Skeleton is a winter sliding sport in which a person rides a small sled, known as a skeleton bobsled (or -sleigh), down a frozen track while lying face down and head-first. The sport and the sled may have been named from the bony appearance of the sled.
Nozomi Komuro pushes off at the start
|Highest governing body||International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation|
|First played||Late 19th century, Switzerland|
|Type||Winter sport, time trial|
|Olympic||1928, 1948, 2002 to present|
Unlike other sliding sports of bobsleigh and luge, the race always involves single riders. Like bobsleigh, but unlike luge, the race begins with a running start from the opening gate at the top of the course. The skeleton sled is thinner and heavier than the luge sled, and skeleton affords the rider more control, making it safer than luge. Skeleton is the slowest of the three sliding sports, as skeleton's face-down, head-first riding position is less aerodynamic than luge's face-up, feet-first ride.
Previously, skeleton appeared in the Olympic program in St. Moritz, Switzerland, in 1928 and again in 1948. It was added permanently to the Olympic program for the 2002 Winter Olympics, at which stage a women's race was added.
- 1 History
- 2 International competitions
- 3 Sport
- 4 Organizations
- 5 Olympic medal table
- 6 See also
- 7 References
- 8 External links
The skeleton originated in St. Moritz, Switzerland, as a spinoff of the popular British sport called Cresta sledding. Although skeleton "sliders" use equipment similar to that of Cresta "riders", the two sports are different: while skeleton is run on the same track used by bobsleds and luge, Cresta is run on Cresta-specific sledding tracks only. Skeleton sleds are steered using torque provided by the head and shoulders. The Cresta toboggan does not have a steering or braking mechanism, though Cresta riders use rakes on their boots in addition to shifting body weight to help steer and brake.
The sport of skeleton can be traced to 1882, when English soldiers constructed a toboggan track between the towns of Davos and Klosters in Switzerland. While toboggan tracks were not uncommon at the time, the added challenge of curves and bends in the Swiss track distinguished it from those of Canada and the United States. The source of the word is debated; some speculating the skeleton-like appearance original sleds, and others an incorrectly anglicized version of the Norwegian word for toboggan, "Kjaelke".
Approximately 30 km (20 mi) away in the winter sports town of St. Moritz, British men had long enjoyed racing one another down the busy, winding streets of the town, causing an uproar among citizens because of the danger to pedestrians and visiting tourists. In 1884, Major William Bulpett, with the backing of winter sports pioneer and Kulm hotel owner Caspar Badrutt, constructed Cresta Run, the first sledding track of its kind in St. Moritz. The track ran three-quarters of a mile from St. Moritz to Celerina and contained ten turns still used today. When the Winter Olympic Games were held at St. Moritz in 1928 and 1948, the Cresta Run was included in the program, marking the only two times skeleton was included as an Olympic event before its permanent addition in 2002 to the Winter Games.
Until 1905, skeleton was practiced mainly in Switzerland; however, in 1905, Styria held its first skeleton competition in Mürzzuschlag, Austria. This opened the door to other national skeleton competitions including the Austrian championship held the following year. In 1908 and 1910, skeleton competitions were held in the Semmering Pass. As the popularity of the sport grew, skeleton evolved into the sport recognized today. In 1892, the sled was transformed by L. P. Child, an Englishman. The newly designed bare-bones sled resembled a human skeleton, and the sport adopted its modern name of skeleton, though it is still recognized as tobogganing in many countries.
In 1923, the Federation Internationale de Bobsleigh et de Tobogganing (FIBT) was established as the governing body of the sport. Soon afterward, in 1926, the International Olympic Committee declared bobsleigh and skeleton as Olympic sports and adopted the rules of the St. Moritz run as the officially recognized Olympic rules. It was not until 2002, however, that skeleton itself was added to the Olympic program with the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah. In 2015, the FIBT was renamed the International Bobsleigh & Skeleton Federation (IBSF), and the Congress of the IBSF adopted its current governing statutes in 2016.
Popularity in the sport has grown since the 2002 Winter Olympics and now includes participation by some countries that do not have or cannot have a track because of climate, terrain or monetary limitations. Athletes from such countries as Australia, New Zealand, Bermuda, South Africa, Argentina, Iraq, Israel, Mexico, Brazil, and even the Virgin Islands have become involved with the sport in recent years. The IBSF operates an support program for "emerging nations", which provides travel, coaching, and equipment funding assistance to countries which have neither a track nor three qualified pilots in three IBSF disciplines; in 2017, 20 national federations qualified for financial support in men's skeleton, and 11 qualified in women's skeleton.
The IBSF organizes four competitive circuits for international skeleton competition, in three tiers: two Continental Cups, the Intercontinental Cup (ICC), and the top level World Cup. Each athlete receives points based on their results and the level of the competition, which are used to determine both their rankings on each circuit they race in and also an overall ranking across all four circuits.
National federations are assigned athlete quota spots in the higher levels according to the overall rankings of their individual athletes during the previous season, but are free to send any qualified athlete to a competition in which they have available quota. However, individual athletes' discipline rankings are used to determine the start order for the first heat of each race: the track becomes less smooth after each successive run, so earlier starts are more desirable. In the second (fourth at the World Championships and Winter Olympics) heat, the competitors start in reverse order of their ranking after the previous heat. (At four-heat races, start order in heats two and three is in ascending order of combined time from the prior heats.)
In addition to the four race series, the IBSF also organizes World Championships, which are held at the end of every sliding season except when the Olympic Winter Games are held, and a Junior World Championships (open to athletes aged 23 and under) which are held annually without regard to the Olympics. One race each World Cup season is also designated the European Championship. The IBSF cooperates with the International Olympic Committee to supervise the skeleton races at the Olympic Winter Games, and the IBSF ranking system is used to determine the National Olympic Committees' athlete quota allocations.
On all of the regular competitive circuits, the race days are preceded by three or four days of pre-race training to allow athletes to learn the intricacies of each track, and each athlete must complete a certain number of successful training runs to be eligible to compete. Normally, if the same competition also includes bobsleigh races, the skeleton races will be held first, as the heavier bobsleighs do more damage to the track.
The two Continental Cup series are the Europe Cup (also called "Europa Cup" and "European Cup") and the North American Cup. Both series are open to athletes from all participating nations, but with some restrictions: the top 15 athletes in combined ranking are not permitted to race in the Continental Cups, and athletes are not permitted to race unless their team has filled all of its assigned quota sports in the World Cup. In addition, teams are limited to four athletes on their home continent and two athletes on the other continent. (For the purposes of this restriction, African teams are considered to be home on the Europe Cup and Asian, Oceanian, and South American teams are home on the North American Cup.)
As the bottom level of international skeleton competition, race results in the Continental Cups are assigned the lowest point values for ranking, with a first-place finish being with 75 points (compared to 120 points for the Intercontinental Cup and 225 points for the World Cup). Only the top 30 athletes receive ranking points; 30th place is worth 1 point. However, two races are generally held in each discipline on a single race weekend, allowing consistently competitive athletes to earn a higher ranking than if they went to a single World Cup race and finished poorly.
The Intercontinental Cup (ICC) was introduced as an intermediate level between the Continental Cups and the World Cup; a first-place finish is worth 120 points in the IBSF ranking (vs. 225 points for a World Cup win). Teams with three athletes in the top 60 (top 45 for women) of the IBSF overall ranking for the previous year may send three athletes (not necessarily the same ones) to each ICC race; teams with two athletes in the top 75 (top 60 for women) may send two; and all other teams may send one athlete each. In order to be eligible to race in the ICC, athletes must have received a ranking in at least five IBSF competitions at three different tracks in the previous two years.
The World Cup is the top level of international skeleton competition, and has the most stringent team quotas, with no teams receiving an automatic entry. To qualify, a team must have placed at least one athlete in the top 60 of the overall ranking table (top 45 for women); teams with two athletes in the top 50 (top 35 for women) receive two quota spots, and teams with three athletes in the top 30 (top 25 for women) receive three. The same athlete experience requirements as apply to the ICC also apply to the World Cup. At the end of the World Cup season, the man and woman with the highest ranking, considering only points earned in World Cup races, are given a trophy known as the "Crystal Globe".
One World Cup race a year may be designated as a continental championship for the continent on which it is held. This championship is a "paper" race, based only on the times in the regularly scheduled World Cup event, with the athletes representing a different continent excluded. Currently, this is done only in Europe; the 2017/18 European Championship races were the World Cup races held on 15 December 2017 at Innsbruck, Austria. The current European champions are Martins Dukurs of Latvia and Elena Nikitina of Russia.
Senior World ChampionshipsEdit
In non-Olympic years, a national federation volunteers to organize the (Senior) World Championships (for both bobsleigh and skeleton), which are open to all athletes meeting the experience requirements that apply to the World Cup and the ICC (including junior athletes). The quota system for the Senior World Championships is the same as for the World Cup, except that all national federations are entitled to send one athlete. The defending Junior World Champion in each discipline also receives an automatic entry. Unlike all other IBSF-sponsored races, the World Championships use a two-day, four-heat format, with rankings determined by total time for all four heats.
The 2016/17 World Championships were held at Königssee bobsleigh, luge, and skeleton track in Bavaria, 24–26 February 2017. Martins Dukurs of Latvia won the men's competition and Jacqueline Lölling of Germany won the women's competition. Because 2018 was an Olympic year, no World Championships were held for the 2017/18 season.
Junior World ChampionshipsEdit
The Junior World Championships are held every year, but are scheduled to avoid conflict with the Olympics and the Senior World Championships. Junior athletes are those who are under 23 years of age, or who turn 23 at some point during the competitive season. All countries are entitled to send up to three athletes to the Junior World Championships, subject to the requirement that each entrant must have finished at least three IBSF sanctioned competitions on at least two tracks in the previous two years.
Olympic Winter GamesEdit
The skeleton event in the Winter Olympics uses the same two-day, four-heat format as the World Championships, but team quotas are significantly smaller. The International Olympic Committee assigns athlete quotas to national Olympic committees in cooperation with the IBSF and using the IBSF ranking system to determine qualification; 20 women and 30 men competed at the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, Korea, with one automatic quota going to the host country (Korea) for each gender. For men, three countries received three quota spots each, six were allocated two spots, and five got one; for women, two countries received three spots, four got two, and two got one. The ranking of the countries for quota assignment was based on their third-highest, second-highest, or highest ranked athlete in total IBSF ranking over the qualification period. In addition, three quota spots are reserved for countries whose continent did not receive any representation based on this assignment procedure.
National Olympic Committees may send athletes other than the ones whose rankings earned the quota spot, but the athletes chosen must be ranked in the top 60 (for men) or top 45 (for women) on the IBSF list and meet similar experience requirements to those that apply to the World Cup. However, IBSF rule 4.1 provides that, for the purposes of determining the top 60 (or top 45) qualification, lower-ranking athletes from countries which have already received a full quota are "cleaned" from the list before an athlete's ordinal ranking is determined This had the effect of allowing continental representatives for Africa into the 2018 games, as they would otherwise have been too low on the ranking list to qualify (notably, Nigerian slider Simidele Adeagbo was ranked 74th before cleaning, but was in the top 45 after application of rule 4.1).
The accessibility of skeleton to amateurs may have been the catalyst for its upswing in popularity. Most notably, Nino Bibbia, a fruit and vegetable merchant from St. Moritz, Switzerland, took Olympic gold at the 1948 event. With the advent of the first artificially refrigerated track in 1969 at Königssee/Berchtesgaden, Germany, athletes are currently able to practice the sport regardless of weather conditions. The sport is also promoted by skeleton officials as a gateway sport to “train young, aspiring athletes…for their future career in bobsleigh.”
“The ‘toboggans’ used in Alpine countries at the end of the 19th century were inspired by Canadian/Indian sleds used for transport”. Various additions and redesigning efforts by athletes have led to the skeleton sleds used today. In 1892, L. P. Child introduced the “America”, a new metal sled that revolutionized skeleton as a sport. The stripped-down design provided a compact sled with metal runners, and the design caught on quickly. In 1902, Arden Bott added a sliding seat to help athletes shift their weight forward and backward, a feature that is no longer included on modern sleds.
In 2010, the FIBT restricted the materials with which skeleton sleds are permitted to be made. Sled frames must be made of steel and may not include steering or braking mechanisms. The base plate, however, may be made of plastics. The handles and bumpers found along the sides of the sled help secure the athlete during a run.
|Maximum combined weight
(athlete + sled)
|Men||115 kg (253.5 lb)||43 kg (94.8 lb)|
|Women||92 kg (202.8 lb)||35 kg (77.2 lb)|
Some athletes opt to attach ballasts if the combined weight of athlete and sled falls below the maximum combined weight. These ballasts may only be added to the sled, not the rider.
- Length: 80–120 cm (31.5–47.2 in)
- Height: 8–20 cm (3.1–7.9 in)
- Distance between runners: 340–380 mm (13.4–15.0 in)
|Alberta Skeleton Association||Located in Calgary, Alberta, home of the 1988 Winter Olympics. Offers racing and tuition. Has produced international-level athletes.|
|Bavarian Skeleton Club||Established in 1969 in Munich, Germany, and headed by Senator Hans Riedmayer and Max Probst (himself a skeleton bob engineer), the club was important in organizing some of the first national and international skeleton events in Konigsee, Tirol, and Czechoslovakia.|
|Brazilian Ice Sports Federation||The Official Brazilian Bob Skeleton organization was established in 1996 in Rio de Janeiro. Their website includes a great deal of information regarding the sport, its history, events, photographs, news and updates on athletes and the sport.|
|British Bob Skeleton Association||The Official British Bob Skeleton organization whose members include both athletes and fans. Their website includes a great deal of information regarding the sport, its history, events, photographs, news and updates on athletes and the sport.|
|International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation||Established in 1923 as Federation Internationale de Bobsleigh et de Tobogganing (FIBT),and renamed in 2015, the FIBSF is the official governing body for the sport. Its headquarters are in Lausanne, Switzerland.|
|St. Moritz Tobogganing Club||A private club founded in 1887 by Major Bulpetts of St. Moritz. Membership is selected from applicants on their “Supplementary List”. St. Moritz is the birthplace of the sport.|
Olympic medal tableEdit
|Olympic Athletes from Russia||0||1||0||1|
|Totals (10 nations)||7||7||7||21|
|Totals (6 nations)||5||5||5||15|
Total Olympic ranking (2018)Edit
|Olympic Athletes from Russia||0||1||0||1|
|Totals (11 nations)||12||12||12||36|
- "Skeleton sledding". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 23 July 2013.
- "How Are Luge and Skeleton Racing Different?". Shape.com. 23 January 2014. Retrieved 17 May 2018.
- Nelson, Dustin (19 February 2018). "Here's How You Can Tell the Difference Between Luge, Skeleton, and Bobsled". Thrillist.com. Retrieved 17 May 2018.
- "St. Moritz Tobogganing Club". Archived from the original on 9 December 2012. Retrieved 18 July 2007.
- "History". Fibt.com. 2 October 1999. Archived from the original on 14 February 2014. Retrieved 14 February 2014.
- "British Bob Skeleton Association". Retrieved 18 July 2007.
- "Skeleton Sledding". Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica. 2007.
- "IBSF Statutes" (PDF). International Bobsleigh & Skeleton Federation. 12 June 2016. Retrieved 16 December 2017.
- Pengilly, Adam (29 September 2017). "IBSF Emerging Nations Support Package 2017/18" (PDF). International Bobsleigh & Skeleton Federation. Retrieved 16 December 2017.
- "International Skeleton Rules 2017" (PDF). International Bobsleigh & Skeleton Federation. September 2017. Retrieved 16 December 2017.
- "European Championship (Men's Skeleton)". International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation. 15 December 2017. Retrieved 17 December 2017.
- "European Championship (Women's Skeleton)". International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation. 15 December 2017. Retrieved 17 December 2017.
- "World Championship". International Bobsleigh & Skeleton Federation. 26 February 2017. Retrieved 16 December 2017.
- "World Championship". International Bobsleigh & Skeleton Federation. 25 February 2017. Retrieved 16 December 2017.
- "Skeleton Athletes Anna Fernstädt and Nikita Tregubov Junior World Champions" (Press release). International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation. 25 January 2018. Retrieved 2 February 2018.
- "Qualification System for the XXIII Olympic Winter Games PyeongChang 2018: Skeleton" (PDF). International Bobsleigh & Skeleton Federation. 17 May 2016. Retrieved 16 December 2017.
- "Standings (2017/2018) (Women's skeleton) (IBSF ranking)". International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation. Retrieved 2 February 2018.
- "Skeleton, in winter sports". The Columbia Encyclopedia. Columbia University Press. 2004.
- IBSF International Skeleton Rules (pdf). 2015. Retrieved 19 March 2017.
- "CDBG homepage". Cbdg.org.br. Retrieved 17 May 2018.
- "Cresta Run homepage". Cresta-run.com. Retrieved 17 May 2018.
|Wikimedia Commons has media related to Skeleton (sport).|
- Torino 2006 Skeleton rules
- Federation Internationale de Bobsleigh et de Toboganning (FIBT) World governing body.
- USA Bobsled and Skeleton Federation (USBSF) Governing body for the sports of bobsled and skeleton in the USA.
- Bobsleigh CANADA Skeleton Governing body for the sports of bobsled and skeleton in Canada.
- Alberta Skeleton Association The Provincial governing body for the sport of Skeleton in Alberta.
- NewSliders.com Introductory site about the sport, from a participant.
- OSSP6P, The Vancouver 2010 Olympic Sliding Sports Pick 6 Pool selection page.


Dodos (Raphus cucullatus) lived in the forests of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, but how they arrived on the isolated island is unclear. In 2002, a group of scientists from the University of Oxford shed more light on the dodo's origins using DNA analysis.
They discovered that the dodo and its close relative, the Rodrigues solitaire (Pezophaps solitaria), belong to the group that includes pigeons and doves - the Columbiformes. The closest living relative to the dodo and Rodrigues solitaire is the beautiful Nicobar pigeon (Caloenas nicobarica), found on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands of India.
Through evolution, dodos adapted to life in Mauritius by increasing their size and nesting on the ground. Their beaks adapted to the food they were able to find easily, and they gradually became flightless. Many island species become flightless and reach larger sizes because they adapt to isolated habitats with few large predators and reduced competition. Unfortunately these particular adaptions left the dodos ill-prepared for the European sailors and the domestic animals they brought with them when they first arrived on Mauritius.


Improve your spatial skills by doing 15 practice questions on spatial pattern matching tests. Use spatial reasoning to identify the correct shape.
Find the right answer from the shape pieces on the above problem into a combination of the form corresponding to the shape pieces on the problem. Choose one of the most appropriate answers according to the pattern matching. See the example of spatial pattern matching test below.
Which one can be made by combining the given pieces?


There are times while hiking when it’s a good idea to be able to fall back on traditional navigation techniques.
Modern maps, compasses and especially GPS units are great. But you can lose your maps, break your compass and run low on batteries. Also, GPS units don’t always work – sometimes the signal gets blocked by, of all things, trees. Well, there tend to be a lot of trees around in hiking areas. As the Boy Scouts say, be prepared.
The best way to be prepared is simply to have some basic navigational knowledge that doesn’t depend on anything more than your eyes and intelligence. Fortunately, that knowledge is super easy to obtain and use.
Most people learn early in life that the sun rises in the East and sets in the West. And that’s approximately true. But being away from the equator, or somewhere near midday, makes it sometimes a little harder to judge.
In the Northern Hemisphere, at noon the sun will be south of you. If you wait an hour, it will have moved enough to judge it’s general direction easily. It’s always better to take multiple measurements when trying to judge direction.
Take note of the landmarks around you and look at your watch to note the time. Take note of the sun’s position at half-hourly intervals and keep a mental graph of the line along which it moves. That will give you a natural East-West line.
Once you know that, finding North and South is easy. North is 90 degrees ‘to the right’ of West, South is 90 degrees ‘to the left’.
At night you have a potential problem. The sun, obviously, isn’t there to guide you. But, you can still navigate well by the stars. After all, humans have done so for thousands of years. Heavy rain or fog, or even trees, can make that difficult, though. Sometimes you just have to wait until you get a clearer view.
When you can see the stars they’re often very bright. Most hiking areas are far away from city lights. It should be relatively easy, then, to pick out some major constellations to use as guides.
Around 8 p.m. look straight up then around in a small circle. Before long you should be able to locate the Big Dipper. That’s the group of stars that looks like a cooking ladle. The two stars at the end of the ‘scoop’ form a line that points to the North Star.
Another easy to spot constellation is Orion’s Belt. That’s a series of three stars that form part of the Orion group. They’re almost straight across east to west looking roughly south about 9 p.m. at night.
Naturally, the constellations will be in different positions at different times of the night. But the Big Dipper’s scoop stars will still point toward the North Star, and Orion’s belt – so long as it is still visible – will still be in roughly the same orientation and direction.
When you plan any hike become familiar with the positions of some of the major constellations. Even a day hike can turn into an overnight stay unexpectedly. You’ll be very glad to have that knowledge if that happens.


Potiphar stands poised to make a grand entrance in this costume painting by Belarussian artist Leon Bakst for the Ballets Russes’ 1914 production of Richard Strauss’s ballet Josephslegende (The Legend of Joseph) at the Paris Opera.
Having purchased Joseph from the slave traders to whom his brothers had sold him, the Egyptian official Potiphar brought him to work in his own house. Joseph excelled in his new position, so Potiphar “put him in charge of all that he had. From the time that he made him overseer in his house and over all that he had, the Lord blessed the Egyptian’s house for Joseph’s sake” (Genesis 39:4–5). This prosperity, however, is not why the name of Potiphar is remembered. After seeing the handsome youth Joseph day in and day out, Potiphar’s wife attempted to seduce him, but to no avail. Angry and embarrassed at being rejected by a mere servant, Potiphar’s wife decided to get her revenge by convincing her husband that Joseph had tried to sleep with her (Genesis 39:17–18). Despite the success of his household under Joseph’s service, Potiphar believed his wife’s lie and immediately had Joseph thrown into prison (Genesis 39:20).
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The "age" of an airframe is measured in 1. Pressurization cycles, and 2. Hours in flight...And the Boeing 737 of today has little in common with the version from 1967 when it first flew, much like comparing a '67 Corvette with a 2012...
Each time a frame reaches a certain number of cycles it'll go through some form of check:
A Check — This is performed approximately every month. This check is usually done overnight at an airport gate. The actual occurrence of this check varies by aircraft type, the cycle count (takeoff and landing is considered an aircraft "cycle"), or the number of hours flown since the last check. The occurrence can be delayed by the airline if certain predetermined conditions are met.
B Check — This is performed approximately every 3 months. This check is also usually done overnight at an airport gate. A similar occurrence schedule applies to the B check as to the A check.
C Check — This is performed approximately every 12-18 months. This maintenance check puts the aircraft out of service and requires plenty of space - usually at a hangar at a maintenance base. The schedule of occurrence has many factors and components as has been described, and thus varies by aircraft category and type.
D Check — This is the heaviest check for the airplane. This check occurs approximately every 4-5 years. This is the check that, more or less, takes the entire airplane apart for inspection. This requires even more space and time than all other checks, and must be performed at a maintenance base.


- Publisher: Cambridge University Press
- Online publication date: December 2020
- Print publication year: 2020
- Online ISBN: 9781108550857
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108550857
The term 'civil rights' has such a familiar presence in discussions about American politics and law that we tend to use it reflexively and intuitively, but rarely do we stop to think about what exactly we mean when we use the term and why certain uses strike us as right or wrong. In this book, Professor Christopher W. Schmidt tells the story of how Americans have fought over the meaning of civil rights from the Civil War through today. Through their struggles over what it means to live in a nation dedicated to protecting civil rights, each generation has given the label new life and new meaning. Civil Rights in America shows how the words we use to understand our world become objects of contestation and points of leverage for social, political, and legal action.
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The Congo River is the largest river in Western Central Africa. Its overall length of 4700 km or 2922 miles long makes it the second longest in Africa (after the Nile). The river and its tributaries flow through the Congo Rainforest, the second largest rain forest in the world. Because large sections of the river basin lie above and below the Equator, its flow is stable, as there is always at least one river experiencing a rainy season. The Congo gets its name from the ancient Kingdom of Kongo which inhabited the lands at the mouth of the river. Although the Livingstone Falls prevent access from the sea, nearly the entire Congo is readily navigable in sections, especially between Kinshasa and Kisangani. The Congo River still is a lifeline of commerce in a land without many roads or railways.
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Damage to the brain from interruption of its blood supply.Symptoms of stroke include trouble walking, speaking and understanding, as well as paralysis or numbness of the face, arm or leg.
Early treatment with medication like tPA (clot buster) can minimise brain damage. Other treatments focus on limiting complications and preventing additional strokes.
People may experience:
- * Muscular: difficulty walking, instability, paralysis with weak muscles, problems with coordination, stiff muscles, overactive reflexes, or paralysis of one side of the body
- * Visual: blurred vision, double vision, sudden visual loss, or temporary loss of vision in one eye.
- * Speech: difficulty speaking, slurred speech, or speech loss
- * Whole body: fatigue, light-headedness, or vertigo
- * Limbs: numbness or weakness
- * Sensory: pins and needles or reduced sensation of touch
- * Facial: muscle weakness or numbness
- * Also common: difficulty swallowing, headache, inability to understand, mental confusion, or rapid involuntary eye movement


Historically, women have found political or editorial cartooning to be one of the most difficult genres to break into. Even today, few female cartoonists make this the main focus of their careers, although they have made inroads in the field since the early twentieth century. Anne Mergen, editorial cartoonist for the Miami Daily News from 1933 to 1956, commented on leading issues and figures of her day but took particular interest in community welfare and such civic duties as voting. Contemporary cartoonists Signe Wilkinson, Lisa Benson, Jen Sorensen, Liza Donnelly, and Ann Telnaes have all addressed such women’s issues as the wage gap between men and women and unequal treatment of women in the workplace. They have also commented on many other topics as well, including fiscal policy, security, access to guns, and civil rights.


Your child may be sleepy or irritable. If you see blood coming from the mouth, this usually means that there was a bite to the inside of the cheek or tongue during the seizure. After the seizure has stopped, place a clean cloth on the area and apply gentle pressure to stop the bleeding.
Call your child’s healthcare provider. It is important that your child is evaluated to see if there is a treatable cause for the fever. Most children will have only one seizure within a 24-hour period. Giving acetaminophen or ibuprofen to treat the fever will make your child more comfortable but will not necessarily prevent future seizures.
There is no evidence that fever-related seizures cause brain damage. Large studies have found that children who experience fever-related seizures have normal school success and perform as well on intelligence tests as their siblings who have never had a seizure.
Fever-related seizures can be very scary to watch but remember:
- They are fairly common in children 6 months to 6 years of age
- They are usually not related to a serious illness
- In most cases they do not lead to epilepsy or other health problems
Talk with your child’s health care provider if you have any questions or concerns.


Premier of British Columbia
|Premier of British Columbia|
|Government of British Columbia
Office of the Premier
|Reports to||Legislative Assembly|
|Appointer||Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia|
|Term length||At Her Majesty's pleasure|
|Inaugural holder||John Foster McCreight|
|Formation||November 13, 1871|
The Premier of British Columbia is the first minister, head of government, and de facto chief executive for the Canadian province of British Columbia. Until the early 1970s the title Prime Minister of British Columbia was often used. The word Premier is derived from the French word of the same spelling, meaning "first"; and ultimately from the Latin word primarius, meaning "primary".
The incumbent is Christy Clark who was sworn into office on March 14, 2011.
Although the Premier is the day-to-day leader of the provincial government, she receives the authority to govern from the Crown (represented in British Columbia by the Lieutenant Governor). Formally, in fact, the executive branch of government in British Columbia is said to be vested in the Lieutenant Governor acting by and with the advice of the Premier.
The political party that wins the largest number of seats in a general election is usually invited by the Lieutenant Governor to form the government. Its leader becomes the head of the provincial government and is known as the Premier.
The position of the Premier is not described in Canadian constitutional statutes. Instead, the position’s power and authority largely depend on her relationship with other Members of the Legislative Assembly, political party, and the public.
The responsibilities of the Premier usually include:
- serving as the President of the Executive Council and head of the provincial Cabinet. The Executive Council is the formal name of the Cabinet when it is acting in its legal capacity.
- serving as the head of the provincial government
- leading the development and implementation of government policies and priorities
- serving as the senior communicator of government priorities and plans between:
- the Lieutenant Governor and Cabinet
- the British Columbia government and other provincial and territorial governments
- the British Columbia Government and the federal government and international governments
- providing advice to the Lieutenant Governor on the exercise of the Queen’s and the Lieutenant Governor’s powers
- functions in respect of the Province of British Columbia, such as recommending to the Lieutenant Governor the appointment of cabinet ministers and allocating ministerial portfolios
- serving as leader of a major political party and its caucus of MLAs
- representing their constituency in the Legislative Assembly
President of the Executive Council
Generally, the Premier selects MLAs from their party to be appointed ministers of the Crown by the Lieutenant Governor. Cabinet appointees are designated ministers in charge of government ministries; they are responsible for the day-to-day activities of individual government ministries such as the Ministry of Forests, and for proposing new laws or changing existing ones. The Premier may also choose an individual who is not an MLA to be a cabinet minister, although on the rare occasion that this does happen, the practice is that the minister proceeds to obtain a seat in the House. The appointment of an MLA to Cabinet is based on their ability and expertise and is also influenced by political considerations such as geography, gender and ethnicity.
A cabinet minister remains in office solely at the pleasure of the Premier. The resignation of the Premier dissolves the Cabinet, but does not involve the resignation of the Executive Council as a whole or individual cabinet ministers.
- Onions, C.T. Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. 1985.
- Much of the information above is adapted from the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia website article "Discover more about the role of an MLA". Please see the external links.


The recent decision by the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Corps of Engineers' regulation defining “waters of the United States” (WOTUS) is something of an oddity.
In court cases, the issue of jurisdiction is fundamental. Without it, a court has no authority to decide any issue in a case. When there is a question of jurisdiction, a court will typically decide that first, as a means of conserving judicial resources. There is little point to decide the subject matter of a case if the court lacks jurisdiction to actually make that decision.
The Clean Water Act confers jurisdiction of some issue directly on the Courts of Appeal. However, it is not transparently clear that the WOTUS rule falls within that jurisdiction. This explains why a North Dakota federal district court ruled on the same matter the Sixth Circuit considered.
The Sixth Circuit took the unusual step of issuing a stay in the matter before it heard argument on whether it had jurisdiction in the case. The majority of the three-judge panel appeared to feel that because there were no compelling arguments showing any harm by preventing the WOTUS rule from going into force, issuing the stay was the simplest way of preserving the status quo.
The third judge dissented over the matter of the court issuing a potentially jurisdictionally invalid decision and did not reach the merits of the arguments of the two parties to the case.
Whatever the outcome, it is likely that any decision will be appealed and it will be up to the U.S. Supreme Court to decide the ultimate answer to the questions presented. The Court could decline to decide the real issue, however, and send it back on some procedural issue, such as a finding that the EPA violated the timelines of the rulemaking process, which could essentially restart the entire process.
And this is why appellate cases may take years to reach a final decision.
Source: washingtonpost.com, “Sixth Circuit puts controversial ‘waters of the United States' (WOTUS) rule on hold,” Jonathan H. Alder, October 9, 2015


This section contains free worksheets,
flashcards, online activities and other educational resources to support
teaching and learning about the Jewish festival of Hanukkah in Early Years, Key Stage 1 and Key
Hanukkah is a Jewish festival of lights which takes
place at the beginning of December and lasts for 8 days. It celebrates
the recapture and rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem by Judas
Maccabaeus in 164 BC. Legend has it that once the Temple had been
reclaimed a lamp was lit for its rededication. The lamp miraculously
burned for 8 days despite only having enough sacramental oil for one. To
commemorate this a lamp is lit during every night of Hanukkah and placed
in an eight-branched candlestick called a menorah.
Tots: Chankuh - History,
games and puzzles, colouring pages and greeting cards.
of Hanukat - Child-friendly introduction
to the celebration of Hanukkah. Includes stories, activites,
recipes, songs and printables.
Software: Hanukkah - Download a
pack full of printable Hanukkah resources here.
us if you know of any useful Hanukkah links or if any of the
links above are broken.
The Hanukkah Story
Authors: Anita Ganeri
Synopsis: Watercolour illustrations
breathe warmth and life into the story that lies behind the Jewish
festival of Hanukkah. Anita Ganeri retells the traditional story with
sensitivity, drawing children into the narrative.
Write a review of this book - click here!
more Hanukkah books - Click here
Last updated: 16th October


It is not unusual to hear from politicians that government spending and household spending operate according to the same overall principles. This narrative usually states that households and governments must both “live within their means”.
And although many astute commentators recognise that attempts to draw an analogy between government and household financing are fallacious, they fail to recognise that the reason for this fallacy runs much deeper than their commonly expressed observation that government expenditure leads to some return in the form of revenue for the government.
For several decades now, currency-issuing countries around the world have been operating without a gold standard to back their respective currencies. Modern currencies are based on pure state fiat money, backed only by the ability and willingness of each central government to tax its citizens.
Unfortunately mainstream economists have largely not yet caught up with the implications of this relatively new situation, and consequently they do not understand the significance of the development of modern monetary theory (MMT) and what it is all about.
Amongst other things, MMT proposes that monetarily sovereign governments (this includes our federal government but not our state or municipal governments) do not need to rely on taxation revenue in order to effectively spend into the economy without having to worry about inflationary pressures or potential rises in interest rates.
Deficit spending, whether accommodated by issuing Treasury bonds to the private sector or more directly to the central bank, allows the central government to inject new net financial assets into the private sector, as deemed appropriate for the purpose of enhancing aggregate demand, boosting the ability of the private sector to save and invest, and reducing the overall level of unemployment. Only central government has the ability to create net financial assets in this way; it never needs to “balance” its budget, and can never go broke.
Putting it another way, a central government which is monetarily sovereign will always live within its means, because it has a bottomless pit of financial assets (denominated in dollars, and easily convertible into actual dollars if this is required) at its disposal. There is no risk of inflationary pressure from deficit spending in circumstances where the economy is operating below its capacity to produce goods and services (such as right now!). None of this applies to a household, or to household budgeting.


So many invisible factors cause us to eat more than we want. Here, easy-to-remember tips for becoming "portion aware."
- Before Eating, Divide The Plate
Here’s a simple rule to portion a plate properly: Divide it in half. Automatically fill one side with fruits or vegetables, leaving the rest for equal parts protein and starch. This way, you begin to see what a properly balanced meal looks like. Spaghetti and meatballs? Steak and potatoes? They’re only half a meal, incomplete without fruits and vegetables.
- Pre-Portion Tempting Treats
The bigger the package, the more food you’ll pour out of it. When two groups were given half- or 1-pound bags of M&Ms to eat while watching TV, those given the 1-pound bag ate nearly twice as much.
- Head Off The Mindless Munch
Five minutes after eating at an Italian restaurant, 31 percent of people couldn’t remember how much bread they ate. If you’re worried you might do the same, have the bread removed from the table.
- Downsize The Dishes
If you’re one of the 54 percent of Americans who eat until their plates are clean, make sure those plates are modestly sized. On a standard 8- to 10-inch dinner plate, a portion of spaghetti looks like a meal. On a 12- to 14-inch dinner plate, it looks meager, so you’re likely to dish out a bigger portion to fill the plate. When researchers gave study participants 34- or 17-ounce bowls and told them to help themselves to ice cream, those with the bigger bowls dished out 31 percent more ice cream.
- Limit Your Choices
The more options you have, the more you want to try. In one study, researchers gave two groups jellybeans to snack on while they watched a movie. One group got six colors, neatly divided into compartments; jellybeans for the other group were jumbled together. Those given a mix ate nearly two times more.
- Use Your Power For Good
Most homes have a “nutritional gatekeeper” who controls 72 percent of the food eaten by everyone else. The person who chooses food, buys it, and prepares it wields power. If that’s you, take advantage of it.
- Avoid A See-Food Diet
Office workers who kept candy in clear dishes on their desks dipped in for a sample 71 percent more often than those who kept their candy out of sight.
- Turn Off The Television
The Vast Wasteland leads to vast waists. It’s not just the couch-sitting. TV distracts you from how much you’re eating, and the more you watch, the more you’re likely to eat. In a study comparing how much popcorn viewers ate during either a half-hour show or an hour-long show, those who watched more television ate 28 percent more popcorn.
- Think Before You Drink
Pour cranberry juice into two glasses of equal volume: one short and wide, the other tall and thin. Most people pour 19 percent more cranberry juice in the short glass because the eye is a poor judge of volume in relation to height and width.
- Serve Good-For-You Foods Family-Style
Not all portion-control strategies are about eating less. You can have as much as you want of some foods. Place the foods you want your family to eat more of―salads and vegetable sides―within easy reach on the dining table. In a soon-to-be-published study, Wansink found people who kept baby carrots in plain sight ate 25 percent more during a day.


Clean your indoor air with house plants. Indoor plants can remove toxins and create a healthier environment in your home! I share which ones are some of the best.
Do house plants clean indoor air?
Back in the late 1980’s, NASA did a study on the benefits of houseplants on purifying air on the space station. I read it in Better Homes and Gardens magazine and I was impressed with the results.
More evidence has emerged that shows just how beneficial house plants are, not only for our breathing but our emotions as well.
What is also important to note is I am not very good at growing house plants. My house is dark and dreary in the winter and these plants thrive for me so I know they will be easy for you to grow too!
Why clean the air in your home?
Indoor air pollutants have been ranked among the top five environmental risks to public health.
Stagnant indoor environments allow pollutants to build up and stick around in greater amounts than we humans should be breathing in.
Since most people spend 90% of people spend the majority of their time indoors, air quality matters.
All sorts of products we have around us and use daily out-gas formaldehyde, benzene, xylene and on to many compounds I cannot even spell.
This includes furniture, fabrics, rugs, and even outdoor toxins can get trapped indoors.
Many now suffer from Multiple Chemical Sensitivity.
The added perfumes in daily products such as shampoos, laundry detergents, dish soaps, and deodorants can make sufferers lethargic, irritable and even extremely ill.
Though many of us may not react strongly to these scents and chemicals, it is a well known fact that they are not healthy.
They are constantly barraging our systems with low levels of toxicity which can build up.
Compound that with the amounts of different products with different scents and you can imagine what our systems are combating daily.
Thankfully there is a low cost way to combat these issues and it comes from the natural world.
What are some of the Best House plants for cleaning the air?
Bringing these beauties into your home not only cleans the air of allergens, dust and pollutants they also have psychological benefits. Including reducing stress, lowering blood pressure and promoting happiness.
The contrasting deep purple of the underside of the leaves makes a beautiful statement in the home.
Want to sleep better?
Place a Snake Plant or Mothers In Law tongue (Sansevieria) in your bedroom, they release oxygen into the air at night making for more restful sleep.
There are a variety of patterned leaves to choose from. Click here for a post of dividing your Sansevieria
House plants also add humidity to the room which is beneficial for those of us in drier climates.
Want a tough to kill but powerhouse air cleaning plant?
The spider plant is one tough cookie and it is easy to propagate.
The little baby plantlets are really what do the bulk of the air scrubbing so I keep as many on the plant as long as possible while taking some off to propagate.
Just detach and place the knobby end in a bit of water and let them grow roots, then pot up.
Voila’, instant new plant.
There are solid and variegated varieties.
Pothos or Devils Ivy also thrives on neglect and tough to kill.
Pothos does well in low light conditions and it easy to propagate as well. See the little bitty pot I have this lush plant in?
Pinch back regularly to keep the plant fuller at top, it does have a tendency to get leggy.
The next powerhouse for removing toxins in the air is the Peace Lily
Peace Lily thrives on lots of water and it will even bloom. It has a lovely white flower.
You can even grow it in a jar of water. I have seen it paired with a Beta fish for a wonderful living display. I love the tropical look of it.
I have an entire post about caring for Peace Lily to help you get the most out of them.
Peace Lily topped NASA’s list for removing all three of the most common VOCs – formaldehyde, benzene and trichloroethylene.
It can also combat toluene and xylene.
English Ivy also cleans many of the same toxins from the air.
Ivy love bright light so keep these outside during the summer months and bring them in for winter. They keep healthier for me that way.
I am working on some topiaries using ivy and I will share soon and I have a post coming up on how to divide one to give it new life.
Blooming Beauties, indoor plants that clean the air
Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter cactus all do a stellar job of cleaning the air while putting out beautiful blooms during the darkest months of the year.
They are easy to propagate and come in a large variety of bloom colors!
Larger Plants that clean indoor air
One last plant family for indoors that works wonders is Palms.
The best air purifier is the Dwarf date palm, but the others such as Lady Palm, Areca Palm and Bamboo Palm work well too, I have been less successful with growing palms in my home so I don’t have any photos.
But maybe you will do better and can enjoy their benefits too.
Fiddle Leaf fig is a popular one but they can also tend to be finicky if moved, they are a variety of Ficus, which is notorious for being fussy about getting moved around.
Do you wish to brighten a dreary winter day.
Try some African Violets…they will blossom through the winter given proper care.
they are affordable and come in so many colors. Here are just a few I found online
You can also find them many times in grocery stores. Our local Save Mart has had some beautiful ones.
This has been written from the perspective of your home but house plants are also very beneficial in a workplace or office building.
I wish you happier, healthier breathing!
See this report for even more benefits: 15 Fabulous Benefits of Houseplants


A Meta Tag is a line of HTML coding containing metadata about the webpage it is sited on. The Meta tag information does not change the appearance of the page and will never be seen by the people visiting the webpage. The only way your Meta tags will be seen is if the audience wish to notice your find language.
A Meta Tag can contain either a description or a keyword. A Meta Tag that contains a meta description describe the contents of the website and provides information about what the website contains. For example, a webpage that deals with drug rehab might have a Meta Tag that contains a description such as “details about drug rehabilitation.” On the other hand, a Meta Tag that contains a keyword identify the terms that are picked up by search engines to help users find the content you offer. Using the same webpage example regarding drug rehab, a keyword Meta Tag may be “rehab”, “drug rehab”, “alcohol”, “abuse”, “rehabilition”, “addiction help”, etc. Search engines can identify these keywords and associate them with your webpage and display your page as a potential site when they perform a search with one of your keywords.
When writing HTML code, you will place all Meta Tags in the heading, or HEAD section of the HTML document.
The main goal of the meta tags are to allow the web crawlers to learn about the purpose of the page. When the search engine is instructed to find a specific page related to a keyword the making the likelihood of your webpage.
SEO or Search Engine Optimization dictates that you create keywords that are specific to your site and that the meta tags you create in your heading be found on the webpage as well. So, using a inappropriate web like “flower box or “dog treat” will not end up in appropriate result.
Some web crawlers ignore meta keywords tags and meta description tags such as larger search engines like Google and Yahoo. These web crawlers will search the content of your site instead of meta keywords.
Unfortunately, this is necessary because of the rampant abuse of unrelated Meta Tags by webmasters in an attempt to drive traffic to their sites. Keep this in mind when you are deciding what content to place on your site. If you want a webpage to be identified by the large search engines for a specific topic, make sure that you include the key term several times in your pages text. If you want your site to be listed as one of the top results for search engines, make sure that your site contains well written information that is related to the the theme of your webpage and is obviously written by a human knowledgeable on the subject.
Related articles you might find interesting:
- SEO: Why Meta Description Is Still Important
- Meta Keywords For SEO – Don’t Bother, Says Google
- Top 3 Search Engine Optimization Tips for Beginners
- Internet Web Site Marketing And SEO
- Attaining Higher SEO Ranking


As define in Wikipedia a Gaussian Mixture Model is a specific Mixture Model.
“In statistics, a mixture model is a probabilistic model for representing the presence of subpopulations within an overall population, without requiring that an observed data set should identify the sub-population to which an individual observation belongs. Formally a mixture model corresponds to the mixture distribution that represents the probability distribution of observations in the overall population. However, while problems associated with “mixture distributions” relate to deriving the properties of the overall population from those of the sub-populations, “mixture models” are used to make statistical inferences about the properties of the sub-populations given only observations on the pooled population, without sub-population identity information.”
In the same article, Wikipedia give us an example for Handwirting Recognition based on  Christopher M. Bishop, Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning.
“Imagine that we are given an N×N black-and-white image that is known to be a scan of a hand-written digit between 0 and 9, but we don’t know which digit is written. We can create a mixture model with K=10 different components, where each component is a vector of size N2 of Bernoulli distributions (one per pixel). Such a model can be trained with the expectation-maximization algorithm on an unlabeled set of hand-written digits, and will effectively cluster the images according to the digit being written. The same model could then be used to recognize the digit of another image simply by holding the parameters constant, computing the probability of the new image for each possible digit (a trivial calculation), and returning the digit that generated the highest probability.”
The implementation of Gaussian Mixture Model is an adaptation of the one done by  Valentin Iovene to process mnist classification.
The input images have 64-pixel width and height so our feature vector hold 4096 values. We make a data reduction with Principal Component Analysis.
We start by keeping 99% of the relevant information and look for the best Gaussian Mixture Model with Akaike Information Criterion. We do the same computation with Bayesian Information Criterion.
The reduction factor with Principal Component Analysis algorithm changes depending on samples fitted and their variability. One of our experiment with 12.000 samples and 99% information kept reduce the feature vector from 4096 to 651 values. The amount of memory needed to drive a complete experiment, with 62 characters and numbers, exceed the capacity of our computer (16 GB). Even with only 4.000 or 3.000 samples and feature vectors of 515 and 470 values we don’t get satisfactory aic and bic curves.
As explained by Ivan Svetunkov, we can not compare the “results” :
“All the information criteria are based on likelihood function, which in its turn depends on sample size. The larger sample size is, the smaller likelihood becomes and as a result the greater IC becomes. So, you should expect that with the increase of sample size, IC will increase as well (whatever criteria you use). This means that you cannot compare different models fitted on different sample sizes using any information criteria.”
With only upper case, lower case (26 char.) and number (10 char.) with 12.000 samples and pca reduction set to 95% we drive the experiments. They turn out to be more satisfying, we get U-curves or near U-curves, as shown below.
The curve obtained during the experiment with the capital letters is characteristic and fits the expected result. On the other hand, the curves for the lower case and the figures need to be supplemented by a larger experimentation up to 200 n-components.
Increasing the number of samples changes the results. For example with 16,000 samples we get the following curves. The two curves are placed side by side for a better reading.
We note immediately that the Akaike Information criterion gives us the best model with 70 components and no longer 60 components. This seems perfectly logical. Then the curve bends to 120 components, which highlights the pseudo plateau that we had previously at this same value. In our opinion, it would be useful to measure more precisely the accuracy of the models around these two zones.
The Gaussian mixture model makes it possible to generate new samples. We recognize a number of characters, and let’s look at the categorization performed by the model.
Bayesian Information Criterion provides the result below if we set the covariance to tied instead full.
As with Akaike information criterion, the experiment for lowercase and numbers needs to be extended beyond 210 n-components to check if the curve is going up.
Afterwards, we implement a Gaussian mixture model with 26 symbols (upper case) and a pca reduction set to 0.95%, then we calculate the accuracy of different models with n-components around the number of n-components given by AIC (60) and BIC (120). In the first case, the Gaussian mixture model with 50 components and covariance full gives the best accuracy of 76.5%.
We drive the same experiment with lower case (accuracy 74.15%) and numbers (accuracy 87.1%).
The analysis of the confusion matrix and the comparison with the images of the characters, leads us to think that the classification, the recognition of the characters with Gaussian models and PCA reduction can not lead to a very great precision without the addition of other characteristics and methods.
These experimentations give a good understanding of Gaussian Mixture Models and the parameters to rule to obtain better classification accuracy.
If now, we have a better knowledge of Gaussian mixture models. Still, we will continue our experimentation with the GaussianMixture implementations of sklearn and gmm tensorflow before continuing with hidden markov models.
 – Bishop, Christopher (2006). Pattern recognition and machine learning. New York: Springer. ISBN 978-0-387-31073-2.
 – Jake VanderPlas (2016) Python Data Science Handbook. O’Reilly. ISBN 978-1-491-91205-8.
 – Tgy – Valentin Iovene, MNIST handwritten digits clustering using a Bernoulli Mixture Model and a Gaussian Mixture Model. github.


Since this is my first blog on MySA.com I wanted to give you, the reader, an idea of what you can be expecting. I will be using this blog to inform you about technology and how it can be used. I will be covering everything from does and don’t to the latest and greatest to everyday practical applications of technology.
I came across an interesting article today on CNET about “malvertising.” You may be thinking that I just made that name up, however viruses and other malware were found to be lurking in ads last year on many different sites including The New York Times, Drudge, TechCrunch and WhitePages.com. Subsequently it has been given the name “malvertising.”
A study on “malvertising” was done by a major player in the anti-virus market Avast. Lyle Frink, a public relations manager for Avast said, “It’s not just the small players but the ad servers connected with Google and Yahoo have been infected and served up bad ads,”
To me, the big question is what can I do to protect myself? That is why having an up to date operating system and anti-virus software is so important. Keeping your internet browser up to date with the latest security updates is as important if not more crucial than anti-virus and operating system updates since “malvertising” exploits security flaws in your internet browser.
If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer it is updated at the same time Windows updates are applied. Typically this happens on Tuesday, also known as “patch Tuesday.” If you are using a third-party browser like Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome it is important that you make sure you have the latest version available to protect yourself from these “malvertising” threats.
At the end of the day no matter what kind of protection you pay for if you click a fake ad there is nothing that can be done but clean up the mess afterward. When in doubt I always recommend just closing the browser and restarting your session if anything suspicious pops up on your screen.


So what shape do pricing strategies typically take? Typically, three types of pricing strategies are found. These are:
1. Cost-based strategies
Pricing a brand based on achieving a given margin over and above costs of manufacturing, marketing and distribution. Often associated with sales- or production-led organisations; tends to encourage a mechanistic approach to cost control and pricing. Examples:
Cost-Plus: Price = full cost + mark-up (as a % of full cost)
Mark-Up: Price = direct cost + mark-up (as a % of direct cost). This technique is preferred to
Cost-Plus for products with a relevant percentage of direct costs on total costs.
Break-Even Analysis: Price = variable costs + fixed costs/quantity. This formula does not depend on any cost controlling technique (Full Cost or Direct Cost); it provides a useful decisional support for different marketing strategies, taking into account return on investments.
2. Competition-based strategies
Pricing based on the competitive strategy and on “attack/defence moves” of competitors against a given brand. Often associatedwith “competitive intelligence-led”
organizations; characterised by an “against-someone” positioning.
Pure Parity: Price = Price of a chosen competitor. Typical strategy of “price takers” who
set price equal to one of the “price makers” and align constantly to it. This can also be
a strategy for specific channels, e.g.: vending impulse.
Dynamic Parity: Given a chosen competitor, the gap with its price is kept constant in time, in order not to change competitive positioning in the consumer perception. This is most common amongst category leaders and the #2 brand, and is usually expressed as an index, i.e.: #2 brand will aim for 90% of the category leader’s price.
Discount Pricing: Price is always below the average of competitors, allowing a precise positioning of low perceived price and low perceived benefits.
Premium Pricing: Price is always above the average of competitors, allowing a precise positioning of high perceived price and high perceived benefits.
3. Value-based strategies
Pricing based on value of a brand as perceived by the consumer. Value perceived by consumer may have little to do with the cost of manufacturing, marketing or distribution. Often associated with marketing-led organisations, tends to focus organisations on maximising
the value creation process. Some common techniques are:
Elasticity Analysis: The price decision results from the calculation of the sensitivity of volumes to price changes. By simulating different price scenarios it is possible to set the optimal price to the one maximizing expected revenues and profits.
Buy-Response Analysis: The price decision results from market research estimating the
consumer’s intention to buy at different price levels. The outcome is a quantification of perceived value.
Conjoint Analysis: The consumer quantifies the economic value of the perceived utility for each product attribute, making it possible to determine the ideal pricing of each product configuration.
Segmentation pricing, niche pricing, EDLP or Hi-Lo pricing, and other approaches are ultimately variations of these three fundamental strategies
This toolkit of price tactics is the marketers’ / retailers’ arsenal for strategizing in the pricing game. Managing price strategy consists of viewing pricing through a variety of perspectives.
By looking at the varied elements of marketing, profit, value, pricing objectives and how these interact with the impact on profitability and the competitive dynamics of the market, arriving at a definitive pricing strategy can be a rewarding activity. This includes looking at key elements of the marketing mix. These are:
Those that exert a downward pressure on prices:
• Macro-economic pressure
• Sensitivity to price and gaps to key competitors
• Whether the product is a luxury, necessity or substitute
• Pricing, promotions, media, innovation of the competition in the market
• New entrants
• Role of category and brand
• Competition between retailers
• Private Label strategy
• Balance of power; trade margin negotiations
Those that exert an upward pressure on prices:
Your own business objectives
• Profit, turnover, volume, share
• Investment in innovation, media, promotions, packaging
Cost of goods
• Increasing supplier and distribution costs
• Volume-dependent costs


This "Geigerscope" is what other people would refer to as an alphascope, similar to a spinthariscope without its own radioactive source. (Spinthariscopes are explained in more detail here.)
It has a lens at one end and a luminous screen at the other (underneath the small cap you see in the photograph). The idea is to point the screen at a radioactive object and look through the lens to see the flashes of light generated on the luminous screen. Based on the number of flashes you can estimate the activity level of the source. A scope like this is far simpler and cheaper than a Geiger counter (just a few dollars vs. Hundreds) and it requires no batteries. It basically can't fail unless you run over it with a truck. On the other hand, it works only in a dark room with dark adapted eyes, and it provides only a rough indication of activity level.
Source: eBay seller geoelectronics
Contributor: Theodore Gray
Acquired: 19 May, 2007
Text Updated: 19 May, 2007
Sample Group: Spinthariscopes


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Medgar Evers was an American civil rights activist from Mississippi who actively fought for voting rights, against segregation, and boycotts of businesses that practiced discrimination.
See the fact file below for more information on the Medgar Evers or alternatively, you can download our 21-page Medgar Evers worksheet pack to utilise within the classroom or home environment.
Key Facts & Information
- Medgar Wiley Evers was born on July 2, 1925, in Decatur, Mississippi. He was the third child of Jesse and James Evers. He had four siblings, including his brother Charles Evers, the first African-American mayor in the state of Mississippi during the post-Reconstruction era. His father worked at a sawmill and the Evers family owned a small farm.
- Evers was drafted into the US Army in 1943. He fought in France and Germany during World War II. He was honorably discharged as a sergeant after the war.
- Evers attended Alcorn College (now Alcorn State University) in 1948. The institution is known as a historically black college in Lorman, Mississippi.
- Evers majored in business administration and earned his Bachelor of Arts in 1952.
- During his senior year, Evers married his classmate, Myrlie Beasley, on December 24, 1951. The couple had three children: Darrell Kenyatta, Reena Denise, and James Van Dyke Evers.
ACTIVISM AND NAACP
- The Evers family moved to Mound Bayou, Mississippi. Medgar worked as a salesman for T. R. M. (Howard’s Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance Company).
- Evers assisted in the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL) boycott of gasoline stations that discriminated against blacks regarding the usage of restrooms. Medgar and his brother, Charles, also actively attended the organization’s annual conferences in Mound Bayou between 1952 and 1954.
- Evers applied to the University of Mississippi Law School in February 1954. However, his application was rejected because of his race. He submitted his case to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and volunteered to help the organization regarding the lawsuit.
- By May 1954, the Brown v. Board of Education case after the ruling of the supreme court was handed down. This signified the legal end to segregation of schools.
- Evers was promoted in NAACP as the first field secretary for the state of Mississippi. He travelled around the state to recruit new members and to set up new local chapters of the organization. He also organized efforts for voting rights, as well as boycotts of businesses that practiced discrimination.
- Evers, being a prominent civil rights activist, became a target of white supremacists. He actively fought against racial discrimination as well as how social justice was being distributed amongst the African Americans. His investigations included the lynching of fourteen year old Emmett Till in 1955. Till was allegedly killed for talking to a white woman.
- Evers also supported his fellow civil rights activist, Clyde Kennard, when he was convicted due to theft charges in 1960.
- Evers was subjected to threats due to his position as a civil rights leader, including a firebombing incident where a Molotov cocktail was thrown into his home on May 29, 1963.
ASSASSINATION AND DEATH
- On June 12, 1963, at 12:40 am, Evers was shot in the back from an Enfield 1917 rifle after he pulled into his driveway. He died at the hospital less than an hour later.
- Evers’ death was mourned nationally. After his assassination, a procession was led in honor of his legacy. The procession leaders included other civil rights leaders like Allen Johnson and Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
- Evers received full military honors and was buried on June 19 in Arlington National Cemetery.
- As per the FBI’s investigation, Byron De La Beckwith was arrested on June 21, 1963, for Evers’ murder. De La Beckwith was a salesman and a white segregationist. De La Beckwith was one of the founding members of the White Citizens’ Council.
- Evidence pointing to De La Beckwith included a rifle found near the crime scene. The rifle was registered to De La Beckwith and had his fingerprints on it. He claimed that the rifle was stolen from him.
- De La Beckwith was supported by various prominent Mississippians, including then-governor Ross Barnett. Two trials occurred, but he was eventually released in 1964 after an all-white jury twice deadlocked the case.
- In 1989, De La Beckwith was questioned again when accounts showed that there had been tampering by the commission. The commission allegedly helped lawyers for De La Beckwith with screening jurors. The tampering was not proven but led to numerous new witnesses, including some individuals who testified against De La Beckwith. The latter bragged about the murder to the witnesses.
- In 1993, a third trial was ruled by the Supreme Court. De La Beckwith was prosecuted in 1994, thirty years later.
- De La Beckwith appealed the case and eventually died in prison in January, 2001, at age 80.
- Myrlie Evers created the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute in Jackson, Mississippi.
- City University, New York, established the Medgar Evers College in 1969.
- USNS Medgar Evers, a US Navy vessel, was bestowed after Evers’ name.
- In 2017, the Medgar and Myrlie Evers House was named as a National Historic Landmark.
- Songs inspired by Evers have also been produced, such as Bob Dylan’s “Only a Pawn in Their Game”, Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam”, Phil Ochs’ “Another Country” and “Too Many Martyrs”, and Wadada Leo Smith’s “Medgar Evers: A Love-Voice of a Thousand Years’ Journey for Liberty and Justice”.
- Films have also been inspired by Evers, such as Ghosts of Mississippi (1996) presenting the story of De La Beckwith’s trial.
Medgar Evers Worksheets
This is a fantastic bundle which includes everything you need to know about Medgar Evers across 21 in-depth pages. These are ready-to-use Medgar Evers worksheets that are perfect for teaching students about Medgar Evers who was an American civil rights activist from Mississippi who actively fought for voting rights, against segregation, and boycotts of businesses that practiced discrimination.
Complete List Of Included Worksheets
- Medgar Evers Facts
- Evers Word Search
- Let’s Identify!
- A Man of Civil Rights
- Famous Activists
- Words from Evers
- Attributes to Imitate
- A Letter to Mr. Evers
- Evers Legacy
- Political Cartoon
- My Advocacy
Link/cite this page
If you reference any of the content on this page on your own website, please use the code below to cite this page as the original source.
Link will appear as Medgar Evers Facts & Worksheets: https://kidskonnect.com - KidsKonnect, February 4, 2019
Use With Any Curriculum
These worksheets have been specifically designed for use with any international curriculum. You can use these worksheets as-is, or edit them using Google Slides to make them more specific to your own student ability levels and curriculum standards.


The Irish name Cowlefields has been taken as synonym for many other names. The Gaelic form of the name Cowlefields was generally Mac Cathmhaoil. The name Caulfield was used by people of the Irish names O Gamhna, O Caibheanaigh and Mac Conghamhna, and Mac Carrghamhna. The Anglicized form of these last four Irish surnames is Gaffney, but for some obscure reason, this has often been changed to Caulfield.
Early Origins of the Cowlefields family
The surname Cowlefields was first found in Fermanagh
(Irish: Fear Manach) in the southwestern part of Northern Ireland
, Province of Ulster
, where they held a family seat
from ancient times. They were directly descended from King Colla da Crioch through the Maguires, Princes of Fermanagh
. Castle Caulfield is a large ruined house in Castlecaulfield, County Tyrone
. At one time, the building was three stories high with large windows and tall chimney stacks. A wooden joist from the castle eludes to the age of the building as about 1282. The Caulfeild Coat of Arms is still seen over the entrance. Nearby, Sir Toby Caulfeild, 1st Baron
Caulfeild (1565–1627) built a house on the site of an earlier O'Donnelly castle. It was burned in the Irish Rebellion of 1641, but was rebuilt in the 1660s. Today Castle Caulfield is a ruin and declared a State Care Historic Monument.
Early History of the Cowlefields family
This web page shows only a small excerpt of our Cowlefields research.Another 437 words (31 lines of text) covering the years 1565, 1627, 1607, 1587, 1640, 1621, 1642, 1622, 1642, 1624, 1671, 1726, 1682, 1734, 1685, 1716, 1715 and 1717 are included under the topic Early Cowlefields History in all our PDF Extended History products and printed products wherever possible.
Cowlefields Spelling Variations
People who were accounted for by scribes and church officials often had their name recorded many different ways because pronunciation was the only guide those scribes and church officials had to go by. This resulted in the problem of one person's name being recorded under several different variations, creating the illusion of more than one person. Among the many spelling variations
of the surname Cowlefields that are preserved in archival documents are Caulfeild, Caulkin, Calfkins, Cawlfield, Cawfield, MacCaul, MacCawell and many more.
Early Notables of the Cowlefields family (pre 1700)
Notable among the family name at this time was William Caulfeild (1587-1640), 2nd Baron
Caulfeild; Toby Caulfeild (1621-1642), 3rd Baron
Caulfeild; Robert Caulfeild (1622-1642), 4th Baron
Caulfeild; William Caulfeild, 1st Viscount... Another 31 words (2 lines of text) are included under the topic Early Cowlefields Notables in all our PDF Extended History products and printed products wherever possible.
Migration of the Cowlefields family to the New World and Oceana
left their homeland in astonishing numbers during the 19th century in search of a better life. Although individual reasons vary, most of these Irish families
suffered from extreme poverty, lack of work opportunities, and exorbitant rents in their homeland. Many decided to travel to Australia
or North America in the hopes of finding greater opportunities and land. The Irish immigrants that came to North America initially settled on the East Coast, often in major centers such as Boston or New York. But like the many other cultures to settle in North America, the Irish traveled to almost any region they felt held greater promise; as a result, many Irish with gold fever moved all the way out to the Pacific coast. Others before that time left for land along the St. Lawrence River and the Niagara Peninsula, or the Maritimes as United Empire Loyalists, for many Irish did choose to side with the English during the American War of Independence
. The earliest wave of Irish migration, however, occurred during the Great Potato Famine
of the 1840s. An examination of early immigration and passenger lists has revealed many people bearing the Cowlefields name: Mary Caulfield, her husband Thomas and one child, settled in Charles Town [Charleston], South Carolina in 1822; Charlotte Caulfield settled in New Orleans in 1823.
The Cowlefields Motto
The motto was originally a war cry or slogan. Mottoes first began to be shown with arms in the 14th and 15th centuries, but were not in general use until the 17th century. Thus the oldest coats of arms generally do not include a motto. Mottoes seldom form part of the grant of arms: Under most heraldic authorities, a motto is an optional component of the coat of arms, and can be added to or changed at will; many families have chosen not to display a motto.
Motto: Deo duce ferro comitante
Motto Translation: God is my guide,and my sword is my companion.


The Qing Dynasty
The Qing Dynasty was the last imperial dynasty of China, ruling from 1644 to 1912 with a brief, abortive restoration in 1917. It was preceded by the Ming Dynasty and followed by the Republic of China.
The dynasty was founded by the Jurchen Aisin Gioro clan in contemporary Northeastern China. The Aisin Gioro leader, Nurhachi, who was originally a vassal of the Ming emperors, began unifying the Jurchen clans in the late sixteenth century. By 1635, Nurhachi’s son Hong Taiji could claim they constituted a single and united Manchu people and began forcing the Ming out of Liaoning in southern Manchuria.
In 1644, the Ming capital Beijing was sacked by a peasant revolt led by Li Zicheng, a former minor Ming official who became the leader of the peasant revolt, who then proclaimed the Shun dynasty. The last Ming ruler, the Chongzhen Emperor, committed suicide when the city fell. When Li Zicheng moved against Ming general Wu Sangui, the latter made an alliance with the Manchus and opened the Shanhai Pass to the Manchurian army. Under Prince Dorgon, they seized control of Beijing and overthrew Li Zicheng’s short-lived Shun Dynasty. Complete pacification of China was accomplished around 1683 under the Kangxi Emperor.
Over the course of its reign, the Qing became highly integrated with Chinese culture. The imperial examinations continued and Han civil servants administered the empire alongside Manchu ones. The Qing reached its height under the Qianlong Emperor in the eighteenth century, expanding beyond China’s prior and later boundaries.
Imperial corruption exemplified by the minister Heshen and a series of rebellions, natural disasters, and defeats in wars against European powers gravely weakened the Qing during the nineteenth century.
“Unequal Treaties” provided for extraterritoriality and removed large areas of treaty ports from Chinese sovereignty. The government attempts to modernize during the Self-Strengthening Movement in the late 19th century yielded little lasting results. Losing the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 was a watershed for the Qing government and the result demonstrated that reform had modernized Japan significantly since the Meiji Restoration in 1867, especially as compared with the Self-Strengthening Movement in China.
The 1911 Wuchang Uprising of the New Army ended with the overthrow of the Empress Dowager Longyu and the infant Puyi on February 12, 1912. Despite the declaration of the Republic of China, the generals would continue to fight amongst themselves for the next several decades during the Warlord Era.
Puyi was briefly restored to power in Beijing by Zhang Xun in July 1917, and in Manchukuo by the Japanese between 1932 and 1945.


This story started innocently enough. One of my current projects is to complete a full metrical and rhetorical analysis of Romeo and Juliet (as I did for Julius Caesar last year), but in order to begin that, I first have to complete a full check against the Folio. At ASC Education, we like to return to the 1623 First Folio to recover stage directions, emotionally inflected punctuation, and other textual variants which editors have sometimes obfuscated over the years. This practice can lead to a lot of intriguing discoveries; little did I know that one such curiosity yesterday would end up devouring a significant portion of my morning.
While checking 1.4, where Mercutio and Benvolio attempted to cheer Romeo up as they head for the Capulets’ ball, I ran across the fascinating error at right: Hora. as a prefix, presumably for Horatio. There is no character in Romeo and Juliet named Horatio, though the stage direction for this scene does specify the presence of “five or six other Maskers, Torch-bearers.” ‘How odd,’ I thought. ‘I wonder if that error is in the Q2.’ The 1599 second quarto of Romeo and Juliet is the other reliable text for this play; most modern editions conflate elements from the Q2 and the Folio to arrive at their preferred version of the text (though many slip in elements from Q1 as well). As you can see below, yes, the 1599 Q2 does contain this error — even more explicitly as Horatio. The Folio, then, simply retains what Q2 shows.
So I wondered, ‘Huh. How strange. Does this error exist in Q1, then?‘ A quick check revealed that: no, it doesn’t. These lines are not in Q1, which jumps straight from Romeo’s “So stakes me to the ground I cannot stirre” to Mercutio’s “Give me a case to put my visage in,” skipping the pictured section of dialogue entirely. So how did the wandering speech-prefix come about? (And ought I to call it a prefix-errant?).
The simplest explanation is basic printer error: speech prefixes and names were often struck as sets, rather than assembled from individual letters. This practice is why the prefixes and names within the verse generally appear in an italicized font rather than the plain text. It’s easy to imagine, then, that a Horatio, struck for some other play, somehow got mixed in with the Mercutios intended for this scene, and that the type-setter’s quick fingers grabbed it and placed it without the type-setter consciously noticing the incongruity. It’s possible, though I suspect far less likely, that the printer did strike the speech prefix Horatio for this single instance. Perhaps Shakespeare wrote Horatio once where he meant Mercutio (in simple Italianate error, or perhaps thinking of another role the same actor played) and that error stayed in the fair copy or prompt book Creede received to set the type off of. Other similar errors exist, as in the editions of Much Ado about Nothing which have Kemp instead of Dogberry — but each of those gets used more than once. It seems less likely that Creede would create and strike a new full-length nameplate to use only once, so, for the intellectual exercise, I decided to pursue my first theory.
I was at first only tickled by this appearance, amused to picture Hamlet’s best friend getting ready to go to a party in Verona. Did he take a weekend trip away from Wittenburg? Did he decide to move south after the tragedy at Elsinore? Fanfiction-like possibilities abound. But then I remembered — the Romeo and Juliet Q2 was printed in 1599. The first quarto of Hamlet wouldn’t be printed for another four years, so it’s unlikely that the speech prefix was struck for Hamlet‘s Horatio. The light amusement began to grow into a prickling curiosity. What character could it have existed for, then?
The only other Horatio who jumped to my mind is the gentleman in Thomas Kyd’s A Spanish Tragedy — which, as it turns out, had a quarto printed in the same year as the Q2 of Romeo and Juliet in which this error originates. Ah-ha! This seemed to fit my theory perfectly. How easy to make the error if both plays were being printed at the same time, or at least within a reasonably close amount of time — especially since both are full of Spanish/Italianate names.
So, I went to Early English Books Online (EEBO) to find out, first, who printed the Q2 Romeo and Juliet, and if that was the same printhouse that put out the 1599 Q3 of The Spanish Tragedy. Answer: No. Thomas Creede printed the Romeo and Juliet Q2, while William White had the 1599 Spanish Tragedy. The next-earliest Spanish Tragedys were in 1592 and 1594, printed by Edward Allde, so there’s no strong connection there, either.
Who, then, is Horatio? How did this speech prefix sneak in? I felt compelled to push my theory farther. If we accept our Occam’s-Razor-Compatible explanation of a wandering prefix from something else originating at the same printhouse, then what other plays and books were that printer putting out around the same time, and was there a Horatio in any of them? Between 1597 and 1599, Creede printed six other plays, including the 1598 Richard III, John Lyly’s Mother Bombie, and the anonymous Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, as well as a lot of prose histories. I skimmed through a couple of the plays — no Horatios (though, as a side note, skimming just the stage directions in an unfamiliar play can give you an interesting perspective on it. The Comicall Historie of Alphonsus apparently includes a brazen head, Venus and the Muses, Medea and Iphigenia having a conversation, and at least one murder). I, sadly, do not have the time to look through all of the narrative histories and discourses to see if Horatio appears in the text of any of them. As such, I have no notion where this error originates, who that first Horatio was that ended up reveling with Mercutio and Benvolio, and I may never have that curiosity satisfied. Such is often the travail of academia.
Why does any of this matter? I recognize that, while I found this to be a wonderful scavenger hunt and an entertaining game, not everyone is thoroughly geeky enough to share those effusive emotions about a relatively minor textual variant. So what’s the practical application? Well, that has to do with the choices editors have made in repairing the error over the years. Every modern edition of Romeo and Juliet that we have here in the ASC Education office assigns those lines to Mercutio. It makes sense. He and Romeo are enjoying a back-and-forth. But… they don’t have to be Mercutio’s lines. Would anything change by giving them instead to Benvolio? It would certainly make him more involved in Mercutio and Romeo
‘s conversation, part of their lively sparring, not separate from it. What sort of a different Benvolio might that yield for the entire production? I don’t know, but I’d like to give that option back to production companies and classroom discussions so that we can find out.


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General random match probability for DNA mixtures
With simple DNA evidence, there is only one genotype possibility. Random match probability (RMP) tells us the chance of making a mistake. RMP gives the probability that someone unrelated to the defendant matches the DNA. The strength of evidence, or likelihood ratio (LR), is one over the RMP.
But with complex DNA, such as mixtures of two or more people, LR error becomes more complicated. More generally, the RMP is the chance that DNA evidence implicates an innocent person at least as strongly as it does the defendant. Finding the RMP may entail calculating LR values for a trillion trillion possibilities.
"The LR is the strength of forensic evidence, while RMP is the chance of making a mistake," says Dr. Mark Perlin of Cybergenetics. "Jurors can use error probability in assessing reasonable doubt." The TrueAllele® VUIer™ interface instantly calculates RMP error for probabilistic genotypes derived from DNA mixtures.
Dr. Perlin spoke about generalized RMP for DNA mixtures last week in Minneapolis at the 10th International Conference on Forensic Inference and Statistics (ICFIS). His half hour conceptual talk is accessible to lawyers and scientists. The webpage shows the YouTube presentation and has more information, including a technical report.


In a handful of nations, virtually all children are learning to make complex arguments and solve problems they’ve never seen before. They are learning to think, in other words, and to thrive in the modern economy. Inspired to find answers for our own children, author and Time magazine journalist Amanda Ripley follows three Americans embedded in these countries for one year. Kim, fifteen, raises $10,000 so she can move from Oklahoma to Finland; Eric, eighteen, trades his high-achieving Minnesota suburb for a booming city in South Korea; and Tom, seventeen, leaves a historic Pennsylvania village for Poland.
Through these young informants, Ripley meets battle-scarred reformers, sleep-deprived zombie students, and a teacher who earns $4 million a year. Their stories, along with groundbreaking research into learning in other cultures, reveal a pattern of startling transformation: none of these countries had many “smart” kids a few decades ago. Things had changed. Teaching had become more rigorous; parents had focused on things that mattered; and children had bought into the promise of education.