“The art of leadership is saying no, not saying yes. It is very easy to say yes.”
A poster on LinkedIn brought a very interesting piece of information to my attention. He said that the word “No” is one of the first 10 words that a baby will learn in their lifetime, whilst the word “Yes” doesn’t make it into the top 20. I have not researched this myself, but it sounds quite accurate to me, so for the sake of this article, I will assume it as fact.
Facts are a very interesting thing. By definition they are not debatable. However, that does not mean that facts can not cause a debate. Two people can take the same factual information and come to very different conclusions.
The poster who alerted me to this fact used it to suggest that saying “no” is easier than saying “yes”. It is easier to avoid responsibility (i.e. saying “no”) than it is to take responsibility. He suggested that we need to become a “Yes Man”, someone who is willing to commit, willing to step up and take responsibility, willing to become a leader.
He later suggests that we tell our children “no” far too often. Suggesting that perhaps we need to do a better job communicating with our children, trying to find ways to say the same thing, without using the word “no”. I also saw others who work in the mental health field who voice a similar view.
I’d like to offer two points about this. First, there are very good reasons why kids get accustomed to hearing the word “no” very often. I know, I say it to my toddler many times per day. When he opens the refrigerator and takes ahold of a raw egg. When he grabs his sister’s ponytail and pulls. When he takes possession of a sharp object. These are just a few of the recent nos that he received. None of these are situations which can really be dealt with in another way. But as children age, parents should try to find alternate ways of saying what they are trying to convey, without using the word “no”
Example: Child wants to color, but the parent wants the child to be in pajamas.
Child: Can I color?
Parent: No, you aren't in pajamas yet
Here is an alternative approach
Child: Can I color?
Parent: Sure, but only after you get into pajamas
The parent has said the same exact thing, without using the overused word “no”.
The second point I would like to make isn’t about what we say to others, rather, it is what we say to ourselves. We are all a product of our upbringing, and that includes a product of being told “no” very often. People process “no” as a negative. Are we negative to ourselves simply because of all the negatives we have amassed over the years? Do we view ourselves as lesser simply because we took the nos of our younger years and nurtured them with more negativity? Granted many of the nos of our younger years were needed and deserving, but that doesn’t mean we need to allow it and the negativity that it yielded to remain a core part of our thoughts about ourselves.
At this point, some of you might be wondering why I chose to begin with a quote that seems to be the antithesis of the direction of this article. The answer is quite simple, because there is a time for a no and there is a time for a yes. There are times when no is the easier word to say and there are times when yes is the easier word to say.
There are times when the no needs to be delivered softly, or in an indirect way, and there are times when it should be a very blunt “NO”. The wisdom comes from knowing which rule applies when.
For this reason, I am personally turned off by the very many “gurus” who preach absolutes. This yes and no discussion had the very real possibility of being interpreted as an absolute. I did not want my readers to think that I was preaching an absolute.
Absolutes can be extremely dangerous. Sometimes the person who is the exception hears it, without knowing that they are the exception.
I have heard many such “absolutes”. Here are a few examples:
Never run from something, only to something - Not good advice for victim of domestic abuse
No one ever succeeds without taking risks - Can the person properly calculate the nature of the risk? Will they blindly take risks simply because they feel the need to be risky?
Opening a restaurant without a proper license and without a chef is risky. Does the listener believe that this is the type of risk they need to take in order to succeed, or do they realize that this reward isn't worth the potential risk involved?
Never Give Up - Sometimes the better advice is to cut one’s losses and move on. The investors who gave up on Enron or Circuit City after losing 50% percent of their investment did better than those investors who “never gave up”.
One needs to be extremely careful when using absolutes, as one can never be certain that the message that they are trying to convey is indeed the message that is being heard. Additionally, the listener might very well hear the message as intended, yet they might later apply it incorrectly.
Yisroel Picker is a Social Worker who lives in Jerusalem. He has a private practice which specializes in working with people of all ages helping them understand their own thought processes, enabling them to improve their level of functioning, awareness, social skills and more. He also lectures on the topics of communication and child safety.
You can email Yisroel at firstname.lastname@example.org
Follow Yisroel on LinkedIn here


The U.S. Treasury reported some positive fiscal news on Monday: For the first quarter of the fiscal year that began in October, the budget deficit was $120 billion lower compared with the same three months in the year-ago period.
It was further confirmation that the deficit is falling as the economy improves, and the government spends less and collects more in revenue.
The government’s fiscal year runs from October to September.
To get an idea of how quickly the deficit is dropping, consider how much it fell from calendar year 2012 to 2013. For all of 2013, the deficit was $560.5 billion compared to $1.06 trillion in 2012. That’s a drop of about $500 billion.
Three months into fiscal 2014, in other words, the deficit has dropped just over one-fifth of what it did in a whole calendar year.
Numbers like these will make calendar year 2009 a distant memory: that year the deficit peaked at $1.47 trillion, up from $680 billion in 2008, as the U.S. struggled with the financial crisis.
– Robert Schroeder
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At St Bernard’s Catholic Primary School Botany, student growth and achievement are measured through a combination of annual standardised tests and day to day class assessments that link to the curriculum. Some assessments include NAPLAN, Progressive Achievement Tests (PAT), Cognitive Ability Tests (CogAT) and the Religious Education Test. In the early years, Observation Surveys and Clinical Interviews are used for Literacy and Numeracy.
Students also have the option of achieving through the following:
- The Pope Francis Award for community service
- ICAS assessments – Digital Technologies, Science, Spelling, Writing, English and Mathematics
- APSMO Mathematics Olympiad and Maths Games and the Lachlan Gifted and Talented Mathematics Competition
- CaSPA (Catholic Schools Performing Arts) Workshops and Performances
- Sydney Catholic Schools Regional and Archdiocesan Sports Competitions
- Local sport gala days and competitions including the Bob McCarthy Cup (Rugby League), Netball, OzTag, Soccer and Basketball.
Each week student achievements are especially acknowledged and celebrated at our Friday afternoon assemblies. Biannually, individual students who have consistently demonstrated our school values are also recognised with the St Bernard’s Award.


Trophy Triathlon Design Challenge
Teams use limited materials to construct a trophy that supports their chosen sports ball, be it a tennis ball, a bowling ball, or something in between. They consider structural stability and load distribution and see how a material's strength can change depending on shape.
Activity Type:Hands-On Activities
Time:60 minutes or less


An artist’s conception of an asteroid recovery mechanism. Astronomers have been characterizing potential NASA asteroid targets using the IRAC camera on the Spitzer Space Telescope. Credit: NASA Near Earth Objects (NEOs) are small solar system bodies whose orbits sometimes bring them close to the Earth, thereby posing a potential threat. Because NEOs are constantly being replenished from the solar system, they are tracers of the composition, dynamics and environmental conditions throughout the solar system, and of the history of our planetary system. NEOs are the parent bodies of meteorites, one of our key sources of detailed knowledge about the solar system’s development. NEOs are also potential targets for NASA missions. They are easier to reach with spacecraft than the moon, and NEOs offer a large number of targets with a wide range of physical properties and histories. NASA’s exploration plans for the next decade and beyond include an Asteroid Retrieval Mission. While it is relatively easy to detect an NEO in visible light by watching its movement across the sky from night to night, determining its size and its potential hazard is more difficult because its optical brightness results from both its size and its reflectivity (albedo). The Spitzer Space Telescope’s infrared camera, IRAC, is a powerful NEO characterization system because NEOs typically have daytime temperatures around room temperature and their emitted radiation in the infrared is almost always significantly larger than their reflected radiation. Thermal models of the radiation can then be used to derive NEO properties, in particular the sizes and albedos.
CfA astronomers Joe Hora, Giovanni Fazio and Howard Smith and their colleagues have been using IRAC for several years to study NEOs. A new paper presents their results for eighty NEOs, the first group from a larger sample of 597 NEOs that will eventually be measured and categorized. The strength of their sample derives in part from the fact that IRAC is very sensitive and can observe sources that are as much as one hundred times fainter than those seen in other infrared studies.
The scientists report that the properties of this initial sample of NEOs agree closely with those of previous measured, brighter NEOs. Among other things, they find that for some NEOs as much as 29% of their infrared light is reflected, but in most cases only 1% is reflected, perhaps representing differences in the NEO compositions. Their analysis includes statistical comparisons to estimate the relative contributions of factors like non-isotropic radiation from geometrical or surface properties. The team also monitors some light curve variations as the NEO rotates, but defers that analysis to a later publication. Their program will ultimately include results from other missions to provides a list of 2000 characterized NEOs.
Explore further:Dead comets and near-earth encounters
More information: ”NEOSurvey 1: Initial results from the Warm Spitzer Exploration Science Survey of Near Earth Object Properties,” David E. Trilling, Michael Mommert, Joseph Hora, Steve Chesley, Joshua Emery, Giovanni Fazio, Alan Harris, Michael Mueller, and Howard Smith, A.J. 152, 172, 2016. arxiv.org/abs/1608.03673
Provided by:Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics


Once you learn to read, you will be forever free. -Frederick Douglas
Is Your Child at Risk for Dyslexia?
What is dyslexia?
- Dyslexia is a language-based learning disability. Dyslexia refers to a cluster of symptoms, which result in people having difficulties with specific language skills, particularly reading. Students with dyslexia usually experience difficulties with other language skills such as spelling, writing, and pronouncing words. Dyslexia affects individuals throughout their lives; however, its impact can change at different stages in a person’s life. It is referred to as a learning disability because dyslexia can make it very difficult for a student to succeed academically in the typical instructional environment, and in its more severe forms, will qualify a student for special education, special accommodations, or extra support services.
What causes dyslexia?
- The exact causes of dyslexia are still not completely clear, but anatomical and brain imagery studies show differences in the way the brain of a dyslexic person develops and functions. Moreover, most people with dyslexia have been found to have problems with identifying the separate speech sounds within a word and/or learning how letters represent those sounds, a key factor in their reading difficulties. Researchers now know that Dyslexia is not due to seeing letters backwards (as once thought); lack of intelligence; or desire to learn. With appropriate teaching methods, dyslexics can learn successfully.
What are the effects of dyslexia?
- The impact that dyslexia has is different for each person and depends on the severity of the condition and the effectiveness of instruction or remediation. The core difficulty is with word recognition and reading fluency, spelling, and writing. Some dyslexics manage to learn early reading and spelling tasks, especially with excellent instruction, but later experience their most debilitating problems when more complex language skills are required, such as grammar, understanding textbook material, and writing essays.
- Individuals with dyslexia can also have problems with spoken language, even after they have been exposed to good language models in their homes and good language instruction in school. They may find it difficult to express themselves clearly, or to fully comprehend what others mean when they speak. Such language problems are often difficult to recognize, but they can lead to major problems in school, in the workplace, and in relating to other people. The effects of dyslexia reach well beyond the classroom.
- Dyslexia can also affect a person’s self-image. Students with dyslexia often end up feeling “dumb” and less capable than they actually are. After experiencing a great deal of stress due to academic problems, a student may become discouraged about continuing in school.
How common are language-based learning disabilities?
- 15-20% of the population has a language-based learning disability. Of the students with specific learning disabilities receiving special education services, 70-80% have deficits in reading. Dyslexia is the most common cause of reading, writing and spelling difficulties. Dyslexia affects males and females nearly equally, and people from different ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds as well.
What are some of the signs of dyslexia?
- Late learning to talk – most children say their first words around 12 months of age and phrases by 18-24 months
- Speaks in “baby talk” longer than his or her peers, sometimes until he or she is 5 or 6 years old
- Difficulty pronouncing words – mispronounces words like spaghetti (pisgetti), animal (aminal), or specific (pacific)
- Difficulty repeating multisyllabic words
- Displays difficulty retrieving words and often has the sensation that words are at the tip of the tongue, but inaccessible; uses vague words like “stuff” instead of more descriptive words
- Difficulty acquiring vocabulary or using age appropriate grammar
- Difficulty following directions
- Confusion with before/after, right/left, and so on
- Difficulty learning the alphabet, nursery rhymes, or songs
- Difficulty understanding concepts and relationships
- Difficulty with word retrieval or naming problems
- Difficulty identifying or generating rhyming words, or counting syllables in words
- Difficulty with hearing and manipulating sounds within words
- Difficulty remembering the entire alphabet
- Difficulty following instructions that have more than one step
- Difficulty remembering the days of the week and months of the year
- Difficulty remembering phone numbers
- Difficulty following spoken instructions
- Difficulty in learning the sounds of letters (phonics or phoneme-grapheme relationships)
- Difficulty remembering names and shapes of letters, or naming letters rapidly
- Oral reading is choppy, not fluent and smooth
- Slow, laborious oral reading
- Reads words in the wrong order
- Skips small words such as a, the, to, of, were, and from
- Recognizes a word on one page but not on the next page
- Inserts extra letters in a word when reading. For example, may read tail as trail (The misread word often has the same beginning and ending letter)
- Deletes letters in a word when reading (i.e., may read sag instead of sang and the misread word often has the same beginning and ending letter)
- Switches the order of letters in a word (i.e., may read mug as gum)
- Substitutes words with similar meanings when reading stories (i.e., may read said instead of shouted)
- Substitutes similar-looking words, such as house for horse
- Ignores punctuation when reading
- Makes up part of the story based on the illustrations or context clues instead of reading the actual words on the page
- Loses place on the page, skips lines, or rereads lines
- Reads at a level substantially below that of peers
- Has difficulty reading single words on a flashcard
- Is fatigued after reading for a short time
- Transposes the order of letters when reading or spelling
- “Stumbles” through longer words
- Poor reading comprehension during oral or silent reading, often because words are not accurately read
- Inserts extra letters in a word when spelling. (i.e., may write tail as trail – The misspelled word often has the same beginning and ending letter)
- Deletes letters in a word when spelling (i.e., may write caft instead of craft – the misspelled word often has the same beginning and ending letter)
- Switches the order of letters in a word (i.e., may write speical instead of special)
- Has difficulty copying words from another paper or the board (i.e., copies letter by letter, referring to the original copy for almost every letter)
- Messy papers, including many crossed-out or erased words
- Misspells many common words like said, there, and does
- May be able to spell the words on a spelling test after much studying, but then misspells the same words outside of spelling class
- Difficulty putting ideas on paper
- Many spelling mistakes
- May do well on weekly spelling tests, but may have many spelling mistakes in daily work
- Difficulty proofreading
- Relatives may have similar problems
Why should you have your child screened for dyslexia?
- Many states across the U.S. are enacting mandatory dyslexia screenings for all K-5 and first grade students to identify potential reading problems in young children before the problems turn into reading failure.
- Early dyslexia screenings can determine if your child presents with enough symptoms to put him at risk for dyslexia.
- A screening can indicate whether a full comprehensive psychoeducational evaluation is necessary.
- A comprehensive evaluation reveals a child’s cognitive profile and can uncover a child’s particular type of dyslexia – phonological, orthographic, or mixed. Knowing a child’s cognitive profile and type of dyslexia can help professionals recommend the right type of early intervention.
- Waiting for students who are significantly behind their peers to catch up on their own is no longer recommended by researchers.
- Children with symptoms of dyslexia often go undiagnosed until they fall way behind their same age peers at which time intervention is more difficult
- Typical standardized tests given in group settings do not identify students with dyslexia
- Early intervention can allow students to learn to cope with this condition before they become labeled as low achievers, suffer from low self-esteem, and lose their motivation in school.
When should a child be screened?
- Dyslexia researchers recommend screenings for children in preschool K-4, kindergarten K-5, and the first semester of first grade.
What does a dyslexia screening measure?
- By examining a young child’s oral language skills and phonological processing ability, specialists can determine if a child is at-risk for dyslexia.
Oral Language Skills
- Oral language, simply stated, refers to our ability to listen to and understand speech as well as to express our thoughts through speech. Oral language is made up of low-level skills, such as recognizing and making the sounds within our speech, and higher-level skills, such as getting meaning by listening to someone speak or creating sentences to express thoughts. Students with dyslexia typically have adequate higher-level language skills. Indicators of higher-level oral language skills include being able to understand an age-appropriate story and spoken directions, to carry on a conversation, and to understand and use words that are age appropriate. If a student has average higher-level oral language skills but much difficulty developing written language (reading and spelling) skills, the need for evaluation for dyslexia is recommended. Although students with dyslexia usually have strong higher-level language skills, they typically have problems (a deficit) in low-level language skills (see following section “Phonological processing”). This deficit limits the ability to learn to read and spell using the sounds of the language. Young children with dyslexia often have delays in language development, but their higher-level language skills are usually age- appropriate by the time they enter school. Difficulties with higher-level language skills suggest a need for a comprehensive language evaluation by a speech-language pathologist to rule out language impairment.
Phonological Processing Ability
- Phonology is one small part of overall language ability. It is a low-level language skill in that it does not involve meaning. Phonology is the “sound system” of our language. Our spoken language is made up of words, word parts (such as syllables), and individual sounds within words (phonemes). We must be able to think about, remember, and correctly sequence the sounds in words in order to later learn how to link letters to sounds for reading and spelling. Good readers do this automatically without conscious effort. However, students with dyslexia have difficulty with identifying, remembering, and pronouncing sounds. Tests of phonological processing focus on these skills.
- Phonological Awareness is an auditory processing skill. It involves the ability to detect and discriminate differences in speech sounds (phonemes) in the absence of print. Phonological awareness is the understanding of the different ways that oral language can be divided into smaller components and manipulated. Phonemic awareness refers to the highest level of phonological awareness. Phonemic awareness is the understanding that words are made up of individual sounds or phonemes. It also refers to the ability of an individual to manipulate these phonemes either by segmenting, blending, or changing individual phonemes within words to create new words.
- Phonological Memory refers to coding information phonologically for temporary storage in working or short-term memory, to be “read off” in the process of applying the alphabetic principle to word identification. For example, when attempting to remember a phone number, most people remember it not by storing a visual representation of the sequence of the digits, but rather by storing a phonological representation of the sounds of the digit names.
- Students with dyslexia often have a slow speed of processing information (visual or auditory). Dyslexia screening tasks measure Rapid Naming speed (also called Rapid Automatic Naming). Sets of objects, colors, letters, and numbers are often used. These items are presented in rows on a card, and the student is asked to rapidly name them.
- The rapid naming of objects, colors, digits, or letters requires efficient retrieval of phonological information from long-term memory. When reading, young readers presumably retrieve phonemes associated with letters or letter pairs, pronunciations of common word segments, and pronunciations of whole words. The efficiency with which individuals are able to retrieve phonological codes associated with individual phonemes, word segments, or entire words should influence the degree to which phonological information is useful in decoding printed words.
- Naming speed, particularly letter naming, is one of the best early predictors of reading difficulties. Therefore, it is often used as part of screening measures for young children. Slow naming speed results in problems with developing reading fluency. It also makes it difficult for students to do well on timed tests. Students with both the naming speed deficit and the phonological processing deficit are considered to have a “double deficit.” Students with the double deficit have more severe difficulties than those with only one of the two.
Please call Breakwater Associates at 843.388.4048 to schedule a dyslexia screening at our office or to set up screenings for your private school students at your school.
Breakwater Associates is a member of The International Dyslexia Association


How to Write a Mood Poem
Mood, the feeling or atmosphere of a piece of poetry, is an important literary device used to create successful poetry, and in mood poems, mood is the dominant communicative force between poet and reader. In order for a poet’s intent to be accurately interpreted, it’s essential to understand what creates mood and why.
The poetic line enables you to manipulate words and phrases in a unique and powerful way. If your intent is for the poem’s mood to convey a formal, structured feel, a conventional sentence structure is one tool you could use. A fragment or series of fragmented lines could be used if you wish your poem to feel free or even mysterious. Ending a poetic line in the middle of a thought, forcing your reader to mentally complete it, is a strong tool for creating a tense mood.
Positive and Negative Words
Each word, in consideration with its context, has a positive or negative connotation that can drastically alter the mood of a particular piece. If you decide to use the word “gather” instead of “capture” in a poetic line, it’s important to realize the ramifications of choosing a word with a light, positive tone, “gather,” as opposed to “capture,” which is restricting and even aggressive. A specific, poignant word choice has the ability to immediately change the feel and atmosphere of a poem.
The rhythm of a particular line can be manipulated by the number of syllables in a word or cluster of words, as well as by which vowel sounds are prominent, and the sound of its consonants. A string of single-syllable words in a poetic line can create a certain speed and urgency, which will contribute to an overall feeling of anxiousness, frustration or even anger, depending the words. By using full vowel sounds such as ‘o’, ‘a’ and ‘ee,’ you can establish a slower-paced rhythm, ultimately contributing to a sadder or more relaxed atmosphere.
Creating an image in the mind of a reader is one of the most powerful tools at the poet’s disposal. Describing a particular image with clarity brings the reader close to the poem, and engages him in a way that’s personal and strong. Which images you create will sway the overall mood of the poem drastically. If you create an image of a woman drowning, the mood will immediately turn dark and ominous, but if positive, happy images are used, the mood will be immediately pulled in that particular direction.
Jake Shore is an award-winning Brooklyn-based playwright, published short story writer and professor at Wagner College. His short fiction has appeared in many publications including Litro Magazine, one of London's leading literary magazines. Shore earned his MFA in creative writing from Goddard College.


FTP File Transfer
What Does FTP Stand For?
FTP technology allows you to transfer files between two computers over the Internet. FTP is a simple network protocol based on IP and also the name people use when referring to the process of file transfer.
What Is Passive Mode (PASV) FTP?
Passive mode (the PASV option) allows FTP clients and servers to communicate more easily through network firewalls.
DISCUSS: Sharing Large Files via FTP
FTP is one solution to the problem of sharing large files between networks, although setting up a public FTP server should be done with care to avoid potential security issues.
SFTP stands for both SSH File Transfer Protocol and Simple File Transfer Protocol. SFTP is one of the primary technologies for secure FTP networking today.
TFTP - Trivial File Transfer Protocol
TFTP is a client-server technology similar to FTP for transferring files between network devices. Both TFTP clients and TFTP servers are available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
TCP Port 21
FTP (File Transfer Protocol) port number 21 is a reserved port in TCP/IP networking. FTP utilizes port number 21 for its control messages.
Linux 'ftp' Command
Learn how to use the ftp command in Linux for FTP file transfers using Linux clients.


To Get To The Next Body
The Immortal Gene
Richard Dawkins proposes the idea of the "replicator," the initial molecule which first managed to reproduce itself and thus gained an advantage over other molecules within the primordial soup. As replicating molecules became more complex, Dawkins postulates, the replicators became the genes within organisms, with each organism's body serving the purpose of a 'survival machine' for its genes.
A look at Fall
Dawkins writes that gene combinations which help an organism to survive and reproduce tend to also improve the gene's own chances of being passed on and, as a result, frequently "successful" genes will also be beneficial to the organism. An example of this might be a gene that protects the organism against a disease, which helps the gene spread and also helps the organism. The Selfish Gene - Wikipedia
Treehouse Fall colors
In other words, the DNA that formed me, (and you), is ancient. Living in body after body since it was part of primordial soup. I am just a temporary vehicle to carry it to a temporary egg carrying vehicle to keep the DNA alive by creating another carrier for this DNA.
On the path
“Our bodies may be important to us, but from our genes’ point of view, they are nothing more than vehicles to get themselves intact into the next generation. The entire collection of the genes that make up you or me is called our genotype. The sum total of all the bodily parts and functions that our genotype creates to advance its cause—you or me—is called our phenotype.” Mindsuckers - Carl Zimmer
This is fascinating information. One can extrapolate and apply this concept to the Id vs Ego, conscious vs unconscious mind, destiny vs free will, or however you choose to describe this duality of human nature that has entertained thinking humans for centuries.
Down by the riverside
I recommend that you read the article by Carl Zimmer in National Geographic. It deals with observable behavior of various insects and animals that have been altered by foreign DNA that ghoulishly uses a series of different lifeforms to ensure its survival.
Pink driveway rose
I find the addition of this information to fit nicely with what I have parsed from hundreds of sources regarding the duality of being human. We are part of the whole and uniquely individual at the same time.
There is life within us that began with existence. That ancient DNA is the very definition of divine wisdom. It protects us from harm and keeps us alive with breathing and beating hearts. We are directed to eat foods that keep us healthy and instinctively avoid threats to our lives, like fire, poisonous snakes, falling off cliffs.
The big pink rose is even bigger today
Our DNA will alter our molecules to produce pheromones that will fill us with irresistible desire for the appropriate mate our DNA has chosen. Love and romance will fill our hearts and souls while we produce a new vehicle for copies of our genetic codes to keep them immortal.
It’s a complex, beautiful, colorful world.


Your teen just got a driver’s license and wants to celebrate by jumping in the car to go meet friends. You’re proud of the accomplishment, yet worried about them driving solo. You have good reason to be anxious: Motor vehicle crashes caused by teen drivers are the number one cause of death among teens with 16-year-olds accounting for the highest percentage.
How can you encourage responsible driving—and still be a cool parent?
1. Trust. Remember riding shotgun as your teen learned to drive, stifling your gasps and gripping the handle so hard your knuckles turned white? Your teen will need this kind of self-control—and self-confidence—to drive solo. While you should emphasize that driving is a big deal with consequences, also reinforce that you trust his or her judgment. If you’ve demonstrated safe driving behaviors, your teen is more likely to follow your lead.
2. Observe and report. Phone calls are so last decade for teens. Texting is the thing, a quick way to be in touch, but it can be a lethal distraction on the roads. Indeed, texting while driving increases the risk of crashing by more than 20 times.
Research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that the way teens drive when they first get their license influences how they’ll drive as adults. Every time your teen takes the wheel, give a reminder to buckle up, stay away from the phone, call after arriving at the destination, and be home before curfew.
You also may want to go James Bond and invest in the latest technology to monitor your teen’s driving such as an in-car tracking device or a smart phone app that allows him or her to send simple messages.
3. Ride along. Sure, teens would rather drive around with their friends, but what’s wrong with driving your mom to the mall? Invite yourself for a ride—to music lessons, soccer practices, anywhere you’d both find enjoyable. See how they’re doing and, if you notice any bad habits, you can nip them in the bud.
4. Practice makes perfect. Your teen has put in 50 hours behind the wheel to get a license. But becoming an experienced driver takes time. The more teens drive, the better they’ll be able to handle different situations, especially in hazardous conditions, such as stormy weather or difficult terrain.
5. Set limits. Most states have laws that limit the number of passengers in a car driven by a teen driver. But establishing other guidelines are up to you. Will you allow your teen to drive on the highway? In the dark? To a party? Clearly outline and communicate your own set of rules to your teen. Be particularly vigilant about curfew, as times vary from community to community and police departments follow different protocols.
6. Talk. Your teen’s newfound independence does not mean you should stop communicating. Quite the opposite: Find ways to engage and encourage an open conversation about driving concerns he or she might have. Also, talking to your friends, and the parents of your teen’s friends, can help you share and articulate your concerns and those of other parents.
7. Adjust. No two young adults are alike. Yes, they sometimes have a pack mentality, but more often than not, they’ll behave in a way consistent with their personality and value system. Just look at who is behind the wheel and adjust your involvement accordingly.
Being supportive of your newly-licensed teen is a juggling act, but watching your teen come home safe and sound is the reward that makes it all worthwhile.


European NEOShield programme
Impact by asteroids or comets: not an impossible nightmare
Significant asteroid impacts have occurred frequently in the past.
These have ranged from the regional devastation caused 100 years ago by the Tunguska event in Siberia: an object of only a few tens of metres in diameter, which nevertheless had the power of 1,000 atomic bombs of the sort dropped on Hiroshima, to 65 million years ago, when another, vastly bigger, asteroid impacted close to the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico and is most probably responsible for the extinction of half of all animal species, including the dinosaurs.
The probability of another impact of an object in this size range in the next 10,000 years is close to 100 percent, but we do not know when. Of the thousands of already identified asteroids crossing the trajectory of Earth, none is expected to collide with our planet in the next 100 years. However, we only see a fraction of the total expected NEOs in our vicinity ...
As the writer Arthur C. Clarke so pertinently remarked: “The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space programme.”
The European Union has decided to invest in the protection of the Earth against impact by Near Earth Objects (NEOs), such as asteroids or comets. This European programme is called NEOShield. NEOShield will be the world’s largest international programme of this type, with participating institutions and companies from across Europe, the United States and Russia.
Asteroid deflection space missions should already be possible using current technologies but to date these have not been adapted for such a purpose. The preparation of a demonstrator mission to protect the Earth against NEO imapact is the goal of the NEOShield programme.
Defining a concept
The work of NEOShield will be coordinated from the German Space Agency DLR’s Institute of Planetary Research in Berlin. Under the programme, Airbus Defence and Space will lead the technical work of an industrial consortium in charge of defining the basic concepts of protecting of the Earth against NEOs.
One of the most promising concepts for such a mission is the so-called “kinetic impactor”: a spacecraft slams into the NEO at very high speed, giving it a nudge and causing it to change its orbit very slightly so it deviates from its original collision course. This concept was studied by Airbus Defence and Space a few years ago for the European Space Agency (ESA) and will now be updated and further developed.
The most critical technology challenges for the kinetic impactor are guidance, navigation and control to ensure successful NEO impact. It involves relative speeds in excess of 10km/s and a target precision of only a few metres. For this reason, two Airbus Defence and Space teams will work in parallel with different concepts calling on their own specific expertise and experience. One team from Airbus Defence and Space has extensive experience of interplanetary missions, including navigation and control over large distances. The other from Airbus Defence and Space, has successfully demonstrated precise space navigation and rendezvous with launchers and the ATV, the European space cargo vehicle.
An international team
Airbus Defence and Space will also oversee the technical studies of the international partners, who will concentrate on two other asteroid deviation concepts. The first is based on the gravitational pull between an object in space and a spacecraft. Known as a gravity tractor, the gravitational pull of a spacecraft in the vicinity of an object such as an asteroid over a long period of time will cause the object to change its orbit. The gravity tractor concept will be investigated by the Carl Sagan Institute in Palo Alto, California, which also carries out similar work for NASA. The other concept is deflection (and not destruction) by an explosion close to the asteroid’s surface. This ‘blast deflection’ concept will be investigated by TsNIIMash, a Russian institution also working for the Russian space agency Roscosmos.
For Airbus Defence and Space, this multi-site project will involve experts in Friedrichshafen (Germany), Stevenage (United Kingdom), Toulouse (France), Les Mureaux (France) and Bremen (Germany). Airbus Defence and Space, Europe’s leading space company will support half of the research and development effort.


Garry Kasparov, in full Garri Kimovich Kasparov, original name Garri Weinstein or Harry Weinstein, (born April 13, 1963, Baku, Azerbaijan, U.S.S.R. [now Baku, Azerbaijan]), Soviet-born chess master who became the world chess champion in 1985. Kasparov was the youngest world chess champion (at 22 years of age) and the first world chess champion to be defeated by a supercomputer in a competitive match.
Kasparov was born to a Jewish father and an Armenian mother. He began playing chess at age 6, by age 13 was the Soviet youth champion, and won his first international tournament at age 16 in 1979. Kasparov became an international grandmaster in 1980. From 1973 to 1978 he studied under former world champion Mikhail Botvinnik.
Kasparov first challenged the reigning world champion Anatoly Karpov in a 1984–85 match, after he survived the Fédération Internationale des Échecs (FIDE; the international chess federation) series of elimination matches. Kasparov lost four out of the first nine games but then adopted a careful defensive stance, taking an extraordinarily long series of drawn games with the champion. With Kasparov finally having won three games from the exhausted Karpov, FIDE halted the series after 48 games, a decision protested by Kasparov. In the two players’ rematch in 1985, Kasparov narrowly defeated Karpov in a 24-game series and thereby became the youngest official champion in the history of the game.
In 1993 Kasparov and the English grandmaster Nigel Short left FIDE and formed a rival organization, the Professional Chess Association (PCA). In response, FIDE stripped the title of world champion from Kasparov, who defeated Short that same year to become the PCA world champion. In 1995 he successfully defended his PCA title against Viswanathan Anand of India; the PCA disbanded in 1996.
In 1996 Kasparov defeated a powerful IBM custom-built chess computer known as Deep Blue in a match that attracted worldwide attention. Kasparov and the team of Deep Blue programmers agreed to have a rematch in 1997. Deep Blue’s intelligence was upgraded, and the machine prevailed. Kasparov resigned in the last game of the six-game match after 19 moves, granting the win to Deep Blue. In 2000 Kasparov lost a 16-game championship match to Vladimir Kramnik of Russia.
Kasparov retired from competitive chess in 2005, though not from involvement in chess. In particular, he produced an acclaimed series of books, Kasparov on My Great Predecessors (2003–06), that covered all the world chess champions from Wilhelm Steinitz through Karpov, as well as many other great players. In Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins (2017), Kasparov offered details of his 1997 match with Deep Blue while praising technological progress. Following his retirement, Kasparov continued to participate in exhibition matches and to coach other players still active in competitive chess.
Kasparov also remained in the public eye with his decision in 2005 to start a political organization, the United Civil Front, to oppose Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin. In 2006 Kasparov was one of the prime movers behind a broad coalition of political parties that formed the Other Russia, a group held together by only one goal: ousting Putin from power. In 2007, following several protest marches organized by the coalition in which Kasparov and other participants were arrested, the Other Russia chose Kasparov as its candidate for the 2008 presidential election but was unable to nominate him by the deadline. He continued to be an outspoken critic of Putin, and in 2015 he published Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped. Kasparov also served as a contributing editor for The Wall Street Journal from 1991. He became a Croatian citizen in 2014.


The Earth’s climate system has been undergoing unusual rapid transformation for decades. This transformation is primarily due to uncontrolled anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases, and on the first place emissions of carbon dioxide, that is product of fossil fuel combustion. Since the end of the nineteenth century, the mean global temperature has increased by 1 °C, causing a number of changes in other elements of the climate system. Severe heat-waves, extreme precipitation and flood events, prolonged droughts, melting glaciers ice caps, sea level rise, strong hurricanes, forest fires, and many other extreme events becoming more and more part of our lives, and all of them can be connected to the warming of 1°C.
All these changes already put pressure on the functioning of modern society, but also on natural systems on Earth. If in the future, anthropogenic emissions continue to follow trends from the past, we can also expect the continuation of these changes, and negative consequences will increase significantly, opening many questions about how the society will look like in the future, but also to what extent the living world will be able to adapt to these changes.
Over the past decades, climate models have become a core element of the climate science. Climate models allow us to better understand the changes in the system, but also to anticipate possible future changes. During the lectures, in addition to presenting the review of the climate change in the past, the results of possible future changes will be presented. Special focus of the second lecture will be on how to understand and interpret future climate projections obtained by climate models, and how these data can be used to assess the appropriate impact of possible changes on different infrastructure, socio-economic sectors and the living world. Understanding current and future impacts can help us during decision-making process that should provide increased resilience to these changes.
Dr Vladimir Đurđević is an associate professor of meteorology at the Faculty of Physics, University of Belgrade, Serbia. During his career, he was a visiting scientist at the “National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)” in the United States; “Centro Euro-Mediterraneo sui Cambiamenti Climatic (CMCC)” in Italy; “Instituto Superior Tecnico (IST), Universidade de Lisboa” in Portugal; and “Mediterranean Center on Insular Coastal Dynamics (ICOD) of the University of Malta” in Malta. He has participated in many international research projects funded by the EU H2020, EU-FP, IPA, JRC, IOC-UNESCO and GEF. Dr Vladimir Djurdjevic participates in the international initiative “Mediterranean Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (Med-CORDEX)” and he is a member of the International Planing Committee for the “Iniative for Regional Hydroclimate Project for Pannonian reagion (PannEX)”.
Engaged as an expert and consultant, he was a coauthor of the National communications on climate change under the UNFCCC for Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Brazil. As a representative from the University of Belgrade, he is a member of the National Committee on Climate Change of the Government of the Republic of Serbia. He is also a member of the working group for the implementation of the activities of the Action Plan for Adaptation to Climate Change in Belgrade. His expertise is in the field of climate modeling, climate data analysis, climate impacts, vulnerability and adaptation to climate change. Beside his career in education and science he regularly participating in different public events dedicated to the problem of climate change.
Dr Vladimir Đurđević talking about climate change @ Kids TV Programme RTS
Guest Lecture: “Unfolding Urban Heritage Conservation As Community-Led Local Development” – Dr. Elena Battaglini
Guest Lecture: ”Wood Use For Health In The Built Environment” – dr Michael Burnard
Guest Lecture: The Europeanization of spatial planning: reasons, mechanisms and dynamics of change – Dr. Giancarlo Cotella
Guest Lecture: Architecture For The Pleasure Of Reason – Martino Pedrozzi
Guest Lecture: “Urban Sustainability – why it is important and how it can be achieved” – Dr. Jerry Anthony
Guest Lecture: “Urban Topography vs. House Scenery” – Tatsuo Iwaoka
Guest Lecture: On Process – Mitesh Dixit
Guest Lecture: Sustainable Urbanism and Globalisation – Prof. Ashraf M. Salama
Guest lecture: ARCHITECT 2049 – Dr. Miloš Dimčić
Guest Lectures: Prof. Alfredo Brillembourg “Urban-Think Tank: Housing the City” and Haris Piplaš “Reactivating Sarajevo’s (Dis)continuous urbanism”
Guest Lecture: about design engineering culture – Professor Hanif Kara
Guest lecture: “The Robotic Touch – How Robots Change Architecture” by Professor Fabio Gramazio
AUR 2014/15 City and Society: Yoshiharu Tsukamoto & Momoyo Kaijima [Atelier Bow-Wow]


Da Vinci’s enigmatic portrait is often considered the most famous painting in the world and resides in the Louvre museum in Paris behind a sheet of bullet proof glass.
There is much mystery surrounding this small painting – both mathematical and artistic: why the knowing smile, what’s with the background landscape and why do the proportions follow the Fibonacci sequence? Yet there is more…
Italian art historians have recently placed the painting under a microscope and found that the eyes of the woman contained a series of numbers and letters. The right eye contains the letters LV – thought to be Da Vinci’s monogram whilst the left contains symbols that are not yet defined but are thought to be the letters CE or B. In the background, the bridge is thought to contain the number 72.
The codes are so deep within the painting that they are considered to have been put there by the artist himself as they are in the pupils – the darkest part of the painting. Other paintings of the era also contain such symbols, thought to have been coded messages understandable to those that the painting belonged to, specific to the era.
Italy’s national Committee for cultural heritage were alerted to the code by Luigi Borgia who had chanced upon a 50 year old book in an antique shop, which describes the numbers and letters.
Inspired by this discovery, the committee are now asking permission to exhume Da Vinci’s remains to see if his scull structure matches that of the portrait – it is a common hypothesis that the Mona Lisa is in fact a self portrait with other specialists asserting that da Vinci’s homosexuality lead him to paint himself as a woman.
This painting continues to mystify even the most qualified and experience and perhaps it is this that means that the painting is so widely enjoyed around the world.


The issue of censorship has been debated many times in the past on federal, state, and local levels. There has also been the celebration of “banned books” at schools every year without students really understanding the reasons behind the bans.
Classic literature such as “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee faced accusations such as promoting institutionalized racism in 1981 by Warren, Indiana Township schools. According to the ALA website, Warren claimed that the book caused, “psychological damage to the positive integration process,” while representing, “institutionalized racism under the guise of good literature.”
There are many racial issues that are brought up in the book that reflect the time period. The book is a great example of the harsh reality that African Americans had to face in the criminal justice system.
Banning an iconic book like this would take away a part of history that students need to understand because they don’t touch on the justice system and its mistreatment of people of color in history classes.
Many of us that have read the book have enjoyed it and see no reason for it to be banned other than the use of racial slurs. I believe that even though they are offensive to many, it is an accurate depiction of the mindset of those living during that time.
Racism was rampant and Lee does a great job of illustrating that throughout the book so to take that away from the school curriculum would leave out part of history that we need to continue teaching.
Books that depict LGBTQ+ characters, relationships, and issues have also been at the forefront of bans because parents feel that it promotes an unideal idea of what a relationship should be.
Middle and high school is when youth are trying to find themselves and understand the world. Therefore, sheltering them from a broader view of it is only going to make them more confused in the future.
Yes, there is a time and a place for everything, especially the knowledge of certain things, but forcing certain ideas on a child and making sure they follow a specific curriculum allows for a narrow-minded view of the changing world around them.
Even things like sexual imagery have a place in specific books because they are tied into the plot.
In 1933, James Joyce’s book titled “Ulysses” was taken to court and tried because of its sexual content. Judge John M. Woosley ruled that it was not pornographic because of the, “stream of consciousness.” The sexual content was needed in order to show the characters thought process and was very necessary to the structure of the book.
There is a lot of content that can be argued by parents but if taken out of these books, the stories would be dumbed down and not as intriguing as they are already.
These complex themes that are shown inside each book allow for students to learn about the world in the past, present, and future. It allows them to grow their depth and be more understanding of differences as well as understanding their own feelings.
Censorship is just a way of dictating what a student should and should not learn. It is an issue that is damaging to curriculums around the country because it imposes on the development of the student and forces them to hold a specific view of their environment.
Topics of race, sexuality, religion, etc. are all necessary to the nurturing of student minds and allows for important aspects of history to be emphasized in schools.


(RxWiki News) Antiplatelet medications, while highly effective, can put surgical patients at risk of serious bleeding. But a new, safer drug may be on the horizon.
A new drug designed to prevent dangerous blood clots from forming in the arteries of patients undergoing surgery appears safe and effective, a new study found. What's more is the effects of the new drug — called PZ-128 — are uniquely reversible.
Similar to blood thinners (anticoagulants), antiplatelets are drugs used to stop blood cells from sticking together and forming blood clots. Blood clots can block blood flow to the heart or brain, causing heart attack and stroke.
However, all antiplatelets currently available carry an increased risk of bleeding, according to David J. Scott, RPh, PharmD, MBA, a clinical staff pharmacist at Scott Pharmacy in Fayette, IA. That means if patients need surgery while taking these drugs, they have a greater risk of serious complications due to blood loss.
"Antiplatelet medications currently available put patients at risk for unusual bleeding or bruising, pain and general discomfort," Dr. Scott told RxWiki News. "These medications tend to irreversibly, and completely, affect platelet function for the life span of the platelets (eight to nine days) and do not have reversal agents. If patients experience major bleeding complications on these medications, hospitals may need to administer blood or fresh frozen plasma transfusions to control the bleeding."
PZ-128 is a new type of drug called a pepducin. These drugs are unique because they act quickly to prevent blood clots from forming during surgery and their effects are reversible, reducing the risk of bleeding. Researchers said this study is the first to demonstrate the potential benefits of pepducins in humans.
For this study, a team of researchers led by Athan Kuliopulos, MD, PhD, director of the Center for Hemostasis and Thrombosis Research at Tufts University, gave the new drug to 31 patients ages 43 to 74.
More than one-fifth of these patients had coronary artery disease. The rest were at risk due to factors like high blood pressure, cholesterol, diabetes or smoking.
Researchers found that the more PZ-128 patients received, the better the medicine prevented blood cells from clumping together. At the highest dose, PZ-128 prevented between 80 and 100 percent of blood clots from forming.
The effects of PZ-128 were also quickly reversed, with the drug completely clearing from patients' blood in as little as 24 hours.
Although these results are promising, researchers cautioned that this is a phase I study and much more research is still needed. Dr. Kuliopulos said his team is currently planning a phase II study on 600 patients undergoing angioplasty or with acute blood flow blockages to the heart.
This study was published Dec. 17 in the journal Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology.
The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute funded this research. Several study authors disclosed ties to pharmaceutical companies.


Coral reefs occur along coastlines in tropical and subtropical regions wherever environmental conditions are suitable for their development.
Factors influencing reef development include:
- Light levels are critical in maintaining the coral-algal symbiotic association
Light is critical in maintaining the symbiotic association between corals and symbiotic algae (zooxanthellae). The intensity of light greatly affects photosynthetic rates of the zooxanthellae, indirectly impacting coral growth and survival. Abundance of corals decreases rapidly with depth due to reduced light levels. In clear tropical waters, corals may live as deep as 150 feet (48 m), with very limited species found beyond that depth.
- Optimal temperature for coral growth is 73-77°F (23-25°C)
Seawater temperatures can be tolerated between 61-95°F (16-35°C), with optimal coral growth occurring at temperatures of 73-77°F (23-25°C). These temperatures exist throughout most of the tropics with the exception of cool water currents off the west coasts of Africa and Australia. However, where currents move warm water from the tropics towards the north, reefs can survive in subtropical regions as near Bermuda.
- Excessive sedimentation reduces available light for coral growth
Reefs can only develop in areas lacking nearby rivers that bring silt and freshwater into marine environments. Excessive sedimentation reduces available light, inhibiting photosynthesis by the symbiotic algae. Silt also settles on the coral surface, blocking feeding and respiration.
- Corals require salinities between 30 and 40 parts per thousand
The amount of dissolved salts in the water is referred to as salinity and is measured in parts per thousand (ppt). Corals can tolerate a narrow range of salinities, between 30 and 40 ppt.
Glossary terms on page
- photosynthesis: process of making chemical compounds using light for energy, plants get their energy from photosynthesis by using chlorophyll converted with carbon dioxide and water to produce carbohydrates and release oxygen.
- subtropical: area on the surface of the earth between tropic and temperate regions, approximately between 40 degrees N. and S.
- salinity: concentration of total salts dissolved in water, usually measured in parts per thousand.


Baker College of Flint
When a person begins nursing school it can be a bit over whelming. One is bombarded by not only new experiences but an overabundance of information. Clinical advisors demand an accumulation of information before setting a toe into a patient’s room. However, being a novice, the student has no idea what all that information pertains to or what to do with it. As the semesters of nursing school pass, the student begins to realize what the information is and what to do with it. The students acquire information literacy. Information Literacy Definition
Due to the enormous growth of the health care industry itself and the many changes of how information is delivered, it is more important now than ever that nurses have acquired information literacy. “Information Literacy is defined as the ability to recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information” (Cherry & Jacob, 2011, p. 306). Nurses need the ability to recognize when information is needed because they need to know what questions they need to ask their patients to be able to clearly assess their patient’s conditions. They also need to assess outside information to be able to establish the best evidence based practice to be used in their patient’s treatment. Information can be obtained from the patient themselves or evidence based practice journals, computer data bases, and facility protocols. “To be able to achieve any of these competencies nurses need to identify where relevant information can be found” (Glasper, 2011, p. 188). It is also very important to consider the level of evidence of your source of information. Once the nurse has gathered information, one must be able to understand what the information means. Anyone can read the words on a lab report, but nurses must be able to know what lab values mean. They must also be able to know when values...


Potsdam is the largest city and the capital of the State of Brandenburg. 170,000 people are living in Potsdam. Since 2006 Potsdam is a member of the ECCAR. The administrative secretariat has also been located in Potsdam since 2012. The city of Potsdam was mentioned, historically, for the first time in a document in 993.
The history of Potsdam was influenced by immigration and tolerance towards religions. For example, the Great Elector Friedrich Wilhelm issued „the Edict of Potsdam” in 1685. It allowed the Hugenots (French Protestants) to migrate to Brandenburg. The Hugenots had been persecuted in France for religion reasons.
This rule is often simply called “Potsdamer Edict for Tolerance”. In 2008 this Edict for Tolerance was relaunced in a dialogue with the city society. It describes the new democratic self-understanding of Potsdam’s citizenship and is a commitment to principles of multiculturalism and tolerance.
In the year 2000 the slogan “Potsdam shows colours! - together for tolerance and a nonviolent and peaceful living together” was created. It was developed by the local sports association to show a sign against cases of right-wing attacks in Potsdam.
To strengthen tolerance and a peaceful living together, the city administration and organizations of the civil society created in 2001 a “Local action plan for tolerance and democracy, against violence, political extremism and xenophobia”. It is basis for the work of the alliance “Potsdam! shows colours". It is a broad union of many organizations of the civil society, political parties, the city administration and other authorities. This organizations and the alliance work as opinion formers into the different levels of the society. In Potsdam right extremism and other forms of intolerance are countered by a combination of political and civil society debate.
In 2016 Potsdam has adopted a model of guidelines for living together in relation to the development of the city. An important principle is, the city is a place, for all kind of people.Potsdam is a city, where it is very important that variety, equal chances and tolerance for all humans, of life draft, age, sex, handicap, origin, culture, faith, sexual orientation and income are respected and protected.
The variety of the citizen wo living in Potsdam, make the city interesting and colorful. Discrimination and exclusion do not have a place in Potsdam.


Data confidence level:
This FACT indicates the vegetable production for human consumption (tonnes) (includes beans, capsicums, carrots, lettuces, melons (including rock, bitter and water), mushrooms, onions, potatoes, tomatoes) in each Australian state and territory. The Australian vegetable production sector is an important source of food, supplying most of the fresh vegetables consumed in Australia and also providing inputs for a large proportion of the processed vegetable products consumed in Australia and exported overseas. This number is represented in thousands. The state with the highest production for human consumption is Victoria, at 682,803 tonnes. The state/territory with the lowest is the Australian Capital Territory at 0 tonnes.


A bacterial corneal ulcer occurs when the cornea becomes scratched allowing bacteria to enter the wound. If left untreated, permanent vision loss can occur.
The cornea is the clear structure covering the colored area of the eye, known as the iris. A corneal ulcer causes the cornea to develop an open sore.
A bacterial corneal ulcer is very common for people who wear contact lenses. Most often, a corneal ulcer will develop when the cornea's surface becomes scratched, causing a bacterial infection to occur. The corneal scratch can occur when the lens is put into the eye or removed.
Bacteria can enter the scratch in a number of ways. When contact lenses are not cleaned properly, bacteria can become trapped under the contact lens which can then infect the scratch. Wearing extended-wear lenses increase the risk for developing a corneal ulcer.
Symptoms of a Corneal Ulcer
Corneal ulcers produce a wide range of symptoms, including redness and eye pain. Other symptoms associated with a corneal ulcer include a thick mucus or pus discharge from the eye and feeling as though something is in the eye. It is not uncommon to experience blurred vision, sensitivity to light, and swelling of the eye lid. Often, there will be a visible white spot on the cornea. If these symptoms occur, it is essential to seek medical treatment.
Diagnosing a Corneal Ulcer
Immediate treatment for a corneal ulcer is absolutely essential because if left untreated, the ulcer can spread to the rest of the eye. Permanent damage, such as vision loss can occur as well. To properly diagnose a corneal ulcer, an ophthalmologist will conduct an examination using an eye microscope. In order to see the eye more clearly, fluorescein drops will be added to the eye. In some cases, a sample of the ulcer may be taken for further analysis.
Treatment for a Corneal Ulcer
If you suspect you may have a bacterial corneal ulcer, there are things you can do at home until you are able to see your ophthalmologist. Remove your contact lenses immediately and do not touch or rub your eyes. Apply a cool compress to the eye and take over-the-counter pain medications to relieve the pain.
To treat a corneal ulcer, antibiotic eye drops are often prescribed, which will need to be administered multiple times per day depending on the severity of the bacterial infection. In rare and severe cases of a corneal infection, surgery may be needed, known as a corneal transplant.
Preventing a Corneal Ulcer
To prevent a bacterial infection from causing a corneal ulcer, make sure you wash your hands prior to touching your eyes. If you wear contact lenses, make sure you follow the proper hygienic and cleansing requirements. Never sleep with your contact lenses in your eyes and never use tap water to clean them. If you are exposed to small particles, wear eye protection to reduce the risk of the particles entering your eye.


A simple and fun educational game, offering preschool children an easy way to learn the Alphabet and many new words. Stimulates the development of memory, observability, logic and manual skills.
This game helps the child to develop and acquire:
- Read and Write
- Word composition
- Understanding text and images
- Logic and observability
- sorting pictures, letters and words
- Ability to make decisions and execute appropriate actions
- Hand and motor skills training
- Game tool
The box contains:
- 52 puzzle-card mushrooms
Made in Italy
The educational games of Sapientino are a timeless and innovative series, designed to support the learning development of children during preschool and school age. They have been studied by special educators and psychologists and have been tested in schools. They cover a variety of educational topics helping children to develop essential skills and knowledge in a simple and fun way!


The parish made their commemoration uniquely personal by telling stories of the four servicemen who died in 1914, and asking the congregation for family stories of those who died, and who survived.
Volunteers have begun to research all of the 227 men who are commemorated on the Garston war memorial, creating family trees for relations who are still in the area.
As 1914 marks the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War, and no surviving soldiers remain, the aim is to ensure that the memorial and the memories of those it honours, are preserved for future generations in Garston.
The exhibition also included a replica of a trench from which soldiers would have gone into battle. Children from two local junior schools visited, to listen to stories of what life was like in the trenches and at home in wartime, and to handle artefacts from the period.
John Davies, Reader at St Michael’s said: ‘It's been a journey of discovery for our small dedicated team. Our most engaging thing has been a slideshow with music, showing details of all of the servicemen on the memorial, as it is such an emotional experience for everyone watching it.’
He added, ‘We’d like other churches to know that it is possible for them to do something similar with some hard work and dedication.’
To find out more contact John Davies: firstname.lastname@example.org


Kagiya No Tsuji
Kagiya no Tsuji was one of the three great vendettas of the Edo period, alongside Chushingura (The 47 Ronin Story) and The Soga Brothers Incident. The Kagiya no Tsuji Incident took place on December 26, 1634, at Otamachi, about 400m west of Iga Ueno Castle.
Kagiya no Tsuji, one of the three great vendettas of the Edo period
The incident began in mid 1630, when Watanabe Gendayu, a favorite retainer of the Lord of Okayama, Ikeda Tadao, was cut down by another young retainer.
Kawai Matagoro, then aged 19, had approached the 17-year-old Watanabe Gendayu, and expressed his feelings for the youth. Gendayu turned him down, and in a fit of rage, Matagoro killed him, and fearing retribution, then fled to the safety of Edo, where he was hidden away by the Hatamoto, Ando Masayoshi.
Ikeda Tadao demanded Matagoro be handed over to him for punishment, but Ando refused, and a conflict arose between the Okayama Ikeda clan and the Hatamoto, Ando.
Ikeda Tadao later contracted chicken pox, and died, but not before penning a will that demanded that Gendayu be revenged, and Matagoro be sought and brought to justice.
Watanabe Gendayu’s elder brother, Watanabe Kazuma then sought to fulfill Lord Ikeda’s will, and seek revenge. He engaged the services of his brother-in-law, the swordsman Araki Mataemon as his second, and three of Araki’s followers, making a band of five to hunt for Matagoro.
Matagoro had by then fled to Nara, but when his whereabouts were discovered and realizing his enemy were closing in, he decided to again flee to Edo. Accompanied by his ten samurai guards, and a large number of supporters, he was ambushed in Otamachi, Iga Ueno, at the Kagiya no Tsuji tea house where the heroes had been waiting. The tea house was located on the busy intersection of the Ise Road and the Nara Highway. A great brawl ensued, in which 36 were said to have been killed, among them Matagoro. Lord Ikeda’s will was upheld and Gendayu was revenged. It is believed that the Todo clan of Tsu Castle had sent a large contingent of men to surround the area to prevent Matagoro from escaping. The duel is said to have lasted about five hours, with more posing, shouting and facing off than actual sword fighting. Late in the afternoon, a short melee resulted in Matagoro being injured on the arms before being cut down.
The ambush at the Kagiya no Tsuji tea house, Otamachi, Iga Ueno
The site of the vendetta is now a historical park, and features a re-creation of the original tea house. The Igagoe Museum has the original oath written by Araki Mataemon addressed to Tonami Matabei, sword master of Toda domain, and many artifacts relating to the vendetta, including Nishkie, woodblock prints illustrating the event. The incident has been remembered in kabuki and bunraku plays, in novels, TV and movies.


A proxy service is service that makes someone anonymous while surfing the internet online. The service allows browsing the internet when hiding one’s information that websites can use to identify the person. It’s a strategy that allows browsers to hide their identity from the websites they are visiting..A server that uses a proxy can help users to surf anonymously on the web
A proxy service provides anonymous web surfing by disabling popup windows and cookies and hides the users IP address. They service normally uses a proxy server for processing each HTTP request. When a person requests for information from a particular site by typing a URL or clicking on a hyperlink, the service retrieves the information and displays it using their own server. The requested web page or the remote server gets information of the anonymous web surfing service instead of getting the user’s information. Websites being visited often gathers information like the type of OS the user is using and the type of browsing program that the user is using. Using anonymous services will help in hiding the details from the websites. The service works by putting a barrier between a user and the site they are visiting. Users who are monitored by their organization on their surfing ways often use this service to hide their details.
Proxy services are commonly used to hide the users information to enhance privacy or to help a user bypass a blocking application that would not allow access to a web page or part of it. The service can make a person feel more secure when surfing and prevent web pages from gathering one’s information that can be collected and used to tailor content for advertising to suit the user. Examples of search services include anonymizer and safe web.
Though the proxy services offer privacy and allow one to access blocked site, they come with limitations. The proxy servers have to first send the user’s information to their servers making surfing slow. Also the proxy tries to bypass software that is suspicious and this prevents some elements on the page from loading. Proxy servers can also be a security hazard when surfing since private information such as details of a credit card and passwords are sent using an external server which can be easily retrieved by someone else if the channel is not encrypted. Some add-ons like the flash player and java plug ins can reveal the users IP address even when they are browsing anonymously.
Users chose to use a proxy service if…
One lives abroad and the data they want to access is restricted to users in a certain country
The user wants to hide their information from being collected by web pages which use it for tailoring advertisements
The organization where the user works restricts access to certain websites which the user needs to access
The user wants to access classified information discreetly
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Australia is a harsh and volatile environment, subject to extremes of fire and flood. We’ve just seen a particularly early start to the bushfire season, with over 60 fires burning and at least two homes destroyed in Sydney. These fires match predictions of increasingly long fire seasons, and trends towards higher temperatures and decreased rainfall.
Extreme weather is on the rise thanks to climate change. It’s one of the factors behind rises in insurance premiums, a cause for public concern. But instead of worrying about price hikes we should be reading the signs.
The latest natural disasters continue to affect home insurance premiums, which are again set to rise. Suncorp, which owns GIO and AAMI and is the biggest home insurer across the nation, has recently identified key factors for its ongoing price hikes. They include the unexpected high costs of rebuilding what are very large Australian homes, as well as a spate of extreme events including the catastrophic 2011 Queensland floods.
More frequent and more intense weather events are expected with climate change. Internationally the insurance industry’s big re-insurers anticipate having to recoup higher pay-outs by raising premiums.
Insurance is about risk reduction as well as risk sharing. Insurance with its various levels of premium identifies and prices that risk. It can provide an incentive or disincentive for home-owners to change their behaviour, and live more safely in an Australian environment that is sometimes very dangerous.
So, rather than just wanting to resist and reject rising premiums we would do well to pay attention and read them carefully.
Research funded through the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility has examined how planning, building and insuring might figure in our adaptation to more extreme weather events in the future.
Of those people living in very big houses with lots of material belongings and located in high risk areas such as fire-prone bushland or waterside settings, some will accept the higher premiums to retain a particular lifestyle. For most Australians insurance allows a home to be replaced after a disaster – often on a “like-for-like” basis – and is what allows life to carry on as usual.
Alternatively, we could decide as individuals and as communities to try and change how we live. Insurance could guide improvements in where housing is built, its size and design, and the use of better materials. New dwellings could be small and compact, built to suit the environment, situated away from floodplains and north-facing slopes in flammable bushland, and using more resistant or cheap and easily-replaced materials.
The availability and cost of insurance should become one of the accepted signals to prospective home-buyers indicating whether or not existing housing stock meets the requirements for this more resilient future. Where insurers fear to tread, so too local governments, planners, developers and builders as well as home-buyers should be wary of entering. Communities in high-risk and insurable areas might in turn be encouraged to retreat to wholly new locations.
But what about people who can’t afford insurance or to move to safer ground? Research funded by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute shows that people in social housing are some of society’s most marginalised and therefore especially vulnerable to natural disasters. Tenants of public housing affected by cyclones, bushfires and floods rarely hold insurance.
Poor housing in disaster-prone areas will remain home to the least well-off members of society. Perhaps the notion of “climate change ghettoes” will be added to the litany of forms that currently identify places of disadvantage in Australia.
The government continues to play a key role as the insurer of last resort, particularly for vulnerable and marginalised households. But proponents of insurance revile such interventions. Insurance proponents say these measures distort the market mechanism that prices disasters, contributing to “moral hazard”, or poor choices given the possible turn to a government handout.
It is hard to deny people in crisis access to assistance from governments and communities. However the use of scarce resources to reinstate households and townships unthinkingly back in the line of fire squanders any opportunity to learn from these events.
The solution may be critical relationships that bring together the different players involved in insurance, housing provision, climate adaptation and disaster management.
They will be required to work together with various stakeholders in bravely and innovatively deciding how and where we redesign and build more resilient Australian communities. The plan to relocate homes in the ravaged township of Grantham in the Lockyer Valley is an Australian first and exemplary of how such initiatives might work through land-swaps.
There will be an uncomfortable period of transition; communities in urban areas have an inertia to them that means change is slow. Even as new safe havens pop up, they will not be available to everyone immediately. Weathering our climate change future will require a response that involves all Australians.


The First Electronic Church of America
Heinrich Hertz, a German physicist who was born in 1857 and died of blood poisoning in 1894 at the age of 37, applied Maxwell's theories to the production and reception of radio waves. In recognition of his work, the unit of frequency of a radio wave -- one cycle per second -- is named the hertz, in honor of Heinrich Hertz.
In 1888, in a corner of his physics classroom at the Karlsruhe Polytechnic in Berlin, Hertz generated electric waves by means of the oscillatory discharge of a condenser through a loop provided with a spark gap, and then detecting them with a similar type of circuit. Hertz's condenser was a pair of metal rods, placed end to end with a small gap for a spark between them. When these rods were given charges of opposite signs, strong enough to spark, the current would oscillate back and forth across the gap and along the rods. With this oscillator, Hertz solved two problems: 1) timing Maxwell's waves (he had demonstrated, in the concrete, what Maxwell had only theorized: that the velocity of radio waves was equal to the velocity of light), and 2) how to make the electric and magnetic fields detach themselves from wires and go free as Maxwell's waves.
Hertz's students were impressed, and wondered what use might be made of this marvelous phenomenon. But Hertz thought his discoveries were no more practical than Maxwell's. "It's of no use whatsoever," he replied. "This is just an experiment that proves Maestro Maxwell was right -- we just have these mysterious electromagnetic waves that we cannot see with the naked eye. But they are there."
"So, what next?" asked one of his students at the University of Bonn.
Hertz shrugged. He was a modest man, of no pretensions and, apparently, little ambition. "Nothing, I guess."
But, even at a theoretical level, Hertz's accomplishments were quickly seen by others as the beginning of a new "electric age." The English mathematical physicist, Sir. Oliver Heaviside, said in 1891, "Three years ago, electromagnetic waves were nowhere. Shortly afterward, they were everywhere."
Summing up Hertz's importance: his experiments dealing with the reflection, refraction, polarization, interference and velocity of electric waves would trigger the invention, soon after, of the wireless telegraph and of radio.
It happened this way: in 1888, Hertz described in an electrical journal how he was able to trigger his electromagnetic waves with his oscillator. A young man in his teens happened to read the article while he was vacationing in the Alps. For him, Hertz's discovery gave him an idea: why not use the waves set off by Hertz's spark oscillator for signaling? Guglielmo Marconi was that young man. He rushed back home to Italy to give the idea a try.
When Hertz died in Bonn, Germany, in 1894, Sir Oliver Lodge gave Hertz credit for accomplishing what the great English physicists of the time were unable to do. It was not hard to give Hertz credit. Not only had he established the validity of Maxwell's theorems, he had done so with a winning modesty. "He was a noble man," said one eulogist in 1894, "who had the singular good fortune to find many admirers, but none to hate or envy him; those who came into personal contact with him were struck by his modesty and charmed by his amiability. He was a true friend to his friends, a respected teacher to his students, who had begun to gather around him in large numbers, some of the coming from great distances; and to his family a loving husband and father."


It’s déjà vu – a repeat of the 1976 swine flu scare.
Consider … one Marine at the 29 Palms Base in California came down with the dreaded “pick your own politically correct name” flu. Before you could blink an eye, he was confined to quarters as was his roommate. As many as 37 others Marines were quarantined.
Earth to Washington:That’s the correct procedure when dealing with a somewhat mysterious, contagious and possibly deadly disease. In this case, it’s swine flu.
It’s basic epidemiology – isolate the contagion carrier until you can determine the seriousness of the illness, how it spreads and the source.
Earth to Obama, Napolitano, the CDC, the Department of Health and Human Services, and everyone else involved in this growing fiasco: Your primary job is to protect American citizens, which includes protecting their health.
The following is a definition from Webster’s New World Dictionary:“Quarantine: The period, originally 40 days, during which a vessel suspected of carrying a contagious disease is detained in port. Also: any isolation imposed to keep contagious disease from spreading.”
From the American Heritage College Dictionary: “Quarantine: A period of time during which a vehicle, person, or material suspected of carrying a contagious disease is detained at a port of entry under enforced isolation to prevent disease from entering a country. Also: Enforced isolation or restriction of free movement imposed to prevent the spread of contagious disease.”
Earth to Washington again: That’s why the Marines were isolated.
Why does our government avoid such basic protections for all Americans when we’re faced with a communicable disease that health officials say could possibly be as deadly as the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed 50 million worldwide.
We know the source of the current flu is Mexico.
We know virtually all the recorded cases involve people who had just traveled in Mexico.
We know the Mexican government is taking correct steps to protect its citizens – shutting schools and entertainment venues, restricting travel and business operations and generally all the day-to-day gatherings.
We know other countries are restricting travel in and out of Mexico and quarantining people exposed to the virus.
We know tourism to and from Mexico is curtailed.
So what does our government do?
“Wash your hands everyone and sneeze in your sleeve!”
It’s no different than normal germ avoidance.
Do we restrict air, ship or train travel? No.
Do we restrict farm workers and others crossing borders to enter this country? No.
Do we do anything to stop the thousands of illegals crossing our borders daily? No.
None of this is done – even when we know the disease originated in Mexico. Question that, and you’re accused of racism.
Defenders of the government policy avoid mentioning that the only death in the U.S. so far was a child from Mexico City who traveled to Texas. He developed symptoms, but before they got serious enough for hospitalization, he spent a day at the Houston indoor mall spreading who knows how much virus among Americans.
One of the most ridiculous official defenses is that doing anything at the border is like “closing the barn door after the horses are out.”
Nonsense! If the barn is full of disease, shutting the door at least isolates the virus in the barn.
A closed border stops more people bringing it across the border and infecting other healthy Americans.
Shockingly, with people worldwide wearing protective masks, our own U.S. border and customs agents were ordered not to wear them!
Perhaps we don’t want to insult Mexicans wearing masks who are crossing the border legally or not.
Sorry. No government has a right to force employees to expose themselves to possible deadly contagion without protection.
All the while, the Obama government races at warp speed to implement every item on his “wish list” to transform this country into his version of a socialist Shangri-la.
People are distracted by flu scare headlines while Chrysler melts, hate crime laws are passed, plans continue for media censorship and nationalizing health care. The government is running banks and credit card companies, setting salaries, involving itself in student loans, trying to fill
administration posts and now, naming a new Supreme Court justice – all, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue and the death toll increases.
But something else is going on – the fast track order to drug companies to develop a vaccine for this “mysterious” new flu.
It’s like the massive campaign by the Ford administration in 1976. It said a swine flu epidemic was imminent because an Army private died from it and an epidemic could be as bad as 1918.
With such horrors on TV nightly, it was easy to get Americans frightened enough to take the advice of the “experts,” most of whom were politicians who jumped on the bandwagon led by President Ford.
Congress ordered the rush development of a vaccine and the president ordered a nationwide vaccination program, begun in October.
Thousands were inoculated, including me, a young and naïve TV reporter who fell for the hype.
Within days, I was so sick I couldn’t raise my head. I’ve never been so sick in my life – in bed for more than 10 days. I thought I was dying. But I was lucky. I survived with no side effects.
However, within weeks, hundreds of people got sick, many with the long-lasting Guillain-Barre syndrome, a neuromuscular paralysis, and more than 30 died
It was so bad that vaccinations were stopped in mid-December.
There was no epidemic, and the only recorded flu death was the original soldier.
Now, they’re developing a new vaccine for today’s “flu.” I’ll be used, not tested. Will it work or cause more problems than the disease itself?
I don’t plan to find out. I haven’t had a flu shot since 1976, and I’ll never have another. I don’t like politically motivated medicine.


Milwaukee is an ethnic melting pot and it celebrates that heritage every summer in a series of lakefront festivals. More than 500,000 people attend these weekend events, which include German Fest, Polish Fest, Asian Moon Festival, Irish Fest, African World Festival, Indian Summer, Festa Italiana, Mexican Fiesta and Arab World Fest. Festivals, however, aren’t confined to the lakefront. In July, Milwaukeeans celebrate the beginning of the French Revolution at Bastille Days, a downtown block party that is considered to be the largest celebration of its kind in the country. Greek Fest is an annual celebration held at State Fair Park.
Though most Milwaukeeans are American by birth, they are proud of their cultural heritage. Thirty-eight percent of Milwaukee residents report having some German ancestry. Other ethnic groups include: African (15 percent), Polish (13 percent), Irish (10 percent), English (5 percent), French (4 percent), Italian (4 percent), Hispanic (11 percent), Asian and Pacific Islander (4 percent) and Native American (1 percent). Racine has a rich ethnic heritage as well. It was home to the largest Danish settlement in the world outside of Denmark and continues to have a strong Danish community.
The Area’s Roots
Native Americans were the first to realize the beauty of Milwaukee’s location at the mouths of the Kinnickinnic, Menomonee and Milwaukee rivers. They called it “Milwaukie,” which means “where the waters meet.” Its natural harbor and lightly wooded bluffs made it a perfect location. By 1817, Milwaukee was already a cosmopolitan village with an estimated 300 people representing a variety of tribes, including the Sac, Fox, Chippewa, Ottawa, Winnebago, Menomonee and Potawatomi. They speared fish in the three rivers and grew wild rice in the grassy swamps where Milwaukee’s downtown now stands.
One of the first known Europeans to visit the area was Jesuit missionary Father Jacques Marquette, who camped here in 1674. He was soon followed by fur trappers drawn to the area by its wealth of natural resources. Indians and fur trappers kept a cautious distance from each other, but from time to time Native Americans helped fight white men’s wars, most notably the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812.
Germans were among the city’s first immigrants, and they soon dominated the city. By 1850, one-third of the city’s population was German and by the early 1900s, the city was referred to as the “German Athens of America.” The city’s South Side Polish population was the second largest ethnic group. Milwaukee’s first African-American church dates back to 1869, but the city’s African-American community did not start growing rapidly until after World War I. The first Hispanics arrived in the early 1920s, when local tanneries recruited men from Mexican villages.
Milwaukee is a diverse community that has been an ethnic melting pot since its founding. It is home to a large number of German, Polish and Scandinavian descendants. African Americans are the largest minority group, representing approximately 15 percent of the region’s population. The Hispanic/Latino population is the fastest growing and currently represents 11 percent of the population. Milwaukee is also welcoming to the gay, lesbian and transgender community.