Developed By: iNFOTYKE
By Prem Singh
While enacting the Police Act of 1861, the limited objective of the British was to use police as a force and as a strong arm of the State to maintain peace and tranquility and to put down any sign of challenge to the authority of the British Crown by use of brute force of the police. The police was thus oriented primarily to maintain the unquestioned authority of the Crown and not to serve the people. Apart from maintenance of peace and order in the society, the other major duties required to be performed by the police under the Police Act of 1861 included crime prevention and investigation and detection of crime thereby helping to bring culprits to justice. But after Independence it was imperative to reorient the role of the police and to change it from ‘police force” to ‘police service’ in order to make it an instrument of service to the people.
With this objective in mind, the Government of India constituted the National Police Commission which submitted 8 Reports during the period 1979-81. Subsequently, the Government of India also constituted Ribeiro Committee (1998) and then Padmanabhaiah Committee (2000) on Police Reforms and both the Committees submitted detailed recommendations on police reforms keeping in view the changed role of the police.
In Prakash Singh vs Union of India, 2006, the Hon’ble Supreme Court issued various directives to the Central and the State Governments to take certain measures aimed at making police an effective instrument of public service in the context of changed role of the police. The directives issued were aimed at protecting the police from unwarranted political interference, ensuring transparency in the process of appointment of the Director General of Police, fixed tenure for the Director General of Police and other field level police functionaries, separation of investigation from law and order, transparency in transfers and postings and putting in place effective accountability mechanism. But the directives so issued were not fully complied with by many of the States and even though the States were required to replace the archaic Police Act of 1861 by a more progressive legislation in keeping with the directives issued by the Supreme Court as well as the changed role of the police, it is found that legislations enacted by many States were worse than the Police Act of 1861.
In 2005, the Police Act Drafting Committee constituted by the Government of India under the chairmanship of Soli Sorabjee produced a Model Police Act which was prepared taking into consideration the Supreme Court’s directives as well as the new challenges faced by the police and the need for reorienting its role accordingly. But the legislations enacted by many of the States did not conform to the Model Police Act. Consequently the legislations enacted by many of the States to replace the Police Act of 1861 do not help in reorienting the role of police in keeping with multifarious challenges confronting the police such as terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir, Left Wing extremism (Naxalism) in Eastern, Central and Southern India and militancy/insurgency in the North East.
Naxalism which was a localised movement when it first started in Naxalbari in West Bengal in the 1960s, and was effectively dealt with by the Government has reared its ugly head again and spread its tentacles along vast swathes of land across several States. It has become the biggest internal security threat. The Naxalites often thrive on the poverty and deprivation of the tribal population due largely to inadequacy and effectiveness of administrative machinery. Since they thrive on sufferings and misery of the deprived sections, it always remains their effort to prevent major developmental activities in the area for fear that they may lose their hold over the local population.
With the exponential increase in the use of computers and internet penetration across the country, there has been substantial increase in cyber crimes including cyber stalking, identity theft, phishing. hacking, industrial espionage, pornography including child pornography and online banking frauds. Investigation and detection of such cases pose a new challenge to the investigating agencies. Illicit drug trafficking has become a serious menace that confronts both the developed as well as developing countries including India. The problem is further compounded by India’s proximity to the regions which are considered to be the major sources of illicit drugs, namely. Golden Crescent (Pakistan. Afghanistan and Iran) and Golden Triangle (Myanmar. Thailand and Laos). India is a traditional producer of licit opium for medicinal and scientific purposes but a part of licit opium finds its way into the illicit market in its various forms. Indo-Pak border is considered to be highly vulnerable to drug trafficking. India is one of the transit points to the Western countries for the illicit drugs that are produced in the Golden Crescent and Golden Triangle countries.
Trafficking in women and children for sexual exploitation and forced labour which has become a transnational organised crime constitutes gross violation of human rights, in that, it violates of person’s fundamental right to life with dignity. It is a serious challenge for India which serves as a source, transit route and destination for such trafficking. Due to legal loopholes, often the actual traffickers go scot free.
Currency counterfeiting has assumed serious proportions globally and poses a serious threat to the world’s economy. Counterfeiting is done with a lot of finesse using high tech equipments like colour photocopies, colour printers and colour scanners as well as offset printing process. Since security features are copied from the genuine currency notes with the help of the latest technology, it makes the task of detecting a counterfeit currency note extremely difficult. Quite often, advanced computer technology is used to give the counterfeit currency note the required finish.
Trafficking of firearms is a global phenomenon. Punjab and Jammu & Kashmir have been particularly vulnerable to arms trafficking from across the international borders. India has long borders with Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, China, Mynmar and Bangladesh and our border guarding forces seize large quantities of heavy machine guns, AK Series of rifles, rocket launchers, revolvers and pistols from across the borders from time to time.
Money laundering is a serious menace which helps the criminals in using the proceeds of crime including drug related crime without being caught by law enforcement agencies. With the exponential increase in transnational crimes, there is similar increase in money laundering activities. This poses a threat to financial stability of a nation. It helps tax evaders in avoiding arrest by resorting to money laundering. It helps the corrupt to camouflage the source of their ill gotten money and use the same without fear of being caught. Quite often, criminals transfer the proceeds of crime through unofficial channels outside banking channels which are called hawala transactions. Proceeds of illicit drug trafficking, gun running, extortion money, etc are often transferred through hawala route.
It is thus obvious that the police have to contend with multi-dimensional challenges while discharging their duties. Another challenge which they have to confront is a vigilant civil society and 24×7 TV channels which have brought human rights issues to the centre stage. Hence any human rights violation gets widely reported in the media. There is a tendency on the part of the public to support rough and ready justice delivered by the police to some of the hardened criminals instead of waiting for long drawn process of law to take its course. Also, there is a tendency among some of the police personnel to resort to third degree method to extract confession or information from an accused person while investigating a case instead of taking recourse to scientific aid to investigation. Also, while dealing with cases of terrorism and insurgency, in view of the difficulties faced in putting together sufficient and credible evidence against the terrorist and insurgent elements, there is sometimes a tendency among the police to resort to staged encounters. However, given , the vigilant civil society and media, police can use of third degree methods and staged encounters at their own peril.
To help the police redefine its role and rise to the challenges that it faces effectively, it is imperative to fully professionalise the police by requisite skills up-gradation. Up-gradation of weaponry, insulating the police from unwarranted political interference, posting police officers strictly on professional considerations, ensuring certain minimum fixed tenure for key police functionaries at various levels, making the police accountable to law, making the process of recruitment completely transparent and not susceptible to manipulation or mischief and preventing the use of third degree and violation of human rights including staged encounters are actions that must be taken. The role of the police must change from that of a ‘force’ to that of a ‘service’ to the community and certain basic values and norms must be inculcated in the police that would make them sensitive to the aspirations of the people and responsive to their needs and help them in serving the people better.
Since police can function effectively only with the active support of the people, to win that support, police personnel must show the highest standards of integrity and probity in discharge of their duties. It is necessary that the police deal with the public with courtesy and discharge their duties without any bias or partiality. If the police have to be made thoroughly professional then it is necessary that more and more emphasis is laid on use of scientific aid to investigation and all efforts made to collect forensic evidence, where possible, instead of relying only on oral evidence.
Training is crucial in professionalising the police. Training is important not only for skill ungradation and capacity building but also for bringing about attitudinal changes and behavioural improvements in police personnel. It is, therefore, necessary that officers be posted to police training institutions which must possess requisite calibre as also aptitude for imparting training.
Use of technology is imperative to enable police to function effectively. Implementation of Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems, a Mission Mode Project under the National e-Governance which aims at creating a comprehensive and integrated system for enhancing efficiency and effectiveness of policing by using e-Governance should be speeded up. Also, if all Police Stations are provided with computer and internet facility and a web camera, it can help the senior police officers to virtually transport themselves to any Police Station through video conferencing and keep track of functioning of Police Stations. Use of technology can be of great help in traffic management. By connecting jails and courts through video conferencing, need to produce UTPs before courts can be dispensed with. Web enabled system of receiving complaints in the Police Control Rooms can help in giving computerised updates on the action taken on the complaints received to the complainant. Use of CC TV installed in crowded places including markets can be of enormous help in detecting cases and in bringing culprits to justice.
Police cannot function effectively if police personnel in subordinate ranks who constitute more than 90% of the force remain demoralised. It is, therefore crucial to make all efforts to keep their morale high by ensuring their timely career progression, providing them with proper housing facilities and reasonably decent working and living conditions. They should get at least one day off in a week and, if the same is not possible, then by ensuring that they are adequately compensated for working on holidays.
Police has a seminal role to play in the developmental process of the nation because developmental activities can only take place in an environment of peace, harmony and tranquility. Even though the challenges facing the police are multi-dimensional, formidable and indeed, daunting, if they function as a body of professional, transparent, accountable/proactive and responsive police service wedded to the service of the society and perform their duties with probity and integrity, withstanding illegal pressures and demands that may be placed on them, they can rise to the enormity of challenges confronting them and help in the nation’s march to peace, progress and prosperity.(The writer retired recently as DGP, Prisons)


This November, the Reading into History Family Book Club is digging into Albert Marrin’s Flesh and Blood So Cheap: The Triangle Fire and its Legacy. We’ll meet to discuss this book on Sunday, December 8th, at 3 pm. This work of non-fiction tells the story of how a fire broke out on the upper floors of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory on March 25th, 1911 and killed 146 workers, mostly young immigrant women. The origins of the fire are a tale of tragedy and corruption, and its aftermath is a tale of hard-won triumph for working people.
One of the people responsible for this triumph was a woman named Frances Perkins who witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. She later became our nation’s first female member of the U.S. Cabinet, serving as Secretary of Labor from 1933-1945 under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (a fellow New Yorker).
Have you ever witnessed a historic event or one that changed your life? Witnessing the fire, and the desperate ways in which the workers tried to escape from it, deeply affected Perkins. Below is an excerpt of a speech she gave about her experience that awful day at Cornell University on September 30, 1964. In it, she discusses the horrors she witnessed and the role that Al Smith, later a governor of New York, played in grieving with the families of the lost. The full text of this speech can be found here on Cornell’s excellent online exhibition called Remembering the 1911 Triangle Factory Fire.
This made a terrible impression on the people of the State of New York. I can’t begin to tell you how disturbed the people were everywhere. It was as though we had all done something wrong. It shouldn’t have been. We were sorry. Mea culpa! Mea culpa! We didn’t want it that way. We hadn’t intended to have 147 girls and boys killed in a factory…
I remember that, the accident happened on a Saturday, I happened to have been visiting a friend on the other side of the park and we heard the engines and we heard the screams and rushed out and rushed over where we could see what the trouble was. We could see this building from Washington Square and the people had just begun to jump when we got there. They had been holding until that time, standing in the windowsills, being crowded by others behind them, the fire pressing closer and closer, the smoke closer and closer. Finally the [firemen] were trying to get out …a net to catch people if they do jump, there were trying to get that out and [the workers] couldn’t wait any longer. They began to jump…the weight of the bodies was so great, at the speed at which they were traveling that they broke through the net…everybody who jumped was killed. It was a horrifying spectacle. We had our dose of it that night and felt as though we had been part of it all. The next day people, as they heard about it in all parts of the city, they began to mull around and gather and talk.
I remember that Al Smith, who was not a governor at that time but a member of the legislature…found that many many of these young people were residents of the same district he was a resident of and he did the most natural and humane thing…He went to the places where they lived; he went to the tenement they had occupied to see their father and mother and tell them how sorry he was or their husband, as the case might be, or their wife, to tell them of his sympathy and grief…He also got to the morgue, I remember, at just the time when the survivors were being allowed to sort out the dead and see who was theirs and who could be recognized.
…the next Sunday a meeting was called in the Metropolitan Opera House, which was a large available place and thereby this time we got a little sense of organization of something must be done. We’ve got to turn this into some kind of victory, some kind of constructive action…
If you want to know more about the victory Perkins speaks of, and of course more about the fire itself, read Marrin’s excellent book and come discuss it with us on December 8th.


After fifteen years and six billion dollars, the United States still lacks a viable long-term solution to the mounting levels of high-level nuclear waste scattered across the nation in 68 sites. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 (“NWPA”) and its 1987 Amendments have driven regulators to approve Yucca Mountain, Nevada, for burial of the 37,000 metric tons of nuclear waste in need of a final resting place. In the NWPA, Congress set January 31, 1998 as the deadline by which the Department of Energy (“DOE”) was to dispose of the utilities' nuclear waste. However, litigation challenges, scientific uncertainty, and political stalemates have all contributed to extensive delays. At present, the best case scenario for when Yucca Mountain can accept the waste is in the year 2010.
This Comment consists of five Parts. Part One explores the background of the nation's nuclear waste policy and Yucca Mountain. Part Two examines some of the reasons for the continual delays in constructing a permanent repository at Yucca Mountain as the precursors to the Indiana Michigan suit. Part Three sets forth an analysis of case law dealing with the DOE's liability for not meeting the January 1998 deadline. Part Four considers the impact that these legal holdings will have on the near-term nuclear waste dilemma. Specifically, the liability for disposal as distinct from taking title to the spent fuel, the corresponding financial ramifications, and incentives for near-term action will be addressed. Part Five concludes with an evaluation of potential remedies that will provide near-term solutions. By shifting the expectations of the parties and balancing the liability between DOE and the utilities, the D.C. Circuit may have provided the needed impetus to break the current stalemate. Instead of a Yucca Mountain-focused approach to nuclear policy, the parties may realize that compromise and alternative strategies are also necessary to provide assurance to the industry, the DOE, and the public that the nuclear waste will be safely contained in the short-term as well.
Amy L. Sypula, Beyond Yucca Mountain: Split Liability Drives Action for Interim Nuclear Waste Storage, 6 U. Chi. L. Sch. Roundtable 251 (1999), available at http://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/facultypub/508


One of the most famous regiments in the Canadian Forces is the Canadian Grenadier Guards. Although it traces its origins back to the earliest days of Canada it was officially born as the "First Regiment Canadian Grenadier Guards" in 1914 and was given the status of a household regiment; which is to say a royal guard which has the duty and honor to guard the monarch of Canada. The regiment contributed fighting men to many battalions during the First World War and by the end of the war King George V granted them the honor of being addressed as Guardsmen. They were officially allied with the Grenadier Guards of Britain and this special relationship has been maintained ever since. They were mobilized for action in World War II and earned battle honors across France, Belgium, Holland and Germany. Members of the Guard also served in the Korean War and more recently units have served in the former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan.
An elite and famous fighting force the Canadian Grenadier Guards are most known for their ceremonial duties such as guarding the residence of the Governor-General of Canada at Rideau Hall and Parliament Hill. The changing of the guard is always a must-see for visitors to Ottawa and, as a guard regiment of household troops the Canadian Grenadier Guards also travel to London when their turn comes to stand guard at Buckingham Palace; the primary residence of the Queen of Canada.


In an enclosed space, when a sound source stops emitting energy, it takes some time for the sound to become inaudible. This prolongation of the sound in the room caused by continued multiple reflections is called reverberation. Reflective corners or peaked ceilings can create a “megaphone” effect potentially causing annoying reflections and loud spaces. Reflective parallel surfaces lend themselves to a unique acoustical problem called standing waves, creating a “fluttering” of sound between the two surfaces. Reflections can be attributed to the shape of the space as well as the material on the surfaces.
Domes and concave surfaces cause reflections to be focused rather than dispersed which can cause annoying sound reflections. Absorptive surface treatments can help to eliminate both reverberation and reflection problems.


CBIBS buoys track dissolved oxygen—“DO”—levels. Having adequate DO is essential for all species that live in the Bay; like humans, the Bay’s living resources—like fish and crabs—need oxygen. Different species can tolerate different levels of oxygen, but scientists generally agree that the Bay’s aquatic species can survive with at least 5 milligrams of oxygen per liter.
Water is considered hypoxic when DO levels are between 0.3 and 2 mg/l; anoxic with very little or no oxygen, 0 to 0.2 mg/l. Large areas of hypoxic and/or anoxic water are often called “dead zones”; in most recent summers, a significant dead zone has formed in the deep area of the mid-Chesapeake Bay. NOAA-supported forecast models indicated the Chesapeake may see a slightly smaller than average dead zone in summer 2013.
Temperature limits the amount of oxygen water can hold—for example, one liter of water can hold less oxygen when the water temperature is 80 degrees than can a liter of water at 60 degrees. So in general, summertime Chesapeake waters can hold less oxygen than can winter waters.
But in the summer, Bay species face a one-two punch: In addition to high water temperatures, summertime is also when conditions are right for algae to grow…and then die and decompose. The decomposition process uses oxygen, which further diminishes available DO in the Bay.
In addition to temperature and algae, development of dead zones can be affected by human activities that contribute excess nutrients (like nitrates and phosphates) that fuel the growth of algae. Weather, including wind speed and direction and precipitation, can also change oxygen levels. For example, a high-wind event can help “stir up” the water, mixing oxygen through the water column, while a large rainfall—while initially mixing up the water—can deliver excess nutrients into the Bay via runoff.
DO levels can affect where Bay species spend their time. While certain species can survive in lower DO areas, they generally prefer higher DO. This means that when they encounter a low-DO area, fish and crabs—unlike oysters, which cannot escape a hypoxic or anoxic episode—often swim to areas with higher DO.
Fishermen around the Bay have noticed that some areas with less-than-ideal water quality are developing. Recreational and commercial anglers seeking summertime striped bass in the Chesapeake Bay are finding higher concentrations of rockfish in the northern portions of the middle Chesapeake Bay, where oxygen levels may be higher.
According to local charter captains, in the lower portion of the middle Bay near Point Lookout (at the mouth of the Potomac River), fishing this year has been challenging. Highly experienced captains have been doing well, but as a whole, anglers in these regions are finding fewer striped bass. Reports suggest the upper parts of the middle Bay (near Gooses Reef) are more productive for striped bass as both the commercial and recreational striped bass fisherman have been successful there.
Several full-time charter captains who usually keep their boats in the lower portions of the middle Bay, near Solomons Island, are moving their bases of operations further north in hopes of shorter runs to the fishing grounds, helping them save money on boat fuel.
In summer, Chesapeake fishermen generally focus their efforts in the top ten feet or so of water where the fish they seek—as well as the fish on which those fish feed—spend much of their time. This is because—while this varies in time and geography—there is generally more DO in waters near the surface than in deeper waters. Phytoplankton—algae—are plants that live and bloom near the surface. Because they are plants, they create oxygen through photosynthesis. But when they die, they sink to the bottom, and the process of decomposition they go through consumes oxygen. The difference in DO levels between surface and deeper waters encourages fish to spend time closer to the surface—often referred to as “vertical habitat squeeze” by scientists.
All CBIBS buoys measure DO just under the Bay’s surface; the Gooses Reef buoy also has a sensor that tracks DO at the bottom under the buoy.
To explore DO levels in the middle Bay, scientists recently used the “Data Download” feature from the CBIBS website to pull and analyze data from the surface at three CBIBS locations—Gooses Reef, Annapolis (the buoy nearest to Gooses Reef to the north), and Potomac/Point Lookout (nearest buoy to the south)—from June 1 through July 16.
A wide variety of factors play into fish habitat preference, and subtle differences in DO levels may have encouraged fish to spend more time near the Gooses Reef CBIBS buoy: While DO at Gooses Reef was above 7 mg/l 87% of the time, it was below 7 mg/l 44% of the time at the Annapolis buoy and 43% of the time at the Potomac buoy. These differences are relatively small and serve as a reminder that many variables—DO, salinity, water temperature, and much more—affect fish habitat choices.
Low DO affects more than the species that live in the water—it can dramatically affect the economy. Scientists have estimated that if dissolved oxygen levels in the entire Chesapeake Bay were less than 3 mg/l, there would be a loss to the economy of more than $145 million.
Dead zones and DO levels can vary widely from year to year, and habitat preferences of fish depend on more than just DO levels. What this year holds for this Chesapeake Bay summer—based largely on weather events we’ll experience over the next few months—will determine the extent of this year’s dead zone. And CBIBS buoys will be tracking DO levels and other water-quality parameters at all ten buoys, every hour, so scientists and fishermen alike can monitor what’s going on in the Bay.


Forces and Motion - Make a Book Two
With this Clicker Book, students record information about simple forces and how they affect the movement of objects in different ways, enabling them to create a text-free on-screen book. They can talk about pictures which illustrate how pushing and pulling forces can make something move, speed up, slow down, change shape, or change direction.
To create the book, go to Edit View. To record information on each page, click/tap on the sound button and then on the record tool on the toolbar.
Students can read about these forces in the Clicker Book "Forces and Motion – Read a Book". Search for forces on LearningGrids for other related resources.
Use this resource with Clicker Books on iPad
Age:For ages 7 to 9
Date:February 2, 2017
To download this resource, you must Log In or Register


DURHAM, N.C. -- Lung cancer is often deadly by the time doctors have detected it, but scientists at Duke University Medical Center are developing a non-invasive test that could detect lung cancer in its earliest stages, while it is still treatable.
Their new diagnostic test employs an instrument called "MALDI-TOF MS" to detect proteins in the blood that signal inflammatory diseases and various cancers. Finding a disease-causing protein is critical because it helps doctors diagnose the disease and develop new ways to block its detrimental effects, the researchers said.
Expanding on the MALDI-TOF MS technique, Duke radiologists have identified a specific protein, serum amyloid A, which is elevated in the blood of lung cancer patients but not in the blood of normal patients. While serum amyloid A has previously been shown to be elevated in cancers and other diseases, the Duke team is the first to use MALDI-TOF MS to identify this protein and others that may be involved in lung cancer, said Edward Patz, M.D., professor of radiology and pharmacology/cancer biology at Duke.
Based on his new findings, Patz plans to develop a blood test that will measure serum amyloid A and other, more specific proteins that can detect lung cancer in the blood before a tumor is clinically apparent.
"Our technique is a new paradigm for identifying protein targets in cancer, because we are zeroing in on the disease-causing protein itself rather than searching for a defective gene and then hunting down its relevant proteins," said Patz.
Patz described his methods and results using MALDI-TOF MS (matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry) in two studies published in the September 2003 issue of the journal Proteomics.
The Duke studies are proof of principle that MALDI-TOF MS can, in fact, pinpoint and identify proteins in blood that are elevated in cancer and other diseases, said Patz. Moreover, the Duke approach to MALDI-TOF is more sensitive than other diagnostic techniques, he said. It generates more precise information on protein expression because it can detect proteins of low molecular mass, acidic or basic, and at concentrations much lower than other methods.
"Using a MALDI-TOF MS platform is a particularly exciting advance because current diagnostic tools -- such as PET and CT scans -- have had no obvious impact on lung cancer mortality rate over the last several decades," said Patz. The overall five-year survival rate remains about 14 percent, despite major advances in genomics and drug discovery.
Patz's approach is the reverse of how scientists generally discover the genetics that underlie a disease. Typically, researchers begin by isolating a defective gene, but a single gene can produce many different proteins -- only one of which may be the culprit in a particular disease process. Identifying the relevant proteins in a disease puts scientists much closer to developing novel diagnostic and therapeutic targets, said Patz.
Once identified, the proteins can be used as biologic "markers" to diagnose the earliest stages of cancer, possibly before a PET scan or CT scan pick up the image of a tumor on the lungs. Moreover, researchers can develop new drugs designed to block a protein's unique role in causing cancer.
"The biology of lung cancer may have been played out by the time we detect a tumor using imaging studies like PET and CT scans," said Patz. "This is why we're trying to develop very sensitive biomarkers that can detect the disease in high-risk individuals early enough to treat them successfully."
While MALDI-TOF MS is not unique to Duke, Patz has expanded its use in novel ways. Not only does his team record the protein "peaks" in blood samples, he then applies a computer algorithm to each protein that identifies its biologic role in the disease process. Patz calls it "fingerprinting" the protein, and he will eventually use that information to elucidate potential ways of blocking the protein's cancer-causing effects in the cell.
The process begins by "fractionating" (dividing) the sample, then feeding the samples into the mass spectrometer, which electrically charges or "ionizes" the blood proteins. The instrument then propels the proteins down a flight tube at high velocity. The manner in which each molecule lands determines its precise mass and hence its level of "expression" in the blood.
Next, Patz's team performs an extra step: they take the most significant protein peaks recorded by the instrument and purify the samples repeatedly until they are able to determine each protein's unique amino acid structure or fingerprint.
"It is useful to know that you have a protein marker for a disease, but it is far more useful to understand the biology of that protein and use that knowledge to develop strategies to combat the disease."
From a clinical perspective, the development of serum biomarkers has benefits, as well. The technique requires only a blood sample from the patient; hence, it is less invasive than tissue biopsies. It is also more cost efficient and may be much more accurate than CT and PET scans, said Patz.
The above story is based on materials provided by Duke University Medical Center. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
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We’re sure you’ve noticed that no two breasts are created equal. Or, maybe you haven’t. Come to think of it, some of the most common questions we’re asked by our clients involve their breasts and whether their size, shape, dissimilar shape, nipple size/color is normal. In almost all cases, the answer is, “Absolutely!” However, just as breasts differ on the outside, they also differ on the inside.
Breasts are comprised of multiple types of tissue, including fibrous tissue and fat (providing their general shape), lobules that produce breast milk (also called glandular tissue) and ducts that carry the milk from the lobules to the nipples. The amount of lobules each breast contains is largely due to genetics. Some women have more and some have less. In most cases, the number of glands you have won’t affect your ability to breastfeed, but they can affect mammogram readings and a doctor’s or radiologist’s ability to detect breast lumps.
Are you overdue for a wellness visit and routine breast exam? Contact your healthcare provider to schedule an appointment.
What is Dense Breast Tissue?
If you have ever had a mammogram or breast exam in a doctor’s office, your doctor or a mammogram reading may report you have dense breasts when the quantity of fibrous and glandular tissue is greater than the fat tissue. You’ll be able to tell this for yourself when you perform your self-breast exam each month; your fingers will notice that there are lots of largish, harder lumps and striations amidst the more malleable, fatty tissue. The more often you do your exam, the more you’ll get to know the feeling and location of these lumps and bumps, making you more familiar with your breasts’ internal landscape.
Breast density is quite normal (about 40% of women have dense breast tissue and 10% have extremely dense breast tissue) so don’t be alarmed if mammogram results report your breast tissue is dense. Odds are it will also tell you to consider having a mammogram more often (since abnormal tumors can be harder to locate in dense breast tissue), and that you perform self-breast exams on a regular basis.
Women With Dense Breast Tissue Have a Slightly Higher Breast Cancer Risk
We’re not 100% sure why this is the case, but breast cancer rates are slightly higher in women with dense breast tissue. As mentioned above, we do know that dense breast tissue makes it more difficult for radiologists to detect tumors because both dense tissue and tumors (also dense) appear white on the breast images. Fatty tissue, on the other hand, appears black. If you have dense tissue and small lump, or lump that blends in with the denser tissue, the lump may not be distinguishable from the surrounding white masses in the image.
Should I do Anything Differently if I Have Dense Breast Tissue?
Not necessarily. Beyond mammograms, there are two other diagnostic tests – ultrasound and MRI – that can also locate cancerous tumors in breast tissue. The problem is that they often detect all sorts of “abnormal” tissue that isn’t cancerous at all, which leads to worry and unnecessary further testing and/or biopsies. Also, in most cases, these tests are not covered by health insurance, so the price tag adds up quickly. Thus, your healthcare provider probably won’t recommend either right away, or may choose to integrate one or the other in addition to a mammogram every few or handful of years just to be safe.
The first thing you’ll want to do if you are told you have dense breast tissue is to check in with your healthcare provider to find out what it means to her. She will let you know the specifics as well as what she recommends going forward.
The most important thing you can do is get to know your own breasts. Look at them in the mirror, perform breast exams every month, at about the same time (glandular tissue changes throughout your menstrual cycle so by performing your exam at about the same point in your cycle, you’ll be better able to detect any abnormalities). Heck, check them out every week for the first couple of months so you get to know your breasts in all of their various phases. The point being, the more familiar you are, the more likely you are to detect any abnormalities as soon as possible.
Finally, if you do notice, feel or see anything different or unusual with your breasts, schedule an appointment immediately. We’d much rather tell you, “it’s nothing to be concerned about,” than to hear you noticed something a few months ago…and we have to tell you it is something to be concerned about. The earlier we detect a problem, the more options we have to treat it.


It is said that creativity is the mother of invention. However, the same could be extended in business to highlight the fact that creativity is the mother of innovation which is the bedrock of the business organization’s success. This is to say that innovation is the spearhead for any business organization that intends to stand out despite the increased competition and unpredictable economic changes.
Given the importance of innovation and creativity, one would want to understand how this culture or practice can be promoted within an organization. Without doubt, it is the role of the management to ensure that an appropriate environment that promotes innovation is created. Scholarship has tried to address the issue with kin interest on the role of management in the promotion of creativity and in handling the various changes that organizations encounter. This paper intends to show the role of management in the promotion of creativity and innovation and how changes within the economic environment can be contained and turned into opportunity (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995).
Decision making is the determining factor on the strength and longevity of any given business. This clearly indicates that the management whose major role is decision making is a very important part of the business. Failure to make sound decisions would lead to no competition (Robins, 1991).
Role of Leadership in change management
Each passing day, organizations tend to encounter changes. In fact, one writer indicates that everything changes except change itself. This means that changes are always present and constant. As CISCO Systems’ John Chambers puts it, downturns and market transitions are just currents that propel the organization to new heights. They are learning experiences that should put leaders on their feet to ensure that they constantly fore the likely trends and react appropriately to avoid fading into oblivion.
However, if leaders fail to foresee the future, serious repercussions might follow. Like in John Chambers’ case, failure to fore see the future lead to his laying off of 8,000 workers that would have led to increased production and was also forced to write down as much as $2 billion in inventory (Chambers, 2008). This clearly indicates that if leaders fail to foresee the future, loses are very likely to be incurred. However, how, exactly, can leaders learn to foresee and handle impeding dangers?
Sadly, very few leaders can foresee the future. In fact, Lewin and Regine (2001) clearly point out that the business environment is usually unpredictable due to the many complexities that are associated with it. This means that there is much to be done. It is not about foreseeing the future, but it is about putting in appropriate strategies that would assist the organization to make it through the changes without suffering too much losses.
This will not only help the organization stay afloat through hard times, but will also putting in front and well ahead of its competitors. On his part, Flower (1996) posits that if well dealt with, changes in the business environment could act as nourishment to the organization. Through the changes, the organizations could thrive and rejuvenate getting new energy to forge ahead stronger than earlier. From the arguments above, it is clear that two reactions can be identified in the event of changes. Either an organization gets new energy and forges ahead or grapples and struggles as they fall deeper into trouble. Therefore, it is important to understand what causes the difference between the two organizations. Is it mere luck that other organizations succeed in the event of changes?
The answer to this question is an absolute no. It is not luck that drives organizations to come out stronger when changes set in. What creates differences between a successful and non successful organization after changes are their fundamental attributes (Flower, 1996). To have a clear comprehension of these attributes, it is important that one understands the complexity theory and how it applies in business management. With this in mind, it will be possible to see how the organization works in order to survive the constant changes (Stamm, 2008).
The Complexity Theory
Dann and Barclay (2006) in their analysis of the complexity theory and its application in management argue that being adoptive and self organized is the only solution to dealing with changes. However, an organization will not be able to acquire such attributes unless its leaders understand the specifications of the complexity theory. The complexity theory can easily be understood after identifying its roots. This theory was developed from the prior existing two theories of systems theory and the chaos theory. The systems theory purports that a system is a single unit made up of a collection of agents of which are interdependent but very independent at the same time.
This leads to a basic dependence on feedback as one element within the system depends on another element so that operations are facilitated. Apparently, an element can bring a positive feedback or a negative one. The positive feedback amplifies the whole system while the negative one damps the system. This is what is referred to as the non linear behaviour within a system. This is the fundamental argument of systems theory (Waldrop, 1992).
On the other hand, the chaos theory argues that while systems might work in a defined way, changes in the initial conditions under which the elements of the system operates might result into large impacts. However, the chaotic theory is not completely random as the word chaos might imply. The systems are believed to be not exactly stable while at the same time not unstable. The operations of the system are believed to be within the boundary of stability and instability.
This is termed as the edge of chaos. Therefore, the systems operate in a way that is neither random nor predictable. As a result, the complex theory derives its main arguments from the two theories. It bases its arguments on the fact that systems depend on the environment in order to provide an outcome. This means that the systems have to be adoptive in nature in order to survive longer (Lewin, 1993)
To apply the theory of complexity, Santa Fe institute identifies a complex system as one that is able to adapt to changes through “self organization, and selection into coherent new behaviours, structures and patterns” (Dann & Barclay, 2006, p. 22). The main tools or elements within the system that offer the main advantage are organization, interactions, random events, adaptation and evolution. When properly manipulated, these stages can be very fruitful because through them, an organization will be able to restructure itself in the event of changes. This means that no new and unpredicted changes will be able to subject the organization into a chaotic system.
In organization, the business entity must put in place adequate and well identified structures and rules through which the several elements should interact. Interaction involves the way through which the organization handles interchanges with the external environment. It also involves the way information process is distributed and how problems are solved. Random events involve those that happen without stability. These involve those events that could not have been predicted and hence not planned for. Adaptation involves the organization’s ability to adjust to the environmental changes that might occur and finally evolution is “the occurrence of events altering the course of evolution: ‘frozen history’ (p. 22).
This part of the essay takes us back to the point where attributes of a successful organization can be identified. This will be done in relation to the complexity theory. To begin with, Steinberg (1999) identifies knowledge accumulation and dissemination as the core of creativity and innovation. It is the role of management to ensure that the organization is well nourished with knowledge through gathering and its transformation.
This knowledge is essential because it is the one that later is transformed into marketable products and services. Therefore, how the knowledge is collected and transformed is imperative to the future success of the organization. The concept of Critical Knowledge Function (CKF) which involves the identification of the most essential knowledge domains and applying them within the organization’s activities and structure forms the most important tool for future success. This means that one attribute of successful organizations is the proper collection and management of knowledge (Luthans, 1989).
McElroy (2003) argues posits that the development and adoptability of the organization totally depends on its ability to use the accumulated knowledge to handle the external environmental changes which include shifts in the market, development of new technologies, increase in the number of competitors, reduction in the life span of the organization’s products and several other uncertainties.
All this can be achieved through the development of an appropriate approach to utilization of the two basic knowledge forms; tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge. This approach must involve socialization, externalization, internalization and combination. All these processes ensure that the tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge within the company is weaved into a single great knowledge that enables the organization to adjust and easily adapt to the changes in the environment (Judson, 1991).
In her argument of the future of management, Wagner (2009) also posits that accumulation of knowledge is integral to success in business organizations. He argues that social networking is one way through which managers can accumulate relevant information that will enable them survive through unexpected changes. In her argument, she reports that through social networking, an organization leader is able to learn collaborative skills which are essential to success. This is especially true considering that the contemporary leaders who are young and vibrant find working and learning to be one. They therefore find networking as a form of information gathering that is fun and entertaining. This means that social networking should be given priority as one way of collecting information (Isaksen & Tidd, 2006).
A good example of organizations that have succeeded in using knowledge and complexity theory to improve on their quality and innovation is Alessi. This is a company that manufactures home furnishings. Since 1985, the company incorporated the knowledge (tacit knowledge) of engineer Graves who designed the whimsical kettle that later sold five times the expectations of the company. According to Verganti (2000), it’s not just the complexity of the model that has led to the success of the kettle.
The company had a good knowledge management that allowed them to appropriately mix tacit knowledge and tacit knowledge, tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge and explicit knowledge with other explicit knowledge to come up with a design that would stay in the domestic market for long. Verganti posits that this organization is a “free-floating community of architects, suppliers, photographers, critics, curators, publishers and craftsmen among many other categories of professionals, as well as the expected artists and designers” (p. 116).
As mentioned in the complexity theory, Alessi as an organization is a single system that is made up several elements that depend upon each other to come up with a market capturing equipment. Just like the theory specifies. Each element is independent but at the same time dependant on other elements through feedbacks. For instance, a designer is unique with his skill. He does not depend on a photographer to be good at his skill. His prowess in designing is a tacit knowledge.
However, for the organization to succeed, the designer will need the photographer to come up with good images that will attract the eyes of the buyers. Marketers will on the other hand develop good marketing strategies while suppliers will ensure that they have penetrated the deepest parts of the country to ensure maximum utilization. The designer will therefore need the feedback from marketers who will have direct information from buyers. Through the feedbacks, the designer will improve on the mode so that it meets the clients’ desire. This forms a system made up of diverse elements that eventually help the organization to succeed (Davenport & Prusak, 2000; Hersey & Blanchard, 1988).
Another role of management in ensuring that the organization is able to deal with changes is through ensuring that learning is facilitated within the organization. Learning is an integral component to organizational existence and competition. Calantone, Cavusgil & Zhao (2002) purport that “learning will become the most viable alternative to corporate extinction” (p. 45). Through learning, organizations can identify the errors made in the course of operations and make the relevant corrections. This notwithstanding, learning can also be done on positive outcomes. While negative results lead an organization into identifying the faults and correcting them, positive results offer the organization the chance to identify the factors that led to their success and hence make use of such advantages.
McKee (1992) further argues on the issue of learning by positing that learning can be constructive to the organization if the learners are receptive, have a shared vision, are open minded and are ready to share their knowledge within the organization. He further identifies three stages of learning which he terms integral to success. These are single loop learning which are the basis for incremental product innovation, double loop learning which causes discontinuous product innovation and finally meta learning which involves making innovation a culture within the organization.
From these arguments, it becomes clear that learning is integral to success within an organization. Learning entails individual and organizational learning. In addition, learning can occur from mistakes which are referred to as mismatches and from successes which is referred to as matches. Finally, what learning is to be done and its impact on the organization depends on the organization’s structure, its culture and the communication pattern of the organization. Therefore, if all these are well managed, the organization will be in position to deal with changes at any time.
Finally, it is the role of leaders to ensure that the whole organization is talking one language. Just like a system operates, the organization must ensure that all of its elements are contributing towards a common goal. Any failure within the chain could lead to abject failure. As Flower (1996) puts it, “healthy, flexible individuals have a clear sense of purpose and all parts of the personality are lined up behind that purpose” (para. 12). This is the way a healthy system should operate. Similarly, this is the way a healthy organization should operate.
In conclusion, it is true what Lewin and Regine (2001) argue that “Companies that operate in the zone of creative adaptability will experience perpetual novelty, constant surprise, as new patterns of behaviour ceaselessly emerge… Surprise is the currency of adaptable change, as the business environment constantly shifts and predictability is difficult’ (p. 75). Therefore, to be on the safe side, organizations must ensure that information is well accumulated and put to use.
The information and knowledge must be incorporated within the organization’s activities and structure. This is important because it is this information that is eventually transformed into important products and services. In addition, leaders must ensure that a learning environment is well developed within the organization. It is through learning that the knowledge base (individual and organizational knowledge can be merged to come up with one large innovative knowledgeable organization. This can be achieved through merging the various forms of knowledge that are available within an organization.
List of References
Calantone, R, Cavusgil, T. & Zhao, Y. 2002. “Learning orientation, firm innovation capability and the firm perform-ance”, Industrial Marketing Management, 31(6), pp 515-524.
Chambers, J. 2008. CISCO sees the future. Interview by Bronwyn and Stewart. Harvard Business Review.
Dann, Z and Barclay, I., 2006. “Complexity Theory and Knowledge Management Application” The Electronic Journal of Knowledge Management. 4(1), pp. 11-20.
Davenport T H and Prusak L., 2000. Working knowledge. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Flower, J.,1996. The five fundamentals of dealing with change. Web.
Hersey, P. & Blanchard, K., 1988. Management of Organizational Behavior: Utilizing Human Resource. NJ: Prentice Hall
Isaksen, S. & Tidd, J., 2006. Meeting the Innovation Challenge. New York: John Wiley and Sons
Judson, A.,1991. Changing Behavior in Organizations: Minimizing Resistance to Change. London: Blackwell Publishers
Lewin, R.,1993. Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos. London: Macmillan.
Lewin, R. & Regine, B. (2001) Weaving Complexity and Business. New York: Texere.
Luthans, F.,1989. Organizational Behavior. New York: McGraw Hill.
McElroy, M., 2003. The new knowledge management, complexity, learning and sustainable innovation. London: Butterworth-Heinemann.
McKee, D.,1992. An organizational learning approach to product innovation. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 9(3), pp. 232-245.
Nonaka, I. & Takeuchi, H.,1995. The knowledge creating company. London: Oxford University Press.
Robins, S., 1991. Organizational Behavior: Concepts, Controversies and Applications. NJ: Prentice Hall.
Stamm, B., 2008. Managing Innovation, Design and Creativity. New York: John Wiley and Son.
Steinberg, R.,1999. Handbook of Creativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Verganti, R., 2006. Innovating through design. Harvard Business Review.
Wagner, C., 2009. Innovation and creativity in a complex world. The world Future Society.
Waldrop, M.,1992. Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos. London: Penguin.


OTTAWA - Pierre Trudeau's bid to enhance Canadian sovereignty and promote economic development in the Arctic created some "friction" with the United States, says a declassified CIA report.
As Stephen Harper wraps up his annual northern tour, the Central Intelligence Agency assessment serves as a reminder that he's not the first prime minister to wave a political flag in the North.
The August 1983 report is among several CIA documents about Canadian affairs released under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act in recent years.
The CIA said Trudeau — and his political predecessors — had effectively tapped into a sense of northern identity, historically a strong ingredient of Canadian nationalism.
The intelligence agency felt Ottawa's interest in asserting itself in the North was primarily due to the region's abundance of petroleum, natural gas and coal.
"This policy has been unilateralist and has resulted in some international friction, particularly with the United States," says the report, adding, "we believe, however, that it will be maintained."
Portions of the CIA handbook on the Canadian Arctic — intended as a reference aid — remain secret.
It traces the history of Canada's claims over the Arctic and examines how boundary disputes, the environment, energy policy, the Inuit and territorial administration had figured in Ottawa's strategy over the decades.
For most of the 20th century, Canada's claims were not challenged because of the region's inaccessibility and the general lack of interest in — or knowledge of — its vast resources, the CIA notes.
The Canadian government "clearly grew uneasy" by the late 1960s as the scarcity of world fuel reserves became increasingly apparent and the location of the Arctic's natural resources became better known.
The U.S. tanker Manhattan's 1969 voyage — without notification or permission — through the Northwest Passage sparked fears of a diminished Canadian grip on the region.
Canada moved to strengthen its legal position by making new jurisdictional claims over fisheries and pollution control, investing in oil and gas exploration, increasing the military's presence and trying to improve communication systems, the report points out.
"It has also sought to formulate Arctic policies with a nationalistic slant to create public interest in and enthusiasm for the development of the 'last frontier.'"
The United States has long been skeptical of Canada's efforts, however, said Christopher Sands, a Canada-U.S. relations expert at the Washington-based Hudson Institute.
"The complaint from the U.S. side, for as long as I can remember, is that Canada uses the Arctic for domestic political purposes — (and) doesn't follow through on commitments and capabilities," Sands said in an interview.
The 1985 passage of another U.S. tanker, the Polar Sea, though the Arctic prompted bold plans by Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservative government to procure an expensive new icebreaker. Soon after, there was talk of acquiring nuclear-powered submarines, but none of these ideas came to fruition.
In recent years, concerns about Arctic sovereignty have intensified due to global warming and the melting of sea ice, which many believe will lead to increased ship traffic through the Northwest Passage.
The Harper government has announced plans for new offshore patrol ships, a high-Arctic research station and a beefed-up military capability in the North.
"This has been a durable theme in Canada, and so I would expect Stephen Harper to keep going up every year he can. Probably his successor will as well," Sands said.
"And there will be lots of announcements of spending. But in terms of actually developing a presence up there, it won't happen. At least it won't happen unless there's a shock to the system that really leads Canadians to demand something else from their leadership."
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By Jim Bronskill, The Canadian Press


Memory is one of the biggest challenges in deep neural networks (DNNs) today. Researchers are struggling with the limited memory bandwidth of the DRAM devices that have to be used by today’s systems to store the huge amounts of weights and activations in DNNs. DRAM capacity appears to be a limitation too. But these challenges are not quite as they seem.
Computer architectures have developed with processor chips specialised for serial processing and DRAMs optimised for high density memory. The interface between these two devices is a major bottleneck that introduces latency and bandwidth limitations and adds a considerable overhead in power consumption.
Although we do not yet have a complete understanding of human brains and how they work, it is generally understood that there is no large, separate memory store. The long- and short-term memory function in human brains is thought to be embedded in the neuron/synapse structure. Even simple organisms such as the C.Elgan worm, with a neural structure made up of just over 300 neurons, has some basic memory functions of this sort.
Building memory into conventional processors is one way of getting around the memory bottleneck problem by opening huge memory bandwidth at much lower power consumption. However, memory on-chip is area expensive and it wouldn’t be possible to add on the large amounts of memory currently attached to the CPU and GPU processors currently used to train and deploy DNNs.
Why do we need such large attached memory storage with CPU and GPU-powered deep learning systems when our brains appear to work well without it?
Why Do Deep Neural Networks Need So Much Memory?
Memory in neural networks is required to store input data, weight parameters and activations as an input propagates through the network. In training, activations from a forward pass must be retained until they can be used to calculate the error gradients in the backwards pass. As an example, the 50-layer ResNet network has ~26 million weight parameters and computes ~16 million activations in the forward pass. If you use a 32-bit floating-point value to store each weight and activation this would give a total storage requirement of 168 MB. We could halve or even quarter this storage requirement by using a lower precision value to store these weights and activations
A greater memory challenge arises from GPUs’ reliance on data being laid out as dense vectors so they can fill very wide single instruction multiple data (SIMD) compute engines, which they use to achieve high compute density. CPUs use similar wide vector units to deliver high-performance arithmetic. In GPUs the vector paths are typically 1024 bits wide, so GPUs using 32-bit floating-point data typically parallelise the training data up into a mini-batch of 32 samples, to create 1024-bit-wide data vectors. This mini-batch approach to synthesizing vector parallelism multiplies the number of activations by a factor of 32, growing the local storage requirement to over 2 GB.
GPUs and other machines designed for matrix algebra also suffer another memory multiplier on either the weights and activations of a neural network. GPUs cannot efficiently execute directly the small convolutions used in deep neural networks. So a transformation called ‘lowering’ is used to convert those convolutions into matrix-matrix multiplications (GEMMs) which GPUs can execute efficiently. Lowering cures execution inefficiency, but at the cost of multiplying either the activation storage or the weight storage by the number of elements in the convolution mask, typically a factor of 9 (3×3 convolution masks). Finally, additional memory is also required to store the input data, temporary values and the program’s instructions. Measuring the memory use of ResNet-50 training with a mini-batch of 32 on a typical high performance GPU shows that it needs over 7.5 GB of local DRAM.
You might think that by using lower-precision compute you could reduce this large memory requirement, but that is not the case for a SIMD machine like a GPU. If you switch to half-precision data values for weights and activations, with a mini-batch of 32, you would only fill half of the SIMD vector width, wasting half of the available compute. To compensate, when you switch from full precision to half precision on a GPU, you also need to double the mini-batch size to induce enough data parallelism to use all the available compute. So switching to lower-precision weights and activations on a GPU still requires over 7.5 GB of local DRAM storage.
You cannot keep such large amounts of storage data on the GPU processor. In fact, many high performance GPU processors have only 1 KB of memory associated with each of the processor cores that can be read fast enough to saturate the floating-point datapath. This means that at each layer of the DNN, you need to save the state to external DRAM, load up the next layer of the network and then reload the data to the system. As a result, the already bandwidth and latency constrained off-chip memory interface suffers the additional burden of constantly reloading weights as well as saving and retrieving activations. This significantly slows down the training time while increasing power consumption.
Three Approaches For Memory-Saving Techniques
Although large mini-batches improve computational efficiency by providing parallelism, research shows that large mini-batches lead to networks with a poorer ability to generalise and that take longer to train. Besides, machine learning model graphs already expose enormous parallelism. True graph machines such as Graphcore’s IPU don’t need large mini-batches for efficient execution, and they can execute convolutions without the memory bloat of lowering to GEMMs. So IPUs have a very much smaller memory footprint than GPUs, small enough to fit on the processing chip even for large networks. The efficiency and performance gains from doing this are huge.
Decades of work on compilers for sequential programming languages means there are several techniques to reduce memory further. First, operations such as activation functions can be performed ‘in-place’ allowing the input data to be overwritten directly by the output. In this way the memory state can be reused. Secondly, memory can be reused by analysing the data dependencies between operations in a network and allocating the same memory to operations that do not use it concurrently.
This second approach is particularly effective when the entire neural network can be analysed at compile-time to create a fixed allocation of memory, since the runtime overheads of memory management reduce to almost zero. The combination of these techniques has been shown to reduce memory in neural networks by a factor of two to three. These optimisation techniques on a parallel program are analogous to the dataflow analysis in a sequential program graph to allow the reuse of registers and stack memory, with their relatively higher efficiency compared to dynamic memory allocation routines.
Another approach is to trade reduced memory for an increase in computation. Often the computational resources are underused, and so an increase in computation won’t necessarily increase runtime. If you’re willing to increase compute further you can achieve relatively higher memory savings compared with the additional computation. This trade-off enables further optimisation of memory usage. A simple technique in this vein is to discard values that are relatively cheap to compute, such as activation functions, and re-compute them when necessary. Substantial reductions can be achieved by discarding retained activations in sets of consecutive layers of a network and re-computing them when they are required during the backwards pass, from the closest set of remaining activations.
Re-computing activations over sets of layers has been demonstrated by the MXNet team to deliver a factor-of-four memory reduction for a ResNet-50 network, but more importantly, results in memory use that scales sub-linearly with respect to the number of layers.
A similar memory-reuse approach has been developed by researchers at Google DeepMind with recurrent neural networks (RNNs). RNNs are a special type of DNN that allow cycles in their structure to encode behaviour over sequences of inputs. For RNNs, re-computation has been shown to reduce memory by a factor of 20 for sequences of length 1000 with only a 30% performance overhead.
A third significant approach has been recently discovered by the Baidu Deep Speech team. They have applied various memory-saving techniques to obtain a factor of 16 reduction in memory for activations, enabling them to train networks with 100 layers when previously for the same memory size they could only train networks with 9 layers.
Combining memory and processing resources in a single device has huge potential to increase the performance and efficiency of DNNs as well as others forms of machine learning systems. It is possible to make a trade off between memory and compute resources to achieve a different balance of capability and performance in a system that can be generally useful across all problem sets.
Neural networks and the knowledge models in other machine learning techniques can be thought of as mathematical graphs. These graphs expose huge amounts of parallelism. A parallel processor designed to exploit graph parallelism does not need to rely on mini-batches to achieve high compute utilization and can therefore significantly reduce the amount of local storage required.
The state-of-the-art results surveyed here show efficient use of memory through reuse and trading increased computation for reduced memory use. These techniques can deliver dramatic improvements in the performance of neural networks. Today’s GPUs and CPUs have very limited on-chip memory, just a few MBs in aggregate. New processor architectures, like Graphcore’s IPU, specifically designed for machine learning adopt a much better balance between memory and compute on chip, delivering very dramatic improvements in performance and efficiency over today’s CPUs and GPUs.


Quality schooling has little impact on teenage sexual activity
A report published in the online open access journal, BMC Public Health, shows that socio-economic situation and the local high school catchment area have a more powerful influence on reported sexual experience among 15 and 16 year olds than classroom discipline or the quality of relationships within schools.
This is the first study to attempt to look beyond the formal sex education curriculum and assess whether the way in which schools are run, in terms of their organisation and social relationships, can affect levels of sexual activity amongst pupils. A team of researchers from Glasgow and Edinburgh analysed data on nearly 5000 pupils from 24 different Scottish Schools. They found that overall 42% of girls and 33% of boys reported experience of sexual intercourse, but the rates between schools ranged widely, from 23% to 61%.
“Schools have the potential to influence their pupils’ behaviour through the school’s social organisation and culture, as well as through the formal curriculum,” said study lead author Dr Marion Henderson from the Medical Research Council Social and Public Health Sciences Unit in Glasgow. “The idea of Health Promoting Schools – whereby schools move beyond their formal health education curricula to examine how their policies and practices throughout the school affect the health and well-being of pupils – is now encouraged by government.”
However, the study found that how well a school is run appeared to have little influence at all on sexual behaviour. Once the researchers had accounted for all the known predictors of sexual activity (parental monitoring, individual socio-economic factors, the age of pupils, their levels of personal spending money or the proportion of their friends perceived to be having sex) – the variance between schools dropped sharply. The characteristics of a school, including relationships between teachers and pupils, appearance, discipline and the school's layout, showed only a very weak impact on the rates of sexual experience.
The results revealed that school level socio-economic factors remain very influential even after individual pupils’ socio-economic status is taken into account. Dr Henderson explained: ‘‘School-level socio-economic factors, such as levels of deprivation, do have a big influence. This suggests that an individual who is deprived but attending a school with an affluent catchment area may be discouraged from sexual activity, whilst an affluent individual attending a school with a deprived catchment area may be encouraged towards earlier sexual intercourse.”
Source: BioMed Central


What Do Fly Maggots Look Like?
By Chris Williams on May 23, 2014.
We’ve seen a couple of flies inside the house and now I’m finding these white worms crawling up the walls in my kitchen! Do you think flies are breeding in our food somewhere? What do fly maggots look like?—A. D., Amesbury, MA
No, I don’t think flies are breeding in your food, but I think other insects might be.
I know that your “worms” are not fly larvae (maggots) because fly maggots are wingless and cannot crawl. You don’t say how big your worms are, but a full-grown house fly maggot is still small, about ¼ inches long. It’s white and has no head or legs; one end is wider than the other which tapers to a point. The maggot has two clawlike hooks at the tapered end (which you can only see under magnification) that it uses for feeding and pulling itself along.
Fly maggots are usually found burrowing in their food material which is always something warm, moist, rotting, and disgusting, like garbage or animal (or human) poop. When they’re ready to pupate and turn into flies, the maggots leave the food material and crawl off to a drier place.
Because your worms are crawling around in the kitchen, I think you might have an infestation of stored food insects. If the worms are whitish, about ½ inch long, and have a brown head and short legs, then I think you have an infestation of Indian meal moths and you are seeing the larval stage (see Those White Worms Are Indian Meal Moths).
These little moths are pretty common pests in home kitchens. Their larvae feed in a wide variety of foods ranging from dry pet food to cereals, flour, bread, spices, nuts, dried fruit, and much more. Like fly maggots, the moth larvae leave the food when they are full-grown and look for a hidden place to pupate. If they are Indian meal moth larvae, you will soon see small copper and gray moths flitting about your kitchen.
Because Indian meal moth larvae can feed on practically anything in your kitchen, finding the infested foods can be a job. I recommend that you contact an exterminator to first confirm the identification of your “worms,” and then to help find and eliminate the source (or sources) of the infestation. As to why you’ve been seeing flies in your home, there could be many explanations. An exterminator can solve that problem, too. Give Colonial a call today.
Maggot photo: Pavel Krok (Own work (own photo)) [GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0], via Wikimedia Commons
Indian meal moth larva photo: Pudding4brains (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
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Mammogram - calcifications
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Calcifications are tiny deposits of calcium in your breast tissue. They are often seen on a mammogram.
Microcalcifications or macrocalcifications; Breast cancer - calcifications; Mammography - calcifications
The calcium you eat or take in as medicine does not cause calcifications in the breast.
Most calcifications are not a sign of cancer. Causes may include:
- Calcium deposits in the arteries inside your breasts
- History of breast infection
- Noncancerous (benign) breast lumps or cysts
- Past injury to the breast tissue
- Powders, deodorants, or ointments that are placed on the skin
Large, rounded calcifications (macrocalcifications) are common in women over age 50. They look like small white dots on the mammogram. They are most likely not related to cancer. You will rarely need more testing.
Microcalcifications are tiny calcium specks seen on a mammogram. Most of the time, they are not cancer. However, these areas may need to be checked more closely.
WHEN IS FURTHER TESTING NEEDED?
When microcalcifications are present on a mammogram, the doctor (a radiologist) may ask for a larger view so the areas can be examined more closely.
Calcifications that do not appear to be a problem are called benign. No specific follow-up is needed.
In most cases, calcifications that are slightly abnormal but do not look like a problem are also called benign. Most women will need to have a follow-up mammogram in 6 months.
Calcifications that are irregular in size or shape (spiculated), or tightly clustered together, are called "suspicious calcifications." Your health care provider will recommend a stereotactic core biopsy. This is a needle biopsy that uses a type of mammogram machine to help find the calcifications.
Most women who have suspicious calcifications do not have cancer.
Bartella L, Smith CS, Dershaw DD, Liberman L. Imaging breast cancer. Radiol Clin North Am. 2007. Jan;45(1):45-67. PMID: 17157623 www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17157623.
Davidson N. Breast cancer and benign breast disorders. In: Goldman L, Schafer AI, eds. Goldman's Cecil Medicine. 24th ed. Philadelphia, PA: Elsevier Saunders; 2011:chap 204.
James JJ, Wilson M, Evans AJ. The breast. In: Adam A, Dixon AK, Gillard JH, et al. eds. Grainger & Allison's Diagnostic Radiology: A Textbook of Medical Imaging. 6th ed. New York, NY: Churchill Livingstone; 2014:chap 69.
- Last reviewed on 11/4/2014
- John A. Daller, MD, PhD., Department of Surgery, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Little Rock, AR. Review provided by VeriMed Healthcare Network. Also reviewed by David Zieve, MD, MHA, Isla Ogilvie, PhD, and the A.D.A.M. Editorial team.
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The celebration of this day came about through the Global Handwashing Partnership, an organization consisting of various companies, organizations and research institutes. Members work to raise awareness of how important it is to wash their hands with soap.
You can read more about The Global Handwashing Partnership here >>
Maintaining good hand hygiene prevents illness and saves lives*.
- Wash your hands with soap for about 30 seconds.
- Rinse your hands
- Use soap thoroughly
- Work up a lather and make sure your entire hands are covered with lather. Don’t forget your thumbs, top and fingers.
- Rinse and dry your hands thoroughly
This is how we can help prevent infections and the spread of infection in society.
Don’t forget to celebrate this day, you too!


|Caribbean > St. Vincent & The Grenadines|
St. Vincent & The Grenadines
In the past, St. Vincent was known as as Hairoun ("Land of the Blessed")
St. Vincent & The Grenadines Caribbean Vacations
St. Vincent and the Grenadines, part of the Windward Islands, are located at 13° 15 N, 61° 12 W. Their closest neighbours are Grenada, 75 miles to the south, St. Lucia 24 miles to the north and Barbados 100 miles to the east. St. Vincent is the largest of the more than 30 islands that comprise the nation, covering roughly 150 sq. miles. The Grenadines extend 72 km 45 miles to the southwest, like a kite's tail.
In addition to its sheltered coastline, St. Vincent boasts an active volcano (La Soufriere), a rarity in the Caribbean. St. Vincent and the Grenadines is the destination of choice for seafarers and nautical enthusiasts, with wide natural harbors and great white sand beaches.
Courtesy Ministry of Tourism, St. Vincent and the Grenadines


Reviewing Timeline Collection: A Collection of Historical Timeline Figures by Home School in the Woods really helped my daughter understand and organize her history studies.
This year, we are using A Child’s History of the World by Virgil M. Hillyer to talk about history.
History is usually a very dry subject in our household. So, we decided to work with stories. Make learning about world history more interesting.
When we got the opportunity to review the Timeline Collection, I was eager to use it to see if it would help my daughter. Hopefully, being able to see the figures on a timeline would help bring the readings full circle for her.
I began by looking through each chapter of the book. Then, I would go through the Names and Dates of each particular time period in the downloadable pdf. Once I found a figure that was mentioned in the book, I would add the page where it was located to my daughter’s list of materials to accompany the reading.
After she completes the chapter, she then prints out the page where the figure is located. We started printing it with text but then decided that it would be best for her to write what she understood in her own words to help with retaining the information.
Not every figure that is in the Timeline Collection is included in her reading. (And there are a lot of figures.) If she was interested in a particular figure, we would open the pdf with text to talk about them. If it was not already printed to cut out another figure, it was easier on the ink to look at it from the computer screen.
Because we do not have a dedicated homeschool space in our house, we chose to create a timeline notebook. Placing the timeline on the wall would have been ideal for my 4th grader, but space is already limited.
There were some great suggestions on how to create a timeline notebook on the Start page. It is a webpage that was included in the download files.
Although my daughter is very crafty, momma is not. It would have taken several hours (or maybe days) to create a timeline notebook that I would have been comfortable using. Thankfully, there were photos included with each explanation. That made it easier for me to locate an already made timeline notebook that I could download for free and then print out as needed.
Because there was such great information and suggestions included in the download files, I also signed up to receive emails from Home School in the Woods. One of the first emails sent talked about how they started using timelines.
I was able to read through one of the many blogs posted to help homeschoolers who may have questions about Teaching with Timelines. It talks about how timelines can help organize the sheer quantity of information that is history.
What caught my attention was the explanation of how teaching with timelines can help keep studies “light and fun” instead of “boring and sluggish”. Like I said earlier…DRY.
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The Geological Outpost T2 was founded by geological survey advance team. They scanned the planet for minerals, finding the likes of: Cinder, Evaporite, and Gypsum. It relied solely on the solar power provided by M6-117's three suns for energy, and consisted of multiple structures, including a Water Reticulation Unit and a coring room.
22 years before the Hunter Gratzner survivors discovered it, an eclipse had rapidly released millions of Bioraptors (both adult and infant), forcing the geology expedition team to immediately abandon most of their work and take shelter inside the structure with the most resilient doors. However, they forgot to lock the cellar door, leading to their demises.
When the outpost was discovered by the survivors of the Hunter Gratzner crash, the site was abandoned, although functional to an extent. They repaired the Water Reticulation Unit, and the Sandcat. They also found a functional Skiff, which was missing the power nodes. Carolyn Fry discovered the orrery and they learned of the eclipse. After retrieving the power nodes from Hunter Gratzner, they started the Skiff and 3 people manged to leave the outpost.


U-Boats in the Black Sea
Last week I examined the U-boat war in the Arctic. This week I'd like to turn your attention roughly 2,000 miles to the south. There in the Black Sea, the Soviet Navy faced off against the Axis powers in a poorly understood war that nevertheless featured nearly the full spectrum of potential naval operations: from amphibious landings, to big-gun fire support for ground forces, convoy battles, sea-control efforts, sea-denial operations, anti-shipping missions, anti-submarine warfare (ASW), mine laying and clearing, and submarine warfare.
In this article we shall look at the battle beneath the waves. More specifically, how the Germans employed U-boats in the Black Sea, and to what extent those U-boats proved effective - or not. Before we can do that however, we first have to set the stage for the arrival of the U-boats. The Black Sea, far from being a distant backwater of the war, proved important to the fighting on land in the Ukraine, Crimea, Southern Russia, and The Caucuses. When Barbarossa began in June 1941 the Soviet Navy ranked as the dominant seapower in the Black Sea deploying: one battleship, five cruisers, fifteen destroyers, eighteen minesweepers, and a whopping fourty four submarines and eighty four motor torpedo boats (MTB's). In comparison, the Romanian Navy served as the primary Axis surface fleet in the region - with a mere four destroyers, six fleet torpedo boats, seven MTB's, two minelayers, one submarine, and five midget submarines.
It's perhaps no surprise then that the Soviet Navy had an outsize influence on the fighting along the Black Sea's coast during 1941. In particular, the Soviet fleet played a key role in allowing the city of Odessa and it's large garrison of nearly 90,000 men to put up a protracted resistance before succumbing to the Axis assault. Even then, the Soviet Navy evacuated a large number of Odessa's defenders, and they along with the Soviet Navy subsequently helped stop initial Axis efforts to take Sevastopol. From there, the Soviet Navy conducted a number of amphibious assaults that in December of 1941 led to the Red Army's recapture of the Crimean Kerch Peninsula. Axis forces were unable to evict the Soviet army, supplied throughout the winter by the Red Navy, until the spring of 1942. Meanwhile, Soviet submarines operating along the Bulgarian and Romanian coast sent nearly 30,000 tons of Axis shipping to the bottom; albeit at the cost of five Soviet submarines lost to Romanian minefields (out of a total of 15 submarines Romanian minefields claimed by the war's end).
The Germans realized they could not let the Soviet Navy continue to be a thorn in Army Group South's side. Though German airpower took the largest toll on Soviet shipping and naval operations the Germans knew that to control the Black Sea they would need to get warships into it. Therein was the problem. The Montreux convention of 1936 had granted Turkey control over the Bosporus straights guarding entry into the Black Sea from the Mediterranean. Though Germany hardly had any problems violating treaties (with Barbarossa itself perhaps the biggest such violation) the Germans were loathe to force or induce Turkey (a neutral power during World War II) to allow the passage of Germany's most effective naval weapon into the Black Sea: Type VII U-boats. The Germans feared that in doing so the large British fleet could enter the Black Sea and make life even more difficult for the Axis powers. As such, Germany turned to a solution first employed during World War I: overland transport of submarines (during WWI accomplished by rail to the Adriatic).
Once again, and just like in the Baltic operations during Barbarossa, Germany turned to the recently retired Type II coastal U-boat fleet: in this case chosing three Type IIB U-boats then in service as training boats off the Prussian coast. Displacing 275 tons surfaced the Type IIB could make thirteen knots on the surface, and seven submerged, with a cruising range of just over 3,000 miles on the surface and about forty miles submerged. As previously mentioned the Type IIB carried only a modest armament of five torpedoes (or a single torpedo and nine mines) capable of being fired from three torpedo tubes. All told, Germany commissioned 20 Type IIB's during the war - six of which served with the 30th U-boat flotilla in the Black Sea.
Transporting the U-boats to the Black Sea proved a complicated process. The Germans first stripped down the U-boats in Kiel and then mounted the hulls on rafts floated through the Kiel canal and up the Elbe to Dresden. From there, they put the U-boats on trailers towed by powerful Kuhlemeyer trucks to Ingolstadt on the Danube River. There, the Germans returned the U-boats to rafts and used tugs to pull them to Galati, Romania. Reassembly took just over a month and thus a process that began in April of 1942 did not end until October of 1942 when U-24 became the first German U-boat to sail operationally in the Black Sea. The Germans also sent down the Danube over 30 S-boats and R-boats as well as a myriad number of other light ships to also fight in the Black Sea. Unfortunately for the Germans, and in part due to their late arrival in the region, the U-boats were able to accomplish very little toward influencing the war during the critical year of 1942. By late 1944 the 30th flotilla had sent to the bottom just over 45,000 tons of Soviet shipping (with most of this damage done during 1943) but by September of 1944 the Red Army was sweeping through the Balkans. All six Type IIB U-boats of the 30th flotilla were subsequently scuttled - three off the Romanian coast and three along the Turkish coast. The Turks interned the crews for the remainder of the war.
The concept of using Type II U-boats in the Black Sea was a sound one. However the U-boats never proved the equal to German airpower in terms of damage caused to Soviet shipping. Moreover, due to the small size of the U-boat commitment they proved unable to effectively interdict Soviet shipping and influence operations on land. One can only wonder what might have been had the Germans reacted with more alarm and urgency to the Soviet Black Sea fleet's success during 1941. By October of 1941 it was clear that Barbarossa had failed to knock the Soviet Union from the war in a single campaign, and the Soviet Black Sea fleet had played a key role in slowing Army Group South's march east. Yet the decision to send U-boats to the Black Sea was not made until the spring of 1942 - far too late to matter with too few of these useful coastal U-boats dispatched to the region. Yet again, the German decision to overemploy available assets in strategically secondary theaters (such as U-boats in the Arctic) cost them in Southern Russia and the Black Sea littoral during the Second World War's most important campaign.


Thomas Ågren, a doctoral candidate at the Department of Psychology under the supervision of Professors Mats Fredrikson and Tomas Furmark, has shown, that it is possible to erase newly formed emotional memories from the human brain.
When a person learns something, a lasting long-term memory is created with the aid of a process of consolidation, which is based on the formation of proteins. When we remember something, the memory becomes unstable for a while and is then restabilized by another consolidation process. In other words, it can be said that we are not remembering what originally happened, but rather what we remembered the last time we thought about what happened. By disrupting the reconsolidation process that follows upon remembering, we can affect the content of memory.
In the study the researchers showed subjects a neutral picture and simultaneously administered an electric shock. In this way the picture came to elicit fear in the subjects which meant a fear memory had been formed. In order to activate this fear memory, the picture was then shown without any accompanying shock. For one experimental group the reconsolidation process was disrupted with the aid of repeated presentations of the picture. For a control group, the reconsolidation process was allowed to complete before the subjects were shown the same repeated presentations of the picture.


MatLab is an excellent software for engineering students because it is not only easy to use, but it allows students to find answers to their questions quickly. This type of flexibility is what makes MatLab so valuable to engineering students. However, these types of skills can be difficult to master when you first start your engineering career.
One of the best things that you can do to learn how to do this is to practice using matrix exercises. Using these exercise questions can get you comfortable with taking problems and solving them with the skills that you are learning about. If you can find an example of a problem that you want to work on, then you should follow the examples in order to solve the problem.
It is very important that you understand that you will have to do matrix exercises in order to learn about this type of skills. Even if you are well versed in basic programming, you will have to use matrix exercises to gain experience in using your MatLab skills. A great way to do this is to read the MATLAB Help Manual to learn how to use the matrices properly.
You can find matrix assignments from a variety of topics throughout the book. These include projects that help students work with the expression system, MATLAB tips, teaching exercises, MATLAB assignment help, and the links chapter. There are also sections on the MATLAB internals that will help you understand the MATLAB software better.
To do matrix assignments effectively, students should read the examples in order. There are problems in the text book that are more complex than the ones in the main text. Students should be able to follow the examples through to the end, even though they are complicated.
The reader will be able to identify with most of the examples in this book, which should help students when they are doing matrix assignments. One interesting section of the book has the list of tools that you will need to learn how to use these exercises correctly. This will allow students to learn more about how to read these tests. Without reading the appropriate matrix, you will find that you will be difficult to understand the consequences of the problems.
In the second part of the book, you will find three different sections that discuss MatLab and how it is used in engineering. Many of the exercises that are discussed in this section will require students to solve problems that involve MATLAB. Some of the problems will also use the tips that students should use.
There are times when students may not feel that they can work on these problems. This book has sections that will show students how to use MatLab in this situation. In this section, students will learn the best ways to use MATLAB to solve problems. There are several different options that will help students work with MATLAB.
An example of an exercise from this book is how to use the matrix update system to answer a matrix assignment. This exercise will require students to go through a matrix assignment that gives the student four digits. Students will need to find the largest and smallest digit in the matrix in order to complete the assignment.
In order to do this exercise, students will need to know how to use the matrix update system. This system is included in the examples of matrix exercises that students will work with. However, this exercise will not teach the student how to solve a matrix assignment with the help of the matrix update system.
MatLab assignment help for this book is very helpful for students who are trying to learn about matrices. They will be able to learn about solving matrices, finding the roots of matrices, solving for the solutions of matrices, and solving for the determinants of matrices. All of these concepts will be learned when they look at the examples.