acids are:
A = Alanine
I = Isoleucine R = Arginine
C = Cysteine
K = Lysine
S = Serine
D = Aspartic Acid
L = Leucine T = Threonine
E = Glutamic Acid
M = Methionine V = Valine
F = Phenylalanine
N = Asparagine W = Tryptophan
G = Glycine
P = Proline Y = Tyrosine
H = Histidine
Q = Glutamine
Return to Hal
White's Home Page, Course
Home Page, or Departmental Home
Posted 14 June 2001 by Hal
Copyright 2001, Harold B.
White, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Delaware
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I love this kind of history, a slice of life from earlier days. Hearing this song is like taking a time machine to a fun and happy moment.
I remember my mother singing “Oats, Peas, Beans, and Barley Grow” to us children when I was small, in the ancient days of the 1950’s. When I recall songs and nursery rhymes and games I learned from Mama, I usually find that they are traditional in both the Appalachian mountains and the British Isles. They were handed down for generations, probably from one child to another, over centuries.
My mother grew up in Toast, in Surry County, N. C. Her parents and grandparents were from Surry and other counties on the North Carolina/Virginia line, and their ancestors seem to have been from the British Isles and to have come to America through tidewater Virginia, in colonial days. Many finally settled in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
“Oats, Peas, Beans, and Barley Grow” is a traditional British folk song, carried over to America. The words are said to date back to 1898, but the tune, called “Baltimore,” was possibly written about 1650. As an Appalachian play party song, it is accompanied by motions and dancing. The words suggest motions like clapping and stomping and turning around, and skipping around in a circle does nicely for the chorus. Young adults as well as children enjoyed this type of “play,” which was performed to music and carefully not called dancing in conservative religious communities that disapproved of dancing and often forbade it.
Here is my arrangement with chords for ukulele or guitar. You can find versions of the tune on Youtube.
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