|North Korea Table of Contents
The constitutions of North Korea have been patterned after those of other communist states. The constitutional framework delineates a highly centralized governmental system and the relationship between the people and the state. On December 27, 1972, the Fifth Supreme People's Assembly ratified a new constitution to replace the first constitution, promulgated in 1948. Innovations of the 1972 constitution included the establishment of the positions of president and vice presidents and a super-cabinet called the Central People's Committee (CPC). The 1972 constitution was revised in April 1992, and ratified by the Sixth Supreme People's Assembly. The South Korean press published unofficial translations of the document in late 1992.
The revised constitution has 171 articles and seven chapters (twenty-two more and four less, respectively, than the 1972 constitution). Among the more significant changes are the elevation of chuch'e at the expense of Marxism-Leninism, the removal of references to the expulsion of foreign troops, and the addition of articles encouraging joint ventures, guaranteeing the "legitimate rights and interests of foreigners," and establishing a framework for expanded ties with capitalist countries. More important, the new constitution provides a legal framework for the 1991 appointment of Kim Jong Il as supreme commander of the armed forces by removing the military from the command of the president and by placing the military under the control of the National Defense Commission, of which he is chairman.
The eighteen articles of Chapter 1 deal with politics. Article 1 defines North Korea as an independent socialist state representing the interests of all the Korean people. Article 15 states that the DPRK defends the democratic, national rights of overseas Koreans and their legitimate rights under international law. Sovereignty emanates from four expressly mentioned social groups: workers, peasants, soldiers, and working intellectuals. State organs are organized on and operate on the principle of democratic centralism. In a change from the previous constitution, attaining "the complete victory of socialism in the northern half" was to be accomplished through the execution of the three revolutions of ideology, technology and culture, while struggling to realize unification of the fatherland by following the principles of independence, peaceful unification, and grand national unity. Previously socialism was to have been accomplished by driving out foreign forces on a countrywide scale and by reunifying the country peacefully on a democratic basis. Other articles in this chapter refer to the mass line, the Ch'ongsan-ni Method (or Ch'ongsan-ri) and spirit, and the Three Revolution Team Movement. The constitution states that foreign policy and foreign activities are based on the principles of independence, peace, and friendship. Diplomatic, political, economic, and cultural relations are to be established with all friendly countries based on the principles of complete equality, independence, mutual respect, noninterference in each other's internal affairs, and mutual benefit.
In Chapter 2, economic affairs are codified. The constitution declares that the means of production are owned by state and cooperative organizations. The text reiterates that natural resources, major factories and enterprises, harbors, banks, and transportation and telecommunications establishments are state owned and that land, draft animals, farm implements, fishing boats, buildings, and small- and medium-sized factories and enterprises may be owned by cooperative organizations. Article 24 defines personal property as that for personal use by the working people for the purpose of consumption and derived from the "socialist distribution according to work done and from additional benefits received from the state and society." Benefits derived from supplementary pursuits, such as the small garden plots of collectivized farmers, are considered personal property; such benefits are protected by the state as private property and are guaranteed by law as a right of inheritance. The planned, national economy is directed and managed through the Taean Work System.
Culture, education, and public health are covered in Chapter 3. Article 45 stipulates that the state develop a mandatory eleven-year education system, including one year of preschool education. Other articles state that education is provided at no cost and that scholarships are granted to students enrolled in colleges and professional schools. Education in nurseries and kindergartens is also at the state and society's expense. Article 56 notes that medical service is universal and free. Medical care and the right to education are also covered in Chapter 5 articles. Article 57 places environmental protection measures before production; this emphasis is in line with the attention given to preserving the natural environment and creating a "cultural and sanitary" living and working environment by preventing environmental pollution.
Chapter 5 extensively details the fundamental rights and duties of citizens. Citizens over the age of seventeen may exercise the right to vote and be elected to office regardless of gender, race, occupation, length of residency, property status, education, party affiliation, political views, and religion. Citizens in the armed forces may vote or to be elected; insane persons and those deprived by court decisions of the right to vote do not have the right to vote and be elected. According to Article 67, citizens have freedom of speech, publication, assembly, demonstration, and association. Citizens also have the right to work, and Article 70 stipulates that they work according to their ability and are remunerated according to the quantity and quality of work performed. Article 71 provides for a system of working hours, holidays, paid leave, sanitoriums, and rest homes funded by the state, as well as for cultural facilities. Article 76 accords women equal social status and rights. Women are also granted maternity leave and shortened working hours when they have large families. Marriage and the family are protected by the state.
Chapter 6, entitled "State Institutions," has eighty articles and eight sections--more sections than any other chapter. The chapter covers the Supreme People's Assembly, the president of the DPRK, the National Defense Commission, the Central People's Committee, the State Administration Council, the local people's assemblies and people's committees, the local administrative and economic committees, and the court and the procurator's office. Chapter 7, which covers the national emblem, the flag, and capital, describes the first two items, designates P'yongyang as the capital, and names the national anthem. In a change from the previous constitution, the 1992 revision mandates that "the sacred mountain of the revolution"--Paektu-san--be added to the national emblem. It is to stand above the existing symbols: a hydroelectric power plant, the beaming light of a five-pointed red star, ovally framed ears of rice bound with a red band, and the inscription "Democratic People's Republic of Korea."
More about the Government of North Korea.
Source: U.S. Library of Congress


Spotting cancer without radiation
Common methods of cancer detection like positron emission tomography (PET) or computed tomography (CT) scans, use radiation to spot tumors. However, new studies show there may be a promising alternative.
Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine in California say a new magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique that effectively diagnoses patients without the use of radiation, is holding promise.
The study, published in The Lancet Oncology, described the method of detection using an iron supplement called ferumoxytol. This supplement acts as a “contrast agent” that increases the visibility of tumors to MRI machines.
The ability to detect and monitor tumors without radiation would greatly lower the risk for children to have future, secondary cancers, study leaders said. They say statistics show the risk for lifetime cancer triples for children who have been given high doses of radiation for PET or CT scans. Experts also say that these scans triple the lifetime risk of secondary leukemia and brain cancer.
Still in its beginning stages, researchers hope further testing can help make this radiation option a clinical alternative to PET/CT scans.
The cost of the procedure is similar to traditional methods but the side effects differ greatly. There are no side effects to the new treatment, other than the potential allergic reaction to the iron supplement, researchers say. Study leaders say these added benefits make the method worth studying further.
Looking forward, lead author of the study, Dr. Heike Daldrup-Link, said in a statement, “We are in the process of applying for funding at the moment and if all goes well, might be able to start the multi-center trial this fall. We already received requests from two centers in Europe who want to join in as well.”
About the Author
health enews staff is a group of experienced writers from our Advocate Aurora Health sites, which also includes freelance or intern writers.


Amy E. Herman’s ted talk expresses that through art analysis, it can help train those to enhance their communication skills by describing what they’re seeing .Observation and analyzation can be helpful in our day to day lives or even in very important situations. For example, Amy mentions a cop reporting for backup and describing the severity of the situation. But once the backup arrives, they notice that the scene isn’t what the officer described at all. This is what she means when she says that art can sometimes save lives . When you walk into a museum it is the most self aware place to be in, why because everyone is looking at certain works of art and analyzing the details to create it . They’re using their eyes to find its meaning, hidden message, or even just to enjoy its form of structure, some even formulate questions as to why something may look the way it does. In our daily routine, we rely on our eyes to get us through the day and our words to respond to others. But if we go back to a basic format of learning we would say in order to teach a child words we use a picture book which then lets a child understand what a specific item is to a specific word. we notice that when we point to a word with an image above it a child will then try to formulate the word and point to the image hinting that they see what you are doing and understand what that image is . So that later on when they see a truck rolling down the street, they will be able to identify it. We use art as an aid to teach us how to observe , identify ,and create descriptions so that we may progress in life and our careers.


- Explore the lives of the peoples who lived in this region—which today includes Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Lebanon, and adjacent parts of Syria—for thousands of years.
- Learn how pottery vessels record changes in economic conditions, technology, and social values, then trace these changes over many centuries.
- Imagine life in Beth Shean (Israel), where Penn archaeologists uncovered 18 city levels spanning almost 6,000 years: Beth Shean was a crossroads of cultures in ancient times and housed an Egyptian garrison, then Israelite, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, and early Islamic settlements.
The region today encompassing Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Lebanon, and adjacent parts of Syria for thousands of years experienced occupation by foreign rule. The artifacts in this Gallery explore how people responded and adapted to occupation, and how they lived their daily lives. The Gallery also shows how ancient artifacts—such as weapons, jewelry, cosmetics, and funerary objects—can provide insight into the past. The Canaan and Ancient Israel Gallery is organized by themes including politics and social organization, religion, domestic life, agriculture and crafts, trade and commerce, and death and burial.
The gallery title comes from two ancient names of the region and its inhabitants. Canaan is the earliest name found in texts referring to a group of people with a common language in the land which the tribes of Israel later conquered. Israel referred first to a people within Canaan and then to a political entity.
The Penn Museum began excavating in the region in 1921, at Beth Shean, Israel. Excavations expanded to other biblical sites including Beth Shemesh, Gibeon (el-Jib, in the Palestinian Territories), and Zarethan (Tell es-Sa’idiyah, in Jordan). Artifacts from these excavations make up most of the Museum’s collection from the region, which spans four millennia.
Sarcophagus LidThis clay sarcophagus (coffin) lid was excavated by Penn archaeologists from a cemetery at Beth Shean, in modern-day Israel. It depicts a face, possibly female, with crossed hands. Around 50 other clay sarcophagi were found in the same cemetery. They all date to around 1200 BCE, which was close to the end of the Egyptian Empire in Canaan. The practice of burial inside sarcophagi originated in Egypt, so these sarcophagi demonstrate how practices traveled across empires to become part of other cultures.


Quartz is one the most abundant minerals on earth and can be found in many shapes, sizes and colors. Many experienced rock collectors can tell if a crystal is real quartz through careful examination. They examine the crystal for small naturally accruing abnormalities (man-made crystals are usually flawless, without abnormalities). Natural quartz crystals will have areas with small cracks, cloudiness or areas where other minerals are forming. Because of the natural flaws, a grade system was developed to determine the quality of the crystal. Grade A quartz is the highest quality of quartz. This grade is identified by its crystal clear transparence, and lack of abnormalities within the crystal's structure. Grade B quartz contains a small amount of natural abnormalities with a small number of tiny cracks in the crystal, and may have small cloudy areas. Grade C quartz will have small chips along the edges, slight damage to the point and several small cracks that do not damage the crystal's structure. Grade D quartz has damaged points and large cracks that damage structure of the crystal, making it very fragile and easily broken. A simple method to determine if a crystal is real quartz is to a perform a scratch test using the Mohs scale of hardness as a guide. The Mohs scale, developed in 1812 by German mineralogist Friedrich Mohs, is a popular guide used to measure the hardness of gemstones by judging scratch resistance. Quartz has a hardness of 7 on the Mohs scale, meaning that it will easily scratch glass, metals and softer stones. This test will not harm the crystal if it is real quartz because glass has a hardness of 5.5 to 6.5.
Clean the surface of the glass, with a streak-free glass cleaner. Completely dry the surface with paper towels.
Examine the glass for scratches. Mark scratches using a permanent marker.
Press the point of the crystal firmly against the surface of the glass. Add a small amount of pressure as you drag the crystal across the surface.
Examine the surface of the glass carefully; the scratch will be faintly visible. If no scratch is visible, repeat the test adding more pressure as you drag the crystal.
If after several tests the surface of the glass is unaffected, you may want to consider trying to scratch the crystal. Find an unscratched, flat area of the crystal and repeat step 1.
Press the corner of the glass firmly against the surface of the crystal. Add a small amount of pressure as you drag the glass across the surface.
Examine the surface of the crystal. If a scratch is visible on the surface, the crystal it is not real quartz.
Things You'll Need:
- Piece of glass
- Permanent marker
- Protective gloves
- Glass cleaner
- Paper towels
- Performing this test on artificial crystal will damage the surface and destroy the value. Be careful when applying pressure to the point of a crystal. Sharp points may break off during testing if too much pressure is applied.
- Performing this test on artificial crystal will damage the surface and destroy the value.
- Be careful when applying pressure to the point of a crystal. Sharp points may break off during testing if too much pressure is applied.
Dina Staggs writes on a variety of subjects ranging from folklore and hobbies, to spirituality and religion. Her writing career began in 2008 with professional product reviews on “Review Time." Today Dina is working towards an Associate of Arts degree in Biblical studies from the United Christian Bible Institute.


Vegetation Indices, Change Detection & Time Series Analysis
Traces of Fire in Satellite Images (Geography)
The concrete example of the devastating 2007 forest fires in Greece serves to introduce the pupils to the causes and the effects of humans interfering in geo-ecological cycles. The pupils take on the role of an expert who is asked on behalf of the European Commission to make statements on the development of the vegetation in Greece after the forest fires by making use of remote sensing methods. At first, the pupils get to know the different spectral bands of a satellite and calculate a vegetation index (NDVI) which can supply information on plant vitality. As a last task, they are asked to combine single NDVI images in order to create and analyse a time series.
Recommended Prior Knowledge: Knowledge in the fields of photosynthesis, ecology (biology) and optics (physics)
The pupils ought to be able to classify the dynamics of ecosystems in connection to the example of the 2007 forest fires in Greece.
The electromagnetic spectrum has to be described and used for comparing the reflection characteristics of plants.
The wave-length range relevant for photosynthesis will be allocatedThe pupils ought to explain the relevance of vegetation indices and apply vegetation indices for change detection.


Evans M. Harrell II, Associate Dean Emeritus
College of Science, Georgia Institute of Technology
Africa is a land of many stories, new and old, told in countless languages. Not least among those languages is the one in which, according to Galileo, the book of nature is written: mathematics. Today is a remarkable time in Africa for mathematics and for the stories it can help to tell.
Little noticed by the world, an ecological disaster unfolded on the westernmost coast of Africa in 2003. The Senegal River is one of the major waterways of West Africa, flowing westward from the interior of the continent and forming the northern border of Senegal and the southern border of Mauritania, before veering sharply southward and closely paralleling the Atlantic coast, from which it is separated by a narrow spit of sandy land known as the Langue de Barbarie. Here this mighty river, comparable in scale to the Potomac at Washington or the Hudson at New York, formed a remarkable peninsula over 30 km long with a typical width of less than 300 m. From the point where it narrows, the Langue de Barbarie belongs to Senegal, and there, covering the small Island of N’Dar on the riparian side, lies St. Louis, the former capital of French West Africa and Senegal’s second city today. Because of its two distinct fisheries, one oceanic and one freshwater, and because the narrow sandy peninsula afforded an easy land shortcut avoiding a day’s upriver travel, St. Louis has long been a regionally important trade and transportation center. With its history and the African cultural events taking place there, against a decaying but still beautiful French colonial backdrop, St. Louis was designated as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2000.
Today is a remarkable time in Africa for mathematics and for the stories it can help to tell.
In late 2003 heavy rains caused severe flooding in St. Louis and associated communities. To relieve the flooding, a 4 meter wide ditch was dug across the Langue de Barbarie a few km. south of St. Louis, draining the high waters to the sea. This had the desired effect, but as the citizens of St. Louis watched in dismay over the next few days, the ditch swiftly enlarged to a width of hundreds and, later, thousands of meters, forming a new mouth of the river in a location shifted by more than 20 km. In the blink of an eye, St. Louis changed from a river city to a city of tides and brackish water. This affected the ecology and the way of life of the region, as well as the physical conditions of the dams, bridges, and buildings along the river.
There is no putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. The people of the lower Senegal River must and will adjust. Here is where mathematics touches their lives. The essence of applied mathematics is modeling, the process where a physical reality is replaced by a set of equations that describe what can be quantified and capture how those quantities affect one another. Think of modeling as an observational tool, akin to a microscope, a telescope, or an MRI device. It allows precise visualization and provides a framework for thinking about the thing being observed, and about its potential futures. Applied mathematicians working in Senegal and elsewhere have taken up the project of modeling the Senegal River basin with the tools of the differential calculus, in terms of flow rates, salinity, geographic features, connectedness and blockages, in an effort to see a certain distance into the future and to engage in rational planning for the economy of the region in order to improve the lives of its population. This is an ongoing project, which will be continuously refined and adapted for the foreseeable future, as the mouth of the river continues to erode and move, as the ecology changes, and as brackish water affects dams and bridges that were not designed to resist salt.
Similar stories are told across Subsaharan Africa. Whenever I have asked Africans what they hope for from mathematics, they reply that they wish to model and predict some pressing environmental, health, or social phenomenon. Again and again the issues Africans most want to understand quantitatively are hydrology, disease, environmental degradation, and economic development. Before any rational response to these problems can be crafted, they have to be understood with quantitative clarity. For data, mathematical modeling is the observational tool of choice.
Africans have recognized this and across the continent have recently embraced mathematics as a key to development. In 2001 Neil Turok, the Director of Canada’s Perimeter Institute and a native of South Africa, had the inspiration that Africa was fertile ground for research in applied mathematics. The African population is young and mass education is expanding. Why, he wondered, shouldn’t the next Einstein be found among the new generation of Africans? Since mathematics is an inexpensive science, it is a relatively easy matter for a developing country to attain a world level of activity, and the bang for the buck for economic and societal benefits is unparalleled. Africa’s human capacity has enormous potential for contributing to the mathematical sciences, and an investment in mathematics has much to return to the continent. Turok made a convincing case in South Africa and founded the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) in Cape Town, which opened its doors in 2003.
Africa’s human capacity has enormous potential for contributing to the mathematical sciences, and an investment in mathematics has much to return to the continent.
With the success of AIMS, Turok thought of replicating it in other countries. His dream of the “Next Einstein Initiative” took a leap forward when he was selected to present it at the 2008 TED Conference. Shortly afterwards a pilot AIMS project was opened in Abuja, Nigeria, within the African University of Science and Technology,. In 2011 a self-standing institute in mathematics opened its doors in Mbour, Senegal, near Dakar, followed not long afterwards by another AIMS branch in Biriwa, Ghana. These institutions have attracted strong support and participation by prominent European and American mathematicians, including Fields Medalists. This is particularly the case for AIMS Senegal, where an applied mathematician, Mary Teuw Niane, is currently serving as the Minister of Higher Education and where there is a national push to build out high-speed data services and other supporting infrastructure. The AIMS branches offer graduate degrees and specialized training in applied mathematics; for instance in 2014 AIMS Senegal operated a program on modeling fisheries.
There are several ways that mathematics can bring clarity to a problem. Descartes famously taught that all of the geometry of the world we live in is describable by three measurements, distances along a set of perpendicular axes. His insight that data can be understood visually, as geometric relationships of coordinates corresponding to dimensions, forever changed science and technology. Following Descartes, mathematicians characterize complexity in terms of dimensions, which are by no means limited to three. We could of course ask for the three spatial measurements, the x-, y-, and z- coordinates, but in a model of a river we will also ask for flow rates, temperature, salinity, and so on. Each of these, in mathematical parlance, is a new dimension. The complexity of a model is gauged by its dimension, which is a concept to be found in many branches of mathematics. The dimension can be understood as the number of distinct questions we are required to answer in order to understand the model.
As Einstein once quipped, a theory should be as simple as possible, but not more so. The art of mathematical modeling consists in stripping away and ignoring accidental and irrelevant features, leaving the essence, as in philosophy. The fewer the quantities in the model, the better, so long as those that remain are sufficient to understand the object of study. The lower the dimensionality, the greater the clarity. Yet when trying to understand a large amount of data, it may not be at all clear how it can be best organized into an understandable narrative with the fewest dimensions.
Modeling can draw from many branches of mathematics: calculus, statistics, and so forth. However, one of particular interest dates from the work of Joseph Fourier. Although like so many later scientists he was anticipated in certain essentials by Euler, Fourier is credited with a method of understanding data which is to the graphical drawings of Descartes as hearing is to seeing. Just as in daily life some information and patterns are better taken in visually while others are are more readily discerned by ear, so it is with data. Fourier showed that any aural signal can be regarded as the superposition of pure vibrations, and that there are efficient formulae for taking the signal apart and putting it together. He enabled mathematics to accomplish what the brain and ear do when extracting the aspects of our sonic environment which we perceive as music, speech, or indeed any sound we recognize as meaningful in some way.
Today’s terms for the pure vibrational tones, as in music, and for the physical forms of those vibrations are the rather unmelodious words “eigenvalues” and “eigenvectors,” while the understanding of these concepts is more colorfully termed “spectral analysis.” (“Fourier analysis” is a special case.) It is important to note that spectral analysis is computationally easy, fast and cheap. It would be hard to overstate the importance of our second sense organ for data in the development of our technological society, without which the hard sciences and engineering would scarcely have advanced since the Nineteenth Century. Just to cite one example familiar today, when Google performs a search for websites containing some search terms, it carries out a spectral analysis of the part of the internet where those terms appear, finds the dominant eigenvalue, as if that part of the internet were vibrating at that frequency, and presents the searcher with the corresponding eigenvector. A site appears in the list of search results in order of the size of the part of the eigenvector vibrating at that site. In essence, Google finds the loudest musical note made by the network with those search terms, and presents the sites that are playing it the loudest.
“Sonification” is a term being used today for a creative way of determining whether a large data set contains information of the sort we humans can understand and use. Researchers first convert data into sound within our hearing range, using Fourier’s methods. Then they listen. Although there are many different ways to thus sonify the data, in practice it does not seem to matter much which one is used. Randomly generated data with no simple patterns will be perceived as noise, perhaps with pops and whooshes but no special tones or rhythmic features. Conversely, if the data are organized, the listener will quickly discern special features that resonate in the mind.
Sonification has become popular enough to sustain an organization devoted to the method, ICAD, the International Community for Auditory Display. Beyond helping researchers identify data sets that contain useful information, sonification enables mathematics to touch art. It has become popular to compose music using scientific data sets, from the motion of molecules to the structure of the galaxy. In Atlanta alone, where Science Taverns and Science Festivals are flourishing, there have within the last year been at least three public performances of music based on data, including “First Life,” a mixed-media piece for string quartet composed by Steve Everett, based on chemical data from Martha Grover’s research group at Georgia Tech.
Can mathematics be of comparable service in illuminating culture or artwork? The Luba people of Congo have a story-telling tradition using devices called lukasa memory boards. These are hand-held wooden objects with markings and pegs of beads or shells in special patterns, which the story-teller can look at or touch, thereby calling up information that is germane to the story, somewhat as the modern academic will look at her Powerpoint slide to organize and recall the information she is imparting, perhaps selecting different bits on different occasions for various audiences.
It is believed that the stories in the lukasa boards include genealogies, political relations, geography, and history.
Exactly how the lukasa board can be read and what information is encoded by the markings and pegs is not fully understood. The art of using lukasa boards was traditionally taught only to initiates in a secret society known as bambudye, whose number has greatly dwindled since the height of the Luba culture in the 18th and 19th Centuries. It is believed that the stories in the lukasa boards include genealogies, political relations, geography, and history, but scholars are hazy about the precise content and how it is encoded. Mathematics can no more bring back a lost narrative art than it can restore the past mouth of a river, but it can be of assistance by identifying patterns and determining how much information is encoded in them. Many lukasa boards are preserved in museums and collections, so data are available. Speculatively, the data probably come in two mathematical types: geometric, and relational. Different cultures understand spatial relationships in different ways, so if lukasa boards contain geographic or other geometric information, the way the information is represented may not be at all in the form of a map, as understood in the Western tradition, with Cartesian or other coordinates. Nonetheless, modern geometry includes a highly developed theory of the different ways a given spatial concept can be represented, of the transformations changing one representation into another, and of the aspects of the geometry that are invariant and independent of the way it is represented. With data from enough examples of lukasa boards, it may be possible to recognize which features recur and have the characteristics of spatial information. If so, one may be able to transform that information into a set of maps with features that could be compared with extant drawings and maps which we understand in our own cultural tradition. Perhaps somewhere there is a match that could serve as a Rosetta Stone for deciphering the lukasa boards!
Reports that lukasa boards contain genealogies and political relations point to another branch of mathematics, the theory of networks, or graphs†. In this theory, all information is stripped away except for information concerning which entities are connected to which. As a common example, one could consider a social group organized by a single relationship, such as marriage or friendship on social media. The members of the group are represented as simple dots (“vertices”), which are connected by links (“edges”) when they have the relationship we specify. All additional information is disregarded. Mathematics brings few new insights when the data set, or number of vertices, is small, but when the data set is large, it can reveal many important and even surprising insights, the Google algorithm mentioned above among many other examples.
Let us suppose that by examining the features of lukasa boards, it is possible to say that in a given board there are so many entities (people? villages? dynasties?) and so many relationships, and to organize these relationships as graphs. One could ask how many different questions the bambudye story-teller is prepared to answer about those entities and their relationships according to the lukasa board: e.g., who is related in a certain way to whom, which events happened in which reign, which villages are allied for purposes of trade, kinship, or war. While this level of mathematical abstraction will cast no light on what the relationships are, it may be possible to identify how many organizing principles there are, quantified as a number of dimensions. That is, how many questions are needed in order to understand the story – if only we knew what those questions were!
Because of the glut of data facing the world today, researchers are keen to find new mathematical tools for extracting information from complexity. This author, with Joachim Stubbe, has been among those expanding the toolbox, by making connections between spectral analysis and dimensionality. In a recent article we show how the dimension that characterizes a graph can be read off from the spectrum of its eigenvalues. The idea of using this tool, along with the more established ones of statistical and geometric analysis, to seek the social information encoded in lukasa boards is intriguing. It would be as if by listening to the musical sounds of a story told in an unknown language one could discern at least the number of characters and the complexity of their relationships.
† In the mathematical community the more common term is “graph,” but the reader should be aware that in this context the word has nothing to do with the more widely familiar Cartesian notion of the graph of a function.


There are two kinds of fiber, soluble and insoluble, and neither contains calories. Soluble fibers are able to dissolve in warm water; this means that they are able to absorb a lot of water and other particles. Insoluble fibers are not able to dissolve in warm water. While soluble fiber is often in the news due to its benefits in heart health, insoluble fiber deserves equal attention.
Insoluble fiber can be found in fruits, vegetables, grains and beans and benefits us in two very important ways. First, it adds bulk to our stool so that we feel an urge to go to the bathroom. This is important because our bowel is a muscle and like every other muscle in our body, it needs regular exercise to maintain its function. How our bowel gets exercise is by having bowel “movements.” Without insoluble fiber, the bowel does not get enough exercise, leading to fewer bowel movements and eventual constipation. Hemorrhoids may also be a side effect of not enough insoluble fiber because of the strain needed when bowel muscles do not move very often and get out of shape.
Another benefit of insoluble fiber is that it can help our gut bacteria grow. Our gut bacteria, or gut flora, are living organisms that eat sugars and fiber, and prevent bad bacteria from living in our gut and making us sick. Insoluble fiber is a strong fiber that takes a lot longer for our gut bacteria to break down, which helps them grow and multiply.
So yes, we really do need insoluble fiber. Make eating fruits, vegetables and whole grain a part of your daily routine and see the benefits on a regular basis.


Within the seventeenth century the rifle scopes had been first launched to supply correct aiming assist to the hunters. Later individuals had experimented with varied sorts of optical gadgets to reinforce taking pictures skills. People who find themselves lengthy vary hunters, scopes are a necessity for them. Beside hunters, the army and police personnels additionally require scopes. For lengthy vary shootings and correct aiming, the scopes turned obligatory for them. So far as paperwork could be discovered, the primary rifle scope was invented between 1835 and 1840. It was manufactured by Morgan James. However, John R. Chapman, an engineer, wrote a e-book Morgan James’ experiments. Later, collectively they produced “Chapman-James Sight.”
Round this identical time a variety of experiments had been carried out on cci 200 primers in stock rifle scopes and thus various manufacturers had been established. The magnifications, elevation and windage changes had been improved. Rifle scopes had been obtainable from 3X to 20X magnifications. These turned so in style that they had been used within the Civil Battle for the very first time. You’ll be amazed to know that in as early as 1880 scopes had been produced for handguns. Arduous to consider, is it? However it’s true. Each troopers and hunters had scopes on their rifles and handguns. And this was a time when the troopers had been nonetheless utilizing balls, powder horns and muskets.
Each battle and looking have develop into extra hazardous within the current instances. It is because of such innovations that taking pictures with a rifle has develop into simpler. These males experimented with optical gadgets and invented a scope. Whereas evaluating varied optical gadgets, it has been famous that the essential strategy of the scopes are just like the telescopes. These had been invented centuries in the past for stargazing. This gadget would carry the celebs nearer to you. Technically a scope has an identical operate however its utility is, in fact, totally different. These are smaller in measurement and magnification is lesser. By the years rifle scopes have been improved with the introduction of higher know-how. Fixed innovation has additionally helped the hunters and shooters. Within the current age you should buy scopes with which you’ll be able to shoot with each eyes open.


Given Texas’ long coastline and low-lying, flood-prone coastal terrain, scientists have warned for years that cities and industries near the Gulf of Mexico are vulnerable both to the direct threat of sea-level rise and to its magnification of tropical storm-surge hazards.
A pair of scientific studies documenting the apparently “unstoppable” collapse of the melting West Antarctic ice sheet dramatically underscore the risks faced by the state and other coastal areas as manmade global warming accelerates.
The Science Now website of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science reported the research results, which suggest the warming trend will bring more sea-level rise than some scientists have projected until now:
A disaster may be unfolding—in slow motion. Earlier this week, two teams of scientists [one from NASA and the University of California and the other from the University of Washington] reported that the Thwaites Glacier, a keystone holding the massive West Antarctic Ice Sheet together, is starting to collapse. In the long run, they say, the entire ice sheet is doomed, which would release enough meltwater to raise sea levels by more than three meters [about 10 feet].
The New York Times summarized the news this way:
The finding [that the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is now “almost certainly unstoppable”], which had been feared by some scientists for decades, means that a rise in global sea level of at least 10 feet may now be inevitable. The rise may continue to be relatively slow for at least the next century or so, the scientists said, but sometime after that it will probably speed up so sharply as to become a crisis.
A study by other researchers, published in 2009, projected that sea-level rise from a collapse of the Antarctic ice sheet would not be globally uniform and that North America would be at higher risk, with sea level rising as much as 21 feet in places like the Washington, D.C., area.
Texas Climate News asked Larry McKinney, executive director of the Harte Research Center for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, to comment on the ramifications of the two new studies about Antarctica that were published this week.
His emailed reply:
The recent reports of an accelerated disintegration of the West Antarctic ice sheet have implications for the Gulf of Mexico and especially Texas where sea level rise is a significant issue, especially along the Upper Coast.
Regardless of the cause, we may have reached a tipping point where we will see a rise in sea level more quickly than anticipated. It adds urgency to the need for the long-range planning to adapt to a changing world-scape and in our case, Gulf-scape.
The Harte Research Institute announced last year that it had received a $790,000 grant from the Houston Endowment foundation (previously a financial supporter of Texas Climate News) to undertake “a ground-breaking project to map and evaluate the effects of sea level rise on the upper Texas coast and develop tools to address this critical issue.”
The institute, which has done sea-level-rise modeling and research along the Texas coast, “will assess the impacts of sea-level rise on the greater Houston area in order to acquire the knowledge necessary to mitigate and adapt to higher sea level during the next 50 to 100 years,” it said at the time.
Writing before the two new studies’ release, Rice University oceanography professor John Anderson, a widely recognized expert on sea-level rise, outlined his appraisal of risks for Texas in the current issue of Cite magazine, a publication of the Rice Design Alliance:
The acceleration of sea-level rise, coupled with minimal sediment supply to the coast, has resulted in increased rates of coastal erosion, both along the Gulf Coast and within bays, and loss of wetlands. Thus, the first line of defense against storm surge in more inland areas is being removed. At the same time, the population of the greater Houston area continues to push south and into areas that are highly vulnerable to storm surge. The highly vulnerable Port of Houston and petrochemical industry at the head of Galveston Bay continues to expand. The City of Galveston refuses to adopt a setback policy for new construction along the Gulf shoreline. We are truly living in a “state of denial.”
Last year, a World Bank study projected financial losses from sea-level rise for Houston and the world’s other 135 largest coastal cities.
TCN reported at the time:
The … study, led by a senior economist at the institution and published in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change, projected that among the world’s 136 biggest coastal cities, Houston will have the seventh-largest percentage increase in average annual losses from sea-level rise by 2050. It’s the only U.S. city on a list of the 20 with the largest percentage increases worldwide.
If sea-level-rise adaptation measures (such as dikes, pumps and movable storm-surge barriers) are implemented that maintain flooding probability at the current level, Houston will experience average annual losses of $190 million as a result by 2050 – about a 60 percent increase, the researchers calculated.
If new protective structures are above the elevated sea level, they could keep average annual losses at their current level, the researchers said. But one storm surge in 2050 that exceeds those new defenses would bring flood losses in Houston exceeding $9 billion, they added. (Cost estimates of Ike’s Texas impact are around $20 billion.)
That scenario combines a higher sea level dubbed “optimistic” (meaning it’s toward the lower end of scientists’ current expectations), coastal subsidence and population and economic growth. In this case, “optimistic” meant a sea-level rise of 20 centimeters, or about 7.9 inches, by 2050.
In a major summary of scientific research from the previous six years, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported last fall that about 75 percent of the recorded global mean rise in sea level in recent decades was attributable to glacier changes and thermal expansion of oceans from atmospheric warming, with about 9 percent due to changes in the West Antarctic ice sheet.
The IPCC reported a global mean sea-level rise of about 2.8 millimeters (0.1 inch) per year from 1993-2010. It estimated that if heat-trapping gases continue to be emitted at a high rate, sea level would rise between a half-meter and a meter (about 20 inches to 38 inches) by 2100, threatening some coastal cities and island nations.
The IPCC also said, regarding the West Antarctic ice sheet, that “the short period of observations does not allow one to either dismiss or confirm that [accelerating ice losses] are associated with destabilization” of the ice shelf itself.
Science Now provided these details about the two new studies’ more definitive conclusions on that subject:
One team [at the University of Washington] combined data on the recent retreat of the 182,000-square-kilometer Thwaites Glacier with a model of the glacier’s dynamics to forecast its future. In a paper published online today in Science, they report that in as few as two centuries Thwaites Glacier’s outermost edge will recede past an underwater ridge now stalling its retreat. Their modeling suggests that the glacier will then cascade into rapid collapse. The second team [at NASA and the University of California, Irvine], writing in Geophysical Research Letters, describes recent radar mapping of West Antarctica’s glaciers and confirms that the 600-meter-deep ridge is the final obstacle before the bedrock underlying the glacier dips into a deep basin.
Because inland basins connect Thwaites Glacier to other major glaciers in the region, both research teams say its collapse would flood West Antarctica with seawater, prompting a near-complete loss of ice in the area. “The next stable state for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet might be no ice sheet at all,” says the Science paper’s lead author, glaciologist Ian Joughin….
“Very crudely, we are now committed to global sea level rise equivalent to a permanent Hurricane Sandy storm surge,” says glaciologist Richard Alley of Pennsylvania State University, University Park, referring to the storm that ravaged the Caribbean and the U.S. East Coast in 2012. Alley was not involved in either study.
A NASA announcement of the other research project quoted Eric Rignot, glaciologist at UC Irvine and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who was lead author of that study:
“The collapse of this sector of West Antarctica appears to be unstoppable. The fact that the retreat is happening simultaneously over a large sector suggests it was triggered by a common cause, such as an increase in the amount of ocean heat beneath the floating sections of the glaciers. At this point, the end of this sector appears to be inevitable.”
[Disclosure: Larry McKinney recently agreed to be a member of an advisory committee for Texas Climate News. The panel, to comprise scientists, journalists and others distinguished in their fields, is in the process of being assembled. The volunteer members will have no authority over TCN’s editorial decisions, which will continue to be made solely by our independent editors and writers. On occasion, we may report on TCN’s advisors, their work and their publicly stated views. If so, we will strive to do it impartially and in keeping with the same standard we announced when Texas Climate News was introduced in 2008: “We publish public-interest journalism, based on traditional principles of independent-mindedness, accuracy and fairness.” We will disclose advisors’ membership on the committee in articles that report on them.]
– Bill Dawson


9 BASIC ABILITIES OF A PERSON HAS HIGH EMOTIONAL QUOTIENT
Emotional Quotient (EQ) is a term to describe the ability of a person to recognize and understand his own emotions as well as those of the others. Most people still assumed that working in business or other professional environments require us to separate our emotions in order to maintain the profession. However, new researches demonstrated that emotional quotient plays an important role in managing an organization, managing a group, employees and doing business in general as well as in personal, family or social relationships.We can see that a person with low emotional quotient and a person with high emotion quotient still have a good job, family and life. However, behind that sufficient life is the pressure from the huge amount of work and family in a long time. If you don’t understand your emotions, you will be easy to make several bad decisions due to lack of ability to understand what happened in your emotions. Some people use stimulant such as wine, tobacco or drug and engage in family violence. The main reason is not because that person is not good, but he is lack of ability to control his emotions and that leads to unsuitable behaviors.
In contrast, people with high emotional quotient find it easy to realize pressure, worries, stress related to business. They remove their negative feelings and solve that effectively. They use healthy ways to express or share their feelings with friends and family. This helps people with high emotional quotient get back to work happily and ready to make good choices. To recognize people have high emotional quotient or not, you don’t have to depend on complicated tests, just pay attention to below 9 points:
1. Recognize and control your own emotions and others’ emotions
People who have high emotion quotient often have a variety of vocabulary of different kinds of emotions. They understand what feeling is considered as hate, love, greed, jealous, sympathy, confident,… Therefore, they are able to identify what they and other people are thinking, control their emotions, spirit to adapt and behave with the present situation.
2. Don’t expect things unreasonably
Unreasonably expectations often create stress and disappointment with yourself and people around you. People have high emotion quotient often discuss, make plans, conduct plans, and hope a good result.
3. Stop unhealthy relationships
4. Stand out negative
With people have high emotion quotient, negative things never have a chance to exist around them or inside them. A negative individual or action often derives from jealousy, greedy, cruelty. You can stand out unnecessary relationships by staying away from taking part in unreasonably situations.
5. Know how to say “No” reasonably
6. Set boundaries
Setting boundaries and limits is necessary to avoid unreasonable expectation or illusion. Moreover, it also helps us avoid to be taken advantage or be annoyed in terms of emotions and material.
7. Don’t let people affect badly
People who have high emotional quotient never let other people affect negatively to their lives. They don’t feel unhappy or jealous with other’s successful, especially don’t be influence by the others uncontrollably.
8. Learn from last experiences or other people
High emotional quotient people always know to learn from their mistakes or past experiences of the others in order to expect similar situations in the future.
9. Love and respect yourself
One of the signs of a high emotional quotient is that they love and respect themselves. They know to choose activities that make them happy and peaceful. Love and respect yourself doesn’t mean always try to achieve most advantage things, but it’s also a balance between giving and taking positive emotions with people around you.
We can probably know that spending time to identify and understand our emotions is more positive and constructive than running away and hiding them. More awful is someone tries to hide their emotion by stimulant such as wine, tobacco or drug. The more you can understand your emotions, the more your life is getting positive, simple and gentle. There’s no stimulant that help us stay away from troubles but we stand up by ourselves.


Depression affects everyone at some point in their life. The National Institute of Mental Health can only estimate how many people are suffering from depression. According to their estimates, more than 26% of the population struggle with depression each year. That is one in four people around the world. Most of the time this mental health problem goes unreported, because of the cost of treatment for this disorder.
When a person gets depressed, they can feel as though there is no hope or that they just cannot function normally. The symptoms of depression show up in different ways. These symptoms can be as simple as not being able to concentrate or not remembering everyday things, as well as not being able to make decisions. These are early signs of depression and when these become prolonged, or last for a long time, can manifest themselves into other more serious symptoms of depression.
All of these symptoms can develop into thoughts of suicide or even, in some cases, attempted suicide. A person struggling with depression can even develop physical symptoms, such as headaches, digestive problems, cramps and aches or pains where they normally would not have them.
No matter what the symptoms are or how severe the depression becomes, this mental health condition can be treated. Doctors and therapists have found many effective ways to treat all types of depression. Some doctors prefer to treat severe or mildly severe depression with medications, but this must be done in combination with other treatments.
The most common types of antidepressants are Paxil, Effexor, Lexapro and Zyban. Depending on the type of medication prescribed for the depression, one thing to understand is that these drugs are not a permanent cure for depression. Learning about each type of antidepressant and how they work will allow you to better understand how depression is treated.
EffexorEffexor is an antidepressant prescribed to people who have mild to severe depression. It is in the class of drugs called selective serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors, or SSNRI. This antidepressant effects the brain’s chemicals that can cause depression. It is often prescribed for people with severe anxiety and those that are prone to panic attacks, as well as severe depression.
This drug does come with some side effects. Effexor has been shown to cause a small percentage of users, under the age of 24, to exhibit suicidal thoughts when they are first placed on this antidepressant. A person prescribed this medication must be checked by a physician regularly when they first start taking this drug.
Other side effects of this antidepressant are dizziness, constipation, loss of appetite, insomnia, nausea, sexual side effects, weakness in the muscles, sweating and a dry mouth. However, less than 10% of the people prescribed this medication show any of these symptoms. A lot of the patients that exhibit some of these side effects had them subside once the body became used to the Effexor. No matter what, see a doctor before taking this medication and stay in close contact with a doctor or therapist when using this antidepressant.
PaxilPaxil is another common antidepressant prescribed to people struggling with long-term depression. This medication is commonly prescribed to people fighting post-traumatic distress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, premenstrual dysphoric disorder and anxiety disorders, as well as depression.
According to researchers, Paxil does not have any major side effects and very few people prescribed this antidepressant are subjected to these side effects. Most people who do exhibit some of the side effects will eventually overcome tthem once the body has gotten used to the medication.
However, those side effects can include ejaculation problems, nausea, insomnia, headaches, constipation, sleepiness, weakness in the muscles, dizziness, drowsiness, sweating, dry mouth, tremors, diarrhea and a decrease in one’s sex drive.
Again, most of these side effects subside after taking Paxil for a while or they can be treated by other medications, especially the sexual side effects. The researchers have determined that none of the side effects from taking Paxil are life threatening in any way.
LexaproLexapro has been an antidepressant that many doctors use to treat anxiety in adults, as well as severe depression. This drug has also been shown to be an effective treatment for children over the age of 12 who are also struggling with depression. Like the other antidepressants, Lexapro does come with side effects, but most people prescribed this medication do not exhibit any of the issues and the others that do show some of the side effects, adjust to them over time.
The common side effects of people taking Lexapro include anxiety, extreme tiredness, dry mouth, insomnia, fatigue, sweating, ejaculation problems, dizziness, headaches, constipation, orgasm problems, diarrhea and a decrease in a person sex drive. Again, most of these side effects subside once a person has taken Lexapro for a while.
ZybanZyban is another common antidepressant prescribed to patients suffering from depression, but has also been shown to be an effective treatment for smokers. This medication is becoming an effective treatment for people wanting to quit smoking, as well as assisting people struggling with depression. Like the other antidepressants, Zyban can treat adults with different forms of depression, but does have its side effects.
A small percentage of people prescribed Zyban have complained about changes in their appetite, drowsiness, constipation, dry mouth, dizziness, stomach pain or cramps, sleeplessness, vomiting, stuffy nose and have become more nervous while taking this medication. A majority of the people taking Zyban have not exhibited any side effects of the drug and the others that have complained about the side effects, have found that most of these problems subside after a while.
Whatever antidepressant your doctor or therapist recommends, you must use it in combination with the right diet and exercise regiment that meets your circumstances. Many times people requiring this medication find it too expensive to keep up the required dosage. This cost can be overcome by finding a legitimate online pharmacy that sells the generic equivalent of these medications.
Reputable online pharmacies offer you a cost-effective alternative to the name-brand products. When searching for an online pharmacy, look at the guarantees each one provides, including money-back guarantees, as well as guaranteed shipping. More reputable online pharmacies offer discounts for bulk orders of these antidepressants and reorder discounts for return customers. Always verify that the online pharmacy only sells products manufactured by a legitimate pharmaceutical manufacturer, such as Cipla. These online pharmacies should also have a consultant available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for when you have any questions about their products, or have concerns about your order.
Using a reputable online pharmacy will save you a lot of money, which will allow you to treat your depression in a budget-friendly manner that won’t add stress to your finances.


I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (1970)
As a child, Angelou's parents divorced and sent her, along with her brother, off to live with their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. The kids move around a few times during their childhoods, to St. Louis, back to Stamps, and to California. Angelou recounts what it was like to be a young black girl in that time period, and how she grew to be a confident young woman in spite of it.
It was the Depression, but when you're poor and marginalized already, it's barely noticeable. The most traumatic incident of her childhood was being sexually assaulted by an adult she trusted. But, I think even more oppressive were the million tiny little ways she was slighted because of her skin color. The incident that stands out to me the most was the time that she had a couple of cavities that got pretty out of control and she was in a tremendous amount of pain. The local dentist only treated white people, but Maya's grandmother went to him anyway, claiming he owed her a favor. Still, they were turned away. By now Maya had been in pain for days, but it had to be prolonged even more while they boarded a Greyhound for a trip to a dentist who would treat her. And they just did it. They didn't raise a ruckus or anything because it wouldn't have gotten them anywhere, and honestly, who has the energy to fight back at every single indignity when they come so frequently?
Maya Angelou's experiences are not something I will ever understand fully. As a white American, how could I? But I can definitely tell you that I would not want to be treated the way she and her family and friends were treated. Which of course is why it's so important to read about experiences different from our own. There are so many little discriminations that take place every day and may not be obvious to someone not experiencing it (and I think most women can understand this to a certain limited extent) so reading this was a great reminder.
Of course it took place many decades ago, but as current events prove, we still have far to go as a society to achieve equality for everyone. If you're interested in the experience of African-Americans in U.S. history, or just want a good coming-of-age story, you won't go wrong with this classic.


Main points for heat transfer:
1) The three different ways that heat can be transferred are conduction, convection and radiation.
2) Most heat in solids are transferred by conduction.
3)Most heat in liquids and gases are transferred by convection.
4)Heat radiation is the transfer of heat energy by in fared radiation.
Main points for In fared radiation:
1) All objects emit and absorb in fared radiation.


Cheap Oil Could Kill Off Cellulosic Ethanol
Inexpensive oil could increase the pressure to reduce mandates for biofuels.
The price of fossil fuels can have a big impact on progress in clean energy technology.
The plunge in oil prices, accelerated by a recent OPEC decision to maintain production targets, will deal a new blow to efforts to commercialize advanced biofuels such as ethanol made from woody plant waste, or diesel made from plant oils. Lower oil prices may also help strengthen the case for scaling back the federal regulations requiring the use of biofuels.
Progress in commercializing advanced biofuels such as cellulosic ethanol has been slow despite federal rules mandating the use of such fuels. Earlier this year a few large-scale cellulosic ethanol plants, including ones operated by Poet-DSM, DuPont, and Abengoa, became operational. All were planned when oil was above $100 a barrel. A number of other projects were canceled even before the recent oil price plunge.
Now that oil is below $70 a barrel, down from a high of $115 earlier this year, new plants simply won’t get built, says Wallace Tyner, an agriculture and energy economist at Purdue University.
Federal biofuel mandates were created with an energy bill passed by the U.S. government in in 2005. Signed into law by President Bush, the standards were meant to promote energy independence, requiring ever-increasing numerical gallon requirements for the use of ethanol and advanced biofuels in transportation fuels.
In 2013, the U.S. Environmental Protection Administration scaled back requirements for the total volume of biofuels that must be added to transportation fuels. The EPA cited market saturation due to lower-than-expected demand for gasoline, limiting the amount of ethanol that can be blended (see “Oil Companies Happy, Biofuels Companies Distraught Over New EPA Rules”).
Updated requirements are expected from the EPA early next year. If the mandates are repealed, says Tyner, “then cellulosic biofuels and biodiesel would cease to exist.”
Cheap oil’s effects elsewhere in clean-tech are likely to be more limited. “Very little oil is used in the production of electric power, so the plunge in oil prices primarily impacts the transportation sector,” says Massoud Amin, director of the Technological Leadership Institute at the University of Minnesota, and a former executive at the Electric Power Research Institute, a utility-funded research group.
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At the first competition, each country was represented by two songs. There were only seven competing countries.
The first Eurovision Song Contest (Eurovision) was held on this day in 1956. Europe was still recovering from the consequences of World War II, so the goal of the organizers was to invent a program that would be entertaining and that would gather Europeans around a common goal. The Sanremo Music Festival was the model around which the Eurovision was developed. Organizing a TV broadcast of the contest in many European countries was quite a challenge at this time since there was still no satellite TV, meaning the show was broadcast exclusively through terrestrial TV networks.
Since the number of Europeans who owned a TV at that time was low, most of them followed the competition over the radio. The place the competition was held was Lugano, Switzerland – a famous resort town at a lake near the Italian border, sometimes called the “Swiss Monte Carlo”. Only 7 countries participated at the first contest: West Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, and the Benelux. There were 39 participants at the 2015 contest (plus Australia as a guest participant).
At the first competition, each country was represented by two songs, but this was reduced to one already for the second competition. Switzerland won the first contest with the song Refrain by Lys Assia. She also tried to become the Swiss representative in Azerbaijan in 2012, but only managed to win eighth place. There was no voting at the first contest, but only a ceremony at which the victor was announced. Lys Assia received no reward for her victory. A peculiarity about the show was that only individual performers were originally allowed to participate – bands were prohibited.


The Russian T-34/76 Medium Tank Background & Development
The famous T-34 Medium Tank came about as a result of M. I. Koshkin’s argument that the T-32 Medium Tank should be capable of performing all the tasks of the BT fast series, the T-26 Infantry Support Tank and T-28 Medium Tank. It wasn’t until after the battle experience gained against the Finns during the Winter War, that the Russians realised they needed a heavier armed and armoured tank. Koshkin was able to show that the T-32 could be up-armoured, and thus the T-34 was born.
The first prototypes underwent stringent testing from the end of 1939. The first T-34 left the production line at the Kharkov plant in June 1940. Production continued at a number of factories, initially at Leningrad, Kharkov and Stalingrad. Later, the Leningrad and Kharkov factories had to be moved to a location beyond the Ural Mountains, as the Germans advanced into Russia during Operation Barbarossa. These two factories merged into one to form Russia’s largest tank production facility, called Tankograd. Famously, the Stalingrad factory continued to produce T-34s even during the great Battle of Stalingrad, and it is said that tanks rolled off the production lines and went straight into battle there!
The T-34 came as a complete shock to the invading German forces, who regarded the Russians, and all other Slavic peoples as being ‘Untermenschen’, or sub-human. The T-34 incorporated a number of innovative features. It had sloped armour on its hull and turret, was fitted with Christie type suspension, which gave it superb cross country performance, and was armed with the excellent 76.2mm gun. This same gun was also fitted to the KV1 Heavy Tank. These features meant that the T-34 was superior to anything that the Germans had at the time, i.e. the PzKpfw III and IV.
The T-34 was very simple, but robust in its construction, and was a ‘no thrills’ design which could be mass produced in vast numbers. In fact, the T-34 is the 2nd most produced tank of all time, with its successor, the T-54/55 being the most produced. Well over 40,000 T-34s were produced during the ‘Great Patriotic War’ and the tank continued to be built after the war as well.
The Russian T-34/76 Medium Tank Models
T-34/76 A, was the initial production model.
T-34/76 B, had a rolled-plate turret and new L/40 76.2mm gun. Later tanks had all steel road wheels because of the shortage of rubber.
T-34/76 C, had a larger turret with two hatches instead of one, better vision devices, larger tracks and an armoured sleeve for the bow MG. The two new turret hatches gave rise to the T-34 being nicknamed ‘Mickey Mouse’ because when both hatches were opened, they looked Mickey Mouse’s ears!
T-34/76 D, had a new hexagonal shaped turret, wider gun mantlet and jettisonable fuel tanks.
T-34/76 E, as for D, but of all-welded construction, commander’s cupola and better engine cooling.
T-34/76 F, as for D, but with cast turret and 5 speed gearbox.
The weight of the T-34/76 increased from the initial version’s 28 tons, to 30 tons in the later versions, However, in spite of the increase in weight; the top speed also rose from 28mph, to 31mph.
As well as the T-34/76 versions mentioned above, there were also the usual command and flamethrower versions as well.
After the Germans had introduced their Panther Medium and Tiger Heavy Tanks, the Russians realised they needed a bigger gun to combat these new tanks. After an extended period of work and trials, the 85mm Zis-S-53 gun was chosen. Like the German 88mm Anti-Tank gun, the 85mm was based on an existing Anti-Aircraft gun. The 85mm was fitted into a modified turret from the KV-85 Heavy Tank and the new tank, designated T-34/85, entered production in 1944 and continued to be built long after the war had ended.
The Russian T-34/76 Medium Tank Combat History
The T-34 served in all the major battles on the Eastern Front, including the biggest tank battle in history; at Prokharovka during the Battle of Kursk. 1393 Russian and German tanks and assault guns faced each other in the southern sector of the Kursk Salient. The resulting battle saw the Russians lose more tanks than the Germans, but these could be easily replaced, and the battle served to halt the German advance. So although Prokharovka was a tactical defeat for the Russians, it was a strategic victory. From this point on, the Germans were in retreat, all the way back to Berlin.
The T-34/85 also served with the North Koreans and Chinese during the Korean War, and went on to continue serving with Third World countries for many years afterwards; the tank being perfectly suited for smaller armies on tight budgets.
The Russian T-34/76 Medium Tank Summary
Although the T-34 was undoubtedly one of the outstanding tank designs of World War 2, it, like a lot of other tanks of the period, wasn’t without its problems. One of these problems was the 2 man turret, which increased the tank commander’s work load, there was also very little crew comfort because of the ‘no thrills, conscript-friendly’ design of the T-34. Another problem was the lack of radios, which meant that battlefield command and control was very difficult. However, in spite of these problems, the T-34 was one of the most important tank designs of the war, if not of all time. It can be regarded as a direct ancestor of today’s Main Battle Tanks.
Written and submitted by Bruce Forrest


We all know that there is a risk associated with undergoing any type of surgical procedure, even the most common kinds. Some you would expect to be more dangerous than others, such as brain or heart surgery. And emergency surgeries are even scarier because they are so sudden. But new research suggests that among emergency operations there are certain ones–including a few of the most frequently performed–that are potentially much more deadly than all the rest.
The study, which was conducted at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, found that there are seven specific procedures that result in 80 percent of the emergency general surgery mortalities in the United States.1 Scott, John W.; et al. “Use of National Burden to Define Operative Emergency General Surgery.” JAMA Surgery. 27 April 2016. Accessed 4 May 2016. http://archsurg.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2516780 The scientists focused on procedures defined by the American Association of Surgery for Trauma as emergency general surgery, which mostly includes operations on organs and soft tissues around the abdominal area.
By examining a government database containing medical records, the researchers evaluated the outcomes of 421,476 emergency general surgeries from 2008 through 2011. They determined that the total death rate was 1.2 percent and that the complication rate was 15 percent among all of the procedures. But there were seven operations discovered to be responsible for an astounding four out of every five deaths in this category. These are partial colectomy (removal of a portion of the colon), small bowel resection, cholecystectomy (removal of the gallbladder), repair of a bleeding or torn ulcer, separation of abdominal organs adhering to one another, appendectomy, and laparotomy (open surgery of the abdominal cavity).
Not only were these procedures responsible for the vast majority of emergency general surgery deaths, but they also were found to result in nearly 79 percent of the complications that arise. And complications including infections, internal bleeding, and adverse reactions to anesthesia can lead to longer hospital stays, return admissions, and sometimes serious, long-term effects.
Of course, it needs to be stated that part of the problem here is unavoidable. There is an inherent urgency and inability to prepare that is the very essence of an emergency procedure. In addition, the patients who require emergency surgery are by definition in more critical, problematic states of health, often experiencing a bowel obstruction, abdominal infection, or gastrointestinal bleeding, which would immediately indicate that they are at a higher risk of difficulties during surgery than those undergoing a planned procedure. In fact, a 2008 study at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill showed that having an emergency surgery increases the risk of death by eight times compared to those who undergo the same procedure scheduled in advance.2 Fecho, Karamarie; et al. “Postoperative mortality after inpatient surgery: Incidence and risk factors.” Therapeutics and Clinical Risk Management. August 2008. Accessed 5 May 2016. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2621384/
But all of these issues still do not change the fact that among emergency surgeries, some are more risky than others. And on the list of most deadly, certainly removing a section of the intestine or safely disengaging abdominal organs from one another would seem to be quite a bit more dangerous than lots of other procedures, emergency or not.
What about operations like removing the gallbladder or appendix, though? These are very common procedures that we tend to think of as relatively harmless. After all, everyone knows someone who has had one of these organs removed and we rarely hear about adverse incidents. But the frequency of these surgeries is actually the reason they made the top seven list. There are approximately 325,000 appendectomies and 460,000 gallbladder removals that take place each year in America, so even if only a small percentage result in a complication or death, the number grows large enough to be a major contributor to the overall risk.
While we can’t always prevent emergency situations from occurring, in the case of many of the types of surgeries on this deadly list, taking good care of yourself can go a long way toward helping you avoid them. If you maintain a healthy weight, eat a nutritious diet, get exercise every day, detox your liver and gallbladder, and visit your doctor for regular checkups, you may never be put into a position of being admitted to the hospital for any kind of emergency care. That way, you’ll get to dodge the surgeon’s scalpel and all of the risks associated with any operation–emergency or planned.
|↑1||Scott, John W.; et al. “Use of National Burden to Define Operative Emergency General Surgery.” JAMA Surgery. 27 April 2016. Accessed 4 May 2016. http://archsurg.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2516780|
|↑2||Fecho, Karamarie; et al. “Postoperative mortality after inpatient surgery: Incidence and risk factors.” Therapeutics and Clinical Risk Management. August 2008. Accessed 5 May 2016. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2621384/|


Principles of Behavior Management II: What can we do?
Course Learning Objectives
After participating in this course, you will be able to:
- Identify clear, developmentally appropriate expectations for children's behavior
- Identify how to use positive reinforcement with children
- List the steps in giving effective instructions and handling power struggles in young children
schedule 1 Hour
star_outline 0.10 CEUs
computer 1 year unlimited access
verified_user Certificate of completion
face Early childhood training approval
This class will introduce you to effective practices for teaching young children to behave appropriately with a view to maintaining a happy and effective classroom environment. It features “10 Big Ideas for Use of Behavior Management with Young Children- together with applied examples.Not all courses are approved for early care and education in every state. Please check State and CEU Approvals page for details.


Continuous speech recognition is a type of electronic tool that can be used for a number of computer-related functions, ranging from general clerical activities in an office to being part of some sort of security system. The idea behind this type of recognition software is to allow the computer system to be able to recognize and translate the spoken word into text that is then captured on templates or in some form of a document. The continuous portion of this process is that the program is capable of receiving the dictation on an ongoing basis, making it possible for the speaker to essentially speak as if participating in a conversation, with the program adapted to suit the voice patterns of the individual. In some cases, continuous speech recognition can be programmed to compensate for regional accents or speech impairments, making it possible to use the software in the preparation of a wide range of documents.
The function of continuous speech recognition calls for the use of software programs that allow a computer to electronically recognize the sounds produced by the speaker and translate those sounds into words that are captured in an electronic document. This means that the recognition software will activate using a voice command, access a saved document or pull up a new one, then respond to the voice commands of the user, including the capturing of text for entry into the document. Software of this type can be extremely useful in terms of saving time, since there is no need to type the words manually using a keyboard.
Using continuous speech recognition software is helpful in a number of applications. Individuals with health issues that limit the range of mobility in the hands can make use of this type of software to enjoy full use of computer resources, ranging from answering emails to creating text documents with ease, and even using the voice to enter data into fields in a database. Writers are able to ply their craft without the need of an assistant to take dictation as they develop the text for a novel, since the continuous speech recognition software essentially manages the task. In an office setting, is it possible to use the software to prepare letters and other documents in a real time fashion, rather than dictating text to an assistant who later creates the actual documents.
Over time, continuous speech recognition software has been developed to accommodate the unique features of a human voice, such as regional accents, lisps, and even volume changes in the voice of the user. This helps to reduce the amount of editing that must be done before a document is considered ready for distribution. The cost of continuous speech software is also much lower than the earlier versions, making the product more accessible to a wider range of consumers.


As a car-size rover named Curiosity prepares to land on Mars, another small robotic explorer — NASA's Mars rover Opportunity — is on track to set its own record: The intrepid rover has nearly completed a full marathon on the Red Planet.
The golf cart-size Opportunity, which landed on Mars in 2004, is just 4.2 miles (6.7 km) short of completing the first extraterrestrial marathon, according to NASA officials. A marathon spans 26.2 miles (42.1 km), with athletes at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London set to compete in an Earthly version of the race in just over a week.
As of July, the hardy Opportunity rover has explored nearly 22 miles (35.4 km) of the Martian surface. And it has been quite a journey.
"This particular marathoner had to fly about 283 million miles across space before being unceremoniously drop-bounced on the Martian surface," Ray Arvidson, deputy principal investigator of the Mars Exploration Rover Mission, said in a statement.
Opportunity, like its twin rover Spirit, was designed for a mere three-month mission at Mars, but both rovers far outlasted their warranties. In May 2009, Spirit became trapped in sand, and 10 months later, it fell silent. After numerous failed attempts to revive the rover, NASA declared Spirit dead in May 2011. [Photos From Rovers Spirit & Opportunity]
As part of NASA's initial goal, Opportunity was slated to travel only 1,970 feet (600 meters), making the current distance recorded on the rover's odometer all the more impressive.
Typically, Opportunity drives only 165 to 330 feet (50 to 100 meters) each day. The rover often pauses to investigate its surroundings, taking plenty of photos along the way, NASA officials said. In fact, Opportunity recently beamed back its 100,000th image, a stunning panorama of Mars.
Spirit and Opportunity were designed to search for signs of ancient water on the Red Planet. While Mars today is bone-dry and has a thin atmosphere, many researchers believe the planet was a much warmer, wetter place billions of years ago.
Opportunity first detected signs of water in deposits near the rover's landing site in Eagle Crater. As Opportunity drove around, it found more evidence of ancient Mars water. Opportunity then struck out for Endeavor Crater, a giant pit 22.5 miles (36.2 km) across.
Opportunity reached Endeavor Crater in August 2011, and the rover continued to make intriguing discoveries.
"Endeavor is surrounded by fractured sedimentary rock, and the cracks are filled with gypsum," Arvidson said. "Gypsum forms when ground water comes up and fills cracks in the ground, depositing hydrated calcium sulfate. This is the best evidence we've ever found for liquid water on Mars."
Still, Opportunity shows no sign of slowing down. Even after the rover passes the 26.2-mile marker, the team intends to keep going.
"We have no plans to stop running," Arvidson said.
That's good, because while Opportunity has been running a one-rover race, it's about to get some competition.
On Sunday, Aug. 5 PDT, NASA's newest Mars rover is due to touch down on the Red Planet. The Mars rover Curiosity, the centerpiece of NASA's $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory mission, is slated to land inside Mars' vast Gale Crater to search for signs that the planet could now or ever in the past host conditions that could support primitive life.
While Opportunity uses solar panels that rely on sunlight to generate power, the Mini Cooper-size Curiosity carries a nuclear power source designed to power its systems for two straight years of uninterrupted exploring. NASA hopes the rover will scale a 3-mile-high mountain at the center of Gale Crater.
Curiosity is scheduled to land on Aug. 5 at 10:31 p.m. PDT (1:31 a.m. EDT, 0531 GMT on Monday, Aug. 6).


New York: Indulging in a less strenuous form of exercise known as whole-body vibration could mimic the muscle and bone health benefits of regular exercise and help combat obesity and diabetes, according to a new study.
Whole-body vibration consists of a person sitting, standing or lying on a machine with a vibrating platform and could also benefit people who find it difficult to exercise.
The findings showed that when the machine vibrates, it transmits energy to the body, and muscles contract and relax multiple times during each second.
“The study shows that whole-body vibration may be just as effective as exercise at combatting some of the consequences of obesity and diabetes,” said lead author Meghan E. McGee-Lawrence from Augusta University in Georgia, US.
Further, the method also increased bone formation, suggesting longer-term treatments could hold promise for preventing bone loss as well, Lawrence added.
For the study, published in the Endocrine Society’s journal Endocrinology, the team examined two groups of five-week-old male mice who were assigned to sedentary, whole-body vibration or treadmill exercise conditions.
One group consisted of normal mice, while the other group was genetically unresponsive to the hormone leptin — responsible for promoting feelings of fullness after eating.
The results suggest that whole-body vibration may be a useful supplemental therapy to combat metabolic dysfunction in individuals with morbid obesity.