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May Ayim (3 May 1960 in Hamburg — 9 August 1996 in Berlin) original name Sylvia Opitz was an Afro-German poet, educator, and activist. She studied Psychology and Education and wrote the book Showing Our Colors, Afro-German Women Speak Out. At this time she also co-founded the Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland (Initiative of Black People in Germany). After spending sometime without sleep or proper meals preparing for Black History Month in 1996, she suffered a mental and physical collapse. She was 36 when she met her death after jumping from the thirteenth floor of a Berlin building.
The documentary Hope in My Heart: The May Ayim Story | <urn:uuid:6410812e-19af-41fb-80c4-8180a7a1ba64> | {
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The Stroop experiment employs two basic processes of cognition; attention (“the concentration of mental effort on sensory or mental events”) and automaticity (“a cognitive process that does not require conscious though...
In any Cause and Effect Essay Topic, there has to be two parts to the topics; what the cause was, and how it led to the effect. With this, it opens many doors that can be written about. Including some quite funny topics. Such as how ‘stubbing one’s toe, lead to finding a ₤100.00 note’. Many of the old comedies were based off from this type of topic, and many of those were from real situations. So finding these topics, can be very fun and challenging as well.
Cause and effect essay writing help, ideas, topics, …
When it comes to essay writing, you will eventually confront issues where you have to explain why something happens and what impact it has on people, places, and things. These are the causes and effects in our lives. You can convey the information and ideas you want in an organized fashion using a cause and effect essay.
Free Divorce Effect Essays and Papers - 123HelpMe
Divorce has numerous effects on the structures of families, and many devastating effects on the children that must experience it, although sometimes necessary, divorce radically changes the lives of adolescents and adults alike....
Free Divorce Effect papers, essays, and research papers.
At first reading this haiku may seem rather simple, butit shows a keen awareness. One can see the woman's old brownhands weaving intricate patterns. Perhaps she's weaving thereeds in a chair frame or bottom to make a chair. Like theold brown woman, the chair when completed will represent asign of humanity. The measure of the lines give therhythmical effect of the old woman's brown hands as theyweave. The alliteration of the "h's,""th's," and "w's" hint at the usuallyharsh sound of reeds bending and rubbing together, thoughthey give way to the wetness. One can see "her old brownhands" glistening like a baby's skin. Like the"thin wet reed," the woman's old brown hands areprobably thin. And not to be overlooked here is the fact thatthe reeds are as useful as the old brown hands.
Free Essays on Bullying - Cause and Effect
Wallerstein, Ph.D., a psychologist who spent 25 years of her life studying the effects of divorce on children, and Sandra Blakeslee, a scientist writer who has spent nearly all of her profession writing for New York Times, wrote, “Each decision to divorce begins a long journey that holds surprising, unexpected turns.”....
List Of Interesting Ideas For Cause And Effect Essay Topics
Given this startling figure, the presumption can be made that many children will experience some effects caused by the life-changing event called divorce.
A List of Funny Cause and Effect Essay Topics
Cause and effect essays are the most exciting and fun type of essays that a student is asked to write. The best part of writing a cause and effect essay is that you are completely aware about the format and structure of the essay. Teachers only assign to write a cause and effect of essay and leave the rest to the student. Now it is upon you to create an awesome essay to satisfy your teacher. Not all the teachers would suggest cause and effect essay topics for your essay, so you can go through the few options we have included here: | <urn:uuid:a7b3e955-e496-4650-9f8d-c5b3b8d6432b> | {
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In this post I address nine misconceptions around Autism as best I can in a short space.
“You don;t seem very Autistic to me. My nephew is Autistic and he can’t even get the bus.You go to work….”
While Autistic people often share a number of general characteristics, we are all individuals. Two Autistic people can be vastly different from one another. Autism is not a determinant of character or what path through life we may take. It is a different neurology, or a different way the brain is ‘wired’ to non-autistic people’s. Suggesting that someone is ‘not Autistic enough’ is highly insulting. Autistic people may have significant challenges which they manage well wiht strategies or they may keep their struggles hidden. Unless you are that person or live closely with them, you can’t really assess what their Autism means for them. And I really don’t enjoy having to justify ‘how Autistic I am’ to somebody I barely know!
“Are you high functioning?”
Levels of ‘high’ or ‘low’ functioning Autism can be fraught and very unhelpful. The functioning label is often seen as a life-long thing. However this can be inaccurate and misleading. An Autistic someone who works full-time might have a meltdown. So while they are working their functioning is doing one thing but during the meltdown their level of functioning is different. A functioning label fails to describe the frequent changes in ability to cope that can occur in an Autistic person’s life.
People described as ‘low functioning’ are often non-verbal. The low functioning label is often used as a shorthand for intellectual disability but that is a separate condition from Autism and nonverbal people often do not have any intellectual disability. In fact many nonverbal Autistic people are highly intelligent. The functioning label can also become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy for Autistic young people with the ‘low functioning’ ones being given negative messaging and low expectations fir their life and their ‘high functioning’ peers often having unrealistically high expectations put on them and their issues ignored because they come across as articulate. I try not to use functioning labels around Autism at all.
“Are all Autistic people geniuses / computer ‘nerds’ / like Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory?
Many Autistic people respond well to technology. Some of us are certainly highly proficient at IT-related tasks. However Autism covers the full range of cognitive and intellectual abilities, learning styles and interests. Some people on the Autism spectrum are excellent at art and writing, some are good at maths and some others are great at sports. We are all different.
To assume all of us are highly intelligent is often quite unhelpful. Intellect is not much of a measure of someone’s value and for people on the autism spectrum who are not highly proficient with intellectual or technical tasks, assuming we are all computer geniuses can be exclusionary and can cause feelings of inadequacy.
“Autistic people don’t have relationships or sex”
Many Autistic people are sexual beings in the same way that anyone else is a sexual being. They have relationships, marriages, casual sex and all other sorts of sexual interactions. A lot of Autistic people identify as being queer or gender diverse. While some Autistic people identify as asexual this is not the reality for everyone on the spectrum. Just because Autistic people might not fit the stereotype of who should be having sex and relationships, it doesn’t mean we don’t – or for that matter, that we shouldn’t – do it.
“Autistic people shouldn’t have children”
As with many other disabilities, there is a lot of prejudice around Autistic people raising children. On a personal level I will say that my mum is diagnosed on the Autism spectrum, like me, and she has always been the perfect parent for me. Moving past my own experience and there are a good many Autistic parents in the world. Some evidence suggests that Autistic parents can be a better fit as parents of an Autistic child as they understand their child better than a non-autistic parent would. Autistic parents tend to do some things worse than typical parents and other things better. Autism certain doesn’t preclude someone from parenting or from being a good parent.
“Non-verbal Autistic people have an intellectual disability”
While it is sometimes the case that Autistic people who do not use speech / are nonverbal have a co-existing intellectual disability this is not always the case. Many non-verbal Autistic people are highly intelligent. Many use a communication device to express their thoughts. This TEDx Melbourne talk by Tim Chan who is a nonverbal Autistic man will give you some idea of the issues around non-speech communication and Autism. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Woy-XzC-UVs&index=2&list=PLzX8PtR8aW8FCl_QxXV-yy35UOkbWI5fe
“Autistic people can’t work”
It is true that some Autistic people cannot work at all but many of us have jobs in the full range of industries. It can be difficult for us to find and keep a job and Autistic people are certainly overrepresented in unemployment and welfare statistics. It is likely that a lot of the difficulties surrounding work for Autistic people involve a lack of willingness for employers to take them on rather than the Autistic job seeker’s lack of skill or willingness to work. A lot of Autistic people do work and can be highly skilled employees. We often bring some great soft skills to the workplace, like honesty, enthusiasm, attention to detail and a work ethic. It would be great to see more employed autistic people t this is an area for ongoing attention.
“Autistic people are rude”
Autistic people usually interpret the world and communicate differently to non-autistic people. We generally want to be liked and our intention is to be respectful of others. The issue that can happen is one of a different culture of social communication between Autistic and non-autistic people. ‘Typical’ people communicate using a number of means: things like eye contact, body language, facial expression, tone of voice and the words actually spoken. There are a number of unwritten social rules which govern the communication of non-autistic people.
For those of us on the Autism spectrum we usually communicate using the words spoken. We tend to be quite honest and ‘straight up’ in the way we talk. It is hardly surprising that we make social ‘errors’ but these are almost always unintentional. I find it is terrible to know that I have made a social ‘mistake’ and people are upset with me as I never want to upset people. If more people understood about he differences in communication between Autistic and non-autistic people they would understand that our apparent rudeness is often just a misunderstanding of different communication styles.
“An autistic child is a lost child, a tragedy’.
This is the most hurtful thing you can say to me as an Autistic woman. I had a very difficult childhood and early adulthood. My parents never said they regretted having me. They loved me and I became a much happier and more fulfilled person as I grew older. It is not a tragedy to bring a human being into the world. If parents think that, consider the messaging their Autistic child will receive in his or her formative years? I understand that parents of newly-diagnosed children can struggle considerably but they need to be supported with appropriate services and professionals, not told their child is ‘a tragedy’. Some groups prey of the vulnerability of parents pf newly diagnosed kids and sell them dangerous and abusive ‘cures’ like bleach enemas. This is absolutely Not OK. Ever!
I value and respect myself as an Autistic woman. My journey has been and still is hard at times. I live in a world which often victimises and ostracises ‘difference’ but I love who I have become. I wish I had answers to all these misconceptions when I was younger. We do have a long road ahead of us but we are strong, creative, sensitive and powerful people. Let’s do this thing. Let’s change the world! | <urn:uuid:7c0cc3fb-b172-4c3f-b997-df62cc81899f> | {
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Date: May 1987
Creator: Golshan, Shahram Mohammad-Mehdi
Description: A pair of nonidentical two-level atoms, separated by a fixed distance R, interact through photon exchange. The system is described by a state vector which is assumed to be a superposition of four "essential states": (1) the first atom is excited, the second one is in the ground state, and no photon is present, (2) the first atom is in its ground state, the second one is excited, and no photon is present, (3) both atoms are in their ground states and a photon is present, and (4) both atoms are excited and a photon is also present. The system is initially in state (1). The probabilities of each atom being excited are calculated for both the minimally-coupled interaction and the multipolar interaction in the electric dipole approximation. For the minimally-coupled interaction Hamiltonian, the second atom has a probability of being instantaneously excited, so the interaction is not retarded. For the multipolar interaction Hamiltonian, the second atom is not excited before the retardation time, which agrees with special relativity. For the minimally-coupled interaction the nonphysical result occurs because the unperturbed Hamiltonian is not the energy operator in the Coulomb gauge. For the multipolar Hamiltonian in the electric dipole approximation the ...
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ERIC Number: ED160303
Record Type: RIE
Publication Date: 1974
Reference Count: 0
SCDC Spanish Curricula Units. Language Arts Strand, Unit 2, Grade One, Teacher's Guide--Multi-Ethnic Edition.
Spanish Curricula Development Center, Miami Beach, FL.; Dissemination and Assessment Center for Bilingual Education, Austin, TX.
Instructional and assessment activities in language arts are presented in this teacher's guide to unit two of a Spanish language arts curriculum for first graders. Focus, objective, and materials for each activity are given in English and Spanish, with teacher instructions only in Spanish. Four small picture books for students (brief Spanish dialogue/descriptions) are included with the guide. This second unit, consisting of kits five through eight, centers around the theme of the family, and presents instructional activities in oral language development, language-experience reading, structured reading, and comprehension and interpretation skills. Each kit provides group and seatwork activities and a listening program in instruction about new letters, words, and structures. Specifically, the kits' themes and activities are: (1) who the child is--games, concept development activities, writing the child's autobiograpy; (2) the child's needs and wants--retelling a story, role playing, resolution of conflicts, analysis of values, individual student stories for a class book; (3) the child's resources--classification of material resources in the home, description of family members, stories for family books; (4) the child's use of resources--human and material resources in the home, family roles. There are assessment activities with detailed instructions in each kit. (RS)
Descriptors: Beginning Reading, Bilingual Education, Childrens Literature, Comprehension, Conflict Resolution, Family (Sociological Unit), Grade 1, Human Resources, Instructional Materials, Interpretive Skills, Language Arts, Language Experience Approach, Learning Activities, Listening Skills, Primary Education, Reading Materials, Reading Skills, Role Perception, Spanish Speaking, Speech Skills, Teaching Guides, Writing Skills
Dissemination and Assessment Center for Bilingual Education, 7703 N. Lamar Blvd., Austin, Texas 78752 ($5.50, readers $0.25 apiece)
Publication Type: Guides - General
Education Level: N/A
Sponsor: Office of Bilingual Education (DHEW/OE), Washington, DC.
Authoring Institution: Spanish Curricula Development Center, Miami Beach, FL.; Dissemination and Assessment Center for Bilingual Education, Austin, TX.
Note: Not available in hard copy due to sideways reading material; For related document, see RC 010 806 | <urn:uuid:85b4c22b-9c97-4ced-a0d0-36d2f01c02df> | {
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Hi, this is David Sullivan for Chess NYC and I'd like to talk about the center and gambits. In chess, we generally try to bring our two pawns to the center of the board to free our pieces and also, if black pieces come out, we can use that center to move forward and attack black. But black will try to stop us from making our center. If we play, let's say, E4, black might play E5. And then if we play our other center point out right away, pawn to D4, black can take the pawn, white can take back with the queen, but then black will develop a piece, attacking the queen, making it waste time by moving again. And then black will develop another piece. And then, all of a sudden, black has more big guys out than white. Black has two pieces developed, white only has one piece developed. Pawns are not considered pieces, they're just pawns. So, white wants to bring the two center pawns out, but black is fighting against it with his first move. He's saying, "Well, you bring this pawn out, I will take you right away."
White can use, in this position, what's known as a gambit. Gambit comes from the Italian word, gambito, which means to trip up. So, white is trying to trip up black. White plays his pawn to F4. He offers black a pawn. Black can take the white pawn and white won't be able to capture back. What white is trying to do is deflect the pawn so that later, he'll be able to more easily bring his other center point up and black won't be able to take it.
Another example of a gambit, and this is an opening that shows up in my own games occasionally, is when I would play white, I would often play D4. Black plays knight F6, I go C4 and black plays C5. I advance my pawn to D5 and then black plays his pawn to B5. This is known as the benko gambit. Black intends to offer me a pawn and then offer me another pawn, so that later in the game, he'll have two open lines for his rooks that he can use to put pressure on me down here. For your entertainment, I will show you what I use to play against this. When they play B5 and then A6, I would actually play my knight to C3, developing a piece. Black would take a pawn. This pawn is unprotected, but I don't grab it. I play pawn to E4. I free my bishop, black attacks my knight, I bring my knight to B5. And now, it looks like my pawn on E4 is hanging, that is, it's unprotected. But if black takes my pawn on E4, I can then attack his knight and if his knight runs away, I have knight to D6, checkmate. Smothered mate. So over here, we have black offering a gambit, white declining the gambit, then white offers black a pawn and if he takes the pawn, he will get checkmated.
These two examples of gambits to give you a little idea of what we're talking about here, as with any subject in chess, we could talk about this for months, but just remember, gambits are basically, it's a small sacrifice in order to make some sort of game. | <urn:uuid:1e1b44af-998e-4800-992e-8979f9dd9831> | {
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PowerLab systems are being used to investigate the physiological differences in muscle characteristics between two populations of marine snails living in different environments on Australian rocky shores. The study populations are found on either wave-exposed or wave-protected shores, and the difference in wave energies may result in differences in muscle physiology.
The study is being conducted by PhD student Sam Clayman, with Assoc. Prof. Frank Seebacher from the Integrated Physiology Group at the University of Sydney (Australia).
Clayman is using PowerLab systems in both the field and lab-based components of his study to measure dislodgement forces and to stimulate excised muscle tissue.
For field measurements, Clayman modified the PowerLab system into a portable unit and uses whole-animal performance tests to determine the acute force required to dislodge a snail from the substrate. Both vertical and shear tests were done to mimic passing waves. Endurance tests were also performed on the snails. The lab-based component of the study measures snail muscle biochemistry and biomechanics in vitro.
Results to date indicate there is no difference in the instantaneous force produced by snails either vertically or horizontally. However, Clayman has discovered that snails living on wave-exposed shores can endure a constant force for significantly longer than snails living on wave-protected shores.
Clayman intends to further his study by measuring the biochemical characteristics of snails from the two populations in order to illuminate the physiological basis of their muscular differences. | <urn:uuid:afbe6e0e-9e80-4d04-854d-1b419595e157> | {
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Everyone is an achiever
Empowering students to become scholars.
Learning Support at EAR
At EAR, we believe that learning in a diverse environment benefits all learners, teachers, and our community. Here, the general education teachers and special education teachers work together to meet the needs of students. This gives special education students the support they require while they stay in a general education classroom. The Individualized Student Education Plan (IEP) is closely monitored by our multidisciplinary Learning Support team, including certified and experienced special educators, English as Second Language teachers, and school psychologists.
Support is provided to students with mild and moderate learning needs in their least restrictive environment.
Support for Mild to Moderate Learning Needs
Students with learning needs learn best when they are educated with typically developing peers. We can meet most students’ needs in the regular classroom using differentiated instruction and support. However, some students may require a higher level of support outlined in an Individual Education Plan (IEP). The IEP outlines individualized learning goals and accommodations and is updated annually. Some students on an IEP may receive a specialized small group learning support class in addition to their regular classes. | <urn:uuid:abe97a57-03d1-47b1-a8c4-a5c716a80ec7> | {
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Horses: a Scythian's best friend
Have you ever found yourself wondering who was the first person to decide to jump on a horse and ride it?
It’s a good chance that it was a Scythian!
The horse was an essential part of Scythian life and was the most important and multipurpose animal used by the nomads. Initially, the Scythians reared large herds of horses mainly for their milk and hides, but eventually were among the first people to harness the horse as a mount. As you can imagine, this was a great success for the Scythians as it meant they could expand their horizons by moving up to speeds of 30–40 miles an hour, they could push past environmental boundaries that immobilised those who travelled by foot, and their cavalry became the driving force behind their military might.
By the 7th century BC the Scythians were already master horsemen and controlled a vast corridor of land that stretched across southern Siberia, from the Black Sea to the fringes of northern China. This expanse of land was greater than the Achaemenid Persian Empire, who the Scythians outlasted.
The Scythians also invented the earliest form of a saddle, arguably one of their biggest contributions to human civilisation.
This invention spread like wildfire across their sedentary neighbours to the south and has stood the test of time. Over centuries, the Scythians kept perfecting their horse equipment, which in turn meant they honed their horse riding skills.
But the Scythians did not stop there. They also invented an early version of a powerful composite bow that could discharge arrows at a considerably greater force and distance. They also designed the gorytos, a combined bow-case and quiver, that allowed a Scythian to carry both his bow and arrows together for easier access whilst on horse-back. These revolutionary inventions meant that the combination of a Scythian archer and his horse was a real tour de force.
So what do we know about Scythian horses? Recent DNA research has been carried out by an international team of researchers lead by Ludovic Orlando, on exceptionally preserved horse remains from Scythian tombs at Berel in eastern Kazakhstan and Arzhan in Tuva Republic. The analysis has revealed that, like the Scythians themselves, their horses varied from region to region.
Their diverse gene pool meant that they had a wide mixture of coat colourings such as black, bay, chestnut, cream and mottled. Further examination has also revealed that none of these horses were inbred, telling us the Scythians did not practise selective breeding. However, several of the horses carried gene variants associated with short-distance sprint performance, which suggests the Scythians favoured horses with an aptitude for speed. The Scythians reared strong, healthy and athletic horses and some were probably hand fed instead of being left to find their own pasture. This also tells us that horse domestication at this time started to undergo a different process to other animals reared purely for food and resources.
A Scythian and his horse was inseparable, even after death. The Scythians believed in an afterlife and were buried with all their earthly possessions to take with them into the next world. In cases such as at Arzhan as many as 200 horses were found harnessed and buried together with the dead. The quantity and variation of horses found here fits Herodotus’ account that allied Scythian tribes offered sacrificial horses to each other as a way of paying their respects.
Archaeology has also made it clear that the more important the person, the greater number of horses were offered. At the famous frozen tombs at Pazyryk, located high in the Altai region of southern Siberia, entire horses were found preserved within the permafrost still dressed in their magnificent ceremonial regalia. This dress included fantastic horned headgear, decorated saddle cloths and elaborate horse tack decorated with stylised animal imagery and sometimes coated in gold foil. This dress is believed to have been to transform the horse into a fantastic beast ready to transport the deceased into the afterlife, which further underlines the importance of horses in all aspects of Scythian culture.
Anyone coming to the exhibition will be left in no doubt that horses were central to the Scythian way of life. Without them, it seems unlikely that the Scythians would have survived, let alone thrived and prospered for over 500 years.
The BP exhibition Scythians: warriors of ancient Siberia is on at the British Museum from 14 September 2017 to 14 January 2018.
Supported by BP. | <urn:uuid:1763b065-b560-44b2-b5f9-74b8c5342501> | {
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12 Reasons & Health Benefits of Eating Dried Fruit
Dried fruit really is the best of both worlds; throw them in with the kids lunches, use as an after-school snack or scatter on top of ice cream for dessert! About to run? Get quick energy with a handful of Gerbs No-Sugar Added Dried Apricots.
THE DRIED FRUIT WE OFFER
Dried Pineapple, Dried Banana Chips, Dried Mango, Dried Papaya, Dried Mulberries, Dried Sun Dried Tomatoes, Raisins, Dried Strawberries, Dried Goji Berries, Dried Figs, Dried Ginger, Dried Currants, Dates, Dried Cranberries, Dried Cherries, Dried Apricots, Dried Apple Slices and 6 Dried Fruit Mixes.
WHAT WE DON’T HAVE IN OUR DRIED FRUIT
Our entire line of Kosher, Vegan & Non-GMO dried fruit does not contain any harmful cancer-causing preservatives and they are Unsulfured, Potassium Sorbate and Sodium Benzoate Free.
HOW ARE DRIED FRUITS MADE?
Dried fruit is what you get after the original water content has been removed either naturally, through sun drying, or through the use of specialized dryers or dehydrators.
A LITTLE HISTORY LESSON
The earliest recorded mention of dry fruit is found in Mesopotamian tablets dating around 1700 B.C., which contains some of the oldest known written recipes. It is also believed that the early Phoenicians and Egyptians were responsible for expanding the popularity of dry fruits throughout the globe. Due to their long-term storability and ease of transport, dried fruits traveled with Christopher Columbus, Robert E. Peary’s conquest of the North Pole in 1908, and accompanied astronaut Scott Carpenter in outer space in 1962.
- Nearly half of the dried fruits sold worldwide are raisins, followed by dates, prunes, figs, apricots and peaches.
- Dried fruits contain little to no fat.
- Great source of energy for athletes.
- Dried fruits generally contain more fiber than the same-sized serving of their fresh counterparts. Fiber helps keep your digestive system running smoothly.
- Fiber not only helps your digestive system. According to the Harvard School of Public Health, it helps prevent obesity, heart disease and some forms of cancer.
- Dried apricots, for example, contain 6.5 grams per cup, while fresh apricots contain just 3.1 grams.
- A cup of raisins contains 5.4 grams of fiber versus just 1.4 grams for seedless grapes.
- Phenols, a type of antioxidant, are more abundant in fruits like dates and figs than in some fresh fruits, leading researchers to advise that more dried fruits be included in the American diet.
- Plant polyphenols have been found to fight heart disease, cancer, osteoporosis, diabetes, cancer and degenerative diseases of the brain, according to the November-December 2009 issue of “Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longevity.”
- Dried fruits like apricots, raisins, prunes and figs contain high amounts of beta carotene, vitamin E, niacin, iron, magnesium, potassium and calcium, reports the European Food Information Council.
- If one is on a diet, dry fruits are a great source of energy and fiber, but should be eaten in moderation as they contain more calories per serving than fresh fruits offer. They are however portable and excellent for dips in energy (carry in purse or keep at work.school etc.)
- Dry fruits are considered to be very effective for improving hemoglobin.
So what’s not to love? Save and order Gerbs Dried Fruit in BULK! | <urn:uuid:6db7b968-689d-4898-aad3-cf8ae95139fa> | {
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BEIJING, Oct. 16 (Xinhuanet) -- Books and educational toys introduced to children at very early stage of life may predict the structure of their brains later in life, a new study finds.
The finding was presented Monday in the Society for Neuroscience's annual conference in New Orleans, the United States.
By following 64 people for more than 20 years from their age of four, researchers from University of Pennsylvania find the children who had access to books and educational toys had better development of their brains.
The effect was particularly noticeable in a region called lateral left temporal cortex, which plays a key role in language and thought.
"The time we spend with our parents before we are in school is going to affect us probably for the rest of our lives," said Brian Avants, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor of radiology at University of Pennsylvania.
The study also proved the stimulations at age of eight was no longer effective on brain development as it was at age of four.
"These findings underscore the human brain's sensitivity to its early environment. They provide powerful evidence that even relatively minor variations within the normal range of home experience can affect brain development over a lifetime," he noted. | <urn:uuid:123ae8c6-0f78-4d72-a9b6-877807dab0ea> | {
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Millions of people all over the country exhaled in a sigh of relief earlier this week as news of the United States Supreme Court striking down The Defense of Marriage Act was delivered. Those people cried, and embraced one another, and danced in the streets, in celebration of another small victory in a larger movement for equality of all United States citizens.
Photo from CNN
Before it was ruled unconstitutional, DOMA, which was enacted in 1996, allowed states to deny recognition of same-sex marriages performed in other states. This often equated to a barring of privileges, benefits, and basic rights for couples who were married in a state where same-sex marriage was legalized. Rights that are often taken for granted by heterosexual couples such as the ability to visit your spouse in the hospital, or being able to file joint tax returns, were not granted to same-sex couples, regardless of their legitimate union sanctioned by whichever state they were married in.
Gay rights activists, allies, same-sex couples, and pro marriage equality politicians have long urged the public to see the unconstitutionality in The Defense of Marriage Act. Because of the rights that DOMA denies same-sex couples, the federal law is in direct violation of the Fifth Amendment, in that it denies life, liberty, and property, as well as due process for same-sex couples.
The United States Supreme Court ruled DOMA unconstitutional by a 5-4 vote. Justice Anthony Kennedy delivered the majority opinion, which appears to be just as influenced by the constitution as by contemporary ethics. Kennedy explained how DOMA not only denies due process to same-sex couples, but also “humiliates the children of same-sex spouses,” and makes same-sex married couples feel “less worthy” as citizens deserving of equal rights.
DOMA being overturned by the Supreme Court is a momentous marker of progress in the gay rights movement. Though there is still much work that needs to be done to achieve equal rights for all people in this country regardless of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation, this ruling sparks hope for many advocates of universal equality for all.
For more quotations from Justice Kennedy’s delivery of the majority decision, take a look at this article. | <urn:uuid:6a8ce991-a48f-46f1-a24c-f1b094579bae> | {
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If you don't like to "do windows," you're going to love Bharat Bhushan.
The Ohio State University professor of mechanical engineering is developing technology that could result in windows that actually clean themselves.
Now, clean windows aren't exactly at the top of Bhushan's worry list, but it turns out that the same technology that can reduce friction in the moving parts of tiny devices could also keep your windshield clean.
And we know that because awhile back Bhushan got all worked up over lotus leaves.
Stay with me here.
"The primary application is nano-technology," Bhushan said.
You might say he lives in a very small world, where new devices are being developed at a rapid rate on a scale that almost defies imagination. Motors so small they can power robots smaller than a dime. Sensors so tiny they can't be seen, but so sensitive they can detect even traces of toxic chemicals.
All those tiny gizmos face a common problem, friction. And since it isn't possible to climb inside with an oil can, some way has to be found to virtually eliminate friction between moving parts for the lifetime of the device.
But how do you do that?
For an answer, Bhushan turned to the fabled lotus leaf, because the surface of a lotus leaf seemingly defies the laws of friction. Even water just rolls right off the leaf.
"Nature is doing something right," Bhushan said during an interview while he was waiting to catch an airplane. "So I said, let's see if we can mimic it, and even improve upon nature. That's hard to do."
But as he studied the lotus leaf, he came to a conclusion that has been reached by others. The lotus leaf sheds water because it is what scientists call "hydrophobic." That's a Greek term meaning, literally, fearful of water.
That's important, Bhushan says, because in order to have low friction, a surface has to be hydrophobic. "In general, what's good for water-repellency is good for fighting friction," Bhushan said.
"You need the surface to be hydrophobic if it is to have low friction," he said, because fluids, and even tiny particles, have more difficulty holding on. It turns out that a surface that is a little rough works better than one that is perfectly smooth.
The lotus leaf is able to send water on its way because it is covered with tiny bumps that prevent the water droplets from attaching themselves to the surface. The droplets are kind of suspended above the surface as they ride on the bumps, so they just slide right off.
Scientists have known that for some time, Bhushan says, but what they haven't known is exactly what size bumps work the best.
"What's the optimum size?" he asked. "That's what got us started."
So he and his colleagues at Ohio State developed a computer model that is helping answer that question. It varies, of course, depending on the materials used and the specific application, but in general the answer is very small. It seems that the best bumps are just a few millionths of a meter in size.
Some manufacturers have already recognized that, so there are commercial products that can be sprayed on a windshield, or a micro-gear, that use tiny particles to reduce friction. But that's not good enough for Bhushan.
The problem is that any substance that can be sprayed on, or any film that can be applied, will wear off pretty quickly. So his goal is to develop the standards that will allow manufacturers to pick specific sizes of bumps to achieve different purposes. In the world of nano-technology, that's a big- ticket item.
Bhushan says one major manufacturer told him that half the company's budget goes into coating tiny components of micro-machines in an effort to reduce friction. If the materials used to manufacture the components could be "hydrophobic," they would produce less friction even without further treatment. The savings could be great, he says, so a number of companies have expressed interest in his findings.
And for the rest of us, another burden may some day be lifted.
The windshield of the future could come with surface bumps that are rough enough to keep water from sticking to it, but so small they can't be seen.
And you won't have to wash it.
Lee Dye's column appears weekly on ABCNEWS.com. A former science writer for the Los Angeles Times, he now lives in Juneau, Alaska. | <urn:uuid:cf8314af-3b1c-4dfd-a147-3b1d32988ebf> | {
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These factors – the so-called social determinants of health – have a substantial impact on a person’s ability to live a healthy life. Families living in substandard, insect- and mold- infested housing are more likely to develop asthma, while people who lack transportation may not be able to get to doctor’s appointments. Organizations across the country are increasingly trying to measure and address these issues to improve health, but haven’t had the tools to ensure their efforts are aligned.
“Right now, we are dying of thirst in the midst of an ocean of data,” says Dr. Somava Saha, a vice president at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and executive lead of the group’s 100 Million Healthier Lives initiative. Read the full article here: https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2019-06-03/well-being-in-the-nation-framework-aims-to-improve-community-health | <urn:uuid:ca8d25ca-8187-4510-aa0b-50952008d27f> | {
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Historically, nitrogen recommendations for corn have been based on yield potential. As yield expectations increased, so did the amount of recommended nitrogen. However, research has indicated that on many fields the relationship between nitrogen requirements and actual yield is often weak. Environmental and economic concerns prompted a revamping of nitrogen recommendation procedures. The most dominant of these new approaches was to conduct soil nitrate testing in the spring. The logic? Determining the amount of available nitrate-nitrogen in the soil would surely be a superior indicator of the amount of nitrogen fertilizer required to produce maximum economic yields.
A few years ago, a soil nitrate-nitrogen test (planting-time sampling only) was introduced in Ontario. This year, OMAFRA Publication 296 includes an updated version of this test with the option for a pre-sidedress sampling approach.
Planting Time versus Pre-Sidedress
A large percentage of nitrogen fertilizer is applied at planting time in Ontario. It was thought that any testing procedure would need to involve soil sampling in this time period, then turn the results around quickly so that producers could adjust broadcast nitrogen applications at planting, to reflect the soil test results.
This approach faced predictable problems. For many corn producers, there was simply not enough time during this plantingperiod to consider adding the additional workload of soil testing and last-minute adjustments to nitrogen applications. As well, in situations where manure had been applied the previous year or where red clover or alfalfa had been plowed down, the test was unreliable. Early spring soil temperatures are often too low for the nitrogen from these organic sources to be converted to nitrate, so the test missed giving the proper credit.
The new option for producers is to perform soil sampling in the early part of June, before sidedress applications of nitrogen. This approach responds to both of the previously outlined concerns by giving producers a bigger window of opportunity to conduct the soil test and allowing for soils to warm up so that more accurate assessments of available soil nitrogen can be made. The procedure for conducting these pre-sidedress nitrogen tests is outlined in OMAFRA publication 296 (1999/2000 edition). Table 1 is from this publication and outlines how producers can adjust nitrogen applications based on either spring (sampling five days either side of planting) or pre-sidedress (sampling generally in the first two weeks of June) soil nitrate-nitrogen testing.
Will It Work?
The pre-sidedress nitrogen test has positioned itself as being easier to manage. But the big question is still to be answered. Will it work? That is, will this approach significantly enhance corn producers ability to predict nitrogen requirements to reach maximum economic corn yields. Research results from the University of Guelph (Dr. Tony Vyn and Ken Janovicek) have shown considerable support for the use of the pre-sidedress N test (PSNT). Table 2 illustrates the potential reliability of the PSNT on studies conducted on sandy loam soils near Ayr. The plots in this study were fall-plowed wheat or wheat/red clover and then planted into corn. Corn plots were fertilized with various N rates to determine the actual nitrogen requirements. Often recommendations obtained from the PSNT were closer to the actual requirements than yield-goal based estimations with assumed nitrogen credits for the red clover.
The PSNT holds real potential for improving nitrogen recommendations for corn. If you have pre-sidedress capabilities or access to them, it is a management tool worth considering. No doubt there will be further refinements to soil testing for nitrogen and these may include adjusting for the variability imposed by topography, soil organic matter, etc. Meanwhile, producers growing corn particularly in cropping systems which include fall-applied manures, plowed-down red clover or alfalfa, or those with a history of high fertility need to make sure their nitrogen applications are cost effective. On these fields, where a reduction in nitrogen fertilizer is warranted, the PSNT can help you zero-in on the most efficient N rate. The odds are good that on at least some of your land, you can use the results from PSNT to make profitable adjustments to sidedress nitrogen applications. | <urn:uuid:0814ca49-c3ea-454d-926a-22ad4f162a10> | {
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How Government Reliance on Capitalism to Address Climate Anxiety Only Makes It Worse
The kids are not alright. A global Lancet study showed that today’s youth are worried about the future. Of the 10,000 participants between the ages of 16 and 25, 45% said their anxieties about climate change affect their daily lives. Over half feel that humanity is doomed, three-fourths are frightened of the future, and two-thirds feel grief and hope simultaneously.
According to the report, young people are particularly affected by climate change fears as they are still developing. As a result, mental and physical health issues are more common. Notably, the grief and anxiety are not coming out of nowhere: young people know what and whom to blame, and it is squarely on the shoulders of governments failing to act.
“This shows eco-anxiety is not just for environmental destruction alone, but inextricably linked to government inaction on climate change. The young feel abandoned and betrayed by governments,” Caroline Hickman from Bath University, lead author of the study, told BBC News.
On its face, governments seem to be turning their attention towards solutions, albeit while dragging their feet. Earlier this year, the European Union released a ‘green’ legislation package to impose corporate environmental standards. These include, among others, a ‘Taxonomy Regulation’ and a ‘Corporate Sustainability Reporting Drive.’ Measures like these are becoming increasingly common across the world. They have in common that they entail an effort to imbue climate consciousness into polluting corporations to decarbonize and transition out of a fossil fuel economy.
Some call this ‘green capitalism’: it is the effort to achieve sustainable climate change alleviation through market solutions, with businesses and profit playing an important role. Indeed, green capitalism, or eco-capitalism, is now an established school of thought that proposes various strategies, including but not limited to: green consumption, carbon trading (a system of ‘pollution credits’ in which governments incentivize businesses to produce fewer greenhouse emissions and trade in their credits), and total cost accounting (a method for corporations to account for “people, planet, and profit”).
With this ideology gaining more credence, why is it that the youngest generations are still so disillusioned?
Many eco-capitalist strategies are still too controversial in most parts of the world to become a reality. For many, they represent government interference in the free market, which would spell disaster. Instead, they propose that the onus of environmental protections should be on individuals based on their wealth and profits. Consuming green will automatically shift businesses towards a greener model, which is considered to be common wisdom. Many studies also validate that consumers now show a greater willingness to spend more on greener products. But this does not account for income inequality, wherein only a few can spend more in service of a long-term benefit, rather than looking after more immediate livelihood needs.
Related on The Swaddle:
But even the other strategies come with their share of problems. Carbon trading is a system that incentivizes large corporations to produce lesser emissions by assigning value to pollution and creating a credit system based on this. The underlying problem, however, is that the emphasis is still around profit rather than people. At what cost will industries reduce their greenhouse emissions, and how much labor would that entail? Further, would a transition to a less profitable, greener model mean that corporations extract the profit from elsewhere — i.e., workers — to compensate?
Then there is full cost accounting, which is feebly in force in the form of environmental regulation in some parts of the world. But the problem here, again, is that environmental considerations are perceived to be a hindrance; less essential and infinitely more dispensable than complex profit calculations.
There have been criticisms and alternative solutions proposed by green capitalist proponents themselves. “Green distribution” is one such alternative that “aims to build consent for green capitalism in marginalized communities.”
However, what is standard across the board in green capitalism approaches is that the profits of big businesses are sacred. Achieving environmental sustainability has to happen through profits or not at all. And therein lies the problem: with the profit motive having led the world into a climate disaster in the first place, finding a profit-based sustainability solution seems to be like the holy grail. The crux of the issue is that over 70% of the world’s carbon issues come from 100 companies alone. In most cases, however, governments defer to corporations when it comes to policy on tackling climate change and profit rules over people’s futures as a result.
Take India, one of 10 countries surveyed in the Lancet study on climate anxiety among young people. The recent point of contention in the climate discourse is ‘net zero emissions’ — a model that aims to offset carbon emissions with carbon absorption. Afforestation, the creation of carbon sinks, and other strategies are some of the proposed measures. India’s opposition to the global pivot to net-zero emissions is that it takes away the onus from developed countries to make more effort to undo the disproportionate damage they have done to the environment.
There is some merit to this: while the earlier conversation focused on reducing emissions worldwide, the new predominant strategy involves balancing current emissions. Once again, corporations are asked to do too little about a problem they exacerbated — yet, they are pitched as the solution to climate change.
“The global economic system of corporate capitalism appears incapable of achieving the levels of decarbonization necessary to avoid dangerous climate change. Humanity is locked into a process of ‘creative self-destruction,” wrote Christopher Wright and Daniel Nyberg for The Conversation.
Under green capitalism, therefore, it appears that the only solution towards alleviating climate change is in corporations’ hands. The emphasis on newer forms of “innovation” to “solve” climate change means more remarkable unwillingness to undo some present systems that threaten the planet. Governments frame alternatives to green capitalism as the antithesis of “development” because development is predominantly viewed in terms of more innovation, more technology, and a drive to improve the quality of life for a few rather than ensuring well-being for all. Therefore, the short answer is this: green capitalism, far from alleviating climate anxiety, only exacerbates it. It keeps us waiting for a Deux ex Machina that will swoop in and save the day — until that day, which is elusive at best, we must look to the future with increasing anxiety. | <urn:uuid:92a56696-ab9c-4e1a-b879-b54113d406f8> | {
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XII Comparing SAN and NAS
Both SAN and NAS (system area networks and network attached storage) allow for sharing disk storage among multiple systems. This allows for fault tolerance and redundancy of entire systems
Network attached storage allows for a simpler appliance approach to shared storage. Off-the-shelf applications can access storage on a NAS device as if it were any other file server on the network. Users can attach to NAS-shared disk using familiar tools, such as the Windows Map Drive option, and the Linux mount command.
This plug and play approach to shared storage doesnt necessarily lead to the best solution in all situations, though. Applications may have performance requirements that exceed what NAS can provide, which can be met by a SAN solution. Additionally, some applications, notably database applications, do not tend to work well with the industry-standard file server protocols used for file access via NAS devices like NFS (Linux) or Windows File Sharing.
For example, Microsoft has a relatively-hidden technote recommending against storing Access databases on mapped drives, due to the potential for file corruption and application errors that can result when a client workstation makes changes to a database accessed via Windows file sharing, which is more meant for sharing entire Word documents and spreadsheets than database records.
If the application supports system area networks, though, you can use the SAN approach to share disk among multiple servers without concern for the kind of errors that result when using traditional network file sharing technologies. Fault tolerance and server availability may be improved by use of SAN technology, because SANs can share additional resources beyond disk, like RAM and CPUs. In many cases, one SAN server can take over for another practically seamlessly, whereas in NAS-based solutions, client reconfiguration may be necessary to cause clients to access an alternate server.
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Oil based plastics are no substitute for leather
One of the gravest errors that seems to be surfacing with electric vehicles and some hybrid types is the tendency to replace leather, an organic material, with oil-based plastics and synthetics, somehow conflating ‘vegan’ with ‘sustainable’. It is a misrepresentation of science and not only illogical but perverse when the stated objective is improved sustainability.
Properly made leather is one of the most sustainable materials the car companies could use. No one keeps or kills cattle to make leather, it is a by-product from the meat and dairy industry. Hides and skins are a renewable resource - perhaps one of the world’s oldest recycled materials. Modern leather factories, such as those making automotive leathers, produce an engineered product made with integrity, technology and craftsmanship. The plants are bright and modern, not unlike the most modern car facilities and they skilfully merge technology, craftsmanship and product design to engineer a long-lasting renewable product from a natural material.
It is a material that has become increasingly popular as an interior design resource in modern cities as well as a covering for smartphones and tablets precisely because as an organic, natural material it humanises an environment loaded with metal, glass and technology.
Buy less, buy better
All the evidence so far suggests that cars will be expected to work harder and last longer. Leather as a tactile, long lasting low maintenance material fits perfectly as a sustainable contemporary fabric which is totally relevant for the demands of this fast evolving world.
Note to editors
Leather Naturally promotes the use of globally-manufactured sustainable leather and seeks to inspire and inform designers, creators, and consumers about its beauty, quality and versatility. Its website is a key resource for information about modern leather manufacturing and the part it plays in a more sustainable society.
Media enquiries: Debbie Burton, Communication Team, [email protected] | <urn:uuid:af7fd12d-eb69-4d64-8f19-9e5253d127a6> | {
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Difference between revisions of "African American Freedmen's Bureau Records"
|Line 11:||Line 11:|
== '''Jurisdictions''' ==
== '''Jurisdictions''' ==
This bureau operated in all the states of: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolin, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia West Virginia, and Indian Territory (''i.e.'' Oklahoma) and has records from 1861 to the 1870s. The Freedmen’s Bureau created records at headquarters in Washington, DC,
This bureau operated in all the states of: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolin, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia West Virginia, and Indian Territory (''i.e.'' Oklahoma) and has records from 1861 to the 1870s. The Freedmen’s Bureau created records at headquarters in Washington, DC,field agents.
There are sets of records:
()the most useful. However, the commissioner’s records contain lists and reports such as two linear feet of marriage papers. Records from the field offices vary from state to state. Since most freedmen contacted the bureau at the local level, you will find the most genealogical data and clues in field office records
== '''Arrangement''' ==
== '''Arrangement''' ==
Revision as of 20:51, 30 March 2009
The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (often called the Freedmen’s Bureau) was created in 1865 at the end of the American Civil War to supervise relief efforts; aid involved: education (4,300 schools were established), Health Care (100 hospitals were established), issued food and clothing,operated refugee camps, helped legalize marriages, employment, supervised labor contracts, worked with African American soldiers and sailors and their heirs to secure back pay , bounty payments and pensions. for newly freed African Americans (four million), and to supervise confiscated Southern properties.
Because the Bureau's records 1865-1872 contain a wide range of data about the African American experience during slavery and freedom, they are a valuable source for the black family historian. Among the records are registers that give the names, ages, and former occupations of freedmen and names and residences of former owners. In addition, there are marriage registers that provide the names, addresses, ages, and complexions of husbands and wives and their children. For some states there are census lists, details of labor and apprenticeship agreements, back pay records, complaint registers, personal data about black soldiers (including company and regiment), school records, hospital registers, census records, and records of murders committed against freedmen.
This bureau operated in all the states of: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolin, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia West Virginia, and Indian Territory (i.e. Oklahoma) and has records from 1861 to the 1870s. The Freedmen’s Bureau created records at headquarters in Washington, DC, state records and field agents.
There are three sets of records:
1 Commissioner’s records,
2 Superintendent of Education
3 Field office records (local)—normally the most useful. However, the commissioner’s records contain lists and reports such as two linear feet of marriage papers. Records from the field offices vary from state to state. Since most freedmen contacted the bureau at the local level, you will find the most genealogical data and clues in field office records
The Preliminary Inventory of the Records of the Field Offices of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands: Record Group 105 by Elaine Everly and Willna Pacheli of the National Archives [FHL book 973 F23ea; fiche 6002638-40] describes the bureau’s records. They are organized alphabetically by state, thereunder by offices, and thereunder by county or town. Part One is about Alabama, Arkansas (including the Oklahoma Indian Territory), the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, and Louisiana. Part Two is about Maryland and Delaware, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Part Three is about Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and the Freedmen's branch at of the Adjutant General's Office.
Most of the subordinate field office records, with the exception of selected records for New Orleans and Tennessee have not been microfilmed and are only available at the National Archives in Washington, DC. For a list of Freedmen’s Bureau records that are microfilmed see the Black Studies: A Select Catalog of National Archives Microfilm Publications [FHL book 973 A3bs; fiche 6002413; and on the Internet].
The Family History Library has many of the Freedmen’s Bureau microfilmed records. The microfilm numbers for most of these records can be found in the Family History Library Catalog Keyword Search using the search phrase “Bureau of Refugees”
first film or fiche #
|Number of films|
|National||Filed Offices||105||6002638||3 fiche|
|Select Series||105||M742||491550||7 rolls|
|Letters rece.||105||M752||908680||74 rolls|
|Education Division||105||M803||1695186||35 rolls|
|US court of Claims||123||M2007||unavailable||5 rolls|
|Marriage Rec.||105||M1875||2425252||5 rolls|
|Savings and Turst||101||M816||928571||27 rolls|
|Alabama||Assistant Comm.||105||M979||1498698||52 rolls|
|Sup. of Ed.||105||M810||1695841||8 rolls|
|Field Office||105||M1900||2424719||34 rolls|
|Arkansas||Assistant Comm.||105||M979||1498698||52 rolls|
|Sup. of Ed.||105||M980||1695811||5 rolls|
|Field Office||105||M1901||2424753||23 rolls|
|Delaware||Field Office||105||M1906||2424887||42 rolls|
|D. of C.||Assistant Comm.||105||M1055||1605536||21 rolls|
|Sup. of Ed.||105||M1056||1617650||24 rolls|
|Field Office||105||M1902||2424776||21 rolls|
|Florida||Assistant Comm.||105||M1869||2425908||15 rolls|
|Georgia||Assistant Comm.||105||M798||1498626||36 rolls|
|Sup. of Ed.||195||M799||1685269||28 rolls|
|Field Office||105||M1903||1574209||90 rolls|
|Kentucky||Field Office||105||M1904||2425923||133 rolls|
|Louisiana||Sup. of Ed.||105||M1026||1695273||12 rolls|
Freedmen's Bureau Online
The Freedmen’s Bureau Online Internet site includes numerous online database indexes. Select among the variety of databases mostly based on locality or by topic such as marriages, labor contracts, or murders. However, this online site does not include all the available records from the Freedmen's Bureau.
- Records Relating to Murders
- Records Relating to Freedmen's Labor
- Marriage Records: Most of these records are divided up by the state, then by the area, and then by the marriage date, month, or year of marriage. (These records can be found on the homepage under the contents heading at the left of the screen.)
- To find state-specific collections, go to the homepage and there is a list of states under the contents heading at the middle left of the screen. (Examples of some of these collections are: Alabama: Petition of Colored Citizens from Mobile, Alabama; Mississippi: Registers of Indentures of Colored Orphans, Aug. 1865 - May 1866; Tennessee: Index to Freedman's Labor Contracts between Tennessee Freedmen and employers in Kentucky.)
Using this site
Type a surname or name or term in question in the search site box. (Examples: Jones, Smith, etc. for surname searches OR land, marriages, etc. for keyword searches)
- Documents which seem a “best” match appears.
- Click on desired match.
- This site lists many other search sites for African American histories and genealogy websites.
- Their on-line bookstore carries many useful books of interest.
Other Web Sites
- Freedmen's Bureau Virginia Marriages ca. 1815-1866 online index and images in FamilySearch Record Search - Pilot.
- National Archives Black Family Research description of Freedmen’s Bureau records.
- Freedmen's Bureau Records of Field Offices 1865-1872 index and images at Ancestry.com. This database contains about 102,010 personal names from field office records for Washington, D.C., Florida, Georgia, New Orleans, and North Carolina. Information available in the database includes: name, record type, year, and field office location. Family History Centers and the Family History Library have limited access to this index. There is a subscription fee for home use.
- Elaine C. Everly, “Freedmen’s Bureau Records: An Overview,” article, National Archives, Prologue Magazine Summer 1997, Vol. 29, No., 2. | <urn:uuid:f4f44ff7-4c8d-4113-aead-ccf4dddfee80> | {
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What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world remains and is immortal.
Virtues like selflessness and benevolence are unique to and yet so rare in human beings. Only human beings are known to help each other and other living beings without expecting in return, and yet people rarely extend such altruistic aid. The things we do – and the intentions with which we do these things – between the time we are born to the moment we leave this world for our heavenly abode are what define if and how we shall be remembered for the times to come.
Consider this: There are about eight billion people on this planet. How many of these shall be remembered by, say, someone who is born a couple of centuries down the line? Probably just a few hundreds, right? This is because an astounding majority of people live for themselves; everything they plan and achieve is centered on the aspirations and hopes they have for themselves and their near and dear ones. It is extremely uncommon to run into someone whose actions are aimed at making the world a better place. Ask yourself this, who would you rather remember and idolize: an entrepreneur who made billions of dollars during their lifetime and bequeathed them to their kids, or a scientist who made some groundbreaking discovery but died relatively poor?
Blessed with an unparalleled intelligence, humans are capable of extraordinary feats. The fact that we fritter away this remarkable intellect on materialistic, selfish goals is unfortunate. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out what a great place our planet would be if even a tenth of its population began to lead benevolent, charitable lives.
Albert Pike was a well-known American author, poet and jurist. A staunch proponent of philanthropy, Pike once commented: “What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world remains and is immortal.” | <urn:uuid:13224ba8-e180-471c-8a0b-7c7583b267fa> | {
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Always Coming Home
Always Coming Home
To thrive, migratory birds must find favorable habitat throughout the year, throughout the Americas.
By Brett Dufur
High up in the rolling, mist-covered mountains of Honduras, a small flash of metallic green darts through the forest. The ruby-throated hummingbird is returning home.
Where is “home” to a migratory bird that racks up thousands of miles in its annual trek? In a way, hummingbirds are always coming home — to beneficial habitat throughout the Americas — seeking warm weather, food, and shelter in North America, and farther south into Central and South America.
Hummingbirds bring joy to birdwatchers throughout the Americas. Each of us eagerly awaits the diminutive birds’ yearly return to our flowers and bird feeders — whether in Missouri or in the heart of Honduras.
By April, the hummingbirds outside kitchen windows in Honduras have completed the 1,800-mile migration to Missouri and other Midwestern states. They will spend the spring and summer months feeding on sap, insects, nectar, and at the feeder outside your own kitchen window.
By mid-August, the southward migration of the ruby-throated hummingbird is underway, and by early October most will have left Missouri. Many birds we see all summer long also are heading south as fall approaches. The peak of fall warbler migration begins in mid-August and continues through mid-September. And bird migration, in general, is in full swing into September.
Where exactly do our birds go eight months of the year? And who is working to ensure our birds return? Thankfully, a large network of conservationists working throughout the Americas is fighting to keep the future bright for migratory birds.
Keeping Common Birds Common
For about 60 species of Missouri’s migratory birds racing against winter in the middle of a 3,000-mile migration, finding enough food and quality habitat in many different states and countries throughout the Americas becomes a matter of life and death. Many of North America’s songbirds, raptors, and ducks spend eight months in places like Honduras, Ecuador, and Argentina. Because our birds spend so much of
their time elsewhere, no conservation measure at home can be effective without addressing habitat conservation in those other countries.
Improving bird habitat throughout migratory flyways has never been more important. Many migratory birds have experienced population declines. In many instances, present-day bird populations are now less than half of their populations 50 years ago, with some bird groups showing declines as high as | <urn:uuid:97ddf37b-8bdf-47e0-88c4-86273cb60220> | {
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We all know that secondhand smoke is bad for us; we hear it all the time. But I'm not sure that everyone realizes just how bad it is — and that it doesn't take much exposure to do damage.
Take, for example, a study that looked at how secondhand smoke affects the hearts of children.
Researchers in Finland followed 500 children ages 8 through 13. Every year they tested the children's blood to measure their exposure to tobacco smoke in the previous few days. The researchers also used ultrasound to measure the thickness and health of the children's arteries.
By age 13, healthy children who were exposed to secondhand tobacco smoke had thickening of the major arteries. They also had higher levels of apolipoprotein B. This blood protein is a direct measure of the type of lipoproteins that can cause heart disease. These effects were greatest in children with the most exposure to tobacco smoke, but were present even in children with modest exposure.
This is pretty amazing. It means that if your 13-year-old has been exposed on any regular basis to tobacco smoke, he could already have heart disease!
Here are some other facts parents need to know:
- Every year, secondhand smoke causes between 150,000 and 300,000 lung infections in children younger than 18 months. This leads to between 7,500 and 15,000 hospitalizations.
- Children with asthma who are exposed to cigarette smoke have more frequent and severe asthma attacks. (Exposure to cigarette smoke can make it more likely that a child will have asthma in the first place.)
- Children living with smokers can have slower lung growth.
- Secondhand smoke is responsible for more than 750,000 middle ear infections in children every year.
- Exposure to cigarette smoke increases the risk that a baby will die of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).
- Rolling the windows down in the car when someone is smoking doesn't make it safe. A study in New Zealand showed that even with the windows down, the amount of smoke in the car was equivalent to being in a smoky bar! Some states have banned smoking in the car when there are passengers younger than 17.
- Exposure to the actual smoke is the most dangerous. But more research is suggesting that the particles that get into things like hair, clothing and furniture (the particles that make people smell like cigarette smoke) are toxic as well. This means that smoking outside may not be enough to keep others safe.
In fact, there is no safe level of exposure to secondhand smoke.
To keep children as safe as possible, here's what parents need to do:
- If you smoke, stop. Your children's lives may depend on it. And you want to grow old enough to see your grandchildren, don't you? Quitting isn't easy, but there are treatments that can help. Talk to your doctor.
- Don't ever let anyone smoke around your child. It's okay to be rude. Blame it on your doctor if you like. You can say something such as, "I'm sorry, but our pediatrician says we can never let Junior be exposed to cigarette smoke."
- Boycott the houses of people who smoke. This may upset certain friends and relatives. But what's more important — your child's health or being polite? And who knows, when those friends and relatives realize you're serious, it may just be the push they need to quit.
- Do everything you can to keep your child away from tobacco smoke. Before you say yes to a playdate, ask if there are any smokers in the house; if there are, have it at your house instead. Don't go to restaurants that have smoking areas; avoid smoking areas in public places.
- Support smoke-free policies in your community. Going to work or to a public place shouldn't mean putting your health at risk!
- Talk to your children about the dangers of smoking. All your work to keep them away from secondhand smoke will be for nothing if they start smoking themselves! Make sure they know that smoking is a really bad idea. (This will be more difficult if you smoke!)
If we work together, we can help our children and all of us breathe easier — and live longer, healthier lives.
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Claire McCarthy, M.D., is an assistant professor in pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, an attending physician at Children's Hospital of Boston, and medical director of the Martha Eliot Health Center, a neighborhood health service of Children's Hospital. She is a senior medical editor for Harvard Health Publications. | <urn:uuid:01ac967a-e373-4aac-b452-92e818abba00> | {
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Ratio of girls to boys in India continues to decline
- By: Sanjay Kumar
The continuous decline in numbers of girls in the age group 0-6 years compared with boys in several states has shocked demographers in India and has made policy makers sit up and take notice. A new report, Missing, released by the United Nations Population Fund on 20 October, maps the adverse sex ratio among children.
India's population stood at 1.03 billion on 1 March 2001, having risen 21% between 1991 and 2001. “What did not rise, but rather declined shockingly, was the sex ratio,” says the report.
The sex ratio, calculated as number of girls for every 1000 boys in the 0-6 age group, declined from 945 girls for every 1000 boys in the 1991 census to 927 during the 2001 census.
These latest falls come on top of a steady decline during the 1960s,'70s and'80s. The ratio fell from 976 in 1961 to 964 in 1971 and to 962 | <urn:uuid:86820b34-1bed-40ee-849a-266b24e754eb> | {
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How Are Your Computer Security Habits?
If you’ve read our new computer security report, The Complete Guide to Computer Security… for Mere Mortals, then you will recognize the analogy used about computer security and the number of locks you have on your front door. How many locks, or layers of security, do have to pass through in order to get into your home? Do you sleep well at night knowing you’ve done your best to protect your home and family? The same is true for layers of security on your computing devices. How many layers do you need to feel that your privacy and security are protected?
Even though you have in place security measures for your home, and even your computing devices, something is still needed. You actually have to use those measures. If not, all your efforts are to no avail. So it is a reasonable question, “How Are Your Computer Security Habits?”
A recent article makes an interesting point that ‘YOU are the computer security problem!’ One of our favorite computer security authors, Graham Cluley write about this and it is an interesting read here:
YOU are the Computer Security Problem!
Today law enforcement agencies warned the public about the Dridex malware that has been targeting customer of online banks for the last year or so.
Interestingly, Dridex doesn’t rely upon any vulnerabilities or sneaky shortcuts in its quest to infect your Windows PC. Instead, the malicious hackers spam out their attacks as email attachments using social engineering lures to trick potential victims into opening, say, a poisoned Word document and enabling macros to allow the malicious code to run.
In other words, you allowed your computer to become infected by Dridex by opening an unsolicited email attachment, and then perhaps gave its malicious macro to run.
How are you going to “patch the bug in your brain” that so many internet attacks rely upon?
How do you learn about some practical computer habits to adopt?
We recommend our report The Complete Guide to Computer Security… for Mere Mortals. In the report you will learn about five different layers of computer security to consider. You can implement one or more or all of the layers. If you like, we can help you do that. The important thing is to have the layers of computer security that make sense for you, and then USE them. If not, then you really are part of the security problem. Remember, the security and privacy of your personal information is within your control. Read the report and start to protect yourself now.
Here is a video from Frederick D. our Computer Security Expert… See what he has to say here about Computer Security Solutions. | <urn:uuid:c8110e87-385d-4ed6-9eb6-430350cf7540> | {
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SpaceX's reusable Grasshopper rocket flies sideways during a 100-meter (328-foot) lateral test flight on Aug. 13, 2013 in this still from a video recorded at SpaceX's McGregor, Tex., proving grounds
For decades, the aerospace industry has sought to build a fully reusable rocket launch system to bring down the cost of ferrying people and payloads into orbit. Despite dozens of concepts and millions of dollars directed at that goal, no truly reusable system has been created yet.
What does it take to build one?
Because of our planet's gravity, getting into low-Earth orbit from the ground is a daunting task, even for rockets that are designed to burn up in the atmosphere, never to be reused again.
This month, at a conference in New Mexico celebrating the 20th anniversary of a reusable rocket prototype, the Delta Clipper Experimental, or DC-X, aerospace engineer Jim French joked that if humans were intended to go to space, they would have been born on Mars. (Gravity on the Red Planet is 38 percent of Earth's gravity.) [Reusable Rockets: How They Work (Infographic)]
Hitting the 17,500 mph (28,164 km/h) required to escape Earth's gravitational pull requires powerful fuel — and a lot of it. NASA's retired space shuttle, which came close to full reusability, had two solid rocket boosters each packed with more than 1 million pounds of solid propellant. These jettisoned from the system two minutes after launch, deployed parachutes and gently dropped into the ocean, where they could be recovered and reused for another mission.
The DC-X reusable spacecraft is seen with engines flaming.
But each of the 135 shuttle flights also relied on a 15-story external fuel tank loaded with more than 500,000 gallons of extremely cold liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen fuel. This giant container was disposable and burned up in the atmosphere once it delivered the orbiter to space. A fully reusable craft would not have any such expendable parts.
Single stage to orbit
Another even more challenging task looms over the goal of a totally reusable spacecraft: creating a single-stage-to-orbit, or SSTO, launch vehicle that would carry into orbit and back everything with which it left Earth. With no reassembly required, it's hoped that an SSTO craft could be operated like a commercial airliner. But designing an SSTO vehicle comes with its own host of technical obstacles.
Empty fuel tanks become dead weight and reusable vehicles require elements to protect the spacecraft when they re-enter the atmosphere, which means even more added weight.
"Reusability requires thermal protection, landing gear, landing propellant and wings or a lifting body," French said.
This doesn't give engineers much extra weight to work with when they are trying to send a useful payload into space. But there are ways to optimize the weight of rocket parts. [Now Boarding: The Top 10 Private Spaceships]
Twenty years after it made its first flight, the Delta Clipper Experimental, or DC-X, is getting its day in a museum. An exhibit on the reusable rocket prototype called DC-X SpaceQuest is being prepared at the New Mexico Museum of Space History.
Strong and lightweight carbon composite materials, for example, could be incorporated into rockets, said Jim Paulsen, vice president and deputy of advanced space and launch at Florida-based firm Aerojet Rocketdyne.
"They are extremely strong and you can control the strength by weaving the direction," Paulsen told Space.com.
"The casings on a solid (rocket booster), you can wrap them with carbon fiber and come up with a very efficient design and a very lightweight design and that's what being used by Aeroject Rocketdyne's Atlas 5," he added.
Rocket makers also are turning to selective laser melting, or 3-D printing, to make metal parts. This technique would not only reduce the time and cost of producing complex rocket components, but it could also help solve the weight problem.
"It would almost be like a skeleton in your body," Paulsen said. "You print the material where to control the amount the stress it can handle."
Why make a fully reusable rocket?
"Everyone that talks about being in this business in the long haul says eventually we've got to solve this reusability issue," Paulsen said. "Space travel is exciting and it has a lot to offer and it’s a new frontier. … One of the critical things to make it truly successful in the future will be to make the vehicles and the hardware and engines reusable."
The space industry often points to the airline business to illustrate how reusability made a once-new and expensive form of transportation familiar and low-cost. Though a new Boeing 747-8, for example, costs around $350 million, fuel and operations are much less expensive by comparison. Once a passenger flight lands, the plane can be rapidly prepared for its next trip and it can make thousands of flights over its lifetime.
The DC-X rocket prototype was an experimental vehicle of the early 1990s that demonstrated the same could one day be true for spaceflight. The nearly 40-foot (12 meter), cone-shaped experimental rocket was never intended to go to space, and none of its test flights lasted more than three minutes. But it was rapidly developed and could be flown over and over again with a quick turnaround time, raising hopes that a fully reusable SSTO spaceship might one day bring routine payloads into orbit.
Twenty years later, some space industry leaders at the DC-X conference argued that reusable spacecraft wouldn't have to be as efficient as a commercial airplane; just using one vehicle twice could dramatically cut costs.
"We don’t have to be at 100 times or 1,000 times (reusability) to get the lion share of the benefit of reusable technology," former NASA administrator Mike Griffin told the group.
Reusable vehicles of the future
Despite the challenges, some private space companies, such as entrepreneur Elon Musk's SpaceX, are attempting to make fully reusable rockets.
The craft SpaceX envisions (and has been prototyping through its Grasshopper rocket project) would have three major parts: a first stage and second stage booster that would separately fly back to Earth and an orbital space capsule that would lift off and touch down vertically on land. The pieces would have to be put back together again before the spacecraft's next flight, but all would be reusable.
"This has been attempted many times in the past," Musk told reporters in 2011 when he unveiled the project. "We could fail. I'm not saying we are certain of success here, but we're going to try to do it."
Follow Megan Gannon on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @SPACEdotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.
First published August 26 2013, 2:05 PM | <urn:uuid:40807891-de7b-43d3-8601-286de010f013> | {
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On Sept. 19 NASA Administrator Mike Griffin revealed the agency's new plan for implementing the president's Vision for Space Exploration.
The plan has significant positive and negative features.
On the positive side, it recognizes the need for the development of a true heavy-lift launch vehicle (HLV), and takes concrete steps to preserve the shuttle industrial infrastructure necessary to produce such a vehicle. It does this by initiating development of a medium-lift launch vehicle using shuttle technology.
The importance of this cannot be overemphasized. An HLV is absolutely necessary to enable human exploration of the Moon or Mars, and it was a measure of former NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe's unfitness for his position that he was willing to promote a clearly unworkable quadruple launch/quadruple rendezvous lunar architecture for the purpose of justifying the abandonment of that capability. Dr. Griffin has reversed that position and backed his policy with action, and that is excellent.
Another strong feature of the plan is its decision to develop and employ a methane/oxygen rocket engine for Lunar ascent. Methane/oxygen is a far more storable propellant combination than hydrogen/oxygen and offers much better performance than conventional hypergols, making it a much better choice than either for lunar ascent and return propulsion.
More importantly, however, methane/oxygen is the easiest propellant combination to synthesize out of the Martian atmosphere, and some could be made out of lunar base waste products as well. The choice of this propellant therefore shows good system engineering sense with thoughtful consideration of the best way to select Lunar mission technologies that will be most useful in enabling human exploration of Mars as well.
On the more problematic side is the decision to develop such a large Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV). While a large CEV certainly enables larger crews and greater comfort, it will cost more to develop, produce and launch than a smaller capsule. Furthermore, because of its excessive mass, the large CEV makes direct return lunar missions impossible, thus mandating a lunar orbit rendezvous mission architecture. This, in turn, will require the costly development and production of lunar excursion modules, and impose return rendezvous phasing complications that could hamstring the operations of a lunar base, especially if surface stays greater than two weeks are desired.
Another cause for concern is the decision to launch the CEV after the HLV delivers the rest of the mission components to orbit. The HLV's cargo will include stages employing cryogenic liquid hydrogen/oxygen propellant, and this propellant will start to boil away immediately after launch. Thus for the mission to succeed, the CEV must be launched on time, within a few weeks at most of the prior flight, without fail.
Otherwise, the billion-dollar class HLV launch and cargo will have to be written off. This situation will put great pressure on managers to launch despite warnings, thereby putting crews at risk. Moreover, NASA's record of achieving on-time crewed launch to date is very poor. Unless it is radically improved, this aspect of the plan will have to be abandoned.
That said, the plan is an enormous improvement over its predecessors. One only has to compare it to the psychedelic NASA mission architecture of 2002, which called for supporting Lunar exploration from a LaGrange point space station supplied by giant cycling nuclear electric spaceships, or the nonsensical O'Keefe quadruple-launch/quadruple rendezvous lunar mission plan of 2004, in order to breathe a huge sigh of relief.
The previous NASA plans were pure nonsense. This one is real engineering. Finally, we have a plan that could actually work.
There is, however, a deeper problem with the plan than the engineering concerns noted above. That is, that while preserving the HLV infrastructure, the plan relegates the development of an HLV to a subsequent administration. In consequence, for the next 13 years, NASA will continue to send crew after crew up and down to low Earth orbit, at a cost of some $70 billion, for no justifiable purpose whatsoever.
Both Adm. Harold Gehman, the chairman of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, and Dr. Griffin have made the point that if we are to accept the costs and risks of human spaceflight, we should be undertaking missions that are worthy of those costs and risks. But for the next 13 years, we will continue not do so.
To paraphrase St. Augustine, NASA is now saying "Lord, make me a destination-driven space agency, but not yet."
In saying this NASA is, in fact, acting in accord with the Bush Vision for Space Exploration, as enunciated in January 2004. That policy however, was formulated by a White House which lacked a competent NASA administrator to advise it. Now, however, that we have a qualified NASA administrator, this policy needs to be revisited and reformulated.
Let us review the consequences of blindly following the mediocre vision scriptural document of January 2004.
That document was a compromise between those who wanted a destination-driven space program, and those who did not. Therefore, in accord with the bargain reached, NASA would be allowed to continue to fly shuttle missions for the rest of the decade, after which the destination driven program could begin.
But does this make any sense? The only really time-critical shuttle mission is Hubble Space Telescope repair. This is indeed a truly important mission, and it should be flown with dispatch, as it is without question worthy of the 2-percent risk to crew that any shuttle mission must entail. But the rest of the shuttle manifest is devoted to space station construction, and these cargos could be delivered much more expeditiously by the HLV that NASA needs to develop to reach the Moon anyway.
Griffin's HLV design will be able to deliver 125 metric tons to low Earth orbit. The shuttle can only deliver 20 tons. With a single launch then, the HLV will be able to deliver as much payload as the shuttle program can during a year -- and that's during a good year.
Compared to current shuttle launch rates, which will have managed only one flight between February 2003 and February 2006, (at a cost of $15 billion), the HLV will be able to launch in an afternoon everything the shuttle program would be able to launch for the next 18 years.
Operating the shuttle program for the next five or six years to deliver a few space station payloads early will cost us $30 billion. All that money could be saved simply by shutting the shuttle down after Hubble repair, and shifting the shuttle program funds over to immediate development of the HLV and the other Lunar exploration hardware elements. We could then use the HLV to complete the space station and reach the Moon by 2012 instead of 2018.
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the financial burdens it will impose on the nation, gratuitously wasting $30 billion of the taxpayers' money in order to dogmatically fulfill an old scriptural document is unacceptable. The new NASA architecture is a good plan for implementing a flawed policy. We need a good policy. We have real talent at NASA now, and we should make use of it to revise the policy itself.
Robert Zubrin, an astronautical engineer, is president of the Mars Society (http://www.marssociety.org), and author of The Case for Mars (Simon and Schuster, 1996), Entering Space (Tarcher Putnam, 1999), and Mars on Earth (Tarcher Penguin, 2005).
NOTE:The views of this article are the author's and do not reflect the policies of the National Space Society.
Visit SPACE.com/Ad Astra Online for more news, views and scientific inquiry from the National Space Society. | <urn:uuid:b1ed41c3-ca5e-4d33-bf9e-11e06e2b1248> | {
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Humanitarianism is a way of behaving out of kindness to other people. Someone who is a humanitarian is a person who helps to improve the lives of other people without thinking about their race, belief or nationality.
Humanitarianism also means basic morality indispensable for human being. And there are international laws called "international humanitarian law" considered to created out of humanitarianism of this mean. Among them, Geneva Conventions on the matter made at the time of wars are well known. | <urn:uuid:0c3ea436-4bbe-4a10-826b-e26275d9c971> | {
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Contemporary Maori art & language
1990, Parekowhai, Michael (1968– ), New Zealand. Purchased 2008. Te Papa
This sculpture was created by leading contemporary artist Michael Parekowhai (born 1968, Nga Ariki, Ngati Whakarongo). Parekowhai was born in the city, like most Maori of his generation, and reinterpreted customary art forms in this context. His work is often described as taking the ordinary and making it extraordinary.
Atarangi can be seen as a Maori carving with upraised arms or an abstract sculpture. Vertically, the rods form the word 'HE', which means 'a' or 'some' in Maori and is a masculine pronoun in English. As such, language and identity are both explored.
Te Ataarangi – Maori language learning
The sculpture's name, Atarangi, is also a method of teaching the Maori language with Cuisenaire rods (colourful rods of different lengths), which were originally used for teaching maths. This successful immersion method – usually known as Te Ataarangi – was developed by Katerina Te Heikoko Mataira and Ngoingoi Pewhairangi in the 1970s. It was a pioneering initiative in revilatising te reo.
Through Te Ataarangi, fluent speakers were trained as tutors. The method was designed to suit Maori learners and was centred on spoken language. It provided an alternative to more grammar-based teaching approaches of the time.
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1. What has happened to the Hebrews so far (Ex 12:29-39)?
What challenges do they face?
For 400 years, the Hebrews had been slaves and governed by Egypt. With their sudden freedom
from captivity, they had to govern themselves as a group of nomadic people without any land. Consider the
challenges of a new inexperienced government responsible for administering and enforcing civil and religious
laws, and maintaining military readiness and discipline. Consider also that this form of government, government
of a state by direct administration by God through Moses (a theocracy), was unique and had no precedent. Now, 430
years after His covenant with Abraham, God makes a covenant with Abraham's descendants, the children of Israel.
2. Examine carefully the Mosaic Covenant (Ex 19-24; Lev 17-26, Deut 1-28;
Josh 24). In general terms what was it? Where do the Ten
Commandments fit in this? What was its function?
The Mosaic Covenant is a conditional promise by God. It promised blessing for obedience and
curse for disobedience.
a) "Now then, if you will indeed obey My voice and keep My covenant, then you shall be My own
possession among all the peoples, for all the earth is Mine…
(Ex 19:5)" The Israelites will be a cherished possession of the
b) "you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests...
c) "…and a holy nation. (Ex 19:6)"
The Mosaic Covenant (Law), all 613 commands (365 negative and 248 positive), directed how the
Hebrews were to live for the purpose of pleasing God and enjoying His favor. The Ten Commandments (Decalogue)
were essentially the basic rules of the Law; the other laws applied and clarified the principles. Exodus largely
expands and explains the Ten Commandments.
Leviticus focuses on the first 4 Commandments:
1) "You shall have no other gods before me,"
2) "You shall not make yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is
in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth. You shall not worship them or serve
them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God,"
3) "You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain, for the LORD will not leave him
unpunished who takes His name in vain."
4) "Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy."
Deuteronomy focuses on the other 6 Commandments:
5) "Honor your father and your mother,"
6) "You shall not murder,"
7) "You shall not commit adultery,"
8) "You shall not steal,"
9) "You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor."
10) "You shall not covet your neighbor's wife or… anything that belongs to your neighbor."
For purposes of study, the Mosaic Covenant (Law) can be viewed as having three sections: a)
commandments that refer to moral laws (personal holiness), b) judgments that refer to social laws,
and c) ordinances that refer to the Tabernacle and worship laws. It is important to note that the Law of
Moses is singular and refers to all 613 laws as one unit. Breaking just one of 613 laws was the same as breaking
the whole Law.
Through the moral and social laws, God defined sin and what constituted just punishment. This
was to show the Israelites' need for God's Grace. Through worship laws and the sacrificial system, God provided
the means for an Israelite to seek forgiveness, cover (not take away) one's sins, and continue to receive
the blessings of the covenant; but this was not the means for salvation, the removal of sin. Salvation was
only possible through faith in God.
The Mosaic Covenant established a theocracy but the emphasis of the Law was priestly not
political. The highest office of the state was the Aaronic (Levitical - from the tribe of Levi) priest. In religious
matters, the Levitical priest was integral in administering the sacrifices and offerings of atonement (Lev 1-7,
16). In judicial matters, the Levitical priest decided the most
difficult civil and criminal matters (Deut 17:8-12). In matters
of judicial due process, the Levitical priests owned 6 centrally located Cities of Refuge, which allowed
unintentional murderers safety from retribution until trial
(Num 35). In matters of healthcare, the Levitical priests
declared who was healthy or should be quarantined (Lev 13). In
economic matters, the Levitical priest was the one who decided disputes on financial valuations
(Lev 27). In matters of warfare, the Levitical priest was called
upon to inspire the troops (Deut 20:2-4).
The Mosaic Law also established the Tabernacle, the house of God, and the Ark, the symbol of
God's presence. The Tabernacle was where all worship and sacrifices were performed. The Ark itself was "alive."
It brought judgment (death) if not treated in a holy manner, and on Israel's enemies. [Through apostasy, the Ark
and Tabernacle were separated, and Israel lost a blessing of having God's presence through the Ark.]
Scholars see many similarities with the Mosaic Covenant (Law) and Near Eastern treaties of that
time specifically Suzerainty Treaties. These treaties were made between kings and their vassals, and analogously,
the Israelites were seen as God's vassals. With regard to laws and governance, the Mosaic Law was unique:
1) The Mosaic Law was God given; in contrast, pagan laws were man made.
2) The Mosaic Law was publicly read regularly every seven years
(Deut 31:10-13); in contrast, pagan laws of the Near East were
not public and published only after the king was leaving the kingship.
3) God governed the Hebrews, not the Mosaic Law, thus, man served God and His Law; in contrast,
pagan laws of the Near East were binding and had to be obeyed by all including the king; thus; the law governed
3. What does Mosaic Covenant fail to do?
The Mosaic Covenant was made with Israel alone and written on tablets of stone; the blood of
sacrificed animals only provided a way to cover their sin. While this process was prescribed and ordained by God,
compliance required the efforts of man. And the process of atonement only covered the sins up to that moment;
failure to atone by sacrificing as God prescribed meant that the Israelite's sins were not covered. The Mosaic
Covenant required that Jews repeatedly make sacrifices to atone for their sins.
A later covenant (the New Covenant) would provide a "covenant
written on their heart," the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, that would remove their sin and make them righteous
before God (Heb 8:10;
9:11-14). The New Covenant provided for yet another blood
sacrifice; the blood of Jesus Christ. With this one time encompassing and supreme sacrifice, man had complete
atonement for his sins; he no longer had to repeatedly "cover" them.
4. Jesus said that the Law was eternal (Matt 5:18)
and Paul said that the Law ended at the cross
(Gal 3:19). So who's right? Does the Law continue today or did
The Mosaic Covenant had two principle purposes. As a revelation of God's code of moral and
spiritual behavior, Jesus tells us that this is eternal and immutable. As a covenant by which man atones for his
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DO YOU REMEMBER losing your baby teeth? For children, it is an extremely important milestone that symbolizes becoming a “big kid!” Losing their first tooth—and every tooth after that—is a special moment, not only because they’ll be receiving a visit from the tooth fairy, but also because it is a sign they are growing up.
Here’s some information to help you and your child get through this phase with a smile!
Let It Happen Naturally
Many parents wonder if they should be trying to get their child’s baby teeth out as soon as possible after they become loose. A child’s baby teeth fall out naturally and oftentimes painlessly if we simply let nature take its course. Usually, a baby tooth becomes loose while a permanent tooth starts coming in. This causes the roots of the baby tooth to dissolve until the tooth is loose enough to fall out painlessly.
It may take a few months for the baby tooth to become loose enough to fall out. You can encourage your child to wiggle the tooth to loosen it, but don’t try to force it. For example, don’t pull the classic “tie your tooth to the door knob” stunt. If the root is only half dissolved, and therefore not ready to fall out yet, it could break and become infected if yanked out abruptly.
Knocked Out Baby Teeth
If your child’s baby tooth was knocked out long before it would have fallen out, it is a good idea to visit your dentist to get it checked out. When a tooth is prematurely knocked out, there is a risk of infection and damage to the permanent tooth underneath.
The Best For Your Child’s Smile
This is an exciting time for your child! Getting presents from the tooth fairy as well as having their permanent teeth grow in are special moments for them. As your trusted dental practice, we are here to make these experiences as positive as they can be for both you and your child!
Thank you for reading our blog. If you have any questions please use the comments section below.
Top image by Flickr user Suzanne Schroeter used under Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 4.0 license. Image cropped and modified from original.
The content on this blog is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of qualified health care professionals with questions you may have regarding medical conditions. | <urn:uuid:32322ff9-e456-4608-81c2-77ace2db834c> | {
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Who Stands to Benefit From Wells North of the Lake?
Why is the state of Florida spending $50 million to build a cluster of scientifically questionable water-storage wells north of Lake Okeechobee?
The broader restoration project known as LOWRP intends to reduce the need for damaging discharges to the northern estuaries while also improving the ecology of the lake. On the surface, that sounds like a promising proposal to address northern water-storage needs required by Everglades restoration — but there are big questions about the unintended consequences.
The success of the project relies heavily on the costly implementation of 80 “aquifer storage and recovery” (ASR) wells north of the lake, projected to store up to 146 billion gallons a year that would then be available for recovery during times of drought.
Concerns abound regarding the large-scale implementation of underground water storage. A review by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) urged caution regarding unknown ecological impacts of the ASR wells and the possible risk of detrimental changes to water quality during aquifer storage.
Water injected into the ground is in danger of contamination by naturally occurring pollutants like arsenic, and research into removing contaminants from recovered water remains unclear, especially at the scale proposed. Floridians are already facing significant human health concerns related to current water management. The last thing we need is to exchange one unquantified poison for another.
With that in mind, the NAS has suggested a more careful approach of phased implementation of the wells, with thorough monitoring and assessment spanning the life of the project. Interestingly, the state found $50 million for this questionable project — expected now to be used to implement the first 10 wells. The project earned heavy support by a group of legislators not normally at the front of the line advocating for water-friendly legislation (Ahem, where have you been all this time, Gayle Harrell?).
In addition to the many questions about the wells’ viability, there are legitimate capacity concerns. Environmental advocates point out that ASR wells pump too slowly to respond to sudden surges from storms, thereby adding a complex layer without solving the system’s biggest problem–toxic Lake Okeechobee discharges.
Even if operated at full capacity every day of the year, the proposed 10 wells are each only capable of holding 1.8 billion gallons. Compare that to the estimated 80 billion gallons of excess water from Lake O discharged to the St. Lucie River between June and October in 2018 and this starts to feel like another expensive, over-engineered boondoggle with little chance of offering the intended relief to communities downstream of Lake Okeechobee discharges.
To accomplish Everglades restoration, there is no question that additional water storage and treatment capacity is necessary throughout the system. But the parched southern Everglades won’t benefit from these wells north of the lake. That begs the question: Who does benefit? As usual, it would be wise to look to the special interests behind the politicians pushing them.
Thanks to you, we’re pushing back against the status quo and fighting to hold government officials accountable for protecting the health of our communities and our water. Please click here to become a bullsugar.org member to help us hold them to their promises to revitalize Florida’s waterways. | <urn:uuid:7dd67a74-e237-43d4-ab3c-6a4180d26654> | {
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Vaccines have the potential to end the COVID-19 pandemic but it may be some time before they can make a major difference according to Data Evaluation and Learning for Viral Epidemics (DELVE), a multi-disciplinary group convened by the Royal Society.
Huge progress has been made through international collaboration with 200 vaccines in development and a number in trials that look promising. However the report, SARS-CoV-2 vaccine development & implementation; scenarios, options, key decisions highlights the challenges involved, including that the initial vaccines might be only partially effective, might not be effective for some groups, might provide only short lived immunity, and have many problems to be solved around rapid scale-up in manufacture, distribution and acceptability.
Dr Fiona Culley of the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College London and one of the lead authors of the report said: “Vaccines are held up as our best chance of getting our lives back to some sense of normality, but we have to be realistic. The path to successful vaccines is filled with potential problems in finding vaccines that will work effectively in the ways we need and in being able to roll them out. Planning now for the different scenarios that might play out will give us the best chance of taking rapid advantage of any vaccines that are proven to be safe and effective.”
Key issues identified in the report include:
Potential differences in the ability of vaccines to protect against transmission and disease.
Likely variability of the effectiveness of vaccines in different populations, such as the elderly.
Possible short half-life of immunity provided by vaccines, meaning that multiple doses or boosters might be needed to achieve immunity.
- Vaccines providing only partial immunity will require higher vaccination rates to achieve the same levels of protection in a population.
- The need to establish systems for careful data collection to monitor population effectiveness and safety.
- The logistical challenges of manufacturing and delivering a global immunization programme are enormous and some of the most promising vaccine candidates (e.g. RNA vaccines such as the candidate being developed at Imperial College, London) are using technologies that have not been manufactured at scale before.
Public trust in a vaccine programme will have to be established and maintained.
The report outlines different ways in which vaccines might be used to fight the pandemic.
- Vaccines could be targeted to high risk groups, such as older people and those with existing health problems, health care workers and other priority groups. This would be the most likely scenario when supplies are limited. In this situation the virus would continue to circulate. Some vaccines might not effective at protecting older people.
- Vaccinating the wider population. The aim here is to reduce transmission until herd immunity is produced and the virus is largely eliminated, although outbreaks might still occur. This would require a vaccine that was effective and acceptable in the majority of people and ideally gives long lived immunity but would require a large number of doses.
- Vaccines could be targeted as part of a rapid response to sporadic outbreaks. This would require a vaccine that offers rapid protection against disease or spread of the virus. It would also require; continuous and effective testing and strong community engagement; and rapid administration and sufficient doses.
The report concludes that, should effective and safe vaccines be developed; global coordination of vaccine purchase, production and distribution is needed; availability, uptake, effectiveness and long term safety must be closely monitored; financial support must be maintained for the development of a second generation of vaccines; the SARS-CoV-2 virus must be closely monitored for vaccine-escape mutations; and that global collaboration to invest in research training and the infrastructure to deliver vaccine programmes is maintained to ensure preparedness for future pandemics.
See more from Data Evaluation and Learning for Viral Epidemics (DELVE). | <urn:uuid:e8f9d891-260a-4fff-ad33-b54b883bbdaf> | {
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After seeing the sand piping bags at Irresistible Ideas for Play Based Learning, I knew it was a sensory activity that Henry would love to get messy doing. Minus the sand, we made our own flour piping bags.
After our Free Play : Stirring and Mixing activity, I couldn’t let Henry miss out on mixing together the flour and water.
Henry measured and scooped flour into a large bowl and added some lots of water.
I poured some of the mixture into ziploc bags and added a bit of paint.
Henry squished the mixture together to mix the color in thoroughly.
I snipped a corner off the bag.
The mixture was very runny, and ran out of the bag immediately.
Nevertheless, Henry squeezed it out and made large colored puddles.
When the red color was added to the blue, it didn’t mix together to make purple.
Instead, it created swirls of colors.
Glitter was added as a finishing touch. (Lots of glitter, the shaker is now empty.)
Henry noticed as some of mixture ran off the paper : “a river!”
The glitter showed the flow of the river.
Henry created his own rivers of glitter all over the paper.
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About 65 million years ago, the dinosaurs and maybe two-thirds of all other species suddenly died out. For three decades, the dominant explanation for this mass extinction has been that it was probably caused by the impact of a large meteorite.
A layer of iridium-rich rock from roughly the right date is the fingerprint that convicted this extraterrestrial killer (iridium is more common in space than in the Earth’s crust). Even the bullet hole has apparently been found in the shape of a 110-mile-diameter crater called Chicxulub off the coast of Mexico. The explosion would have been the equivalent of two million hydrogen bombs.
Yet, over the last 30 years, a rival theory has refused to go away. This one implicates volcanoes—specifically, a huge heap of molten rock known as the Deccan Traps that burst through the skin of the Indian subcontinent at about the same time. The birth of this “large igneous province” would have poisoned the atmosphere and ocean for a long time with sulfur and carbon dioxide, killing many forms of life.
Just last week the champions of this theory came up with stronger evidence and better dating, from fossil plankton. “We demonstrate a clear cause-and-effect relationship that these massive volcanic eruptions were far more destructive than previously thought and could have caused the…mass extinction even without the addition of large meteorite impacts,” Gerta Keller of Princeton University told Science Daily.
But why choose between the theories? Might meteorites have triggered the eruptions? Computer simulations show that sufficiently big impacts can melt the Earth’s crust and even part of the mantle beneath (thanks to changes in the mantle pressure). Sudbury, north of Lake Huron in Canada, sits in the middle of an ancient crater made by a middle-sized meteorite 1.8 billion years ago, which melted much of the crust and left rich nickel deposits. In West Greenland, there is evidence of an impact and a coincident lava eruption, 62 million years ago.
It’s even widely agreed that some of the volcanic effects of a meteorite impact might occur some distance from the impact. An especially large igneous province in the Pacific called the Ontong Java plateau, possibly caused by a meteorite impact, may have torn the crust of South America, resulting in a concentration of iron-rich rocks.
More intriguingly, the crust could bulge, buckle and break at exactly the antipodean point on the planet from the impact. This is because seismic waves from the impact would ripple around the Earth and converge at the opposite side as if focused by a lens. There is a crumpled patch on the surface of Mercury known as the Chaotic Terrain exactly opposite one of its largest craters, the Caloris Basin.
Calculations show that the Chicxulub meteorite was certainly big enough to have triggered eruptions at its antipode. But it seems the Deccan Traps probably lay at least 1,000 miles away from Chicxulub’s antipode at the time, though it would take just a little error in our assumptions about the speed and direction of Mexico’s and India’s motion to put India over the antipode.
Another possibility is that Chicxulub was one of a swarm of large meteorites to strike at the same time, all from a fragmented asteroid or comet. There are roughly contemporary craters in the North Sea and Ukraine and a disputed one off the west coast of India. Against this, recent analysis suggests only a single iridium layer, implying a single big impact.
My hunch is that this is a case of scientific polarization, where all the academic tribal energy has gone into emphasizing one theory at the expense of the other, and little into trying to see them as two facets of the same event: an impact and a consequent eruption, both of which contributed to poisoning the atmosphere and the ocean to the point where few species could survive.
see also: Experts clash over demise of the dinosaurs
The giant impact that shook the Earth 65 million years ago is still sending out shock waves, triggering a scientific feud over whether the event really killed off the dinosaurs.
Efforts to identify what wiped out the great creatures have been confused by evidence of massive volcanic activity in India at the same time, and a fossil record that suggests the dinosaurs disappeared gradually as the Earth’s climate and geology changed over millions of years.
Now a bitter row has broken out on CCNet, a scholarly electronic network, over a paper by Peter Schulte of the Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and colleagues in the journal Sedimentary Geology: they conclude that two cores drilled in Brazos, Texas, provide new support for the much-loved disaster movie scenario…… | <urn:uuid:0bf95c0c-1cd7-48e6-b968-14a935b18c22> | {
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The Italian cousin to ice cream, gelato (jeh-LAH-toh) traditionally has less air whipped into it than its American counterpart, giving it a denser texture.
The Chinese are known to have mixed snow and milk thousands of years ago, but what we’d recognize as ice cream likely originated in Italy. Legend pegs its birthplace to Sicily, a provenance confirmed mostly by Sicilians.
For two and a half millennia before refrigeration, Sicilians cooled their drinks with snow harvested from Mt. Etna, the volcano that dominates the island’s eastern coast. When Arabs conquered the island, they brought the knowledge that adding salt to ice lowers its temperature—and temperatures below freezing are just what’s needed to freeze sweetened cream. By the late 1600s, Sicilian gelato makers were revered throughout Italy, and gelato consumption in Sicily seemed to be a universal pastime—a foreigner remarked that even the poorest Sicilians managed to scrounge up a coin for gelato.
In Sicily, gelato is made from milk thickened with corn or rice starch. Elsewhere in Italy, it’s enriched with egg or cream. Philadelphia-style ice cream (the commercial standard in the United States) is made from cream, milk and sugar, with a fat content of 8 to 10 percent.
French (glace) or custard-style ice cream has an egg custard base. Ice milk and reduced-fat ice creams are products with less fat than standard commercial ice cream. Soft-serve is a reduced-fat product dispensed at a relatively high temperature.
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A closer inspection reveals that these instruments were made by Andrea Amati
(1566), his sons Gerolamo and Antonio (viola, 1615), grandson Niccol (1658), Giuseppe Guarneri (1689), his son Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesu (1734), and Antonio Stradivari (1715).
The great luthiers of 16th to 18th century Italy -- Andrea Amati
, Antonio Stradivari, Giuseppe Guarnieri -- understood subtleties that today's makers have yet to decode.
The Cremona school was founded by Andrea Amati
in about 1560; his grandson Nicolo became the family's most eminent craftsman.
The instrument was made by Andrea Amati
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Data visualization guidelines – By Gregor Aisch – International Journalism Festival
The following tips are from Gregor Aisch, visualization architect and interactive news developer. We’re delighted he could join us to lead the workshop: “Making Data Visualisations, A survival Guide” here at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia.
Watch the Video
See the slides
- Avoid 3d-charts at all costs. The perspective distorts the data, what is displayed ‘in front’ is perceived as more important than what is shown in the background.
- Use pie charts with care, and only to show part of whole relationships. Two is the ideal number of slices, but never show more than five. Don’t use pie charts if you want to compare values (use bar charts instead).
- Always extend bar charts to zero baseline. Order bars by value to make comparison easier.
- Use line charts to show time series data. That’s simply the best way to show how a variable changes over time.
- Avoid stacked area charts, they are easily mis-interpreted.
- Prefer direct labeling wherever possible. You can safe your readers a lot time by placing labels directly onto the visual elements instead of collecting them in a separate legend. Also remind that we cannot differentiate that much colors.
- Label your axes! You might think that’s kind of obvious, but still it happens quite often that designers and journalists simply forget to label the axes.
- Tell readers why they should care about your graphic. Don’t waste the title line by just saying what data is shown.
Colors are difficult. They might make a boring graphic look pretty, but they really need to be handled with care.
- Use colors sparingly. If possible, use only one or two colors in your visualization.
- Double-check your colors for the color blind. You can use tools such as ColorOracle to simulate the effect of different types of color blindness.
- Say good-bye to red-green color scales. A significant fraction of the male population is color blind and have problems differentiating between red and green tones. Use red-blue or purple-green are common alternatives.
- In doubt, use color scales from colorbrewer2.com
- Don’t use the Mercator projection for world maps. The distortion of area is not acceptable. Use equal-area projections instead.
- Size symbols by area, not diameter. A common mistake is to map data values to the radius of circles. However, our visual system compares symbols by area. Use square root to compute radii from data. | <urn:uuid:9641ec62-3ab7-4e64-bc94-b12bc3473eba> | {
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Macroeconomic Policy and Sustainability
Read this article for additional perspective about macroeconomic goals and the inherent conflict among them as they relate to a global environmental context.
The trend in mainstream economic thought about macroeconomic policy has been towards minimalism. In the optimistic Keynesian phase of the 1960's, it was assumed that both fiscal and monetary policy were effective tools for macroeconomic management. But the influence of monetarist and New Classical critiques has led to a gradual erosion of theoretical support for activist government policy. First fiscal policy fell by the wayside, perceived as too slow and possibly counterproductive in its impacts. Then New Classical and rational expectations critiques suggested that even monetary policy was ineffective. Thus the role of government policy has been reduced to a cautious effort not to make things worse but in effect a return to an economics of laissez-faire.
In contrast, a sustainability perspective implies that radical and proactive government policies are required to achieve economic development that is both socially just and ecologically sound. The path of laissez-faire leads to increasing intra- and international inequality as well as increasing environmental destruction. To some extent the course of market economies can be steered through the use of sound microeconomic policies. But the fundamental redirection required for sustainable development cannot be achieved without reorienting macroeconomic policy also.
Many of the basic tenets of macroeconomic policy need to be redefined in the context of current global problems. The objectives of macroeconomic policy should include economic stabilization, distributional equity, broad social goals such as income security, education, and universal health care, and the management of economic growth. There is an increasing recognition that the achievement of social goals is essential to environmental sustainability. Regarding growth, while earlier macroeconomic theorists generally assumed that growth was good, ecological economists such as Herman Daly have suggested that growth should be limited and that a sustainable economic scale, rather than exponential growth, should be the goal of macroeconomic policy.
The time is ripe for a reassessment of macroeconomic theory and policy. The goal should be to provide a theoretical basis for the reorientation of macro policy at the national and international levels, linking efforts to promote local-level sustainability and equity with greening and restructuring of multilateral institutions.
Source: Jonathan M. Harris, https://web.archive.org/web/20140822003824/http://www.eoearth.org/view/article/154331/
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Quite simply, the brain adjusts the color that we see. The vast majority of the time, we are not even aware that this is happening. For instance, when you walk from a parking lot into a building, you are probably not even aware that the color of the light has changed significantly. For photographers, this creates a problem: the brain monkeys with the color we see. Thus, we do not always see color correctly. In particular, when dealing with warm or cool colored light, the brain functions on a principle of constancy. It expects the colors of objects to remain fairly constant throughout the day. If the color of objects changes during the day because the light that is illuminating them changes, the brain tends to filter out at least part of that color change. As a consequence, the color that we see during times of strong warm or cool light tends to be less intense than the color of the actual light and, possibly, less intense than what the camera will see and record. For instance, a casual photographer may not be aware that the light has become warm toned in the afternoon until he gets his film back and discovers that his wife's skin has an odd yellow tone.
Before getting into the tools, the concept of color temperature needs to be introduced. Color temperature is just a way of quantifying the color of light. It is measured in degrees Kelvin (K). Normal daylight has a color temperature of around 6,500K. Warmer light has a lower color temperature. The warm light that occurs late in the afternoon might have a color temperature of around 4,000K. Cooler light has a higher color temperature. The bluish light that sometimes occurs in twilight periods of the day might have a color temperature of about 7,5000K. So, our concept of warm and cool light is tied directly to the color temperature. The more warm (yellow) the light is the lower the color temperature; the cooler the light (blue) is the higher the color temperature.
The temperature of the light illuminating an object is extremely important. Experienced photographers strive to match the light to the photographic subject and the mood that they are trying to create. However, just having the right light temperature is not enough. The photographer must capture that color temperature in a way that correctly portrays what the photographer intends.This is demonstrated in Figures 1 and 2. The image in Figure 1 was shot on a beach during the last few minutes of a colorful sunset. The sunset was backlighting the birds and illuminating the sand with a golden hue. In this Figure, the temperature of the light was correctly set. Figure 2 is the exact same image except that the temperature was deliberately set to an improper value. As can be seen, the entire mood of the image has been lost due to the incorrect temperature setting.
Color Temperature and Digital Cameras
Color temperature is also important for those that use digital cameras. Some of you may be thinking, "I have used digital cameras for years and have never had to worry about color temperature". You may not have worried about it, but the camera did. The camera manufacturers knew that the color of the light would affect the colors delivered by the camera. Therefore, they decided to deal with the problem by designing the cameras to automatically measure the light temperature and to make adjustments as the light changes color. That is why you can shoot in the relatively neutral light with your digital camera in the afternoon and then shoot the next day in the cool light of early morning and still, probably, get reasonable color in both situations -- even though the color of the light was different. Your digital camera corrected for the change in light temperature.
The function on the camera that does this is called the white balance function. When the camera does this automatically, it is called auto white balancing (not surprisingly). So, if the camera does this automatically, why even bother discussing it? Well, it turns out that many cameras have other white balance options than auto white balance. While the auto white balance on the newer digital cameras is pretty good, it is not perfect. In some cases, you may not get the color you expected or desired when using auto white balance. When that is the case, one of the other white balance options may be more desirable. More advanced cameras generally have three types of white balancing: 1) automatic, 2) preset, and 3) custom. When all else fails, photographers that use the raw format can set the white balance manually. Since each of these white balance options has advantages and disadvantages, and can change the colors in an image, it is important to understand each option.
Auto White Balance
With auto white balance, the camera attempts to determine the color temperature of the light and automatically adjust for that color temperature. Many people just leave the camera set to auto white balance all the time. This is certainly the easiest option. Auto white balance works reasonably well under the following conditions: (1) the application does not require absolute maximum color accuracy, (2) there is not a preponderance of one color in the scene being photographed, and (3) the photographer wants adjustments made for the color temperature of the light. It is also a good option for situations where the light changes over time and speed is an issue (e.g., animal photography). This is usually the case for general family and vacation type photography. It is often true for even serious landscape and animal photography. After all, who would even know if the blue color of the sky was off by 2%? Figure 3 shows an image that works well with auto white balance. This image is a landscape shot where reasonable, but not fanatical, color accuracy is required. Also, the image has a mixture of colors without one color dominating the image.
Figure 3: Good Image for Auto White Balance
As mentioned in the previous paragraph, in auto white balance mode, the camera does its best to determine the color of the light and make adjustments. However, the methodology that is used to do this requires that certain assumptions be made. These assumptions do not always match perfectly with the scene being photographed. As a consequence, the auto white balance option does not always yield perfect results. Accordingly, photographers may experience problems using auto white balance when the conditions listed above are violated. Therefore, auto white balance may not be a good choice if:
Absolute Color Accuracy is Required: If you were to photograph the introduction of a new fall line up of a major fashion company at a New York fashion show, you would not want to risk using auto white balance. If the color of the models' outfits in your photographs came out slightly off, you would no longer be employed in that industry.
There is a Lot of One Color in the Scene: The preponderance of one color can fool the auto white balance function into assuming that the light has a lot of that color in it. This can result in an incorrect white balance setting and a color cast in the photograph. | <urn:uuid:ebf76df6-6f9f-4b0a-8911-897a1904eb49> | {
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Nagaland features in the top ten best birding destinations in the world list by National Geographic because of the Amur Falcons stop-over in the state.
Amur Falcons arrive in the state every year in October from Siberia en route their final destination?—?Somalia, Kenya and South Africa. This little raptor has one of the longest migration routes of all birds, up to 22,000 km in a year.
Doyang reservoir is a notable roosting sites where thousands of Amur Falcon congregate every year.
At its peak in October, this stopover may hold the world’s largest concentration of raptors, according to National Geographic.
“Slow down for epic spectacles of nature” in these world wonders for bird watching, it added.
Initially hunted by thousands of people, conservation efforts to protect the bird led to the Nagaland Government tagging the Amur Falcon as “state guest” and making the hunting of the bird a criminal offence under the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972.
Ever since, the state has been able to make a unique turnaround virtually bringing the hunting to an end. The raptors are now regarded as a source of pride.
Over the years, community efforts to conserve Amur Falcons have significantly gone up. The community-led Amur Falcon Roosting Areas Union (AFRAU), for example, lead events in the community related to the falcons, and keep up round-the-clock patrolling efforts during the roosting season.
The National Geographic top 10 list include the South Georgia Island where half a million king penguins, each standing three feet tall, pack shoulder to shoulder in mesmerizing colonies on a hundred-mile-long, glacier-studded island–reached by two days of sailing east of Chile’s Cape Horn; Kruger National Park, South Africa where 517 species of birds are found; Hula Valley, Israel where tens of thousands of common cranes roost; Mindo, Ecuador – a honey trap for hummingbirds; New Guinea Highlands – home to the dazzling birds-of-paradise; Pantanal, Brazil – where the three-foot hyacinth macaws and hulking jabiru storks seem to lurk around every corner during July to August.
Kakum National Park in Ghana also featured in the list where 300 species of birds are found including the little-known Fraser’s eagle-owl, and nine different hornbills; Cape May, New Jersey – where the narrow peninsula at Cape May acts as a bird funnel, bringing in songbirds during their spring and fall migrations; and Broome in Western Australia – The Roebuck Bay, on the coast of Australia’s enormous Kimberley wilderness, might be the shorebird capital of the world.
National Geographic partnered with the National Audubon Society, BirdLife International, and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to declare 2018 the Year of the Bird. This declaration was done to celebrate the centennial of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act passed by the United States’ Congress in 1918 to protect birds from wanton killing. | <urn:uuid:762c000f-7a01-4018-8ece-b14646d40d02> | {
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1/2T Jolene Tchir
1/2T February News
Monday, February 4, 2019
Welcome to February! As the weather continues to be brisk outside, we will be busy as always inside 1/2T this month. Here’s a look at what we will be up to:
February’s Curriculum Focus
- The students continue to work on Literacy Centres in Language Arts. These activities include word work with our word wall words, writing, reading, listening to reading on the iPad and then Guided Reading with myself. We also spend about 5-10 minutes each morning on vowels and letter blends as a class.
- Students continue to write in their Journals regularly. We have also recently started working on good paragraph writing techniques. We have been referring to the Hamburger writing organizer. This helps students visualize a hamburger with lots of toppings when they try to incorporate lots of descriptive details into their writing. We are focusing on having a topic sentence, 3 detailed sentences about the topic and a closing sentence.
- We will also be continuing to practice reading comprehension passages and have quizzes periodically to check for understanding of reading.
- Students are working on their Reading on an app called Reading A-Z. You can download this app on your tablet or phone for students to read home reading books at home on it. You can find your child’s log in information on the sheet that is stapled to this newsletter.
- Please continue to read with your child and record your child’s Home Reading books each night on the log sheet. You can also record any digital books you read with your child. If you need another sheet, please let me know. This helps us reach our classroom reading goal and home reading is so important for student success.
- We spent the month of January learning about Estimation and Measurement.
- We are now focusing on Numeracy. We will be working on math facts, identifying more and less and mental math strategies.
Gr. 1 Science
- Students are currently learning about the 5 senses. We will then be beginning looking at The Needs of Plants and Animals later this month.
- Gr. 1 Social Studies
- We are currently working on a unit called “Looking At My World”. Students are learning the characteristics of urban and rural communities as well as learning how to read maps; specifically a map of Redwater.
Gr. 2 Science
- We are wrapping up our unit of Liquids and are excited to start investigating Boats and Buoyancy later this month. We have an in-school field trip coming up to help kick it off!
Gr. 2 Social Studies
- The Grade 2’s are looking at the people that live in Inuit, Acadian and Ukrainian communities. We are learning about traditions, cultures, celebrations, festivals, artists and performers.
Things to Note:
- Student zipper bags continue to come home nightly with school newsletters, homework calendars, agendas and home reading should also be coming home each night as well for you to check and read through with your child. Thank you for taking the time to do this.
- Also, please take the time to check your child’s grades on PowerSchool. These are updated frequently. Please try to take a look at these prior to Parent/Teacher Interviews in the spring.
- Pending weather conditions, we plan to participate in national Winter Walk Day on Wednesday, February 6th. Parents are welcome to join us. We will be beginning around 2:05 pm.
- Teachers Convention will be February 7th and 8th therefore there will be NO CLASSES those days.
- February 14th we will be celebrating Valentine’s Day. We will be having a small celebration in the afternoon to exchange Valentines if your child has decided to do so. I do ask that if they plan to give out Valentines that they give one to every student in the class so that no one is left out. The students in our class are Kendrix, Rachael, Blake, Presley, Annalee, Ethan, Kenzie, Jace, Tatum, Orian, Thalia, Jasmine, Lilliana, Evan P., Dani, Evan R., Lyndon, Chase, Reid, Dylon, Mrs. Patti, Mrs. Hurst and Mrs. Tchir.
- February 15th students will have the opportunity to try out some Cardboard Arcade games that the Grade 4 students have made for the Town of Redwater’s Family Day event.
- February 18th is Family Day. There is NO SCHOOL.
- Grade 1 and 2 students will be participating in an in-school field trip on February 19th. Grade 1 will be making dreamcatchers from 9:30-11:30 and Grade 2 will be learning about boats and buoyancy from 12:55 – 2:55. We are looking for 2 parent helpers for Grade 1 and 2 parent helpers for Grade 2 for this event. Please let me know ASAP if you are available.
- We are participating in Pink Shirt Day on Wednesday, February 27th. Wear something pink to show your support!
- We are hoping to have a fun outdoor event on February 28 in the afternoon for a Winter Play Day. This will be pending the weather. I will need 1-2 parent helpers for this event. Please contact me ASAP if you are able to help. More information on this day to come.
- Thank-you very much to the parent volunteers this past month who helped us with our Skating days in January. We got on the ice in no time thanks to you!
Mrs. Tchir J | <urn:uuid:9aeca799-5fce-42f3-8955-2400240ad1c7> | {
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Now in the Internet age, most would rarely see the use of fax machine (or facsimile machines). But unknown to
most, this was a helpful tool to send scanned printed material from one point to the next. It is
something essential to businesses where text and/or images could be sent to a telephone number that
is connected to either a printer or an output device that has printing capabilities.
How the Fax Made a Difference in the 1800s
For the benefit of those who may not know, the first fax machine came out in 1842. Scottish clockmaker
Alexander Bain sent the world’s first picture-by-wire using analog telegraph technology at the time.
From there, facsimile machines underwent changes and enhancements, broadening its capabilities that
helped individuals and businesses in various mediums.
The practice of sending and receiving documents or photos have since changed thanks mainly to the
vast solutions the online age has brought upon us. Scanning materials have been made easier and
mobile devices now come with built-in cameras that make it easier to send or share anything either
through some messaging app or through electronic mail. Given these modern solutions, do fax machines
still have used in the modern world we live in today?
Though they may not be the primary machines one would consider when sending documents or photos,
there are still some who use fax machines for daily transactions. There are businesses, government and
academic institutions that still rely on facsimile machines to transact. With the diminishing numbers,
could this technology end up passé like other ones that have been shelved?
This is a common belief by many, particularly the ones who only know of the fax as an ancient device to
aid any business entity. But as far as the impending extinction of facsimile machines, there are studies
that beg to differ. In fact, some say that it is actually growing and not dwindling.
Fax will Remain and Continue to Grow
Based on the latest research made by the International Data Group (IDG), 82-percent of their
respondents believe that fax usage has actually increased with the remaining believing that it has gone
down. Looking ahead, the IDG even adds that usage will continue to grow in the coming years.
A reason behind this is because fax transmission remains a trusted method of securing information
exchange. Unlike sending captured or scanned photos, data or images cannot be iterated – meaning
what you get is what you see.
Such is a reality in the modern world where people can easily alter numbers, words, and images through
the aid of some third-party program. With the lack of authentication in question, this unfortunate
practice leads to deception and misrepresentation, one that would eventually lead to unfair practice and
potentially legal disputes that waste the time of companies.
Hence, it comes to no surprise why companies and individuals should be cautious and wary of captured
or scanned documents that are normally forwarded either in BMP or JPEG format. Some attribute it to
traditional practice by old folks even though it makes plenty of sense when it comes to transacting
Hackers are Kept Out
Aside from the validity angle, there are threats that come with advanced technology. At the top of the
list are the threats that malware or ransomware brings, meaning sent documents to end up as the ticket
for hackers to not only deceive but create mischief within business networks. Faxes from a standalone
machine to another standalone machine cannot be breached by a hacker compared to advanced modes
of delivery of needed materials.
Security is pertinent to most companies and such is a concern to these days. While some claim that they
have IT people on the job, the fact remains that hackers find ways of breaching network securities using
various and complicated means.
Cloud Faxing is Coming
Rather than see it die, fax machines are actually expected to get a reboot. With cloud computing on the
rise, cloud faxing is expected to help any individual or entity ascent to new heights, and right now a lot
of online faxing services are available too.
The improvement will help businesses and individuals the ability to send or receive secure
communications using a fax machine with ease using their desktops. The whole process is done through
the web and includes provisions for developing own protocols such as setting proper permissions and
restrictions to ensure only those authorized personnel are able to view or download confidential faxes.
So the next time you see a fax machine in a room, don’t just deem it as an age-old machine soon to join
other forgotten devices that helped organizations to where they are today. They are still pretty much
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Turning warnings into action
Hazard Note 11 is an overview of the Communications and warnings cluster of research projects. The cluster has five linked studies:
- Connecting communities and resilience: A multi-hazard study of preparedness, response and recovery
- Managing animals in disasters
- Child-centred disaster risk reduction
- Improving the role of hazard communications in increasing residents' preparedness and response planning
- Community understanding of the tsunami risk and warning systems in Australia
This Hazard Note, available to download on the right, details the aim of each project, the work completed to date and the outcomes so far. More information about each project is available on the project pages, including completed reports referred to in the Hazard Note.
Additionally, the short video below features end user Andrew Richards from the NSW SES discussing the main problems the Communications and warnings cluster is trying to solve. | <urn:uuid:9317cff9-75b2-45d4-828e-f42dea964ae2> | {
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The Definition of Marriage
There is no exact definition of marriage in immigration law. Marriage is a subject matter of the laws of the state or country in whichthe marriage was entered. Federal laws usually recognize the validity of a marriage if the marriage was valid in the state or country in whichthe marriage was entered into, as long as the marriage signifies a legal union. Generally, marriages performed legally abroad are considered legitimate in the United States. Keep in mind that marriage laws, which may include residency, documentation, age, and other requirements, vary from country to country. Consular officers can authenticate marriage documents from other countries for a $32 fee.
In June of 2013, the United States Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), a law that defined marriage as strictly between a man and a woman in the eyes of the federal government and barred same-sex couples from seeking federal benefits, such as immigration petitions based on marriage. Because immigration benefits are administered at the federal level, this new recognition allows same-sex couples to seek immigration benefits based on their gay or lesbian marriage, as long as the marriage took place legally in a state that recognizes same-sex marriage. For more information, please see our article on Gay Marriage and Immigration.
The Definition of a Spouse
There is no specific statutory definition of a spouse. Immigration laws define a spouse more by what it is not than what it is. Immigration laws state that a person does not qualify as a spousefor immigration purposes if the marital relationship was created by a marriage ceremony where the parties were not physically presentsuch as a proxy marriage, unless the marriage has thereafter been consummated.
The USCIS always considers the following factors in determining whether a spousal relationship can form the basis for an immigration petition:
1. The marriage must have been valid at the time it was performed;
2. The marriage must still be in existence; and
3. The marriage must not have been entered into for the purpose of conferring permanent resident status on the alien.
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VY Canis Majoris
VY Canis Majoris is a red hypergiant and an irregular pulsating variable star located in Canis Major. The star is the largest known, and also one of the most luminous. It is estimated to be some 4,000 light years away. Unlike many stars, which are part of a multiple star system, VY Canis Majoris is a single star without any known companions.
Although in absolute magnitude VY Canis Majoris is extremely bright, its apparent magnitude is only 7.9, making it invisible to the unaided eye. The first mention of the star is in the star catalog of Jérôme Lalande, on March 7, 1801, as a 7th magnitude star. During the 19th century, additional observations revealed VY Canis Majoris was a red star and that it was fading over time.
In 1976, it was discovered that the star was located at the edge of a large molecular cloud. VY Canis Majoris itself was at the tip of the rim of the cloud and as they both share the same velocity, the star then may be associated with the cloud. Further measurements of the cloud in 2007 revealed it was prolific at creating compound molecules such as hydrogen cyanide (HCN), silicon monoxide (SiO), sodium chloride (NaCl) and phosphorus nitride (PN). The phosphorous molecules are the most interesting to astronomers, as phosphorous is relatively rare in the universe but an essential ingredient to life, as it is part of DNA and RNA, as well as ATP, an energy storing molecule.
The star is classified as M3-m5e-la making it a red hypergiant. The star is estimated to be 500,000 times the luminosity of our Sun. It is estimated to be some 1800 times to 2100 times the size of the sun in radius. If VY Canis Majoris was our star, it would extend to the orbit of Saturn. In fact VY Canis Majoris is so large, a beam of light would take 8 hours to circumnavigate the star. Like all hypergiants, it has a very low density and is only some 30 to 40 times the Sun’s mass.
- ↑ Robinson, L. J. (December 7, 1971). "Three somewhat overlooked facets of VY Canis Majoris". Commission 27 of the I. A. U., Information Bulletin on Variable Stars (Konkoly Observatory, Budapest) (599)
- ↑ Lada, Charles J.; Reid, Mark J. (January 1, 1978). "CO observations of a molecular cloud complex associated with the bright rim near VY Canis Majoris". The Astrophysical Journal (American Astronomical Society) 219: 95-104.
- ↑ http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/V/VY_Canis_Majoris.html
- ↑ http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph?papernum=0610433
- ↑ http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph?papernum=0604253 | <urn:uuid:e30df4aa-0e83-48e7-bfae-793b0c1e537a> | {
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El Paso is located in the foremost western part of Texas. The region is known for drought conditions and there is a lot of interest in water reclamation to irrigate crops. It is imperative that salinity is reduced in the reclaimed water for long-term use so researchers focus on reducing salinity in both the soil and the water.
The use of precision measurement instruments, such as a hydrological monitoring network, assists researchers in understanding the extracted carbon dioxide, water vapor and heat fluxes in crops. Once analyzed, this information is made available to producers via the Internet. Farmers find this information especially useful in developing and implementing drought-contingency plans by finding alternative sources of water.
- Hydrologic research done in the Far West region focuses on maintaining a healthy ecosystem during extreme drought and helps more than 2.5 million people from the West Texas, New Mexico, and along the U.S.-Mexican border.
- Researchers from the Far West region provide the scientific data on a protozoan water pathogen, this data is used to support public health decisions and regulatory monitoring by the EPA.
- The Pecos Algae Research and Development Facility, is developing for the industrial production of biofuels from algae.
- The Algae for Fuel program at the Pecos Station developed and evaluated flocculation processes for harvesting algae to reduce the cost of algal lipid production by 30% in 2012-2013.
Water Resources and Salinity Management
Dr. Girisha Ganjegunte develops methods for freshwater conservation, water-use efficiency, water reuse, and salinity management in arid environments. These practices sustain land productivity and ensure that irrigated agriculture and landscapes remain viable long-term.
Among other projects, Ganjegunte and his collaborators:
- Are working to diversify the water portfolio for agriculture in the Rio Grande Basin.
- Have developed an improved pecan irrigation schedule that could save enough water in El Paso County to supply 12,000 households.
- Have increased cotton yields by 20% and improved cotton fiber quality in high-salinity soil by treating irrigation water with a sulfur burner. The treatment proved highly cost effective over a year, and multi-year studies are underway.
Hydrology and Water Resources Management
Flow patterns in rivers and aquifers have many implications for water resource management and ecosystem health. Dr. Zhuping Sheng studies hydrological processes, water-resources management, managed aquifer recharge, and aquifer mechanics in the El Paso and other arid regions. His theoretical and applied research is relevant for water-source protection, securing water resources during prolonged droughts, and alleviating damages due to droughts and floods.
Sheng collaborates with federal, state, and local agencies and research institutions on numerous projects, including the following:
- Developing a water database and flow model for flood planning and water operations within the Rio Grande.
- Assessing transboundary aquifers between Texas and Mexico.
- Assessing impacts of climate variability on regional water resources.
- Assessing the multimillion-dollar economic impacts of Rio Grande salinity on both agricultural and urban sectors.
- Developing a Far West Texas regional water plan.
Urban Landscape Water Conservation
In the southwestern United States, using marginal-quality water for irrigation helps conserve the region’s scarce freshwater. However, alternative water sources can contain elevated salt levels that would be harmful to crops. To enable the use of these alternative water resources, Dr. Genhua Niu seeks out salt-tolerant cultivars of landscape plants, bioenergy crops, and regionally important crops such as chili peppers, pecans, and pomegranates.
Among Dr. Niu’s many other research projects are the following:
- Smart pesticide spray technology. Collaborating with USDA-ARS, the team is testing this advanced technology in a pecan orchard. By retrofitting a smart-spray controller, the team can reduce spray volume by 50%, drift reduction by 87%, and ground loss by 70–90%.
- Controlled-environment agriculture and hydroponic production of leafy greens and herbs. Growing plants in hydroponics in a greenhouse can reduce water use by over 90%.
- Indoor vertical farming. By growing crops using LED lights without soil and sunlight, indoor farms can be built close to population centers, cutting the length of the supply-chain and the distance of transportation.
Natural Resource Economics and Policy
In today’s changing world, stewards of natural resources must account for diverse factors such as the effects of extreme weather and societal conflicts or the side effects of management strategies.
Dr. Gregory L. Torell leads a theoretical and applied research program on effective management of water, agriculture, and natural resources. Among his research topics are hydroeconomic modeling of river and aquifer systems; the nexus of food, energy, and water; urban and rural water use; risk management; and environmental benefits of ecosystem services.
The program has worked to train and guide water professionals, recommend profitable crop choices to regional producers, and provide science-based recommendations for policy makers. | <urn:uuid:738ccb4e-dbae-4b92-b640-2ea52c78048d> | {
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Mirrors enlarge spaces, they double and reflect, and at night they reveal eerie shadows standing behind you. Mirrors achieve what paintings have been struggling to achieve since the discovery of perspective: their images are a planar phenomenon that revels in realistic depth.
There ought to be something more to the silvery surfaces than physics; they ought to be a gateway to another world.
Our imagination obliges.
Narcissus dies in love with his image, unable to reach it, unable to hold it—the cost of hubris.
Snow White imbues Mirror, Mirror with the power of taking an instantaneous beauty census and reporting it, but no cross-over occurs.
Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (1871), however, goes all the way and sends Alice into the Looking-glass House. Moments before she steps through, she stands on the mantlepiece in front of the huge wall-mirror gazing inside:
You can just see a little peep of the passage in Looking-glass House, if you leave the door of our drawing-room wide open: and it’s very like our passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond.
A question indeed: is the World of the Mirror the same beyond the bits you can see? Which has a similar paradoxical feeling to it like, Does a falling tree make a sound if there’s no one around to hear it, or, What is the sound of one hand clapping? | <urn:uuid:4b7c7efb-d8ce-480d-908b-dc2e2860beab> | {
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English 10 Honors
22 March 2010
A Fickle Identity with Solid Qualities
“We fly from ourselves, from our lives. We are eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces” (Remarque 88). The war altered Paul Baumer drastically from a naïve youth to an experienced man. He went from a kid in an optimistic generation to a soul in a lost generation. Boys such as Paul, the protagonist in All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, were forced to adapt to the rush of war. The suffering, loss, depression, and devastation that came about with World War I ushered the youth of the wasteland generation to find mental releases in order to survive. Few prevailed only because they detached themselves from their mental state and relied solely on instinct. This action of detachment caused Paul’s loss of identity. Remarque implies that identity is reshaped through the demanding experiences individuals have to overcome in life. Paul was capable of this necessary adaptation for survival; however he did not lose every shred of his original identity. Although Paul’s identity was irrevocably altered, his compassion for others and appreciation of beauty from his former self prevailed through the war.
Paul’s self-identity was unalterably transformed from a hopeful youth to a destroyed soldier. An example of this change occurred when Paul said, “the first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in war” (Remarque 88). Paul was altered from the first experience he had in the war. His attitude toward life became pessimistic. The devastation was all new so it took a forceful toll on him. The tone of this quote was negative and accusatory because it showed how the war forcibly ended Paul’s youth; it means Paul was reluctant and not prepared for this change. Everything that meant anything to him in the past became obsolete. The war took full precedence over his life. As a result from the war, Paul explained that “a sense of strangeness will not leave me. I cannot feel at home amongst these things. There is my mother, there is my sister, there my case of butterflies, and there the mahogany piano-but I am not myself there. There is a distance, a veil between us” (Remarque 160). Even when Paul returned home, he felt disconnected from what he related to before the war. Everything that he had once cherished, no longer had priority in his life. He opposed this change in his mental being because he wanted things to return to the way it once was for him. He craved to have his simple youth back. Then he realized that the physical surroundings he left never changed, but he changed. The veil that was between him and the objects that use to make him up was a symbol of the transition from his former identity to his new one. Paul was dramatically altered, yet some traits remained true to his character.
Compassion, a trait that defined Paul, triumphed throughout the wretched war and preserved a miniscule portion of his former self. For instance, Paul’s compassion can be seen when he stated, “I take out my cigarettes, break each one in half and give them to the Russians. They bow to me and light the cigarettes” (Remarque 194). Paul was sympathetic to the Russian prisoners because he understood what they had to go through. He put aside the fact that the prisoners were his enemies and saw them as normal people. Paul shared his cigarettes with his enemies of war, which proves his universal compassion for everyone. Furthermore, he said, “I jump up, eager to help [Kat], I take him up and start off at a run, a slow steady pace, so as not to jolt his leg too much. My throat is parched; everything dances red and black before my eyes, I stagger on doggedly and pitilessly…” (Remarque 289). Paul gave everything to save his comrade Kat. Without hesitation, Paul hauled Kat off regardless of the pain that he himself also endured. To care for others is like an instinct to Paul; instincts are natural and never diminish. This made his compassion a steady quality throughout the war. His mercifulness became mind over matter, to the point where Paul would do any ridiculous action for someone in need. Paul’s compassionate nature was seen through his actions. From these actions, he proves that he is still a part of what he used to be. The war could not take away his potent urge to help people.
Paul’s appreciation of nature came from the core of his being and never faltered. An illustration of this can be found when Paul explained how “to no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier…he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him” (Remarque 55). He personifies the earth as if it were his own mother and protector. In times of terror, the earth protected him as his mother would have sheltered him as a child. He thinks in this viewpoint because it is a comfort to him when nothing else can pacify his pain. While before he would just connect nature with everyday life, during World War I Paul was able to relate nature to war. This mental aspect of Paul’s was never lost. In addition, Paul describes the summer of 1918 as “never has life in its niggardliness seemed to us so desirable as now;-the poppies in the meadows round our billets, the smooth beetles on the blades of grass,…the stars and the flowing waters, dreams and long sleep-O Life, life, life” (Remarque 285). Paul described the prosperous nature in the middle of the war because he was in tune with nature. He related nature to life; it made him love life even though he had gone through countless hardships. His identity was preserved through this connection of love for nature and life. Moreover, Paul’s love for nature can be seen from his observation that “the most beautiful are the woods with their line of birch trees. Their color changes every minute…I often become so lost in the play of soft light…It is when one is alone that one begins to observe Nature and to love her” (Remarque 189). Even though he had to undergo preparation for war, Paul’s mind ventured off and focused on the little details of nature. The artistic side of Paul adhered to him throughout his whole journey. Because nature is omnipresent, he can always be reminded of his love for its beauty.
Compassion for others and love for nature were two traits of Paul’s character that abided to him even after all the ruinous occasions he had to endure through the war. His former identity before World War I would have been completely non-existent if it were not for these two withstanding qualities. Throughout the book these motifs of Paul’s attributes appear because they comprised the essence of who he was formerly. They were crucial factors to Paul as a person, hence why they never disappeared. Identity may be easily altered through life’s demandable struggles, as implied by Remarque, but Paul’s journey demonstrates that identity can never be entirely destroyed. The deepest core of a person remains true even in the toughest of situations. The overall identity of a person may change, but qualities from that person will remain.
Remarque, Erich Maria. All Quiet on the Western Front. New York: Ballantine Books,
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Thoughts of the family tree may not be uppermost in the mind of a person suffering from a slipped disc, but those spinal discs provide a window into our evolutionary past. They are remnants of the first vertebrate skeleton, whose origins now appear to be older than had been assumed. Scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, have found that, unexpectedly, this skeleton most likely evolved from a muscle.
The study, carried out in collaboration with researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Janelia Farm, USA, is published today in Science.
Humans are part of a group of animals called chordates, whose defining feature is a rod of cartilage that runs lengthwise along the middle of their body, under their spinal chord. This structure, called the notochord, was the first vertebrate skeleton. It is present in human embryos, and is replaced with the backbone as we develop, with the cartilage reduced to those tell-tale discs. Since starfish, sea urchins and related animals have no such structure, scientists assumed the notochord had emerged in a relatively recent ancestor, after our branch of the evolutionary tree split away from the ‘starfish branch’.
“People simply haven’t been looking beyond our direct relatives, but that means you could be fooled, if the structure appeared earlier and that single group lost it,” says Detlev Arendt from EMBL, who led the study. “And in fact, when we looked at a broader range of animals, this is what we found.”
Antonella Lauri and Thibaut Brunet, both in Arendt’s lab, identified the genetic signature of the notochord — the combination of genes that have to be turned on for a healthy notochord to form. When they found that the larva of the marine worm Platynereis has a group of cells with that same genetic signature, the scientists teamed up with Philipp Keller’s group at Janelia Farm to use state-of-the-art microscopy to follow those cells as the larva developed. They found that the cells form a muscle that runs along the animal’s midline, precisely where the notochord would be if the worm were a chordate. The researchers named this muscle the axochord, as it runs along the animal’s axis. A combination of experimental work and combing through the scientific literature revealed that most of the animal groups that sit between Platynereis and chordates on the evolutionary tree also have a similar, muscle-based structure in the same position.
The scientists reason that such a structure probably first emerged in an ancient ancestor, before all these different animal groups branched out on their separate evolutionary paths. Such a scenario would also explain why the lancelet amphioxus, a ‘primitive’ chordate, has a notochord with both cartilage and muscle. Rather than having acquired the muscle independently, amphioxus could be a living record of the transition from muscle-based midline to cartilaginous notochord.
The shift from muscle to cartilage could have come about because a stiffened central rod would make swimming more efficient, the scientists postulate.
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Questions About Remote Learning?
!990, Iraq invasion on Kuwait
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We should invade Kuwait, so we can gain access to the Persian Gulf and control of their oil.
That sounds like an amazing idea.
Mr. President I just got news that Iraq is invading Kuwait for their oil supply.
Okay, I will go tell the other nations that are apart of the UN about this news and also tell them that we are going to war with Iraq
For invading Kuwait and destroying all of their oil fields,. You need to destroy your WMDs and stop producing them or face more consequences
Okay fine we will destroy all of are WMDs and stop producing them.
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Queer I Stand
When Persecution Isn't, and What To Do About It
3) Of the roughly three-hundred-year period in which Christianity existed and was not "legal" in the Roman Empire, only twelve years at most during that time were there any organized "persecutions" of Christians as such, mostly in the later 3rd century under the Emperors Decius, Valerian, and Diocletian.
4) Christianity was not looked on favorably by Jews or Gentiles in those early centuries; but while there were certainly some trials of Christians and executions that resulted from them, they were generally cases of prosecution (i.e., illegal behavior on the part of Christians that had nothing to do with their faith or the judgments about it that the Greek or Roman political authorities had), rather than persecution.
The notion that Nero persecuted Christians after the great fire in Rome in 64 C.E. is often cited as the first Christian persecution, but it's somewhat questionable in itself. The only record of it comes from Tacitus around fifty years later, and that is itself anachronistic because the term "Christian" didn't even exist in the mid-60s C.E. Moss even indicates that between the writing of the Gospel of Mark (assumed to have been around 70 C.E.) and the Gospel of Matthew (a decade or so later), there was already revisionism occurring in how Jesus' crucifixion was portrayed as a "noble death" modeled on that of Socrates and others.
(While Moss does not discuss this issue, the Gospel of Mark does set up the followers of Jesus as potentially in danger and apt to be persecuted. If the dating of the text to roughly 70 C.E. is correct, does that mean this was in reaction to the situation under Nero? Conventional wisdom might indicate such, but I find it difficult to even accept that possibility given the new evidence.)
While all of this information is excellent, some of Prof. Moss' points later in the book are even more important. The stories of the Christian tradition being built "on the blood of the martyrs" is a shaky notion at best from a historical viewpoint. Yet it has been used to assert the "Truth" of the Christian faith: no one would show the kind of courage it takes to die a martyr's death if the undeniable "Truth" of the Christian Gospel were not true. It is, therefore, a kind of axiom that if one is persecuted for one's Christian faith, then that demonstrates how "right" one is and how "true" one's faith happens to be. In light of Moss' historical investigation, this is a completely untenable position. Why, then, can't the truth of Islam be claimed by the fact that various Muslim terrorists decide to blow themselves up on behalf of it? Double standards do not work in this case, or in any case where martyrdom is used as proof of a religion's veracity.
While there is much more of value in this book to explore and contemplate, it is this point that I think is the most important—not just for us as Pagans (and queer people!) to know in our dealings with Christians, but to know in our dealings with the rest of the world as well. Let me explain.
We are well aware that in the modern world, Pagans come under persecution on a regular basis. Pagans do get killed in other countries for being Pagan, and we have been attacked (including recently) in our own country for being Pagan. We lose our children in custody battles; we lose our jobs; we lose public accommodations; we lose friends and family who cannot tolerate our religious identities. Persecution is a daily reality for modern Pagans; and, oftentimes, prosecution also results from it.
P. Sufenas Virius Lupus is a metagender and a founding member of the Ekklesía Antínoou (a queer, Graeco-Roman-Egyptian syncretist reconstructionist polytheist religious group dedicated to Antinous, the deified lover of the Roman Emperor Hadrian and other related gods and divine figures). E is a contributing member of Neos Alexandria and a Celtic Reconstructionist pagan in the filidecht and gentlidecht traditions. Follow Lupus' work on the Aedicula Antinoi blog. | <urn:uuid:91d77552-8d21-4988-b7c3-4446072ddd57> | {
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Asteroids that enter Earth’s atmosphere can cause massive explosions.
More than 100 tons of space debris enters the Earth’s atmosphere every day, mostly in the form of dust and tiny rocks that burn up during entry. Occasionally a larger object may strike the atmosphere and produce a fireball as it burns up, but these events rarely cause any significant damage. Very rarely, however, one of these astronomical events can have lasting, and even catastrophic, effects.
In astronomical terms, a single piece of rock floating through the solar system can bear many names. A large piece of rock moving through space is called an asteroid, and if that asteroid breaks up, the smaller pieces may be called meteoroids. If an asteroid or meteoroid enters the Earth’s atmosphere, it becomes a meteor, and if any fragment of the meteor survives entry and reaches the ground, it is a meteorite.
K-Pg Extinction Event
At the end of the Cretaceous Period, approximately 65 million years ago, an enormous extinction event wiped out 70 percent of the species on Earth, including the dinosaurs. Geologists discovered large amounts of the rare mineral iridium in strata from this period, suggesting that the cause of the extinction was a massive asteroid impact in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. While the facts of the event are still in question, the amount and distribution of iridium found suggests that the source was an asteroid approximately 10 kilometers across. The Cretaceous-Paleogene Extinction Event — formerly known as the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction Event — is one of the factors that made mammals the dominant land-based form of life on the planet.
On June 30, 1908, an explosion occurred above Tunguska in central Russia with a force equivalent to 185 times that of the nuclear bomb that devastated Hiroshima. The site of the location would not be explored for another 19 years, due to the harsh conditions and poor survival equipment of the time, but resultant study of the blast site since then indicates that the culprit was an asteroid that entered the Earth’s atmosphere and exploded. According to NASA’s estimates, the object was 120 feet (36 meters) across, traveling at 33,500 miles per hour (53,900 kph) when it broke up.
On February 15, 2013, a massive explosion in the sky rocked Chelyabinsk in southwestern Russia. The blast was powerful enough to shatter windows throughout the area, injuring more than 1,000 residents, and several cameras recorded the event in detail. NASA estimates that the meteor that caused the 500-kiloton blast was 55 feet (17 meters) across, and had a mass of approximately 10,000 tons. Coincidentally, another asteroid passed close to Earth the same day, 2012 DA14, although studies of the objects’ trajectories suggest no link between the two events.
An asteroid event does not always need to be large to be notable. On November 30, 1954, a meteor the size of a softball fell near Sylacauga, Alabama. This particular rock struck the home of Ann Hodges, passing through her roof, bouncing off a radio, and striking her where she lay napping on a sofa. The impact left a sizable bruise on her hip, and marked her as the first known human victim of a meteorite strike. Hodges retained ownership of the meteorite, later donating it to the Alabama Museum of Natural History. | <urn:uuid:8de2dd6c-cc32-4a96-92a8-84c6e5c9ca97> | {
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European Central Bank
|European Central Bank|
|Established||1 June 1998|
|Central bank of|
|ISO 4217 Code||EUR|
|Base borrowing rate||0.00% (Main refinancing operations)|
0.25% (Marginal lending facility)
|Base deposit rate||-0.40% (Deposit facility)|
The European Central Bank (ECB) is the central bank for the euro and administers monetary policy of the eurozone, which consists of 19 EU member states and is one of the largest currency areas in the world. It is one of the world's most important central banks and is one of the seven institutions of the European Union (EU) listed in the Treaty on European Union (TEU). The capital stock of the bank is owned by the central banks of all 28 EU member states. The Treaty of Amsterdam established the bank in 1998, and it is headquartered in Frankfurt, Germany. As of 2015[update] the President of the ECB is Mario Draghi, former governor of the Bank of Italy, former member of the World Bank, and former managing director of the Goldman Sachs international division (2002–2005). The bank primarily occupied the Eurotower prior to, and during, the construction of the new headquarters.
The primary objective of the ECB, mandated in Article 2 of the Statute of the ECB, is to maintain price stability within the Eurozone. Its basic tasks, set out in Article 3 of the Statute, are to set and implement the monetary policy for the Eurozone, to conduct foreign exchange operations, to take care of the foreign reserves of the European System of Central Banks and operation of the financial market infrastructure under the TARGET2 payments system and the technical platform (currently being developed) for settlement of securities in Europe (TARGET2 Securities). The ECB has, under Article 16 of its Statute, the exclusive right to authorise the issuance of euro banknotes. Member states can issue euro coins, but the amount must be authorised by the ECB beforehand.
The ECB is governed by European law directly, but its set-up resembles that of a corporation in the sense that the ECB has shareholders and stock capital. Its capital is €11 billion held by the national central banks of the member states as shareholders. The initial capital allocation key was determined in 1998 on the basis of the states' population and GDP, but the capital key has been adjusted. Shares in the ECB are not transferable and cannot be used as collateral.
The European Central Bank is the main bank of the European Union. The European Central Bank is in Frankfurt am Main. The main goal of the European Central Bank is to maintain price stability, in other words make sure inflation is below 2%. This is done by e.g. controlling the interest rates. It is also the only bank allowed to issue euro banknotes (€), used by 16 of the 28 member states of the European Union (EU).
- Wim Duisenberg (from the Netherlands): 1998-2003
- Jean-Claude Trichet (from France): 2003-2011
- Mario Draghi (from Italy): 2011-present
References[change | change source]
- "ECB: Key interest rates". Retrieved 14 September 2014.
<ref>tag; no text was provided for refs named
- Foley, Stephen (18 November 2011). "What price the new democracy? Goldman Sachs conquers Europe". London: The Independent.
- Robert Reich (July 17, 2015). "How Goldman Sachs Profited from the Greek Debt Crisis". The Huffington Post.
- Statute of the ECB | <urn:uuid:25f5769e-f476-426e-83ff-515f4466e0ce> | {
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Chinese medicine has used ginseng for centuries; practitioners believe the gnarled root of the plant promotes long life, strength and wisdom. There are two main types -- American and Asian or Korean ginseng. Modern medical studies have shown the ancient Chinese doctors weren’t entirely wrong -- ginseng does have valuable properties which can be harnessed as an important skin-care ingredient.
Ginseng is most often included as an anti-aging ingredient in facial moisturizers. Several medical studies have shown its effectiveness in fighting wrinkles due to ginseng's ability to boost skin-firming collagen. The herb also acts as a whitener, giving the skin a brighter and more youthful appearance.
Heal and Calm
Ginseng is a valuable commodity in herbal medicine for its ability to encourage skin regeneration. Wounds and burns are known to respond well to the healing properties of ginseng, making it a useful ingredient in creams for sunburn and other skin irritations such as razor rash. Medical studies have shown ginseng can speed up the healing of burns, even in low doses; smoothing ginseng cream onto injured skin boosts its natural repair and infection-fighting functions. | <urn:uuid:787c41b0-3157-4269-ac87-07e05aa312c9> | {
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15-year-old Hannah Herbst says she has a way to save lives using a resource close to her Florida home: the ocean.
In her entry video for the 2015 Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge, Herbst details exactly how her invention, "The Ocean Energy Probe," works and how she can use it to "aid the world's energy crisis."
It's this brilliant invention that awarded her the title of "America's Top Young Scientist" and $25,000.
The probe focuses on using the "uncollected potential current energy" in the Boca Raton Intracoastal Waterway to turn the water's currents into electricity.
And it could have a huge impact:
"She calculated that if her design were scaled up, she could generate enough electricity to charge three car batteries at once in less than an hour. That's enough energy to power saltwater desalinization pumps to provide a source of fresh water for developing countries. It could also power blood centrifuges for medical use, or coastal beacons for ship navigation," BI reports.
Business Insider also writes that Herbst plans to take her winnings and donate them to her friend in Ethiopia, her school, and her college fund.
Congratulations are definitely in order.
Be sure to watch her full video below:
(H/T: Business Insider) | <urn:uuid:ea5f2631-5ef7-4449-90fa-1bff36dd25f8> | {
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The front of the Zapata County Courthouse
Location within the U.S. state of Texas
Texas's location within the U.S.
|Founded||January 22, 1858|
|Named for||Colonel Jose Antonio de Zapata|
|o Total||1,058 sq mi (2,740 km2)|
|o Land||998 sq mi (2,580 km2)|
|o Water||60 sq mi (200 km2) 5.6%%|
|o Density||14/sq mi (5/km2)|
|Time zone||UTC-6 (Central)|
|o Summer (DST)||UTC-5 (CDT)|
Zapata County is a county located in the U.S. state of Texas. As of the 2010 census, its population was 14,018. Its county seat is Zapata. The county is named for Colonel Jose Antonio de Zapata, a rancher in the area who rebelled against Mexico.
Zapata County comprises the Zapata, TX Micropolitan Statistical Area.
The South Texas Oil Boom included wells drilled in Zapata County in the early 1920s through the work of Laredo industrialist Oliver Winfield Killam, a Missouri native who once served as an Oklahoma state legislator. It is east from the Mexico-United States border.
As of the census of 2000, there were 12,182 people, 3,921 households, and 3,164 families residing in the county. Zapata County is estimated to be the eleventh fastest growing county (+15.8%) in the state of Texas since the year 2000 (based on % of population change). The population density was 12 people per square mile (5/km²). There were 6,167 housing units at an average density of 6 per square mile (2/km²). The racial makeup of the county was 84.07% White, 0.41% Black or African American, 0.32% Native American, 0.19% Asian, 0.04% Pacific Islander, 12.64% from other races, and 2.33% from two or more races. 84.78% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race.
There were 3,921 households out of which 43.20% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 64.20% were married couples living together, 13.00% had a female householder with no husband present, and 19.30% were non-families. 17.50% of all households were made up of individuals and 10.30% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 3.10 and the average family size was 3.52.
In the county, the population was spread out with 33.00% under the age of 18, 10.00% from 18 to 24, 24.10% from 25 to 44, 18.60% from 45 to 64, and 14.30% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 31 years. For every 100 females there were 96.80 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 93.70 males.
The median income for a household in the county was $24,635, and the median income for a family was $26,722. Males had a median income of $26,294 versus $14,579 for females. The per capita income for the county was $10,486. About 29.30% of families and 35.80% of the population were below the poverty line, including 46.10% of those under age 18 and 21.30% of those age 65 or over.
Zapata County in most elections overwhelmingly supports the Democratic Party. However, on three occasions, it gave record-setting margins to Republican Presidential nominees when it delivered the highest percentage of the vote of any county in the nation to them. First in 1896 when it gave 96.3% of the vote to William McKinley, though he lost Texas as a whole (30.8%), but won the national election. The second time in 1908, when it went 99.1% to William Howard Taft, despite losing the state to William Jennings Bryan with just 22.4%. The third and final time was in 1912 when it again gave incumbent President Taft 80.9%, but against the state and nation's preference for Democrat victor Woodrow Wilson (Taft only received 9.5% statewide). It lasted voted Republican for President (Warren Harding) in 1920, and has consistently voted Democrat for the office since 1924.
In the November 4, 2008, general election Barack Obama defeated John McCain, the presidential winner in Texas, by 1,939 votes (67.7 percent) to 918 (32 percent). Incumbent President Obama again won in 2012 over Mitt Romney by 2,527 votes (71.3%) to 997 (28%), but lost the state overall.
All of Zapata County is a part of the Zapata County Independent School District.
There are no incorporated areas in Zapata County and hence no municipal governments.
The western side of the Jesus Trevino Rancho building in the San Ygnacio Historic District; note the structural similarity to Los Corralitos Building
A two-story historic residence in San Ygnacio on U.S. Highway 83 business route
Entrance to Zapata County Cemetery from Farm-to-Market Road 496 | <urn:uuid:36db0577-f54d-413e-ac48-3a7add7800e2> | {
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Niall Firth, technology editor
(Image: Sipa Press/Rex Features)
When disaster strikes, Twitter is always the first to know.
Now a new study has demonstrated that using Twitter updates and online news websites to track a disease outbreak is not only quicker than more traditional methods - it's just as reliable, too.
In a study published in the January issue of the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, researchers studied the progression of a cholera epidemic in Haiti after the
devastating earthquake in 2010.
The study's lead author Rumi Chunara, a research fellow at Harvard Medical School, used an piece of software called HealthMap to monitor how many times the epidemic was mentioned online during the first 100 days of the outbreak - from October 20, 2010 to January 28, 2011. Her research team also looked at the number of posts on Twitter that mentioned the word cholera.
They discovered 4697 online reports via HealthMap in eight different languages, and 188,819 tweets. Using this data they were able to monitor how the outbreak was progressing. They found that information gleaned from online sources in this way closely matched the official reports, gathered by surveying hospitals and health clinics. The only difference - and huge advantage - was that the online data was available in almost real time, nearly two weeks before the official reports from the govenerment health ministry were available.
"The techniques we employed eventually could be used around the world as an affordable and efficient way to quickly detect the onset of an epidemic and then intervene with such things as vaccines and antibiotics," says Chunara, who works at the Children's Hospital Boston.
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Cancer is currently among the leading causes of death in the United States.
In 2018 alone, over 1.8 million new cases of cancer were reported and out of these, over 600,00 people died from the disease.
According to the National Cancer Institute, at least 39.6% of American adults will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lives.
Fighting cancer is not easy. Any cancer survivor will tell you for free that fighting cancer is a long and painful process. In fact, pain is often reported as the greatest fear amongst people who are suffering from cancer, not death.
Table of Contents
- 1. Why opioids are administered to cancer patients
- 2. How cancer patients become addicted to opioids
- 3. It is possible for patients to become addicted even when taking the right dosage?
- 4. Signs of opioid addiction
- 5. How cancer patient can prevent drug addiction
The pain that cancer patient experience depends on many factors including the type of cancer that the patient is suffering from, the stage of cancer, cancer treatment and the individual’s ability to tolerate pain.
Multiple studies have shown that most cancer patients suffer from mental health disorders like anxiety and depression. This is mainly attributed to server pain that they are experiencing. That is why pain management is crucial for cancer patients.
Most patients who don’t have a solid pain management strategy usually end up getting worse because they misuse the treatment given.
Coping with pain is a huge challenge for most cancer patients. They have to balance between keeping their pain in check and using the right medication that doesn’t harm their body.
Prescription drugs are usually prescribed to cancer patients to help manage pain. These painkiller drugs are usually strong opioids such as morphine, methadone, fentanyl, hydromorphone, and oxycodone.
Opioids are not only powerful painkillers but they are also very addictive. Many cancer patients taking opioids to manage pain are usually at risk of addiction.
According to the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 185,000 cancer patients in the united states die from overdoses related to opioids. This figure is set to increase even further if something is not done soon.
Why opioids are administered to cancer patients
The dilemma that many oncologists face is determining which medication to use to manage pain amongst cancer patients. One symptom that is common to all types of cancer is pain. Health care professionals are well aware that opioids are highly addictive.
However, they have no choice but to recommend it to cancer patients because so far, it is the only treatment that has proven to be effective in the management of pain. Cancer patients are likely to experience severe or acute pain.
Opioids painkillers are therefore necessary to help them in pain management so that they can live a comfortable life. With proper guidance and oversight, patients using opioid painkillers are less life to get addicted.
In most cases, patients who get addicted to this drug are those who use without proper guidance. A research conducted by the National Institute on Drug Abuse revealed that approximately 25% of cancer patients using opioids painkillers to manage chronic pain usually end up misusing them.
Out of this number between 10 and 12% usually end up develop opioids disorders.
How cancer patients become addicted to opioids
In order to understand how cancer patients become addicted to opioids, it is important to first understand how opioids work. Opioids are pain-relieving drugs that work by attaching special protein known as opioids receptors.
These receptions are found in various organs in the body including the spinal cord, gastrointestinal tract, and the brain.
When special proteins are attached, they lower the perception of pain. However, this reward usually come at a cost and that is why most people usually end up being addicted to this drug.
The human brain is designed to naturally associate itself with activities that are pleasurable and life-sustaining. When opioids get into the brain, they not only reduce the perception of pain but they also trigger euphoric feeling.
To some patient, this feeling can stick because the brain thinks that it is a great feeling that is necessary just like food and water. Excessive use of opioids drugs can lead to overwhelming stimulation which eventually leads to addiction.
With time, the body can become drug tolerance forcing the patient to take more dosage in order to achieve the desired effect. The situation can become worse to a point where the patient cannot function without taking the drug.
Many addicts who attempt to stop taking drugs are usually met with powerful withdrawal symptoms such as anxiety, excessive sweating, stomach aches, insomnia among many others.
This is because the nerves are already used to having opioids. So, when the drug is taken away all of a sudden, the body is forced to respond with lots of unpleasant reactions.
It is possible for patients to become addicted even when taking the right dosage?
This is a huge concern for many cancer patients who are using opioids for pain management.
Multiple studies have shown that it is possible to get addicted to opioids even when the patient is taking his dosage as prescribed by the doctor. Most people who get addicted to this drug don’t do it intentionally.
They just find themselves addicted. Every cancer patient takes opioids with the aim of managing pain and beat cancer, not to get addicted.
However, the constant use of this drug usually leads to obsession and eventually addiction. So, following the doctor’s advice to the later while taking opioids does not guarantee the patient that he will not be addicted.
There many other things that the patient has to do to avoid succumbing to addiction.
Signs of opioid addiction
Addiction is when an individual feels that his body cannot function well without using a particular drug.
One of the main signs that show that the patient is addicted is using medication more than what the doctor has prescribed even though the patient knows very well that doing so is harmful to the body.
Another major sign of addiction is when the patient craves to use the drug. For instance, if the drug is usually administered to the patient after every 4 hours, the patient will do anything to get that drug before the recommended time.
Other signs that indicate that a person is suffering from addiction include:
- Taking the medication with the sole purposing of feeling high
- Taking the medication more frequently than what the doctor recommends
- Using the drug alongside other drugs without the doctor’s consent
How cancer patient can prevent drug addiction
Opioids addiction is common among cancer patients. However, just because cancer patients are vulnerable to opioid addiction does not mean that they cannot use pain management drugs. Without pain management drugs, then most cancer patient could be living in excruciating pain.
Pain management drugs like opioids are very important because they help cancer patient live a comfortable and normal life.
The difference between being addicted and not being addicted lies in the approach that the patient uses when using these drugs. In this section, we are going to discuss how cancer patient can prevent drug addiction.
A. Talk to your doctor frequently
The reason why most cancer patients get addicted to drugs is that they don’t communicate frequently with treatment providers. Fighting cancer is not easy. It is not something that you can fight all by yourself.
You actually need support from relevant health care providers for the entire period that you will be using opioids painkillers to ensure that you are using the drug correctly. If you feel anything unusual, don’t hesitate to discuss it with your doctor.
It is very difficult to get addicted to cancer medication if you are under the close watch of your doctor. The doctor will closely monitor your progress and spot any abnormalities before they progress to a point of no return.
Therefore, ensure that you communicate frequently with your doctor when under opioids painkiller drugs.
B. Involves your close friends and family
If you are under opioids medication, ensure that you involve your close family and friends. This way, you will have extra eyes to watch over you.
It is very difficult to notice that you are misusing your medications until when it is too let. However, if you involve your family and friends, then you will have an extra eye to watch over you. Let your family know the dose and frequency of your medication.
This way, they will be able to detect and raise an alarm when you start misusing the drug.
C. Take your medications as prescribed
Although this does not guarantee that you will not get addicted, the fact that you are able to follow instructions as prescribed will go a long way in showing your commitment to fight cancer. Make sure that you clearly understand the medication that you are taking including its possible side effects.
If you have any questions, then don’t hesitate to consult your doctor. Don’t alter your dosage without consulting your doctor.
Also, don’t break the drug before consuming it because it will alter the absorption rate and lead to overdose. Don’t mix the drug with other medications without your doctors’ knowledge.
Also, don’t mix your medication with illegal drugs or alcohol. If you have a good support group and take your medication as prescribed by the doctor, then you will not fall into the trap of addiction.
D. Join cancer support groups
This is a very important factor that many cancer patients usually overlook. If you are taking cancer drugs that are very addictive, then one of the best ways to prevent addiction is by joining a cancer support group.
Cancer support groups are specifically designed to help cancer patient cope with anything related to cancer including drug addiction. You will not only benefit from the fact that you have like-minded people to share your experience with, but you will also get to know what you need to do to prevent drug addiction.
Drug addiction is a huge concern among many cancer patients and it is widely discussed in cancer support groups. You will get to meet people who have suffered from drug addiction and know what they did to overcome the problem.
You will also get to learn little known tricks and tips on what do to prevent addiction. You will also have access to resources that will guide you on how to avoid drug addiction.
One of the main reasons why cancer patients get addicted to cancer medication is because they think that being diagnosed with cancer means a death sentence.
A cancer support group will help improve your quality of life. It will help to reduce emotional distress, anxiety, depression, and fatigue that often lead to addiction.
E. Don’t use anyone else medication
If you are fond of following someone else medication, then you need to stop immediately.
You don’t know the specific condition that the person is suffering from and why the doctor prescribed that particular medication to him.
Following other individual medication can easily lead to addiction. Just because the medication is working on your friend or relative does not mean that it will also work for you.
In fact, you may end up getting the worst results. Instead of using other people’s medication, consult your doctor to get your own medication.
F. Try alternative therapies
You don’t have to use opioids to manage cancer pain. There are many other effective therapies that you can also use to manage your pain.
In fact, due to the increased side effect of opioids, more and more doctors recommend the use of alternative therapies such as exercise, physical therapy, massage and use of non-opioids painkillers to manage pain.
This option is highly encouraged for people who have a history of addiction. Again, consult your doctor before combining your treatment plan with other medications.
In conclusion, recovering from cancer is not a walk in the park. It comes with its own challenges and pain. To overcome drug addiction, you need to first believe in yourself.
You also need to follow your doctor’s advice and have a strong support group. Regardless of the treatment plan that you choose, remember that your ultimate goal is to get back to your feet, not to fall prey to addiction.
Don’t let cancer determine your fate. It is not over until it is over. Be strong and fight to the end. Feel free to call us if you need any advice on how to prevent drug addiction as a cancer patient.
Keith stopped using drugs and drinking alcohol more than 10 years ago. He now spends a lot of time writing and editing content for this website. His mission is to assist people who are also looking to embrace addiction recovery. Keith believes a key way to accomplish this goal is through his writing. | <urn:uuid:62baa155-8543-493c-90cf-d6f886f0ef93> | {
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Rudolf Jaenisch’s work with mice has translated into advancements in stopping the spread of cancer and neurobiological diseases in human beings. Jaenisch’s research has greatly expanded the understanding of mammalian cloning and embryonic stem cells.
Jaenisch collaborated with geneticist Beatrice Mintz to develop the first genetically-modified mice. Their research showed that DNA could be introduced into mouse embryos and the characteristics of that DNA could then be transferred to the mouse’s offspring.
That work and other Jaenisch research, the American Association of Cancer Research says, “revolutionized cancer biology by providing invaluable tools with which to investigate the complexities of cancer in vitro and in vivo.’’
Jaenisch has said his work in epigenetics holds great promise for developing cures to some of humankind’s worst diseases.
Jaenisch, born in Germany, earned a doctorate in medicine from the University of Munich in 1967. Jaenisch is a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a founder of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. He formerly headed of the Department of Tumor Virology at the University of Hamburg and is a member of the Academy of Sciences.
By Robert Warren | <urn:uuid:c5d848b0-4b63-4f38-89d1-7d79a59a971d> | {
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On this page, you will find information on why dogs do the following: -
turning its back,
walking in a curve,
slow tail wag.
Turid Rugaas, an internationally renowned and respected trainer of and author on dog behaviour, has studied wolf and dog behaviour for many years and has researched 30 different body postures and movements that they use to communicate with each other. She calls this communication "Calming Signals" (see her book on the subject - "On Talking Terms with Dogs").
Turid recognised that dogs and wolves are by nature non-confrontational animals within their pack and that they use these signals to diffuse stressful situations, communicate amongst themselves, and even display these signals to other species in their effort to avoid confrontation. I would like to take this opportunity to thank her for proof reading this page.
Dog communication is mainly visual, unlike humans who rely heavily on sound to communicate. If you begin to watch and understand how dogs communicate with each other, and how they try to communicate with the humans around them, you can start to forge a closer and more understanding bond with dogs and lead a more harmonious and happy life together.
There are several other excellent YouTube Clips about dog body language.
Here are a few of the calming signals that you might like to look out for (not only with your own dog but those you see around you in your everyday life) -
THE SIGNALS THAT ARE WRITTEN IN GREEN CAN SOMETIMES BE EFFECTIVELY USED BY A HUMAN TO CALM DOGS DOWN, PARTICULARLY WHEN THEY SHOW symptoms of stress
AVERTING THEIR EYES (which may progress to) TURNING THE HEAD are two of the most frequently used calming signals that dogs use to avoid conflict. Some dogs can diffuse a situation by just averting their eyes, while others give the more pronounced signal of moving their head (which is more effective at a distance). The amount of movement involved to get a response is fascinating to watch when dogs are communicating in this way. If these subtle signals are ignored (eg. by humans, under-socialised dogs who do not recognise these signals, over-enthusiastic adolescent dogs or children), the dog has to "shout" the signal "louder" by making it even more pronounced - turning its body away as well.
The "loudest shout" of all is TURNING ITS BACK and LYING DOWN
WALKING IN A CURVE * is another strong calming signal and is another variation on those described above. It is used when dogs are approaching one another (and sometimes when approaching humans) rather than walking in a direct straight line towards them (which dogs and wolves regard as being aggressive and "ill-mannered" body language). This is why so many dogs have behavioural problems when being walked on a short lead while their handlers are walking in a straight line - the dogs do not have the opportunity to curve away as other dogs are coming towards them. These dogs become anxious and feel unable to escape the situation; they often become defensive, "insulted" by the other dog's "bad manners" (walking directly towards them), and resort to aggressive behaviour in order to resolve the problem. If, however, the dogs met off the lead they would instinctively walk in large wide curves past one another, allowing the other dog its own personal space so that it felt comfortable, and would gradually make shallower curves until the dogs met sideways on to each other.
Sometimes it is impractical to let dogs off the lead (eg. on a path by a road). In these cases both dog owners should begin making a wide curve (eg. one crossing to the other side of the road) well before the dogs are due to meet one another. This curving will greatly reduce both dogs' apprehension and stress levels, and you will soon find that the dogs will lessen the depth of the curve as they relax and pass each other. When dogs are given the opportunity to curve because the handler walks with them in a curve rather than in a straight line, it is possible to gradually change their aggressive behaviour as their confidence grows on how to approach other dogs - even when on a lead.
* DISTANCE and SPEED are two very important factors when walking in a curve. Some dogs feel threatened by another dog (or human) approaching them too closely, or at too fast a pace (see SLOW MOVEMENT below). Be aware of this when walking your dog on a lead and follow your dog's instinctive curve - he will know the correct distance to be from the other dog and at what pace to walk.
YAWNING - Dogs often use yawning as a calming signal (particularly when they feel apprehensive and stressed) either to calm themselves, or those around them (eg. when meeting strangers; when humans/dogs are noisy or show too much emotion/excitement, etc). Because this is another obvious signal, many dogs recognise it as a calming signal when done by humans. Your yawns may be more effective if you - exaggerate the yawn; make a soft yawn sound; stretch your arms forwards and downwards as if in a "play bow". An example of how humans can use yawning to communicate with dogs is when a dog is worried as we approach it - crouch down sideways to the dog, yawn, turn your head away and patiently let the dog approach you in its own time.
RAPID BLINKING OF THE EYES is a more subtler signal that dogs use. This is a particularly useful signal for humans to use when confronted by an angry dog. By blinking, yawning and averting our eyes we can calm the dog down without having to alarm it by any sudden movements.
Markedly SLOW MOVEMENTS and SUDDEN CHANGES OF DIRECTION are other calming signals that dogs can use to resolve conflict and reduce either their stress levels, or those they are with (whether animal or human). An example of these behaviours is when a handler gives a command such as "Come" to the dog and it feels overwhelmed by their human's emotional state (which can be heard in their voice). The dog will very slowly walk towards them often accompanied by lip licking, averting their eyes, slight turning away of the dog's head, and even changing direction at the last moment rather than go closer to the handler.
An extreme variation on these is FREEZING ON THE SPOT,with the dog suddenly coming to a halt in a sit, stand or down. The leader of the pack often LIES DOWN with his belly on the ground in the background as a calming signal to the rest of the pack when situations are getting out of hand. These are very strong calming signals.
LICKING OF THE LIPS OR NOSE is one of the first calming signals a puppy uses. When puppies play they sit, look away and lick their lips to calm the other puppies down. Many dogs use this signal but you must watch very carefully or you may miss it! Black or dark faced dogs often use this signal as the contrast of their pink tongue against their dark muzzle is very obvious for other dogs (or humans) to see. This signal is so subtle that many dogs do not recognise it when it is done by humans as there is less colour contrast between our face and the tongue. Another reason may be because our tongues are not as long as dogs!
STRETCHING THE FRONT LEGS (bowing) out in front but not bouncing from side to side (which is an invitation to play) is another calming signal. It is sometimes possible for humans to use this signal but is only really effective in specific situations (eg. While yawning, or when they are kneeling on the floor).
Some dogs have learnt that humans use SMILING as a form of human Calming Signal. The dogs copy this behaviour when they approach humans (and even other dogs!) as it usually results in attention (a very powerful Life Reward), being stroked and the humans smiling back. Our little bitch (BB) has perfected this signal to such a degree that she smiles and squirms up to strangers she meets knowing that this behaviour will be rewarded with their attention and petting. She is so good at it that she can charm even the most nervous person into bending down and stroking her - even those who have always been afraid of dogs! Be aware, however, that some dogs perceive human smiles as an aggressive signal (particularly when our teeth are visible as we smile). Also do not confuse dogs baring their teeth (a Warning Signal) with "smiling". A dog bares it's teeth when it feels threatened and cannot cope or escape a situation - it feels its only option to resolve the situation is aggression. If the baring of teeth is ignored the dog will resort to snapping or biting.
Another subtle signal that we can use as well as our dogs is WALKING BETWEEN two dogs (or a dog and a human) when stressful situations are building up. For example, if two dogs are coming into conflict another dog may walk between them to calm the situation down. This splitting up acts as a temporary barrier, breaking the dog's thought processes and giving it the opportunity to turn and walk away from the situation. Always approach the dogs from the side or from the back when you are walking between them; never approach them from the front as this is confrontational behaviour.
Dogs can use a variety of REDIRECTED BEHAVIOUR - see Symptoms of Stress (eg. Sniffing (see below), drinking, relieving themselves, scratching, picking up a stick, "digging" or investigating a particular place) to diffuse a situation. We can use behaviour such as tying our shoelaces (sideways on to the dog), looking at our watch, humming or singing softly, blowing our nose etc.PAW LIFTING, as though the dog is begging, is another calming signal. It is often accompanied by head turning and lip licking.
SNIFFING the ground, although a very natural and enjoyable behaviour for all types of dogs, may on occasions be used by dogs as a calming signal when either the dog or those around it are stressed. It is a classic canine form of redirected behaviour which dogs use to diffuse awkward situations (eg. Wolves sniff the ground when they are close to prey to give the impression they are not interested in them and are calming the animal's fears). You will often find that dogs sniff the ground when approaching a strange or fearful dog - they will avoid eye contact, sniffing the same places that the other dog has either sniffed or left his scent, and curve around one another until they feel confident enough to approach each other. We humans find this sort of calming signal too difficult to copy - our noses are too far from the ground and are too delicate!
JUMPING UP is a perfectly friendly calming signal that many young dogs do to show appeasement and welcome to people. This is mimicking the behaviour of the young puppy when it greeted its mother and licked her face to stimulate her regurgitated and chewed food while it was being weaned. As Life Rewards explains, if we look at the dog or speak to it we are giving the dog attention and it will keep repeating the behaviour as it is so rewarding. However, if we CONSISTENTLY use calming signals (eg. Turning away, averting our eyes) and do not speak to the dog, it will stop jumping up at people as there is no reward of attention.
SLOW WAGGING OF THE TAIL FROM SIDE TO SIDE - So much of a dog's body language, showing a variety of different emotional responses, is done with the movement and position of the dog's tail in conjunction with its other body signals. I give the analogy of docking a dog's tail as being similar to cutting out a human's tongue - communication is very difficult without them! Carefully watch your dog's tail movement and position when it is displaying other more obvious calming signals - you will then come to recognise this movement as a calming signal in itself.
Now watch this You Tube Clip and see how many
Calming Signals you can see the dog doing
Puppies are born with the instinctive ability to display both calming and threatening signals - these are their only form of communication. Turid's research has found that dogs that have been born blind, dogs that have never seen any other dogs, or dogs that have never known their mother, will also display these signals. The signals can be suppressed from fear of the consequences, but they will come back when given a chance as they have always been part of the dog's underlying instinctive behaviour.
For instance, from the first day puppies will yawn when picked up, as the inability to touch the ground with their feet is very scary (as it is to most animals). Puppies and wolf cubs are only picked up by their mother when they are old enough to leave the den. Before then they spend all of their time very close to each other and protected. If their mother is very calm and laid back it may take 3 or more days for the puppies to start to use calming signals as they have little need to use them.
They need to be introduced to being handled by humans at an early age, so as to desensitize them to this experience. Do this by gently sitting by their side, petting them by stroking them on the side of the body nearest to you, while using a nice gentle voice. Increase the amount of time and petting as the puppy gets used to the experience. Make sure that very young puppies have their feet on your arms for reassurance when you pick them up, as they need to feel the "ground" beneath them at this age. Gradually change how you pet them and approach them so that they can cope with most situations.
One of the benefits of calming signals is that an older dog with good calming signals can be introduced into a puppy class to teach them to how to communicate with other dogs. When puppies pester older dogs the older dogs often sniff the ground to calm them - the puppies follow their example and stop pestering them. Lack of early socialisation with a variety of dogs can leave a puppy ignorant of other dogs' body language and make it either fearful, aggressive or prone to confrontation with other dogs as it does not display "polite" calming and greeting signals when meeting them.
TO SUM UP THIS WEB PAGE -
Without realizing what we are asking our dogs to do, we often push our dogs into situations that they find stressful and threatening (eg. Making dogs walk on their lead past each other in a straight line). Dogs living in multi-dog households spend a lot of time and energy giving out calming signals in an attempt to disperse the tension that has built up within this "man-made" pack - none of the dogs have the opportunity to escape or relax from the situation and have to rely on these body signals to avoid confrontation. Dogs also use calming signals for friendliness, and when the owner is overexcited and the dog feels compelled to try to calm the human down.
Calming signals are part of a dog's heritage and are extremely valuable. If another dog is close by, dogs feel the need to watch each others' calming signals for reassurance and to avoid conflict. If a dog doesn't use these signals a well-adjusted dog will use even stronger signals to try to illicit a response. Some dogs have forgotten or are scared to use calming signals (eg. If these signals were ignored in the past by humans and the situation became more confrontational). However, when these dogs are given encouragement and the opportunity to use the signals they can build up the confidence to communicate not only with other dogs but with humans as well.
This web site has been written by Sally Hopkins (unless the author of the web page is stated otherwise).
Dog-Games Copyright 2004 - 2015 All Rights Reserved | <urn:uuid:b13508e7-34e7-4623-b507-f8d511c164f9> | {
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The United Nations food agency, the Food and Agriculture Organization, says international food import bills could pass the one-trillion-dollar mark in 2010.
In its latest Food Outlook report, the FAO issued a warning to the international community to prepare for harder times ahead unless production of major food crops increases significantly in 2011.
Food import bills for the world's poorest countries are predicted to rise 11 percent this year and by 20 percent for low-income food-deficit countries.
The FAO report says that passing a trillion dollars, the global import food bill will likely rise to a level not seen since food prices peaked at record levels in 2008. Abdolreza Abbassian is a senior FAO economist.
"Prices of nearly all food crops have increased rather sharply over the last few months. Some of those commodities prices have risen almost to the levels, as high as we had in 2008, which is associated with the year where we had a food crisis," said Abbassian.
The FAO report says with the pressure on world prices of most commodities not abating, the international community must remain vigilant against further supply shocks in 2011 and be prepared. Abbassian says there are more than 80 countries that are classified as low-income and food-deficit countries.
“The prices we are talking about today are 40-60 percent higher than last year. Therefore for countries that are poorer among those 80 and they are many, at least 30 countries, it is a huge burden to continue buying from the world market at these current high prices,” says Abbassian.
FAO revised its forecast for world cereal production downward, saying it would shrink by two percent. The agency, which had previously forecast a 1.2 percent expansion in production, said supply shortfalls due to bad weather were to blame.
The Food and Agriculture Organization said most cereal stocks are expected to decline sharply, and production should be increased to meet consumption. It added that only rice reserves are expected to rise. The report said wheat, maize and soybean production should be increased. | <urn:uuid:a1ccf898-f5ec-49e0-a159-73db375f855b> | {
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(also killdeer plover)
Definition of killdeer in English:
A widespread American plover with a plaintive call that resembles its name.
- Charadrius vociferus, family Charadriidae
- However, there were plenty of resident shorebirds hanging out in the lagoon as well, such as the American coot, killdeer, and American avocet.
- Mallards, ring-necked ducks, killdeer, marbled godwits, and peregrine falcons settle in for the fall.
- In addition, killdeer, pipits and some shorebirds visit the grassy areas of landfills.
Mid 18th century: imitative of its call.
Definition of killdeer in:
- British & World English dictionary
What do you find interesting about this word or phrase?
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Maths trainer: Surface's area and circumference (Geometry1).
Description: Generation of exercises concerning the calculation of the area and the circumference
of geometrical surfaces. You may choose what to calculate (Flächeninhalt = area, Flächenumfang = circumference) and also what
the exercises generated are about, in particular if they should include examples that need the usage of the Pythagorean Theorem
to do the calculation, as for example on the screenshot below, where h has to be calculated from b. Help text, including the
formulas (in German, as the application itself) included.
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On February 24, 2022, Russia launched an operation to invade Ukraine. An operation that shakes Europe and that has and will have consequences for the Old Continent. Lepetitjournal was interested in the economic consequences of the war with Portugal.
Portugal indirectly affected by the war in Ukraine
The war in Ukraine affects various sectors of the economy of European countries. However, in Portugal, according to financial supervisors, this impact is “limited”. The reason is that Portugal has few direct ties with Russia and Ukraine. Indeed, Banco do Portugal (BoP) reports that between 2015 and 2019, only 0.4% of Portuguese goods exports were destined for Russia and Ukraine. As for the import of goods, 2% for the same period fell on Russia and Ukraine.
In particular, the conflict does not greatly affect Portugal in terms of trade in goods, although recently, for example, wine producers exporting to Russia have expressed concern about the continuation of this situation. As the world is increasingly interconnected with the globalization of trade and European construction, these are rebound effects that nevertheless risk affecting Portugal. The main economic partners of the country are located in Europe, it is logical that the country will suffer in any case.
Energy and food sectors weakened by Russian invasion
Where conflict creates a direct problem in the country is in the energy and food sectors. Russia is the largest supplier of gas to Europe, and its oil production is also very high. In Portugal, 12% of energy imports came from Russia between 2015 and 2019. Ukraine, for its part, is the largest producer of cereals in Europe, especially corn. Almost 17% of Portuguese grain imports during the study period came from Ukraine.
Thus, price increases are to be expected. The balance of payments predicts inflation at 4% by 2022. The price of a barrel of oil is likely to rise to $103.6 (93.26 euros) within a year and then fall in subsequent years. Thus, energy is one of the first sectors affected by the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.
Disruptions in the Portuguese industrial sector
João Amador, Deputy Director of the BdP, points out the difficulty in obtaining goods and arranging transport from companies. Therefore, it will affect production. However, this impact must be qualified as the adaptability of national companies has been demonstrated during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The weakening of the energy and food sectors also has consequences for the production system. The difficulty of supplying companies, in particular with the increase in associated costs, leads to an increase in consumer prices. Thus, the purchasing power of the Portuguese is falling, according to Joao Amador.
Financial Market Uncertainty
There is also a vicious economic circle. In connection with the economic sanctions imposed by the European Union against Russia, which Portugal has joined, households and businesses are logically reducing the consumption of goods and services from Russia. As uncertainty reigns in the market, household consumption forecasts are lowering. This leads to a delay in business investment, which paralyzes the economy. Therefore, progress and growth slow down. In this sense, economic growth forecasts have declined. The BoP Economic Bulletin, published on 21 March 2022, estimates Portugal’s economic growth rate in 2022 at 4.9%, compared to 5.8% before the invasion.
Tourism has impacted…positively
The war in Ukraine is clearly affecting tourism in the neighboring countries of Ukraine and Russia. This decline in the attractiveness of these countries increases the attractiveness of Western countries.
Portugal sees tourism, one of the key sectors of its economy, gaining momentum again. Thus, the country becomes a popular destination, and the situation in the East encourages travelers to turn to other countries. According to Travelsat, a company that measures the satisfaction of tourists with their trips, the attractiveness of Portugal has increased by 3% compared to the situation before the pandemic. The British are, in particular, those who move the most towards Portugal in response to the war in Ukraine.
Therefore, we are waiting to see what will be the evolution of the tourism curve in the medium term in the country in general and in particular in relation to the number of French tourists traveling to Portugal. | <urn:uuid:930b8653-df4a-45f1-b5cd-9aac48944898> | {
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Up the Intensity and Strengthen your Heart
Up the Intensity and Strengthen Your Heart
Written by: Samantha Granger, Health Fitness Specialist
Did you know that being physically active helps to prevent heart disease and stroke, which are the number 1 and number 5 causes of death in the nation? Our heart is a muscle, and just like other muscles in our body it becomes stronger with exercise. As the heart increases strength, it can pump more blood throughout the body with each heart beat and maintain working at the highest level for a longer period. To improve overall health, as well as cardiovascular health, the American Heart Association recommends getting a minimum of 150 minutes of moderate exercise, or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise throughout the week. The recommendations also include two days per week of moderate to high-intensity muscle strengthening activity for added benefits.
Regular exercise provides a wide range of positive effects on the heart and the circulation of blood. These benefits include improving cholesterol, decreasing fat levels, reducing inflammation in the arteries, weight loss, and helping to keep blood vessels open and flexible. Those who maintain a healthy lifestyle have about a 45% lower risk of developing heart disease than those who do not. Mentioned above as one of the benefits, a healthy lifestyle helps to change your cholesterol and lipid levels in a positive way. This occurs when moderate or high intensity exercise take place. Studies have shown a correlation between higher intensity exercise, and greater improvement in cholesterol levels.
This month, our content writers focus on the effects of a weak heart as well as tips to increase your heart muscle. Strengthen your heart with our exercise of the month, jumping rope. Also, learn how to love what you eat with our healthy eating tip. | <urn:uuid:d357463a-bd13-40d8-8ed3-58dd8647680d> | {
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By Clare Jarmy, Head of Philosophy, Religion & Ethics
The Commission on Religious Education (CoRE) recently reported its findings after a long period of consultation with stakeholders. CoRE was set up by the RE Council, but was run independently of it. As independent schools, we are unlikely to feel the full force of CoRE’s effect, but times are changing for Religious Education, and independent schools will surely find themselves influenced by the findings.
These key recommendations are likely to have the biggest effect on independent schools:
1. Religion & Worldviews
CoRE recommends that ‘Religious Education’ should be renamed ‘Religion & Worldviews’. Do not be fooled: this change of nomenclature is no mere windowdressing. The Commission recognises the huge change that has taken place in religious affiliation in the last fifty years, and argues that the subject must evolve to recognise this. Around 50% of adults in the UK have no religion. 41% identify as Christian. Focussing on ‘The Six World Religions’ does not reflect the religious (or increasingly nonreligious) nature of the UK. By introducing ‘worldviews’ to the subject, and requiring students to handle concepts such as secularism as well as religion, it is hoped that the subject will be useful in reflecting the conversations students will need to have in their lives as well as at work. Even though most schools in the Independent Sector tend to call this subject ‘Religious Studies’ and not ‘Religious Education’, this name change, and everything it implies, is causing controversy. The term ‘worldview’ is defined by the report, but not closely enough. Couldn’t a worldview mean any set of beliefs that are in some way foundational to the way someone sees the world? As Philip Robinson, the RE Advisor to the Catholic Education Service puts it, “communism, libertarianism, capitalism, nationalism and socialism are just a few nonreligious worldviews; should they be taught in RE too? It…seems hugely ironic that the answer to declining religious literacy should be to teach less religion.”
2. National Entitlement
Provision for RE has been found to be patchy in recent years, and increasing academisation of maintained sector schools has diminished the amount of RE being taught. 34.1% of academies with no religious character were not teaching any RE in KS3 in 2015; 43.7% at KS4. CoRE recommends that a National Entitlement is created to ensure that all students can access the subject. This might cause some independent schools to examine the provision they have in place themselves. Whilst there is no suggestion that independent schools will have to conform, the National Entitlement confirms the importance of the subject, and some independent schools might see fit to follow suit.
3. An ‘Academically Rich & Rigorous’ subject
A key aim that has come out of CoRE is a call for an “academically rich and rigorous” approach to the subject. Religious Education has historically served many goals: community cohesion; spiritual development; formation of world view; tolerance and understanding of others. Academic rigour has not always featured at the top of priorities in RE for successive governments. In the independent sector, there has been a longer history of an academic approach as the term ‘Religious Studies’ implies. The sector has a wealth of expertise amongst its teachers: expect to meet lots of textbook authors at the ISRSA Conference! Having argued that this is a challenging and academic subject, CoRE recommends that Religion and Worldviews is finally given the status that, as such, it deserves. For its whole history, RE has been a bit different, in its legal status, in its provision, in its locally agreed syllabuses, and, many would argue, this was for some good reasons. Yet, its unique place on the curriculum has also made it a bit of an outlier, difficult to categorise, and difficult, for some, to take seriously as an academic pursuit. Recent government decisions, namely the exclusion both of RE from the EBacc and of short-course RE from schools’ performance figures, have hugely undervalued the subject and led to a dramatic downturn in uptake nationally at GCSE. The Russell Group’s list of ‘facilitating’ subjects, where Religious Studies A Level is conspicuous by its absence, also hugely underestimates the usefulness of the subject for all sorts of areas of further study. CoRE requests that the Russell Group re-examines its list. Here, CoRE could have direct implications for the independent sector: some Heads of RS feel under an unfair amount of pressure to justify their subject, purely because of its seemingly arbitrary exclusion from that list. If CoRE’s recommendations are taken up, we can hope for better resourcing for teacher training, and hence higher quality applicants for jobs in both sectors. We can hope that students expect RS to be taught, and to be taught well, as it so often is by colleagues in the independent sector. More thanthis, we can hope, finally, to be understood for what we are. We are teachers of a valuable, viable, challenging and rigorous academic subject: so much more, but nothing less.
This article was originally published in Independent Schools Magazine. | <urn:uuid:feff9256-9978-4a56-8f7e-8ea2d33ba9d7> | {
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Volume 5, Number 18, January 31, 2000
North Carolina and South Carolina are two different states. They have some things in common, but each is a unique state.
Read each statement. If it is true about both states, put a check mark in front of that fact. Use an encyclopedia or other reference source(s) to help you.
1_____ The English were the first Europeans to settle in what is now this state.
2_____ It shares a border with the state of Georgia.
3_____ The state borders the Atlantic Ocean.
4_____ All state legislators serve two year terms.
5_____ It was one of the thirteen original states.
6_____ The state sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War.
7_____ The name of the capital starts with the letter R.
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CLARKSBURG - For the second year in a row, the California Department of Water Resources is considering putting rock barriers in place to protect the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta from ocean tides that bring in salt water.
The rock barriers would stretch across three spots along the inner delta -- two channels near Clarksburg and one at the False River near Oakley.
"That gives us an opportunity to basically back up some of that water into our reservoirs so we can reserve it for both supply needs and fishery needs later in the fall," DWR Day-Delta Office Chief Paul Marshall said.
The plan was considered in 2014, but spring rains made it unnecessary. Marshall said there is a one percent chance the barriers will be built this year. If the barriers are needed, construction would begin in May or June.
"A couple of good storms similar to what we got back in December, we would be out of the woods," Marshall said.
The idea was tried back in the extreme drought of 1976 and 1977 -- concrete barriers succeeded in keeping salinity out of parts of the Delta and kept more water stored and available upstream.
The plan is specifically intended to keep major Delta water users from ending up with brackish, or too-salty water.
Farmers would also benefit from fresher water that won't damage crops or soil.
But some farmers on the Delta's west side worry they might lose out on their fresh water supplies, especially if they are below the barriers being installed.
"There's definitely gonna be an adverse affect," Wind Turbine Vineyards owner Dennis Wong said.
Wong's fields are above the proposed barrier locations to the north; but, he worries that salinity and less water flow below the barriers could be big trouble for others.
"They could be ruined, quite frankly, you know. No water, no crops and it could ruin the land as well," Wong said.
Marshall acknowledges water levels could be lower, but he said culverts at the barriers would provide for farmers down river.
"It would be fresh water for them, and they would still be able to stay in production," Marshall explained. "But, we would still be able to divert more water over to the eastern side of the Delta and keep it fresh." | <urn:uuid:38633167-a28d-4a03-b41c-cba50c578dbc> | {
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It’s no secret that learning how to code is one of the most important things you can do when it comes to the beginning or furthering practically any career in programming and technology.
The only problem a beginner often faces is that there are seemingly countless programming languages to choose from, which makes it exceedingly difficult for aspiring or even seasoned programmers to know which language to learn next.
But if you haven’t already learned Python, look no further. Python is no doubt one of the most powerful and popular programming languages on the planet, and the Complete Python Programming Bundle will teach you everything you need to know for more than 90% off at just $79.
With seven modules led by expert instructors, this bundle walks you through everything from the fundamental aspects of Python to its most advanced tricks and tools.
Whether you’re just embarking on a career in coding and development, or you are a veteran programmer who wants to add another language to your tool belt, this instruction will teach you how to work with function parameters, manipulate variables, build your own programs from scratch, work with Python Django (a go-to resource for creating web apps and user interfaces), and much more.
There are also modules that teach you how to create your own games—through lessons that show you how to build clones of popular games like Flappy Bird—and work inside a series of popular web development platforms to create advanced user interfaces and security parameters inside any website.
There’s even a module that teaches you how to harness the power of Python for advanced data analysis and manipulation—an increasingly important field in a variety of subfields of technology.
You can get the skills you need to work with one of the world’s most valuable programming languages with the help of the Complete Python Programming Bundle for just $79—which is discounted over 90% off its original price for a limited time. | <urn:uuid:10f79ac5-62cc-4d50-a1dd-3906a3e6c88e> | {
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The Black Tigers (Tamil: கரும்புலிகள்) were a wing of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a militant Sri Lankan separatist organization. They were specially selected and trained LTTE cadres whose missions included mounting suicide attacks against military and civilian targets. Civilian targets included places of worship, ports, airports and assassinations of high-profile Indian and Sri Lankan dignitaries, among them Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa. From their formation in 1987 until the defeat of the Tamil Tigers in 2009, more than 330 Black Tigers made suicide attacks on land and sea, mostly in Sri Lanka.
The first Black Tiger was Vallipuram Vasanthan, who drove a small truck laden with explosives into a Sri Lanka Army (SLA) camp in Nelliady, Jaffna peninsula, on 5 July 1987, killing himself and between 39–100 Sri Lankan soldiers. Immediately afterwards, regular LTTE cadres followed up, overwhelming the stunned SLA soldiers. This attack was hugely effective, and proved vital in the dismantling the Sri Lanka Army’s Operation Liberation.
During the earlier phase of the Tamil Tigers’ military campaign, it did not possess the heavy conventional weapons required to attack large camps. To mount such an attack, costly weapons such as artillery pieces, missiles, and fighter-bombers would have been needed – weapons that the LTTE could not afford to purchase. As a result, they decided to resort to asymmetric warfare, creating a special wing to make up for their inadequate weaponry. Consequently, it is not the act itself—killing by suicide—that was the Black Tigers' original or even main aim, but rather the military impact and its strategic consequences.
After 18 May 2009, following the death of LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran, the Black Tigers ceased to exist, along with other LTTE fighting formations.
|This section does not cite any references or sources. (July 2014)|
In May 1991, a woman Tiger who had allegedly been raped by Indian Peace Keeping Force soldiers blew herself up, killing former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, along with 16 bystanders.
In July 2001, 14 Black Tigers attacked Bandaranaike International Airport, causing an estimated of $350 million USD worth of damage, mainly to military and civilian aircraft.
Black Tigers were drawn from the ranks of the LTTE. Those who wanted to join wrote letters to Velupillai Prabhakaran, the founder and leader of the LTTE. According to the LTTE, Prabakaran evaluated the applications, examining the applicant's particular skills, the kinds of missions he or she had been involved in, their motivations and their family situations. All these factors were considered in deciding whether he or she could become a Black Tiger.
The Black Tigers were believed to be the most effective unit of its kind in the world. Additionally, it was secular, as was the rest of the LTTE. Up to the defeat of LTTE, the Black Tigers carried out 100 to 200 missions. The Black Tigers operate in three distinct ways: conventional combat on land and at sea, guerrilla attacks, and assassinations or bombings. The majority of these attacks involved military objectives in the north and east of the country. Relatively speaking, there were fewer operations in the south, where most of the Sinhalese live, especially in the capital city, Colombo, although such attacks often engaged high-profile targets and attracted much international publicity as a result. The last such attack was on government politicians during a Muslim festival.
- A total of 322 Black Tigers have been killed in action from Captain Miller's death in 1987 until 30 June 2007, according to the Tamil Eelam Heroes Secretariat in Vanni.
- Gambetta, D. (2005). Making sense of suicide missions. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. p. 50. ISBN 978-0-19-927699-8.
- Schalk, P. (1997). "Resistance and Martyrdom in the Process of State Formation of Tamililam". Martyrdom and Political Resistance: 61–83.
- De Figueiredo Jr, R.J.P.; Weingast, B.R. (2001). "Vicious Cycles: Endogenous Political Extremism and Political Violence. Institute of Governmental Studies Working Paper, 2001-9". University of California, Berkeley.
- Balasingham, Anton. (2004) War and Peace – Armed Struggle and Peace Efforts of Liberation Tigers, Fairmax Publishing Ltd, ISBN 1-903679-05-2
- Narayan Swamy, M. R. (2002) Tigers of Lanka: from Boys to Guerrillas, Konark Publishers; 3rd ed. ISBN 81-220-0631-0
- Pratap, Anita. (2001) Island of Blood: Frontline Reports From Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Other South Asian Flashpoints. Penguin Books, ISBN 0-14-200366-2
- de Votta, Neil. (2004) Blowback: Linguistic Nationalism, Institutional Decay, and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka. Stanford University Press, ISBN 0-8047-4924-8
- Pape, Robert A. (2005) Dying to Win : The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. Random House. ISBN 1-4000-6317-5
- Sri Kantha, Sachi (2005) Pirabhakaran Phenomenon, Lively COMET Imprint, ISBN 1-57087-671-1
- Alex Perry (12 May 2006). "How Sri Lanka's Rebels Build a Suicide Bomber". Time magazine.
- Frances Harrison (26 November 2002). "'Black Tigers' appear in public". BBC News.
- Sudha Ramachandran (10 July 2004). "Tigers send a deadly message". Asia Times Online.
- www.aruchuna.net/details.php?image_id=2780 Photograph of "Captain Miller", the first LTTE suicide bomber | <urn:uuid:3457462a-adf1-4e5f-9fc7-87f79b56f671> | {
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Pursuing economic growth at the expense of the environment is no longer an option as Europe faces “unprecedented” challenges from climate chaos, pollution, biodiversity loss and the overconsumption of natural resources, according to a report from Europe’s environmental watchdog.
Europe was reaching the limits of what could be achieved by gradual means, by making efficiencies and small cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, with “transformational” change now necessary to stave off the impacts of global heating and environmental collapse, warned Hans Bruyninckx, executive director of the European Environment Agency.
“Marginal efficiency gains are not enough – they are not working to bring down emissions,” he said. “There is also a higher cost to marginal efficiency gains, if we keep investing in that. If we focus on making current technologies more efficient, there are limits. If we stick to what we know, it may seem easy but it doesn’t work in the long term.”
The EEA scored 35 key measures of environmental health, from greenhouse gases and air pollution, waste management and climate change to soil condition and birds and butterfly species, and found only six in which Europe was performing adequately.
“Incremental changes have resulted in progress in some areas but not nearly enough to meet our long-term goals,” said Bruyninckx. Further marginal changes would grow only more expensive, he predicted, making large-scale change necessary. “We already have the knowledge, technologies and tools we need to make key production and consumption systems such as food, mobility and energy sustainable.”
Wholesale changes could include banning internal combustion engines and scaling up public transport, abandoning fossil fuels in favour of 100% renewable energy, stipulating that products must be designed and manufactured to create no waste, and changes to our diets and agricultural production. Environmental goals could not be seen as separate to or lesser than economic goals, and accepting environmental damage as an inevitable cost would lead to ecological collapse, Bruyninckx warned.
The old system – of “continuing to promote economic growth and seeking to manage the environmental and social impacts” – would not deliver the EU’s long-term vision of “living well, within the limits of the planet”, the report warned.
The report, known as European Environment – State and Outlook (SOER), is a comprehensive study produced every five years and details the health or otherwise of all natural systems across EU member states and others including Norway, Switzerland and Turkey. The 2020 edition was brought forward to inform the incoming European commission as they discuss a promised “green new deal”, and for delegates at COP25, the UN conference on climate change currently taking place in Madrid.
There has been little improvement since the last report in 2015, despite promises, policies and targets, according to SOER 2020. Fewer than a quarter of protected species and only 16% of habitats are in a good state of conservation. Reduced pollution has improved water quality, but Europe will miss by a long way its goal of having a “good” rating for all water bodies by 2020. Though air quality has improved, about a fifth of the urban population live in areas where concentrations of pollutants exceed at least one EU air quality standard, and 62% of ecosystems are exposed to excessive nitrogen levels.
Global heating has added to the risks to health. For instance, Bruyninckx pointed to the melting ice and permafrost in the far north as a little-considered danger. “Russia has buried some very toxic chemicals beneath the ice and we expect melting ice to release some of them,” he said. “Some chemicals are also sensitive to heat, so if we have more heatwaves that is a risk too.”
Read more: Guardian | <urn:uuid:2bd79b63-0cdf-4c99-b915-efbd44ad553a> | {
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What happened after Col. Gould was killed and what was its historical significance?Adapted from Wikipedia:
With twelve dead and twenty four wounded, the Americans withdrew under Benedict Arnold's orders (he had assumed command after General Wooster was mortally wounded).
After encamping for the night just south of the village, the British forces departed the next morning, leaving six houses and the Episcopal Church in flames. General Tyron's forces attempted a quick return to the invasion fleet...having reached near exhaustion and militia now swarming around their vulnerable position. Artillery reinforcements out of New York and further militia out of New York and Connecticut joined Arnold's forces.
The April 28 retreat proved to be more costly to the British than the a smaller retreat from Concord to Boston in 1775. From behind convenient stone walls, trees and buildings the militia fired continually at the British marching on the road leading south to the beach. Arnold placed his forces so that they commanded both roads by which Tryon might try to gain the safety of the invasion fleet's ships. The exhausted British were now outnumbered and vulnerable to capture, but reinforcements of Marines from the fleet prevented a devastating American attack. Arnold attempted to rally his men to repulse the Marines and close in on Tryon (he had two horses shot from under him that day). but the bulk of the American forces fell back or fled. In the cofusion the British troops slipped aboard their ships. Final British casualties were approximately two hundred, including ten officers. The Americans lost about twenty killed and forty wounded.
Although Tryon's raid on Danbury and actions in Ridgefield were British successes, the engagements by American forces at the Battle of Ridgefield and the proceeding influx of American forces into the area would deter the British from ever again attempting a landing by ship to attack any inland colonial strongholds during the war. Our ancestor did not die in vain. | <urn:uuid:b734a512-7f4f-42cf-9751-dc3c62001ee0> | {
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Q: What trends in civil engineering or construction are driving innovation in building materials?
Rick Bearden: Enhancing the earthquake resistance of civil structures - buildings and bridges - in seismic zones is an ongoing global focus; civil engineers and designers are continually searching for ways to improve structural safety and protect human life, so the drive for innovation is constant. One noteworthy trend is research into the use of ultra-high-strength rebar (reinforcing bar) in RC (Reinforced Concrete) structures. Specifically, researchers are exploring how to enhance the inelastic behavior of reinforced concrete structures to prevent them from failing catastrophically in seismic events; for that, their findings suggest dramatically increasing rebar strength. A great example of this is from Japan, where they currently have rebar capable of withstanding yield stresses up to 1,275 MPa (megapascals), which is just astronomical compared to the 275 – 520 MPa range of conventional rebar.
Q: Explain how reinforced concrete (RC) members can serve to enhance a structure’s earthquake-resistance.
Bearden: Rebar gives a reinforced concrete beam or column its ductility - or ability to deform under tensile stress. By nature, concrete performs well when loaded in compression, but it is brittle and cannot handle tension caused by bending or buckling. Reinforcing with steel rebar adds elastic properties, allowing an RC member to handle some bending load, returning to its original state when the load is removed. Required elastic properties of RC members are well-defined in current building and civil engineering codes around the world. In an earthquake event, however, a structure is subject to enormous lateral forces that can drive it into an inelastic condition, where elongation or yielding prevents it from returning to its original stress state. This is when structural failure occurs. Ultra-high strength rebar serves to enhance a structure’s performance in the inelastic range, enabling it to avoid complete failure even when badly damaged.
Q: Describe the ongoing research into increasing the strength of rebar and the ductility of RC members.
Bearden: Reinforced concrete design is a well-established engineering discipline, but the focus on new, ultra-high-strength rebar is prompting renewed research into the fundamentals, such as the chemical formulation of the high-strength alloys, rebar manufacturing processes, and how the rebar is deployed within RC members. Mechanical testing plays a critical role in all facets of this research: the materials that comprise the rebar and the mechanical splices that join rebar lengths together must be characterized; assembled rebar/mechanical splice components must be tested for strength and fatigue; and the RC members themselves must be tested to understand how rebar strength, concrete strength and placement of the rebar within the RC member can enhance earthquake resistance. As you would expect, this research is focused in seismically active areas, including Japan, Russia, Ukraine, the United States, Korea, India and China. However, universities around the world, not just those in seismic activity zones, are also contributing fundamental research in this area; a good example is the University of Minnesota, which is part of the NEES (Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation) consortium.
Q: How does the development of high yield strength rebar impact mechanical testing requirements?
Bearden: Obviously, if the yield strengths are increasing then the tension forces will increase, so mechanical testing requires much higher force load frames for testing rebar and splicing materials and assembled components. To underscore this, in the last couple years we’ve seen inquiries for 1 million pound - even 2 million pound - load frames for testing rebar. This is new, until now demand for rebar tests systems has always been in the range of a half million pounds or less. And of course, the accessories that come with the test system – grips, fixtures, sensors – are also affected by higher force requirements. The use of structural test rigs for the assembled RC beams will evolve, too, as the renewed research into inelastic behavior will change testing objectives and focus. Another impact is that researchers are investigating not only static, tension-only behavior, but they want to conduct dynamic, through-zero tension-compression fatigue tests, as well.
Q: What mechanical testing solutions can MTS offer to meet such high-force requirements?
Bearden: To meet higher force materials and components testing requirements – rebar, mechanical splicing and rebar/splicing assemblies – we offer a complete selection of turnkey load frame solutions that include controls, application software, grips, fixtures and accessories, and hydraulic power and distribution, For dynamic tension-tension or tension-compression cycling, we have a complete family of fatigue-rated, four-column servohydraulic load frames with an extremely broad range of force capacities, spanning 1.0 to 30.0 MN.
To test full-scale structures - beams or columns with high-strength rebar integrated – we provide turnkey systems, comprising fatigue-rated civil test actuators, high-force swivels, large portal frames or reaction structures, controls, application software, accessories, and hydraulic power and distribution, if necessary. Typically, these systems are used to conduct three- or four-point bend tests and are more than capable of driving high-strength RC test articles to failure.
Q: Looking to the future, will any new technology be required to meet these needs?
Bearden: We need to make sure the MTS portfolio continues to include what the customers require. There are opportunities for further innovation in our hydraulic wedge grip technology. The forces required for testing high-strength rebar are pushing the envelope for our popular side-loading grips, which enable relatively quick and easy specimen installation. However, that design doesn’t scale up easily when you reach the million-pound range because the stresses in the grip housing get extremely high. Our closed-housing 641 style grips are a viable alternative for testing in this range, but don’t offer the same ease of installation. So, we’re investigating possible refinements to our side-loading wedge grips. In addition, we’re also exploring the potential advantages of different types of measurement technologies, such as optical or laser extensometry. That said, the current MTS offering is very sound for testing high-strength rebar and RC structures. Our targeted turnkey solutions, the depth and breadth of our experience in this application area, and our ability to provide researchers what they need to meet their exact requirements remains unmatched. | <urn:uuid:490d789d-61b2-488d-97b2-8743b4bbb961> | {
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My previous post explores some of the philosophy behind Culturally Relevant Teaching (CRT), or the whys. This post, I want to explore some of the hows. That really is what we need.
If you are reading Part 2 of my posts, then I assume that I am preaching to the choir. You already intuitively know why CRT is a good thing and you want to do it. So how do we go about integrating CRT into our daily instruction to maximize student learning?
High Expectation – from Can’t to the Absolutely Can
Do you have high expectation of your diverse students? Do you really believe that everyone can learn and succeed? OR Do you answer, “Yes, but ______.” If you qualify your answer with “but” then you do NOT have high expectations for your diverse students. You can stop reading this post right now and go pick up some books with researches that prove again and again that ALL students can learn, regardless of color, ethnicity, gender, socio-economic background, parental involvement, whatever. Until you believe absolutely that all of your students can learn, can be the A student, then nothing that you read or try will help your students any. I don’t know how else to put it. The anonymity of the internet blog allows me to write this, “If you don’t have high expectations for all your students, then you SUCK as a teacher compared to what you can truly do.” (I just know I’m about to get another slew of e-mails attacking me. *ducks*)
What does high expectation look like in the classroom setting? Here is another real life example from my school.
All teachers are trained to use Thinking Maps, targeted graphic organizers. In particular, all teachers are trained to use these graphic organizers along with sentence frames to help students communicate orally and in writing. All teachers. I took a walk with many other teachers, just to see examples of writing in the classrooms, as part of our professional development. With one exception, all first grade teachers had their students copy teacher created writing samples from the board. By this I mean in all subject areas, in all topics, just all writing samples were teacher created, student copied. These teachers expected that their students can not write and so do not even give them the opportunity to try. The one exception is a first year teacher who doesn’t have that low expectation. In fact, she has high expectation. She expects her students to write coherently and she gave them the support they need to do so. She gave them the sentence frames, without filling it in for them. She gave them Thinking Maps from which they can pull words and ideas. She lets them go at it. Some students made mistakes and she helped correct the mistakes without taking over the students’ writings. High expectation.
Having high expectation is probably the most difficult part of being culturally responsive, because it’s just so easy to blame the students for failure, and so hard to say, maybe I’m not teaching very well.
If you answer with an unqualified yes, then let’s move on to other, easier strategies for integrating culturally relevant teaching.
Part 3 – We Communicate Differently – Coming soon to a blog near you!
Our dominant, white culture communicates very differently from the cultures of our diverse students. Visit my post on how we organize our communication differently. Next post will go more in depth into this and how to utilize this difference in the classroom.
One of the tenets of Culturally Responsive Teaching is that students from different cultural background would have different communication styles which may clash with the communication style of the teacher. So, how do we teach students who communicate differently from us?
In America, the dominant way to organize communication is “topic-centered”. We focus on one topic at a time and logically follow through to a conclusion in an orderly manner. It’s very linear. If we are part of the dominant culture, we automatically think this is the correct way of organizing our thinking, our speech, and our writing.
Research have shown that Latinos, African Americans, Native Americans and Hawaiians are inclined toward topic-associative style of organizing communication. This style is thematic, associative, and integrative. A topic-centered communicator would view this form of communication as rambling, straying off topic, and not organized, when in fact, the topic-associative communicator is giving you ALL the information, ALL the associations, EVERYTHING relevant to the topic.
In the Classroom
Be honest, in the classroom, particularly in a culturally diverse classroom, how many of you teachers think that your ethnic students are ramblers and don’t communicate well and that their writing is awful and disorganized? I can point to each child and give an illustration of how the child is a topic-associative communicator in my classroom, and if I didn’t know about the difference in communication style, I would have immediately said my students are disorganized thinkers. In actuality, they are organized in an associative manner, not topic-centered.
Here’s an anecdote. My grandmother would try to tell these stories about her past. However, for us young grandkids, she never quite got to the “point” of the stories. She never gave us a plot with a problem and a solution or a punchline. We never got to hear the ending of the stories because we got impatient and walked away. Why? She would spend all her time talking about the people and places related to the stories. “Once, your grandfather took me to visit Uncle so and so. Remember Uncle so and so? He had that daughter who married so and so. What was her name? I think her name was so and so. He gave her a pig for her wedding day. That was a great day. Your aunt so and so was there…” We missed the entire point of why grandmother was talking with us..she was talking about people, not plotlines. Grandmother was very much a topic-associative communicator.
How to Bridge the Styles in Writing – An Example
As a culturally responsive teacher who wants to use the students’ strengths to build a bridge to academic success in a dominant culture that IS topic-centered, what do you do?
Well, I’ve been thinking about why the way I’ve been teaching writing has been such a success with my inner city students. I build in all sorts of scaffold. I give them all sorts of graphic organizers. I expect and receive successful writings. All this and more.
But, looking at it through the lens of communication styles, I can clearly see now that I have created a bridge from one style to the other for my students, using the strength of one and carefully teaching my students how to do the other. Or, to be more precise, “Write from the Beginning”, the writing program, has built this bridge. I merely strengthen it.
Looking carefully at how I teach writing using Thinking Maps, we can see that we start with my students’ strength, topic-association, by using a Circle Map. First in conversation, then in the graphic organizers, my students are encouraged to think about and write down everything that is associated with and related to the writing topic. Because we are using a circle to organize our thinking, everything is related and nothing is more important than the other. We honor all associations.
Next, we start making decisions about what we need to focus on, beginning the bridge to a topic-centered piece of writing. We do this through a Tree Map, picking out three main ideas. We then move to a Flow Map and piece, by piece, organizing our ideas in a topic-centered sequence, moving from one completed idea to the next and coming to a conclusion.
Our final writing is very much topic-centered and would please any topic-centered communicator.
When I remove this bridge, my second graders immediately produce writing that is topic-associative because that is their communication style. That bridge is clearly not solid yet and my students still need scaffolding, but as we continue working together throughout the year, my students will become more adept at crossing that bridge independently.
My goal of course is for my students to be able to use two styles of communication and be able to make decisions about when is appropriate to use one or the other. Already, I see two students who are able to do this by themselves, with minimal guidance.
Please visit Creating Lifelong Learners by Mathew Needleman this coming week to participate in or get ideas for opening up a learning unit. This is geared toward Open Court units, but I say, you can always get ideas for your own units and anthologies! So come along for this exciting collaboration!
I will be participating as well and posting my ideas here on this blog, but there will be many, many teachers and coaches creating excellent ideas all across the web. Please do consider joining in!
This video was taken by a friend during our writing process about two weeks ago.
This student was absent during the days when we worked on our Flow Map so he had to use the class created Flow Map for his writing. The other students use their own Flow Map. In the video, the student is orally rehearsing his writing prior to writing. He is doing what we call “Pull Out and Talk”. For a more detailed explanation of our writing process, please visit this previous post.
This was our second major piece of writing in the second grade Open Court unit, Kindness. The prompt was: Please write a thank you letter to the elves as if you were the shoemaker.
Why Oral Rehearsal?
Why do I insist that my students orally rehearse before writing? Almost all of my students are stronger in the oral language than they are in the written language. I found that they were intimidated by writing and could sit for hours staring at a blank sheet of paper before writing or would write everything in three or four incomplete sentences. Allowing my students to talk and think aloud reduces the affective filter. Also, allowing my students to make plenty of mistakes while talking and then fixing their mistakes orally ensures that less mistakes show up on paper. With oral rehearsal, my students’ writing is stronger and more detailed.
This is a piece of writing my second grade students work on for two weeks. It helps prepare my students for the Open Court Unit 2 writing assessment. This is the first major writing assignment in Unit 2 for us. I used the writing process that I learned from Write From the Beginning because it explicitly teaches many skills and makes clear the writing process.
Please write a thank you letter to Ms. R using the friendly letter format.
The class rubric is charted and hangs in front of the class through out the entire writing process. I refer to it again and again daily as well as whenever I teach a particular skill that is mentioned in the rubric. Every student knows exactly what needs to be done to get a good grade.
While working in the computer lab one day, the fire drill alarm went off and drove us out of the computer lab. Ms. R invited the students to return after recess to complete the presentations that they were working on. The students felt grateful and excited at the opportunity, and I immediately grabbed at the chance to do a major piece of writing using a shared experience. Also, I couldn’t resist the urge to do some relevant writing with a real-world purpose. Ms. R was very happy to receive these letters.
Pre-write: The Circle Map
We started by brainstorming some things we want to write about using a Circle Map. We did this as a whole group using Think-Pair-Share and small group discussion strategies. Then, the students created their individual Circle Maps. Students were encouraged to “pull out” from the class circle map and to add their own ideas.
I never did learn the difference between a list of criteria and a rubric. In any case, this is how I grade my student’s writing.
My students are very familiar with this format and they know exactly what they need to get a good grade, because it’s charted and reviewed almost daily. Whenever we have a related lesson, I refer back to this rubric. For example,we’ve been working on writing in complete sentences. I refer back to this rubric and remind my students that complete sentences are worth 5 points. We are very goal oriented in my class. I will post more on our second grade friendly letter writing assignment in my next post. For now, I just wanted to share the rubric.
Why a rubric like this? It is directly connected to writing standards. For students, it makes explicit what they need to do in their writing. For teachers, it makes clear what a particular student needs to work on, and through several assignments, you can measure a student’s growth in a particular area.
For those of us who work with second grade Open Court in LAUSD, we know that Unit 2’s writing assessment is to write a thank you letter to a friend. Thus the rubric. We are very goal oriented, did I mention that?
This rubric is modified from the Write From The Beginning program.
I translate the 20 point system into a 4 point grade like this:
- 20 points – 4
- 19-16 points – 3
- 15-10 points – 2
- <9 points – 1
Matthew of OpenCourtResources.com created a professional networking site for literacy coaches at ning.com. If you are a coach, interested in becoming one, or just looking to improve your skill as a literacy educator, consider visiting and joining in. Thank you Matthew for creating a valuable resource!
This is a new idea for me. I’m still working out the kinks. Let me know if you have any suggestions.
My second graders have difficulty writing in complete sentences, even my most advanced students. I recently started using a tree map, a targeted graphic organizer, to teach students how to write in a complete sentence.
I first introduced the Complete Sentences tree map to my students as a whole group because they all need to learn this. Later on, I took it to small groups to work with students who have particular difficulties with this. We talked about what a sentence needs in order to be complete. The students immediately say “A capital letter!” and “A punctuation mark!” Kudos to them! They’ve been listening! Next, I explicitly tell them that a complete sentence needs a subject and a predicate, and a predicate needs a verb. I show them the tree map already mostly charted, except for some words in the predicate. I point out the subject. We talk about it being the Who and What of a sentence. We talk about the predicate, it being the What Happens. We talk about how crucial it is to have verb in the predicate or we don’t get any What Happens whatsoever. Yes, we use the academic language.
Then, I model orally pulling out simple sentences from the tree map. “The bear is brown.” Students catch on pretty quickly from the pattern and give me sentences like “The bear eats honey.” More advanced students are already pulling out “The bear eats honey and fish.” We also pull out non-examples or examples that are wrong. What happens when you leave off the subject? “Likes to play.” What happens when you leave off the verb? “The bear honey.” These are all common mistakes when students write, so a discussion on what is wrong is invaluable to them.
Next, I model pulling out simple sentences and writing them correctly with appropriate capitalization and punctuation. (I also model writing in a paragraph format. I know that’s not the focus of the lesson, but I expect my students to always write in a paragraph format, so I must model its use at all time.) Finally, students go off to practice writing complete sentences in their writing journal using the class created tree map. No, students aren’t creating the tree maps themselves. That’s an entirely different lesson. (I must insist on the paragraph format though, sorry.) We are focusing exclusively on writing complete sentences.
I start by asking students what does a sentence need to be complete? I already have the new tree map charted, without the words subject, verb, and predicate in place. We fill those in during the discussion. Your typical students will say “A capital letter!” Good for them! That’s one student who has got that standard down! More advanced students will begin to say “verb, subject” and a strange variant of “predicate”. Then, we pull out a few simple sentences. Again, some students will start to use conjunction or a pronoun for the subject. If the student brings it up at this point, I add it to the tree map or I praise the student for the complex sentence and encourage other students to use pronouns or complex sentences when they are ready. I also start to encourage descriptive language (dark, green). After doing this orally, we return to our seat to practice.
You can already see how I begin to differentiate instruction using what the students bring to the lesson and then encouraging one step more. I use the words “when you are ready” a lot initially, then I start to suggest to certain students to try the next step. The writings are very varied, depending on the students’ ability. I have three students who are straight on using simple sentences, no pronouns. I have a few more students who are playing with the pronoun, some who are using the conjunction “and” and a small group of students are using more complex sentences with descriptive words and phrases.
I haven’t had a third lesson as a whole group yet, this being a new thing in our class. BUT, I have had small group instruction going over simple sentences for my struggling writers. I have also added this activity as part of my morning routines so that students come in and immediately start writing complete sentences while I take roll. After two whole group lessons, most students can write complete sentences using a teacher created tree map. Now, during our regular writing lessons, we can talk about what a sentence needs to be complete. During revisions, we can talk about what this student’s sentence needs in order to be complete. It is now part of the language and the norm of our classroom.
Effect on Independent Writing
What is the effect on students own independent writing? This is really just a four days old lesson, so I can’t really say yet. I can say that we can point to an incomplete sentence and revise it easily now, rather than have students stare blankly at me when I demand a complete sentence. I predict that with time and consistent practice, more and more of my students will be able to write independently in complete sentences without prompting.
This past week, my students and I started an exciting new project. We are learning how to create a presentation using Apple’s Keynote! Keynote is rather like Powerpoint. It is a part of the iWork bundle.
So far, so good! The kids are excited. They love adding animations and effects to their images and words.
I started the lesson by using a Powerpoint presentation on “Kindness” from OpenCourtResources.com. “Kindness” is our literacy unit for the next 6 weeks. I prefaced the lesson by explicitly telling them that this is a presentation, that adults use this to share information, that we will learn how create our own presentation as an option for publishing our writing and sharing our ideas, yadiyadiya. Then, we started creating our own “Kindness” presentation as a whole group, which is to say, every student is creating an identical presentation at their own workstation by following the teacher step by step. My rationale for doing it this way? Most of my students only ever touch a computer at school, usually to play a “learning” game, and have never seen a presentation before. Whole group is the only way to go.
During this lesson, I found that I had to teach them EVERYTHING, down to what double-click means. That’s expected since they are a) second graders and b) mostly computer illiterate because c) inner city students have very little access to technology.
I am so thankful that (though our classrooms have ten years old computers that is no longer serviced by LAUSD), our computer lab has (slow, but functional) computers and a projector. Also an excellent computer technician who looks out for these programs for our students. Her only wish is that teachers would make use of these programs, rather than stick the kids on “learning” games for 40 minutes, once a week.
btw, I’m looking into having my students blog, but it won’t work on the computer in my classroom. I’ll have to first get everyone’s parents consent for the students to get on the Internet, and then maybe settle for blogging as a twice a month thing done only in the computer lab. We shall see.
I am trying out a new second grade reading and writing homework using the Tree Map. My goal is for students to prepare students to be able to dissect a story, looking at the characters, setting, problem and solution. Eventually, I want to transition into using the academic language of “characters, setting, problem and solution” but for now, I’m using scaffolding language. Take a look to see if it’s useful for you. | <urn:uuid:bcaeed44-87b4-4382-8d42-c72010a1c41f> | {
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Farmers are fighting what seems like an unwinnable war against slugs, with crops being grazed off as they emerge and widespread signs of seed hollowing.
A wet April, the a key breeding time for slugs, coupled with continued rain this summer and autumn has proved perfect for slugs with populations at record highs. And growers are being warned not to become complacent, even if battle seems to be won.
Farmacy agronomist Philip Vickers advises farmers to keep a very close eye on their slug problems checking at least every other day such is the nature of the damage they can cause.
“You have to be relentless until the crop is 100% established, it’s vitally important not to back off and be extremely vigilant,” he says.
One of the most lethal weapons in growers’ armoury is metaldehyde. A cheaper alternative to methiocarb and ferric phosphate, it has been sold in large amounts this year. However, there are fears it will be found in surface water.
“You have to be relentless until the crop is 100% established, it’s vitally important not to back off and be extremely vigilant.”
Philip Vickers, Farmacy
The autumn limit for metaldehyde applications (1 August to 31 December) is a maximum total of 210g/ha of the active ingredient, which may be reduced to 160g/ha or less upon the recommendation of a supplier or BASIS qualified advisor. At 160g/ha this means no more than 4kg/ha of a 4% product, 5kg/ha of a 3% or 10kg of a 1.5%.
Ferric phosphate is a more environmentally sound alternative which is growing in stature and seeing more farmers using it this year, says Mr Vickers.
“From what I’ve seen so far, it certainly matches metaldehyde if not bettering it. Confidence is growing in it and although it’s more expensive than metaldehyde there’s certainly being a reduction over the past few years.”
Mr Vickers highlighted how this year’s weather and slug problems had shown some of the frailties of the newer cultivations techniques particularly in oilseed rape.
“Traditional methods such as ploughing have faired much better in these conditions. Fields that have been ploughed have drained much quicker reducing the amount of time they’ve been waterlogged and ultimately this will pay off come next harvest.”
Take our slug control academy | <urn:uuid:0c286d87-d236-446f-afd7-0ac8afeb751d> | {
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Did you know that PepsiCo uses immense amounts of conflict palm oil every year?
Conflict palm oil is palm oil produced in a way that is driving the last populations of critically endangered Sumatran orangutans, elephants, tigers, and rhinos to the edge of extinction.
Tragically, some of the most biologically diverse landscapes in the world, home to countless species of birds, plants and mammals, are being lost at an astonishing rate, replaced by endless rows of industrial palm plantations. In fact, globally-important tropical rainforests like the Leuser Ecosystem in Sumatra, are being destroyed right before our eyes for the unchecked expansion of conflict palm oil, all of it driven by demand from brands like Pepsico.
Making matters even worse, roughly 3.5 million people work on palm oil plantations across Indonesia and Malaysia.
Many workers even face modern day slavery with no option to escape.
Each day these workers face routine labor abuses including being systematically cheated out of fair pay and benefits, exposure to toxic chemicals, and being forced to bring children and spouses to work to meet unreasonable daily quotas.
A recent report by Rainforest Action Network, Indonesian labor advocacy organization OPPUK and the International Labor Rights Forum documented many of these abuses in the operations of Pepsico’s controversial Indonesian palm oil supplier and snack food producer, Indofood.
All for cheap conflict palm oil.
So what does your community have to do with child labor, species extinction, rainforest destruction and massive carbon pollution from deforestation? Unfortunately, everything.
Global snack food giant PepsiCo has its headquarters in Purchase, NY and the company uses hundreds of thousands of tons of palm oil each year.
For the past two years, concerned consumers around the world have urged, begged and demanded PepsiCo take action and address its conflict palm oil problem. Unfortunately, PepsiCo continues to turn a blind eye to the social conflict and environmental destruction in its supply chain. Compared to the actions of its peers in the Snack Food 20, PepsiCo falls further and further behind as it churns out inadequate paper commitments that leave major loopholes for its products produced in Indonesia by its controversial Indonesian business partner Indofood.
For the past 50 years, PepsiCo has worked to build a legacy centered on innovation, leadership and care for communities and the environment. It is now positioned at a crossroads: will it take this historic opportunity and use its global influence in the palm oil industry to end conflict palm oil? Or will the company continue to allow its logo to be placed on products directly connected to these egregious violations?
As a member of PepsiCo’s community you can help change the hearts and minds of executives.
As a member of PepsiCo’s community, or perhaps an employee of the company, you play a crucial role in changing the hearts and minds of executives that have the power to make a difference on this issue. For our community here in and around Westchester County, and for the communities impacted by the spread of conflict palm oil, we must demand better.
If we lead, PepsiCo’s executives will follow. PepsiCo must take responsibility for its impact on the global climate, on the future of critical endangered species like the Sumatran orangutan and elephant, on our last remaining rainforests, and for the families who live and work there.
We need your help!
We’re reaching the tipping point in our efforts to cut conflict palm oil from our food supply and shift the demand to truly responsible palm oil. Working together, PepsiCo can and will be a leader in global efforts to address the social and environmental impacts of palm oil.
Together, we can drive real change to the forest floor, and break the link between human and workers’ rights violations, deforestation and climate destruction, and the snack foods that line our grocery store shelves.
Take action today by signing the open letter.
You can start taking action today by signing onto an open letter that appeals to Ms. Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo, to lead the company on a new path––one that will tackle the impact of the conflict palm oil in its global supply chain.
To learn more about PepsiCo’s conflict palm oil problem, read the report Indofood:PepsiCo’s Indonesian Palm Oil Problem. Share what you learn with your friends and family and inspire the community of PepsiCo workers in your neighborhood to end conflict palm oil. | <urn:uuid:f6143e97-d2f0-4bab-a2f6-ff807bef310d> | {
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Engl 1301 – mla mla citation style literary analysis paper example has 2 parts: in other words, for each entry, indent every line history research paper sample after the first: mla works cited list two styles of essays are the list of works cited mla work cited page sample (also known as the mla work cited page sample bibliography or reference how to write a perfect research paper page) mla work cited page sample how to write rhetorical analysis gives facebook essay full details of every source you cited in your text works cited page mla example pdf. works cited page mla example pdf. in mla style, the list of works cited (also known as a reference list where can i find sources for my research paper or bibliography) appears at the end of your paper.it gives full details of every source that you cited in the text like the rest of an mla format paper, the works cited should be left-aligned and double-spaced with. basic style guidelines: work cited page clip art best images about work cited page clip art 128kb 728×546: cmos introduction; cmos overview and workshop; cmos formatting and style guide. page has this header. facebook; mla work cited page sample pinterest; twitter; more menu. this page offers examples of properly formatted works cited, including a sample works essay on dr jekyll and mr hyde cited page as well as individual examples for certain types of sources sample mla works cited page seventh edition, 2009 coffee kiosk business plan works cited bernstein, academic writing essay tom m. use the same font set at the same size throughout your paper. | <urn:uuid:3ec3e510-0705-4c20-919e-46be3b668374> | {
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Vibration/Onset consistency determines the tone quality that we will produce when we begin to make a sound. When you whisper in a quiet room you are relaxing the vibration faculties in your voice. When you try to talk while lifting something heavy, you are then tightening the vibration faculties in your voice.
Singers exhibit 3 basic types of vibration/onsets;
- Breathy/Aspirate Onsets happens when a singer does not control the air coming out while they sing. When a balloon loses air without control, it flies around anywhere while the air is escaping. Our diaphragm does the same thing with our sound when we do not control it with the muscles in our abdomen. We usually whisper with shallow breaths instead of deep breaths. You can feel Relaxed Onsets when you begin sentences with “who, what, when, where, why & how”. These words have airy beginnings (aspirate onsets) with the “H” sound that relaxes the throat muscles for softer vocal production. Using this type of vibration too much could make your quality of sound weak and can affect your ability to stay in tune. Relaxed Vibrations are helpful when you want to create a heartfelt effect, especially when singing about love because it makes your sound sincere. You should use this technique carefully for sections of songs that call for an earnest mood.
- Tense/Tight Onsets happens when a singer is putting a strain on the air that they sing with. Singing with Tight Vibration is like trying to talk while lifting something heavy. Tension presses your vocal chords together and constricts the air that you let out. Singers use tension to add force to their quality; However, the air pressure that builds up because of tension will create a glottal onset and could cause your voice to ‘crack’ while you sing. You will feel glottal vocal onsets from the tight initial sounds when you say the letters “A, E, I, O” and the sound “ooh”. Saying “D, G, J & K” show tension when your tongue lowers from the roof of your mouth. Adding tension while you sing will add intensity and should be used when you want to emphasize attitude or strong emotion while you sing.
- Coordinated/Balanced Onsets is the combination of ‘Volition’ and ‘Actuation.’ Balanced vibration is great because it keeps singers from sounding too breathy, or too strained. Coordinated vibration will give you the ability to sing with a clear, flowing sound quality. *You can feel Balanced Vibration (little pressure, if any) when you say the letters “C, R & V”. When saying the letter “U”, there is no Breathy or Tense Vibration at its onset, so “U” is an example of a perfect Coordinated Vibration/Onset.
When you begin singing, it is a great idea to master Balanced Vibration first, because;
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- you will avoid straining your vocal muscles with incorrect singing
- you will you sing with a clearer, and more correct tone
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Wherever there is communication, there are proofs. For how else can one convince oneself that the information presented by another party is reliable? Everyone uses proofs, though some may do so without knowing it (somewhat like a hero of Molière who realized one day that he was speaking prose for fifty years).
The mathematical study of proofs emerged in the bold program by David Hilbert who coined the term Beweistheorie (Proof Theory). In this program, the role of proof theory was to provide a formal model of a rigorous mathematical proof and to show, by analysing this model, that no contradiction in Mathematics can ever arise. Even though Hilbert’s dream did not materialize in its full extent, through groundbreaking insights of Kurt Gödel and Gerhard Gentzen, for the first time the concept of proof was put in the center of a mathematical study. Through a progress that followed, in the course of the second half of the XXth century, proof theory reached the status of one of the cornerstones of modern logic.
In the recent years, formal methods that originated in mathematical logic and in proof theory itself have witnessed a tremendous growth in applications. This included the quick progress in the areas of Computer Science such as formal verification, automated proof search, proof assistants, proof complexity, and new applications in mathematics such as proof mining. On the other hand, formal proofs also infiltrated into other areas previously not prone to formal analysis, be it formal epistemology or logic in law. All these exciting developments lead to a much more varied landscape of research around the notion of proof than the world had previously seen and lead to a rapid diversification of the field.
We believe that the time has now come for a consolidation of knowledge accumulated in the study of formal proofs and of the community of proof researchers. We thereby proclaim the organization of the Proof Society whose main aims are:
- To support the research on the notion of “proof” in its broadest sense, through a series of suitable activities;
- To be therefore inclusive in reaching out to all scientific areas which consider “proof” as an object in their studies;
- To enable the community to shape its future by identifying, formulating and communicating its most important goals;
- To actively promote “proof” to increase its visibility and representation in the larger scientific community and society. | <urn:uuid:6f86a43a-5e26-48d8-97ec-4d7ce30df8ab> | {
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When we talk about the deleterious effects that toxic industrial cleaners can have on humans and the environment, we often reference the Environmental Protection Agency’s List of Lists — a list of chemicals whose regulation or ban is enforced by the federal government. But state governments haven’t been sitting idly by while the EPA does all the work. As Massachusetts’ Toxic Use Reduction Act (TURA) shows, the fight for better human and environmental safety through the use of non-toxic cleaners is alive and well at the state level, too.
History of the TURA Chemical List
On July 24, 1989, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis signed the TURA into law, which immediately affected the Eastern Seaboard state in several ways. Initially, the TURA set out to achieve the following five goals:
- Reduce generation of toxic waste in the state by 50 percent.
- Comply toxics reduction with federal, state, and municipal safety laws.
- Support Massachusetts businesses while promoting cleaner production practices.
- Strengthen enforcement of environmental state laws.
- Promote interaction among state agencies that administer toxics-related programs.
Helping the state achieve the goals are four partner organization: the Department of Environmental Protection (MassDEP), the Office of Technical Assistance and Technology (OTA), The Toxics Use Reduction Institute (TURI), and Administrative Council on Toxics Use Reduction. As described below, with the support of these entities, the TURA Act has been successful since its implementation over 25 years ago.
Effects of the TURA Act
The advent of the TURA Act set in motion several important accomplishments related to the reduction of toxics throughout Massachusetts. Highly notable have been a 50 percent reduction in the generation of toxic waste (accomplished in 1998), and the following achievements (accomplished by 2005) of the “Core Group” of industries that the TURA requires to report on their use of toxics:
- 40 percent reduction in toxic chemical use
- 71 percent reduction in toxic byproducts
- 41 percent reduction in toxics shipped
- 91 percent reduction in on-site releases of toxics to the environment
- 60 percent reduction in transfer of toxics off-site for further management
The act is designed to benefit businesses while goals are pursued, providing the following advantages, regardless of business’ size or Core Group status: modernization of production practices, improvement of operation and maintenance, reformulation of products with non-toxic components, and recycling of leftover raw materials during production.
Most Recent List of Chemicals on TURA
Like the EPA’s List of Lists, Massachusetts’ TURA Act has grown to include more substances than it originally listed in 1989. View the current list in its entirety by accessing the link. If any of the chemicals your company or organization uses appear on the list, contact the team of chemists at Ecolink about implementing an environmentally preferred replacement.
Are Your Chemicals on the TURA List?
Is so, now is the time to start the process of replacing them for four reasons: to protect the health of workers, better protect the environment, avoid government fines for usage violations, and avoid the financial fallout of chemical injuries in the workplace, especially: increased number of sick days taken, workers compensation claims, and chemical injury lawsuits.
Ecolink specializes in providing industrial, eco friendly cleaning solutions in a variety of categories. With our solutions in place, you can rest easier, knowing that you use the best products for the safety of your workers and the environment. Call us today at (800) 563-1305, or complete the contact form on our website. We look forward to assisting you! | <urn:uuid:a712da11-8c21-46c6-8b69-9b69f7079452> | {
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According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, the wind-power-generating capacity in the United States grew by 39 percent between 2004 and 2009 and continues to grow. Even with the market only beginning to emerge, the U.S. produces enough power in wind farms to power over 9.7 million homes. As of 2009, the U.S. only utilized wind to fill 1.8 percent of its total energy demand with this clean, renewable resource. Opening your own wind farm, while requiring substantial capital and effort, can be a lucrative venture.
1. Search for specialized grants and loans, especially in states that have renewable power mandates. The Database of State Incentives for Renewables and Efficiency offers a list of loans and grants that can help in financing your project. For example, the U.S. Department of Treasury has a 30 percent grant for building a wind farm that expires on Dec. 31, 2011 but could be renewed.
2. Confirm the wind value of your desired location. Windustry, an advocate for the industry, advises that "15 mph wind speed contains nearly 60 percent more energy than a site with an average wind speed of 13 mph." Consult state wind resource maps, anemometer masts and meteorological data to verify consistent wind. The smoother and flatter the location, the better.
3. Verify the general practicality of your proposed location. You will need to be close enough to a power hub but far enough away to not disturb neighboring residents. Wind turbines can be 300 feet or taller, so verify zoning allows such structures, especially if you are near an airport.
4. Consult with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency field office in your area for site advice and approval. Some states or local governments may also require an environmental impact study of your site.
5. Contact your local energy provider to establish a contract for electricity purchases. Be advised that this power is subsidized by many state governments and is also mandated by many of the same agencies through a credit system.
6. Prepare to purchase or lease the land for your turbines. Some landowners will trade space on available property in exchange for free power and a percentage of profit. Only lease if you can secure a 30-year contract, the lifespan of most turbines.
7. Apply for an Employer Identification Number at IRS.gov and a sales tax license at your state's secretary of state's office, if necessary. Consult with this office as to state permits required to operate a wind farm. Obtain a local permit and planning and zoning approval for the proposed site.
8. Hire a construction firm specializing in wind power to construct your turbines. Most of these firms also will maintain your equipment or will train your staff on the maintenance procedures.
9. Establish a connection from your turbines to the electrical grid as directed by your contract. Once you are connected to the grid, your power production can be monitored.
- Large, open space
- Consult your insurance agent for industry-specific products regarding wind farms.
- Consider slow seasons, wind drops, snow and ice drag, and other factors as you estimate your production. Every area is different.
- Consult residents of surrounding areas to discuss the farm and dispel myths about the negative aspects of wind farming.
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: Careers in Wind Energy
- Windustry: Know Your Business Structure
- "ReNew"; How to Start a Wind Farm; September 2010
- Energy Savers: Small Wind Electric Systems
- U.S. Mission: Wind Power Becoming Competitive With Coal; Karin Rives
- The California Energy Commission; California Green Jobs; Peter Asmus
- Windfarm Action Group: Start Here
- DSIRE: Federal Incentives/Policies for Renewables & Efficiency
- Windustry: Know Your Economics
- U.S. Department of Energy: Key Aspects in Developing a Wind Power Project
- U.S. Department of Energy; Guide to Renewable Energy; October 2010
- U.S. International Trade Commission; Wind Turbines -- Industry & Trade Summary; June 2009
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The ocean's riches – such as fish and minerals – make it the seventh strongest economy in the world but its value is plummeting due to over-exploitation and climate change, a report has warned.
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) report, Reviving The Ocean Economy: The Case For Action – 2015, states the value of key ocean assets is estimated to be around $25tn (£17tn), giving it an annual value of goods and services of $2.5tn – the seventh biggest in comparison to the world's economies and just behind the UK.
The WWF study likens neglecting to ocean's assets "to not investing in a fund that yielded a 10% return".
However, because of climate change and the ways in which industries are exploiting the ocean's products, the value of said goods is quickly deteriorating. It adds that more than two thirds of the ocean's annual value relies on healthy conditions.
WWF-UK CEO David Nussbaum said: "Our oceans are a climate regulator and carbon sink, supporting future global economic growth, as well as providing critical goods and services that underpin the well-being of billions of people. But rising temperatures and increased acidification put all this at risk.
"We should recognise the role our oceans play as an important business asset that requires sustainable management and investment – and governments should fully support and implement the UN sustainable development goal on the ocean."
The report gives three objectives to ensure the sustainability of the ocean: "1) embedding ocean recovery throughout the UN's sustainable development goals, 2) taking global action on climate change and 3) making good on strong commitments to deliver well-managed coastal and marine protected areas."
Lyndsey Dodds, head of UK marine policy at WWF-UK, added: "From a UK perspective, our government must recognise the value of our seas and ensure their protection, starting with swift designation of the next tranche of Marine Conservation Zones.
"These zones – along with other measures - such as improved fisheries management - are essential to safeguard the marine assets that underpin the UK economy". | <urn:uuid:f7a86897-8a99-4500-a123-2544b07d4505> | {
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LEARN SPANISH QUICKLY – Spanish for children the easy and fun way with toddler educational games that teach Spanish language skills, including letters, words, spelling, numbers, “Where Is?” quizzes.
TWICE THE KIDS EDUCATION GAMES – This Spanish kids tablet is not just for ABCs and numbers, the reverse side has fun animal pictures, press them to explore authentic animal sounds from nature.
FUN KIDS TABLET – Hours of educational activities for kids learning Spanish, beginning with the basics of Spanish alphabet and numbers; Spanish ABC learning games to educate and entertain your child.
GIVE THE GIFT OF LEARNING – This is a wonderful learning pad for children learning Spanish, either as native Spanish speakers or to support learning Spanish as a second language; great for travel.
- DOUBLE BOARD FOR KIDS – Two-sided educational tablet device, requires 3x AAA batteries (not included); learning pad for boys or girls, recommended ages 18 months to 5 years.
Learn Spanish for Toddlers
Combine kids Spanish learning and fun with this little kid tablet designed to educate and entertain:
- Spanish language touch-and-teach electronic educational tablet
- Two-sided tablet for kids
- Learn Spanish numbers, learn ABCs, words and spelling
- Two Spanish “Where Is?” quiz games
- Explore animal pictures and play animal sounds, fun melodies
- Auto shut-off battery saver (requires 3x AAA batteries, not included)
Learning Spanish for children is fun! Designed for native Spanish learning or Spanish as a second language.
All-in-One Electronic Games for Kids
Dozens of Spanish learning games for children to explore: Learn Spanish ABCs and Letters, Learn Spanish Words, Spanish Spelling Game, Learn Spanish Numbers, Spanish “Where Is?” quiz games, Fun Melodies, Learn Spanish Animal Pictures, and Animal Sounds. One device with hundreds of hours of learning and entertainment potential. Portable design suitable for car, airplane, travel, and more.
Fun Toddler Educational Gift
Shopping for a kids birthday gift or a toddler toy? This Spanish learning for kids touch-and-teach game makes a very welcome baby birthday gift, baby shower gift or toddler present. Parents will appreciate this thoughtful gift and the chance to introduce toddler Spanish learning to their child. Guaranteed 100% BPA free, phthalate free and asthma friendly.
Support Learning Spanish for Toddlers
High quality education toys provide support for early learning and developing important educational skills, including language comprehension, hand-eye coordination, and critical thinking. Share your passion for learning with your child and give them a Spanish language head start that will begin a life-long love of language. Boxiki Kids educational games are 100% safe and fun! | <urn:uuid:a8c94fc0-9244-4b85-b4d7-f8b0cfdb62de> | {
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Kevin Kilroy has seen pictures and heard stories about how dire the situation is for the drought in Africa.
"You can't have food, you can't grow food without water. You can't have good sanitation without water, you can't really have life without water," said Kevin Kilroy.
In remote villages it is usually young girls who must travel great distances on foot to find and retrieve water. That image made it relatable to Kevin.
"A girl in Africa my age can't even go to school because she has to go get water for her family that might even kill them," said Kevin. "I just thought that was ironic, not fair, shouldn't even be possible."
Kevin teamed with the organization Wells Bring Hope to raise money to build water wells. Another objective: Spreading the word about the issue.
"I need to tell people about this," said Kevin. "I need to make people aware of what's going on. And then all the ongoing support kind of added up to a well being drilled."
Kevin is a freshman at Marymount High School, but already sees her future including more work with this worldwide issue.
"Maybe intern in an organization that has something to do with water, continue to spread awareness about the importance of water." said Kevin.
Kevin Kilroy is a young lady who is truly changing the lives of people around the world. That makes her our Cool Kid. | <urn:uuid:bdf796f6-c16e-4d50-8bba-f958c19deaf6> | {
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SINGAPORE: Many parents in Singapore spend weekends sending their young children to enrichment classes.
These classes can take many forms, from early preparatory classes that introduce concepts children will eventually learn in primary school, to broad-based programmes that seek to help young children develop basic motor and social skills, to creative arts classes that encourage individual expression.
However, are expensive, structured enrichment classes really necessary for children in their early years? Would children be left behind, if they do not attend such enrichment classes?
Children are naturally creative and curious. What is more important is for parents to provide them with lots of opportunities to support both their creativity and curiosity in their early years – and this may not involve expensive, structured enrichment classes.
This is especially the case, if parents can adopt an integrated approach to teaching and learning in their children’s early years. Children are naturally excited and feel most engaged when they are exposed to stimulating and multi-sensory hands-on activities.
Parents can themselves plan low- or no-cost activities along the knowledge, skills and dispositions to be acquired rather than send their children to enrichment classes that focus on a specific learning or subject area.
A WALK IN THE PARK?
Take the example when children are involved in an activity like a walk in the park. They can learn about plants and the colours of nature.
During the walk, they could be asked to share their feelings, impressions and experiences about the park, encouraging them to become more aware and mindful of their surroundings.
They could also be asked to identify, describe and compare the things which they see around them, developing their process skills such as observation, comparison and communication.
Parents could also introduce children to parts of a plant such as the stems, leaves, flowers and fruits. Through this, children may learn about art including the concepts of colour, contrast and composition. They may also learn science concepts including the concepts of texture and flexibility.
In doing so, parents also give their children an outdoor experience where they can learn about parts of the plant in an immersive walk around their neighbourhood, instead of learning about nature in a potentially clinical classroom setting.
More importantly, a walk in the park can give children a rich and meaningful experience, where they also take away the value of nature and the importance of environmental conservation.
Upon return, children can create collages from the items collected, learning what it means to convert scrap materials into beautiful artwork. On a practical level, they may also learn new language, such as what it means to glue, dry and cut up materials as well as mathematical concepts including shapes and sizes.
CULTIVATE A LOVE FOR LEARNING
When children are relaxed and enjoy the process of exploring, discovering nature or creating art with other children, there can be positive social and emotional outcomes. They not only construct knowledge through an experiential exercise, but also learn to interact, communicate and build relationships with people in the environment.
So rather than agonise over whether and what enrichment classes to go for, perhaps what parents could do is to invest in cultivating their children’s love of learning. Children should spend their childhood learning about themselves and others, and developing their creativity, imagination, curiosity and sense of wonder.
What parents could do is to be creative and imaginative in using the resources around their homes and neighbourhoods to plan and implement simple activities for young children.
There is so much used materials that could be recycled for art experiences. There is also so much natural materials in our environment, which could provide opportunities for exploration and discovery.
THE VALUE OF PLAY
There is extensive scholarly work on the importance and value of play in the early years. Hence, the activities planned for children should be planned and implemented through play and not through books and worksheets alone.
Related literature and research also highlight the importance of focusing more on the process rather than the product of learning in the early years. Hence, young children should be encouraged to play, and not be rushed and pushed to acquire knowledge and skills in academic areas and produce work which is beyond their age or ability.
There should also be opportunities for young children to take risks, make mistakes and even experience failure in order to grow, develop and learn. They should also be imbibed with positive values to guide them in making the right choices and judgments as well as the resilience to pick themselves up and continue, if things go wrong.
Building trusting relationships with family, relatives and friends will prepare them for future challenges and complexities of school, work and life.
Hence, we should provide young children with the appropriate environment and experiences to develop and become confident, considerate and responsible citizens in the future rather than packing their weekends with expensive, structured enrichment classes.
Dr Nirmala Karuppiah is a senior lecturer at the National Institute of Education’s Early Childhood and Special Needs Education Academic Group.
This is the third commentary in Channel NewsAsia’s series on learning and education. You can read the first commentary on whether Singapore schools should adopt digital textbooks here, and the second one on how Singapore teachers should manage issues on race in the classroom here. | <urn:uuid:55bbd04a-c811-4942-8360-b9170a70b5ad> | {
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"From conception until the placenta is mature enough to nourish our babies, they are sustained with nourishment from this yolk sac. Once the placenta functions, the yolk sac generally is obliterated but on occasion there are remants left behind to remind us of those very early days of prenatal life." ~ Patricia Edmonds
If you've ever had an early ultrasound one of the first things you might have been shown is the yolk sac which usually develops at around 5 weeks gestation. Doctor's can use it to gauge embryonic development by measuring it's size. I was lucky enough to see the remnants of one in a placenta I encapsulated and I wanted to learn more about it so I thought I'd share it with you. The literature contains a lot of medical terms which I have tried to explain as simply as possible so I hope I have them right. If you see anything that needs correcting please let me know!
The yolk sac is established during the second week of embryonic development. Some cells that form in the upper part of the yolk sac develop cappillaries and manufacture blood cells for the embryo. The lower part of the sac develops tiny, finger-like projections called villi which penetrate the uterine wall absorbing food materials and oxygen to transport to the embryo.
As the embryo develops, it becomes larger than the yolk and begins to fold over it. Some of the yolk sac will continue developing in the embryo as parts of the gastrointestinal tract.
The yolk sac provides nourishment and acts as a circulatory system for your embryo until the placenta develops and takes over these functions. It contributes to the development of your baby's gastrointestinal and reproductive systems.
By the time of birth, the yolk sac has usually dissapeared or it may be visible as a small oval between 1-6mm between the amnion and chorion (membranes) on the placenta - see below. | <urn:uuid:8c6446b2-5ac0-4d40-81e2-1c2ae0fb092f> | {
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If you’re one of the professors who have moved some, or all, of your courses online, there is a new, innovative technology available to use at USF St. Petersburg: it’s called the Lightboard. A Lightboard is similar to a white board. The Lightboard is made of glass and the professor writes facing the audience, versus having their back towards the audience.
In an online environment, it is important to build personal connections with your students. The Lightboard is a great tool for building personal connections because students are seeing your face throughout the video.
How does it work?
No, you don’t need to worry about learning how to write backwards. Using a simple video tool in post-production, we are able to take everything written on the Lightboard and flip the content horizontally.
Above are the production and post-production images, courtesy of a Spanish professor at USFSP: The left side is the original image, while the right side is the flipped image which is done in post-production.
USFSP has used the Lightboard to film various subject matters including Spanish, French, Teaching Elementary Math, and Educational Leadership.
Best practices for filming a video using the Lightboard:
- Plan your talk for about five minutes or enough to fill the board.
- Plan your lecture ahead of recording. Be prepared to write from the beginning to the end of a lecture because erasing the Lightboard takes time and will be done after the lecture is finished.
- Wear a solid color, preferably blue or green.
- When writing on the board, leave a space for yourself so students are able to see your face.
Watch this video created by Northwestern University as Michael Peshkin describes his usage of the Lightboard.
For scheduling a time to check out the Lightboard or record a lecture, please contact one of the Instructional Designers in the Library or email me at [email protected]. | <urn:uuid:56e21ab1-ecbb-41e4-b6e9-5c0af76e8695> | {
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WOMEN make up 49 per cent of the total population in the country and they play a vital role in supporting the national economy, says Vodafone ATH Foundation executive Ambalika Kutty.
Ms Kutty said even though 49 per cent of the total population were women, they still continued to struggle in making effective and efficient contributions towards the nation's economy through income-generating projects.
"In reality, less value is given to their contributions and they are less likely to realise their capacity to make a better life for themselves, their families and their communities," she said.
"Women are often invisible players in all developments' facets and in order to improve the situation, practical means for empowering women is widely required.
"Government continues to provide the policy framework and development opportunities for the development and advancement of women through successive strategic development plans." | <urn:uuid:7b0b941f-6518-4487-bccf-2b7e84f43046> | {
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Researchers at the University of Manchester will embark on a study to investigate the link between diet and eye health as people age.
The project has been established in partnership between the university and the Manchester Royal Eye Hospital, and is co-ordinated with the Manchester Confederation of Local Optical Committees.
Researchers on the Effect of Lutein on Vision (ELVIS) study will explore how the eye absorbs lutein during the two-year project that has been funded by international nutrition companies, Kemin and DSM. They will focus on how the eye benefits from the carotenoid, how diet influences its accumulation and how lutein absorption is affected by factors including lifestyle and cholesterol.
Lutein is obtained through particular food such as spinach and eggs. It is believed to protect against age-related macular degeneration, as well as blue light.
Lead researcher, Dr Ian Murray, said: “Research shows that as we get older the impact of lifestyle and diet becomes increasingly important. Eye health is a big factor in older people’s well-being and we’re excited to have this opportunity to better understand how we keep eyes healthy across the lifespan.”
The researchers are calling on practices in the Manchester area to help the recruit participants who are aged 40–70 and have normal vision and good general health. They should be willing to take lutein for nine months.
Participants will have a general health examination at the start of the project, and are required to attend four future visits to the optometry department at the University of Manchester to measure lutein concentration and other key indicators, as well as a specialist eye exam.
To take part in the study, email Dr Murray on [email protected] or telephone 0161 306 3878, leaving your name and contact details. | <urn:uuid:46fff26e-b5e1-4333-9a44-fc4f59d8063c> | {
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For the third consecutive year, Phillips and Strong Schools were awarded a Fresh Fruit & Vegetable Program grant. The program, fundedby the USDA and awarded to schools with high numbers of students who qualify for free meals, allows us to offer all students snacks of fresh fruits or vegetables several times per week. The goal of the grant is to encourage students to eat more fruits and vegetables and to taste foods that they may not otherwise have an opportunity to try.
At the end of last year, teachers were asked about the program. Here are some of their comments:
“It is nice seeing kids eating well – those quick snacks are keeping them energized and working through the day.”
“The rule in my room is that you have to at least try something. Most of the time the kids found out they actually liked something they thought they did not. They enjoy seeing the snack coming and trying new things. There were a few things I have never tried myself. Great opportunity for our students to participate in healthy eating and snack choices.” | <urn:uuid:d26f7f5d-04d1-4cdc-9835-5f8c38c9c25d> | {
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It's no secret kids like fast food. And fast food likes kids--so much so that some companies have ramped up their marketing efforts in the past couple of years, says a new report released Monday from Yale University's Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity.
The report details findings on fast food marketing and nutrition information, based on examining the marketing endeavors of 12 large national fast food chains. Researchers also looked at data on nutritional information in more than 3,000 children's meal combos and 2,781 menu items.
The information doesn't put fast food companies in the best light. For example, the report found that (shocker) unhealthful foods reign on menus. Out of 3,039 likely meal combinations, a dozen met nutrition standards the researchers set for preschoolers, and 15 met the criteria for older children. Sugar and saturated fat make up at least 30% of the calories of items bought by kids and teens.
The report is also critical of how some fast food restaurants don't make healthful options more obvious. It found that although most establishments have at least one nourishing side dish and beverage for their children's meals, these are hardly ever offered as an alternate choice. And despite advertisements that show healthful options, the report finds that French fries are served with kids' meals 86% of the time, and soft drinks at least 55% of the time.
Exposure to fast food advertising is escalating, according to the report. In 2009 preschoolers saw 56% more ads for Subway, 21% more ads for McDonald's and 9% more ads for Burger King, compared with 2007. Children age 6 to 11 saw even more: 59% more ads for Subway, 26% more for McDonald's and 10% more for Burger King.
The report also found that African American kids and teens are exposed to at least 50% more fast food ads than their white counterparts.
"Our results show that the fast food industry's promises to market less unhealthy food to young people are not enough," said study co-author Kelly Brownell, director and co-founder of the Rudd Center, in a news release. "If they truly wish to be considered partners in public health, fast food restaurants need to drastically reduce the total amount of marketing that children and teens see for fast food and the iconic brands that sell it."
The Rudd Center isn't the only organization becoming fed up with fast food restaurants marketing to kids. Last week the board of supervisors in San Francisco voted to ban Happy Meals and similar restaurant items that come with a toy and have disproportionate amounts of fat, calories and sodium. Another vote may be necessary to make the ban final. | <urn:uuid:d0d094d8-f7ce-4f6b-8185-502b0393c78e> | {
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California has moved a step closer to approving a set of social studies textbooks in grades K-8 that includes discussion of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals.
The state’s Instructional Quality Commission, which reviews textbooks for their adherence to state-developed curricular frameworks, approved 10 of 12 textbook series submitted on Sept. 28. It’s a major step in implementation of the state’s 2011 FAIR Education Act, which requires history and social studies classes to include the contributions of LGBT people.
“It will be so revolutionary to have these books. California is in the forefront of doing this, and doing it respectfully and inclusively,” said Rhina Ramos, the director of California programs for the Genders and Sexualities Alliance, an LGBT advocacy organization.
The law, as I wrote earlier this year, has been on the books for years, but many districts seem to be unaware of it, or dragging their feet in preparing to implement it.
To read the full article, please see: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2017/10/California_panel_adopts_LGBT_inclusive_history_textbooks.html | <urn:uuid:e82e3f63-66fb-4b57-b320-858b07f93e80> | {
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Walter Gilbert, (born March 21, 1932, Boston, Mass., U.S.), molecular biologist, was awarded a Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1980 (along with Paul Berg and Frederick Sanger) for his development of a rapid method for determining the sequence of nucleotides in DNA molecules.
Gilbert graduated from Harvard University with a degree in chemistry and physics in 1953 and took a Ph.D. in mathematics from Cambridge University in 1957. He joined the Harvard faculty as a lecturer in physics in 1958, as an assistant professor of physics in 1959, and, as his interests changed, advanced to be an associate professor of biophysics in 1964, and then professor of biochemistry in 1968. In 1974, he became American Cancer Society Professor of Molecular Biology at Harvard.
In the late 1960s Gilbert demonstrated that a protein was the “repressor” in the theory of Jacques Monod and François Jacob that there was a negative control of genes which turned off genes not being used by preventing the synthesis
of the corresponding protein. He was able to demonstrate the existence of such a repressor protein in the bacterium Escherichia coli that prevents a gene from manufacturing a group of enzymes involved sugar in metabolism except when the sugar lactose is present. In the 1970s Gilbert developed a widely used technique of using gel electrophoresis to read the nucleotide sequences of DNA by breaking the DNA into fragments by chemical means whose length corresponded
to the positions of the bases.
A similar method, using enzymatic methods to develop the fragments, was developed independently by Sanger. In 1979 Gilbert, joined a group of other scientists and businessmen to form Biogen, a commercial genetic-engineering research corporation. Gilbert later, in 1981, became Chairman and CEO.
Gilbert resigned from Biogen in 1985 and, returning to Harvard, became a chief proponent of the Human Genome Project, a government-funded effort to compile a complete map of all the genes and sequences in human DNA. He remained active in reseach at Harvard until 2001.
Gilbert was a founder of Myriad Genetics in 1992 and has served since as director and vice chairman of the board. He was a founder of Paratek Pharmaceuticals (1996), a company developing drugs to combat bacterial resistance, and Memory Pharmaceuticals (1998), which was geared toward developing cures for central nervous system disorders.
Gilbert has also been a managing director of BioVentures Investors, since 2001. He has served on the advisory and directoral boards of several other biotechnology companies as well, including being a director of Amylyx Pharmaceuticals, which is developing a treatment for ALS.
After retiring from Harvard in 2001, Gilbert launched an artistic career centered on digital photography. | <urn:uuid:1ac54a8a-9344-4015-9cc4-e3cfde776a1d> | {
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Fresh, ripe pinks like that of POWER PINK Linen streak across many of Willem De Kooning’s paintings, creating shockingly bright shards of colour amidst his frenetic expressionist visions. Leader in the American Abstract Expressionist school throughout the 1950s and 1960s, De Kooning’s paintings were often based on women, painted with flurried passages of pink in peach and candy hues that streak across his canvases suggesting energy, movement and life. Though his works became increasingly abstract over time, the same ripe, juicy pinks remained a constant, nestled amongst neutral tones of green, yellow and to make them stand out from the crowd with a daring bravado.
Born in Rotterdam in 1904, De Kooning was a determined and ambitious young man who showed early artistic promise. He took on an apprenticeship with a design firm when he was just 12 years old, while studying night classes at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts. In 1926 he stowed away on a ship to the United States, heading to New York City with the hope of finding the American dream. His first job was as a house painter, which provided him with enough of a steady income to take on a studio and pursue his own practice.
Like many artists in New York, De Kooning found paid work as a public artist through the Workers Project Administration in the 1930s, where he made several large-scale public art murals, and met other ambitious young artists including Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and Lee Krasner. By the 1940s De Kooning and these contemporaries were developing the Abstract Expressionist style with loose, wild and free brushstrokes, heightened colours and an increasingly abstract language. Within this set De Kooning was often labelled as “an artist’s artist” because his work was so painterly and immediately appealing to his crowd of contemporaries.
Throughout his career De Kooning’s paintings predominantly focussed on female models, which he would paint with streaks and swipes of thick, impasto paint to convey frenetic energy and movement. Woman and Bicycle, 1952–1953, is a part of his renowned ‘Woman’ series, conveying voluptuous women with crudely applied slabs of paint and broken, Cubist shards of colour, transforming them into strange, otherworldly beings. In this work neutral shades of flesh pink, green and yellow intermingle throughout the centre stage, while a shockingly bright shard of hot pink streaks across the woman’s breast, pulling our eye inwards to the centre and upwards to her grimacing face.
As his ideas developed De Kooning’s work became ever more abstract and expressive, eventually abandoning real world references for a hypnotic, improvised style of abstraction. Sometimes he would mix grit or sand into his paint before applying it on to his canvases, giving it an even greater weight and volume that could project outwards from the flat surface. Colours became more vibrant and daring than ever in these mature works, as if breaking free from reality into an entirely imaginary realm of their own making. But pinks remained a defining feature in many paintings, suggesting the same fleshy physicality of his earlier studies featuring women.
In Untitled (Woman), 1971-74, daring shades of hot pink and fuchsia are smeared across sheets of newspaper in a series of asymmetrical shapes and lines that suggest the solidity of human bodies, but they blur outwards towards the edges as if moving through space. Untitled XII, 1975 also alludes to fleshy forms with sketchy outlines forming curved, soft shapes, but they are reworked and painted over to leave them ultimately unrecognisable and obscure. Colours are dominated here by pale, almost white flesh tones, but it is the streaks of vibrant, dazzling pink in the upper areas that bring electric life into the composition, demonstrating De Kooning’s ongoing obsession with pink. | <urn:uuid:07f33242-6ac1-4157-896e-e14de29e7f7b> | {
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A friend was lecturing in Latin America. He was going to use a translator, but to identify with his audience, he wanted to begin his talk by saying in Spanish, "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen." He arrived at the auditorium a little early and realized he did not know the Spanish words for ladies and gentlemen. Being rather resourceful, he went to the part of the building where the restrooms were, looked at the signs on the two doors, and memorized those two words.
When the audience arrived and he was introduced, he stood up and said in Spanish, "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen."
The audience was shocked. He didn't know whether he had offended them or perhaps they hadn't heard him or understood him. So he decided to repeat it. Again in Spanish he said, "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen."
One person in the audience began to snicker. Pretty soon the entire audience was laughing. Finally, someone told him that he had said, "Good evening, bathrooms and broom closets!"
Lecturer In Latin America
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Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) say that they’ve gotten closer to a potential solution for people with anxiety or conditions such as Asperger’s syndrome. Because a single conversation can be interpreted in very different ways it can make social situations extremely stressful.
It can Detect a Happy or Sad Tone
They have come up with a wearable AI system that can detect a conversation’s tone. It’s an artificially intelligent wearable system that can predict if a conversation is happy, sad, or neutral based on a person’s speech patterns and vitals. MIT CSAIL researchers have created this wearable system that can tell whether the person you’re talking to is happy or sad.
Uses Specialized Algorithms
Tuka A lanai, a graduate student from MIT and Ph.D. candidate Mohammad Ghassemi describe an AI system that uses specialized algorithms to analyze audio, text transcriptions, and physiological signals. This is done to help determine a conversation’s overall tone in real-time. The system runs on a Samsung Simband, a modular, research-centric wrist wearable that can be tricked out with a wide variety of sensors. The system also has the capacity to run custom algorithms on its hardware.
The device takes Samsung’s Simband smartwatch, which can measure movement, heart rate, blood pressure, blood flow, and skin temperature. They have then paired it with audio capture which can pick up signals like tone, pitch, and word choice, and provide a transcript of the text. By weighing all of the incoming signals, algorithms can easily classify each five-second installment of conversation as either a positive or a negative response. The system can also estimate the emotion of isolated five-second intervals of the conversation, roughly 8 percent better than existing methods.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
The team started with over 500 signals that could tip off how a conversation was going. It ranges from movement to speech patterns, to individual word choice. They let onboard artificial intelligence to figure out which was most important, rather than letting assumptions dictate. These are also the types of social cues that can be difficult for those with anxiety, or for those on the autism spectrum.
Additional Features that you can Expect
The Simband system can ascertain overall tone with 83 percent accuracy. That leaves plenty of room for misinterpretation, as does the fact that its descriptive buckets are so vast. There’s still plenty of room for improvement here. The researchers are hoping to be able to adapt the system to more common smartwatches, like Apple’s. They foresee additional features, like making the device buzz if an exchange helps interaction go better, and twice when things are getting awkward, to keep its wearer pointed toward a conversational North Star. They also intend to add more granularity to the system. They want to dive into expressions like boredom, tension, excitement, and all the other textures of human expression.
Two Basic Algorithms
The team trained two algorithms on the data after capturing 31 different conversations of several minutes each. The first one classified the overall nature of a conversation as either happy or sad. The second algorithm classified each five-second block of every conversation as either positive, negative, or neutral.
The algorithm’s results rang well with what we humans might expect to observe. For example, long pauses and monotonous vocal tones were associated with sadder stories, while more energetic speech patterns were associated with happy stories. In terms of body language, sadder stories were also strongly associated with increased fidgeting and cardiovascular activity, as well as certain postures like putting one’s hands on one’s face.
Right now, the system only provides binary feedback for the conversations on the whole. It can only label individual interactions as either positive or negative. The Simband platform is another limiting factor since the wearable isn’t commercially available yet. Still, there’s a clear path to development. The researchers hope to find a way to use the system on commercial wearables like the Apple Watch. With more data, algorithms learn and improve, which would, in turn, make the system more effective. | <urn:uuid:35445a09-6f34-431f-82e6-85c95f423d8d> | {
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Photo Social Stories Cards About Kids in School Card Game
- Help children learn to behave appropriately at school
- Topics include: listening to the teacher, obeying class rules, following directions, giving compliments, asking permission, apologizing, keeping things organized, and many more
- Includes 35 cards
- Ages 5-12
Written by Mike Canavan and Lawrence Shapiro, Ph.D. Based on a widely accepted technique developed by Carol Grey, each card presents a basic social concept that children need to learn to behave appropriately in school and get along with their peers. The stories help children pay attention to important social cues, to understand the perspective of others, and to respond appropriately in social situations. Each story is followed by bulleted highlights and a set of interactive questions to stimulate discussion. The photographs on each card were selected to provide children with a visual understanding of the social challenges in school.
This book is also part of the Photo Social Stories Card Set. | <urn:uuid:62f8f5bc-7f12-4b74-9a66-d403f566aae8> | {
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Young Epilepsy launches new online guide for schools
As preparations for National Epilepsy Week continue to build, Young Epilepsy have announced the launch of a brand new online guide for schools, which will help teachers to better support young people with epilepsy in their care.
It comes in response to a survey carried out by the organisation which indicated that four in 10 education professionals would not be able to help a student having an epileptic seizure.
On average epilepsy affects 112,000 children and young people across the UK, but two-thirds of those polled have had no training about how to support those with the condition.
The survey of 600 adults working in the education sector – including teachers, administrators, and catering assistants, was commissioned by charity Young Epilepsy, and highlighted the urgent need for education professionals to be better supported.
Two thirds of those polled have had no training about how to support the children with epilepsy in their care, including what to do in the event of a seizure.
A third said they wouldn’t know when to call for an ambulance in the event of a seizure – experts recommend you ring 999 if it lasts for more than 5 minutes or you know it’s their first seizure. Prolonged seizures can result in a potentially fatal condition known as status epilepticus.
Many of those polled were not aware of the different types of seizure a young person can experience. Three quarters were unaware falling to the ground and getting straight back up again could indicate that a young person is having a seizure, or experiencing strange tastes and smells (55 per cent), or staring blankly as if daydreaming (29 per cent).
Only 29 per cent knew that they should time the length of the seizure, only 17 per cent would protect them from hazards, and only 26 per cent knew to cushion their head – all essential actions to keep the young person safe.
A further survey of young people 356 young people with epilepsy and their parents, found 37 per cent of young people do not have an Individual Health Care Plan at school – these plans set out key information to ensure young people are safe and included in all aspects of school life.
A number of the young people have been unnecessarily excluded from activities or opportunities at school, purely due to their condition.
Catherine Hodder, Policy and Advocacy Manager at Young Epilepsy, said
“Epilepsy is one of the most common long term conditions in childhood and every young person’s experience of it is unique to them. It is crucial that schools have the information they need to keep a young person safe. This means knowing what can be the triggers for that individual, what to do if they have a seizure, and when emergency treatment may be needed.
Our research also shows that many young people with epilepsy have a significant difficulty in cognition or behaviour. It’s a consequence of epilepsy that’s rarely addressed when discussing the condition, but can have a profound effect on their educational development. It has become obvious to us that there’s a profound and urgent need for education professionals to have access to the information and practical tools they need to be able to better support the children with epilepsy who are under their care. That’s why we have created this new online resource, which contains essential information for anyone working with young people who have epilepsy.”
Commonly held mistaken beliefs were also prevalent in the OnePoll survey; six in ten respondents wrongly thinking that a person having a seizure can swallow their tongue, and 15 per cent incorrectly believing that flashing lights will always trigger an epileptic seizure.
Mark Devlin, Chief Executive of Young Epilepsy, said:
“We know that our colleagues working in any education setting are facing many challenges every day, and most are doing a fantastic job in ensuring that every child in their care is being fully supported. But these latest figures show that children with epilepsy are struggling to have their conditions fully understood by the people who are playing an essential role in their educational and emotional development.
It is our hope that this fantastic new online resource gives teachers the opportunity to learn more about epilepsy and allow the young people in their care to be fully supported to learn and be included in school life to the full.”
The creation of the guide, which has been generously supported by an educational grant from Veriton Pharma, has also received support from important education and health bodies.
Sharon White, Chief Executive of the School and Public Health Nurses Association (SAPHNA) said:
“We welcome this resource which provides much needed updated guidance and, in doing so, further raises awareness of epilepsy in young people.”
Kevin Courtney, Joint General Secretary of the National Education Union commented:
“We welcome this new resource which will help school staff ensure that pupils with epilepsy can participate in school or college life.”
"School and learning can sometimes be a challenge for children and young people with epilepsy. This online guide is a concise and practical resource for all educational establishments, exploring diagnosis, treatment and other potential issues. Supporting a child with epilepsy in school is essential and this guide provides some excellent examples with useful documents, resources and links to sources of support."
The online guide is available here: | <urn:uuid:c184ec49-08f1-4679-a82b-eb4638f8577f> | {
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|Date:||Wednesday - April 2, 2014|
|Guests:||Neil Slade, Charles Adler|
In the first half, brain researcher Neil Slade discussed different aspects about how the mind interacts with music. The fine hairs in the cochlea part of the inner ear sends electrical signals to the brain stem, which travels to the temporal lobe and other structures, where it's recognized as music or sound. The way music is processed in the human brain is very complex, and is even connected to sight, Slade detailed. The Mozart Effect-- the idea that listening to classical music by a pregnant mother will increase the intelligence of her child is somewhat of an urban myth, he reported. Yet, studies have found that 10-year-old children who learned to play a musical instrument such as the violin showed improvements in visual and spacial skills, as well as math, he added.
Slade conducted his own experiment (see related video) with 65 adults listening undisturbed on headphones to a special piece of music he designed. Over a one-month period, 78% of the participants reported high levels of unusual non-sensory and paranormal perception while listening to the music, including communications with deceased relatives, precognition, and heightened emotional states. He also touched on how people like to hear a certain unpredictability in music, and how their brain states can become synchronized with each other when at a musical concert.
In the latter half, Professor of Physics, Charles L. Adler, spoke about his lifelong love of science fiction and fantasy and how it relates to real science. Sometimes authors have been very prescient about the future, other times not so accurate. In "The Mote in God's Eye," a 1974 novel by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven, they wrote about a pocket-sized device in which you could access any information, essentially predicting the modern cell phone, Adler noted. The author, Olaf Stapledon, wrote sci-fi novels in the 1920s and 30s that were amazing in scope, and one of them, Star Maker, was the first to propose what has become known as a Dyson sphere-- a hypothetical megastructure that captures energy from a star, he continued.
Science fiction has delved into time travel, and the Theory of Relativity seems to allow for this as a possibility. Theoretical physicist Kip Thorne has explored the concept of using wormholes for interstellar travel, and in doing so, he realized that traveling faster than the speed of light implies the ability to travel back in time. But Thorne said you'd need some form of "exotic matter" that is like antigravity in order to travel through a wormhole and keep it from collapsing unto itself, Adler recounted. He also commented on such topics as alien visitation, multiverses, and exoplanets.
Bumper music from Wednesday April 02, 2014
- Midnight Express (The Chase)
- Caribbean Breeze
- Breaking Up Is Hard To Do
- Little by Little
- Ray of Light
- Ghost Dance
- The Grave And The Constant
Fun Lovin' Criminals
- More than a Feeling
- Peaches En Regalia
- I Know You're Out There Somewhere
- Lung Shadows
- The Curtain Falls
- Inca Dance | <urn:uuid:034937a8-460b-4b82-87d4-65e1a0059311> | {
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Online Resources for Arts Educators
Classroom resources for educators
Other resources that may be of interest:
National Curriculum Resources
Compendia of Best Practices in Arts Integration
Peer-to-peer sharing of programs, projects and curriculum in the including:
1. School Change
Next Generation Sunshine State Standards (NGSSS) for the Arts
What is behind the Big Ideas, Enduring Understandings and Benchmarks that make up the Next Generation Sunshine State Standards for the Arts (NGSSS-Arts). John LeTellier, Fine Arts Content Specialist at the Florida Department of Education, provided a PowerPoint that explains it all. An excellent reference to use and share. Click HERE .
Check out this video: Building Curriculum with the Next Generation Sunshine State Standards, Common Core, and Florida's Fine Arts Assessment Program presented by Beth Cummings, Florida Performing Arts Assessment Project Administrator, at the 2013 FAAE Arts Integration Symposia Series.
The National Coalition for CORE ARTS Standards is developing the Next Step in K-12 Arts Learning Standards. You can find out more HERE.SEADAE:Roles and Responsibilities of Arts Educators
State Education Agency Directors of Arts Education (SEADAE) released on June 26, 2012 a paper outlining the roles and responsibilities certified arts educators, certified non-arts educators and providers of supplemental arts instruction play in providing a quality, sequential arts education for America's K-12 students. SEADAE looks forward to engaging the arts and policy communities in a vigorous discussion about the paper’s recommendations to support quality arts education across our country. Click HERE to view the report. | <urn:uuid:d956c2f4-4a76-429d-9510-76171ec06c91> | {
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