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SQLBalls: Day 4 Summit Keynotes Live, DENALI HAS A NAME! SQL Server 2012!
Day 4 Summit Keynotes Live, DENALI HAS A NAME! SQL Server 2012!
Hello Dear Reader, this is my first live blogging. I'm going to do this a little different, I'll be writting in reverse. I owe you a blog on Day 3 and another lesson in Compression for SQL U, and they will be coming but for now the Keynote is about to begin for the opening day . This will stay at the top, but I'll be bloggin in reverse order, so start from the bottom and scroll up to see the updates as they are posted.
Ted is wrapping this out, he talks about how the community is essential to move this forward. About how we could take the worlds data and use it immedieately.
1st half of the next Calendar we will have SQL Server 2012. He plugs the next two days of Keynote sessions.
The Windows 8 Tablet is being demoed showing PowerView/Cresent! It is completely Dynamic and internactive.
Ted thanks Amir for taking the stage.
Amir starts talking about how if you use your data properly you can use it to tell a story. That story is what is going on in your business, and that every business would want to know their own story by the data.
Yesterday they confirmed that they would be able to do Export to PowerPoint from Cresent/PowerView!
Now Amair is showing that Cresent/PowerView is going to work on a Windows 7 Phone, and it is fully functional!
Wow so if your company goes with a Windows 7 phone you can use your self service BI on the Windows phone. Now he is Demoing a PowerPoint on the IPAD 2. He is now demoing PowerView on the Android Samsung Tablet.
We continue on the Demo, there are a lot genera's to hop from, and it is very interestign to see how internactive this data is.
Amir said Samuel Jackson is no Tom Hanks, but Samuel L Jackson has the most gross ever, Ted cringes. He doesn't know who Alan Richman is and why he is in so many high grossing power house movies. He uses the data to show Alan is in all the Harry Potter and the first Die Hard movie.
Samuel L Jackson has twice as many movies as most actors. The only Actor with more movies than Samuel L Jackson John Wayne. Ha! Nice funny demo with good interplay.
Our Demo is going to come from Real Data with Cresent/Powerview from BoxOfficieMojo.com, one of my favorite movie sites, and they are owned by IMDB.com.
He is showing the Cresent out lyers for what the number of movies and their sales in a scatter chart. The top 2 outlyer's Computer Animation kids, and Comedy. He uses the highlighting function in PowerView, and in comedy Meet the Focker's is the #1 comedy of all time according to the data by sales & profit. He does a breakdown of the evolution of comedies by year and timeline. He does a slicer that on different sales go tive us a card deck view by different profit margines.
He shows how profit margine increases as Hollywood adopted BI, and could look at data like this, drawing quite a few laughs.
He shows how when Toy Story launched from 1995 on computer animation ruled the roost. The most impressive thing is he did all that without touching the keyboard. PowerView is very dynamic on what the user can do with the data.
Because Data Explorer is a service and the data follows us in the Cloud, this data is mobile and available very quickly.
tim and Nino leave the Stage and Ted returns. Just an FYI this is code named "Data Explorer" in Azure Labs.
Ted is talking about how this ties into Microsoft's Vision for Empouring all users through the tools they use every day. We are discussing Self Service BI, how delivering this to the end user empowers them, and gives IT a greater roll in Governance.
He is building towards an anouncment, refrencing Cresent/Power View, PowerPivot, and mobile devices. Ted is talking about how he used his mobile Windows Phone to look over his slide deck for today last night while he was out getting a coffee.
He welcomes Amir Netz Technical Fellow to discuss Unlock New Insights, Anywhere. Ted is discussing what it means to be a Technical Fellow. Amir has a distingusihed career in BI. "He was in BI at Microsfot before we had a BI Stack." With that Ted leaves the stage and turn's it over to Amir.
They are now discussing what the datasets are that were brought in. There are Bing Services will add refrence data for phone books, they are overlaying the number of High Schools within a 1 mile radious because teenagers like frozen yogurt.
I get the demographic information, however people are laughing because a demo where you track High Schooler's and where they are is a little creepy. I get it professionally, but they should have done a different age segment.
The point is they are showing how actual Service Calls to Microsoft Applications will be able to be used to provide demographic information to provide analysis on the Azure Market Place.
Now they are using PowerPivot to pull down the information and using Sharepoint to make this available to many different users. They were able to pull disparet datasources to determine the Shopping Centers that teenagers are most likely to shop at, and that is where the targeted location of the store should be.
The demo is Hontoso Frozen Yogart to figure out the best location for their next store. They got a SQL Azure Databae and got a normalized score about how their Stores are performing by profit.
They are extracting the data and they will use the Data Explorer to interface with that data, and then return highly relavent recommendations of what they should do next.
He added an Excel spreadsheet of a list of Shopping Centers for the area. He hit a button called Mashup, that will overlay the data on top of one another and start making comparisions. There is a rank field called relative performance value.
Tim explains to us that Overlays are to the business world what Joins are for us DBA folk. The Azure Marketplace has recommended some data that would show demographic information that would help with the decision. Another Overlay/Join is done, and we now are starting to get recommendations.
We made a 3 way join against Excel, Azure, and the Marketplace in very little time.
Ted is talking about how we integrate media from disparet sources. Data Quality Services, Family Data, reference Data, Weather & Climate, Health and wellness, and much more all available via the Azure Marketplace.
Microsoft's Vision, being able to Enrich your data with the world's data using "Decision Engines", Empower developers to build new services and applications, offer a Vibrant marketplace ecosystem for the World's Data.
Our next demo is SQL Data Explorer. He welcomes Tim Mllalieu and Nino Bice to the stage. We are looking at SQL Azure Labs, it looks a lot like Windows 8 or the current Windows Phone.
He is a web admin who wants to monitor his trafic. The solution, Hadoop on Windows Cluster. He starts showing us HiveQL a query that is similar to Java that will run against Hadoop on Windows Server.
The Hadoop console is basically the command line. He's telling us about the millions of rows that his multi-node cluster is processing along. He wants to figure out a better way to see this data. His connector of choice? PowerPivot for Excel using the Hadoop conectors that are available now.
He pulls it all down, and shows us one of the workbooks that are coming with PowerPivot Denali. He's joining this data against SQL Server, and Azure Market place data.
He's showing us the data about people hitting this website, by language. He now switches over to Sharepoint to show us the server that he is running. The report refresh took an hour, he is demoing how when you write a report and post it on Sharepoint, it will continue to refresh from disparet datasources and become something a business can rely on.
Ted Thanks Denny and Denny leaves the stage.
Horton Works is taking the experts that help Google solve it's problems and brought them together. He believes that Hadoop could be storing 1/2 the world's data in 3 years. He is discussing working with other companies and that hortonworks will be working to expand this use.
This is an Open Source Community project. Eric is very excited that they SQL Server community and all of our activitiy could be providing feed back to this project.
Eric Thanks us all and leaves the stage.
Now Denny Lee, a Principal Program Manager for the SQL Server team, is coming on stage next to discuss Activating New Types of Data.
Denny takes the stage and ask's if we are ready for some Demo's! YES! He says not yet.
He is talking about participating in the Apache Program. To make sure that SQL interfaces with it in the best way.
The other Announcement, they have formed a partnership with Horton Works. He just welcomed Erick Baldeschwieler the CEO of Horton Works to the stage to talk about the partnership.
Where would you see or know Hadoop, that is the back end for Google! This is big!
The vision going forward is in 3 points.
Manage and Process all types of data, mission criticle scale from on premises to cloud, Common management and development between SQL Server and SQL Azure.
We are discussing Big Data now. Here is how he is defining it.
He points out that Microsoft because of Search, Email, and all thier other offerings they have over 700 PB's of DATA!
"We believe the Cloud is a hybrid work place. You will want to keep things in your data center on the ground, and there are things you will want in the Cloud." He just announced very slyly that they are MERGING the code base for the Cloud and Denali. A move forward in that is SSRS in the Cloud, and features that they are delivering in Denali.
Those 3 area's in Denali AlwaysOn for High Availability, Column Store Indexes for Denali first introduced in PowerPivot, Cresent which will be Power View in Denali. Thoughts of the Cloud in what they do Juneau will be SQL Database Tools when Denali is released.
He points to some of the customers that have database's in production in Denali: Dell Pilot, Great Western Bank, and others.
Ted is talking about what we will cover today, Denali and demos.
He is Thanking PASS for all we do to spread the word about SQL Server. He points out that we offer over 400,000 Technical Hours, 79,000 Members, 300 Microsoft MVP's, and 233 SQL PASS Chapters. This is the largest PASS Summit Ever!
"It's been a busy year since we last got together." Yes it has. Choice is a big theme, he is pointing out the advances made in releases for Hardware Devices like Parallel Data Warehouse, the releases in SQL Server 2008 SP 3, 2008 R2 SP 1, the Cloud, Azure Marketplace, Management Portal for SQL Azure.
He is thanking Microsoft Dell, CA, EMC, Expressor, Fusion-IO, and HP for being sponsors for the Summit. AND A BIG THANK YOU INDEED! We have the largest collection of vendors ever at a PASS Summit.
We are talking about the SQL Server MVP Deep Dives 2 Book that has been on sale exclusively at the Summit. Next week it opens up every where over 53 MVP's contributed to this. One of the great things about this book is that the MVP's do not recieve a dime for this book. Every penny spent goes to Operation Smile to provide dental work for children in 3rd world countries. Great Cause.
Rushabh's rapping up now, and introducing Sr. Vice President of Business Development Platform Division Ted Kummert, he owns all the applications from the Database, Application, and the way they integrate. From the Cloud to the Ground.
Ted said that SQL Server is the most widely adopted Database platform in the world, from Ground to Cloud. Quick dig at Oracle who just hit the cloud, and Microsoft has been ther 18 months already. Nice.
A picture of our bloggers that are at the blogger table today is posted. a lot of amazing people, Denny Cherry, Brent Ozar, Andy Warren, Jorge Segarra, just an amazin number of people.
I'll try to get the full list out later with links to thier blogs and twitter handles.
We are talking about Twitter and the way that we use that so heavily, some of the # Hashtags, or search terms that we have created.
Right now he is posting information about the SQL CAT Team the clinic hours that they have open, and the different sessions that they have. At PASS this year we have.
The importiance of Community and building connections has been a common theme throughout the Summit. The First Timers Program and the session with Don Gabor (Awesome and I haven't done the recap yet), had over 800 people attend it yesterday evening until 8 pm.
This year PASS has given 430,000 hours of free traing, we have 80,000 members and 1 Global Region. The goal is to get to 1 Million hours of technical training, 250,000 members and 5 Global Regions.
To help achieve this goal 3 international Board of Director seats were added to help influence this from Denmark, Germany, and I missed the third. PASS was a partner in SQL BITS in the UK and they felt that was a very large success.
Rushabh Mehta the PASS President just took the stage. Apparently Twitter is tipping over!
Rushabh is thanking the Board of Directors, the Committie members, and making sure we know these are the people that we should approach with ideas.
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2019-04-24T20:22:47Z
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http://www.sqlballs.com/2011/10/day-4-summit-keynotes-live.html
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Tom Rich is an entrepreneur with 50 years of dedication and experience as a management consultant to Fortune 100 Corporations such as: Colgate-Palmolive, American Express and American International Group (AIG). Tom is also the founder of various Phoenix Energy companies.
In the last 25 years, he has developed entrepreneurial projects in an array of important and timely sectors in agribusiness, nutraceuticals and real estate. In the last 10 years Mr. Rich has been working on projects that allow communities to create clean energy using the materials they have on hand. This aspect can make communities reliant on reconstituting waste by turning it into energy and freeing their community from imported fossil fuels from now and into the future. In the last few years Tom has dedicated himself to utilizing various wastes for creating sustainable energy systems by using his Phoenix Environmental Systems as his vehicle.
Finally, he is currently involved with digital products and services for mobile-web application development through DigiData Systems Inc., which he founded to address state of the art digital technologies.
Tom served his country honorably for four years in the United States Army, with extensive service overseas. He received his Master’s degree in International Studies from the University of California, Berkeley and a Bachelor’s degree in International Economics from Saint Steven’s College at the University of Delhi in India.
Richard A. (Rick) DiIoia has 25 years in the power and energy field holding various levels of sales and management positions. His technical and marketing background covers Turbine, Diesel, Gas Engine Power Generation, Cogeneration and Trigeneration Microgrids. Rick has held sophisticated management positions for divisions of Cummins, Detroit Diesel, DTE Energy Technologies and OnSight Energy. He has also served as a consultant to solar installation companies and alternative energy providers. Mr. DiIoia has additionally managed major regional energy efficiency utility programs.
In addition, his vast experience in development and management of the delivery and installation of a variety of power systems for both foreign and domestic business establishes him as a well versed expert in the field of power and energy. He has tirelessly worked to improve the power and energy systems for government and military facilities as well as power plants, resort hotels, hospitals, telecommunication facilities, landfill sites, residential developments, utility operations, college and municipalities.
Mr. DiIoia received a BS Degree in Mechanical Engineering from Temple University.
Traffic.com- Power Reliability Turnkey Installation consisting of UPS, Emergency Generator and Switchgear for TV stationTraffic.com（Power Reliability Turnkey Installation).
Bruce initiated his legal career at Wyeth (formerly American Home Products Corporation, now merged with Pfizer) in the Law Department, where he was a Senior Attorney with responsibility for corporate legal affairs in Latin America and Asia. Responsibilities included supporting mergers and acquisitions, tax planning, litigation, and Patent and Trademark licensing. Bruce was promoted to management, where he was Group Vice President for the Ethical Pharmaceutical Division for Latin America and Canada having responsibilities for 10 vertically integrated subsidiaries (including pharmaceutical and infant nutritional manufacturing facilities) having sales in excess of US$ 1 billion. He was subsequently promoted to President, International for the Consumer Health Division with responsibility for 30 subsidiaries engaged in marketing and sales of global brands such as ADVIL, CENTRUM, CALTRATE, ROBITUSSIN and CHAP-STIK. At Wyeth, he served on the Operations Committee and carried out extensive government lobbying while Chairman of both the Latin America and Canada Committees of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. He maintains an independent law practice advising clients on transnational transactions and is Vice President and Chief Financial Officer for Phoenix Environmental Systems, Inc., engaged in developing sustainable development communities in the United States and several foreign countries.
Bruce holds a BA from Villanova University, a JD from Temple Beasley School of Law (where he is on the Board of Visitors) and an LLM in International Legal Studies from NYU Law School. He is a member of the Bar in New York and Pennsylvania.
For the past 30 years Robert has honed his technical, sales and management skills in the power and energy industry. His working knowledge of high and low pressure boilers, conversions of waste to energy, landfill installations, co-generation, natural gas engine and stand-by engine applications are superior by foreign and domestic standards.
Mr. Finger has provided energy conservation projects to industrial, medical and commercial facilities in both foreign and domestic venues. He was instrumental in the construction of more than 100 Mw of landfill, methane reclamation projects in the United States alone. In conjunction with his duties at Phoenix Environmental Systems, he operates CEI Energy. The CEI Energy Company is primarily a project management group specializing in co-generation applications. As COO of Phoenix Environmental Systems, Robert’s primary responsibility is to represent the project owner-customer as their Project Manager and Procurement Manager.
Robert Attended North Shore Community College and Northeastern University.
George brings over 42 years of engineering and environmental experience. Mr. Namie has been instrumental in securing environmental permits for large and small manufacturing facilities. Mr. Namie has permitted several new waste conversion technologies over the past three years in the states of Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Utah. Mr. Namie has extensive experience with technical and regulatory issues including Solid Waste Management, RCRA programs, Waste Minimization, Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, Toxic Substance Control Act, Process Hazard Analysis, Process Safety Management, and ISO 9001:14001 Certification for industrial, institutional, and commercial operations.
Mr. Namie attended The Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, where he majored in Environmental Engineering and Science.
Tom Chou has over 20 years of experience in business development, management, marketing, sales, and manufacturing. He began his career as an engineer at Manufacturers’ Hanover Trust. In 1990, he started T.A.I. Computer Inc. in a basement. Within eight years, he had grown this business into an important computer manufacturer and distributor with annual sales exceeding 100 million dollars and 250 employees in seven east coast locations. In 1998, he was appointed Senior Vice President and General Manager of CTX International, one of the largest PC and monitor manufacturers, with responsibility for new product development and OEM manufacturing. He left CTX International in 1999 and entered into a partnership with China Telecom to provide residential and business international calling services with VoIP technology. This company partnership went on to provide more than 40% of the long distance phone cards in Tri-state New York, New Jersey Connecticut area. Currently he has oriented his entrepreneurial energies to participate in projects in environmental systems, health care, reusable energy, applications of information technology, telecommunications, interactive web programs, real estate, and the entertainment industry. Tom is responsible for the development of PES’ activities in Asia from his office in Beijing, China.
Tom attended State University of New York at Stony Brook and NYU-Polytechnic University at Brooklyn, where he majored in Electrical Engineering and Applied Mathematics. He completed further studies in international business and commerce at New York University.
© 2013 Phoenix Environmental Systems, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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2019-04-22T08:50:12Z
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http://www.phoenixenvironmentalsystems.com/content/management
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An inclusive, nurturing Christian community serving our neighborhood, our city, and our world.
And I’ve struggled this week about what to say, because I know that Paul was writing to a new Christian community that was experiencing real persecution because of their faith, and that doesn’t translate directly to our situation. I would venture to say that Christians in America do not experience religious persecution, although people of other religions in our country do experience, if not persecution, some pretty strong prejudice or hate. Christians in other parts of the world are persecuted, and by that, I mean killed because they are Christians.
It’s complicated. In the United States, there are hate crimes committed against those of other faiths, and perhaps most common are hate crimes against Muslims. Mosques are graffitied and burned; Muslims are threatened, hurt, or killed. We decry that.
If we read about the persecution of Christians in other parts of the world, often it occurs in predominantly Muslim countries, carried out by Muslim extremists. That strengthens the resolve of those in our own country who persecute American Muslims. But I would say that radical Islamic terrorists do not represent the heart of Islam, just as white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan, which claims to be a Christian organization, do not represent the heart of Christianity.
That’s echoed in these words of Paul in verse 14, “bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.” It makes no sense – unless you fully immerse yourself not only in the teachings of Jesus, but also in the kind of life he invites us to live.
One of the interesting things about working with the letters of Paul is remembering that they were written before the gospels, although the gospels tell a story that took place before Paul wrote his letters. I wonder if Paul had heard some of the stories of Jesus that would be written down after his own death – if he had heard some version of the beatitudes and interpreted them in the writing in his letters; there’s a lovely harmony between the beatitudes and this scripture passage.
But Paul wrote in a very different context than the gospel writers. He was a devout Jew, raised at the crossroads of world civilizations, and drew from the great academic traditions of both the Greeks and the Romans. He had an experience of Jesus that changed his life. He stopped persecuting Christians, and began following Christ. Perhaps he knew of what he wrote when he urged the Romans to bless those who persecuted them. Perhaps he knew, better than most, how a blessing, a good word, a sincere praise, could change hate to something else.
In some ways, his letter to the Romans, and especially this part of chapter 12, best presents his understanding of the new way of life Christ calls his followers to. In ways subtle and not so subtle, Paul took on the way of life proscribed by Rome.
Go ahead and picture in your mind’s eye some wonderful old Cecil B. DeMille-type, ancient-Rome movie – chariots and gladiators and the coliseum and soldiers. Caesar after Caesar after Caesar ruled by military might – the Pax Romana (the peace of Rome) was achieved through military victory. If someone stood in your way, you killed him. It was a violent world, and loyalty to Caesar was essential. Human Caesars were considered divine and were worshipped, along with the pantheon of other Roman gods.
Then the Christians came along. They wouldn’t worship Caesar, wouldn’t call him “lord” because Jesus Christ was their Lord. The authorities of Rome claimed these Christians practiced abominations, that they were mischievous and superstitious. They thought the Lord’s Supper sounded a lot like cannibalism. They thought Christians, in renouncing the ways of the world, hated the human race. Christians didn’t honor the class distinctions that were so critical to a well ordered Roman society. Politics and religion were intricately intertwined, and Christians were on the wrong side of both, as far as Rome was concerned.
When there’s something new that is different, and weird, and you don’t understand it, and you’re the one in power, the first impulse can be to get rid of that thing. And so Rome practiced, to varying degrees, persecution of those who followed Jesus.
The thing about making peace by seeing your enemy or your persecutor as a human being, and the thing about pursing peace through nonviolent justice, is that it takes a long time. There are no quick fixes, no easy victories, no sated blood lust, and no revenge or satisfaction that can feel so good and righteous. It’s more like one step forward and two steps back.
I think about the long and arduous work engaged by people in the world to overcome persecution. It was in South Africa where Mahatmas Gandhi learned about nonviolent resistance as a man of color in a white-ruled nation. He took that learning back to his native India, where he worked tirelessly, using nonviolent means, to help India gain independence from Britain and to establish a country that embraced religious pluralism. That did not happen, but Gandhi continued his work – until he was assassinated for being too accommodating of those who opposed his work.
As the issue of apartheid came to a head in the 1980s, it was the work of the church, of Bishop Desmond Tutu, and the calm-in-a-storm leadership of Nelson Mandela that helped lead that country out of repressive racism. When apartheid was dismantled, the government began the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a very public confession of very real violence and sin, an effort to cauterize some wounds by opening them and exposing them to the power of healing. It’s not perfect there yet, not by a long shot. There are still tensions, and poverty, and racism. But the thumb of oppression has been lifted, and the church, in part, is to thank.
In Northern Ireland, the Troubles between Roman Catholics and Protestants rumbled for decades, creating a society of such sudden violence that no one felt safe. It was Christian against Christian, though the conflict was political in nature. Only a few remembered the way of life Jesus called them to. When the Troubles ended in the late 1990s it was more because of a weariness of all the violence, and some key political concessions, more than a Gandhi-like leader helping to bring resolution. But who knows what effect all the prayers had, prayers of all the people, the priests, the pastors, the nuns, the laywomen and men who were tired of their loved ones dying.
I wonder how Coptic Christians in Egypt, or Orthodox Christians in Syria, or Christians staring down Boko Haram in Nigeria would hear these words of Paul. Do they live amid so much violence that they cannot imagine blessing their persecutors? Or do they hold fast to these words as the only real, holy solution?
The natural disasters of the last month have been horrifying and depressing and sickening. The silver lining has been the stories of good, the stories of neighbor helping neighbor, of people going the extra mile for complete strangers who, in other circumstances, they might hate or consider their enemies or their persecutors. Jim Wallis of Sojourners tells one such story about the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey in Houston.
There are things we will have to leave behind if we’re going to follow Jesus on this slow road to peace. We’ll have to leave behind our desire for vengeance. We’ll have to leave behind all the good curses we’ve been storing up. We’ll have to leave behind our definition of enemy.
But who knows what we’ll pick up along the way? A friend, perhaps, or some grace, or an insight that changes everything. Who knows?
Join us this Sunday, April 28, as the Reverend Eileen Parfrey preaches on 2 Corinthians 3:17-18 and John 20:19-23.
Located on bus lines #8, #17 & #77.
The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has over 10,000 congregations answering Christ's call to ministry. Presbyterians affirm that God comes to us with grace and love in Jesus Christ. As Christ’s disciples, we continue his mission of teaching, feeding, healing, and welcoming.
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2019-04-25T14:14:52Z
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http://westprespdx.org/sermon/bless-their-hearts
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As a Domo Consulting Partner, we’ve seen an increase in executives reaching out to us to get their hands on this fast growing BI technology. Through working with them, I’ve come to realize that there are key differences that set Domo apart from other dashboard and data visualization platforms.
Here are the top 5 reasons that executives love Domo, and why they are driving adoption within their companies.
I’ll start off with what is the most appealing aspect of Domo, and what has led to its momentum. Simply put: Domo drives action. Action = results. And executives love results!
Simply put: @Domotalk drives action. Action = results. And executives love results! Click & Tweet!
Dashboards: Domo’s dashboards get the job done, but are very similar to other data visualization tools out there.
Processing tools: Their internal data processing tools are robust, but nothing too different from what is available in the market (although they do package them all in one platform).
Data Connectors: Sure, they have a lot of connectors (and I do mean a lot) which is definitely a competitive advantage — but so do a lot of other platforms, and they can be buggy at times.
One could even argue the pros and cons of being exclusively in the cloud (clearly it worked for Salesforce), but none of those things are what sets Domo apart, and brings the executives running.
Domo’s main competitive advantage is their entire methodology is geared towards taking action and getting results. It’s not just a “nice to have.” It’s an “all or nothing.” Let me illustrate by comparing their process for creating dashboards with other business intelligence (BI) visualization tools.
Few, if any, drill-downs Most often includes analytics, such as ratio calculations, forecasting, trends, etc.
Dashboards are only the beginning. Who wants to stare at a dashboard all day and try to determine how their business is doing? In this regard, Domo’s claim to fame is its alerting capabilities.
Actionable dashboards should alert someone when something is out of place. If the executive team has done their strategy right, they should know exactly what they are expecting within a margin of error. If the outcome falls outside that margin of error, then it’s time for action!
Here’s an example of Domo’s alerts in their new alert center. An executive is able to see all of the alerts in real-time as they are coming in across the team, and each type is easily identifiable because they are color coded. This allows you to quickly follow different conversations or see when sales are down — all from the Alert Center.
No alerts for today? Time for a round of golf!
Domo is an all-inclusive platform, or as Domo would put it, a “Business Cloud,” designed with the executive in mind — it’s not just another self service BI tool. The last thing an executive wants is to ask a dozen different people for basic answers to questions that are critical to run their business.
Platforms provide an environment where synergies can be realized and ROI gained. And with hundreds, if not thousands, of different tools available in the BI space, it’s no wonder executives are migrating to all-inclusive analytical systems to gain a competitive advantage.
Platforms provide an environment where synergies can be realized and ROI gained. Click & Tweet!
Domo integrates sales, operations, finance, marketing, IT, and everything else that uses data to solve problems or answer questions, and it does so by simplifying your data management. Domo provides simple connections to external data sources, processes your data in-house, and visualizes your data in a streamlined manner that is immediately actionable.
For example, here are some of the products, which you would normally have to purchase separately or build on your own, that Domo provides as part of their platform.
Internal data warehouse: All your data available in one location, without having to manually connect to 50 different sources. This also facilitates self-service analytics by key stakeholders.
Over 450 API connectors: Get up and running with valuable metrics quickly with pre-built connections to your data.
Data visualization tool (Analyzer): Create actionable dashboards that display key performance metrics in real-time.
Team collaboration tool (Buzz): Communicate via chat instantly and directly with your team and record those conversations for a history of your progress.
Extensive resources (Domo University, Dojo Community, Resource Library, Live Support, Dev Portal): It’s clear that Domo was built by business users and business consultants with the executive in mind. Some of the industry best practices are within the Domo resources.
Over 1,000 pre-built applications (think Apple marketplace 10 years ago): Need your development team to create some custom interactive charts, or do some advanced analytics? It might already exist in the Domo AppStore, saving you valuable time and money. And the entire Domo community continues to grow the AppStore more every day.
App Design Studio and App Dev Studio: If it doesn’t exist in the AppStore, then your team can usually build it using the resources and documentation available here. Domo’s support team can also help with difficult tasks.
Multiple ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) tools (SQL Magic tools, Workbench, Data Fusion, etc): This is one area that is rare to find in a data visualization tool, but is critical to providing clean usable data. Domo allows you to schedule data transformations that keep your most valuable data up to date and accurate.
ALERTS: This is likely the most valuable piece of Domo, and something other platforms have lagged behind on. As an executive, you need to know when things are going wrong. Domo is designed from the ground up to provide actionable alerts when the numbers fall out of line with your benchmarks.
Mobile collaboration capabilities: Reports and insights are not actionable if it’s sitting on your desk in the form of a pdf. Domo let’s you see your data, collaborate with your team, and make updates, all while you’re on the go.
Data security and governance: Your company and reputation is only as good as it’s weakest link. If you fail to implement a data governance plan, and secure your data, you leave the company open to chaos. Domo allows you to set passwords and create groups that secure sensitive data. It provides your team with User Level analytics without jeopardizing sensitive information.
As you can see, Domo has approached the BI space with an all-inclusive strategy. They have capitalized on the fact that although there are tools for everything, if those tools require steep learning curves, don’t work well together, or only do 80% of what you need them to do, then you end up with fragmented teams, silos of data, and frustration. Unfortunately, this is the same department that is supposed to bring simplicity, clarity, and insights to your most important questions.
Think of how many companies out there house your personal data (i.e. financial institutions, healthcare, hospitality, retail, e-commerce, education, etc). Most, if not all, of these companies will reach out to you and everyone else in order to grow their business. That means that your data is in motion at these businesses and executives are ultimately responsible for what happens to that data.
PII is one of the fastest growing concerns among executives, especially when GDPR goes into effect in 2018. Mishaps in this area can lead to catastrophic consequences for businesses, including heavy fines from regulators.
Domo has approached this issue by providing the ability to encrypt and decrypt data at the individual row level based on permission levels and set Personalized Data Permissions (PDPs) throughout the organization. Domo also has a “publication groups” that allow executives to select specific people who will be able to view certain reports. This is especially useful when you start looking at regional segmentation and sales territories.
Executives want answers, and they want them now.
Waiting for answers until the next meeting, or for someone to respond via email, doesn’t cut it. Buzz, Domo’s free Slack equivalent, helps team members respond to executive requests immediately. The conversation stays within the dashboard so there is a history of action and progress.
With Domo you can find out immediately why campaign ROI is down, and chat directly with those responsible. Or, discuss a dashboard alerting operations managers to the fact that inventory is low. No more last minute trips to the office for conference meetings and gone are the days of 60 deep email threads!
Finally, executives love the fact that Domo is infinitely scalable in the cloud.
Let’s face it, organizations are either growing or dying, and data structures are racing to keep up. Platforms that are great for a 100 or even a 1,000 person company are not all that great for 10,000+ employee companies and vice-versa. Collaboration and company culture is simply different from company to company. Many tools for a small company (ie. basic data processing tools, spreadsheets, etc) don’t translate into larger organizations where enterprise class tools are required.
Domo took a page out of Salesforce’s playbook and, although clunky in the beginning, has embraced the full force scalability of the cloud. This approach helps across the board from data storage to their tools and dashboards. The cloud has experienced challenges over the years with slow load times and lack of basic functions, but one thing it does not suffer from is scalability.
Domo is great, but be aware this doesn’t mean it is without flaws. From a pure analytics perspective, Domo has a lot of growing up to do. Many of the tools, although well integrated, can be difficult to work with and a lot of customization is necessary to access valuable data beyond the out-of-the-box data connectors.
You must weigh the alternatives available for your team and decide what is best. To stick with a traditional BI tool that is complex and doesn’t provide clear insights for decision making, or move to a platform where immense power is included out of the box, alerts and insights are a given — but a greater company wide commitment is required for optimal benefit.
You may find it comforting to know that the most critical step of a successful BI implementation is not the actual BI tools themselves, but the strategy involved. Strategy requires business discovery, data architecture, transformation, and visual design. If you need support with your BI/analytics program to ensure success…Blast can help you assess what is the best BI solution for your company, and create a strategy that drives analytics maturity within your organization.
Greg Armstrong is a Senior Business Analyst at Blast Analytics & Marketing. He is involved in helping clients understand their business objectives and key performance indicators through data analysis and visualization tools. Prior to joining Blast Greg was an associate at a venture capital firm in Salt Lake City, UT, where he helped analyze investments and facilitate deal flow. Greg Armstrong has written 2 posts on the Web Analytics Blog.
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2019-04-22T13:24:00Z
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https://www.blastam.com/blog/top-5-reasons-executives-love-domo
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2019-04-26T06:41:33Z
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Political activist Tawakkul Karman has brought Yemen’s revolution to New York, speaking directly on October 20 with Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon and organizing rallies at the United Nations headquarters in lower Manhattan, the largest of which is slated for the afternoon of October 21. The purpose of her visit is to keep pressure on the UN Security Council to adopt a resolution that reflects the aspirations of the overwhelming numbers of Yemenis who have sustained peaceful calls for change for the nine long months since protests began in late January. Arriving newly anointed by the Nobel Committee, which named her as one of three recipients of the 2011 Peace Prize, Karman fears -- as does much of the Yemeni opposition, in its many forms -- that the UN will merely reiterate the approximate parameters of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) initiative put forth in April. That plan, which has enjoyed support from the United States, as well as Yemen’s GCC neighbors, would allow legal immunity for President ‘Ali ‘Abdallah Salih, whose crimes against Yemeni protesters have multiplied in the months since the spring. For this reason, Karman will end her week in New York as she has ended so many weeks in Sanaa in recent months -- at the head of a protest.
That the Yemeni revolution is now led symbolically by a woman is an attractive concept to many international observers. Karman’s biography, however, and her record of activism are more complex than the Nobel Committee’s citation would suggest. She is unquestionably worthy of the international recognition attending the Peace Prize, but not necessarily for the reasons given. The Committee recognized Karman, along with two Liberian activist women, Ellen Sirleaf Johnson and Leymah Gbowee, “for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work.” Yet Karman is at the UN demanding trenchant political reform, of the kind that will enhance the political freedoms of Yemeni men, women and children, and produce a new regime more accountable to the public. She is decidedly not calling for “women’s rights.” In its citation, the Committee reduced the scope of the work of a multi-dimensional activist whose efforts have been resisted inside and outside the party from which she emerged. Without understanding Tawakkul Karman as both a cause and an effect of change in state-society relations in Yemen, it is difficult to see precisely what she represents or why so many Yemenis from different backgrounds have been so responsive to her call for sustained non-violence.
Yemen’s revolution has developed into a post-partisan affair, but its origins undoubtedly lie in the decade of partisan opposition and alliance building that preceded it. Whereas today’s revolutionaries are calling, first and foremost, for the end of the Salih regime, the partisan opposition was primarily focused on procedural reforms that would expand their opportunity to hold the country’s leadership accountable. There is good reason for drawing this distinction between reformist and revolutionary activism, because the failures of the reformist project fed the frustrations that have sustained the revolutionary movement, even as partisan actors have stepped in to help organize (and, according to some, attempt to coopt) the momentum of the youth.
The partisan opposition is composed of several small leftist and nationalist parties, as well as the Yemeni Socialist Party, which has performed poorly in elections, but nonetheless carries weight as the ruling party of South Yemen prior to its 1990 unification with the north. But by far the largest opposition party is the Islamist Yemeni Congregation for Reform, or Islah.
Beginning through a series of informal linkages between mid-level and senior leaders of the Socialists and Islah as early as 2002, a robust (if procedure-minded) political opposition named the Joint Meeting Parties (JMP) alliance became an important feature of Yemen’s political landscape in the succeeding decade. After running a candidate against Salih in the 2006 presidential election, however, the grand coalition has been unable to achieve most of its political aims. Its letdowns stem largely from divisions among (and within) the constituent parties, and what critics have viewed as a preoccupation with the court politics of Sanaa, at the expense of constituencies in the periphery, particularly in the south. Feeling neglected by their nominal representatives in the capital, southern activists mounted massive popular demonstrations beginning in 2007, demanding greater autonomy and redress of perceived inequality with the north. The grassroots Southern Movement caught the JMP leadership in the capital by surprise and contributed to its internal divisions, with party chiefs uncertain about whether and how to support the independently developed movement.
The eventual postponement of the 2009 parliamentary elections -- a delay agreed upon by Salih’s government and the JMP -- was probably the most poignant sign that the opposition was unlikely to reach its goals through status quo institutions. The JMP had lobbied for a series of electoral reforms that would level the playing field, allowing the opposition parties a fighting chance against the ruling General People’s Congress. The government, unwilling to level that field, was concerned that a boycott by the JMP would tear apart even the few shreds of democratic credibility that it hoped to retain. So government and opposition agreed to a postponement -- the JMP to avoid going forward without reforms, and the government to avoid going forward without opposition. For many Yemenis, the deal marked the end of hopes that political change could occur through elections, at least if the Salih regime was a participant.
Islah’s position on women’s rights -- to the extent that it is possible to speak of a single position, given the deep cleavages within the party, among tribal, Muslim Brother and salafi factions -- is equivocal. On the one hand, the party has been more successful than any other Yemeni party in mobilizing women as voters. And its parallel institutions have afforded them (gender-segmented) opportunities for leadership far greater than those enjoyed by women in the secular and leftist parties. From the perspective of many women (and men) from the south, where there was a tradition of state feminism under the Marxist regime before unification, Islahi activism has meant a regression in political rights and freedoms for women, evidenced in educational segregation, an Islamized family law and a general Islamization of public space. At the same time, for many women in the north, Islah has been central to advancing a “rights consciousness” whereby women have been encouraged to know and seek “their rights” and to view the state, in theory if not in practice, as the guarantor of those rights. That does not mean, however, that these rights are always conceptualized by Islahis as equal rights, in the sense meant by many women’s rights advocates in the secular and leftist parties, or by those in government. Indeed, disagreements over this question within Islah and among the opposition parties helped to widen the gaps among the parties making up the JMP.
Instead, the politics of the JMP have focused not on women’s rights, but on citizen rights, with implications for women. The procedural reforms of the JMP platform have been transformed in the post-partisan context of the revolution into a more forceful version of the same -- those who are protesting are doing so for their dignity as Yemeni citizens.
In retrospect, despite the fractiousness of the partisan sphere (and, arguably, Yemeni society) regarding the rights and roles of women, it should not be entirely surprising that a woman activist has played such an essential role in mobilizing the post-partisan revolutionary movement. As the opposition parties became mired in internal debates over women’s rights (among other issues), many Yemeni women -- again, including Tawakkul Karman -- shifted some of their energies to the associational sector, taking up the cause of reform through their work as journalists or through various civil society organizations, and building dense networks of personal and professional alliances. Growth in the number of women leading such organizations helped to shift the substantive focus of “women’s rights” work: Whereas, in the 1990s, this work strove for reforms that would improve the lot of women as wives and mothers, the new activities sought to frame women’s rights as human rights or to expand the reach of civic and economic freedom in general.
Tawakkul Karman’s organization, Women Journalists Without Chains, founded in 2005, reflects this shift in its commitment to freedom of expression and civil rights. Staging weekly protests each Tuesday from 2007 until the beginning of the revolution in 2011, Karman called for inquiries into corruption and other forms of social and legal injustice; the lifting of limitations on press freedoms; and more. When the partisan opposition of the JMP came under fire from the government, Karman and her associates rallied to their aid, often working with other Yemeni and international organizations. And when she and other opposition journalists faced pressure, even arrest and detention, the partisan opposition did the same for her. The migration of women into associational sector activism and the ties they forged -- illustrated by Karman’s own multi-faceted persona as Islahi, journalist and activist -- have been central to laying the groundwork for the network-reliant post-partisan opposition movement that has sustained the revolution for these many eventful months.
That Tawakkul Karman is the public face of this movement -- and has now become, perhaps, the most recognized Yemeni after President Salih himself -- may have a lasting impact on the ultimate inclusivity of conceptions of citizenship and equality in the future. At this stage, however, there is no particular reason to view this question as resolved, just as the success of the revolutionary movement itself is still very much in doubt amid the ongoing violence in Yemen and the limited international support for the insurrection. Throughout the revolution, Karman has continued to embody the fraught question of women’s rights and roles. She has been a lightning rod for criticism: from salafis within Islah for her public role and unseemly visibility; from those on the secular left who distrust her Islamist leanings; from those who resent what they see as Islah’s effort to dominate the revolutionary movement.
For these reasons and more, the language of unity and the focus on areas of procedural agreement seem to be taking pride of place in Karman’s approach to the revolution, as well they must in these movements of great uncertainty and risk. Her work has been essential to the revolutionary movement and she is a resonant exemplar of the vision of Yemeni women. But recognizing her for work on behalf of Yemeni women has been a controversial gesture, one which bypasses the other ways in which Yemeni women have pursued progress for their sisters over the two decades since unification (and still others under the distinct regimes of North and South Yemen before then). Two of these women have died in 2011: Fawziyya Nu‘man, who worked within the system to pursue essential reforms in girls’ and women’s education, and Ra’ufa Hasan, who worked at great personal cost to retain her independence in the associational sector, as both the regime and Islah launched campaigns against her. Both of these women, and the many others who have followed their respective trajectories, might take issue with the idea that Tawakkul Karman is being honored for her work on behalf of women’s rights, but they would probably also join Mashour and the many others who carried Karman’s image at the celebration in Sanaa’s Change Square following the Peace Prize announcement. These men and women, in their the tens of thousands, admire Karman for the work she has done in transforming Islah, as a party, and advancing the rights of all Yemenis, regardless of gender or political creed.
Susanne Dahlgren, “A Snake with a Thousand Heads: The Southern Cause in Yemen,” Middle East Report 256 (Fall 2010).
Stacey Philbrick Yadav, “Segmented Publics and Islamist Women in Yemen: Rethinking Space and Activism,” Journal of Middle Eastern Women’s Studies 6/2 (Spring 2010).
Susanne Dahlgren, Contesting Realities: The Public Sphere and Morality in Southern Yemen (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2010).
Interview with Amat al-Salam Raja’, Islah Women’s Directorate, Sanaa, October 6, 2004.
Interview with Houriyya Mashour, Women’s National Committee, Sanaa, January 7, 2009.
Stacey Philbrick Yadav and Janine A. Clark, “Disappointments and New Directions: Women, Partisanship and the Regime in Yemen,” Hawwa: International Journal of Women in the Middle East and Islamic World 8 (2010).
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2019-04-23T12:27:24Z
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http://www.wluml.org/news/yemen-tawakkul-karman-cause-and-effect
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What kind of intelligence MCQs came in TCC initial test????
We appreciate your interest in using pakprep.com. Both verbal and Non verbal MCQ’s will be there. Please follow the bellow mentioned link for your preparation. For more details you can call us at 0335-5833265.
Sir math,chemistry, physics and intelligence test ki marks division bata dah in detail???????
We appreciate your interest in using pakprep.com. There are around 80 Intelligence MCQ’s and academic portion is not confirm they use to change academic portion every time, so prepare all subjects. For more details you can call us at 0335-5833265.
I want the pattern of TCC academic test.
We appreciate your interest in using pakprep.com. There are around 80 Intelligence MCQ’s and academic portion is not confirm they use to change academic portion every time, so prepare all subjects. Academic portion contains English, Physics, maths and Chemistry Mcq’s. For more details you can call us at 0335-5833265.
We appreciate your interest in using pakprep.com. There will be around 80 Intelligence MCQ’s, however MCQ’s from academics section are not fixed they use to change every time, so you have to prepare fully. Total time allowed is around 2 hours for both Intelligence and Academic section. Please follow the bellow mentioned links for your preparation. For more details you can call us at 0335-5833265.
We appreciate your interest in using pakprep.com. Total time allowed is around 2 hours for both Intelligence and Academic section. Please follow the bellow mentioned links for your preparation. For more details you can call us at 0335-5833265.
We appreciate your interest in using pakprep.com. If they accepted your registration and you got your test date and time so there will not be any issue unless you provided correct information. Please follow the bellow mentioned links for your preparation. For more details you can call us at 0335-5833265.
How much chest is required in tcc and does eyesight matter in tcc?
We appreciate your interest in using pakprep.com. Minimum chest required is 36 inches however do appear in Initial medical. There will be no issue if your chest is not up to minimum requirement they might give you time for that.
We appreciate your interest in using pakprep.com. Yes you can but for this you have to visit your nearest Army Office. Please follow the bellow mentioned links for your preparation. For more details you can call us at 0335-5833265.
assalam o alikum sir kia ap mujhy bata sakty hain k medical test ma kia kia hota ha..?????
We appreciate your interest in using pakprep.com. In initial medical they will just check your height, weight, chest, and knee knocking.
Ii want to ask one of the most important question regarding the test of ISSB on account of TCC. i heard that, Only those candidates will go through ISSB of TCC that are shortlisted not the All candidates that cleared the initial process i.e( initial test,Medical and physical). Is it true?
We appreciate your interest in using pakprep.com. Usually they call all candidates who passed initial test. They make merit after ISSB test not before that. We do not have such information or there is no official notification regarding this.
How many time tcc announce in a year?
We appreciate your interest in using pakprep.com. Pakistan Army announce TCC course once in a year. Please follow the bellow mentioned links for your preparation. For more details you can call us at 0335-5833265.
Initial test of TCC consists of Verbal,Non-Verbal & Academic test.
Academic section consists of questions from maths,physics,computer science and english.
We appreciate your interest in using pakprep.com. Yes TCC pattern is almost same. Please specify your question so that we can help you. For your preparation please follow the bellow mentioned link.
Sir please muja batay ka kya ma Ab tcc ko leay apply kar Sakta go?
We appreciate your interest in using pakprep.com. Registration dates are over now you have to wait till next course announcement. Please follow the bellow mentioned link for your preparation.
Tcc course only offered after FSC. Please read the eligibility criteria.
can i apply in army after BSIT?
We appreciate your interest in using pakprep.com. There are only two options for females in Paf which are GDP and Aeronautical engineering. You can apply for both if your age is not more than 22 years.
We appreciate your interest in using pakprep.com. Yes you have to appear in TCC initial test and medical after clearing that there will be ISSB if you mange to get successful in it that you can join Pakistan Army as TCC cadet. login to http://www.pakprep.com for the preparation of TCC test.
I want to join pak army as an engineer can I go for it??
We appreciate your interest in using pakprep.com. TCC course is only for males however you can join Pakistan Air force as GDP. Next course for girls will announce in February. Please follow the bellow mentioned links for your preparation.
can i apply in army now? em waiting for my second year result.
We appreciate your interest in using pakprep.com. Yes you can apply on the basis of 1st year result. However TCC course is not announced yet.
We appreciate your interest in using pakprep.com. Yes if you have Physics, maths and computer in your icom than you can apply for TCC. Please follow the bellow mentioned link to start your preparation.
We appreciate your interest using pakprep.com. Yes if you have 60% marks with Physics, Chemistry/computer, Maths/Biology. Please follow the bellow mentioned link for your preparation.
We appreciate your interest in using pakprep.com. If your fsc part1 is clear and you have 65% marks in fsc part 1 than you can appear in this test.
Sir tcc ki registration dates kya hain ?
We appreciate your interest in using pakprep.com. TCC next course is expected in January/ February. Please follow the bellow mentioned links for your preparation.
Sir please tell me, how many marks required to pass the test as a commissioned officer..
We appreciate your interest in using pakprep.com.. If you have 65% marks in FSC than you can apply for TCC course. However in test you have to get at least 60%+ marks. Please follow the bellow mentioned links for your preparation.
Sir ap plese bta deen ga k tcc ki isi sal agli date kon si a rhi ha???????.
We appreciate your interest in using pakprep.com.. Next TCC course is expected in February. Please follow the bellow mentioned links for your preparation.
Sir after matric can I join army in faculty pre medical ??
We appreciate your interest in using pakprep.com.May be you can please visit http://www.joinpaf.gov.pk to get all details.
Aoa, Hi! if a person passes all these tests except chin ups, can he proceeds???
and if if he do pull ups, not chin ups can he proceed!!!
We appreciate your interest in using pakprep.com. Its depends we can not say any thing exactly about this however you have to clear all test.
We appreciate your interest in using pakprep.com. TCC next course is expected in February. Please follow the bellow mentioned links for your preparation.
Sir tcc ki test kab lete hain, kis month mein?
We appreciate your interest in using Pakprep.com. It depends upon youur interest but go for PMA L/C which will be held in 2018. We have all online material for the preparation of entry test. For registration please follow the below mentioned links.
We appreciate your interest in using Pakprep.com. The registration dates are expected in February 2018. Keep following Pakprep.com blogs for the latest details.
Please follow the bellow mentioned links about TCC cadets. For further details you can call our helpline at 0335-5833265.
Dear sir,can you told me about the information of tcc exams who college are prepared the tcc exam and also told me sir i am a student of fsc part 2nd year.
We appreciate your interest in using Pakprep.com. The initial test will be Intelligence (verbal,non verbal) and acedemic test. Pakprep.com provide you complete material for the preparation of the TCC. It includes Intelligence MCQs , English and Physics important MCQs for the preparation. There are many sucesful students from Pakprep.com for TCC. Follow the below mentioned links and start your preparation today.
You can apply on the basis of Hope certificate if you have 65% marks in FSC part 1st.
Tu ye test mere exams me tu koi disturbance create nhi kre ga?
Mtlub test date kia ho hi?
No it will not create any disturbance. TCC administration ensures that.
Sir fsc med student apply kar skta ha???
No. Medical students can not apply for TCC.
TCC kaliy aik saal main kitni bar seats ati hain?
Not compulsory for Initial test 1st day. After passing Initial test it is compulsory in ISSB form.
I want to apply for tcc test issb kindly provide me informamation regarding next registration..when can i apply ? Is thw registration open these days ? If not ! When will it be open?
please can you inform me how to apply for TCC?
and what is commissioner ?and more about the dates to apply?
looking forward for a favorable response..
We appreciate your interest in using pakprep.com. TCC next course is expected to announce in January/February 2019. Minimum 65% marks are required to apply for TCC for more details follow bellow mentioned link. You can apply online after they are opened for registration. Please follow the bellow mentioned link for your preparation. For further details you can call our helpline at 0335-5833265.
Sir i wanted to know that If i cleared my Tcc All physical , medical then when will be ISSB Date For it. can you suggest me any specific date. Also, One Student have told me that his ISSB date for 2018 was In the MAY End. I have also applied for navy that’s why I am asking you to help me out whether i would ISSB for NAVY or I would take ISSB for TCC? Plz reply me sir.
sir tcc 2019 ki registratioon dates kab announce ki jae ge?
Sir initial test intelligence, physical and medical test same day hi ho Ga?
Sir Tcc ma English ka test Ni hota Kya .???
Or sir ye test computer program hota ha ???
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2019-04-20T18:40:49Z
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https://pakprep.com/blogs/2017/03/06/pakistan-army-has-announced-registration-dates-for-29-technical-cadet-course-tcc/
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Welcome to Design journal #19: Pre-Alpha Experiences. The last Design Journal we had was back in May of 2016 and was over 4,000 words! Well, sit back and relax because this one is longer. While it has been a while, the time has come to return to our origins and once again spend some time talking about what we're doing differently in Chronicles of Elyria and why it'll make for a better overall game.
Given that our last DJ was on Kingdom Management, and that we first mentioned our Pre-Alpha experiences back in June of 2016, it should be no surprise that in this DJ we're going to dive into those Pre-Alpha experiences in greater depth. So let's get started.
What is a Pre-Alpha Experience?
In most modern MMOs the developers spend a non-trivial amount of time in research and development experimenting with different engines, taking their existing engine and re-purposing it for a new game idea, and creating tech demos to verify the validity of their ideas before even beginning production.
Once production begins there's generally still months (if not years) of early development to get to a point where they feel comfortable showing it to the world at large. This 'Pre-Alpha' milestone is an indication that, while the game isn't yet feature-complete, its overall direction, features, and visual style are more or less 'locked in'. At that point, all that remains is implementation of the remaining features and iteration on the current ones until they reach a state of quality that the studio feels comfortable calling them complete.
The problem is, by the time a game hits pre-alpha it's often too late to make any significant changes to the design of the game. Aside from cosmetic, easily-altered items or things so game-breaking that the game would be lost without it, modifications to the core design are often viewed as too costly to change at this stage of development.
In a formulaic game that sticks close to the typical features of a genre, this is generally a safe bet. But Chronicles of Elyria is anything but typical. With the vast number of new, never-before-seen features and the re-imagining of several well-established ones, it's extremely important that we have an opportunity to change tack on anything which could jeopardize the overall fun of the game.
Our solution? Pre-Alpha Experiences. Put plainly, Pre-Alpha Experiences are opportunities for players to jump into some form of the game as early as possible - even before pre-alpha, to provide feedback.
This has many advantages to us (and to you) beyond the obvious. Let's look at them a bit shall we?
Perhaps the most important reason is the opportunity for early feedback. Obviously, the sooner we get feedback from our target audience, the more likely we are to be able to make changes in a timely fashion. There's nothing mysterious here. The key is finding a way to get feedback from players before development progresses too far!
A slightly less obvious but equally important reason is community engagement. For an MMO to be successful it requires a certain 'critical mass' of players. For existing intellectual properties or well-established companies it's still difficult, but possible, for them to gather that critical mass of players within the few months leading up to the launch of the game. But a grass-roots game like Chronicles of Elyria requires a slow, rolling boil. It's going to take between now and launch with us continuously reaching out and growing the community for us to hit our target numbers.
But all the outreach and evangelizing in the world is useless if players come to the site, see the game is in-development and then immediately bounce. We need a way to capture and retain players throughout the development process. The pre-alpha experiences give players something to do in the interim. This also has the pleasant side effect of preventing players from becoming idle. So it serves as not only a good tool for maintaining player engagement, but is also just a good cure for boredom.
Next, one of the biggest challenges any MMO - or really any RPG – faces, is connecting players to the rich history of the world. This is often done by placing books in the world for players to read, or creating quests and story arcs that talk about the history of the world. When players feel a sense of connectedness with the past, it naturally makes them more concerned about and responsive to potential futures.
By making the events of our pre-alpha experiences persistent - that is, by accepting the events that occur in the pre-alpha experiences as part of the game's history - it gives players the unique opportunity to be a part of, to experience first-hand, and to drive the history of the world. There's no stronger connection to the past a player can have. By the time launch happens, players will have been responsible for writing the history of the previous 30-50 years. So, when the books and NPCs talk about recent events in history, those players who were part of it will feel a stronger connection.
Speaking of recent history, one of the things we've learned in the last year is how important it is to temper expectations and to prevent a NMS (Not Much t'See) situation. By that I, of course, mean years of us talking about the features and mechanics of the game only to have you get into the game and discover none of it is there. We prevent this by gradually adding the mechanics to our Pre-Alpha experiences. This should increase confidence in what we're doing and give you all a strong impression of what is and isn't going to make it in the final game.
Ok. With all of that out of the way, let's dig in to the three Pre-Alpha Experiences for Chronicles of Elyria. Note that each of the following - Prologue: The Awakening, ElyriaMUD, and Kingdoms of Elyria - each provide a different user experience and are designed to best meet the objectives outlined above as quickly as possible.
One of the main objectives is, of course, to get feedback on the different features of the game. So the main thing to know as we move forward is that each of the three pre-alpha experiences are designed to test a subset of the roughly 40 different feature areas and hundreds of individual features of the game. When I talk about each experience I'll highlight some of the most important feature areas we'll be testing.
The first of the Pre-Alpha experiences I wanted to talk about is the Prologue. Put as succinctly as possible, the Prologue is an offline, playable demo (desktop UE4 client) of Chronicles of Elyria. But, like many of our approaches to game development, game mechanics, marketing, etc., the Prologue serves a dual purpose.
There are likely to be small amounts of features from other feature areas, such as Identities but, as some of the Pre-Alpha Experiences provide more direct opportunities to test these features/areas they'll only make a cameo appearance in the Prologue.
Now, in addition to being a sandbox in which to experiment with the aforementioned game mechanics, the Prologue also provides players an opportunity to experience a pivotal moment in the history of Elyria - The Awakening. Thus, the Prologue provides a narrative experience which will take players from the town of New Haven, down to the mining village of Silver Run, and back up again. Because of the subset of features provided, as well as the narrative story arc, Prologue should play like a short, single-player RPG.
While not a stand-alone game, and initially limited to a small set of crafting professions, combat trees, etc. the Prologue will continue to be iterated on throughout development, and will act as a test-bed for new user-experiences as they're added.
By the time players complete the Prologue, they should have a good idea what the 'feel' of the game is, but will still be lacking an understanding of how the multiplayer elements of the game will work, as well as the features of the dynamic story engine. To really understand those requires jumping into the second Pre-Alpha Experience.
The second Pre-Alpha experience is ElyriaMUD. When we first talked about ElyriaMUD about nine months ago we initially described it as a traditional text-based MUD. However, in December of 2016 I took a trip over to London to visit with Improbable. While there, Herman Narula, the CEO of Improbable and I sat down and had a conversation about the scope of the Pre-Alpha Experiences. He made a compelling argument about the accessibility of a text-based RPG and how likely we were to get the player-engagement we wanted.
At the same time, I realized that providing ElyriaMUD as a 2D, sprite-based game would allow us to further test the positional queries of our game. Things like 'If I'm within X of this building, provide Y passive bonus.' The result is that we've transitioned away from perceiving ElyriaMUD as a text-only RPG, and instead intend for it to be a richer, more accessible 2D Graphical MUD. Instead of using a traditional MUD client, we will instead build a simple 2D game client - likely using Unity.
And, of course, like with the Prologue, ElyriaMUD will have cameo features as well, such as survival mechanics, combat, crafting, etc. These are there as necessary elements to test the other intended features of the game, but aren't there to validate those specific mechanics. In many cases, such as combat, they exist in ElyriaMUD as a shadow or completely disassociated version of the final system. I.e. Don't expect combat in ElyriaMUD to work like it does in Prologue / CoE. Likewise, while there will be crafting in ElyriaMUD, it's more to validate the overall system of gathering resources, converting them into crafting materials, crafting components, and then constructing them into objects. The user experience of crafting will not be the same as Prologue / CoE.
In terms of game-play, where the Prologue has a narrative story intended to expose players to The Awakening, ElyriaMUD will leverage the Soulborn Engine to expose characters to a dynamic, evolving story-line in which they have control of the narrative.
And like Prologue, not all feature areas and features will be available as initial release. Over time we'll continue to integrate new features and functionality into the Graphical MUD.
Finally, ElyriaMUD takes place before the events of the Prologue in the overall history of Elyria.
The final Pre-Alpha Experience we're working on is Kingdoms of Elyria. This is, in some ways, the lightest in terms of its features and mechanics but, in many ways, has been (and remains) the most difficult to design.
In Chronicles of Elyria, as players shift in social status from adventurer to aristocracy to nobility, their play experience changes, quite necessarily. Where once they focused on their individual deeds - whether that be exploration or crafting - their focus now begins to shift to something larger than themselves.
As a member of the Aristocracy - Mayors & Barons, the focus of the game grows to include concern for the welfare and development of their settlement. This is everything from ensuring that it has the necessary resources, to making strategic decisions about the benefits to inhabitants. In this way, it plays a lot more like a settlement simulation (SimSettlement?).
Likewise, as someone moves from Aristocracy to Nobility their scope continues to increase. Counts must now be concerned about everything that goes on within the boundaries of their county. That includes resource management, roads & infrastructure, trade between neighboring counties, and the shared wealth of the individual settlements.
Dukes must also care about the safety and security of each of the counties within their duchy, and must enforce the law to protect its inhabitants from thieves, murderers, and other miscreants.
Finally, Kings and Queens must determine the overall trajectory and win-condition for the Kingdom.
In all cases, each tier of aristocracy and nobility are responsible for setting laws and tax rates within their domains and settlements so they have enough resources to complete their objectives. As you can see, as you move up the hierarchy of Nobility the game plays more and more like a Kingdom Management game.
It should be noted that while there will again be cameo features in KoE, they're significantly fewer in number. Instead, there's shared features with ElyriaMUD which are intentionally added. This is because the two games, while potentially different game clients, are linked. Reputation & fame, government conflicts, broken laws, and the changing economy are all shared between the two games.
But what is the actual play experience of KoE? We're still iterating on it. At the moment, the plan is for KoE to be a top-down, 2D graphical overlay game - likely built with Unity, much like a traditional Kingdom Management game. From this birds-eye view, the players will be able to open up the UI to change laws, alter manufacturing goals, set new tax rates, and specify technology to research.
In the event that someone was to obtain a casus belli, this perspective allows someone to direct markers to indicate where the armies should mobilize. It even allows the players to send couriers to mobilized military to change their orders.
Direct markers? Send couriers? Why not just issue the commands to the mobilized military directly? When I first mentioned Kingdoms of Elyria back in June I said 'Kingdoms of Elyria is intended for the nobility and aristocracy. But what about the gentry or other players...' After which I proceeded to talk about ElyriaMUD. What might not have been obvious is that these are not just sort-of linked, but intimately linked.
When a Count changes the tax rates on their map in KoE, it changes the tax rates of the people who call the same settlement home - in ElyriaMUD. When a Duke issues commands in KoE to a mobilize a military unit on their map, it's a request to the members of their duchy to mobilize at that location - in ElyriaMUD! And when a Duke sends a courier to a staged army on a nearby border telling them to cross over and attack the neighboring duchy - it's a request to those people stationed at that encampment to engage. A King, Duke, Count, or Aristocrat's success in Kingdoms of Elyria is based largely on the support of their followers in ElyriaMUD.
One of the advertised goals of our Pre-Alpha experiences is to allow players to alter the history of their world. But to do this, the actions of ElyriaMUD and KoE must be persistent. This naturally raises questions about what can and cannot be done in KoE and ElyriaMUD. So let me take a moment to talk briefly about that.
First, let me dispel with peoples' concerns right away. Kingdoms of Elyria and ElyriaMUD are prequels to Chronicles of Elyria. When you purchased a title from our online store or Kickstarter you were purchasing your opportunity to be a King, Duke, Count, or Aristocrat at launch of Chronicles of Elyria. This means that you cannot / will not lose your titles either through playing or not playing KoE or ElyriaMUD. These are entirely optional play experiences.
That said, what you didn't buy during Kickstarter or through our online store was a domain of a specific size. As previously advertised, counties, duchies, and kingdoms come in all shapes and sizes. Nobody is guaranteed the largest (or the smallest) of the domains.
Throughout Kingdoms of Elyria, the actions of the players will dictate the previous 30-50 years of history of the Kingdoms. This includes the positions of the borders. It is possible, through KoE, to grow & shrink the size of your domain. We recognize that not all players like the idea of directly engaging with enemy player-kingdoms and would be much more comfortable playing against NPCs. We also recognized that with 100% of the kingdoms, duchies, and counties in a region occupied by players, your only option would be direct PvP with other players. So we've gone ahead and mitigated this.
When we first announced our intentions to allow people to purchase titles and to govern lands we were basing it on a system of a random distribution. That is, we were planning to have 3-5 kingdoms per continent, 6-10 duchies per kingdom, and as many as 50 counties per duchy.
We did this with the idea that players would quietly sit in the forums for the next year and talk with anxious excitement about the game until Settlement / Domain selection. At that point, they'd go ahead and form alliances, enemies, etc. In short, we expected the Dance of Dynasties to begin with Settlement / Domain selection. We were wrong.
People started dancing the Dance immediately and, within a short period, there were well-established Kingdoms and Duchies and a slew of Counties that had already pledged their allegiance to one Duke or another.
I couldn't answer him. All I could say was 'We'll find out during settlement / domain selection.' But the longer I thought about it, the more I realized that it was counter-productive to the community building the players were doing and that we were encouraging. I needed to find a way to solve this.
After spending several months thinking about it, last month during the Exclusive Q & A with the high-level backers I proposed my solution in order to get feedback. The proposed solution was to change from a random distribution across servers to a fixed number of domains per region.
Once I had decided to lock in the numbers of Kingdoms, Duchies, and Counties per server it was just a matter of knowing how many. My first response was just to take the averages of the ranges we'd previously defined. That would have resulted in about 4 kingdoms per continent, 8 duchies per kingdom, and around 36 counties per duchy. But then I looked at the store purchases and realized that there were far fewer counties being purchased than I expected, which would leave a lot of empty, unowned land.
At the same time, I realized there were more kingdoms being purchased than expected and worse - people buying two kingdoms and duchies! So this suggested I should move up to the maximum number of kingdoms & duchies and the minimum number of counties, which would have resulted in 5 kingdoms per continent, 10 duchies per kingdom, and around 16 counties per duchy.
This was a reasonable approach, but then I remembered Kingdoms of Elyria. It occurred to me that if I increased the number of Kingdoms, Duchies, and Counties a bit it would result in slightly smaller starting sizes, but would give players the opportunity to attack and engage with their NPC neighbors. This would allow them to once again grow their domains back to their original - and perhaps larger size. This seemed like a win-win to me. The players got more control of their final domain sizes, and players who didn't want to participate in KoE would likely hold onto more of their domains due to buffer zones.
As I said, I presented these ideas during the January Q&A with the high-level backers and got mostly - aside from the Oceanus server - positive feedback.
This gives everyone room to breathe and grow during KoE, and lets you be the masters of your fate. Keep in mind again, it's impossible to lose your domain, but it is possible for it shrink or grow - potentially even consuming neighboring NPC domains entirely!
I know, I know. It'll be ok. For those of you out there who do not currently have titles, I don't want you to feel left out. Kingdoms of Elyria & ElyriaMUD are exciting opportunities for player engagement, collaboration, teamwork, and community growth.
Thus, we'll be offering Store Credit (and Influence) for certain activities and participation in KoE and ElyriaMUD. This means it's theoretically possible for someone to gain enough credit to purchase a title they didn't previously own. We don't expect this to be a hugely common occurrence, but it is possible for new Mayors / Barons to emerge from KoE. It's extremely unlikely, anyone could earn enough Influence / Store Credit from KoE to become a new Count.
Who can play the different pre-alpha experiences?
As you might guess from the name, the Pre-Alpha Experiences are just that, pre-alpha. As a result, they're very early iterations on many of the mechanics. We'll be rolling ElyriaMUD, Prologue, and KoE out first to the Alpha 1 backers, then Alpha 2, then Beta, then Beta 2, and finally to those people who've purchased only the basic game.
Note that events in ElyriaMUD and KoE only become official once it's rolled out to all paid players. The earlier waves/releases are for testing and stabilization.
We've spent a large part of this DJ talking about the different Pre-Alpha experiences, as well as the benefits of the Pre-Alpha experiences. But what about the costs? Surely there's a ton of work involved in the development of these extra games? Wouldn't we be insane to try and do three games in addition to Chronicles of Elyria?
If we were attempting to create three additional games we would be. But we're not. It's important to note that, aside from the UI and the inexpensive 2D graphics we're adding for KoE and ElyriaMUD, all the mechanics and functionality for these three Pre-Alpha experiences are already required for the complete version of Chronicles of Elyria. All we're doing is detaching the features from the final game in a way that allows us the benefits listed above. But how?
Interface-Driven Development. Consider a microwave oven plugged into a wall socket. A microwave oven is a fairly complex piece of equipment with microwave emitters, electronics, mechanical components, etc. At the same time, the system of infrastructure on the other side of the wall socket is equally complex. You've got a full house of wiring and grounds, local substations, and complex power stations.
So you've got two sides of a complex system that depends on one another to provide value, but neither of them really care what's on the other side of the wall socket. In theory, you could plug a high-powered battery into the wall behind the wall socket. So long as there's an AC adapter on it, the microwave oven won't care you're missing the wiring, substation, or generator. It needs power, it's getting power, that's all it cares about.
Likewise, while you could plug a microwave to the wall socket, you could just as easily plug in a lamp, game console, or a cell phone charger. Either way it completes the circuit and draws power from the back-end.
The key point here is that the wall outlet creates an interface between the two complex systems.
An MMO is much the same. On one end of a network you've got a client and on the other you've got a complete back-end server. Both require the other to function properly, but neither really care - if done correctly - what lies on the other end.
While we are developing our Prologue as an offline demo, we're doing so with the knowledge of our future plans. So rather than developing the offline demo to, for example, pull the list of characters you've created directly from disk, it does so through an implemented interface. This interface, in the case of the Prologue, hides a system behind it which pulls the character list from local storage, but the Prologue doesn't know that. This means that by replacing that hidden component which pulls data from disk with another component that pulls data from the cloud, the client continues to function the same.
Similarly, while we're writing our back-end server as an engine on top of SpatialOS, our engine uses a well-defined protocol for receiving messages. So long as the messages come in the correct protocol, it doesn't care what kind of client is sending them. It could be the Chronicles of Elyria game client... or it could be a 2D Graphical MUD client. The presence of a network layer creates a sort of 'wall socket' for us that allows us to make forward progress without caring about what's on the other end.
When will the pre-alpha experiences be available?
The final question I want to address is when will the Pre-Alpha experiences be available. We don't know yet. We continue to make progress on all three of them simultaneously and, once we've reached a critical turning point in their development, will have a more solid idea of when they'll be available.
What I can say is that our order of development hasn't changed. Right now we're primarily focused on the implementation of the Prologue and ElyriaMUD, however we're also focusing heavily on World Generation and the web for the purpose of Settlement Selection.
Our next major milestone is Settlement Selection and after that, the Prologue, ElyriaMUD, and KoE are likely just a few months away.
Are all 3 of the differing pre-alpha games Caspian mentioned still available as we are still pre-Alpha?
Honestly, if I had the money to fund this entire game, I would. It's been years since I've been excited about an upcoming game and never with this much potential. I just hope you stay true and avoid a "NMS" situation.
*not this specifically. But it implies a..mindset that the devs have towards its players.
I feel that playing CoE will be like dealing with a cell phone carrier. You think your just paying for cell phone service, but your gonna get hit with ridiculous fees and charges. As in you'll have to pay for additional game features and what not.
Seriously this pops up the the recent threads and I saw your post. What make a you think the devs are going to make you pay for additional features?
Oh wait there isn't one.
Oh wait again that's not this game.
Maybe it's the spaceships that are being sold for over $100 each.
Ah that must be it, you have mistaken this game for another one that had a successful kickstarter but has turned into a big money slink for its investors.
So on that basis please make your your posting in the right game forum before making silly comments like this.
Posted By **CptBloodBeard** at 8:09 PM - Sun Aug 06 2017 > > *not this specifically. But it implies a..mindset that the devs have towards its players. > > I feel that playing CoE will be like dealing with a cell phone carrier. You think your just paying for cell phone service, but your gonna get hit with ridiculous fees and charges. As in you'll have to pay for additional game features and what not. > > Like I've said before, I hope I'm wrong. But I'm pretty sure this'll be the case. And if the game launches and it is, I'm gonna be blasting the forums with I TOLD YOU SO Seriously this pops up the the recent threads and I saw your post. What make a you think the devs are going to make you pay for additional features? Maybe it's the extra money shop that sells legendary gear.... Oh wait there isn't one. Maybe it's the recent release stating that there will be monthly patches you have to pay for.... Oh wait again that's not this game. Maybe it's the spaceships that are being sold for over $100 each. Ah that must be it, you have mistaken this game for another one that had a successful kickstarter but has turned into a big money slink for its investors. So on that basis please make your your posting in the right game forum before making silly comments like this.
Pay to build and pay to play definitely. To win... nope. Search the boards.
Definitely not pay to win. Even with Noblility packages, they will spend a great deal of time managing resources, land, and other players. It will be a different aspect of the game for each level/rank of players within a kingdom. It should be very interesting to see how things play out through the Alpha and Beta stages of testing and finally release.
Haven't been this excited over an MMO in quite some time.
Definitely not pay to win. Even with Noblility packages, they will spend a great deal of time managing resources, land, and other players. It will be a different aspect of the game for each level/rank of players within a kingdom. It should be very interesting to see how things play out through the Alpha and Beta stages of testing and finally release. Haven't been this excited over an MMO in quite some time.
So this confirms that we pay to access the MUD and what not, AND we'll have to pay additionally for the Toolkit?
Haha I knew it. This game could be fun, but it's gonn be pay to win.
So this confirms that we pay to access the MUD and what not, AND we'll have to pay additionally for the Toolkit? Haha I knew it. This game could be fun, but it's gonn be pay to win.
Really looking forward to the coming months. Great job folks!
Great post. This answered several of my questions. I am so looking forward to this game, but I am also enjoying watching its development and being a part of that. The other games that I currently play have lost a lot of their "flavor"??? because of my anticipation of COE. I am particularly excited about ElyriaMUD. Trying hard to be patient!
What a good read! This really gave me a better understanding how the roll-out of the Per-Alpha Experiences is going to work and what to expect of them. For all new comers, I will suggest taking the time to read through this DJ. It will give you a nice understanding of what is about to unfold in the next few months coming. Great work on all the developers. Keep it up.
when will the pre-alfa open to those who buy the game?
They'll announce when Pre-Alpha experiences will be available.
Posted By **MIkaido** at 5:21 PM - Thu Apr 20 2017 > > when will the pre-alfa open to those who buy the game? They'll announce when Pre-Alpha experiences will be available.
I've been reading through this game and thinking about a LitRPG book I've read, written by pseudonym Brent Roth. This game sounds a lot like the story and if it's anything close I really look forward to playing it. Like the main character of that book, I look forward to the challenge and expect to start with the basic. Can't wait.
None of us can wait. It's shaping up awesomely and they have a superb team on board.
Posted By **Teak** at 4:22 PM - Tue Apr 11 2017 > > I've been reading through this game and thinking about a LitRPG book I've read, written by pseudonym Brent Roth. This game sounds a lot like the story and if it's anything close I really look forward to playing it. Like the main character of that book, I look forward to the challenge and expect to start with the basic. Can't wait. Elyria isn't based on any existing book, film, game title, real life characters etc. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental :) None of us can wait. It's shaping up awesomely and they have a superb team on board.
So more information on NPC presence in the CoE universe will be appreciated. I think CoE will lose lots of potential players if it focuses primarily on PVP content to the exclusion (or minimization) of PVE.
You are looking at CoE through old style mmo glasses. In CoE there is no pve or pvp. The entire game is a sandbox with players doing everything from gravedigger to king. NPCs will fill in where there isn't a PC for a specific job. Your traditional pve "bosses" and bandits parts are played by players now including raid bosses like vampires or liches.
You will not be able to tell who is a player and who is an NPC (assume their AI does a better job pathing than most) and will likely interact with them virtually the same.
There will be no artificial safe zones or super NPCs. A player is literally an NPC when offline and a NPC is just a shell waiting for a spark of life ( player ) to soul jack their body. As for losing players SBS has repeatedly stated the game will be a niche game and they are happy with that.
@RanceJustice *So more information on NPC presence in the CoE universe will be appreciated. I think CoE will lose lots of potential players if it focuses primarily on PVP content to the exclusion (or minimization) of PVE.* You are looking at CoE through old style mmo glasses. In CoE there is no pve or pvp. The entire game is a sandbox with players doing everything from gravedigger to king. NPCs will fill in where there isn't a PC for a specific job. Your traditional pve "bosses" and bandits parts are played by players now including raid bosses like vampires or liches. You will not be able to tell who is a player and who is an NPC (assume their AI does a better job pathing than most) and will likely interact with them virtually the same. There will be no artificial safe zones or super NPCs. A player is literally an NPC when offline and a NPC is just a shell waiting for a spark of life ( player ) to soul jack their body. As for losing players SBS has repeatedly stated the game will be a niche game and they are happy with that.
Thank you for putting forth these plans! I've a couple of questions that perhaps someone could illuminate me on the details..
With regards to PvE, I am very glad that there is some discussion about NPC kingdoms. You are correct that there are many, players - even Gentry, Aristocracy, and Nobility, d prefer to focus less on PVP, and instead favor PVE elements, roleplaying, and other facets of the game, no matter at what "tier" they play (ie a King, Duke, or Count who may be most interested in making their vassals/ residents as strong thriving as they can be in kingdom management and whatnot, working with other title-holders cooperatively, and competing primarily against NPCs).
With this in mind, throughout not just the pre-release elements, but roles will PvE content play in the fully "Live" version of CoE? Will this range from NPC bandits and monsters for individual players to fight against , NPC traders in various cities etc.. all the way up to full NPC kingdoms or other land grants? Will there be both "monstrous/enemy/evil" NPC kingdoms that generally exist in opposition to all sorts of PCs, as well as a variety of "Player-Like NPC" Kingdoms in and to which players can live, swear their loyalty, ally etc... and will generally be very similar and open to the same sort of behavior at all levels as PC kingdoms? Are there plans to put NPC Kingdoms exclusively in their own locales to start or will there also be NPC controlled lands within ostenstibly PC controlled Kingdoms; that is to say, a PC King has both PC and NPC ruled Duchies, who in turn have both PC and NPC Counties etc... which would make for interesting play, but will have to have some good mechanics in place to ensure that PCs don't immediately attempt to overthrow their fellow "nearby" NPC peers because its easier than going after another player.
Alpha 1 access was the old Astronomer tier at $350, and now it's the Magistrate tier. Not sure of the price, but I think $500?
From there, there is Alpha 2 access, Beta 1, and Beta 2. Mixed up with all this is prologue, then KoE/CoEMUD, and then Exposition, then launch.
Currently, there is no access before Alpha 1 that I know of, and that is not currently accessible.
Alpha 1 access was the old Astronomer tier at $350, and now it's the Magistrate tier. Not sure of the price, but I think $500? From there, there is Alpha 2 access, Beta 1, and Beta 2. Mixed up with all this is prologue, then KoE/CoEMUD, and then Exposition, then launch. Currently, there is no access before Alpha 1 that I know of, and that is not currently accessible.
As a result, they're very early iterations on many of the mechanics. We'll be rolling ElyriaMUD, Prologue, and KoE out first to the Alpha 1 backers, then Alpha 2, then Beta, then Beta 2, and finally to those people who've purchased only the basic game.
I think Wicked was confusing the Prologue and Exposition (which is not a pre-Alpha experience) when he mentioned the $350 tier. Though access to Exposition is from the $120 tier so maybe they are mixing it up with something else. Anyway you do not need to buy more than the base game to get access to all three experiences as long as you are patient.
Everyone who buys the base game will get access to all three eventually. However, as with everything they will need testing and that means those who have bought tiers that have access to those tests will get to play them sooner: > As a result, they're very early iterations on many of the mechanics. We'll be rolling ElyriaMUD, Prologue, and KoE out first to the Alpha 1 backers, then Alpha 2, then Beta, then Beta 2, and finally to those people who've purchased only the basic game. > > From the OP I think Wicked was confusing the Prologue and Exposition (which is not a pre-Alpha experience) when he mentioned the $350 tier. Though access to Exposition is from the $120 tier so maybe they are mixing it up with something else. Anyway you do not need to buy more than the base game to get access to all three experiences as long as you are patient.
But HOW can I get acces to the pre-alpha experience. HOW can I get acces to Elyriamud and HOW can I get acces to KoE.
To get access to prologue you need to buy the tier associated with prologue. I think it is the $350 tier.
I think Elyria Mud and KoE is available to everyone when it is released but to test it BEFORE release you need the alpha test tier purchased.
Posted By **Florencus** at 3:52 PM - Tue Mar 07 2017 > > But HOW can I get acces to the pre-alpha experience. HOW can I get acces to Elyriamud and HOW can I get acces to KoE. To get access to prologue you need to buy the tier associated with prologue. I think it is the $350 tier. I think Elyria Mud and KoE is available to everyone when it is released but to test it BEFORE release you need the alpha test tier purchased.
Every time i look something up I get this dj. I have so many questions and this does not help.
What questions do you have. I am new to the game but have been doing a lot of research in it, I may be able to point you in the right direction.
Can we get a Dev Journal about the music and sound of CoE? I'm hearing music in Q&A's, and gameplay but you've never directly discussed them. Music and sounds are integral parts of gameplay, and as a musician I'd love to see them get the recognition they deserve!!
I think you may be a little confused Eruhin. There are no PvE "zones" in CoE. NPC kingdoms are not PvE kingdoms, they are simply kingdoms not claimed by PCs so instead have NPCs in the leadership roles in their place. If anything these NPC kingdom will have even more PvP disruption on them as players will be actively trying to consume them as part of the Dance to make their own territory larger come Exposition.
That';s one thing I too was concerned about. However, I imagine that if the devs wanted to (and I think they should) there are ways they could encourage PVE even in such a situation. For instance, if the idea that there are NPC owned Baronies/Counties etc... that are sworn to the same Count/Duke/King (PC or NPC) than the system should be set up to for the most part, encourage peace between them.
After all, that's how Feudalism worked for the most part. Its one thing for border areas to clash - say duchies or counties that border on another hierarchy/kingdom etc.. but generally, the Nobility wanted peace in the realm and their bannermen to not spend time infighting for no good reason. Sure, it happened, but it was relatively rare that someone would breach the King's/Duke's/Count's peace to attack their neighbor and it would not be without severe repercussion. Building those systems into CoE too will help to mitigate that issue.
Now of course that's for "fully integrated" NPCs. I do think its also worthwhile to have "NPC Bad Guys" - such as bandits (on the basic, on the ground adventurer level) and hostile kingdoms ( on top, management level) in which players can't normally spawn etc... until there's a major upset like the PC kingdoms banding together and the server-wide "raid victory" of taking down one of these kingdoms and allowing it to be opened to PCs and part of the "civilized world". These will provide an existential threat especially to borders of the "civilized" world, give PvE players something they enjoy, all while teaching them the basics of Kingdom-level warfare without having to go up against Players who have a lot more to lose.
Of course I'd like to see other PVE content on every level, from the aforementioned bandits, to lurking "monsters" and threats, to say... a coven of necromancers or something threatening a Barony, so the Baron would call sworn Knights and take on citizen levies and adventurers to put a stop to it... providing a reward that can be then dispensed as he sees fit. But what's this... an ancient tome the necromancers were using. Will the Baron give it to the local church to be destroyed? Send it to the University (or whereever magic might be studied) elsewhere in the County, so its "gifts" can be imparted to the province? Will the Count object and overrule the issue, claiming the risk of a pestilence is too high to be worth its study? And on and on it goes on all levels of the game..
There are plenty of opportunities for engaging PVE experiences and I hope to see many of them in CoE. I see other MMOs (one, notably) that is similar to CoE in some ways, but in others it is putting the bulk of its content mostly on PVP which I think will drive away a large audience that could come and help make the world much more immersive and engaging. All of the "throne war" elements can still happen and thee can still be upsets, but providing for pure PVE content and having areas that are not totally safe but are more conducive to those who want to play this way . For instance, Kingdom A is an "anything goes" PVP friendly kingdom where various Nobles don't mind the struggle for power among their subordinates etc. Kingdom B on the otherhand is made up of Nobles who don't permit this kind of squabbling and only approves fighting against enemies of the kingdom etc, which is more favorable to PVE types. Now, some of those enemies of Kingdom B may be both NPC and PC owned lands, but the players can choose (or, are "encouraged" / ordered) to help defend the border zone or try to roust the Kingdom's enemy on an official incusion if they wish. However, they can also stay on the "interior" to mostly have to deal with the aforementioned NPC cultists, bandits etc.. Sure, thieves,an assassin or murderous band of PVPers could find their way into Kingdom B's lands and its citizens may be affected, but there would be bounties, trials, jail time, fines etc... so it wouldn't be "tolerated"" the same way they would be in Kingdom A.
So yeah..lots of potential for depth. PVP and PVE are equally important in a title like this.
That';s one thing I too was concerned about. However, I imagine that if the devs wanted to (and I think they should) there are ways they could encourage PVE even in such a situation. For instance, if the idea that there are NPC owned Baronies/Counties etc... that are sworn to the same Count/Duke/King (PC or NPC) than the system should be set up to for the most part, encourage peace between them. After all, that's how Feudalism worked for the most part. Its one thing for border areas to clash - say duchies or counties that border on another hierarchy/kingdom etc.. but generally, the Nobility wanted peace in the realm and their bannermen to not spend time infighting for no good reason. Sure, it happened, but it was relatively rare that someone would breach the King's/Duke's/Count's peace to attack their neighbor and it would not be without severe repercussion. Building those systems into CoE too will help to mitigate that issue. Now of course that's for "fully integrated" NPCs. I do think its also worthwhile to have "NPC Bad Guys" - such as bandits (on the basic, on the ground adventurer level) and hostile kingdoms ( on top, management level) in which players can't normally spawn etc... until there's a major upset like the PC kingdoms banding together and the server-wide "raid victory" of taking down one of these kingdoms and allowing it to be opened to PCs and part of the "civilized world". These will provide an existential threat especially to borders of the "civilized" world, give PvE players something they enjoy, all while teaching them the basics of Kingdom-level warfare without having to go up against Players who have a lot more to lose. Of course I'd like to see other PVE content on every level, from the aforementioned bandits, to lurking "monsters" and threats, to say... a coven of necromancers or something threatening a Barony, so the Baron would call sworn Knights and take on citizen levies and adventurers to put a stop to it... providing a reward that can be then dispensed as he sees fit. But what's this... an ancient tome the necromancers were using. Will the Baron give it to the local church to be destroyed? Send it to the University (or whereever magic might be studied) elsewhere in the County, so its "gifts" can be imparted to the province? Will the Count object and overrule the issue, claiming the risk of a pestilence is too high to be worth its study? And on and on it goes on all levels of the game.. There are plenty of opportunities for engaging PVE experiences and I hope to see many of them in CoE. I see other MMOs (one, notably) that is similar to CoE in some ways, but in others it is putting the bulk of its content mostly on PVP which I think will drive away a large audience that could come and help make the world much more immersive and engaging. All of the "throne war" elements can still happen and thee can still be upsets, but providing for pure PVE content and having areas that are not totally safe but are more conducive to those who want to play this way . For instance, Kingdom A is an "anything goes" PVP friendly kingdom where various Nobles don't mind the struggle for power among their subordinates etc. Kingdom B on the otherhand is made up of Nobles who don't permit this kind of squabbling and only approves fighting against enemies of the kingdom etc, which is more favorable to PVE types. Now, some of those enemies of Kingdom B may be both NPC and PC owned lands, but the players can choose (or, are "encouraged" / ordered) to help defend the border zone or try to roust the Kingdom's enemy on an official incusion if they wish. However, they can also stay on the "interior" to mostly have to deal with the aforementioned NPC cultists, bandits etc.. Sure, thieves,an assassin or murderous band of PVPers could find their way into Kingdom B's lands and its citizens may be affected, but there would be bounties, trials, jail time, fines etc... so it wouldn't be "tolerated"" the same way they would be in Kingdom A. So yeah..lots of potential for depth. PVP and PVE are equally important in a title like this.
First off, thanks for all the hard work and thought as to the best ways to implement and roll out the game and make it enjoyable for the players.
As someone who games for fun and much prefers PvE over the stress of PvP as a means of relaxation, I like the fact you are increasing the number of PvE areas so they will act as buffers between kingdoms since I find building and industry much more enjoyable than the PvP aspects of games.
Has there been thought given to what happens if/when a PvP based kingdom grows big enough to consume the NPC buffer regions and directly threaten PvE-based kingdoms?
Are any explicit game mechanics planned to help support PvE based kingdoms, or is the plan to leave this up to player negotiations, alliances, trade treaties, etc?
These questions become especially important since I agree that early involvement of the player base in game development should significantly increase the base, and provide much more manpower for kingdoms to expand and control NPC areas.
First off, thanks for all the hard work and thought as to the best ways to implement and roll out the game and make it enjoyable for the players. As someone who games for fun and much prefers PvE over the stress of PvP as a means of relaxation, I like the fact you are increasing the number of PvE areas so they will act as buffers between kingdoms since I find building and industry much more enjoyable than the PvP aspects of games. Has there been thought given to what happens if/when a PvP based kingdom grows big enough to consume the NPC buffer regions and directly threaten PvE-based kingdoms? Are any explicit game mechanics planned to help support PvE based kingdoms, or is the plan to leave this up to player negotiations, alliances, trade treaties, etc? These questions become especially important since I agree that early involvement of the player base in game development should significantly increase the base, and provide much more manpower for kingdoms to expand and control NPC areas.
This is a fantastic way to engage the community in the development process. I am very excited to see how it all works out in the end. While I have not purchased a title yet, I am hoping to in the near future. Great post!
Awesome can't wait for all this to go down , I'll be paying off my baron/astronomer title soon !
It seems as though you have separated "crime and punishment" and "laws". One will be tested in the MUD and the other in KoE. How can you test one without the other?
Also realize that KoE and ElyriaMUD will work in unison, they will be tested together, and what happens in one will affect the other.
Posted By **The_White_Mask** at 5:24 PM - Sun Feb 26 2017 > > It seems as though you have separated "crime and punishment" and "laws". One will be tested in the MUD and the other in KoE. How can you test one without the other? Also realize that KoE and ElyriaMUD will work in unison, they will be tested together, and what happens in one will affect the other.
One is the ability to enforce laws, the other is the ability to create/change them.
Posted By **The_White_Mask** at 08:24 AM - Sun Feb 26 2017 > > It seems as though you have separated "crime and punishment" and "laws". One will be tested in the MUD and the other in KoE. How can you test one without the other? One is the ability to enforce laws, the other is the ability to create/change them.
I deeply appreciate how SBS is willing to break down the development process like this. The continued transparency and honest verbage of this team is going to win over a lot of people. Time will tell how long they stay; I'm definitely enthusiastic for the long-term future of this game.
I agree! Most AAA companies nowadays like to keep themselves in the dark, away from the public, where lies and miscommunication can spawn. They have handled themselves well, and they deserve acknowledgement for that.
Agree , I just hope they are as good at developing games as they are at handling/producing them and this game will be the best MMO to ever be created !
Wow, that was a lot of information. So much so, that I don't even know where to begin or even where I'm allowed to begin.
I really appreciate your DJ, you can keep writing longer ones and i won't complain. My concern is about the influence points we can earn at ElyriaMUD and at KoE, if some players start gathering too much influence you could possibly start rising the prices of all stuff in the exposition. I have seen that in a ton of games and it's really unfair. A easy way out is to limit the amount you can gain a day or week, or simply not rising the prices haha. Thank you.
I can see where you are coming from. But from my personal perspective, if you were to limit the amount a player gets per day then that might deter players for playing longer periods of time if that player cares a lot (or only about) their influence points.
For example: If the cap is so much and it is rather easy to reach that cap, then a player may grind for that progress but then quit once they reached that cap.
I understand a lot of people are not like that and they might enjoy the game for what it is, but it is a thought to keep in mind.
I can see where you are coming from. But from my personal perspective, if you were to limit the amount a player gets per day then that might deter players for playing longer periods of time if that player cares a lot (or only about) their influence points. For example: If the cap is so much and it is rather easy to reach that cap, then a player may grind for that progress but then quit once they reached that cap. I understand a lot of people are not like that and they might enjoy the game for what it is, but it is a thought to keep in mind.
That's right, i also want to get as much influence as i can and keep playing these amazing experiences, but it's just a concern that it can happen.
Great read! I personally really like the info in these developer's journals. They give the player base a good look into the process's behind the massive undertaking of an MMO. While I am sure several in the community are well aware of the intricacies of programming/developing a game, I personally do not. Transparency is a rare thing these days and it's enjoyable seeing it from a crowd-funded enterprise. In a sense, I see these dev. journals as more of a meeting with your shareholders, than bland info. sent from some large corporation to its player base. Thank you, and as always, looking forward to the next update (and an official launch date).
How much information is going to be released prior to settlement/domain selection and family name generation regarding local and regional geography of settlements, cultural features such as language, mythology and theology, and the local flora and fauna that is central to daily life i.e. animals that are eaten or used for construction or clothing. I got the impression from the Q&A and journal that most of this information except for tribes (which could contain everything listed above) and a basic overview of local resources will be unavailable before the initial names are locked in.
The reason I ask is that this kind of information helps in the creation of immersive names for settlements and families; personally, I have tried not to think too much about this kind of thing until I know for sure where my settlement will end up.
As cool as it is seeing the kingdoms come alive on the forums it seems that they all fit with the medieval northern European look and feel of the new haven/titan steppes area and, if I’m not mistaken, most of these kingdoms will be in vastly different biomes.
How much information is going to be released prior to settlement/domain selection and family name generation regarding local and regional geography of settlements, cultural features such as language, mythology and theology, and the local flora and fauna that is central to daily life i.e. animals that are eaten or used for construction or clothing. I got the impression from the Q&A and journal that most of this information except for tribes (which could contain everything listed above) and a basic overview of local resources will be unavailable before the initial names are locked in. The reason I ask is that this kind of information helps in the creation of immersive names for settlements and families; personally, I have tried not to think too much about this kind of thing until I know for sure where my settlement will end up. As cool as it is seeing the kingdoms come alive on the forums it seems that they all fit with the medieval northern European look and feel of the new haven/titan steppes area and, if I’m not mistaken, most of these kingdoms will be in vastly different biomes.
I'm beyond excited to be a part of this amazing game. I hope it lives up to expectations of all it's fans. I have no doubt it will since it's in the capable hands of gamers who share our passion.
These questions are very specific, and could probably be answered in one word. Is this all possible?
I begin as a Count, selecting my county seat as a Civilian settlement.
My brother joins the county, as a Baron (his backing tier), selecting a military settlement.
He joins as part of my family.
Other family members // friends join as family members.
As a Count and a Baron, my brother and I build a small hamlet each, as a supply / gathering point, ie within 20 mins of our main settlements. These we buy with EP as personal holdings.
In the (hopefully not) event I happen to be displaced as a Count, I expect to lose my county seat. Presumably however, my personal holdings (including the small hamlet), I would continue to own, as would my brother, if he lost his Barony?
As family members, to retain a non-abandoned state on the local lands, any family member can visit them?
I think the answer to your questions are yes. This is from my research into this game, which I think is going to be great. You should keep your personally owned lands even if you lost the title. From my reading in the DJ's any family member visiting you property keeps it from becoming abandoned.
When you mention 'Artificial Intelligence (NPC)', does that include 'offline character scripting' (default and custom), or is that not going to be tested in the pre-alpha stage?
I'm also curious about this. It seemed a major part of their initial promise to people was the ability to do meaningful things in the game with a constrained time schedule i.e. a lot of time offline because LIFE. I would hope that the two would be developed in conjunction, hopefully we'll see more as the MUD comes to be.
This game looks kinda fantastic but I have to ask, Will it be translate to Spanish?
or... will there be translations to any language? or will the game be in elyrian only? translations need to be quite good, if i want to make contracts with someone that doesnt speak my language. best would be that contracts are written in elyrish/elyrian and every language needs to adapt :P I cant give someone a contract written in german, spanish, portuguese if the target person only speaks english and chinese... just wont work.
Posted By **Mixras** at 10:28 PM - Fri Feb 24 2017 > > This game looks kinda fantastic but I have to ask, Will it be translate to Spanish? or... will there be translations to any language? or will the game be in elyrian only? translations need to be quite good, if i want to make contracts with someone that doesnt speak my language. best would be that contracts are written in elyrish/elyrian and every language needs to adapt :P I cant give someone a contract written in german, spanish, portuguese if the target person only speaks english and chinese... just wont work.
@Caspian One question that came to mind during the Q&A yesterday I had I thought I would share here.
On a multitude of occasions my wife and I (as well as other friends/guild mates) have discussed that game X or game Y should have waited to release the game and worked out the bugs/mechanics rather than rush to release. So with that in mind, is the intention of SBS to truly test the different game mechanics and functionalities to a higher level of satisfaction irregardless to the release date of the game?
Thanks again for sharing your DJ and being so upfront with the community. This is a rarity and greatly appreciated. It shows your willingness to share your successes and failures alike and being open with the community. That in my mind shows trust and integrity. Thank you.
@Caspian One question that came to mind during the Q&A yesterday I had I thought I would share here. On a multitude of occasions my wife and I (as well as other friends/guild mates) have discussed that game X or game Y should have waited to release the game and worked out the bugs/mechanics rather than rush to release. So with that in mind, is the intention of SBS to truly test the different game mechanics and functionalities to a higher level of satisfaction irregardless to the release date of the game? Thanks again for sharing your DJ and being so upfront with the community. This is a rarity and greatly appreciated. It shows your willingness to share your successes and failures alike and being open with the community. That in my mind shows trust and integrity. Thank you.
I second this comment and question!
Great and interesting news! I just miss some commitment on high level release dates. I'm aware of delays which cannot be predicted but at least referring e.g. to 4Q 2017 or so would set some realistic expectations. For now, when I speak to individual people, they predict dates starting with summer 2017 and ending with game release in 2021. That is a bit huge range, isn't it?
This is super exciting Caspian! I think Prologue, ElyriaMUD, and KoE will bring in a lot more players and retain more in the long run as people will have tangible things to play with, which are connected to the main game!
And now that ElyriaMUD is going to be 2D and not simply text base? That's going to be much more exciting for a lot more people!
This is super exciting Caspian! I think Prologue, ElyriaMUD, and KoE will bring in a lot more players and retain more in the long run as people will have tangible things to play with, which are connected to the main game! And now that ElyriaMUD is going to be 2D and not simply text base? That's going to be much more exciting for a lot more people!
And less so for those of us that were fond of (and looking forward to) the MUD.
i would like to know how many skills and skilltrees the Prologue will be reduced to (if it is)?
in regards to combat, and more importantly (for me), to crafting. can we test every craft, or is it just one to see how it can work?
will taming/farming be in it?
i would like to know how many skills and skilltrees the Prologue will be reduced to (if it is)? in regards to combat, and more importantly (for me), to crafting. can we test every craft, or is it just one to see how it can work? will taming/farming be in it?
okay, well i am very impressed, and this has really helped me get hyped. (as if i wasn't hyped enough already.) now i should probably start working on my towns recruitment page... gotta get some troopers to help expand the county. ty for the update.
Ok, a question about Prologue. I know that it is just a short demo, but will we be able to replay it multiple times? I have played full featured rpg games multiple times over each with a different way (Character class and race). I know CoE doesn't have set classes, but I would like to play it as a crafter, an explorer, possibly different tribes to see what I prefer. Granted, I realize that because of already pledged to liege lords for CoE, I might not have an option to play different tribes in CoE as the tribes are likely region locked, but I am still curious to maybe play something other than the regional tribes.
Hey Moonlynx, while the Prologue can technically be played multiple times, you won't find as much replay value as you might with fully finished games.
For example, we'll likely have mining, smithing, lumberjacking, carpentry, and maybe a handful of other production / gatherer skills depending on how different each crafting profession is. That said, we won't have even half of the available crafting professions as CoE and more to the point, there will be a limited number of items that can be crafted.
This is to give you an idea of what crafting feels like. But in the absence of a player-economy, trainers spread around the world to learn new patterns and techniques, it's not like one could just be content being a "crafter" for the prologue.
Likewise, while you could be an Explorer in the Prologue to go off and find some interesting encounters, in the absence of a full party of adventurers the encounters won't be nearly as interesting as in the actual game. Similarly, one of the primary goals of an Explorer in CoE is to find the locations of unique or rare materials so the information can be sold to gatherers. But w/o other players to sell it to, the information is less useful.
What I'm getting at is that the Prologue isn't intended to be an opportunity to try CoE in different roles - that requires the full multi-player experience.
Finally, unlike most single-player RPGs, one thing that is true in the Prologue is that it is still event-based. Success or failure is predicated on you completing the necessary objectives in a timely fashion. Wander off too far, too long, and the story will proceed without you to one conclusion or another.
As for tribes, while there will be other tribes present in the demo, and you could potentially play as a few region-specific tribes, they don't change the play so significantly that it would be worth re-playing just to experience a different one.
Posted By **Moonlynx** at 02:37 AM - Fri Feb 24 2017 > > Ok, a question about Prologue. I know that it is just a short demo, but will we be able to replay it multiple times? I have played full featured rpg games multiple times over each with a different way (Character class and race). I know CoE doesn't have set classes, but I would like to play it as a crafter, an explorer, possibly different tribes to see what I prefer. Granted, I realize that because of already pledged to liege lords for CoE, I might not have an option to play different tribes in CoE as the tribes are likely region locked, but I am still curious to maybe play something other than the regional tribes. Hey Moonlynx, while the Prologue can technically be played multiple times, you won't find as much replay value as you might with fully finished games. For example, we'll likely have mining, smithing, lumberjacking, carpentry, and maybe a handful of other production / gatherer skills depending on how different each crafting profession is. That said, we won't have even half of the available crafting professions as CoE and more to the point, there will be a limited number of items that can be crafted. This is to give you an idea of what crafting feels like. But in the absence of a player-economy, trainers spread around the world to learn new patterns and techniques, it's not like one could just be content being a "crafter" for the prologue. Likewise, while you could be an Explorer in the Prologue to go off and find some interesting encounters, in the absence of a full party of adventurers the encounters won't be nearly as interesting as in the actual game. Similarly, one of the primary goals of an Explorer in CoE is to find the locations of unique or rare materials so the information can be sold to gatherers. But w/o other players to sell it to, the information is less useful. What I'm getting at is that the Prologue isn't intended to be an opportunity to try CoE in different roles - that requires the full multi-player experience. Finally, unlike most single-player RPGs, one thing that is true in the Prologue is that it is still event-based. Success or failure is predicated on you completing the necessary objectives in a timely fashion. Wander off too far, too long, and the story will proceed without you to one conclusion or another. As for tribes, while there will be other tribes present in the demo, and you could potentially play as a few region-specific tribes, they don't change the play so significantly that it would be worth re-playing just to experience a different one.
Great info, thanks for all your hard work. I can't wait until we get Prologue. Things will really start to become a reality then!!
Another great update! I can't wait to get in and start helping to give feedback!
Oy-vey. My head is bleeding. I suddenly have a supersized respect for the monarchs of this game.
I am finally feeling like I have backed a "winner". It's been a long time in coming.
I can neither confirm nor deny whether that was my intention or not.
Posted By **nashoxx** at 5:52 PM - Thu Feb 23 2017 > > When I read "NMS" I thought No Man's Sky lol I can neither confirm nor deny whether that was my intention or not.
what mechanics, if any, are in place for a Count or a Duke who is on layaway, and hasn't completed his/her layaway come Land Selection time.
are they SOL or would they be able to claim an NPC County/Duchy if any are still in existence at the time they complete their layaway?
@Caspian what mechanics, if any, are in place for a Count or a Duke who is on layaway, and hasn't completed his/her layaway come Land Selection time. are they SOL or would they be able to claim an NPC County/Duchy if any are still in existence at the time they complete their layaway?
I do believe it was said in the past that any title on layaway that wouldn't be complete by the time land selection happens would be converted into store credits.
Posted By **Dleatherus** at 8:51 PM - Thu Feb 23 2017 > > @Caspian > > what mechanics, if any, are in place for a Count or a Duke who is on layaway, and hasn't completed his/her layaway come Land Selection time. > > are they SOL or would they be able to claim an NPC County/Duchy if any are still in existence at the time they complete their layaway? I do believe it was said in the past that any title on layaway that wouldn't be complete by the time land selection happens would be converted into store credits.
Would have been good to know if the same growth principle that applies to counts in KoE was being applied to dukes and kingdoms. ie some counties and duchies begin as neutral - success in KoE helps to determine which they begin loyal to..
It's the same in both. With now 12 duchies per kingdom, any that have not been claimed by KoE can be expanded into to increase the size of an existing duchy.
Posted By **Oracle** at 4:52 PM - Thu Feb 23 2017 > > Would have been good to know if the same growth principle that applies to counts in KoE was being applied to dukes and kingdoms. ie some counties and duchies begin as neutral - success in KoE helps to determine which they begin loyal to.. It's the same in both. With now 12 duchies per kingdom, any that have not been claimed by KoE can be expanded into to increase the size of an existing duchy.
Sorry for tagging on a little late but does this mean that Entire counties could potentially disappear (if they are NPC) from one dutch and end up in another or would County A from Dutchie A simply decrease in size as Dutchie B grows in size?
And What about taking Counties, and Dutchie from other kingdoms? Same thing as above?
@Caspian Sorry for tagging on a little late but does this mean that Entire counties could potentially disappear (if they are NPC) from one dutch and end up in another or would County A from Dutchie A simply decrease in size as Dutchie B grows in size? And What about taking Counties, and Dutchie from other kingdoms? Same thing as above?
Second, a question, what if some king is killed few times during MUD? Does he lose opportunity to continue growing his Kingdom?
Or deaths hold no such impact during MUD?
First, nice post! Second, a question, what if some king is killed few times during MUD? Does he lose opportunity to continue growing his Kingdom? Or deaths hold no such impact during MUD?
Death do not hold impact in the MUD. Caspian's reason he stated in the Q&A was since this is history, this basically translates (for your scenario) "The king had a lot of frequent naps and constantly woke up with new scars around his neck. "
Posted By **Gothix** at 4:46 PM - Thu Feb 23 2017 > > First, nice post! > > Second, a question, what if some king is killed few times during MUD? > Does he lose opportunity to continue growing his Kingdom? > > Or deaths hold no such impact during MUD? Death do not hold impact in the MUD. Caspian's reason he stated in the Q&A was since this is history, this basically translates (for your scenario) "The king had a lot of frequent naps and constantly woke up with new scars around his neck. "
Great reading as always. I am happy to see that the offical launch will be same for everyone.
I think you forgot exposition ;) Things happening in exposition will carry over to launch, but not everyone will take part in exposition.
Posted By **Mesis** at 01:36 AM - Fri Feb 24 2017 > > Great reading as always. I am happy to see that the offical launch will be same for everyone. I think you forgot exposition ;) Things happening in exposition will carry over to launch, but not everyone will take part in exposition.
Another great DJ. Always good to hear the how and why when it comes to the games development.
Looking forward to the, often eluded, tribes DJ.
Another great DJ. Always good to hear the how and why when it comes to the games development. Looking forward to the, often eluded, tribes DJ.
Any number of settlements/towns/baronies per county?
I am REALLY eager to know how many cities we can have per county as all of the barons & mayors in the county I am a part of seem to have backed at a higher tier (Governor or Magistrate). If we can have as many cities as we want, I may up my pledge to Magistrate or Governor to start with a larger settlement.
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2019-04-25T02:08:58Z
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https://chroniclesofelyria.com/blog/17384/DJ-19-PreAlpha-Experiences
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Whether your budget is $10,000 or $200,000, this roundup of modular home prices in your area puts prefab within reach.
Once regarded as uninspiring look-alikes with no personality or pizazz, modular homes can now be found in just about any configuration you can imagine, and at just about any price point. Not only that, modular homes have become incredibly of the moment, incorporating modern design and sustainable practices for maximum efficiency.
The problem is, many potential buyers don’t know much about modular homes. That’s why we’re here to clear up any confusion—after all, modular homes make great dwellings for today’s modern families looking for energy-efficient and affordable options.
Based in New York City, Cocoon9 takes a unique approach to prefab homes, offering a line of tiny homes with high-quality construction and finishes, smart technology, energy efficiencies, and versatile spaces that are ready for the modern market. Their models start at 160 square feet and go up to 480. Although design and production of each prefab takes about four weeks, on site installation typically takes under one week to complete.
Modular homes are built as several large pieces in climate-controlled indoor factories, then pieced together at the site the homeowner has chosen. During construction, modular homes are subject to extremely rigorous quality control standards. The truth is, modular homes are just as—if not more so—sturdy as stick-built homes that are constructed fully on site. Today’s modular homes are made to withstand wind speeds up to 180 miles per hour.
Are modular homes less expensive than regular homes, and by how much? You’ll be glad to know that another major benefit of prefab homes is that they are generally less expensive than stick-built homes; choosing a modular design can save as much as 15 to 30 percent over traditional homes. Most of that savings is reflected in the much shorter build time.
Since they are constructed in indoor factories on assembly lines, modular homes are much less labor intensive than traditional, stick-built homes. Be aware, however, that the price you’re quoted for a prefab home often won’t include additional costs like land, permits, site work, customization, and transportation.
Here, we’ve rounded up a sample of modular homes at a variety of different price points for every budget. The modular home prices featured here are just for the homes. Additional costs mentioned above will apply.
No matter where you live across the United States (and even worldwide), you shouldn't have any trouble finding modular homes under $200,000. Given that modular homes are often cost-effective choices, the modular homes under $200,000 that we’ve included are spacious with lots of stylish customizations.
Constructed with durable Montana timber, corrugated metal roofing, and energy-efficient windows, the FUSE 2 by Ideabox is a 1,360-square-foot modular home.
IdeaBox expertly makes small spaces seem much larger with seamless views of the outdoors, 8-foot ceilings, tall windows, and light, airy interiors. These features make the FUSE series a popular option for modular homes under $200K.
At 550 square feet, Ma Modular’s "Grand Ma" model is one of the larger modular homes under $200K on our list. Prices vary—modular home prices in Texas for this model are $225 per square foot, bringing the Grand Ma to about $124,000. Modular home prices in Pennsylvania for the same model are somewhat less, at $118,000. Finally, to own the Grand Ma in Florida, you’ll pay about $107,000.
Despite the small size, Brightbuilt Homes’ modular homes under $200K are tastefully designed with modern touches, like light-toned hardwood floors and stainless-steel appliances.
Brightbuilt Homes has been constructing beautiful modular homes in Maine since 2005. Modular home prices in Maine reflect the somewhat more expensive Northeast market: this tiny but tasteful, fully customized, net-zero energy barn runs about $280 per square foot.
The modular homes under $100,000 on our list don't scrimp on high-quality materials and stylish accents. At this price point, choices abound, so be sure to find the model that speaks to your individual taste.
The handsome K6 Series, one of KitHaus’ largest models, offers modular homes under $100K. These can be customized to include an Ipe deck and hardwood siding, as well as corrugated roofing. All KitHaus frames are lightweight but durable, made with M.H.S.** structural anodized aluminum framing.
Modular home prices in Pennsylvania tend to be lower than in California or New York. But most pricing variations come down to external factors, such as land, customizations, transportation, and zoning costs. KitHaus serves many markets across the U.S., so final pricing may vary.
KitHaus modular homes offer modern touches, like sleek, angular designs and vanities made of timber.
One of the most popular models of modular homes under $100K, the M.05 Studio by Honomobo offers small-space living with a unique twist; all of Honomobo’s beautiful homes are made out of shipping containers. The M Studio is a 200-square-foot modular home made of extremely durable Cor-Ten steel, which is made to withstand the harshest weather conditions.
Offering a truly seamless indoor/outdoor experience with floor-to-ceiling windows, the M Studio, like all Honomobo models, can be customized with a variety of upgrades, like this high-gloss white cabinetry and premium countertop.
Steel Homes, a Florida–based modular home company, faces a unique problem: how to design and build a modular home that can withstand the frequent hurricanes the state sees. That’s why these modular homes under $100K use light-gauge steel. The high strength-to-weight ratio maximizes building design flexibility and provides rigid structural integrity. Modular home prices in Florida are comparatively cheaper than in markets like California, New England, and D.C. At 1,010 square feet, the Tulip is Steel Homes’ smallest model, with a price tag right around $80,000.
The amazing global story of the prefabricated house, once regarded as a cheap and easy solution, now synonymous with ambitious design and sophisticated detail. This book features a unique compilation of prefab houses as well as contact details for relevant suppliers and manufacturers.
Prefabricated housing of high design and quality construction has long been an elusive goal for architects, where industry practices, bureaucratic regulations, and cost have always stood in the way— until now.
For many, the idea of prefab housing may bring to mind trailers and other less desirable images of home life.
Go big on style and small on size with our selection of modular homes under $75,000. Though these modular homes may have less square footage, they make innovative use of the space.
Begun as an architecture school project and later patented through the University of South Florida, AbleNook is a flat-packed kit home comprising aircraft-grade aluminum framing and SIPs. Adjustable leg jacks mean that the homes can be assembled on uneven terrain, and the modules can be added to suit any building type and function: dwelling, temporary housing for disaster relief, school, office. No power tools are required to assemble the modular homes. A larger, bespoke dwelling with a Smeg kitchen and spacious, skylit bathroom costs $65,000, with proceeds going towards production design for disaster relief AbleNooks. Deliveries are expected in Q3 2019.
Based out of Canada, Jenesys Buildings offers three different designs of "Laneway" houses. The Wings model is an attractive, contemporary design, with an angled roof, modern finishes, and cladding. It’s a great option to consider if you’re looking for modular homes under $75K.
Minim Homes are wrapped in beautiful, shiplapped cyprus that will gently age to grey. And a 960-watt solar array on the roof can be battery powered, allowing the home to be completely off-grid if desired.
On the inside, genius design meets modern styling. Minim offers one of the most innovative modular homes under $75K. The company has won numerous American Institute of Architects awards for their incredibly space-conscious designs.
If you're looking for modular homes under $50,000, be sure to find a local prefab company to get the most bang for your buck. Steep transportation fees can make even the most affordable modular home prices rise quickly.
While it's definitely possible to find modular homes under $40,000, you'll find smaller spaces with few customizations. Still, we've included some can't-miss models on our list of modular homes under $40,000.
The Bonsai tiny home is one of Bamboo Living's many homes that use timber-grade structural bamboo as a building material. These innovative modular homes under $40K use bamboo-framed exterior wall panels, which are now available as single-wall (for warm climates) or double-wall (for a wider range of temperatures). On the exterior, the Bonsai uses natural split bamboo siding. Based in Pahoa, Hawaii, the company seeks to protect and restore the planet by pioneering the use of timber-grade structural bamboo as a tree-free building material.
Designed by architect David Day and manufactured and constructed by Green Modern Kits, Casa Ti is a passive solar, one-story modern modular with a whopping 1,200 square feet and three bedrooms. That makes it one of the largest modular homes under $40K that we’ve seen.
The net-zero, off-the-grid prototype is clad in SIPs (Structural Insulated Panels). Green Modern Kit homes come without anything included, and you’ll have to contract your own builder, but the kits are fully customizable.
For the most part, modular homes under $10,000 aren't stand-alone living spaces, but rather add-on spaces. Consider these tiny spaces if you need an extra bedroom, a pool house, or a dedicated studio space.
If you’re willing to sacrifice space for a super-low price tag in your search for modular homes under $10K, the K3 by KitHaus is an option. It’s adaptable as a backyard studio, home office, pool house, or play room, to name a few options. Its exterior is clad in corrugated galvalume or smooth, natural cement board with corrugated roofing, and floors are natural hardwood or finished plywood.
From Oregon Timberwerks comes one of the lowest modular home prices we could find. These adorable log cabins make great options if you’re considering a (seriously) tiny home. They’re well insulated and fully weatherproof, constructed with solid wood and plywood. The floors are constructed of pressure treated lumber and exterior plywood, and the walls are covered with tapered lap siding over plywood sheathing and a vapor barrier.
Architects have been intrigued by prefabricated construction since the early twentieth century.
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2019-04-24T15:01:33Z
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https://www.dwell.com/article/modular-homes-for-sale-24b9941b
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The debate over publicity and privacy in financial remedy cases may be about to be clarified. An application for a reporting restriction order by a former wife involved in financial remedy proceedings has been rejected by the Court of Appeal. Tina Norman had claimed that her financial affairs were “private business”, and that there was no public interest in the disclosure of her identity. However, editors at a number of media organisations objected to Ms Norman’s application, saying that the principle of open justice should prevail. The Court of Appeal agreed and ordered that journalists could name Ms Norman and her ex-husband in reports of the case. The judgment will be published at a later date, and no doubt many family lawyers will be eagerly awaiting it.
Changes to the court rules that apply in cases concerning arrangements for a child in which it is alleged or admitted, or there is other reason to believe, that the child or a party has experienced domestic violence or abuse perpetrated by another party, or that there is a risk of such violence or abuse, have been recommended Mr Justice Cobb. The changes include: displacing the presumption that involvement of both parents in the life of the child concerned will further the child’s welfare where the involvement of a parent in a child’s life would put the child or other parent at risk of suffering harm arising from domestic violence or abuse; amending the rules to include a requirement for the court to ensure that the court process is not being used as a means in itself to perpetuate coercion, control or harassment by an abusive parent; and amending the rules to afford further protection for the alleged victim of abuse from cross-examination by an alleged unrepresented perpetrator. I hope that these changes will, if implemented, have the desired effect of protecting victims of domestic abuse, although I’m not sure that they will actually make a lot of difference.
This has been ‘Family Mediation Week’, a campaign aiming to raise awareness of out-of-court options for families going through divorce or separation. To mark it, the charity the Family Mediation Association has said that the public need to be better informed of the availability and benefits of mediation. For my part, I am all in favour of the use of mediation in appropriate cases, although it is not, of course, a panacea for resolving all family disputes.
In a worrying piece of news the BBC has reported that a victim of domestic violence was assaulted after a social worker twice disclosed the address of her safe house to her abusive ex-husband. It was apparently claimed that the social worker believed it was the husband’s “parental right” to know where his children were. The social services department involved has apparently apologised, but this really is not good enough. Safe houses, or refuges, are vital for the safety of victims of serious domestic abuse, and it is essential that their addresses are not disclosed – all professionals involved in domestic abuse cases should know this.
A new Family Procedure Rules Practice Direction has been published to facilitate the launch of the first small online divorce pilot. The location and timing of the pilot is not yet known, but this does confirm that we are at last moving towards a virtual divorce system.
The Court of Appeal has set aside a number of orders made in a financial remedies case, after finding a series of procedural errors with how the case was handled. In Iqbal v Iqbal the husband appealed against various orders, including an interim periodical payments (maintenance) order, judgment summonses and the final financial remedies order. Giving the leading judgment of the Court of Appeal Sir Ernest Ryder said that the husband was not given the ‘elementary procedural protections’ he had a right to expect, as orders were made against him without him being given the opportunity to respond. He went on to say that ‘on any numbers of bases’ the decision made at the conclusion of the final hearing was procedurally unfair, to the extent that it should be set aside. He directed that the application for a financial remedy order be re-heard.
Interesting comments as ever John. It seems that the Paramountcy Principle is no longer paramount and that Practice Directions can overturn statute law.
Let’s just examine what you say on Practice Direction 12J.
We know that Domestic Violence and Abuse can include physical, emotional, psychological and also financial abuse. What the draft wording appears to suggest is that if for example the mother felt that it would be so traumatic TO HER that the Court should allow her beautiful child to see that horrible evil swine of a father then the Court would need to act to circumvent the will of Parliament set out in statute law – i.e the presumption that involvement will further the child’s welfare. S11 (2) of the 2014 Act.
Clearly it is insufficient to be able to prove that the involvement of the ‘other parent’ would not further the welfare of the child as the 2014 Act requires. Merely the risk of the mother (sorry, controlling parent) suffering some form of domestic abuse is sufficient to overturn the provisions of statute. Either the ‘best interests of the child’ are paramount or they aren’t. Which one is it?
In his ‘review’ of PD12J Stephen Cobb has obviously applied the same rigour that he does in his ‘day job’ in the Family Court. He tells us in paragraph 4 of his report that he consulted with ……………..…..Women’s Aid, oh and Rights of Women. He also mentions a number of feminist academics including Professor Rosemary Hunter – who is currently the academic representative on the FJC plus a few others – all of whom are likely to have argued from substantially the same position. Did he consider that perhaps Women’s Aid and Rights of Women are not the best qualified to represent the perspective of male victims of abuse? Did he consult with anyone about the extent to which false and spurious allegations of abuse are a characteristic of Private Law proceedings? We can but speculate.
Justice Cobb may be able to evidence that he consulted with a range of perspectives on this issue – personally I see no indication that he did. However, let’s look at the next question of the extent to which he tested the evidence? Again this is a pretty standard task for a Family Court Judge one would suppose.
Furthermore he repeats the evidence produced by Women’s Aid that asserts that 39% of women were physically abused by their former partner in the Family Court!!
Unlike Justice Cobb, Lucy Reed – Chair of the Transparency Project, has asked questions about the reliability of the data. It seems that the figures were produced from a self-selected sample of Women’s Aid service users amounting to 90 individuals.
ensure that the court process is not used as a means to perpetuate coercion, control or harassment by an abusive parent.
Men who turn to the Family Court as their last hope of ever seeing their children again are now ‘presumed’ to be perpetrators of abuse! Clearly the existing provisions of s91(14) of the Children Act 1989 are wholly inadequate to prevent these wicked men from wasting their £215 application fee and presumably tens of thousands of pounds worth of legal fees simply to continue this terrible pattern of abuse involving having the absolute cheek to expect to maintain a relationship with their own children.
Is the Paramountcy Principle now subordinate to the ‘risk of harm’ to the controlling parent?
Can a Practice Direction overturn statute law?
I do a lot of work helping parents (mainly, but not all, dads) keep in touch with their kids following separation. It is very common for mothers to make allegations about violence that are later found to be false – but by then they have care and control of the kids, so: game over. They are helped a lot in this by those involved (court, CAFCASS, SS) willingly believing that men are abusers and that women are victims.
Even when a woman is shown to be violent, she is often forgiven. Two weeks ago someone who I help reported that his wife had a row with their son and hit him. Action from social services was “build the relationship with son and mother” – if it had been father who hit the child he would have been out of the house and lucky if his son saw him in a contact center.
It is quite remarkable that it is considered that a Practice Direction can be put in place to displace a legislative presumption, thus usurping the will of Parliament. Surely the job of the judiciary is to interpret and enforce legislation not to reinterpret it or invest it with a new meaning that Parliament clearly never intended. Given that the PD proposals are apparently based solely on a survey of 90 members of Women’s Aid and totally ignore the high propensity of false allegations that feature in Children Act cases, this is especially worrying.
As to the proposal to amend the rules to include a requirement for the court to ensure that the court process is not being used as a means in itself to perpetuate coercion, control or harassment by an abusive parent, whilst such an amendment is highly questionable as an objective, not least because it would be so difficult to determine, it must be hoped that if adopted it will applied to parents seeking to unjustifiably exclude the other from a relationship with the child as a form of control and coercive behaviour.
With regard to the proposals to amend the rules to afford further protection for the alleged victim of abuse from cross- examination by an alleged unrepresented perpetrator, clearly if an alleged perpetrator unable to afford legal representation is denied that the right to test evidence in cross-examination, then he/she is denied his/her right to a fair hearing. If that right is to be denied then the “overriding objective” which requires ensuring that the parties are on an equal footing, must also require that the alleged perpetrator should benefit from legal aid to support his case in the same that the alleged victim does. Only allowing legal aid to an accuser and not to accused is wholly inconsistent with the overriding objective and the court’s duty to promote it.
I am astounded that these proposals have come in so quickly without any proper thought, research or consultation. I know of over 100 cases in detail where men have allegations of serious DV including alcohol/drug abuse and physical assault over a pro-longed period of time. Not one of these Fathers have gone to commit any crime. Indeed, as time goes on in the vast majority the court becomes frustrated with the mother who fails to abide court orders, fails to act in the best interests of the child and nearly always goes to make further unsubstantiated allegations. Yet nothing seems to happen – there’s no cost to making false allegations and yet they add to the “weight” of domestic violence allegations which clearly sway some social workers and judges. It is truly frightening.
There have been several pieces of legislation (coercive control) and procedures (PINs) all to address domestic violence issues. Many encroach on the innocent until proven guilty principle. Yet the figures of their use are woefully low.
The fact that this rule significant rule change – which should be legislative change – has come in on the back of politically motivated is quite upsetting. If someone has been convicted of domestic violence I could understand. Many of the cases I know of the women doesn’t like to give evidence (even when the father is represented) because she knows she’s lying and it usually comes out.
I wouldn’t support any man who I thought had been violent towards a women.
The Family Court may as well be renamed “Mother’s Court”.
When will the government (if not the MoJ via directions!) introduce crimes for making False Allegations, Parental Alienation and Coercive Control of children in Family Separation.
The ‘justice’ system is abused by mothers who play victim constantly to remove a father from a child’s life. Mothers introduce other men, who they barely know, to their children yet fathers that have been a good parent to their child are refused contact. A mother can choose to take her child into a prison to see its father who may be a murderer but a father, who very often suffers with mental health issues following a breakdown of a relationship, has to pay and beg and plead to see his own flesh and blood. There is no equality in the family justice system, fathers are refused contact but legally forced to provide, while mother does what she wants and the children continue to suffer. How many new dads will the children have who nobody checks on? Nobody cares about mums new boyfriends because she is the mother!!! Its an absolutely disgusting set up and all children should have contact with their fathers until they are old enough,16, to decide that they do not wish to have contact or there is a serious life or death situation if contact is maintained.
It’s almost unfathomable to read a post such as yours, see the authors name and believe that a person of the opposite gender can be so perceptive that I find myself saying “You have got it spot on” (on every point from first hand experience and a close observer to a sibling). Rally your troops, it’ll take an army of women saying the same thing to change things because until then, no one will ever listen to a man! “Margaret Ellis for President of the family court of England and Wales” I say. I bow my head with the greatest and most sincerest of respect to you as a person. Wish there were many more people like you – I wish there were judges out there who experienced first hand what it’s really like at the broken end of the family court bottle – empathy for the non resident usually male parent would go a long way to swiftly ensuring the best welfare interests of children instead of years upon years of prolonged emotional torture they are subjected to caused by parental alienation unhelped by the indifference and apathy shown by the family court.
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2019-04-25T20:01:23Z
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https://www.stowefamilylaw.co.uk/blog/2017/01/27/privacy-mediation-and-more/
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Hamza bin Ladin, son of Usama and one of al-Qaeda’s rising media stars, released an audio speech on 31 March, labelled as the sixth edition of his “Sovereignty of the Best of Nations Is In the Uprising of the People of the Haram” series. Oddly, the last speech in the series, released on 18 January, was labelled as the fourth instalment. This speech also focused on delegitimising the Saudi government, in this case by laying out the history of its close relations with the United States and the work the Saudis have done to suppress jihadism. An English-language transcript was released by al-Qaeda’s As-Sahab Media and is reproduced below with some editions in transliteration.
Praise be to Allah, the Noble One who has bestowed His grace upon us, the Great One who has subjected the necks of the mighty to Him, and I bear witness that there is no god but Allah alone and there is not partner ascribed to Him and a witness we hope as a survival from the Hereafter, and I bear witness that Muhammad is His lone messenger and His lone slave, may Allah’s prayer be upon him and his family and his companions.
This is the sixth episode from the episodes: “Sovereignty of the Best of Nations Is In the Uprising of the People of the Haram,” which incites our dear people in the Arabian Peninsula to rise up against the criminal tyrants and rulers of the country and to strip them of their fictions, and incites them to liberate the place of revelation from the Crusaders and protect the Two Holy Mosques from the Safavids, and establish a complete and rightly-guided Islamic system, spreading justice, simplifying the shura [consultation], and reviving jihad for the sake of Allah, while redistributing the riches of the country among the poor and the needy and the deserving, so that the sons of the country can live honourably and in strength in the shade of the shari’a of the Lords of the Worlds.
We have mentioned in the previous episodes that the change in Bilad al-Haramayn would benefit the entire umma [Islamic community], Allah permitting, and that this change would be a main reason for the return of the Islamic umma to its glory and its luster and its sovereignty.
And we pointed out the danger of the creeping Rafida [Shi’a, i.e. Iranian] extension toward the Two Holy Places, from the outside on several fronts and from the inside as well, versus the shameful inability of Al-Sa’ud to confront them. But rather that confronting one faction of [the ruling regime in Arabia], we concluded that Al-Sa’ud and its army was not eligible to defend the Two Holy Mosques.
It is incumbent upon our people in the Arabian Peninsula to prepare the equipment and materials, and prepare to protect the Two Holy Mosques from the Rafida Safavids [Iranians], and to support their mujahideen brothers [al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP)] in Yemen, the Land of Faith and Wisdom, with money and men; Oh Muslim merchants, this is a chance for he who wants to obtain the honour of preparing an army to protect the Two Holy Mosques. Oh young Muslims, go forth lightly and heavily to your mujahideen brothers in Yemen, the Land of Faith, to prepare the equipment and gain the necessary experience from them; they are a people of virtue, and a people of faith and wisdom, and loyalty and help, may Allah consider them such.
We also discussed in the previous episodes about Abdulaziz ibn Sa’ud of the Third Saudi State, and its master and its misguided guider, and we clarified his relationship with the Ottoman State, which betrayed us and broke its pledge of loyalty with us and fought it, and we mentioned his close relationship with Britain, which he loved, and said that it would not leave his mind until the Hour of Resurrection. Then we discussed his relationship with the Ikhwan and his betrayal of them after their role was finished, and we mentioned his betrayal of the Palestinian Issue, his acceptance of a State for the Jews on Palestinian land, his standing in the way of a Palestinian revolution and aborting it, and we clarified also his excessive compassion for the Jews and his harsh cruelty upon our people, the people of Palestine.
Today, by the will of Allah, our discussion is about the relationship of Abdulaziz ibn Sa’ud with America.
After all the close relationships, and the agreements which were between him and between Britain, this loyalty transferred from Britain to America at the end of the Second World War, after the British star faded and the American star appeared in its place—and which is now on its path to decline, by the grace of Allah, glorified and exalted is He, because of the strikes of the mujahideen. The documents in this regard confirm a truth of this relationship. At the famous meeting between Abdulaziz and the American President Roosevelt on Rabi al-Awwal in the hijri year 1364, corresponding to 14 February 1945, on the back of the American cruiser, [the U.S.S.] Quincy, Abdulaziz and Roosevelt agreed to establish a relationship of dependence of the Saudi regime to America and transfer of allegiance of Al-Sa’ud from Britain to America.
The meeting of Abdulaziz with Roosevelt was not ordinary but rather was a dangerous and fateful meeting that dragged the Islamic umma into calamities and disasters. It resulted in the establishment of a stronger relationship with America, at the expense of Britain, and Ibn Sa’ud agreed to allow American ships to use ports of Bilad al-Haramayn and establish a large American air base, and became a region for the American army for a period of five years, then returned after that to Al-Sa’ud with all the facilities built in it.
This was a dangerous step, the first establishment of a crusader military presence in Bilad al-Haramayn since they were banished from it by our prophet, Muhammad, may Allah’s prayers and peace be upon him. Abdulaziz was named as the Abu Rigal of the past century, the greatest traitor, who has his name tied to this great treason.
Thus, Roosevelt and Ibn Sa’ud established the foundations of a Saudi-American relationship, which continues to this day, and which has caused the occupation of Bilad al-Haramayn, and the entry into it of army units and battalions that participated in the killing of hundreds of thousands of Muslims in the region. The wealth of the Islamic umma were looted; wealth whose numbers are astronomical and are not able to be counted except by Allah, glorified and exalted is He, and the reason for that is that Abdulaziz al-Sa’ud, who made this bad deal for his children, and his grandchildren after him, and I wish for him a shameful history.
As for the first: it is the Ottoman State, which he betrayed, breaking his allegiance to it, and fighting it.
As for the second: it is the Crusader British Empire; he allied with it and loved it and ceded Palestine to it.
As for the third: it is the Crusader American Empire, which he allowed to occupy Bilad al-Haramayn.
Abdulaziz became a traitor of the Ottoman State, conceded Palestine, and agreed to the occupation of Bilad al-Haramayn; he is the seller of the three mosques to the Crusaders, and we seek refuge in Allah.
Is this the founder of the State of Tawhid [Monotheism]?!
In conclusion: Abdulaziz ibn Sa’ud, as the supreme leader of the ruling family [in Arabia], betrayed Islam and the Muslims with unprecedented treachery: by allowing the first crusader military force to enter Bilad al-Haramayn; conceding Palestine and Masjid al-Aqsa [“The Farthest Mosque” in Jerusalem]; fighting the Ottoman Caliphate; being subservient to the British Empire, then America, and loving them both. What did he say about the President? The disbelieving Crusader Roosevelt? That he is a twin brother, and a good friend, and he had never met anyone like him in his life, and to have met him was one of the most important events in his life!
Oh Allah, fix for us our religion which is the infallibility of our command, and fix for us our world which we live in, and fix for us our afterlife to which we are headed, and make the life for us better with all good things, and make death a rest for us from all evil.
Our Lord, forgive us, and our parents, and whoever has the right to pray for us, and guide the Muslims.
Allah is the master of mankind, but most people know not.
Our last prayer is: praise be to Allah, the Lord of the Worlds.
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2019-04-23T22:55:45Z
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https://kyleorton1991.wordpress.com/2018/03/31/al-qaeda-denounces-saudi-arabia-for-its-closeness-to-america/
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Qutub Minar–and the only photo I snagged of the mysteriously rust-less iron pillar.
In that same way you can feel a prickly scratchiness at the back of your throat before a raging fever sets in, I can feel the prickly ugliness of a little bit of culture shock beginning to cast a shadow on this stage of our time here.
I’m feeling two different kinds of culture shock really, towards both India and, as a friend here calls it, the “cruise ship” lifestyle of living on an embassy compound.
I hate to really complain about these things because–for every leering, innuendo-spewing pervert in Delhi, I know at least four or five wonderful men who’ve helped me with my stroller, held open a door, or simply said “Hello” in the most respectful and kindly way. For that one horrific incident we had in Lodhi Garden a few weeks ago where a woman, shouting and snarling, tried to grab Will out of my arms over and over until her husband intervened and Will was shaking in terror, we’ve had dozens and dozens of kind people since then nod understandingly as Will bursts into tears whenever anyone so much as tries to stroke his cheek.
And for as much as it sometimes feels like a social gauntlet to exchange greetings with at least 25 gardeners, sweepers, guard, nannies and neighbors every time we step out our front door, it’s also an incredibly nurturing environment for Will to toddle around in, knowing that everyone he meets will smile and wave every single time they see him–even if it’s the 16th time that day. I miss “real India” living here with so few markets, stores and restaurants within walking distance, but it is so very nice to come home to great neighbors, quiet green lawns and a home where the generator faithfully kicks in 5 seconds after every power failure.
I can’t deny though that this week I’ve begun to think about where we might go next instead of simply relishing our short two years here.
My instinct, when the culture shock is just starting to kick in is to retreat, to hibernate, to stay at home where its comfortable and easy and where I can very nearly pretend I’m not in India at all.
I’m learning though that this is often, paradoxically, the absolute worst thing I can do to cope. As isolated and “Americanized” as our lives are here, the more that I cling to all things familiar, the more jarring the foreignness becomes.
And after awhile a certain amount of inertia can take hold. The longer a person stays at home and avoids going out into the city, the more insurmountable the challenges seem and the harder it gets to simply pack a bag, hail a taxi and just go somewhere.
So, with these things in mind, I asked our driver if he’d mind a few hours of early morning overtime pay, woke Will up before the crack of dawn, hustled him into his car seat, blew off warnings of unseasonal morning showers and away we went to Qutub Minar. I’d been wanting to visit for months and today seemed as good a day as any to do it.
The things that can be annoying about our India experience were still present–the touts, the baby-cheek-pinchers, the men talking about me as they huddled just over my shoulder and refused to budge. But these things that can be so maddening when they take place on a quick shopping trip, or during what should be a routine trip to the park, are always overshadowed by the magnitude of the experience when we’re out visiting someplace new.
I had hoped to catch Delhi’s beautiful sunrise over the ruins and get home before rush hour traffic took over the city. With lingering rain clouds hovering over the site, we at least did well on our second goal. By 9am we were back in New Delhi and I realized we had time for another culture-shock-busting secret: when in doubt, indulge in what you love about where you live.
If it’s the sites, go sight-seeing. If its the shopping, go shop. If it’s the food, go eat. If its that one place on the edge of town that is half-way pretty if you squint your eyes and pretend not to notice the sewer smell, go there.
As for me, I like food. I particularly like South-Indian dosas–a treat that’s hard to find here in Delhi, especially if you want it done right.
I can’t say that I know where to find the absolute best dosa in Delhi yet but I’ll tell you this, the coffee shop at the Taj Ambassador by Khan Market is an excellent cure for culture shock. I could buy 20 dosas in Chennai for the $10 I pay for a cup of chai and a dosa and 30% in taxes at the Taj, but the wafer-thin dosa and the spicy sambar and the kitschy old-world atmosphere of that sunny little cafe make the indulgence worth it And it’s a heck of a lot cheaper than a plane ticket home.
We’re back home on the “cruise ship” now, but I don’t feel quite so prickly as I did before we got out this morning. I’m sure I’ll have my moments again very soon, but for now, owing mostly to an especially good dosa, the worst of the culture shock has been momentarily averted.
How do you deal with creeping culture shock?
Pssst. I did a guest-post for one of my favorite expat bloggers, Wanderlustress, over at World Moms Blog this week. Click over to check it out. Also, want to read a really, really long post on making sourdough bread at home? I’ll post my recipe and tips later this weekend.
my cure today for life on the compound is to leave and go visit with the Canadians!
I wish the Canadians had worked out! Hopefully next time!
I’m not dealing with my culture shock here very well at the moment and need to find some alone time without other obligations on my mind to at least write about it. I need the stillness you referred to in your last post, but when?
Thanks Dee, I think we’re not quite to the worst of the culture shock which makes getting over these little bumps a bit easier. But I think living in a huge place like Delhi where there is always something new to do and see makes a huge difference. I think smaller places are harder for that reason.
I am glad you found a way out. Part of it is understanding bit about how the lives in india are entwined, the culture, circumstances and that will calm you down and feel safe around people. But beware, sometimes few bad people can take away good impressions altogether..as you say! Take care and Merry Christmas!
Thank you for your thoughts and I agree, its through understanding why things happen the way they do in the place ou live that makes living there both interesting and easier. Merry Christmas to you soo!
Your photos of the historic sites are wonderful. The birds flying! The towering brown/red pillar! Amazing. But I have to say my favorite is the shot in the cafe! Food gets me through it all too! Right at this moment I would do about anything for a perfect cheeseburger, shoe string french fries and a holiday ale! When I start to feel prickly I usually end up blaming it all on my household staff (in my head at least). Then I bust out my cookbooks, needle and thread or my camera! Going out to find something new to photograph always makes me feel better. Can’t wait for the new one to arrive. In the mean time I can ogle over your photos.
I feel like I need to pick your brain about photography. My new camera is eons more advanced than my old Nikon. Do you shoot in JPEGs or RAW? What mode do you shoot in mostly. I like aperture priority. Do you mess with white balance, D-lighting, settings and such? Let’s chat!
I wish there was something I could say or had some wisdom for you, but since this is my 1st post, I am learning as I go. Just know that I appreciated your kind words when I was going through my shock and that I will be thinking about you and wishing you and your family all the best, especially over the holidays.
Thanks so much Tiffany! I really appreciate your kind words and warm thoughts! Hope you guys are doing well in Bosnia!
I mean, how can you not want to pinch those little cheeks! But I agree, it is rude. I think you are very brave — not just for venturing out to parts of the city that (I’m guessing) a lot of other expats/Americans wouldn’t go, especially with a toddler in tow, but for doing the exact opposite of what your natural inclination is. It’s hard to venture outside of our comfort zones and so much easier to stay in, to do what’s familiar. I’m sending you and your family happy thoughts. I know you will get over this little hump of culture shock as you always do!
Pshh not brave at all. Every time I think I’m doing something “cool” I always find out that someone is doing something even more fun and adventurous and interesting than me. It is helpful though that is is a huge city with so much to do!
Lovely photos, as usual! Your wee man is so cute.
THank you so much, what a great piece I really learned a lot from it!
First, his cheeks are yummy. If or when I get to meet him live I will have to indulge in pinching him just once… 😉 For me it’s the markets… I try to visit them often but it’s not always easy… As for the post at WMB, I loved it! I have yet to comment there! It’s been a whirlwind of a week!
Thanks Ana! Oooh the markets yes! They are always wonderfully rejuvenating! By the way I met someone here who knows you! What a small world!
Yes, he’s got amazing cheeks!
My personal pick me ups are shopping (a good deal/interesting find), going someplace new (preferably out of town but if that’s not an option, fortunately, Delhi has a lot to offer), some quality me time (very hard to carve these days), a good movie (I have been indulging in some good Indian movies) and doing something creative (doing something with my hands is best but difficult with a toddler around).
Thanks Daniela! I agree Delhi has so much to offer, I think its kind of the saving grace. What good Indian movies have you been watching lately? That’s a unique coping strategy that I hadn’t thought to try!
I’ve been stumped about my doldrums and wasn’t quite willing to tag it as culture shock. Your last couple of posts have convinced me that culture shock it is and that I should just own it and get on with cross-cultural living. Getting out is a good idea and I think I’ll learn how to say something new in Nepali for the occasion.
It’s sooo tempting to deny culture shock because it seems like something that “good travelers” don’t get. But that’s so not true. We all experience it, often in many different ways. Being conscious of the fact that moods are part of a normal, healthy adjustment period and not necessarily the fault of the place our living always helps me avoid feeling ugly and instead simply mildly frustrated. Thanks for reading and best wishes!
Your photos are gorgeous!!! Yes, the cheeks. Yummy. Boys are so cute. Now I have a boy, I see the world of boys differently!
Thanks Kaho! Great to hear from you! Boys are a whole different experience from little girls its so true!
Great blog Dani! I found you through Joanna on A Cup of Jo. And I absolutely love it! It makes me miss Delhi more and go back home right away. I am in DC and miss Delhi a lot. Esp so coz my parents live right next to Khan Market making Delhi extra special to me!
Now, about the Dosas – I’m going to ask the obvious – have you tried Andhra Bhavan and/or Sarvana Bhavan. There’s so many places! Also, if you can (since I read you love food) try out the Delhi Food Tours – it was started by a friend and he has great taste, literally!
Thank you for reading Gayatri! I have to say, I’ve since found my dosa nirvana here in Delhi since writing this post at a little place over in Defense Colony (well not little, it’s arguably the most popular dosa place in the city I think) You are right, there are so many places, it just takes being here awhile to start to figure it all out. I’ve heard so many great things about the Delhi Food Tours, we have many friends who’ve done them. Up to this point, our son hasn’t been comfortable enough with us leaving him for more than a few hours to go do one but maybe soon!
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2019-04-20T00:28:47Z
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http://www.thehotpotblog.com/an-antidote-to-culture-shock/?replytocom=1353
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During the afternoon of Saturday, October 28th, I took a little journey back in time. As an English Literature student at University some of the books I studied back in GCSE feel like a lifetime away. So, when I was given the opportunity to see Of Mice and Men, one of the most well-known of these GCSE books, brought to life on stage at Cardiff’s Chapter Arts Centre I was immediately intrigued.
This production put on by August.012, has unfortunately finished it’s run at the Chapter Arts Centre. So, for this article, I’m still going to include some aspects of reviewing the production but I’m mainly going to focus on the adaptation of the text specifically and any intriguing differences which were included and I’ll discuss how these changes affect the text and its place in today’s culture. Just a little heads up, there is so much in this production that this is going to be a long article but if you just want a review of the production you can read Troy Lenny’s review here.
Mathilde Lopez directs an adaptation of John Steinbeck’s 1937 novella that tells the story of two unlikely travelling companions Lennie Small and George Milton. They travel from ranch to ranch in California seeking work during the Great Depression in order to achieve their very own American Dream of independence and security. Along the way, they encounter themes of loyalty, injustice, race and even sexuality. Thanks to both the education system and the internet the spoilers concerning the end of this novella are widely known, but I will still attempt to be sensitive to those who may have managed to avoid spoilers so far.
This production constantly blurs the line between the setting of the Great Depression and the 21st Century. The setting of the ranch is still the same and the theme of the American Dream is still very strong. However, there are changes to the script which flicker between major and minor that addresses 21st century elements like the set, the microphones and even prawn cocktail crisps. The more major changes will be addressed below when I talk about specific characterisation. While these flippant mentions of 21st-century aspects were certainly startling when I first sat down they certainly made the difference between our time and theirs starker but also more familiar.
In my opinion, this production uses this blend to bring out themes that aren’t normally connected with Of Mice and Men. For example. Curley’s fight with Lennie is commentated on like a modern boxing match by Slim and George through the microphones. To me, this brought out the theme of observation and watching, especially connected with the lack of context the other characters have concerning Lennie and some of his actions. Another example of this comes in the ending. The final recitation of George and Lennie’s American Dream in this production, to me, had a more solid connection with heaven or at least a heavenly state that was an unobtainable state on Earth. The level of acting in this moment is really something special as this becomes more George’s realisation despite it affecting Lennie more directly.
A cast of just five carries this show. I found this aspect very intriguing as certain actors had to double up. George and Lennie remain completely grounded throughout the whole show but I was amazed by the flexibility of the three actors who had to constantly switch from character to character. I like to think that one of the most intriguing switches shows just how far we have come from this period of racial segregation. The character of Crooks is always an integral part of any reading or performance of Of Mice and Men because of his comments regarding his experience and actual implementation of racial segregation. However, due to the actors doubling up the ranch owner and Curley’s father is actually played by the same actor as Crooks. While there is no added comment on the ranch owner being of any different ethnicity it is certainly an intriguing angle to take considering the setting of the text.
I found Curley and Curley’s Wife being played by the same female actor very interesting as John Steinbeck himself, to paraphrase, stated that Curley’s Wife is not a person, she is a symbol and, specifically, a threat to Lennie. She is also mainly examined as an example of a wife being the property of her husband, so to have these two characters played by the same actress not only emphasises how she has no independence beyond her husband it also highlights that Curley has barely any independece beyond her. I think that this is a very intriguing way to give Curley’s Wife more prominence and, in my opinion quite rightly, play down any threatening nature Curley may have had.
In my opinion, I liked how this production gave Curley’s Wife more weight. Sara Gregory’s vehemence when talking to Crooks makes Curley’s Wife far more threatening than I ever remember her being and I love it. While in her main scene they move away slightly from the original text I think that these additions are certainly useful for younger audiences to see what must be added to the dialogue and her character to make her a woman you may see in the 21st century and how this differs from the text’s setting. She is far more hysteric and actually goes to the point of reigniting her denied dream of acting in Hollywood and reaches the point of leaving her husband. This vital addition makes her death all the more tragic as a comment that a woman in the setting of not only the ranch but also the Great Depression could never leave her husband, let alone achieve her long lost dreams. It’s certainly an interesting take on a deliberately vague character who was written to be barely human.
Even with these intriguing differences, one of the most interesting and outstanding parts of this play for me was actually seemingly a throwaway line from Lennie. He says it so quickly that some may have missed it but it actually is a massively important line to insert into the direct dialogue of Of Mice and Men. It is clear in the book and subsequent films that Lennie is, in some way, mentally disabled. However, it is never directly stated in the text what form this takes. The closest we get is George’s fabrication that Lennie was kicked in the head by a horse but Lennie questions this and it becomes clear that all we got was a fabricated explanation from George. This production completely changes that. Lennie states that George has said he has Dyspraxia.
This is another monumental change that may seem small but it highlights the vast difference between the setting of Of Mice and Men and the 21st Century and between ambiguity which makes Lennie quite frightening to those who don’t know why he is different and a time where the condition is known and labelled. I also like that this then adds weight to the questions of intent and knowledge from an outsider’s perspective concerning Lennie’s character. Is the reason that George sticks by Lennie after all of the bad things he has done because he has knowledge of Lennie’s specific condition and he knows that he is not a bad person because of this? It certainly adds so much more to their relationship.
The production also stood out in the way the deaths of certain characters were presented. There are two main deaths of human characters in Of Mice and Men and both have become very well known to the point of fame. This production did not let down this reputation. The first was very brutal and clear in its use of physical action to show exactly how that death came about. The second brought a spectacular building of tension which I felt directly despite knowing what was coming. The lighting in this finale was also spectacular and I like that they decided to use lighting rather than loud sound effects.
The only death depiction that I wasn’t a fan of was how the death of Candy’s dog was handled. I understand that Of Mice and Men can get quite heavy but I just wasn’t a fan of the use of audience participation which turned the shooting of Candy’s dog into a more comic moment. I really liked how Carson came in with (in the setting of the play) the dog’s blood on his arms and this could have been a very dramatic moment but it was mismatched with the comedy that came before.
In conclusion, as a student who has studied this book to see it put on stage in such an intriguing way with some inspiring changes that highlight both how far we have come and also how close we still are to the troubling time and setting of America’s Great Depression despite the difference in the country. For the most part, the execution of these changes was also very well done by August.012 and I would be very interested in seeing how they could take on other books and forms of literature because I was so intrigued and impressed by this tackling of one of the most well known and controversial of novellas. For this reason, I’m giving this production four stars for its adaptation of Steinbeck’s classic.
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2019-04-26T04:15:41Z
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http://getthechance.wales/tag/chapterartscentrecardiff/
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This week we have Nathan, the editor.
Moreover I declare to you that the LORD will build you a house. 11 When your days are fulfilled to go to be with your ancestors, I will raise up your offspring after you, one of your own sons, and I will establish his kingdom. 12 He shall build a house for me, and I will establish his throne forever. 13 I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me. I will not take my steadfast love from him, as I took it from him who was before you, 14 but I will confirm him in my house and in my kingdom forever, and his throne shall be established forever. 15 In accordance with all these words and all this vision, Nathan spoke to David.
Have you ever heard of a “yes” man or woman? It’s a thing. Merriam Webster defines it this way, “a person who agrees with everything that is said; especially: one who endorses or supports without criticism every opinion or proposal of an associate or superior.” You will meet “yes” men all the time in the workplace. Have you ever heard of a celebrity out of control because they’ve surrounded themselves with no one that ever tells them no? I can name all sorts of actors/singers/entertainers that died tragically because they were surrounded by people on the pay roll. They received no unbiased opinions, because the machine around them depended on their celebrity for their livelihood. We can give countless examples of these behaviors…..Hello, Britney shaving her head or Justin Bieber in his latest trouble or need I even say Lindsay Lohan without images flashing through your head?
They needed someone to be “real” with them or keep them grounded. They needed an editor, like Nathan. Nathan spoke truth to power. Who’s not afraid to call you into account for your actions? Who’s not afraid to get under your skin? Who’s not afraid to gently, but firmly say that you’re acting like a jerk? That’s your Nathan.
A Nathan reveals, pulls back the curtain, to who you truly are. Recently I went on a facebook posting rampage, where I watched the movie The Legend of Bagger Vance. In the movie Bagger played by Will Smith, says, “Inside each and every one of us is one true authentic swing. Something that we were born with. Something that’s ours and ours alone. Something that can’t be taught to you or learned. Something that got to be remembered. Over time the world can rob us of that swing. It can be buried inside us in the woulda, coulda, shoulda’s. Some people forget what their swing was like.” A Nathan’s not afraid of calling you out because he can see through the layers to YOU. And the Nathan’s in your life, care about and love you, but they’re not about to let you get away with anything, just like Bagger Vance.
Nathan figured prominently in David’s life 3 times. At 3 critical junctures. In the text for today, 2 Samuel 7, David had just finished building his palace. He had been greatly blessed by God and decided that the ark of the covenant, which was still in a tent, needed a permanent home. He consulted with Nathan who agreed at first, but as you hear in the passage, Nathan changed his mind because it was not what God wanted. Nathan also said some good things to David – that David’s name would be great, his people would have peace, his son would build a “House for my name,” the throne and kingdom of David and his son would be established forever, and what would later become the Davidic Covenant – that Jesus would be in the lineage of David. You may be thinking that’s not gutsy speaking truth to power, he just told him not to build a church, and he said several good things after that. Well in 2 Samuel 12, David had recently committed adultery with Bathsheba and had arranged the death of her husband Uriah. Nathan was sent to David by the Lord with a parable – a poor man had one lamb, a rich man had great flocks of sheep – a traveler came to the rich man who prepared a meal for him – the rich man took the lamb from the poor man rather than use one of his own for the meal. David heard the story and said to Nathan, “As surely as the Lord lives, the man who did this deserves to die!” [vs5] Then Nathan said to David, “You are the man!” [vs7] Awkward.
David repented of his sin, and the Lord forgave him – but the consequences of his sin then meant that the child born to Bathsheba did in fact die. The sign, however, of forgiveness was that David and Bathsheba had another son, Solomon, the inheritor of the promise.
The third time doesn’t have the same sting as the Bathsheba story, but it’s important nonetheless. It happens in 1 Kings 1 right at the end of David’s life. God had made it clear that Solomon would inherit the throne from his father – when another of David’s sons, Adonijah, tried to usurp the throne, Nathan supported David rather than Adonijah. He informed Bathsheba of the plot and advised her on how to ensure the right successor. Nathan was called in by David and told to anoint Solomon king – this he did and it was proclaimed to the people.
An editor works tirelessly so that you can be the best that you can be.
How many times do we see the editors of our lives as our biggest critics? How many times do we see the ink all in red and think that we’re not good enough? How many times do we take personally what we see as criticism but those that love us have said it to make us better?
As anyone who has ever written some words on a piece of paper, it’s not always pleasant or fun to get edited. The English major in me, cringes at the thought of taking my paper to the writing center and for them to pull out the fine tooth comb or the magnifying glass to make corrections. It’s like they see my soul stripped bare and the vulnerability is apparent. They see me. In all of my weaknesses, in all of my vulnerabilities, in all of the places I would rather not see – they see me.
So prayerfully consider the Nathans in your life. You don’t want to pick a person that is critical for critical’s sake, that is destructive to your world, or does not care about your well-being. So be discerning as you notice the people in your life that make you better, aren’t afraid to give you a reality check when the situation calls for it, and do so in love.
But as you notice the Nathans in your life they have some tell-tale signs. The first is they get under your skin. They look at the inner workings of your life and are not afraid to call BS. An English teacher in high school taught me the acronym meant Be Specific.
My brother Josh just happens to be a Nathan in my life. You’ll meet him on fall retreat because he’s going to be the speaker. He’s not afraid to call me on the carpet when he thinks I’m not being my most Godly. But I trust him implicitly. I don’t always like what he says. I don’t always agree with what he says. But 9 times out of 10 he has a point. He has perspective on my life. Even when I don’t see it. Even when I can’t see it. He has a way of breaking through. It may take a couple of days, of inner debate within myself, to see truth in his observational interruptions, but I trust him. So I listen to him. Because I know he’s watching out for me and just wants me to be the best that I can be.
So I’m glad that Len Sweet writes, “Everybody needs a Nathan. Even Nathan needs a Nathan.” Even Josh needs a Nathan in his life.
So open your eyes to the Nathan’s of your life. Your Nathan’s may easily come to mind. They may not. But we all need them. Oprah is attempting to be Lindsay Lohan’s, but that is another story and another sermon.
Do you know what David named his son? That’s right. Nathan. And that’s the line through which Jesus came through Mary’s side. You see, the Nathan’s of your life will have a big Godly impact in your life if you will let them. May it be so.
Holy and gracious God, may we be ever on the look out for the Nathan’s in our life. That they call us into account and are willing to ask the hard questions. May you set our feet on right paths and may we walk in your ways. Thank you that we were fearfully and wonderfully made and we can rest in the promise that you will never leave us or forsake us. May you give us wisdom as we discern answers to questions that seemingly have no answers. May you give us your peace that transcends all understanding, when we wrestle or need your comfort. May you give us your grace that we may know your more fully and as we continue in your sanctifying grace to be the person you created us to be. In Jesus’ name I pray. We pray now as you taught your disciples to pray….
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2019-04-22T08:29:04Z
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https://narciejeter.com/category/gods-voice/
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As WTI Surges, Is This the "New Normal" for Oil Prices?
As WTI Surges, Is This the “New Normal” for Oil Prices?
After 735 consecutive daily trading sessions, one of the market’s longest streaks ended on Friday.
For the first time since August 16, 2010, West Texas Intermediate (the daily benchmark crude rate on the NYMEX) priced slightly higher than North Sea Brent (the equivalent benchmark in London).
The spread that existed for so long between the two had finally disappeared.
Admittedly, this “new normal” didn’t come as a shock. The spread between the two had been narrowing and the inevitable onset of parity – and even a slight premium for WTI – had been expected.
And yes, you can be sure there will be fluctuations moving forward, like yesterday when Brent traded at a slightly more expensive price.
But absent any major outside (i.e., exogenous as it is often termed in the business) event, the closing of this long-time spread has created one important outcome: a more favorable pricing environment for the U.S. benchmark.
In these conditions, the price of WTI should continue to climb.
Traditionally, a better pricing environment for WTI would have been expected (at least prior to August 2010). Because while both WTI and Brent are “sweeter” (that is, having less sulfur content) than almost 80% of all oil traded globally, WTI is actually a slightly better grade of crude.
That would mean, while most of the world’s oil would trade at a discount to both benchmarks, WTI should be priced higher than Brent.
However, of the two, Brent is clearly a more global standard than WTI. More trades internationally are discounted to Brent than any other benchmark.
And that combined with inventory problems in the U.S. are the primary reasons why the spread in favor of Brent lasted as long as it did. The well-publicized oil glut in Cushing, OK was as the “poster child” for these supply-side problems.
Cushing is the primary crude oil pipeline hub in the states. It is the location where the price of WTI is actually determined each day for NYMEX-traded futures contracts.
The ongoing problem was more oil was being produced than could be moved. As a result, the storage facilities at Cushing maxed out causing pipeline capacity to be used for stockpiling oil rather than transporting it.
When these sorts of conditions occur in an environment of stagnant demand, the result is downward pressure on oil prices.
Some of the Brent-WTI spread, therefore, was not a result of either benchmark’s usage so much as it was a reflection on a backup in the transiting of U.S.-based production.
In the absence of this glut, WTI has been surging of late, outdistancing the increases in Brent.
By July 19, WTI was $108.47 a barrel, higher than for any daily trading session since March 1. Meanwhile, Brent hit $109.04 a few days earlier (July 16), higher than any day since March 28.
As the spread now straddles parity, market dynamics themselves will continue the movement of prices in favor of WTI.
Of course, rising tensions in the MENA states (Middle East and North Africa) could change that in short order. Hiccups in crude exports from the MENA region tend to put almost immediate pressures on Western Europe. That would accelerate Brent prices.
Nonetheless, the vanishing of the spread has some direct impacts on oil markets.
One will be to put a new upward direction on WTI. Assuming the glut at Cushing continues to diminish (and remember that very reduction in stockpiles is itself a reason for the narrowing of the spread), the price of WTI will be rising.
Demand, though, is certainly another aspect of the situation. But even here we have yet another wrinkle. It has to do with the price of gasoline.
As of the close on Friday (July 19), RBOB futures had risen 14.3% for the month. RBOB stands for “Reformulated Blendstock for Oxygenate Blending,” the NYMEX traded high-octane gasoline futures contract.
This double-digit move occurred despite an overall leveling off of domestic demand.
Now, I have explained the factors converging in a rise of gasoline prices at the refinery level in OEI before (“A Big Time Squeeze for Refineries is About to Begin“). The “four whammies” I discussed there continue to place renewed pressure on refinery margins.
In addition, the federal requirement that 10% of retail gasoline include ethanol (slated for an increase to 15% without Congressional intervention) has also prompted a gas price spike. This is due to higher prices for corn (a major result of the pronounced drought in the U.S. midlands), from which the American market obtains most of its ethanol production.
Those rising prices, however, are also a reflection of the genuinely global market for oil products. More and more U.S. production is now being exported to developing markets where both demand and prevailing retail prices are much higher.
The current rise in WTI, therefore, is in large measure simply a reflection of what the pricing levels ought to be in a market not beset with a glut at Cushing. Higher refinery prices for oil products sent abroad are still below pricing levels elsewhere.
In other words, rising domestic prices in the U.S. are offset by rising exports. This is the starkest reality of how the retail end is impacted by parity between WTI and Brent.
The added element is the fact that a narrow differential between the two primary oil benchmarks may now be the “new normal” in crude pricing.
Initially, the onset of ongoing parity will provide profit opportunities in two distinct categories of companies that I have mentioned before.
First, while U.S. oil production will benefit from any nod to WTI, some companies will fare better than others. They include well-managed, mid-sized operators working in selected basins. Companies like this will simply provide better profits.
For example, there are producing fields in East Texas, Oklahoma, and Alaska where the crude lifted is actually priced higher than WTI.
Many of them are operated by small companies that have lifting rates below the threshold larger companies require. Larger producers often require higher daily volume figures to justify higher levels of overhead.
On the other hand well-run, focused, smaller companies do not. It’s a case where bigger is not always better in the oil business.
The second opportunity is in U.S.-based midstream companies that provide gathering, initial treatment, terminal, storage, and transit services to upstream producers.
As the spread disappears and the premium falls upon WTI, you can expect well-positioned midstreams to realize added profits from all of these pass-through elements.
These services are the essential lynchpins in the upstream (wellhead) to downstream (refining and distribution) movement of oil.
So while the streak may have ended, the opportunities in the oil markets have only just begun. The bull market in energy is still just warming up.
Kent’s comments are accurate, informative and educational. Understandable after careful reading and reviewing.
I wish he would not be so professorial in writing. At times, as a 90 year old former dentist, I feel that I’m again reading medical and anatomical material. I’m sure that my financial knowledge is also part of my problem.
I’m glad to hear that the investment side of the picture will be improving, but where the hell are gasoline prices going, i.e. how high should we expect regular unleaded to be for the rest of 2013?
Does the summer Driving Season have anything to do with this?
Finding other sources for ethanol is important, maybe even switchgrass?!
My investig is geared towards the long term, expecting that demand for hydrocarbons and all other commodities, will increase a lot.
It seems like the glut would just be moved from one location (Cushing) to another (Gulf Coast?) since it is against the law to export oil and it is my understanding that the refineries were/are pretty much running at full capacity. Does it push aside imported oil at the refineries? But still, wouldn’t the increase in usable supply bring down the price of oil? Perhaps it’s because the discount that existed for WTI was due to the fact that anyone who bought it before would have to contend with storing it somewhere or transporting it from Cushing?
If the lack of demand, i.e. Chushing OK oil tanks full and the pipe as well, caused the unbalance in WTI with Brent, where did all that oil go? From the Petroleum & Other Liquids website, I note only a small decrease in the oil storage.
Am I getting this wrong, I don’t see the connection as the trend has been an increase in storage, even with some new capacity and an increase from 100,000 to 400,00 bbl with the new pipe line.
Maybe you can set me right on this.
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2019-04-26T09:39:43Z
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https://oilandenergyinvestor.com/2013/07/as-wti-surges-is-this-the-new-normal-for-oil-prices/
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In the wing mirror on the passenger side of a vehicle, objects are closer than they appear.
Rearview republishes fundamental texts of art criticism that are crucial for the present moment. They deserve a renewed attention because they reveal “blind spots” in contemporary discourses. These “found” documents (indeed, quasi-artifacts) are prefaced by one of our writers.
View of “Les Immatériaux,” Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1985. All images courtesy of Centre Pompidou - MnamCci - Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Paris.
From our contemporary vantage point, is there anything—whether philosophical inquiry or historical phenomenon—more anachronistic than postmodernism? Jean-François Lyotard published The Postmodern Condition in French in 1979, but the intervening three-and-a-half decades cover a period we now call “the contemporary,” even as the label struggles with each passing year to contain all that falls within its temporal and now global bounds. In March 1985, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris opened "Les Immatériaux," an exhibition organized by Lyotard—then at the height of his influence—and Thierry Chaput, director of the Centre de Création Industrielle in Paris.
While Lyotard’s attempt to convey the profoundly destabilizing experience of contemporary life via an exhibition may now seem as outmoded as the clunky IBMs he included, our current interest in new materialisms and attendant critiques of the relations between objects and humans, exhibition histories and their dramaturgies, and a spate of publications theorizing the contemporary all converge at the Beaubourg in 1985. In "Les Immatériaux" Lyotard attempted to use all the tools in his arsenal, from the latest technology to the full human sensorium, to query if and how our relationship to the world had fundamentally changed. For the tangle of conviction and ambivalence found in its gaze into the future, Lyotard’s vision for an exhibition is worth looking back on.
Philippe Parreno and Hans Ulrich Obrist, The Conversation Series 14 (Cologne: Walter König, 2008), 17.
Jean-François Lyotard, “Les Immatériaux,” Art & Text 17 (1985), 48. For Lyotard, the Cartesian program so endemic in modernity was manifest in exhibitions through several conditions: first, the visitor is an eye, and sight is the dominant sense. Here, space becomes understood, ordered, and rational. Lyotard sought to undo each of these conditions. Instead of an eye perceiving space organized in linearly unfolding enfilade, he threw up all manner of barriers to vision: darkness, the grey screens, and the twists and turns of the labyrinth. Instead of privileging sight, he activated the entire sensorium. Instead of enlightenment, he aimed at “intensifying the interrogation” and “aggravating the sense of uncertainty” posed by his principal question. The immaterials had triggered a loss of our identity as human beings and led us to this state of uncertainty. In this state, and in this exhibition, Lyotard intended that we feel the dissolution of the boundaries between our bodies and the things we encounter.
Just before the show opened, Bernard Blistène, who was named director of the Centre Pompidou’s Musée national d’art moderne in late 2013, sat down with Lyotard to discuss his exhibition. An excerpt of their conversation, which appeared in Flash Art in March 1985, follows.
Bernard Blistène: Tell us about the exhibition you’re organizing.
Jean-François Lyotard: The idea of “immaterials” or “non-materials” was a little bit different at first, since I’d been asked to do the exhibition under a different title. It was supposed to be called “Nouveaux Matériaux et Creation”—New Materials and Creativity. But then I slightly shifted the subject by trying to give it a somewhat different range; I said to myself, “Creativity? What is that supposed to mean?” And again, “What is ‘new’ supposed to mean?” Thinking about “materials” today, I thought, “But what does that imply for an architect, or for an industrialist?” I came to the conclusion that all of these words have undergone considerable shifts in meaning, and I thought that the question had to be approached from a different point of view.
BB: But what can we say about the philosopher who decides that his job is to give us something to look at?
JFL: Everybody knows that books are going through a period of crisis as instruments for the diffusion of ideas, and that this is a part of the general crisis of intellectual life today, here in what we could call a kind of democratic despotism that makes for the world we live in. And of course, there’s no question of maintaining the superiority of any kind of aristocratic power, but the both of us know very well that the philosopher experiences a very grave problem with respect to the writing or recording of what he has to say, and there is a problem of the shortcomings of the philosopher with respect to the available modes of writing and recording, or of what I would call “inscription.” As far as I myself am concerned, my acceptance of the idea—to use the words with which you’ve stated it—of becoming “the philosopher who decides that his job is to give us something to look at” is something very simple and not even particularly original. I accept myself as a philosopher, and it seems to me to be important for the philosopher to be able to record what he thinks through the use of instruments that don’t have to be restricted to the instrument of the book. It’s just that simple. New and different things are at stake today, even though they’re not totally new, and we have to try to understand the things that are being offered to us.
BB: And that is the point where we find a lack of differentiation between technological experimentation and the questions posed by art?
JFL: Even the most modest tinkler with software has an attitude that’s somehow “artistic”—an attitude of a kind of astonishment. And what that means is that metaphysics, as Adorno puts it, goes into crisis at much the same time as the rest of classical philosophy and that there’s a way in which it is going under as a result of a decline in the capacity it can have for the creation of wide-ranging global systems that include the great and final issues for which we feel a need. If there’s a decline of metaphysics, there’s also a decline of everything that people in general call philosophy. And this decline—which is something that Adorno grasped quite clearly—shows us the history of the diaspora of philosophy as it wanders through domains that can’t be properly defined as philosophical, even though the domain that can be properly defined as philosophical continues to exist. What this means is that metaphysics, as Adorno puts it, goes under, along with classical philosophy, even though certain people continue to practice it as though it weren’t in crisis at all.
BB: Your texts on “painting” go from Adams to Buren, and from Monory to Arakawa. They seem to contain what I’d call the logic of discontinuity. Can you say something about the reasons that have prompted you to write about certain painters rather than others? And do you think of your essays on painting as fragments of a whole within your work as a writer?
JFL: I’d answer quite simply that it has been something of a question of chance. I’m usually acquainted with the painters whom I decide to write. I’ve worked along with them, and I’ve seen them at work, but then again, there are obviously painters with whom I’m personally acquainted but whom I’d never want to write about. It’s not that I can give you an answer simply by saying it’s a matter of people I’ve happened to meet. And if you ask me if these essays are part of some single thing, and if this single thing is part of my reflections as a philosopher, I’d have to answer in much the same summary way and that for the moment I think of all these various short texts as the beginning of a kind of dossier that could lead to some substantial study not so much of art, but specifically of painting. Contemporary painting. And my goal would be to attempt to define the nature of a possible philosophy of art today.
BB: You mean that you don’t at all exclude the idea of writing a theory of aesthetics?
JFL: I don’t think it would be a question of a theory, and I don’t think it would be a question of aesthetics. I don’t think it could be a theory since I think of the idea or theory as belonging to the area of metaphysics, which we were saying is now in decline, and I don’t think of it as a question of aesthetics, since I don’t think that aesthetics corresponds to the time we live in. Aesthetics primarily appertains to a very precise moment in the commentary on art, which is to refer to the Age of Enlightenment and to what follows after it, so it’s a question of something in the order of two centuries ago. Basically, I’d be ready to maintain that there wasn’t any such thing as aesthetics up until the eighteenth century, and that up until that time there was only a series of poetics. Aesthetics actually corresponds to the philosophy of the sublime and to a theory of genius.
BB: In the light of what you’re saying, do you think that Adorno could give an explanation of the title of his book?
JFL: No, I don’t think he could. I think that his title… how can I put it? I think his title is bad but that his book is very good. And that’s precisely because it isn’t at all a theory and has nothing to do with aesthetics. This is the line of thought into which I’d like to situate this work, and I’d want it to be a kind of prolongation of what’s indicated in Adorno’s work. But, you know, whenever I reread Adorno, I always see that his approach is negative, and almost always cynical, which is the measure of the breadth of his despair. It’s the measure of the strength of the attachment still to be felt for modern aesthetics, the measure of the strength of the attachment still to be felt for modern aesthetics, the measure of a refusal to go into mourning for the final death of it. With Adorno we’re within the sphere of melancholy. You can’t forget the context in which that book was written. The most admirable parts of German art were being burned in public, and the most intelligent parts of literature and the arts were being persecuted. We no longer live under that kind of despotism, but today we can see we live under a kind of democratic despotism of the media, which is of course, something very different. And so, even though there’s nothing that has been forgotten, we have to attempt to work our way into the philosophy of contemporary art by completely disengaging ourselves from romantic aesthetics. And so this reflection on art begins for me with “Discourse-Figures” as a way of starting to palliate—or rather to supplant—the political thinking of the present day.
Basically, the most essential question of all for me, is the question we’ve just been talking about: “What do we do if we no longer have the prospect of emancipation? What sort of line of resistance can we have?” When Zola took part in public affairs, he knew exactly what he was talking about, he was aware of his “prospects of emancipation.” The same thing was true for Voltaire, and for Fourier, who was also a political thinker, and it was still true for Sartre, even though Sartre was wrong. We intellectuals are no longer capable of any kind of real intervention. And so what is our line of resistance if it’s no longer a question of a prospect of emancipation? I think that it’s something that’s very closely connected to artistic activity, or philosophico-artistic activity. It’s something that has to be thoroughly explored by asking ourselves what’s happening at the level of time, space, and the social community in contemporary art. That’s what I’ve been trying to explore by means of these various small texts that I write on art, and sometimes of music, when I feel sufficiently audacious. I’d like to write a commentary on Paris, Texas and say that it’s an Alice in the Cities , which is not poor art anymore.
BB: Let’s go back to your exhibition “Les Immatériaux” and to the concept behind it.
JFL: We arbitrarily and quite purposely created a kind of filter, since there were so many things to exhibit that our very first worry was about how to go about dealing with it all. There was never any pretense of doing some sort of universal exhibition. Universal exhibitions are no longer possible, and that’s more than just a question of budgeting. And so what were our criteria of selection? They were on three different levels. First of all, we wanted to exhibit things that inspire a feeling of incertitude: incertitude about the finalities of these developments and incertitude about the identity of the human individual in his condition of such improbable immateriality. That’s a criterion of selection that’s concerned with the philosophical stakes of the exhibition. Then we obviously had to give attention to the arrangement of the show in terms of time and space. And here we appealed to two principles: no fancy mouldings and no pedestals. We didn’t want still another re-evocation of a gallery or a salon, by which I mean an arrangement of rooms in a royal palace as designed by the king. We wanted to avoid this way of squarely defining things and we had to discover a more fluid and immaterial system for the organization of space.
BB: Is there a postmodern formalism?
BB: How do you feel then about the attempt to rehabilitate “technique” and “métier” as primary values for the judgment of an artist?
JFL: It would be a little paradoxical to reduce the history of a painting to a single problem of technique or supports. In any case, that’s far too little. Do you remember those extremely incisive texts by Diderot, like the one he called “La petite technique” not without a certain air of disdain. And if Chardin, for example, was far beyond his contemporaries even though they were technically his peers, one surely has to explain that in different terms from a phenomenological point of view. And look at Cezanne: he wasn’t exceptional from any technical point of view, and yet, at the same… But even though I’m not at all tempted to take these problems of technical mastery any too seriously, I’m in any case quite concerned with the aspect of technique when it comes to trying to understand the way it can affect a viewer and modify the course of his attempt to make use of his sensibility as the instrument of some kind of exploration. I imagine that someone from Flanders who made a trip to Venice in the sixteenth or seventeenth century must have been terribly shocked. But apart from that kind of consideration, we still have to realize that we’ve been witnessing a permanent process of reformation in the individual’s ability to see and then to love what he sees. But that’s not at all the situation to be seen in the majority of the works that are being produced today. They don’t teach me anything. I say to myself, “I’ve already seen that, and I’ve already seen it done better.” The overemphasis of the hand, the agitated drawing, and all the rest of it, we already know that, and we’ve already seen it. I’m not saying that it’s entirely without interest. I’m just saying that it’s without any interest to me.
BB: What, finally, is postmodernism?
JFL: My work, in fact, is directed to finding out what that is, but I still don’t know. This is a discussion really that’s only just beginning. It’s the way it was for the Age of Enlightenment: the discussion will be abandoned before it ever reaches a conclusion.
The full text of this conversation originally appeared in Flash Art, no. 121 (March 1985), pp. 32–39. This excerpt is reprinted with the kind permission of Flash Art.
Tara McDowell is Associate Professor and Director of Curatorial Practice at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
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2019-04-23T20:59:25Z
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https://www.art-agenda.com/features/235949/les-immatriaux-a-conversation-with-jean-franois-lyotard-and-bernard-blistne
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Did you know clients search for you using local terms? That means you need to get local, too, whether you provide legal services in one jurisdiction or more. Local pages help potential clients find your website easier and faster and make it more likely that they’ll contact your firm. Below, we discuss ideas to optimize a local page strategy and provide examples to make it easy for you to apply the concept of local pages to your website.
Before getting into the mechanics of local pages, it is important to understand why they are needed.
The problem: If your content lacks geographic indicators and local information, it’s going to be difficult for search engines to return your site when locally focused searches are made.
The consequence: You lose local potential clients who could have been a good fit for your firm.
The solution: Creating local pages to address local queries. Local pages communicate to Google and other search engines the locations you serve, and these pages offer valuable content that visitors want, appreciate, and will act on.
Identified geographic location entries — In this case, the search engine uses the location provided by the internet user and returns results based on that geographical qualifier (e.g., “criminal law attorney in Baltimore” or “What happens after an arrest in Baltimore?” will likely return pages of Baltimore criminal law attorneys).
As mentioned, when you do not have local pages and local information for each location you serve, then you can miss out on opportunities. For instance, maybe your office is in Bethesda, but you represent clients in Baltimore, too. Without local pages specific to Baltimore, your website may be less likely to show up on a search result for a potential client in Baltimore searching for an attorney or for a person using the keyword “Baltimore.” Local pages are an effective way to communicate to search engines where you provide services. It’s also an effective way to show potential clients that you understand their thought process.
Identify key geographical service areas — whether it is several cities, counties, or states — and this can include both the jurisdictions you currently provide representation and the jurisdictions you would like to break into.
Incorporate these geographical indicators throughout the website — meaning you will highlight them on your homepage, your About Us page, your Contact page, your substantive practice area pages, etc.
Create local landing pages for each individual geographical location and provide original, hyper-local information on each of these pages.
Identify where on your website you will place these pages — they may be nestled under a top menu item, for example.
Link these pages to other relevant pages of your website and vice versa for thorough and easy navigation within the website.
Employing this general local page strategy is key to getting your website noticed more in all the places you work or want to work, but it may not be the key to converting visitors to clients. It is not about quickly drafting a local page and placing geographical locations throughout that page, and then using the same language for all other local pages on your site except for changing the name of the jurisdiction. It is more about using the local landing page as a means to engage visitors and convince them to convert as clients by contacting your office. To do so, you use local language, local names, local trends, etc. that matter or make sense to the visitor in that geographical location. Thus, what follows is a discussion on how to use content on local pages to attract and convert visitors.
Act on (by contacting your law firm).
Know their questions and answer them in understandable language presented in an easy-to-read format.
Below, we provide the basic elements of a local page and then provide example outlines so you know how these elements are best used on the local page.
Local pages should be structured and written with all things local. These are hyper-local pages that show you understand the community and thus are in a good position to represent the community. This kind of intimacy nurtures a sense of trust from the outset between you, as a lawyer, and the potential client. The rest of the website will help develop this trust, which may lend itself to converting leads to clients. Here are the basic elements you should provide on each of your local pages.
You want the geographic locations and keywords to be read in a variety of ways because people type in searches differently.
The content you add on the local pages should be specific to the location. For instance, if you are writing a county page and are a criminal attorney, you can provide information like jail and prisons located only within the county. More on content is outlined below.
With things like pictures or images, you can add a title and alt text, too, with your specific geographical location added.
Every page should end with a call-to-action. In your call-to-action on the local page, reiterate the area you represent and provide contact details.
Regardless of whether or not you are focusing on cities, counties, or states, you must provide information that is unique to that location — information your potential clients want to know and need to know. Here are some examples of content outlines to better help you understand the type of location-specific content you should provide.
Brief Introduction to DWI in Houston For example, provide any local details, like roads where there are high rates of DWI arrests or local entertainment areas where police wait for people leaving clubs, etc. Link to any relevant external sites.
Jails and prisons where you could be sent.
All local information should be complete with links, addresses, phone numbers, names of police chiefs and judges for each court, and embedded maps, among other details.
Alternative Sentencing Available Within the Jurisdiction If there are drug courts or other specific courts available in lieu of sentencing, then provide that information, location, embedded maps, and other important details — like if the alternative sentencing is in your best interests or not (this will be aligned with your law firm’s brand and specific practice goals).
You want to provide links to any practice area pages you may have for each of these offenses.
Why Your Law Firm is the Right Fit Provide information about you and your specific experience and qualifications in the law practice area and the specific jurisdiction. You should provide links back to your website’s attorney bio(s) and your case results.
Brief Introduction to Dog Bites & Personal Injury Law Provide local details and this could include local data on dog bites, e.g.: demographic information, nature of injuries, where they occurred.
State Laws & Local Ordinances Provide the state’s laws, but also go into detail on local ordinances — explain what they mean and link to ordinance’s external site.
III. Hospitals / Medical Centers Provide information (and links) about local hospitals and medical centers where you could be treated, complete with addresses and embedded maps. Inform if rabies shots are provided, etc.
Other Relevant Information Provide information (and links) on local authorities, like where to report the dog bite incident (police, dog pounds, etc.).
Why Your Law Firm is the Right Fit Provide information about you and your specific experience and qualifications in the law practice area and the jurisdiction. Provide internal links to relevant pages.
Provide Specific Local Information For instance, if you provide IRS audit services, then provide information and links to local IRS offices. Potential clients may search for local IRS offices. If you provide the relevant information, then you could result in organic searches for the same.
For all your local pages, make sure you review and update them on a regular basis. Because you are providing ultra-local information, it may be subject to change more so than other information on your website. For instance, each election year, judges may change — so you may want to calendar the date to review your local page at that time. Keeping these pages current is important.
In addition to structuring and formatting your pages for optimal local landing pages, here is a summary of key points as well as other local page best practices you will want to implement.
Create a page for each jurisdiction or location.
Use only unique and original content for each page — do not copy and paste and simply change the location or else you may be penalized by the search engines for duplicate content.
If you serve the entire state, you still need local pages — the State of Texas, for example, is not locally optimized, so you won’t be considered for local searches when cities like Houston or San Antonio are used.
Structure content with headings that use geographic location indicators and keywords.
Make the headline <H1> tag unique from the title tag — this allows you to use different keywords to accommodate differently phrased searches.
Use geographical keywords in meta descriptions — make sure meta descriptions also accurately describe the content of the page because, if not, visitors will click the link and then click out of it, causing a high bounce rate.
Update information on the local page regularly.
To get the best use out of your local pages, you want them to work in sync with the rest of your website. This means making sure your substantive practice pages have introductions or calls-to-action with each location mentioned and links to each location’s local page. It also means making sure your home page includes where you work. You may also consider a top menu option like “Where We Work” to neatly house your local pages in one place and make it easier for visitors to find. Finally, if you write blogs, make sure you write them on all your locations. They can be about interesting yet relevant local events, news, rules, processes, etc. In the end, keep in mind that your potential clients have a tendency to think locally, not legally. As a result, your website needs to provide potential clients with information that mirrors the way that they think and search. When you focus on a local strategy, your website is likely to bring better and more qualified potential clients to you.
LawLytics membership includes a high-performance website, the attorney-friendly LawLytics software, and our expert legal marketing team dedicated to your success. Use the form to reveal pricing.
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2019-04-21T10:42:57Z
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https://www.lawlytics.com/blog/law-firm-website-traffic-local-pages/
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“We invent these days because we need it, because we aren’t being seen, we aren’t being acknowledged. So we take the power back and we acknowledge ourselves and each other,” Tessa Thompson told BuzzFeed News.
From left: Honorees Tessa Thompson, Lena Waithe, Tiffany Haddish, and Danai Gurira onstage during the 2018 Essence Black Women in Hollywood Oscars Luncheon in Beverly Hills.
If you, like Issa Rae, were rooting for everyone black this awards season, you only got to celebrate a few moments. At Sunday’s 90th Academy Awards, there was Jordan Peele’s Best Original Screenplay win for Get Out and Kobe Bryant’s Best Short Film (Animated) win for Dear Basketball. (And even that win for Bryant had a problematic shadow cast over it due to the former NBA player’s past.) Earlier this year at the Golden Globes, Sterling K. Brown won for Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series. And at the Globes and Screen Actors Guild Awards, Oprah Winfrey and Morgan Freeman were given honorary awards respectively. But that’s about it.
At the Oscars, some of the nominees included Denzel Washington and Daniel Kaluuya for Best Actor, and Octavia Spencer and Mary J. Blige, both for Best Actress in a Supporting Role. Granted, this was an especially unpredictable year but none of the aforementioned actors prevailed with a golden statue. While Peele made history for winning Best Original Screenplay, he did not win in the coveted Best Director category in which only four black men have been nominated in 90 years — none of whom have won. Mudbound director Dee Rees joined the list of black female directors who didn’t even get nominated in the category despite having her film recognized for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, and Best Supporting Actress (Blige). Tiffany Haddish was overlooked altogether for her hilarious comedic performance in Girls Trip, unlike Melissa McCarthy for her role in Bridesmaids, widely categorized as Girls Trip’s white-counterpart film. And finally, one of 2017’s most successful films, Get Out, failed to win for Best Picture — and this time the envelope was read correctly.
But #OscarsSoWhite isn’t anything new, and Black Hollywood no longer waits for their recognition at mainstream award shows. In fact, almost everyone who deserved to be honored for their work this year was celebrated in the week leading up to the Oscars — it just didn’t happen at ceremonies that air live on network television. Instead, it happened in “rooms of requirement” created for us, by us: At annual pre-Oscar awards ceremonies like the American Black Film Festival Honors (ABFF) and Essence’s Black Women in Hollywood Luncheon; intimate dinners like Common’s Toast to the Arts and Alfre Woodard’s Sistahs Soiree; and black excellence parties like the one Jay-Z and Beyoncé threw this year that shook up the post-Oscar party scene that used to have a clear hierarchy. Each of these events look like a powerful sea of melanin, and leave a current so strong every glimpse can’t help but go viral.
Left: Dave Chappelle, Jordan Peele, Jay-Z, Kobe Bryant, and Anthony Anderson. Right: Tiffany Haddish, Danai Gurira, Marcus Henderson, Jay-Z, Winston Duke, and Lupita Nyong'o at Jay-Z and Beyoncé's Oscars afterparty.
Thompson was honored at the magazine’s 11th annual luncheon, created to honor black women both in front of and behind the camera in Hollywood. The ceremony, which airs on Oprah Winfrey’s OWN network (notice a trend?), also honored Black Panther’s Danai Gurira, Girls Trip’s Haddish, and Master of None star and creator of The Chi, Lena Waithe, this year. Held at the Beverly Wilshire hotel in Los Angeles, the event can best be described as a huge black girl magic brunch where all of your Black Hollywood faves (and I do mean all) come together to uplift, celebrate, and fellowship with one another. Many of the women in attendance that day echoed Thompson’s feelings and noted that the luncheon is their favorite awards season event, even more than the Academy Awards itself.
Clockwise from left: Susan Kelechi Watson, Yvette Nicole Brown, Lupita Nyong'o, Honoree Lena Waithe, Honoree Tessa Thompson, Sonequa Martin-Green, Edwina Findley Dickerson, and Honoree Danai Gurira attend the 2018 Essence Black Women in Hollywood Oscars Luncheon in Beverly Hills.
That subtle change in how Waithe framed her speech demonstrates the difference between these events and the traditional awards season ceremonies. There’s a level of comfort present in the former, a common bond formed through the struggle of being black in Hollywood, and in the case of Essence’s luncheon specifically, a sisterhood that’s formed when a win for one is a win for all.
Honoree Danai Gurira (left) and Lupita Nyong'o onstage during the 2018 Essence Black Women in Hollywood Oscars Luncheon.
“It’s important for us to remember who we are, and when we look into the eyes of those like us, we remember who we are, we get renewed, we get inspired, we get rejuvenated, we get revived,” Gurira told BuzzFeed News. The Black Panther star went on to explain how many of the women in attendance have broken down barriers and opened doors for future generations of black women in Hollywood to move through. Gurira herself was in the room five years ago watching Oprah Winfrey, Alfre Woodard, Gabrielle Union, Mara Brock-Akil, Naomie Harris, and Quvenzhané Wallis be honored. Since then her star has risen with a hit show (The Walking Dead), No. 1 movie (Black Panther), and a play under her belt (Eclipse). So as she stood onstage accepting her award, presented by another former honoree, Lupita Nyong’o, the newer actors in the room saw that upward mobility in Hollywood is possible for black actors, and that they are not alone in the obstacles they face while trying to achieve it.
Lil Rel Howery (left) and Daniel Kaluuya during the 2018 Essence Black Women in Hollywood Oscars Luncheon.
The ABFF Honors were held exactly one week before the Oscars, honoring Ava DuVernay, Omari Hardwick, Tiffany Haddish, Billy Dee Williams, and the cast of Martin while also awarding Black-ish, Insecure, Get Out, and Queen Sugar in various traditional categories. It was the only event during awards season where you could see Martin Lawrence and Tisha Campbell-Martin mend their rift onstage, or Issa Rae joke about being too drunk to give a proper acceptance speech, or hear about how Omari Hardwick paid for the craft services while they filmed Middle of Nowhere together because DuVernay couldn’t afford it.
Clockwise from left: American Black Film Festival Founder & CEO Jeff Friday, Nicole Friday, Omari Hardwick, Tiffany Haddish, and Billy Dee Williams at the 2018 American Black Film Festival Honors Awards in Beverly Hills, California.
Common took his support a step further by creating his own platform to do so, through his Toast to the Arts dinner held in West Hollywood the Friday before the Oscars. There, he honored Rees, Blige, and Charles D. King for Mudbound and filmmaker Charles Burnett.
Common and Mary J. Blige attend Toast to the Arts Presented By Remy Martin at Ysabel in West Hollywood, California.
Tiffany Haddish (left) and Yvonne Orji attend the 2018 Essence Black Women in Hollywood Oscars Luncheon in Beverly Hills.
At one point or another, these FUBU awards ceremonies rooted for everyone black: They recognized the impact black actors, directors, and producers have had in the industry and honored them accordingly; not just with nominations but with actual awards that allowed them a platform to give inspiring speeches and a trophy to take home (or more likely, give to their mama). And they give black actors a place to convene and be in the room since many are often not even invited to awards season’s darling ceremonies, as Gabrielle Union pointed out at the Golden Globes in January when she revealed that was the first time she received an invitation to attend. And when you’re constantly snubbed a seat at the table, it’s only a matter of time before you create your own damn table. That’s what these events are: a space for black artists to be fed both literally and figuratively before they’ve even stepped foot on red carpets; to know that their work mattered whether or not it was recognized by the Academy, the Hollywood Foreign Press, or the rest of the Screen Actors Guild.
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2019-04-18T11:00:49Z
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https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/sylviaobell/black-hollywood-tired-awards-season
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Published October 24, 2014 at 500 × 375 in Annual Plant Sale.
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2019-04-21T09:07:30Z
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http://nanaimohort.org/?attachment_id=534
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This page will hold all the blog posts made by other people. There have been many people effected by my cancer journey and I would love for anyone who wants to their stories to be able to do so. If you are interested in writing a blog post, please e-mail it to me and I will post it. Some people (ex: Steve) may be making semi-regular posts.
It seems inevitable that as the year draws to a close, we look back over the past 12 months, think of the good (and the not-so-good) things that have transpired, and muse about how the upcoming year may unfold.
For our family, this past year has been like no other – difficult, distressing, demanding, and yet strangely uplifting as it has played out.
Maybe not so odd that a much-quoted-quote from Dickens came to mind during these end-of-year musings. To be sure I had remembered it correctly, I looked up the quote but found when I did that the original phrasing seemed to fall in the wrong order.
The worst of times – the darkness of Lynsey’s brain tumour diagnosis.
The best of times – the rise of an absolutely incredible number of supporters… not just Lynsey’s official Firecrackers team who provided such strong support before, during, and after the Spring Sprint fundraiser for the Brain Tumour Foundation in May, but the many, MANY people – friends, relatives, neighbours, friends of friends, co-workers, even complete strangers – who rallied ‘round with prayers, advice, rides, donations, research, friendship, financial support, and yes, even SOUP!
The year of UN-believability – how was it possible that our beautiful, full-of-energy daughter who had just started out on her very promising career, could be diagnosed with a brain tumour?!
The year of Reality – MRI’s and neurosurgeons don’t lie.
The season of Darkness – the 12 month ‘sentence’ of chemotherapy with its many accompanying challenges and side effects – and, of course, worry.
The spring of Hope – discovering many medical and personal support opportunities, including the discovery of YACC (Young Adult Cancer Canada) and the knowledge that people – around the world in fact! – were, and ARE holding Lynsey in their thoughts.
Months of Despair – the months of despair.
We had nothing before us, we had everything before us – the ‘nothing-ness’ of being POST-chemo coupled with the sense that new possibilities lie before us leaves us open to explore ALL options with a very positive attitude.
…and THAT is as close to Dickensian as I shall EVER be, I’m sure!
During the past year, our family’s life seems to exemplify Levi-Montalcini’s words – many extremely ‘difficult moments’ but definite evidence of ‘the best’ coming from them.
with things in a way that continually blows me away, and makes me feel privileged to be by her side on this journey.
The remarkable rise of supporters around our family is another of those ‘best’ things this year. The old adage about the cream rising to the top really applies here, for we have seen people who were mere acquaintances prior to this year become the closet of friends, and complete strangers encircle our family with support in many forms.
And the last, but certainly not the least of the ‘best’ things have been the stripping away of the insignificant in our lives and a fine-tuning of the focus on everyday joy. Priorities have been sharply realigned – and all in a wonderful way. The reality is that EVERY day is a gift… for EVERYONE, not just people who are struggling with things – and the sooner we all GET this, the better off we will be!
Previously, I wrote about fear and worry. Now I feel enveloped by a strong sense of hope and a lightness that comes with the joy of being intimately connected to remarkable people.
With everyone’s continued support, and with Lynsey as the beacon to light our way, ‘the best’ will continue to rise from the ‘difficult moments’ that may challenge us down the road.
Together, I feel certain we will achieve a HAPPY and HEALTH-FILLED New Year!
For well, about a year now, I have been looking for articles, testimonials, anything, to guide me in some way in my role as a supporter to Lynsey. Aside from what I learned at the YACC conference, there has been very little. From time to time either Lynsey or I will come across something, start reading, and find nothing… new or interesting. The truth is, there was really nothing new or interesting out there to help me to begin with.
Honestly, a year ago, the one thing I knew about supporting someone with cancer and on chemotherapy was to wash my hands a lot.
And it’s not just me; it’s not just the direct supporters who have to feel their way around in the dark with this disease. It’s everyone who comes into contact with someone who has cancer. No one knows what to say, what to offer, or what to do in general.
I think one of the great things that I experienced at the YACC conference was the ability to talk openly about cancer with people other than Lyns. As she alluded to in her last post, we don’t really get to do that with anyone else we know. Again, not your fault. From what I gathered at the conference, it seems to be the ‘norm’.
As the world has seen time and time again, the ‘norm’ can change, but it has to be changed. That is why I stand behind Lynsey and Mary’s challenge to embrace vulnerability and be authentic with each other. I believe open, honest, and authentic conversation will be the only way for everyone involved to offer the thoughts, help and support that we all know they intend to. And not just to Lynsey, to each other.
Like I have said, there’s nothing out there that is going to tell you what to say or do. You can only learn that from expressing yourself authentically, hearing others do the same, and growing from that.
Lyns can’t do it alone, Mary can’t do it alone, I can’t do it alone, and you can’t do it alone. Please, let all of us help each other out with this. Who knows, maybe we’ll come up with something new or interesting.
A sincere thank you to everyone who has already reached out and responded to the challenge, and I look forward to reading what even more people have to share.
P.S. This speaker, Brené Brown, gives an amazing talk on the need for people to embrace their own vulnerability, and how it leads to a healthier lifestyle. I strongly suggest everyone check it out.
…my beautiful daughter has thrown down the gauntlet!
Issued the challenge of authenticity to all of us who love her.
With tomorrow marking exactly one year from the very worst day in our family’s life – the day Lynsey’s tumour was discovered on that hateful MRI – many emotions hurricane around me and muddle together. One emotional descriptor, however, stands out above the rest – the “S” word that Lynsey herself identified in her blog post “The Weekend I Felt Normal” (Nov 9).
For most of this past year, I have dealt with the “S” word in the same way that most of the characters in the Harry Potter books related to “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named” – that is to say, if “he” (Voldemort) was not actually named out loud, then perhaps he (or in my case, it) won’t be made real.
So ‘SCARED’ was – and very much is – the word.
I can’t shake the image of all of us (our family, that is) being in an extremely wobbly boat during the past year – being tossed around in very choppy waters and certainly thrown about the boat, but all the while being held up and supported within it, and heading in a very specific and prescribed direction.
Now, as the year (and hence the treatment plan) nears ‘completion’, I can’t shake the new image of us having to step OUT of the boat – with no idea of whether there will be solid ground upon which to stand, or just whirling, heaving waters pulling us in an unknown direction.
Despite this unsettling feeling though, I DO feel that if we follow Harry Potter’s lead and speak the word out loud – SCARED – that we can defeat this emotion just as Voldemort was ultimately defeated.
And just like Harry, we too have many friends and supporters who continue to stand by us, fight with us, and help along the way — that means ALL of you who are reading this, and everyone connected to Lynsey in one way or another.
Now it YOUR turn to take up her authenticity challenge.
Together, let’s tackle “SCARED” and send it packing!
This past week, Lynsey invited me to go to one of her medical appointments at the Juravinski Cancer Hospital in Hamilton. Lynsey’s cousin Becky, also a close friend, was already going down with her, and I was both honoured and glad to know that Lynsey felt comfortable enough including me in such a personal and sensitive experience.
One of the things that has impressed me the most about Lynsey, is how open and honest she has been, regarding the struggles she has been facing, since being diagnosed with cancer. Whether it has been the personal feelings and frustrations she has expressed in her blogs, or standing up in front of all the people in attendance at the Spring Sprint Run, or even just during a casual conversation when she articulates her day-to-day worries, she proves time and again how strong she really is.
At the hospital, Lynsey automatically fell into routine, taking a number in the blood clinic waiting area. While we waited for her number to be called, we were talking about the usual everyday, silly-stuff that is of no consequence (for example, what had being happening on the Bachelorette, etc.). We laughed a little and chatted, similarly to how we would if we were at one of our weekly breakfasts or at someone’s house. I started to wonder, (as did Becky), are we being disruptive somehow or not acting as you are suppose to act while in a cancer hospital waiting room? Most of the other patients, all of whom were noticeably older than Lynsey, were quiet and reserved. When we asked if she would have rather we not talk about such unimportant things, she replied, “Nope!” Talking about those things and acting how we ‘normally’ would was what she wanted and needed at the time.
As I am only one of the many people in Lynsey’s life, who have had a glimpse into what she had been going through, it seemed that the routine of driving down to the hospital, having her blood drawn, talking with her cancer doctor about her symptoms and next steps, and finally going to the pharmacy to pick up her chemotherapy medication, had become like second nature to her. All the while, I couldn’t help but think, how ridiculously unfair, that these are the types of activities that now fill up many of her days??
Even though, I am no stranger to hospitals myself, I found that this was such an eye-opening experience and one that I’m glad she chose to share. Lynsey has said that writing her blog and sharing her story has been very therapeutic and has helped her at times to cope. In doing so, I also think she is helping others. Helping people feel less alone and a little more brave, teaching people to be more understanding and compassionate towards others, and to just appreciate life!!
I know this, because I am one of those people!
thanks for sharing this with all of us, and you’re soooo right, we don’t know what they are going through, all we know is that we care and love them and would take it all away for them if we could.
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2019-04-18T23:01:33Z
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https://lynsthefirecracker.wordpress.com/guest-appearances/
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The handicapping process does not end when the bets are made; it ends by reviewing the results of the races that were bet and analyzing the handicapping process to determine if anything was missed. After taking a day to recover, I looked back at the 2011 Breeders’ Cup results and came up with the top four things to take away from the last Breeders’ Cup at Churchill Downs.
Every horseplayer has watched or bet a race that was won by a horse that appeared to have no chance of winning. The horse may have appeared to be too slow, was running at the wrong distance or had not run well in months or years. The horse triggers large payouts and causes great frustration. After reviewing the past performances nothing points to the horse as a winner. The result is still implausible but that is perfectly acceptable. Horse races are run by living breathing animals and ridden and trained by humans. The horses are not machines and the jockeys and trainers are imperfect so it is inevitable that from time to time a race will produce an un-explainable result. This scenario occurred not once but twice on Breeders’ Cup Saturday.
The first impossible to come up with horse was Afleet Again in the Breeders’ Cup Marathon. Afleet Again was the least likely winner of the Breeders’ Cup Marathon after a subpar 2011 that saw him go winless in eight starts including two losses in allowance races. Afleet Again was also unproven at the distance and based on speed figures was the slowest horse in the race. Despite all of these negative factors Afleet Again won the Breeders’ Cup Marathon by a comfortable 2 ¼ lengths at odds of 41 /1.
The second improbable winner was Court Vision in the Breeders’ Cup Mile. Court Vision was the least likely winner in the Breeders’ Cup Mile after a lackluster 2011 season. Similar to Afleet Again Court Vision was winless in 2011 and based on speed figures was the slowest horse in the race. Court Vision was coming off a mediocre seventh place finish in the Woodbine Mile yet he managed to blow past three-time defending champion Goldikova and hold off Turallure (winner of the aforementioned Woodbine Mile) to post the biggest upset in the twenty seven year history of the Breeders’ Cup Mile. Even after the race was run it was impossible to make a case for Court Vision.
After reviewing the past performance of each horse and knowing they had won their respective races I still could not find a reason to bet either one of them but guess what? That was perfectly fine.
Some horses prefer one track over all others or in extreme cases only run well at one particular track. These horses are often referred to as a “horse for the course.” This angle plays out everyday at tracks across the country.
This year’s Breeders’ Cup Turf Sprint was won by Regally Ready, a Churchill Downs “horse for the course,” who was two for two in turf sprints at Churchill Downs prior to the race. The “Horse for Course Angle” has become a potent handicapping factor for the Breeders’ Cup Turf Sprints as it has produced all four winners of the race [through 2011]. Chamberlain Bridge won the 2010 Breeders’ Cup Turf Sprint after compiling a record of three wins and a second from four turf sprints at Churchill Downs. California Flag won the 2009 Breeders’ Cup Turf Sprint on Santa Anita’s downhill turf course and had previously won two of four starts over the course. Desert Code, who I mentioned in my post about multi-ticket betting strategy, won the 2008 Breeders’ Cup Turf Sprint on the same downhill turf course and had won three of five turf sprints at Santa Anita.
The Breeders’ Cup returns to Santa Anita in 2012 and once again the Breeders’ Cup Turf Sprint will be run on the unique downhill turf course. The downhill turf course is notorious for producing “horse for the course” winners so it will pay to give special consideration to horses that have won or performed well over the course in the past.
Betting a horse “turning-back” in distance is one of the oldest angles in the book. To fit the angle a horse simply needs to be running in a race at a shorter distance than its previous race. The most common example is a horse going from a route to a sprint, such as from 1 1/16 miles to seven furlongs, but the angle also works for horses “turning-back” in distance from a route to a shorter route .
Caleb’s Posse, Shackleford and Tres Borrachos completed the trifecta in the Breeders’ Cup Dirt Mile this year. All three fit the “tum-back angle.” Caleb’s Posse and Shackleford were exiting the 1 1/16 miles Indiana Derby and Tres Borrachos prepped for the Breeders’ Cup Dirt Mile in the 1 1/8 miles Goodwood.
The “Turn-back Angle” has become quite possibly the most important handicapping factor for the Breeders’ Cup Dirt Mile as it has produced the winner of all five runnings of the race [through 2011]. Dakota Phone won the 2010 Breeders’ Cup Dirt Mile after running in the 1 1/8 miles Goodwood. Furthest Land won the 2009 Breeders’ Cup Dirt Mile after prepping in the 1 1/8 miles Kentucky Cup Classic. Albertus Maximus won the 2008 Breeders’ Cup Dirt Mile after running in the 1 1/8 miles Goodwood. Corinthian won the 2007 Breeders’ Cup Dirt Mile after competing in the 1 1/8 miles Woodward. One day a horse may win the Breeders’ Cup Dirt Mile after running in a sprint race but until the trend is reversed it pays to give preference to horses “turning-back” in distance.
Favorites in horse racing are normally associated with unexciting payoffs, however when combined with a few upsets they can produce massive payouts. The six Breeders’ Cup races on Friday (2011) made up the Pick 6. Three of those races were won by the post time favorite (Secret Circle in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Sprint, My Miss Aurelia in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies and Royal Delta in the Breeders’ Cup Distaff), the other three were won by 6/1 Stephanie’s Kitten (Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies Turf), 20/1 Musical Romance (Breeders’ Cup Filly and Mare Sprint) and 27/1 Perfect Shirl (Breeders’ Cup Filly and Mare Turf) resulting in a Pick 6 payout of $444, 571. The last four Breeders’ Cup races made up the Pick 4. Two favorites (My Miss Aurelia and Royal Delta) combined with the aforementioned 20/1 Musical Romance and 27/1 Perfect Shirl produced a Pick 4 payout of $23,428 . In both sequences favorites won half of the races which proved that it is not necessary to beat the favorite in every race to win a substantial amount of money.
Although these points relate directly to the Breeders’ Cup each can be applied to everyday handicapping. The most important lesson however is that just like horses are not machines handicappers should not bet like machines. Automatic bets should not be placed on horses that meet the criteria outlined above; they should be one factor to consider in the handicapping process. Sound handicapping involves evaluating all of the available information and using that information to bet the horse that figures to win the race at hand.
While the Classic, Distaff, Mile and Turf will rightfully garner the majority of the Saturday headlines, the other five Breeders’ Cup races will be filled the very best equine talent, with several championships lying in the balance.
The Maker’s Mark Breeders’ Cup Filly & Mare Turf, run at 1 3/8 miles, is expected to be led by Peter Brant’s divisional leader SISTERCHARLIE (IRE), who qualified for the race when she won Arlington Park’s “Win and You’re In” Beverly D. (GI) August 11 for trainer Chad Brown, who could also start FOURSTAR CROOK and SANTA MONICA (GB). Sunderland Holdings’ SEA OF CLASS (IRE) won the “Win and You’re In” Darley Yorkshire Oaks (GI) August 23 at York to gain an entry for trainer William Haggas and rates the best of a European contingent that could also include EZIYRA (IRE), MAGIC WAND (IRE) and WILD ILLUSION (GB).
The one-turn Breeders’ Cup Dirt Mile is shaping up as a tremendous race, as Hronis Racing’s CATALINA CRUISER, who earned a berth into the race when he won Del Mar’s “Win and You’re In” Pat O’Brien (GII) August 25 for trainer John Sadler and has won his four career starts by 18 ½ lengths, rates as one of the most talented horses in training. Waiting in the wings is multiple Grade I winner CITY OF LIGHT and the undefeated ARMY MULE, on the comeback trail after suffering a minor injury shortly after winning Aqueduct’s Carter (GI) by 6 ¼ lengths April 7. Defending Dirt Mile winner BATTLE OF MIDWAY made his return from retirement and was second in the Pat O’Brien and is also pointing to the race.
The six-furlong TwinSpires Breeders’ Cup Sprint is expected to be led by Ray Mamone’s IMPERIAL HINT, who aired in Saratoga’s Alfred Vanderbilt (GI) July 28 for trainer Luis Carvajal, while LIMOUSINE LIBERAL and RANSOM THE MOON qualified for the race with wins in this summer’s “Win and You’re In” Belmont Sprint Championship (GII) and “Win and You’re In” Del Mar’s Bing Crosby (GI), respectively. Defending Sprint winner ROY H is also expected, as are Grade I winners PROMISES FULFILLED and WHITMORE and multiple graded stakes winner X Y JET.
The Breeders’ Cup Filly & Mare Sprint, run at seven furlongs, looks to have a solid favorite in Cicero Farm’s MARLEY’S FREEDOM, who earned a berth into the race with her win in Saratoga’s “Win and You’re In” Ballerina (GI) August 25 for trainer Bob Baffert. STORMY EMBRACE earned a berth into the race in the “Win and You’re In” Princess Rooney (GII) in June, while multiple graded stakes winners AMERICAN GAL, FINLEY’SLUCKYCHARM, LEWIS BAY and MIA MISCHIEF are also pointing to the race.
The Breeders’ Cup Turf Sprint, run at five furlongs, is expected to draw a deep field, with Patricia Generazio’s homebred DISCO PARTNER, who qualified for the race when he won Belmont’s “Win and You’re In” Jaipur (GII) in June for trainer Christophe Clement, looking to better his third-place run in last year’s renewal at Del Mar. Defending champion STORMY LIBERAL headlines the rest of an American contingent that could also include BELVOIR BAY (GB), BUCCHERO, LADY ALEXANDRA, PURE SENSATION, and VISION PERFECT, while the Europeans could send BLUE POINT (IRE), CORINTHIAN KNIGHT (IRE), EL ASTRONAUTE (IRE).
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2019-04-18T19:16:27Z
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http://agameofskill.com/tag/breeders-cup-dirt-mile/
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A conversation with Jin Liqun, chairman and president of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, can take you down some interesting literary paths. Before our interview in Beijing kicks off, he quotes William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens and DH Lawrence in reference to industrialization and air pollution, before moving on to Faust and the devil in the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Christopher Marlowe.
One wonders what the country representatives must have made of this discomfiting allusion, equating membership with the torments of a soul-pilfering devil, but Jin was trying to say he understood their concerns.
“If you induce countries to join with nice words, once they are on the boat and it is moored in the middle of the lake, what can they do? No lifejacket!” He laughs. So, he says, AIIB did everything in its power to make membership inclusive, inviting ideas from member countries about the drafting of the articles of association, and bringing all of them to a meeting at the historic Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing, not just to be presented with a binding document to sign but to consult them on what those final documents should say.
If Jin has one message he wants to put across about AIIB, it is about inclusion, and that is probably because so much of the AIIB’s formation took place against a backdrop of considerable suspicion.
Demand for infrastructure in the region in the period 2015 to 2030 is estimated at $40 trillion, well above the available financial resources. AIIB, which puts the financing gap at about $21 trillion, was launched to channel funds into Asian infrastructure, but was viewed by some as a multilateral where China would call the shots, providing a vehicle for Chinese soft power and a rival for the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, which are led by the US and Japan respectively.
In a practical sense, AIIB was seen as an agent of the One Belt, One Road initiative to build infrastructure across Asia and the Middle East in order to improve Chinese export markets, while demonstrating China’s financial and political importance in world affairs. The United States, even under president Barack Obama, wanted nothing to do with it, and voiced its objections when the UK joined.
But that control will be relinquished. “We said that in the early years China was willing to provide up to 50% of the capital for the bank, but that with new countries joining, Chinese shares will be reduced. The media picked up on the first [part of the] sentence. They didn’t pick up on the second,” Jin says.
On that point, something important is about to happen. AIIB now has 57 member countries, including G7 economies France, Germany and the UK, and another 30 nations are set to join. If they do so, China’s stake in the bank will drop from 26.6% of the voting shares to around 20%.
This is a crucial difference, because since many big AIIB decisions require a 75% vote to go ahead, China effectively has a veto today, but will willingly surrender it through dilution from the expanded membership.
The barb is clearly aimed at the IMF and World Bank, the Bretton Woods institutions conceived in that year, and is one of several occasions Jin seeks to distinguish AIIB from its peers. He is quick to point out, for example, that when he himself worked at the World Bank (first in 1980 and then as alternate executive director for China from 1989 to 1992), US voting power was 21%, and the required special majority was 80%. Even after US voting power was diluted with the membership of additional countries, the articles of agreement were amended to make sure the Americans kept the veto, which they still do today.
Barbs aside, Jin is not antagonistic to other multilaterals and has worked at the highest levels within them. In addition to his two stints at the World Bank, he spent five years as ranking vice-president of the Asia Development Bank. But he is keen to distinguish AIIB from their world view, and has said in the past that they have drifted from their mandates, focusing so heavily on poverty alleviation that they have neglected the infrastructure development that would pave the way for social development.
This is a reasonable point as it is hard to find anyone who can describe with any great clarity what One Belt, One Road actually is, and it is possible to swing a tenuous connection pretty much anywhere from Africa to London to Japan.
Jin has said he wants AIIB to be lean, clean and green. Its modest but on-target first year of lending, at $1.73 billion to nine projects from power distribution in Bangladesh and slum upgrades in Indonesia to road improvements in Tajikistan and maritime infrastructure in Oman, was achieved by a staff of 60, though headcount has since risen to about 90. The ADB, according to its 2015 annual report, has a permanent staff of 3,105.
Building the institutional capacity is obviously a work in progress, and has involved a mix of younger local staff and those with international experience.
This double act – differentiating the institution from other multilaterals while filling it with their staff – is going to be challenging, but some analysts like what they see so far.
Beijing’s air pollution is one deterrent when it comes to hiring. And already there has been turnover in the upper echelons as the Korean vice-president, Hong Kyttack, left to deal with a scandal at the Korean Development Bank dating from his time as chairman there.
Three quarters of AIIB’s lending to date has been in partnership with other multilaterals, usually the World Bank and ADB, and it is tempting to wonder if this is a matter of policy or just because AIIB doesn’t yet have the institutional capacity for proper risk assessment. Jin, who is clearly pleased at having been able to cooperate – “it shows that we measure up to the same standard” – paints it as more of an issue of financial, rather than professional, capacity.
He cites the example of a pipeline from the Caspian Sea through Azerbaijan into Turkey with a total cost of $8.6 billion. The World Bank put in $800 million, AIIB $600 million and the ADB has a related project worth $1 billion.
AIIB has said up to $2.5 billion of lending is likely for the bank’s second year, which still seems small when compared, for example, with the ADB’s $27 billion of lending in 2015. All development institutions started small, Jin says, pointing to the EBRD and ADB as examples.
When seeking a president for a China-based regional multilateral development bank, what would the ideal CV look like? Senior experience at home and overseas, ideally in comparable institutions. Not just a willingness to engage with other countries, but a fascination in them, plus an ability to communicate.
One can see why Jin Liqun was approached. He has worked at the most senior levels at the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, China’s ministry of finance, the China Investment Corporation sovereign wealth fund, and the investment bank CICC. As a bonus, he speaks English with greater erudition and fluency than many English people, and turns out to have translated Ron Chernow’s book on JPMorgan, ‘The House of Morgan,’ into Chinese.
Jin is proud of his resumé and happy to recount it, but it’s when one goes further back that one understands the attitudes that have shaped him.
He was born just before the Communist victory in 1949 and grew up in Suzhou, not far west of Shanghai. Talking about pollution in industrial China, he recalls in his youth not only swimming in the river but also drinking from it, memories that perhaps partly drive his yearning for environmental improvement. In our interview, he says the only loan he is considering granting in China itself is for environmental protection.
His early life was shaped by the political movement of the era. Recalling his culture shock when he went to the World Bank in 1980, he says: “You certainly could not forget I was 10 years in rural China during the Cultural Revolution.” He confirms reports that he spent years in a thatched shack doing hard labour from 4am to 10pm, and that he turned to the works of Shakespeare – Othello, Macbeth and the Merchant of Venice – at night. At one stage he volunteered for a night shift in a toilet paper factory.
He had been learning English from the age of 10 and, when the political climate changed and Mao told students to rise up against their teachers, he still found a way to study during his rural work, listening to the BBC on a short-wave radio. Even today, his pronunciation of certain vowels has a hint of the British public broadcaster.
Eventually he found his way back to study, joining Beijing Foreign Studies University in 1978. When he took the World Bank job in 1980, it was not without regret, as he had also been offered a position as professor of English literature. A love of the English language and the finest writing in it is very obvious from meeting him.
And then, the big multilateral, state and investment banking roles. “I try to synthesize all these experiences in creating this bank with my colleagues,” he says.
“Because we have the privilege of working with them, we can move a little faster,” Jin says. “This year, we will try to do a little bit more, but the number is not that important.” He says his message to staff is quality, not quantity.
“However, you must still have a certain amount, otherwise there’s no impact,” he says. “We would build all the way up and may cruise up to the level of $10 billion beyond, let’s say, five or six years’ time. But we don’t try to be the biggest. If people say you are not doing a lot, I am not worried about that.” One wonders, though, if AIIB has started lending at an unfortunate time for China.
Too late now, though; AIIB will soon have almost 90 voices only one of which will be China’s, although, as some point out, China’s loss of a veto doesn’t mean it won’t be able to ask Asia-based allies to vote as it does.
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2019-04-19T21:16:17Z
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https://www.euromoney.com/article/b12khpl52g8lvw/jin-liqun-chinas-internationalist
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Getting down to brass tacks for purposes of making your first purchase or becoming a property owner: make the purchase as a homeowner. We want you to make your purchase as a homeowner because as a homeowner you get better access to financing, therefore, this the absolute easiest way to buy your first property.
You want a move-in ready property. It doesn’t have to be a new property but we want you to buy a property that’s move-in ready so that when you get that loan commitment, when you’ve made your down payment, when you close, all you do is move your things there. Stay away from those that cause you a lot of work.
Hi this is John welcome to today’s program. Today’s title is: The Absolute Easiest Way to Buy Your first property.
Now that may sound a little bit over the top. It may sound a little bit too easy but that’s the whole point. We want to focus on items that people can do themselves to purchase their first property without having to go through hurdles, hoops, barbed wire and everything else that people think is required of them to become a homeowner or a property owner.
At 21-years old I dropped out of college because I was making more money in real estate than I thought I could ever make by becoming an educated person which of course in the long run is not true. But at 21 I thought that was true. A few years later I’m 23 and I’m not making as much money in real estate and I come across an older man that’s looking at me and seeing potential. He asked me why I dropped out of school. I said because I’m making more money in real estate than I think I ever will by being in college. And he said, well how old are you now and I told him 23. He said, well, how old will you be in two years. And of course I said I’ll be 25. he looked at me sternly and he said you might as well be 25 with a college degree.
That didn’t settle very well with me at the time but I did take his advice to heart and I did go back to school. But I think the same rule of thumb applies to real estate ownership; if you don’t own any real estate now, two years from now will you own any real estate? And if the answer is no that’s fine. But if the answer is, yes, in two years I wish to own some real estate, then you probably need to start working on that now because working on it now will allow you to put that time in that’s necessary to meet a two-year goal.
In real estate things do not happen in a vacuum and they certainly don’t happen in a short period of time.
It’s a very time intensive business to get into the business of real estate and it’s a very time intensive business to stay and operate real estate and just as much to exit from a particular property. Time is not on your side when it comes to real estate. It’s really is a slow-moving asset class.
Real estate requires you to have a long glide path just to get into the business. If you’re thinking you want to be a homeowner or a real estate owner in one or two or three years you really need to start now preparing to make that occur because that’s the only way it will occur. If you wait three years to start it will be another year or two after that until you actually get into the business. Think about that as we go through today’s program.
I’m not trying to distinguish those that have purchased property before or if this is your first property. I’m just suggesting that the methods we’re going to go through here represent just an easy way to buy a property. I mean there’s all kinds of tricks and tabs and various methodologies for getting through the process of buying a property. No money down, low cash down payment, creative financing with lease option to buy- all of those require a high level of expertise and many of them require more financial accountability than people realize.
With this particular program, we’re discussing exclusively for my perspective, the absolute easiest way to buy your first property or to buy a property and have it in your name. And whether or not it turns into a rental or not at some point that is not relevant to the beginning of this process which is buying a home to live in or buying your first property that may eventually turn into a rental.
The easiest way to buy your first property is to buy it as a homeowner.
We want you to make your purchase as a homeowner. As a homeowner, you get better access to financing, therefore, this the absolute easiest way to buy your first property. And that would be to have your parents buy it for you. Now after the pregnant pause, we say of course that doesn’t happen very often, right? For the other 99.999 percent of us the likelihood that your parents are going to buy your first property for you- it’s not probable.
Another option is to crowd fund your down payment- another uncomfortable pause to say of course that doesn’t happen very often. It may, but the likelihood is not very high.
Getting down to brass tacks for purposes of making your first purchase or becoming a property owner: make the purchase as a homeowner. You and your family make the purchase as a homeowner. That gives you access to the best financing, the most normalized financing that’s in the marketplace which is 80 percent new first mortgage money which requires a 20 percent cash down.
If you have issues with garnering that down payment go to JohnWilhoit.com. There’s a free e-mail course called “10 Ways to Find Your Down Payment. Some of the methods we highly recommend and a few of the methods we suggest you stay away from. Get that free e-mail course to assist you in looking for ways to get you down.
First, make the purchase as a homeowner. Secondly, use regular (or straight) 80 percent new first mortgage money with a 20 percent cash down payment. Then move into the property yourself.
Don’t look to do this: garner home-ownership financing and flipping it into a rental. Just move in and stay a while. Your loan documents will likely say that you have to reside in the property for two years personally. So, meet the loan document requirements and move into the property.
Call it your own home with that two-year period. Make the purchase as a homeowner and then my suggestion is that you only purchase move-in ready condition because we’re trying to make this easy. We’re not asking you to look at fixing things that are broken, in need of repair.
You want a move-in ready property. It doesn’t have to be a new property but we want you to buy a property that’s move-in ready so that when you get that loan commitment, when you’ve made your down payment, when you close, all you do is move your things there. There are ample properties that meet that criteria.
Stay away from those that cause you a lot of work. My family is a good sample. I have a number of nieces and nephews that have tool belts- they can fix anything. Then there’s the rest of us that can’t hit a nail straight with a hammer. For making this purchase easy, only look at properties that are move-in ready.
Now the other part I want you to keep in mind, from a financial perspective, is to keep the purchase price at no more than two times your household income. People will often go higher than that because they can. The normal range is between one and a half and four times household income. But for purposes of keeping this purchase easy, we want you to stay under two times your household income for the purchase price.
Next, only buy in neighborhoods that you know, neighborhoods that you have experience with, neighborhoods that you know how they work, you know what happens there. You know who lives there already, in terms of the demographic profile of the neighborhoods. Don’t go out into the world and find a new place. Just focus on those places that you already have a high level of confidence in already. In that way, it makes it easier because you don’t have to figure out where things are.
Next, if you’re going to buy single family stay with a three-bedroom two bath or larger. Stay within that two times household income. That property will be easier to sell or rent when that time comes. If you’re buying a condo, try to purchase a property that’s at least one bedroom one and one half baths. Very often the one bedrooms will have just one bathroom. Try to stick with those that have that one and a half bath. It’s just that extra feature that allows the master bedroom to stay private because there is another half bath for use by guest.
Think about that when looking at a condo. Also, we want to look at properties that have low maintenance. We don’t want you to buy a small house on a big lot that requires hours of outside maintenance or hundreds of dollars to keep the outside of the property maintained. We want you to buy a property that’s a low maintenance place to assure its an easy first purchase.
As a homeowner, purchase only a move in ready property, live in the property yourself.
Plan on staying for a while; two years or longer.
Keep the purchase price at less than two times your household income.
Use straight 80 percent new first mortgage with 20 percent cash down payment.
Only buying neighborhoods that you have a track record with: places that you are familiar with and already know.
If a single-family home, make it a three bedroom two bath- minimum.
If it’s a condo preferably one and one half bath minimum and then also property this moment.
Look for a property with low maintenance.
When you put all these things together it may not necessarily seem like it’s any easier than buying any other property but those things that we just mentioned streamline the process. What I mean by that is it takes everything else out of play.
When you put all those items in the same basket you’re looking at a property that will be affordable and one that you can live in for an extended time. A home that will be the easiest in terms of processes in the marketplace where are you the buyer.
Please consider reading my book 12 Steps to Home-Ownership. I also have an online course. You can find the online course at JohnWilhoit.com. The book outlines these items in sequence and goes into far more detail than what we have here. For this episode, we’re trying to knock down even those processes further and make buying your first home or buying your first property the easiest that we possibly can.
What happens when we go through all these steps? What’s the next step after buying your first home? Well if you live there for two years or longer and have some appreciation then you have the option of potentially selling that property and buying another one. But if you want to stay for a while that’s all well and good. Most people stay in their home between five and seven years.
If you’ve had it for a while and you know what rents are, you’ll be able to determine if the rents that you can obtain for that property will pay the mortgage payment that is on the property. If that’s the case, then you have the option of going and doing the same thing again; buying another property and keeping the first one as a rental and then buying a duplex. That’s the segue with a duplex; getting into the property rental business along with becoming a homeowner.
With a duplex, you are becoming a homeowner and a property owner that has a rental. If it has been a short period of time you are not very likely to be in a position to refinance the first property and cash out. But if it’s been five years or longer there may be equity in that initial property where you can refinance that property and take cash out and use that cash to buy the second property.
This second property could be yours as a homeowner or it can be another rental property that you intend to live in for just a short time, two or three years, and then turn that one into a rental. If you want to know the next step in property ownership you can look at duplexes as your initial purchase or a duplex as your second purchase.
That way you’re buying a rental income property along with homeownership at the same time and you still have access to homeownership financing because you’re buying a property that’s non-commercial. By non-commercial it just means one to four units. Once you get to five units that would be considered a commercial property and it will require a larger down payment; 25 percent if not higher.
For purposes of making the absolute easiest purchase on your first property think about a single-family home or a condo. And then secondarily a duplex if that suits you. Once you buy a duplex you are now a homeowner and a landlord.
As you’ll hear throughout many of the programs, if you’re a small property owner, I highly recommend the first year of ownership that you hire professional property management because you need the folks around you that do this for a living. That first year as a rental owner is not the time for you to go through a learning curve. Why become a homeowner and concurrently becoming a property manager with all the things that requires?
Thanks for listening today. This has been John Wilhoit On Real Estate.
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2019-04-25T06:20:14Z
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http://johnwilhoit.com/2017/08/18/the-absolute-easiest-way-to-to-buy-your-first-property/
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CO2, water, and CH4 (methane) and some other minor gases are so-called “greenhouse gases” because they absorb infrared energy. However, be careful to avoid the common misunderstanding that the earth and its atmosphere behave like a garden greenhouse; that is not true. Greenhouses are closed systems except to incoming energy. Earth is an open system, open to receive energy, as well receive gases and other matter from space and also open to transmit energy, gases and matter back into space. A greenhouse is a poor analogy for earth’s climate.
Greenhouse gases also re-emit almost instantly the energy they absorbed, emitting that energy at a slightly lower energy than which it was absorbed. Rarely is that emission mentioned in the news or by climate alarmists. Proponents of global warming want you to believe that energy is stored and builds up in the atmosphere in a sort of hothouse or pressure cooker, but that is not true.
In most locations, the concentration of water vapor (including clouds) in the atmosphere is far higher than CO2 and methane, that is, there are far more water vapor molecules in a given volume of air than there are CO2 or methane. Near the equator and bodies of water, swamps and tundra water vapor in atmosphere will be near 100% relative humidity. That is, the air is saturated, no more water vapor can be added to the air at that temperature and air pressure. Water vapor in air is found in the range of 0% to 100% relative humidity. Cold air holds very little water vapor. The air at the poles is usually very dry. Warm air holds much water vapor. Air in the tropics is usually humid.
The tropics and sub-tropics receive large amounts of solar irradiation during the day, but none at night. During the day, the surface of ocean water is warmed by solar radiation and that warmth results in release of large amounts of CO2 and CH4 as well as water vapor into the atmosphere; the amount of these released gases dwarfs all contributions of these gases by humans. At night, the cooler ocean surface absorbs large amounts of CO2. CO2 is very soluble in cold water.
The oceans and subsea floor hold far more methane (CH4) than all petroleum and fossil fuels ever discovered, and this methane is continuously degassed out of warm water and soil into the air. CH4 released into open air spontaneously converts (oxidizes) to CO2 and water at standard temperature and pressure. CH4 + 2 O2 -> CO2 + 2 H2O + a small amount of energy. Almost all CH4 originated as living cells. The cells died, entered the soil, rivers, lakes and ocean as runoff, metabolized and degraded by natural biological activity; this is the ultimate source of almost all fossil fuel on earth. That natural resource is continuously renewing and unlikely to be exhausted so long as there is life in the oceans.
Water vapor is the dominate greenhouse gas, absorbing by far both more direct solar energy and indirect solar energy re-emitted by the earth. More than 70% of the earth is covered with liquid water and about 40% of the earth and liquid water is receiving direct solar radiation every day. Additional liquid water is on land and in soil and plants. Solar radiation increases the molecular activity of liquid water molecules until they can no longer be held by the surface tension of the water. These active water molecules evaporate, i.e. release energetic water molecules, to become gaseous water vapor in the atmosphere. This release of energetic molecules cools the surface of the water, not warm the water, they just left. Your skin is cooled when your sweat evaporates.
Liquid water is far denser than air. Dense liquid water in the oceans is a huge reservoir of stored energy. The oceans contain greater than 1000 times more energy than the atmosphere; this means that earth’s atmosphere as a whole – regardless which gases make up the atmosphere – cannot warm the oceans in any significant amount. And this means the oceans are warming the atmosphere. The oceans are controlling the weather and climate on earth, not the atmosphere. The oceans are warmed by direct and indirect solar radiation as well as volcanic and tectonic forces resulting from gravity.
The specific gas molecules (nitrogen, oxygen, water vapor, as well as CO2, methane, and several other trace gases) that make up the atmosphere, each with their various concentrations, individually or in combination, are irrelevant to the long-term average temperature of the planet. In other words, an atmosphere of 100% CO2 could not significantly change the earth’s average temperature; instead, the ocean with its huge heat content would control the temperature of the 100% CO2 atmosphere. The atmosphere cannot warm significantly the earth over an extended time period, such as a year. But a warm ocean current, such as an El Nino, can change our climate and weather overnight.
However, water vapor and CO2 cause relatively minor temperature changes of the atmosphere at the surface (troposphere.) Water vapor and CO2 delay the release of energy from the earth into outer space, and this is most evident at night. Night time air temperatures at earth’s surface would be significantly cooler without water vapor and CO2. In a sense, greenhouse gases act as a nighttime insulator for the earth.
The effects of this are clearly seen at night. In warm, humid climates like New Orleans, the warmth of the air is retained late into the night, finally cooling by morning. Water vapor and CO2 do that. In dry desert or arctic areas, the warmth of the day very rapidly is re-radiated into outer space and nighttime temperatures plunge rapidly. The absence of water vapor and CO2 do that. CO2 has the same effect as water vapor/humidity except in far less amount than water vapor/humidity. CH4 is even less than CO2.
Nitrogen (78%), oxygen (21%) are the primary gases in the atmosphere, but these gases are mostly transparent to direct incoming solar radiation. Transparent means there are very limited or no energy bands available in these gaseous molecules to absorb energy at the wavelengths of the incoming solar radiation. A significantly large amount of solar energy is reflected by earth’s clouds, land and water surfaces back into outer space; this effect is known as albedo. The other atmospheric gases in total comprise about 1% of the atmosphere; this 1% includes water vapor, the inert gases (mostly argon which makes up 0.93%) and the trace gases. Carbon dioxide, methane and all other trace gases combined make up only about 0.04% of air.
Most radiant energy of the sun is transmitted through the gases in the atmosphere to the surface, i.e. to water and land surface, where it is absorbed. Most solar radiation is in the higher energy infrared, visible and ultraviolent wavelengths. Visible light, UV, X-Ray, and gamma radiation are all higher energy (higher frequency/shorter wavelength) than IR. Water vapor absorbs at certain visible energy bands…so we see darkening clouds as water vapor concentration increases. Solar radiation is absorbed by the molecules at the surface of water and land and then is spread through conduction and convection and dissipated in the energy cascade in the molecules of the water or solid matter. Some energy is re-emitted from the surface of land and water into the atmosphere but at lower energy, longer wavelengths, lower frequency than which it was originally absorbed.
Solar radiation received by the earth is known as Total Solar Irradiance (TSI). TSI has a cycle involving multiple variables which I will not go into here except to point out that climate cycles on earth correlate well with the TSI cycle and also with ocean temperature cycles known as PDO.
Temperature does not track CO2 very well (figure 11 below). Note temperature is flat, increasing, declining, and increasing while CO2 is increasing. Statistical correlation is weak.
Over longer time periods, the correlation between CO2 and temperature is very poor. The two trends are widely diverging as seen in the graphic below. If the global warming hypothesis were valid, these two trends would be parallel or converging.
For the remainder of this discussion, I will consider only energy in the infrared (IR) wavelengths. Molecules in water and land absorb IR at several discrete higher energy/shorter IR wavelengths that match discrete energy bands of the electrons of each molecule. If the incoming energy does not match an energy band of the molecule, or if that energy band is not available to absorb because the band is already occupied with energy, then the energy passes through the molecule without being absorbed. If the IR energy is absorbed, then in a fraction of a second, part of that energy is dissipated as kinetic energy (various motions such as stretching, bending, and vibrations internal to the molecule or collisions with other molecules) leaving slightly lower energy/slightly longer wavelength/slightly lower frequency IR energy. That lower energy is then re-emitted. Since part of the energy has already been dissipated internally by the molecule, the emission has a longer wavelength, lower frequency of IR than the IR that was originally absorbed. Energy is not stored in a molecule except in the macro sense of all molecules taken together, and then only temporarily while the energy is progressively dissipated. Energy moves from one molecule to the next and at each step the energy is reduced. By this process, IR energy is absorbed by a water vapor, or CO2 molecule, or CH4 molecule for only fraction of a second and then re-emitted at a longer wavelength (lower frequency, lower energy, cooler). This cascade continues progressively downward in the energy until eventually the remaining energy is dissipated as kinetic energy by collision with other molecules, or various internal molecular motions.
IR radiation is a sub-spectrum within the overall solar radiation spectrum. IR is 49.4% of solar energy reaching the outer atmosphere of earth. H2O, CO2, and CH4 absorb IR radiation ONLY at specific, discrete wavelengths (or quanta, or energy bands). Other wavelengths, which include most down-dwelling IR radiation directly from the sun, pass transparently through the molecules. Water vapor does absorb some incoming direct IR radiation. Some H2O, CO2, CH4 absorption wavelengths overlap (see graphic Figure 5-2), that is, these three molecules absorb IR at some of the same discrete wavelengths. This means that the gas which has the highest concentration in air absorbs and re-emits the most IR radiation. On average, water vapor including clouds is the highest concentration among the greenhouse gases, and thereby water vapor including clouds is the dominant greenhouse gas.
Most direct solar IR passes through air molecules to interact with molecules on the surface of water or land. Thus, infrared radiation is largely responsible for warming Earth’s surface, both land and water. In other words, the sun is not DIRECTLY warming the atmosphere, but INDIRECTLY warming the atmosphere. Most solar energy is absorbed in the molecules of the ocean and land which in turn warm the atmosphere. Most greenhouse warming is caused by reflected IR and IR emitted after dissipation from higher energy visible and UV energy. We don’t perceive visible light as heat; but when visible light interacts with matter, unless reflected, its energy is dissipated step by step in the downward energy cascade as described above until it becomes longer wavelength IR which then we perceive as heat. Re-radiation, conduction and convection from the surface of water and land warms the atmosphere.
IR energy only penetrates a few meters beneath the surface in liquid water in the oceans and lakes, while visible light transmits many meters beneath the surface of water, progressively loosing its colors from red to eventually higher energy blue and finally no visible light at increasing depth. The higher energy, shorter wavelength, higher frequency UV, x-ray and gamma energy mostly transmits through liquid water and finally interacts with molecules in solid matter in land or sea floor, or minimally with inorganic molecules dissolved in ocean water. Molecules on land and the seafloor surface are irradiated by these higher energy wavelengths, absorbing this energy, or conducting it further, and then these molecules progressively dissipate their energy as described above to progressively longer wavelengths and lower energy, eventually to IR wavelengths. The energy cascade continues on down the energy spectrum to satellite, wireless, radio, TV, MRI wavelengths and finally dissipated as kinetic motion of the molecule itself or collision.
The earth and the atmosphere also reflect and emit energy back into outer space, mostly in the visible and IR bands. IR emission from the atmosphere, water and land into outer space occurs day and night and is measured by satellite. Earth is an open system, continuously re-radiating its energy (which originally came from the sun) back into outer space, that is, radiating from higher energy earth to the much lower energy outer space beyond our atmosphere.
The fact that earth’s temperature is relatively stable over long periods of time, millions of years in multiple geological periods, implies that there is a balance between incoming energy and outgoing energy. I won’t go further into this energy balance topic here.
Over the very long time period of millions of years leading to the present, the earth has been in a slow cooling trend and has had a slowly declining atmospheric CO2 concentration as indicated in these graphics; this is probably contrary to what you have been told and taught.
On the other hand, and probably what you have been taught, in the geological short term, that is since the Little Ice Age and Industrial Revolution, earth warmed and total CO2 concentration increased. However most of that warming occurred before the 1950’s and that period was prior to the highest CO2 emissions by humans due to use of fossil fuels. In other words, the warming that followed the end of the Little Ice Age had very low CO2 concentration, thus that CO2 could not have caused the warming that occurred. The warming that occurred since the end of the Little Ice Age is within the statistical variation of the much longer-term cooling trend. In geological terms, since there is year-round ice at both poles, our present period is part of an interglacial period within an ice age.
There has been global warming during our lifetime, mostly occurring before the 1950’s, but this warming is not unprecedented. And there has also been global cooling during our lifetime, also not unprecedented.
Returning to our “greenhouse gases,” the takeaway point is, again, the sun heats the earth, then the earth heats the atmosphere. The atmosphere is not heating the earth. According to the laws of thermodynamics, energy only flows from higher energy earth to the lower energy atmosphere. Earth (oceans and land) heat the air, not the reverse. Where can we measure this effect in the natural world? Detrended (i.e. seasons removed) sea surface temperatures versus air temperatures, we see in the graph below that increasing air temperature ALWAYS FOLLOWS increasing sea surface temperature. No matter how high the CO2 or methane concentrations are in the air, the ocean temperature will control the air temperature of the earth. In bulk, like insulation, water vapor, CO2, and methane temporarily delay but do not halt the continuous dissipation of energy/heat via the process described in the above paragraphs.
According to the proposed hypothesis for human-caused global warming (AGW), the continuing accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere causes or forces increased warming in the atmosphere. The hypothesis requires disregarding the important facts that warming has currently stopped and also that there has been cooling for some periods in our lifetimes and historically, when according to AGW there should have been an increasing rate of warming due to the increasing concentration of CO2. Also, again falsifying the AGW hypothesis, when warming periods have occurred, there is no difference in the rate of warming during those periods despite the fact that CO2 has increased.
Based on a single molecule, one CH4 molecule absorbs more energy and re-emits more energy than one CO2 molecule, and one CO2 molecule absorbs more energy and re-emits more energy than one H2O molecule. But, the concentration (or abundance) of water vapor in air is about 1%, while the concentration of CO2 in air is only about 0.04% (or 400 ppm) and the concentration CH4 in air is only about 0.0018% (or 1.8 ppm). Thus more water vapor molecules in the air absorb more IR energy upgoing from the earth. Also, the IR radiation absorption wavelengths of water vapor overlap most of the IR radiation absorption wavelengths of CO2 and CH4. Since the concentration of water vapor is more than 10 times higher than that of CO2 and 100 times higher than CH4, the IR radiation emitted by the ocean, land and sun is more than 10 times more likely to be absorbed by water vapor molecules than by CO2 molecules and 100 times more likely to be absorbed by water vapor molecules than CH4 molecules. Then, when the water vapor, CO2 and CH4 molecules re-emit their energy upgoing and horizontally, or else collide, once again these emissions or collisions are far more likely to be interactions with a water vapor molecule; these phenomena change with increasing altitude.
With regard to CO2 and CH4, the net result is that exponentially less warming results from each incremental increase in CO2 or CH4 concentration. The natural logarithm function is the inverse of the exponential function. The graphic below illustrates the natural log curve of temperature versus CO2 concentration that results from progressively increasing the CO2 concentration. In climatology terms, climate and temperature sensitivity are progressively diminished as CO2 concentration increases. Each doubling of CO2 concentration results in incrementally less warming, following a logarithmic progression. The available quantum energy bands of CO2 and CH4 are already occupied with energy received from nearby molecules. Adding more absorbing molecules decreases the mean-free-path of the radiation between molecules. Progressively higher levels of CO2 (and methane) produce progressively less warming. The absorbance of radiation is logarithmic.
Furthermore, of the approximate 400 ppm (or 0.04%) total CO2 concentration in earth’s atmosphere, humans from all sources emit only about 3% of that total. About 97% of atmospheric CO2 is natural. About 98.5% of total CO2 is absorbed by nature.
CO2 concentration has been increasing since the end of the Little Ice Age, around the time of the Industrial Revolution, primarily because earth has been slowly warming since that time. The human contribution is minimal. But, since CO2 is not causing significant warming (or even reproducibly measurable warming), and since the earth is in fact becoming greener according to NASA satellite studies, then there is no good reason to reduce CO2, or to reduce use of fossil fuels. Also, since most CO2 is natural, there is no practical way for humans to significantly reduce atmospheric CO2 concentration. Carbon sequestration, carbon offsets, carbon taxes, carbon trading are environmentally useless, harmful, economically wasteful, fraud. On the contrary, there are benefits to higher CO2, such as increasing crop yields. And there are also benefits to warming.
Despite clear evidence that the atmosphere is not significantly warming the planet, and under the laws of physics the atmosphere could not significantly warm the planet, still some politicians and scientists try to alarm citizens to persuade them that increasing CO2 and CH4 concentration forces catastrophically dangerous, large increases in temperature trends by increasing absorption of IR by water vapor. The alarmists’ torturous and unvalidatable hypothesis and models treat water vapor as part of a feedback system rather than as the dominant greenhouse gas. But, if this hypothesis were true, and it is not, since CO2 has been increasing steadily since the end of the Little Ice Age (CO2 increased about 150% from a very low CO2 level), then we should be seeing rapidly rising global temperature due to this feedback forcing effect, and we should be seeing a difference in rate of warming over time (or significant difference in second derivative.) However, the temperature trend has been only slightly increasing, and then only sometimes, and the warming trends are not exceptional or unprecedented in nature, and the overall temperature trend is diverging from the steadily rising CO2 trend.
If CO2 were the cause of warming, then the CO2 and temperature trends would be parallel or converging during the same time periods, and the CO2 increasing trend would occur before the warming trend; however, these correlations are not found in real world evidence unless the time periods are cherry-picked or the data has been manipulated. Even worse for the climate alarmists, there are multiple time periods, decades, where the temperature trend decreased while CO2 trend increased…for example the 1960s to late 1970s when most scientists and news outlets were proclaiming global cooling. CO2 cannot force both warming and cooling.
Climate catastrophe and gloom are entirely based on computer models, models which have never been validated against scientific observations.
Cover of Time magazine, January 31, 1977.
Most CO2 is emitted by the oceans and lands, naturally, by degassing caused by the slow warming trend since the Little Ice Age. Warmer water holds less CO2 than cold water. The relative partition ratio of a gas such as CO2 between water and air is controlled by Henry’s Law. Compared to the atmosphere, the oceans contain enormous energy (as already shown). Oceans contain about 50 times more CO2 than the atmosphere and 20 times more CO2 than the biosphere on land.
It would take 10,000 years for humans to change the temperature of the ocean by a mere 1 degree even if humans devoted all energy resources full time to that effort. The effects of the oceans on the earth’s climate are enormous, but the warming effect of human CO2 is trivially tiny.
The claim that the relatively tiny amount of CO2 contributed to the atmosphere by humans is controlling earth’s temperature is falsified according to the rules of science. We mere humans are not able to change the temperature of earth by adding or subtracting CO2, no matter the amount of CO2. Even if the air were 40% CO2, an amount that is 1000 times higher than today’s total CO2 and 10,000 times higher than the human contributed CO2, the atmosphere can not significantly warm the oceans. Oceans are a gigantic heat sink or reserve, moderating the earth’s temperature and controlling earth’s climate.
This is NOT to say that humans do not affect temperature and climate in other ways, such as building cities, roads, planting or cutting forests and fields, etc. This IS to say that AGW, the hypothesis of human-caused global warming by the contribution of a mere 0.004% of the total CO2 emissions, is scientifically wrong. The human contribution to global warming is statistically insignificant, so tiny it is unmeasurable in the real world; the hypothesis of human-caused global warming/climate change has been falsified by real world observations and experiments.
Bottom line: the global warming / climate change agenda is a giant, global fraud. The where, why, who, and when proponents knew it was a fraud is a subject for another day and a court of law. The global warming/climate change agenda is a global, political scheme to re-distribute wealth, change national economic systems away from capitalism, reduce national and individual sovereignty and reduce citizen control of private property, and hand over funding and control to unelected supra-national alliances and organizations like the UN and the EU.
Figure 12. Sherwood Idso, PhD. http://www.co2science.org and https://thebestschools.org/special/karoly-happer-dialogue-global-warming/happer-major-statement/ Dr. Sherwood Idso with Eldarica pine trees grown in various amounts of CO2 in experiments done about 10 years ago when the ambient concentration of CO2 was 385 ppm. S.B. Idso and B.A. Kimball, “Effects of Atmospheric CO2 Enrichment on Regrowth of Sour Orange Trees (Citrus aurantium; Rutaceae) after Coppicing,” American Journal of Botany, 1994, 81: 843–846.
Figure 13. https://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html Table 4a.
14. Sorokhtin et al. (2007) Sorokhtin, O.G., Chilingar, G. V., Khilyuk, L.F. (2007). Global Warming and GlobalCooling. Evolution of Climate on Earth,Developments in Earth & Environmental Sciences 5, Elsevier, ISBN 978-0-444-52815-5.
As with others, thank you for this effort. I meet thrice annually with a group of businessmen to pursue interesting ideas, politics and our own personal development. Climate Change always provokes heated discussion which labor under too little knowledge and amid great certainty. I wanted to take your article, in printed form, as a means of better understanding the issue. Alas, your numerous slides of graphs and data won’t print. Any other way I can get a printable file? Thanks again.
thank you for this wonderful article. Being a layman it helps me very much to understand the atmosphere a little bit more.
Wondering what is your opinion?
Thanks for those kind words and these references. I will review them.
I thought your post was well done and requested (in the comments section) some feed back from others at Climate, Etc. It did end up generating some feedback.
I really don’t want to start an internet war (I’m just a curious layperson), but would be interested in what you think about some of the comments made about your post above. That said, I totally understand if you don’t wish to do so. People seem to get very defensive, not watch their manners, etc.
Thanks for letting me know Geoff. I wrote this by request of some friends who are laypeople. They liked it, so I posted it here on my blog. Of course many technical details are glossed over and simplified. Dr. Curry’s blog is far more technical, of course. I read it, but I missed that post. I will take a look. Thanks.
I appreciate very much Dr. Curry’s blog and I have followed it for years. I read that entire thread and all the comments.
I do not respond to ad hominem comments such as ‘doom.’ But, for your information, I was trained as a chemist and my entire career (30+ years) was selling, servicing, supporting and managing people who do that in scientific instruments such as gas and liquid chromatographs, mass spectrometers, spectrophotometers, scanning confocal laser fluorescent instruments, etc, worldwide. I have measured the absorption and emission of water, CO2, CH4 etc and many other of their properties using multiple techniques from all the way back to college laboratory classes to putting a gimbled mass spectrometer in a C-130 for NOAA to fly through hurricanes.
Title: The Relationship between Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentration and Global Temperature for the Last 425 Million Years.
I’ve only gotten as far as the 3rd paragraph, but I noticed few errors.
Greenhouse gases also re-emit almost instantly the energy they absorbed, emitting that energy at a slightly lower energy than which it was absorbed.
That is incorrect, in two respects.
1. When a molecule of CO2 absorbs a longwave IR photon, it usually does not re-emit that energy as another photon. On average, it takes about one second before it emits another photon, but (at typical temperatures and 1 Atm pressure), only a few nanoseconds before it gives up the absorbed energy by collisional transfer to another air molecule. That means its several hundred million times more likely to loose the absorbed energy by collision with another air molecule, than by re-emission of a photon.
That’s why the GHG molecules in that atmosphere stay in thermal equilibrium with the rest of the air.
2. When a CO2 molecule in the atmosphere does give up energy by emitting a photon, it is not “slightly lower” than the energy it absorbed. It might be a bit higher, if the molecule happens to be moving in the direction in which the photon is emitted, causing the photon to be blue-shifted. Or it might be a bit lower, if the molecule happens to be moving in the opposite direction, causing the photon to be red-shifted. But energy is conserved, there’s no loss of energy taken out as a toll by a molecular middleman.
Near the equator and bodies of water, swamps and tundra the concentration of water vapor in atmosphere will be near 100%. … Water vapor concentration in air is found in the range of 0% to 100%. Cold air holds very little water vapor. The air at the poles is often very dry. Warm air holds much water vapor.
E.g, at a sweltering 40°C = 104°F, a cubic meter of air at 100% RH holds 51.1 grams of water.
The cubic meter of air, however, weighs about 1.29 kg. 0.051 / 1.29 = 0.0395, i.e., 3.95% by mass.
However, water vapor is only 18/29 = 0.62 the density of dry air, and gaseous concentrations are customarily expressed by volume ratios. 3.95% by mass = 6.4% by volume = 64000 ppmv.
Also, you wrote, “The air at the poles is often very dry.” That’s an understatement. The air at the north pole is always fairly dry, because it is always fairly cold. But the air at the south pole is always EXTREMELY dry, because it is always EXTREMELY cold.
I only got to your point 1. With regard to your number 1, that is what I said. Higher energy/higher frequency IR (or NIR) is emitted at a lower frequency/lower energy or else it was transmitted transparently altogether. The difference between the absorbance and emission energies is dissipated on molecular motions. Lower energy, longer wavelength IR is dissipated entirely in molecular motions or collisions with no radiation.
That is incorrect. The emission and absorption spectra are identical.
Sorry. You are mistaken. I have made these measurements myself. The energy differences between absorption and emission are documented in the literature.
Please remember that this is not a scientific publication for peer review. It is a general understanding for laypeople. Otherwise I would have posted a long bibliography, and a much longer article and different format is expected. For example, an understanding of the differences between relative humidity (a climate or weather term) as compared to concentration was beyond the needs, intent or message of my article. The point of this article is that the atmosphere as a whole is not controlling the climate, regardless the composition of the atmosphere. Therefore CO2 cannot cause global warming.
You still ought to use the correct terms. “Concentration” has a specific meaning. The concentration of N2 is about 78%, by volume. The concentration of O2 is about 21%, by volume. The concentration of Ar is about 1%, by volume. The concentration of CO2 averages about 410 ppmv (0.041%), by volume. The concentration of H2O vapor varies from near zero to about 7%, by volume.
That’s incorrect. Weather and climate “happen” in the atmosphere. The temperatures that so many people are obsessing over are air temperatures. So the atmosphere certainly is a part of the climate system, and CO2 in the atmosphere does cause the surface of the Earth, and the Earth’s lower atmosphere, to be warmer than they would be without it.
Your comment: “The concentration of N2 is about 78%, by volume. The concentration of O2 is about 21%, by volume. The concentration of Ar is about 1%, by volume. The concentration of CO2 averages about 410 ppmv (0.041%), by volume. The concentration of H2O vapor varies from near zero to about 7%, by volume.” is the same as my article. Sorry, the atmosphere as a whole is not controlling the climate, regardless the composition of the atmosphere. CO2 cannot cause global warming. CO2 is only provides temporary insulation in the lower altitudes near sea level. In upper altitudes, CO2 is radiating into space. CO2 adds no energy to the system. CO2 only buffers or delays the energy emitted from the surface into space. The atmosphere is between 30 and 40 C warmer than it would have been without CO2.
I modified the paragraph to include relative humidity. Frankly, I think it makes it more confusing to have both concentration and relative humidity. But, we’ll see what the laypeople say. Here’s the new paragraph: In most locations, the concentration of water vapor (including clouds) in the atmosphere is far higher than CO2 and methane, that is, there are far more water vapor molecules in a given volume of air than there are CO2 or methane. Near the equator and bodies of water, swamps and tundra water vapor in atmosphere will be near 100% relative humidity. That is, the air is saturated, no more water vapor can be added to the air at that temperature and air pressure. Water vapor in air is found in the range of 0% to 100% relative humidity. concentration. Cold air holds very little water vapor. The air at the poles is usually very dry. Warm air holds much water vapor. Air in the tropics is usually humid.
And, by the way, a GHG molecule is rarely (i.e. but for 2 moments per day like correctness of the proverbial clock) “in thermal eqilibrium with the rest of the air.” Like the earth as a whole, net net, the GHG molecule is losing energy at night, or during the day, net net, it is gaining energy. The integral calculus would be interesting to model. Equilibrium is a bulk quantity only. Energy stays in motion.
Thanks for your intelligent comments. If you would like to edit this, upgrade it, or re-write it entirely, please give it your best.
I’d add to it, I’d say: “climate catastrophe and gloom are entirely based on models”. Only a small number of scientists believe that basic model. Only tiny number of scientists ever went over the maths and model in detail. David Evans explains this model in a series of blog posts and criticised it in a paper. He presents an alternative model which explains why the catastrophe model is wrong. Dr Roy Clark gives more fundamental criticisms of the catastrophe model & outlines a better model too.
The big problem (and opportunity) we have convincing warmists is they believe on the basis of authority, not evidence. The authority is wrong but its case is rarely addressed, and never presented in detail.
Note: “in detail” = count those times when you saw this basic model fully explained to you. In my case, the count = 1 (by skeptic Evans). Why are warmists not presenting their basic model more often? Do they have something to hide?
Thanks Mark. Good idea on the climate catastrophe comment. And, yes warmists have a lot to hide.
A very nice explanation of how the air/land/sea temperature of the planet works. Technical concepts explained very well, but with a minimum of mathematics.
This explains very well the “non-problem” of CO2. Further explanation of how the planet has warmed and cooled over the eons would require delving into astronomical and solar cycles. I hope this writer will take all that on in a follow-on piece written as well as this was.
I’ve bookmarked and printed this blog, and will happily pull it out as a Reality Reference for the rational and intelligent people I encounter who only know what they’ve heard from the CAGW crowd.
Thanks Ken. I will keep your suggested additional paper in mind also.
May I introduce to you, Bud and Can, David Dilley, who is working too on astronomical, solar and lunar cycles in regard to climate. His 2012 article is as great as yours here.
Thank you. I will review these. Thanks for reading.
Thanks Ken. Let me know if you have or get any questions. Also, don’t miss the science paper linked at the bottom of my article. It’s recent but even more technical. It challenges the AGW crowd to consider a new paradigm.
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2019-04-22T06:14:22Z
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https://budbromley.blog/2019/01/15/co2-is-not-causing-global-warming/
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2019-04-18T12:59:28Z
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http://wiki.ubuntu-br.org/Setup%20office%5E%2B1%2B888%2B216%2B9077%20phone%20number%20microsoft%20customer%20service%20contact%20microsoft%20windows%20support%20here.?highlight=%28%5CbCategoryDocumentacao%5Cb%29
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Dr Cowan, with Louisiana State University’s Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences started hearing about fish with sores and lesions from fishermen in November 2010.
Cowan’s findings replicate those of others living along vast areas of the Gulf Coast that have been impacted by BP’s oil and dispersants.
Gulf of Mexico fishermen, scientists and seafood processors have told Al Jazeera they are finding disturbing numbers of mutated shrimp, crab and fish that they believe are deformed by chemicals released during BP’s 2010 oil disaster.
Along with collapsing fisheries, signs of malignant impact on the regional ecosystem are ominous: horribly mutated shrimp, fish with oozing sores, underdeveloped blue crabs lacking claws, eyeless crabs and shrimp – and interviewees’ fingers point towards BP’s oil pollution disaster as being the cause.
Read the whole thing. One fisherman says that she’s catching crabs that you open up, and they’re still alive, but they smell like they’re dead.
“I’ve never seen this,” he said, a statement Al Jazeera heard from every scientist, fisherman, and seafood processor we spoke with about the seafood deformities.
Given that the Gulf of Mexico provides more than 40 per cent of all the seafood caught in the continental US, this phenomenon does not bode well for the region, or the country.
I’d trust this account more if a venue other than Al Jazeera was promulgating it!
Al-Jazeera is probably a far more honest news organization than FOX, NBC, ABC, CBS or CNN.
If only Obama had allowed more on-shore and close off-shore drilling, we would not be in this mess. This is all the fault of environmentalists and their socialist anti-colonial Kenyan master.
Do you question the accuracy of any specific parts of the report? On what basis?
I dunno. Are Arab news outlets notoriously anti-oil and pro environment? Why not al jazeera?
It might be selection effect — that heightened awareness due to the accident is leading to fishmen, etc, noting more deformed sea animals. I wonder if the marine biologists have a baseline on this sort of thing for the various areas of the Gulf Coast.
Cindy and Thomas — a slew of sources are quoted by name in the al-Jazeera link — all very American, from what I can tell — plus there’s the separate Outside publication, and you’re apparently shocked/less inclined to trust all this because of the fact that the first report — with all the video, for that matter — is on al-Jazeera. As opposed to what other channel, say? And if the same people repeated the same quotes on this other channel, would you somehow be inclined to trust it more in that case, where you couldn’t before? If you don’t like those questions or don’t like where those answers might take you towards, a look in the mirror awaits. Meantime, mutated fish are being born while you cavil.
BP is still making great profits. I guess that is the only thing that matters in Plutocratic American these days.
And just think, the same woman who was behind BP’s PR after the spill was the same who made the egregious comments about Mrs. Romney spurred your post earlier.
It’s a small, mutated and polluted world.
Why are people questioning that this appeared on Al Jazeera? Isn’t the question why this isn’t on Fox News?
Quelle horreur! Sans parler des pauvres huîtres!
That said, I would love to meet that Grande-Île négociant de fruits de mer. He sounds like a conteur d’esprit.
@ interestedobserver, et al: before you climb off your high horse, you might stop to reflect that I said nothing about whether I belive or disbelieve the sources in this report. I simply expressed surprise at the report being from a news source that I have rarely, if ever, seen Rod or anyone else link to. And it is surprising to me that Al Jazeera actually has a reporter on the Gulf Coast of the USA . I assumed, wrongly as I see, that they report on and from the Middle East. It’s really that simple, and not as nefarious as you might think.
Al Jazeera is actually pretty good. We get their English language service on our satellite dish network, and I watch their news broadcasts from time to time. I am predisposed to dislike them, I guess, but from what I can tell, they do a good job. Very professional. Of course they have their own biases, but so do all the news sources.
Rod’s right–biases aside, Al Jazeera runs a good organization with solid, professional reportage. Still, it’s sad that no American news outlet seems to think the story newsworthy and that the only place you can get it is on a foreign outlet.
I’m not sure that Outside Magazine should be taking the word of Dean Blanchard who is a criminal and in the seafood brokerage world, a cheat.
Think of this story (and it’s absence from your main news sources) next time you see an oil company’s ad about how they’re “re-thinking the energy business” or whatever.
At least half of high-dollar advertising in this country is about purchasing silence. It happens in the NYT. It happens on CNN. It happens wherever you get your news. Car companies do it, insurance companies do it, pharmaceutical companies do it, and banks seem to do it most of all.
A lot of us have been cautiously optimistic about the safety of Gulf seafood. Most of what I’ve heard and read it that’s it’s fine. But, I’m not sure if anyone really knows the full impact of mixing such incredible amounts of dispersants and oil.
BTW, I often find the 30-minute program Al Jazeera World quite interesting.
Turmarion, it’s not that no American news outlet thinks the story is newsworthy, it’s that no corporate media wants to lose the potential BP advertising revenue.
Considering that Al-Jazeera is run by a member of the Qatari royal family and Qatar’s economy is based mostly on oil, the fact that Al-Jazeera is reporting this so forthrightly is surprising. I recall an editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution saying something to the effect that they wouldn’t be able to cover a scandal at AOL/Time Warner as thoroughly as an independent paper would, because of course, AOL/TW owns the AJC. That a Middle Eastern Monarch gives freer reign to journalists than American corporations do is a reality check on the notion that free enterprise necessarily equals more freedom.
But surely the Qatari royal family would benefit from Gulf of Mexico oil reserves being put off limits.
However, as an IT manager at an Internet Service Provider, I can tell you that traffic to AJ, correlated with other patterns, is of continuing interest to certain data mining entities relocating soon to rural Utah. There are just certain things that good Americans should not look at, just as we ought not to surf links to WikiLeaks, as our government has pointed out, especially if you work for or ever want to work for it.
One thing to note, if we don’t “drill here”, there will be drilling in other places. Brazil, West Africa and the Far East will only be further incentivized to open up their deep well operations. Also, Cuba has shown plenty of interest in drilling in the Gulf with Chinese companies, and PEMEX is not likely to remain shy about expanding their operations, either. At least if Americans do it, you have a rather rigorous regulation regime in place.
As far as Al-Jazeera goes, obviously if the GOM is shut down, the Middle East will benefit because it will restrict the supply and drive up the value of their stocks.
But putting aside possible bias, the problem with the story is that it’s based solely on anecdotal evidence. I’ve caught plenty of fish in the Gulf with sores and lesions. They get parasites, or they’ve escaped from the jaws of a predator. We also see mutant shrimp in our bait buckets. Shrimp breed prodigiously, and some of their offspring DNA don’t copy well. Is the rate higher. Yes, these fisherman swear it is, but is that confirmation bias at work or an actual statistical change. Moreover, is it really due to a two-year-old spill, where the chemicals have all long since broken down, or is it related to some other event. In Texas we’ve had a severe drought due to La Nina. This has increased the salinity of the estuaries to very high levels, introduced some red tide and other effects. Is that going on in LA, or something like it?
If this seafood buyer wants someone to blame for the oil spill, he needs to take a good, hard, long look in the mirror, just like the rest of us. BP wouldn’t be out in the gulf if we didn’t have an insatiable thirst for oil. Does Mr. Blanchard think the fishing trawlers that haul in hundreds of tons of seafood everyday run on wind power these days?
BTW, I don’t by any means endorse Blanchard’s anti-British comment. I just thought it was funny for being so outrageous.
“Good Americans”: a red flag.
Fran Macadam, self censorship of that sort is the first step to fascism. That’s why people were so outraged by Ari Fleischer’s “Americans must watch what they say” speech.
At least if Americans do it, you have a rather rigorous regulation regime in place.
Like the kind that prevented this spill from happening?
The Macondo spill was a concatenation of a number of events, and it was in fact contained and dealt with rather quickly. You have far more regular spills and outright dumping taking place overseas. You never hear about them because of their distance from the U.S., and their individual small size, but in the aggregate, they are far, far worse than what we have in the U.S. This is especially so when you factor in how many wells we have operating off our shores.
On top of this, you have to remember that when we rely on offshore oil, it has to come here by tanker. Tankers have an even worse environmental record than drilling rigs. You have to weigh a number of factors into these decisions.
I’ve watched a LOT of it (in Arabic mostly), and Al Jazeera is a fairly reputable news source, once you recognize their biases and quirks (which EVERY news outlet has.) They have a bit of an emphasis on social causes. The average American audience may not be keen on some of those Middle Eastern social causes on their Arabic news channel, but I’d not expect anything different. Their Arabic station also does include some commentary from religious speakers during I guess what you could call editorial segments. The English and Arabic channels are both a little keener to criticize governments in other regions than ones in the Middle East. But that’s shifted since the Arab Spring.
Makes our problems look smaller – and yeah – thank goodness we do have regulatory agencies however imperfect they may be.
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2019-04-18T18:29:16Z
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https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/bp-boils-louisianas-seafood/
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Welcome to Black Mountain! This amazing property is the source of joyous memories for the owners and their extended family and friends for many years. And, they're excited to share it with you! The Farmhouse and Pool House are situated on 92 beautiful acres in the Russian River Valley, with views of serene forests and hills. Though private (there is an onsite caretaker family), Black Mountain is in the ideal location for your Sonoma County getaway. The Russian River is just under a mile away, and there are numerous wineries and vineyards within a short drive.
The Farmhouse was built in 1932 and retains much of its original character. On the main floor, the modernized kitchen with extensive counter space, breakfast table, bar seating and adjacent enclosed sun room with ping-pong table allows you to gather with friends and family while cooking, eating and playing without breaking up the festivities. The kitchen is well stocked for serious food events and well lit with generous windows and built in lighting. The living room with woodstove and TV (DVD player only), a second dining area and a bedroom with queen bed and a full bathroom round out the downstairs area. A wide deck with built in bench and additional seating stretches the length of the Farm House and wraps around the kitchen to end at an outdoor shower. Upstairs you'll enjoy the updated 2 full bathrooms and décor throughout the 4 bedrooms - each one is distinctive with original artwork and pieces collected locally and around the world blended with contemporary touches. Two of the bedrooms open to a balcony overlooking the valley and hills.
The Pool House, just down the driveway from the Farmhouse, was designed and custom built in 1999 by the current owners. Your first stop at the Pool House is the great room with open trestle ceilings, fireplace, built-in window seat, generous seating areas including a lovely wood dining table, and kitchen with ample wood and concrete counter tops. International folk art and on- of-a-kind furniture make this a remarkable space to gather. There are also musical instruments - a piano, guitar and drums - and sheet music and lyrics for the musically talented. With multiple exterior entrances and large outdoor gathering spaces, the vibe is distinctly upscale camping. An extensive covered patio with built in grill and large table connects the great room to the bedrooms and bathrooms. The two spacious bedrooms and half bath (toilet and sink) are up a set of exterior stairs. Exterior doors lead from a small covered outdoor hallway into each bedroom and the half bath. The bedroom facing the hillside has a queen bed and a private patio and the bedroom facing the lawn and pool area has two queen beds. Both have grand windows to allow sunlight and great views! On the ground level, the full bathroom is definitely upscale camping! The entrance is below the front bedroom and faces the pool area, but once inside the shower and toilet have separate rooms and there are benches and hooks for all towels, shoes and clothes while you play at the pool.
Abundant outdoor seating areas, numerous fruit trees, grassy lawns, pool, hot tub and BBQs inspire outdoor living at Black Mountain! The main area of outdoor activity is around the pool and Pool House. There are multiple BBQ options, including a gas grill and a built-in charcoal grill. The covered BBQ patio extends to the pool, which has a safety cover, and along the front side of the Pool House. At the far end of the patio is a 6-person spa.The lawn and stage area to the side of the wisteria covered lounge area are another great place for guests to hang out. Between the apple, pear and plum trees facing the pool is a kid's play structure with swings and a slide. There is truly something for everyone!
Maximum Occupancy and Quiet Hours: The maximum occupancy is 16. Quiet hours are from 10:00 p.m. until 7:00 a.m. Outdoor amplified sound is prohibited at any time.
Driveway and Parking: The driveway is an uphill ½ mile, gravel and single lane. On-site parking is permitted for a maximum of 7 vehicles.RVs, trailers and campers are prohibited.
Bed Sizes: Farmhouse: Main Floor Bedroom(downstairs): Queen Bed. Upstairs Bedrooms: Bedroom 1: Queen Bed, Bedroom 2: Twin Bed and Twin Bunk Bed, Bedroom 3: Queen Bed, Bedroom 4: Queen Bed. Pool House Bedrooms: Bedroom 1: Queen Bed, Bedroom 2: Two Queen Beds.
Caretaker Cottage: The caretaker, Faik, and his family live in the cottage at the top of the driveway, just before and in sight of the pool house. Faik is very respectful of guest privacy. However, he has been instructed to call our office and report any gatherings that exceed the maximum occupancy, or any other guest activity that is in blatant violation of our rules and potentially dangerous or damaging to the property.
Rural Property: Black Mountain is a rural family compound. There is a variety of plants and animals living on and around the 92 acre forested hillside. Guests should be prepared to encounter spiders, ants, wasps, mosquitos, tics, poison oak, lizards, deer, raccoons, mice and more. While the homes and grounds are spacious, well-furnished, clean and comfortable, this is not a luxury property. There is no air conditioning, there are no window screens, and the home systems, such as the septic system and the well system, require conscientious treatment. Unattended trash will be ravaged by animals. Guests need to be prepared and willing to deal with the country environment, which requires a degree of mindfulness to ensure their own well-being and the well-being of the property.
Pool Heating: The pool has the passive solar heat turned on mid-March through mid-November. The amount of sun and the average temperature will affect the temperature of the pool. In Spring and Fall (mid-March to mid-May and mid-October to mid-November), the temperature varies between 60° and 80°. Mid-May to mid-October, the temperature is typically ideal for swimming, between 80° and 85°. During the winter months, the pool is not heated and stays around 50°. Because this system relies on the outside temperature and the amount of sun we get, we cannot guarantee the pool temperature at any time. Please contact our office if you need more information on pool temperatures.
*The nightly rate is reduced when the pool heater is not turned on. Take advantage - Black Mountain is a great place to spend a winter weekend and the hot tub is hot year-round!
Heat Source: The Farmhouse does not have central heat. There are electric space heaters in all bedrooms and living areas, and a wood-burning stove in the living room. The Pool House has zoned radiant-floor heating and a fireplace.
Distance to the Russian River: The river at the Hacienda Bridge is 1 mile away.
Cell Phones: Please be aware that many cell phones will not have service at this location. There is WiFi though!
Stairs: Exterior Stairs - The pool house bedrooms are up a flight of exterior stairs. Four of the Five Farmhouse bedrooms are up an interior flight of stairs. One Farmhouse bedroom and bathroom are ground-level.
During the Peak Season, which runs end of June through August, Black Mountain has a 7 night minimum and rents on a Thursday to Thursday pattern. If you make an online reservaton outside of this rotation day requirement, we may contact you about altering your dates.
We had a great time at the house. The place was perfect for our little reunion.
What a wonderful compound- truly felt like a retreat for our team- and the great hall was perfect for gathering for larger meals and relaxing. The views of the mountains and forest were breathtaking and the farmhouse and poolhouse had plenty of room for our group of 12.
We had a wonderful and relaxing stay.
The farmhouse and pool house are spectacular and comfortable. We had a wonderful and relaxing stay.
The home far exceeded our expectations.
The home far exceeded our expectations. We had a large group and needed a large kitchen and many beds. This place had not only a large kitchen and plenty of beds, but a wonderful location, a beautiful pool, and every amenity that we would need. But probably the best feature was the fact that they were responsive to every question we had had both before and during our stay. Highly recommended.
It's a great easy space to have lots of people.
We had a fun reunion at this property with four families with little kids. The pool house is where we spent all of our time, playing in the pool, in the yard, and making meals. It's a great easy space to have lots of people. It was harder to hangout at night with little kids since the kids were split, sleeping in both the upper house and pool house, and monitors can't reach that far. But other than that, it was a lovely property with lots to do very close by.
Fantastic place with amazing views! Would love to stay here again.
We had a large group of 12, consisting of 2 separate families (all adults), celebrating my recent engagement and my 30th birthday so the two houses were perfect for our group. This was everyones first trip to wine country and overall, we had a GREAT experience and stay at this property and by the end of the trip, everyone was sad to be leaving! Knowing all I know now, we would definitely stay here again! This rental has SO many great amenities and features- the pool house was the perfect place to gather as a group and relax and the pool and hot tub were big hits! Between the two properties, all the essentials were covered. All that said, I do want to call out some caveats for any future renters to just be more clearly aware of. Like mentioned, the drive up to the property is quite a bit more complex and off the beaten path than I realized even after reading all the info. You have to drive up a VERY narrow winding one lane dirt road, through the woods, to the very top of the mountain, and at nights, this is very dark. I would recommend a vehicle with a GPS as cell service goes out as you get closer to the property. Our winery shuttle driver was still able to find it and make it up and down ok which was great! This is also a very rustic property. Truly more cabin like. Make sure to arrive during daylight and give yourself time to get acquainted, how to control the heaters, where everything is, etc. The towels were clean but smelled a little musky so we just washed them (in unit laundry at the farmhouse!) which worked out ok. Lastly, there is NO WIFI or TV signal and little to no cell service while on the property. After restarting the modem and trying numerous attempts it still didn't work. Plan to be mainly off the grid until you get down the hill into town. Net Net- it was a BEAUTIFUL property, with amazing views, and truly a hidden gem in wine country!
Thank you for the review!!! We are looking into why the wifi wouldn't work during your stay... It's not the fastest signal, but it's usually good for email and social media updates!
Our group was fifteen women on a bachelorette trip. The pool house kitchen + living room was perfect as a common area! We even had a private chef for one evening, and the pool house was ideal for socializing and dining as a big group. We didn't feel crowded despite the size of our group, and the number of bathrooms was great. The farm house has a lot of charm, with a nicely updated kitchen. The driveway from the pool house up to the farm house is short, but at a steep incline - not an issue for our group, but for a less mobile person, it would be challenging to move between houses. Cell service was non-existent in the pool house, with a weak signal in the farm house. WiFi was not strong in either house, which was sometimes inconvenient, but other times nice to not have a reason to check phones all of the time.
This "country estate" is just perfect for a quiet get away where you feel like you're the only people for miles! Our group of grown ups had an amazing time venturing out for wine tasting or lunch but mostly just hung out at the pool house where there was abundant space for 16 to enjoy each other's company and eat meals together. Early mornings watching the fog in trees form the hot tub were magical! We're all looking forward to coming back in the summer with the kids to enjoy the pool and playground!
We visited Black Mountain for a weekend retreat and reunion with 14 people. Not only is it located in a beautiful and secluded area but there was plenty of room for everyone and all the amenities we could want. Each couple had their own room and there's also a bedroom with 3 single beds. The pool house was the perfect gathering area and two fully functional kitchens made dinners in the evening a real treat. We would highly recommend the property and property manager. If we're able to plan a future getaway in the Russian River area we will definitely look to stay here again!
Perfect for a big group.
The place was just perfect for a big group. The two houses each have its own unique feel and all our friends loved it. The pool area is great for a group dinner and we took advantage of it all weekend. The hosts were always so quick with any help I needed along the way too. I would definitely rent this again.
This property was very beautiful and clean upon arrival; a welcoming place for a large group. The poolhouse is the perfect communal space for meals, etc. and it definitely felt like a little vacation. The location is very rural and getting there was straight-forward up a steep dirt driveway, but it ended up convenient enough for our needs. I would come back and stay in this lovely home with a group again someday and recommend it to anyone!
We absolutely loved our stay. There were 7 couples and we were all super comfortable for the entire long weekend. The property is beautiful and the decor is stylish. Both kitchens are awesome and the pool house is a great hang out spot for a big group of people. Keep in mind that the pool house is separate from the main house, by about a 3 minute walk. It didn't bother us at all but something to keep in mind. We would love to come back in the summer to enjoy the pool, hot tub and amazing BBQ area. Our group loved cooking, playing games, and just hanging out, and the property definitely made our weekend memorable. Thank you so much!
The property is great and well maintained.
Eight adults and eight children enjoyed the farm house, pool house and pool very much. The property has great amenities and is well maintained. The only real issue was the bees/yellow jackets around the pool. Perhaps some bee traps could have helped! Also, if live sporting events are important to guests, there's no TV service, so that could be an issue. Otherwise, all was great!
We enjoyed our week at Black Mountain...especially the pool!
Awesome rustic getaway for a group!
Black Mountain is a fantastic property. Our group of 16 adults fit perfectly, and had a wonderful Labor Day weekend. We thoroughly enjoyed the pool and left a ton of fun floats for the next guests (you're welcome! ;)), cooked big meals in the pool house kitchen, star-gazed from the pool deck, and enjoyed the nearby redwood hikes and wineries. The location cannot be beat! We decided to keep all of our food and drinks in the pool house kitchen because we spent most of our time down there (rather than at the Farmhouse, which is about 50 yards uphill). It was nice to have an indoor space that was separated from the bedrooms so the the group had a place to hang out after the 10pm quiet time without disturbing anyone. We're a pretty loud group (lots of musicians and constant laughter), so we had to keep our outdoor volume in check once it got late. Despite the large acreage, the houses are close together and the groundskeeper cottage is closer to the pool than we expected, but there's a privacy wall and we didn't see him more than a few times over the weekend. A few things worth noting: - there's no TV or internet in the pool house, and it's pretty much a dead-zone for mobile service due to the metal roof. - there was an issue with ants in some of the bedrooms in both houses, so I made sure to bring that up and I'm sure it will be dealt with swiftly. - while the furnishings are nice and stylish, the property is definitely rustic -- the pictures may look like a villa in napa, but think hiking shoes over stilettos. Was the perfect mix for our adventurous group. All in all, a pretty idyllic weekend. Hope to make it back to Black Mountain someday!
"This place is awesome for a large group!"
We had 15 of us gathering for my wife's 50th birthday celebration and, in planning, found it somewhat difficult to find a place that would accommodate our size group. I stumbled across this place on-line and, after reviewing it and seeing the photos, decided to give it a try. Everyone in our group thought it was amazing. Although it says you are in the country and close to nature, we had no issues with anything animal related. In fact, it's actually quite close to the main road, and easy to get to the wineries. There was a nice hiking trail on the property and plenty of room for everyone to spread out and enjoy. We had both the farmhouse and the pool house occupied, and there were no complaints. The only issues we encountered were when a couple people in our party both fell on the driveway going from the pool area to the farmhouse and skinned some knees. It is dark and uneven. The vacation rental company warned us to bring flashlights but, of course, we didn't, and accidents happen. Also, the oven in the pool house didn't work so we had to go to the farmhouse to prepare our food, hence the slipping on driveway as mentioned. Hopefully they will fix the problems as I addressed them with the caretaker, who was great, by the way. He left us to our business and only appeared when we needed something. I'm not sure we could have had a better time at another property, especially for the price that we paid to stay here. We all agreed this was an AWESOME place and we would definitely stay here again if the party was large enough.
"Incredible experience with minor considerations"
This is a beautiful, seriously beautiful location - the view from the main house (on top of a rather steep curving driveway) is spectacular. The pool house is amazing and the pool was perfect. It's definitely isolated (except for the caretaker's house which is visible from every building on the property) and at the same time, in the heart of things in the area.Pros: massive capacity - with five bedrooms in the main house and two more in the guesthouse, plus couches, areas outside for tents it allows you an exceptional flexibility in terms of sleeping arrangements.TWO kitchens - the entertaining flexibility is also unparalleled - there are two, enormously well appointed kitchens (the pool house is larger and more open, allowing for larger numbers, and the barbecue and in-wall, elevated fireplace were really put to great use.Pool - the pool while not heated (at least not that we detected) absorbed a lot of heat during the day to make it very pleasant in the evening. Kids things - toys for the pool, games in the house, toys in the kids room, two kinds of rope swings and a wooden play structure make this a fantastic place to occupy children of all ages (and the ping pong table saw heavy use for everyone).CONS: Internet - the internet sort of works. They are on a use-plan, which translates into if you are there at the beginning of the month, you have decent internet access, speeds, and data use, but toward the end of the month (when we were there) with 11 connected adults and kids, the connection slowed to virtually nothing. While this was a blessing for some, it was exceptionally painful for others - caveat emptor with the data connection.Temperature - while it does absolutely cool down in the evening (we were there in August), there is no AC in either house. The Farm house has screens on all the windows, so at least you can keep the insects out while cooling off, sort of. They do provide fans in each room though, so that helps a bit.The pool house has no screens, so when you open the windows to cool off, you also get TONS of bugs - flies, bees, (there was clearly a nest near by and we had tons of yellow jackets). Citronella candles and bait traps seemed to mitigate that to some extent.Proximity of the caretaker: While we only had one conversation with the caretaker, and it was very pleasant and he was very nice, it does feel a little like you've got eyes on you while you're there. His house is right next to the pool - and the "privacy wall" doesn't block a view of the pool, the people, or the goings on. The road: it's a VERY narrow road - with almost no turnouts, on the way to the property. This means that if you're in an SUV, someone is going to have to reverse their way back up or down the precarious road if there's a meeting of vehicles. The drop-off on the side of the road is potentially very scary for people who are anxious about that kind of thing, so be prepared for a slow careful drive up the driveway.Disabilities, or movement impaired people will struggle greatly with the entire property. The farmhouse does have one bedroom on the bottom floor, so it's easy to access for anyone who might need assistance walking or uses assistive devices. The driveway from the main house to the pool is also so steep that people with difficulties walking will likely need to be driven down to the pool. The pool house's rooms are both up two flights of stairs. So that might be a consideration for people to think about.Overall - we had a WONDERFUL time and with he exception of Internet and cell service being so slow or non-existent and it being generally very hot until late evening, it was seriously worth every penny our family spent on one of the best weeks we've had.
"Excellent Weekend Getaway for Group of 14"
Thank you so much for the kind words and we're glad you enjoyed Black Mountain! It is a delightful place for larger groups that also want to spread out and have rooms to themselves. I hope you had a chance to check out the hiking trails on the property, hot tub and pool!
"Perfect for our group. Location and Amenities"
The property worked great for out large group with the large hall separate from the sleeping areas allowed for group activities and privacy. We have all been traveling together for years and this was classified as "a do over"
We had a group of 12 at Black Mountain in Forestville over the 4th of July for a week and very much appreciated the beauty of the land and the total privacy we had there, the pool, the tub, the newly renovated pool house with a lovely spacious kitchen, and last not least the couple who live there, both not only super responsive, but welcoming and personable.Everybody loved the comfort and quality of the furnishings; comfy rooms, comfy beds, great towels and sheets, generally things feel classy and put together with thoughtful consideration.THANK YOU !!! Don't think twice! Black Mountain is booking up quickly!
Thank you for sharing your experiences for future guests to read. And it sounds like you had a great time - we're so glad! The on-site caretaker lives in a cabin closest to the driveway at the beginning of the main part of the property. For the most part, they keep to themselves and respect your privacy and we ask guests to do the same for them. In case you need help with anything, give us a call at the office and we'll have the caretaker head over to help!
Black Mountain is really a superb property! We really recommend looking at all the photos and reading through the description and notes since it's not your average vacation home.
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2019-04-23T07:58:35Z
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https://www.riverhomes.com/vacation-rentals/black-mountain
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Colour revolution (sometimes called the coloured revolution) or color revolution is a term that was widely used by worldwide media to describe various related movements that developed in several societies in the former Soviet Union and the Balkans during the early 2000s. The term has also been applied to a number of revolutions elsewhere, including in the Middle East. Some observers[who?] have called the events a revolutionary wave, the origins of which can be traced back to the 1986 People Power Revolution (also known as the "Yellow Revolution") in the Philippines.
Participants in the colour revolutions have mostly used nonviolent resistance, also called civil resistance. Such methods as demonstrations, strikes and interventions have been intended protest against governments seen as corrupt and/or authoritarian, and to advocate democracy; and they have also created strong pressure for change. These movements generally adopted a specific colour or flower as their symbol. The colour revolutions are notable for the important role of foreign sponsorship, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and particularly student activists in organising creative non-violent resistance.
Such movements have had a measure of success, as for example in the former Yugoslavia's Bulldozer Revolution (2000); in Georgia's Rose Revolution (2003); and in Ukraine's Orange Revolution (2004). In most but not all cases, massive street protests followed disputed elections, or requests for fair elections, and led to the resignation or overthrow of leaders considered by their opponents to be authoritarian. Some events have been called "colour revolutions" but are different from the above cases in certain basic characteristics. Examples include Lebanon's Cedar Revolution (2005); and Kuwait's Blue Revolution (2005).
Government figures in Russia, such as Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, have stated that colour revolutions are a new form of warfare. President Putin said that Russia must prevent colour revolutions, "We see what tragic consequences the wave of so-called color revolutions led to. For us this is a lesson and a warning. We should do everything necessary so that nothing similar ever happens in Russia."
Carnation Revolution Portugal 25 April 1974 The revolution is associated with the colour carnation because carnations were worn.
Yellow Revolution Philippines 22 February 1986 25 February 1986 The 1986 People Power Revolution (also called the "EDSA" or the "Yellow" Revolution) in the Philippines was the first successful non-violent uprising in the contemporary period. It was a series of peaceful demonstrations against the government of then-President Ferdinand Marcos, that increased after the 1983 assassination of opposition Senator Benigno S. Aquino Jr. A contested snap election on 7 February 1986 and a call by the powerful local Catholic Church sparked mass demonstrations across Metro Manila from 22–25 February. The Revolution's iconic L-shaped Laban sign is derived from the Filipino term for People Power, "Lakás ng Bayan", whose acronym is "LABAN" ("fight"). The yellow-clad protesters, allied with the Armed Forces, ousted Marcos and installed Benigno's widow Corazón as the country's eleventh President, ushering in the present Fifth Republic.
Velvet Revolution Czechoslovakia 17 November 1989 29 December 1989 in 1989, a peaceful demonstration by students (mostly from Charles University) was attacked by the police – and in time contributed to the collapse of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia.
Bulldozer Revolution Yugoslavia 5 October 2000 The 'Bulldozer Revolution' in 2000, which led to the overthrow of Slobodan Milošević. These demonstrations are usually considered to be the first example of the peaceful revolutions which followed. However, the Serbians adopted an approach that had already been used in parliamentary elections in Bulgaria (1997), Slovakia (1998) and Croatia (2000), characterised by civic mobilisation through get-out-the-vote campaigns and unification of the political opposition. The nationwide protesters did not adopt a colour or a specific symbol; however, the slogan "Gotov je" (Serbian Cyrillic: Готов је, English: He is finished) did become an aftermath symbol celebrating the completion of the task. Despite the commonalities, many others refer to Georgia as the most definite beginning of the series of "colour revolutions". The demonstrations were supported by the youth movement Otpor!, some of whose members were involved in the later revolutions in other countries.
Rose Revolution Georgia 3 November 2003 23 November 2003 The Rose Revolution in Georgia, following the disputed 2003 election, led to the overthrow of Eduard Shevardnadze and replacing him with Mikhail Saakashvili after new elections were held in March 2004. The Rose Revolution was supported by the Kmara civic resistance movement.
Orange Revolution Ukraine 22 November 2004 23 January 2005 The Orange Revolution in Ukraine followed the disputed second round of the Ukrainian presidential election, 2004, leading to the annulment of the result and the repeat of the round – Leader of the Opposition Viktor Yushchenko was declared President, defeating Viktor Yanukovych. The Orange Revolution was supported by PORA.
Purple Revolution Iraq January 2005 Purple Revolution was a name first used by some hopeful commentators and later picked up by United States President George W. Bush to describe the coming of democracy to Iraq following the 2005 Iraqi legislative election and was intentionally used to draw the parallel with the Orange and Rose revolutions. However, the name "purple revolution" has not achieved widespread use in Iraq, the United States or elsewhere. The name comes from the colour that voters' index fingers were stained to prevent fraudulent multiple voting.
Tulip Revolution Kyrgyzstan 27 February 2005 11 April 2005 The Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan (also sometimes called the "Pink Revolution") was more violent than its predecessors and followed the disputed Kyrgyz parliamentary election, 2005. At the same time, it was more fragmented than previous "colour" revolutions. The protesters in different areas adopted the colours pink and yellow for their protests. This revolution was supported by youth resistance movement KelKel.
Cedar Revolution Lebanon 14 February 2005 27 April 2005 The Cedar Revolution in Lebanon between February and April 2005 followed not a disputed election, but rather the assassination of opposition leader Rafik Hariri in 2005. Also, instead of the annulment of an election, the people demanded an end to the Syrian occupation of Lebanon. Nonetheless, some of its elements and some of the methods used in the protests have been similar enough that it is often considered and treated by the press and commentators as one of the series of "colour revolutions". The Cedar of Lebanon is the symbol of the country, and the revolution was named after it. The peaceful demonstrators used the colours white and red, which are found in the Lebanese flag. The protests led to the pullout of Syrian troops in April 2005, ending their nearly 30-year presence there, although Syria retains some influence in Lebanon.
Blue Revolution Kuwait March 2005 Blue Revolution was a term used by some Kuwaitis to refer to demonstrations in Kuwait in support of women's suffrage beginning in March 2005; it was named after the colour of the signs the protesters used. In May of that year the Kuwaiti government acceded to their demands, granting women the right to vote beginning in the 2007 parliamentary elections. Since there was no call for regime change, the so-called "blue revolution" cannot be categorised as a true colour revolution.
Jeans Revolution Belarus 19 March 2006 25 March 2006 In Belarus, there have been a number of protests against President Alexander Lukashenko, with participation from student group Zubr. One round of protests culminated on 25 March 2005; it was a self-declared attempt to emulate the Kyrgyzstan revolution, and involved over a thousand citizens. However, police severely suppressed it, arresting over 30 people and imprisoning opposition leader Mikhail Marinich.
A second, much larger, round of protests began almost a year later, on 19 March 2006, soon after the presidential election. Official results had Lukashenko winning with 83% of the vote; protesters claimed the results were achieved through fraud and voter intimidation, a charge echoed by many foreign governments. Protesters camped out in October Square in Minsk over the next week, calling variously for the resignation of Lukashenko, the installation of rival candidate Alaksandar Milinkievič, and new, fair elections.
The opposition originally used as a symbol the white-red-white former flag of Belarus; the movement has had significant connections with that in neighbouring Ukraine, and during the Orange Revolution some white-red-white flags were seen being waved in Kiev. During the 2006 protests some called it the "Jeans Revolution" or "Denim Revolution", blue jeans being considered a symbol for freedom. Some protesters cut up jeans into ribbons and hung them in public places. It is claimed that Zubr was responsible for coining the phrase.
Lukashenko has said in the past: "In our country, there will be no pink or orange, or even banana revolution." More recently he's said "They [the West] think that Belarus is ready for some 'orange' or, what is a rather frightening option, 'blue' or 'cornflower blue' revolution. Such 'blue' revolutions are the last thing we need". On 19 April 2005, he further commented: "All these coloured revolutions are pure and simple banditry."
Saffron Revolution Myanmar 15 August 2007 26 September 2007 In Burma (officially called Myanmar), a series of anti-government protests were referred to in the press as the Saffron Revolution after Buddhist monks (Theravada Buddhist monks normally wear the colour saffron) took the vanguard of the protests. A previous, student-led revolution, the 8888 Uprising on 8 August 1988, had similarities to the colour revolutions, but was violently repressed.
Grape Revolution Moldova 6 April 2009 12 April 2009 The opposition is reported to have hoped for and urged some kind of Orange revolution, similar to that in Ukraine, in the follow-up of the Moldovan parliamentary elections, 2005, while the Christian Democratic People's Party adopted orange for its colour in a clear reference to the events of Ukraine.
A name hypothesised for such an event was "Grape Revolution" because of the abundance of vineyards in the country; however, such a revolution failed to materialise after the governmental victory in the elections. Many reasons have been given for this, including a fractured opposition and the fact that the government had already co-opted many of the political positions that might have united the opposition (such as a perceived pro-European and anti-Russian stance). Also the elections themselves were declared fairer in the OSCE election monitoring reports than had been the case in other countries where similar revolutions occurred, even though the CIS monitoring mission strongly condemned them.
There was civil unrest all over Moldova following the 2009 Parliamentary election due to the opposition claiming that the communists had fixed the election. Eventually, the Alliance for European Integration created a governing coalition that pushed the Communist party into opposition.
Green Revolution Iran 13 June 2009 11 February 2010 Green Revolution is a term widely used to describe the 2009–2010 Iranian election protests. The protests began in 2009, several years after the main wave of colour revolutions, although like them it began due to a disputed election, the 2009 Iranian presidential election. Protesters adopted the colour green as their symbol because it had been the campaign colour of presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, whom many protesters thought had won the elections. However Mousavi failed to show any credible evidence that he had won the election.
Jasmine Revolution Tunisia 18 December 2010 14 January 2011 Jasmine Revolution was a widely used term for the Tunisian Revolution. The Jasmine Revolution led to the exit of President Ben Ali from office and the beginning of the Arab Spring.
Lotus Revolution Egypt 25 January 2011 11 February 2011 Lotus Revolution was a term used by various western news sources to describe the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 that forced President Mubarak to step down in 2011 as part of the Arab Spring, which followed the Jasmine Revolution of Tunisia. Lotus is known as the flower representing resurrection, life and the sun of ancient Egypt. It is uncertain who gave the name, while columnist of Arabic press, Asharq Alawsat, and prominent Egyptian opposition leader Saad Eddin Ibrahim claimed to name it the Lotus Revolution. Lotus Revolution later became common on western news source such as CNN. Other names, such as White Revolution and Nile Revolution, are used but are minor terms compare to Lotus Revolution. The term Lotus Revolution is rarely, if ever, used in the Arab world..
Jasmine Revolution China 20 February 2011 20 March 2011 A call which first appeared on 17 February 2011 on the Chinese language site Boxun.com in the United States for a "Jasmine revolution" in the People's Republic of China and repeated on social networking sites in China resulted in blocking of internet searches for "jasmine" and a heavy police presence at designated sites for protest such as the McDonald's in central Beijing, one of the 13 designated protest sites, on 20 February 2011. A crowd did gather there, but their motivations were ambiguous as a crowd tends to draw a crowd in that area. Boxun experienced a denial of service attack during this period and was inaccessible.
Many have cited the influence of the series of revolutions which occurred in Central and Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s, particularly the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia in 1989. A peaceful demonstration by students (mostly from Charles University) was attacked by the police – and in time contributed to the collapse of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. Yet the roots of the pacifist floral imagery may go even further back to the non-violent Carnation Revolution of Portugal in the mid-1970s, which is associated with the colour carnation because carnations were worn, and the 1986 Yellow Revolution in the Philippines where demonstrators offered peace flowers to military personnel manning armoured tanks.
The first of these was Otpor! ("Resistance!") in Serbia, which was founded at Belgrade University in October 1998 and began protesting against Miloševic' during the Kosovo War. Most of them were already veterans of anti-Milošević demonstrations such as the 1996-97 protests and the 9 March 1991 protest. Many of its members were arrested or beaten by the police. Despite this, during the presidential campaign in September 2000, Otpor launched its "Gotov je" (He's finished) campaign that galvanised Serbian discontent with Miloševic' and resulted in his defeat.
Members of Otpor have inspired and trained members of related student movements including Kmara in Georgia, Pora in Ukraine, Zubr in Belarus and MJAFT! in Albania. These groups have been explicit and scrupulous in their practice of non-violent resistance as advocated and explained in Gene Sharp's writings. The massive protests that they have organised, which were essential to the successes in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine, have been notable for their colourfulness and use of ridiculing humor in opposing authoritarian leaders.
According to Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Russian military leaders view the color revolutions as a "new US and European approach to warfare that focuses on creating destabilizing revolutions in other states as a means of serving their security interests at low cost and with minimal casualties."
Aram Karapetyan, leader of the New Times political party in Armenia, has declared his intention to start a "revolution from below" in April 2005, saying that the situation was different now that people had seen the developments in the CIS. He added that the Armenian revolution will be peaceful but not have a colour.
A number of movements were created in Azerbaijan in mid-2005, inspired by the examples of both Georgia and Ukraine. A youth group, calling itself Yox! (which means No!), declared its opposition to governmental corruption. The leader of Yox! said that unlike Pora or Kmara, he wants to change not just the leadership, but the entire system of governance in Azerbaijan. The Yox movement chose green as its colour.
The spearhead of Azerbaijan's attempted colour revolution was Yeni Fekir ("New Idea"), a youth group closely aligned with the Azadlig (Freedom) Bloc of opposition political parties. Along with groups such as Magam ("It's Time") and Dalga ("Wave"), Yeni Fekir deliberately adopted many of the tactics of the Georgian and Ukrainian colour revolution groups, even borrowing the colour orange from the Ukrainian revolution.
In November 2005 protesters took to the streets, waving orange flags and banners, to protest what they considered government fraud in recent parliamentary elections. The Azerbaijani colour revolution finally fizzled out with the police riot on 26 November, during which dozens of protesters were injured and perhaps hundreds teargassed and sprayed with water cannons.
In Belarus, there have been a number of protests against President Alexander Lukashenko, with participation from student group Zubr. One round of protests culminated on 25 March 2005; it was a self-declared attempt to emulate the Kyrgyzstan revolution, and involved over a thousand citizens. However, police severely suppressed it, arresting over 30 people and imprisoning opposition leader Mikhail Marinich.
In Burma (officially called Myanmar), a series of anti-government protests were referred to in the press as the Saffron Revolution after Buddhist monks (Theravada Buddhist monks normally wear the colour saffron) took the vanguard of the protests. A previous, student-led revolution, the 8888 Uprising on 8 August 1988, had similarities to the colour revolutions, but was violently repressed.
A call which first appeared on 17 February 2011 on the Chinese language site Boxun.com in the United States for a "Jasmine revolution" in the People's Republic of China and repeated on social networking sites in China resulted in blocking of internet searches for "jasmine" and a heavy police presence at designated sites for protest such as the McDonald's in central Beijing, one of the 13 designated protest sites, on 20 February 2011. A crowd did gather there, but their motivations were ambiguous as a crowd tends to draw a crowd in that area. Boxun experienced a denial of service attack during this period and was inaccessible.
The opposition is reported to have hoped for and urged some kind of Orange revolution, similar to that in Ukraine, in the follow-up of the Moldovan parliamentary elections, 2005, while the Christian Democratic People's Party adopted orange for its colour in a clear reference to the events of Ukraine.
On 25 March 2005, activists wearing yellow scarves held protests in the capital city of Ulan Bator, disputing the results of the 2004 Mongolian parliamentary elections and calling for fresh elections. One of the chants heard in that protest was "Let's congratulate our Kyrgyz brothers for their revolutionary spirit. Let's free Mongolia of corruption."
An uprising commenced in Ulan Bator on 1 July 2008, with a peaceful meeting in protest of the election of 29 June. The results of these elections were (it was claimed by opposition political parties) corrupted by the Mongolian People's Party (MPRP). Approximately 30,000 people took part in the meeting. Afterwards, some of the protesters left the central square and moved to the HQ of the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party - which they attacked and then burned down. A police station was also attacked. By the night rioters vandalised and then set fire to the Cultural Palace (which contained a theatre, museum and National art gallery). Cars torching, bank robberies and looting were reported. The organisations in the burning buildings were vandalised and looted. Police used tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannon against stone-throwing protesters. A 4-day state of emergency was installed, the capital has been placed under a 2200 to 0800 curfew, and alcohol sales banned, rioting not resumed. 5 people were shot dead by the police, dozens of teenagers were wounded from the police firearms and disabled and 800 people, including the leaders of the civil movements J. Batzandan, O. Magnai and B. Jargalsakhan, were arrested. International observers said 1 July general election was free and fair.
In 2007 the Lawyers' Movement started in Pakistan with the aim of restoration of deposed judges. However, within a month the movement took a turn and started working towards the goal of removing Pervez Musharraf from power.
The liberal opposition in Russia is represented by several parties and movements.
An active part of the opposition is the Oborona youth movement. Oborona claims that its aim is to provide free and honest elections and to establish in Russia a system with democratic political competition. This movement under leadership of Oleg Kozlovsky is one of the most active and radical ones and is represented in a number of Russian cities. The movement contributed with its activities recently during the elections of 8 September 2013 to the success of Navalny in Moscow and other opposition candidates in various regions and towns of Russia. The "oboronkis" also took part with other oppositional groups in protests against fraud in the Moscow mayoral elections.
Since 2012 protests it was Aleksei Navalny, who mobilized with support of the various and fractured oppositional parties and groups masses of young people against alleged repression and fraud of the Kremlin apparatus. After a strong campaign for the 8 September elections in Moscow and many regions the opposition had won remarkable successes. So Navalny reached in Moscow a second place with surprising 27% behind Kremlin-backed Sergei Sobyanin with 51%. In other regions oppositions candidates received ramrkable successes. So in the big industrial town Yekaterinburg In 2013 opposition candidate Yevgeny Roizman received the majority of votes and became the mayor of that town. The slow but gradual sequence of opposition successes reached by mass protests, election campaigns and other peaceful strategies has been recently called by observers and analysts as of Radio Free Europe "Tortoise Revolution" in contrast to the radical "rose" or "orange" ones the Kremlin tried to prevent.
The opposition in the Republic of Bashkortostan has held protests demanding that the federal authorities intervene to dismiss Murtaza Rakhimov from his position as president of the republic, accusing him of leading an "arbitrary, corrupt, and violent" regime. Airat Dilmukhametov, one of the opposition leaders, and leader of the Bashkir National Front, has said that the opposition movement has been inspired from the mass protests of Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. Another opposition leader, Marat Khaiyirulin, has said that if an Orange Revolution were to happen in Russia, it would begin in Bashkortostan.
In Uzbekistan, there has been longstanding opposition to President Islam Karimov, from liberals and Islamists. Following protests in 2005, security forces in Uzbekistan carried out the Andijan massacre that successfully halted country-wide demonstrations. These protests otherwise could have turned into colour revolution, according to many analysts.
The revolution in neighbouring Kyrgyzstan began in the largely ethnic Uzbek south, and received early support in the city of Osh. Nigora Hidoyatova, leader of the Free Peasants opposition party, has referred to the idea of a peasant revolt or 'Cotton Revolution'. She also said that her party is collaborating with the youth organisation Shiddat, and that she hopes it can evolve to an organisation similar to Kmara or Pora. Other nascent youth organisations in and for Uzbekistan include Bolga and the freeuzbek group.
Uzbekistan has also had an active Islamist movement, led by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, most notable for the 1999 Tashkent bombings, though the group was largely destroyed following the 2001 NATO invasion of Afghanistan.
When groups of young people protested the closure of Venezuela's RCTV television station in June 2007, president Hugo Chávez said that he believed the protests were organised by the West in an attempt to promote a "soft coup" like the revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia. Similarly, Chinese authorities claimed repeatedly in the state-run media that the 2014 Hong Kong protests, known as the Umbrella Revolution, was organised and controlled by the United States.
In July 2007, Iranian state television released footage of two Iranian-American prisoners, both of whom work for western NGOs, as part of a documentary called "In the Name of Democracy." The documentary purportedly discusses the colour revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia and accuses the United States of attempting to foment a similar ouster in Iran.
the imagery of a colour revolution has been adopted by various non-revolutionary electoral campaigns. The 'Purple Revolution' social media campaign of Naheed Nenshi catapulted his platform from 8% to become Calgary's 36th Mayor. The platform advocated city sustainability and to inspire the high voter turn out of 56%, particularly among young voters.
In 2015 a the NDP of Alberta earned a majority mandate and ended the 44-year-old dynasty of the Progressive Conservatives. During the campaign Rachel Notley's popularity gained momentum, and the news and NDP supporters referred to this phenomenon as the "Orange Crush" per the party's colour. NDP parodies of Orange flavored Crush soda logo became a popular meme on social media.
↑ Akbar E. Torbat,The Arab Uprisings and Iran’s Green Movement, 19 October 2011.
Kurt Schock: Unarmed Insurrections: People Power Movements in Nondemocracies. University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
Joshua A. Tucker: Enough! Electoral Fraud, Collective Action Problems, and Post-Communist coloured Revolutions. 2007. Perspectives on Politics, 5(3): 537–553.
Akbar E. Torbat,The Arab Uprisings and Iran’s Green Movement, 19 October 2011.
Central Asian Backlash Against US Franchised Revolutions Written by K. Gajendra Singh, India's former ambassador to Turkey and Azerbaijan from 1992–1996.
"Sowing seeds of democracy in post-soviet granite" – the future of democracy in post-Soviet states Written by Lauren Brodsky, a PhD candidate at the Fletcher School in Medford, Mass., focusing on US public diplomacy and the regions of Southwest and Central Asia.
United 4 Belarus Campaign British campaign website drawing attention to the political situation in Belarus ahead of 2006 presidential elections.
This page was last modified on 17 April 2016, at 16:44.
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2019-04-20T22:30:30Z
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https://infogalactic.com/info/Colour_revolution
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The Lower Rio Grande Valley is famous for its spring migration: during the peak times of mid-April to mid-May ... Fall birding isn't quite as predictable but it can still be exciting!
Amazing to us living in North America, a large continent, is the extensive information the small island of Great Britain has about its birds. We use rough estimates, but in Britain they have much more detailed information, and so the population of each bird species is known.
Does a wall keep migrants and smugglers out of the US, or does it keep farmers and nature tourists inside the wall and away from legitimately accessing lands along the Rio Grande? Everyone has an opinion. If you want to stir up an argument, just ask anyone for opinions on the border wall.
Birders visit the Valley from mid-October to mid-May. They seem to avoid summer months. My theory is that they prefer to bird in the cold northern latitudes when the big thaw is in place while it is fun to be in the woods and on the water without snow and ice. Some folks do visit the Valley to bird the summer months, but only a few smart people.
Migration - Still Great In May!
Because May is such a prime migration month in northern states, most folks think that "the show is over" in the Valley by the end of April. Not so! In fact, if you check John Arvin's excellent Birds of the South Texas Brushlands, you'll see that the peak times for most of the warblers is mid-April through mid-May, and the flycatchers come through primarily during the entire month of May!
I was going about the yard routine with our chickens, goose, and vegetable garden on a warm spring morning, when I felt as if I was being watched, causing me to look up. There, about ten yards from me was a pair of Black-bellied Whistling-ducks.
Some birds have a great affinity for water. They forage for aquatic life, they wade in it, and they live around it. A friend, Neil Gunnar Berg, recently took some great photos of water birds, and wrote about his experience in his blog "1410 Oakwood". With his permission we share his work here.
The Lower Rio Grande Valley boasts many specialty birds, and we are blessed with many birders who come from all over the world to see our special birds! But among the larger group of "general" birders, there are those who will make a special effort to come all the way down to see a "mega-rarity" - an avian visitor from Mexico that they desire to add to their North American (aka "ABA") list!
Not a bird, but a wild cat, larger than a house cat, but generally smaller than a Bobcat. Ocelots have long tails and rounded (Mickey Mouse) ears. They play a valuable role in our South Texas wild lands.
What rare birds are around? Where can we find them? Generally that is the first question we hear from birders visiting the Valley. After that subject has been exhausted the next subject is "Any good restaurants in the area?"
November is a big month in the Valley for birders because it offers really great birding, and that is why the 22 year old Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival is held in early November annually.
It started at 9 am yesterday. Charlie, my daughter's pseudonym, photographed a kettle of hawks moving south east over Alamo. We counted 200 hawks in that kettle.
The Lower Rio Grande Valley (LRGV) isn't just a hotbed of unique birds for the United States, but for butterflies (and other critters) as well! Just as birders flock to the Valley in hopes of seeing lifers and rarities, the same holds true for butterfly watchers who come in search of Mexican butterflies that reach the northern limits of their range here in south Texas, but also in hopes of that rare stray that may wander across the border!
Some folks work in the fields, on roofs, in construction and garden in the summer here in the Valley. Other folks drive or fly in to bird watch. I respect everyone who has to work outdoors in the sun in three digit heat because they have to do that to earn a living. Birders do it for fun.
There's great birding in the Lower Rio Grande Valley any time of year, but there's no denying that "summer vacation time" is slow, primarily due to the oppressive heat and humidity!
The lure of birding the Lower Rio Grande Valley is strong. It amazes us, but really should not, that birders from so many countries hear about the Valley and make their way here, binoculars and cameras in hand.
After a great start to the tour, birding very full days, we were up early next morning, following back roads from Refugio to Rockport, stopping at wetlands to see Mottled Duck, Black-necked Stilt and Teal. We stopped on a busy road where the group wandered along peering through binoculars and scopes, bird watching.
It may have occurred before today, but if it did, I don't know about it ... a birding tour of South Texas by a tour group from Germany. We have the privilege of hosting this tour for a remarkable group of birders who all speak German.
How would I describe a typical bird-guiding day in the Lower Rio Grande Valley? Fabulous! Client birders ... everyone is different, and everyone has a unique list of target birds, whether it's their first time to the Valley and everything is new, or it's a seasoned hard-core birder who hops a plane to see that one bird that will put them over 700 species for North America ABA list area!
Texas leads the United States and Canada in birding. Our state has some 640 species on record. That count is governed by the Texas Bird Records Committee, a group of experts who are very careful before recognizing a new species to add to the state list.
No doubt many Valley residents already have heard of the top Valley birding hot spots, twenty to thirty of them. At the head of the list is Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge, with 2,088 acres, just south of Alamo, along several miles of the winding Rio Grande encircling two sides of the refuge. It was the first National Wildlife Refuge in the Valley, having been purchased in 1943.
Mary Beth Stowe works for Alamo Inn B&B, Gear & Tours as a birding guide. She gets out birding regularly, and last weekend she and a birder friend visited these special areas at Delta Lake, Hargill, and Brushline Road.
The 22nd annual birding festival (2015) will be held in Harlingen, at the Harlingen Municipal Complex at Fair Park, with events from Thursday, November 5 through Sunday, November 8.
My own favorite time is November and December. For one thing it is cool and I feel the call to go hiking. Better than that, the fall migrants are moving through, and winter birds are showing up for their stay in the Valley.
The Valley has great native trees, which I call money trees, that attract 540 species of wonderful wild birds which in turn attract Birders from across the U.S. and around the world.
So where can we find money trees and the fantastic Valley birds they attract? Almost anywhere in the Valley, including in our yards. In addition, the Valley has a network of great birding destinations, woodland parks, sanctuaries, and refuges, that include wetlands and grasslands, and are set up for the comfort of birds. They also attract birders. We call these great places "birding hot spots".
If I had a money tree, unfurling green dollars on each branch, would I nurture it, and help it grow to produce more and more green dollars? You bet I would. Most folks would be thrilled to have a green money tree growing in their yard.
Imagine digging clay out of the sticky Valley earth and fashioning it into large bricks, laying these in the sun to dry, and then building your dream home with them. Certainly the cost of materials would be low, but what would it look like, and would it last? Could clay mud like this withstand Valley wind, rain, and drought?
Creeping up behind a reclining bright green spring mesquite, I raised binoculars and stared into the brown, scaly face of Big Mama, a huge alligator, reclined at the edge of the pond.
The Valley Spotlight gratefully acknowledges the support that Keith Hackland has shown through advertising and as a contributing writer since our beginnings in 2014. Thank You Keith!
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2019-04-25T18:45:56Z
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https://www.rgvaff.com/BIRD/index.html
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In this post I demonstrate how easy it is to learn jazz guitar improvisation.
The main reason a lot of people struggle with improvisation on guitar is not that they lack the ability to do it, but that they haven’t really nutted out their method for learning it and process for practicing it. There is nothing mystical about the ability to improvise – it is a musical skill that anyone serious about music can learn, and should learn, due to the new possibilities that it can open up for you on your instrument.
It’s great fun to do!
Rather than get too technical into the nuts and bolts of the theoretical concepts about what to do harmonically over the chord changes and so on, this lesson takes a simple minor pentatonic pattern and improvise with using some standard jazz chord changes.
Handy PDF Download: Get access to a print friendly pdf version of the exercises in this article as well as a backing track to use for your practice session.
Learning to improvise has similarities with learning a spoken language. It is a process of learning vocabulary – however in a musical context the ‘words’ are actually musical phrases, patterns and ideas.
That’s right, you need to actually learn the phrase, patterns and ideas. Improvisation is usually not an act of complete spontaneity, of ‘making stuff up on the spot’. Imagine doing that in a spoken language context – people would think you were having some kind of esoteric spiritual experience at best, or at least will not be able to understand you at all. This is why to me I think of improvisation more like ‘speaking’ then creating. Obviously there is creativity at play however it is primarily a musical way of communicating with your listener and interacting with other musicians.
My 2 year old son is in the process of learning words. Every day he surprises my wife and I with a new one. However when he becomes an adult he’ll be able to spontaneously put the words together for the purpose of conversing. The process of learning an improvised music form is very similar to this.
Implement the vocabulary, and just stick to one idea or lick at a time in your practice session.
Then, start to combine the patterns/ideas/licks you have learned. At this point, your solos will naturally begin to sound much more original.
The lesson video features the following 7 steps to creatively using the minor pentatonic pattern in a jazz guitar improvisation context. Fast forward the video to the time code (in green) to get to the spot in the lesson that demonstrates each step below.
Step 1 involves memorising the above minor pentatonic pattern, and then just messing around a bit with as you play the scale up and down a little bit over the backing track. You don’t need to play the full scale, just take a few notes here and there and improvise with them using different rhythms and patterns.
A lot of horn players include fourths intervals in their melodic solos, and this is a very convenient interval to play on guitar as the tuning of most of the guitar strings is in fourths. This means to get that jazzy horn sound on guitar you simply need to move one string across as you stay on the same fret.
An easy way to play this pattern is to think ‘Left-Up-Right-Up’: as you play the scale cross ‘up’ to a higher string on the left side of the hand, and then ‘up’ for the right side of the hand. Play the backing track again and use only this idea as you improvise until you feel it really under your fingers.
This pattern is an interesting twist on the previous fourths idea in step 2. This time, follow each of the scale notes with a note a fourth below as you ascend the scale. In this case you play ‘down’ a string on the left side of your hand, and then ‘down’ a string with the right side.
Once again, play along with the backing track but just use this ‘Left-Down-Right-Down’ pattern before you move to the next step.
Yet another variation on fourths patterns on the scale. Now think as if going ‘up’ 2 notes on the left side of the hand, and then ‘down’ 2 strings on the right side of the hand, hence the name of this ‘Left-Up-Right-Down’ pattern.
Once you have mastered this idea over the backing track, combine all the ideas covered from Step 1 to 4. You should find that your solo is sounding a bit ‘richer’ at this point with more variety.
Half-step approach notes are notes one fret below a scale note, and are one of the iconic ideas used in jazz. Before you hit each note of the scale simply play a note one fret below each scale note.
Approach notes are key trick to helping your solos sound more jazzy. If you solo only with approach notes your solo may sound a little bit strange, but it is still important to initially limit yourself to just using this one idea as you practice over the backing track. Once you incorporate the other ideas you can use them more sparingly and it will give a great sound to your solos.
Just as with the previous ideas, practice soloing exclusively using half-step approach notes for a while over the backing track and then start to combine a solo using the ideas in the previous steps.
The final idea used in this jazz guitar improvisation post is half-step enclosures, a melodic idea used frequently by the great jazz guitarist Joe Pass. Enclosures are notes that surround a scale note. If you play one fret above a scale note, then one fret below, and finally playing the scale note, you have a half-step enclosure. The above exercise places enclosures on each step of the scale.
I find that half-step enclosures are quite a ‘spicy’ solo ingredient, so in a real solo you would only use these occasionally. However, just as with the previous steps, experiment on the backing track exclusively using enclosures without other ideas initially. Doing so will train your ear to their sound so you have more intuition when to include them in your soloing.
So you have all your ingredients now, now it’s time to combine them into a tasty solo! Deliberately try to incorporate all the above ideas as you practice with the backing track. Pick perhaps just 2 of the ideas at a time, and then finally combine them all as you improvise.
The magic starts to happen once you have really internalised the vocabulary, and aren’t so much consciously thinking about using a piece of vocabulary in a solo. Just like when you get fluent in a spoken language, you don’t need to think of every single word that you say, you are just spontaneously communicating with someone. This feeling in your solos will come with time as you become more acquainted with the jazz vocabulary.
I would like to give a shout out to Matt Warnock at mattwarnockguitar.com who I credit for the ideas I go through on the video. He’s a great teacher and has a ton of resources about jazz guitar improvisation on his site.
I hope that this beginner’s guide on jazz guitar improvisation has helped you learn this crucial musical skill that is overlooked by many guitarists. Having started out as a classical player and now dabbling in other styles like jazz, my eyes have really opened to the amazing possibilities that improvisation can bring. Improvisation is a great way to express yourself in your music and is a great way to develop aural skills too. I am excited to share more of my explorations in jazz guitar playing in the future on this blog.
Thanks very much for reading and I hope you had some good takeaways out of this lesson. I would really appreciate your feedback, so do let me know what you think about this post by leaving a comment below. If you enjoyed this post and would like to be notified when my next posts are coming out, make sure to subscribe to the blog by entering your details below if you haven’t already. I wish you the best in your improvisation journey!
This is exactly what I needed as I am in the area of learning this scale. My teacher taught it to me yesterday, now I have things to practice with as I move forward. Thank-you for the easy to understand method of putting your lessons together.
That’s great Chuck – When I was shown this approach I was really drawn to it as it is a very natural way of learning jazz vocabulary. It’s also a very good way to memorise scale shapes like this.
Thanks for this, Greg. This is most helpful. Ir’s simple to understand and is practical, and it didn’t load me with fancy jazz terminology. Many other teachers impress with convoluted theory and terms I don’t understand to get their point across, but this is great.
A great lesson! As good a way to get started as I’ve heard. Your blood’s worth bottling, as they say in your neck of the bush.
Hi, nice recommendations for the beginning. I read many such instruction in e-books and printed one but I miss some good ideas to change for the 4th or 5th used in many songs. Mostly the pentatonic, scales and arpeggios goeas up and down. When a simple songe changes e.g. for Am to Dm and the to E7 and back I would like to get some hints. I try myself to stay in one fret porsition and change only the one or other tone, but I am sure there are other and better ideas. Nice greetings from Vienna!
Thanks George! In future posts we’ll get into more complex scales and ways to play over changes – stay tuned!
Thanks from Ohio, USA, for the lesson Greg. The simplicity of the approach belies the complexity of the material. Well taught.
Thanks Larry! I’ve found that many of my students have gotten a lot out of approaching improvisation in this way, it’s a great way to get started in the style.
I like your approach and the way you communicate it. So much of what’s online is really only marginally useful, but I found this lesson well thought out, and the emphasis on limiting practice sessions to just an idea or two is right on. This is a scale I’ve know for a very long time, but have used only for blues. Employing it in a jazz context is extremely useful. Thanks for a really fine lesson.
Really enjoyed the lesson, it’s a great introduction to Improvising, made me look at the whole concept from a different perspective, thank you very much.
My pleasure Gintautas, great to help this have given you a good start with jazz improv. Cheers!
Thank you so much for this strait forward approach I bin taking lesson for years and you taught me more in a 10 minute lesson than I learned in 6 months. Thank you.
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2019-04-26T02:26:36Z
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https://www.fretdojo.com/jazz-guitar-improvisation-for-beginners/
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Alfred and Rose, portrayed by Sidney and Xavier, in the hearth kitchen at Historic Locust Grove in Louisville, Kentucky. – Photo by Heather R. Hiner/Fox and Rose Photography.
In my previous post, I shared the story of an enslaved man named Alfred who was most likely sold by the Croghan family of Historic Locust Grove as punishment for an unknown act. This post begins a series on the life of a second man, Alfred Croghan.
For the most part, the enslaved people who lived and labored at Locust Grove in Louisville, Kentucky are poorly documented. When I started this research project, Alfred Croghan was documented better then most. But “better than most” is a low bar. I knew his first name, the approximate year of his birth, and that he had spent part of his adult life at Mammoth Cave. After many, many hours of research and with the help of librarians, archivists, and others, I am excited to share that Alfred Croghan has gone from being poorly documented to being the first enslaved person owned by the Croghan family that we can trace from a child at Locust Grove to his death as a free man in Louisville.
Alfred’s first documented appearance may be in the 1820 Census. According to the census, half of the enslaved people living at Locust Grove were 14 or younger. I cannot be entirely sure that Alfred is one of the children listed in the census because the only person listed by name is the head of the household, Major William Croghan. Major Croghan’s family and the enslaved people he owned are not listed by name.
1820 Federal Census for William Croghan (highlighted in yellow). Alfred Croghan may have been one of the eight male enslaved children seen in the census (highlighted in orange).
I have not come across any records of births of enslaved children at Locust Grove. However, I am pretty confident that Alfred was born in 1820 based on some wonderful photographs I will share in a future post about Alfred. The census was taken in August of 1820, which means if Alfred was born before August, he is one of the eight enslaved male children living at Locust Grove who were recorded on the census.
Portrait of William Croghan, Jr.
The only real glimpse of Alfred’s childhood that we have is a letter written by William Croghan, Jr. to his three year old son, William Croghan III in 1828. In fact, it is the best account of enslaved children in general that we have and is a treasure trove of information.
Based on a birth year of 1820 and with no other records pointing to another man around the same age with the same name owned by the Croghans, it is a near certainty that “Al” is an eight year old Alfred Croghan. It’s an account that shows an exuberant boy who is bold enough to be a bit cheeky with William, Jr.
William Croghan, Jr. inherited Locust Grove from his father in 1822 and continued to live there until the death of his wife in October of 1827. Devastated by his loss, William and his children moved to Pittsburgh where he could manage his late wife’s estate. He wrote the above letter to his son in Pittsburgh one after the death of his wife while he was visiting Locust Grove.
Being moved to Pittsburgh to serve William’s daughter, Mary, followed by being passed between other members of the Croghan family would have been an experience Alfred shared with other enslaved people owned by the Croghans. It was a common practice for the Croghans to loan, buy, or sell, enslaved people who belonged to their family amongst themselves.
Under the ownership of Dr. John Croghan, William, Jr.’s, oldest brother, Alfred would become one of the enslaved guides of Mammoth Cave. Working alongside the storied Stephen Bishop, Materson Bransford, and Nicholas Bransford, Alfred would leave his own marks at the cave and become a part of it’s history. And that’s a story for the next blog post, so stay tuned!
When trying to decide on what to share first, I kept going back to something I posted on my personal Facebook page a few months ago. In the spirit of not filling my friend’s feeds with a great wall of text, I tried to pare my thoughts down as much as possible and it was still a lot for a medium that isn’t necessarily set up for sharing thoughts that are more appropriate for a blog. As more and more of my research projects have led to a desire to share what I have found along with my thoughts on the process of unearthing facts from the past and how they translate to life today, I have finally decided to give them a more proper home here. And since this was the post that got the ball rolling, I feel it is only appropriate to expand upon and share that original Facebook post here.
While I plan to post on a wide array of subjects, this particular project, researching the enslaved people that belonged to Croghan family of Historic Locust Grove, may be the most important research I have ever done and as such will appear quite a bit here. I am very proud to be a volunteer at a site where bringing these stories to the forefront is a priority.
Today, I begin to organize and expand on the research on the enslaved people of Locust Grove that I have have been doing off and on for the past two years. I find myself in a different mindset than I usually am when I tackle research. Normally, I’m energized and very focused when I settle into a research project. There’s a sense of satisfaction when I turn up something new and expand on someone’s story. I get very excited when I discover something that allows us to relate to and empathize with someone from the past. I still feel those things, but this time, there are other feelings, too.
Stone from the remains of a slave cabin at Historic Locust Grove.
I feel a greater need to turn over every stone and pebble, to find the tiniest of facts. There are so few that no matter how small, they are all significant. I find my heart heavier at times as I try to grapple with understanding lives lived that I can never fully comprehend because their experiences were so different from mine. There’s a desire to fill in the gaps and give agency and voice to these people who had so little of it in their lifetimes and who were often silenced or ignored by history. There’s anger at how the details of their lives were recorded by others and frustration on the scarcity of information available. And there’s hope, hope that I can somehow do justice to their memories, to their struggles and triumphs, and to the lives they lived.
There’s also a weight to the process. It weighs on me. How do I properly share someone else’s story? Can I do justice to them? There’s concern if my self taught research skills are enough to fully convey someone’s existence that was so very different from my own. In the end, I always circle back to the idea that something done in the spirit of love and service to another is worthwhile in spite of the fact that I am still learning the best ways to research and share. It also drives me to keep learning how to convey these stories in a better way.
Remains of a tree growing on the foundation of a slave cabin at Historic Locust Grove.
And there’s also a beautiful solemnity to the process. This past spring, I photographed the ruins of the foundation of the slave cabin in the woods at Historic Locust Grove so they have a visual record of it’s current condition. As I was trying to figure out which pictures I needed to take, I also found myself reflecting on who might have lived there. Who from my list of names made this their home? Was this Charlotte’s house, or maybe this is where Criss lived? Or could this be the abode of Hannah, Isaac, Alfred, or someone whose name was never recorded? Who cooked meals here, raised their children, rested after a long day’s labor? We don’t know and it’s possible we never will.
But we do know this: There’s no slave cemetery at Locust Grove. We have some theories and guesses about the final resting places of these people, but ultimately, we just don’t know for sure. That, of course, is it’s own kind of indignity when you look at the family graveyard so carefully preserved. Was the “child of Beaty”, who died from bilious fever in the fall of 1832, buried in an unmarked grave outside the boundary of the family cemetery as was often the case, or was this unnamed child laid to rest somewhere else on the property? It’s a mystery that may never be solved.
But I do know this: enslaved people lived their lives and worked to carve out their own space on the site of that cabin foundation. They existed in that space and the simple act of naming their names, of standing where they stood and remembering them is a spiritual act of remembrance.
Remains of the foundation of a slave cabin at Historic Locust Grove.
As I moved around the space, trying to find the angles to properly record the building’s remains, I couldn’t help but feel the presence of those who lived there over 200 years ago. Standing by myself, among the scattered stones in the quiet woods, I was struck that it was a very sacred space. And so I left my own stone, my own token of remembrance, just like I do when I visit a grave. There may not be a slave cemetery, but this space was more their’s than most on the property and it just felt right to honor their passing there, where they had lived.
How I felt as I recorded the site has become an overriding reminder of why I do this and it does add to the weight of it all. How do I do right by these people who were marginalized during their lifetimes and forgotten after their deaths? Ultimately, I know I can never fully give them the justice they deserve and that the best I can do is to gather what we have and hopefully find a few new details to fill in the narratives of their lives. And so I organize, and search, and dig, and hope I do well by them. I share their names and their stories and honor their memories in doing so.
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2019-04-19T00:27:37Z
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http://pastinfocus.com/tag/slavery/
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In the midst of a fiercely contested presidential race, Snowden remains steadfast in his distrust of partisan politics and declined to endorse any particular candidate or party, or even to label his beliefs. But he stresses that the U.S. government can win back trust and confidence through rigorous accountability to citizens and by living up to the ideals on which the country was founded.
0:00 Meet the Free State Project.
Edward Snowden, thank you so much for joining us. We’re talking from the Liberty Forum of the Free State Project. In 2003, [the organizers] created a project where they said, “We’re going to get 20,000 people to agree to move to New Hampshire and make the state a freer and more interesting, more innovative and fun place.” They recently passed the 20,000 mark so the great migration has started and at some point I’ve been asked to welcome you to come to New Hampshire, to a free state when you have time.
And I’ve been told that among other things, it will be a free and independent New Hampshire. They’re even getting rid of the state liquor stores and they’re not going to have extradition with the rest of the United States. So hopefully you can join us.
Let’s talk about the story that’s very much in the news now: The issue of Apple being requested by court order to unlock the cell phone of one of the San Bernardino shooters. You recently tweeted, “This is the most important tech case in a decade. Silence means Google picked a side, but it’s not the public’s.” Can you elaborate on that? Is Apple really on the public’s side? And how does strong encryption of personal communication, even when utilized by terrorists, strengthen freedom and liberty?
00:53 Apple vs. the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Why should strong encryption be legal?
ES: This is an incredibly complex sort of topic. When you think about the whole Google/Apple thing, first off, Google did come forward. Their CEO made some comments in sort of the defense of the ability of private enterprises not to be constricted by government but to sort of do softer work at their direction rather than at the direction of their customers. Now it was very tentative, but hey, it’s a start.
When we think about sort of Apple, are they the big champions of liberty and individual rights, it’s not really about that. We’re not looking for the perfect heroes here, right? It’s “don’t love the actor, love the act.” And what we see is that what the FBI is asking for right is in the wake of the San Bernadino shootings which are of course legitimate crimes, this is an act of terrorism as it’s been described. And they said “alright, we’ve got this private product out there that’s designed to protect the security of all customers, not a particular individual customer, but it’s a binary choice. Either all of us have security, or none of us have security.
And so the FBI went “yeah yeah yeah, that’s great but we want you to strip out some essential protections that you built into this program so we can attack the program in a certain way.” And as a technologist, this is deeply disturbing to me because I know that we’ve had laboratory techniques since the 1990s that allow the F.B.I. and other organizations that have incredible resources to unilaterally mount hardware attacks on security devices to reengineer their software without compelling private actors, private enterprises, private individuals to work contrary to their will. Now prior to this there are important court precedents that have equated code to speech. It’s an act of creation, an act of expression when you program something, which is no different than someone writing a paper or building a house. These are things that are guided by your intention. And if the government can show up at any time, at any house, at any individual and say “regardless of your intention, regardless of your idea, regardless of your plan, you don’t work for you, you work for us, that’s a radically different thing.
And whether it’s Apple or Google or anybody else who at least challenges that assertion of authority and allows us to litigate that, both in the courts and in the public domain, this is critical. Because prior to this moment, these things were being litigated in secret in front of a secret court, a foreign intelligence surveillance court. In 33 years, [FISA courts were] asked by the government 33,900 times to authorize surveillance or reinterpretations of statutory law that are more favorable to the government, that we never knew about because all of these decisions are classified. In those 33,900 times in 33 years, the government got a no from this court only 11 times in 33 years. And that’s why it matters and that’s why I think this is important.
NG: Can I ask a follow up question and part of this is legal and part of this is kind of technological, I mean is any communication really secure anymore? David Brin 20 years ago talked about the transparent society: privacy is done, get over it. And if no communication is really secure anymore, is it a problem or is there a way to actually hold the government accountable and to restrain it, or corporations for that matter? Is this beyond a question of government acting and corporate acting and individual acting because certainly Brin was writing long before Facebook and social media where people are giving away oodles of information again and again (and all freely).
So is any communication private anymore and if it isn’t, then what next?
05:02 Is privacy dead? Should we just get over it?
ES: Well this is again, a really complex question. I could talk for a lot longer than the time we have on it. But the idea here is that there are different kinds of surveillance. Mass surveillance, which is typically done on communications in transit right, as they cross the internet over lines that you don’t own, but you don’t have a choice not to use because of the nature of the modern communications grid.
You can’t say “I want my communications to only route this network.” Once they leave your home, once they leave your handset or your cell phone or whatever device you’re using, it’s out of your control and it gets routed invisibly across borders, across systems, across enterprises. The danger of this is that any one of these actors, whether they’re corporate actors, whether they’re governments, and we know for a fact that governments particularly are using this sort of capability. As they transit, if they are transiting electronically naked, that is unencrypted, anybody can read these. They can capture these, they can store these, they can do whatever they want with them and there’s no indication that it happened. So this is the property of course that spies like, whether they’re corporate or they’re state.
NG: It’s that nobody even knows they’re being spied on.
ES: Right. Does this mean that there’s nothing that works, no. There are ways to shelter the content of the communication which is basically, if you think about what’s in the e-mail, what’s in the register with Amazon.com or the call that you made on a voiceover IP system, or the text message that you send through a certain app, they can no longer read that.
All they can see, what you’re doing is those communications that were electronically naked have now been closed. They’ve been armored in the kind of thing that means I can’t just look under your skirt and see what’s happening there. All they can do is see that now there’s a covered wagon sort of moving down the trail. That cover allows you to have some measure of privacy but there’s still a danger here which is they can monitor the movement of the wagons. And this is what the government refers to as metadata.
But they’ll be near enough to see who you’re meeting with, when you got there, what the license plate of your car was, when you left, where you traveled to, where you slept at night. Now this stuff is being done on a mass, indiscriminate scale to all of us, even today, even sort of after these reforms. The government stopped holding these repositories of data for a particular phone collection program who everybody in the country calls, but they said the phone companies can still hold this information and we’ll just ask them for it. But for the internet, they haven’t made any changes to those programs as a result.
Now when we talk about the direct factual challenges there, there are two points. One is armoring the in-transit communications. This is a principle called end-to-end encryption. Now the Founding Fathers of the United States used encryption to protect their communications. Benjamin Franklin did a number of enciphering systems himself because he recognized that when great power has intensely detailed private information about the political activities of groups that are acting in manners that they would find inconvenient or burdensome, it’s going to be a very short revolution and we would have lost.
So they sort of asserted means of defense. That is what is happening today, for the internet is a standard. It’s not targeted against the United States government, it’s targeted against all actors who seek to subvert the intention of the users. We’re trying to protect everyone everywhere across borders. We’re not just fighting the NSA, right, this is about China, Russia, North Korea, whoever you’re afraid of, we can protect everyone from all of them by working together. There is still that further measure of metadata, sort of “me data” again, the private activity records, where how do we conceal the fact that a communication occurred as opposed to the details that occurred within it. And that’s still an area of active research. There are programs that are developed that do help this, but this is still actively a topic of research.
10:48 What would a legal and effective government surveillance program look like?
NG: People like William Binney, Kirk Wiebe, and Thomas Drake [whistleblowers against surveillance]: You’re not against the government actually acting to ensure the safety of citizens. Can you talk a little bit about what would a government surveillance program that is legal and effective look like for you? How would they play that out without inevitably [abusing their reach]? You’ve written about that what the government can do and what it should do, are merging, that there’s no sense of morality. But how do we put that kind of stopping point where we have a government that can help protect us but not ultimately surveil us constantly?
ES: Well, the first point here is to recognize that the nature of open societies, free societies, right, nations of liberty, is that life does entail some measure of risk. You’re only going to be perfectly protected if you sort of bury yourself under the ground and live in prison. And then, you’ll still be at risk from the inmates that are walking the asylum with you. Life involves risk, it involves choice, it involves contest.
That’s a problem because it radically reorders the balance of power in society. It is preemptively restricting our rights without any cause to do so to create a sort of surveillance time machine that allows them to go back and say no matter what you’ve done, we know what that was. We can analyze you, we can assess you. And why this matters is it’s no longer justice. It’s only order, and these are very different things.
14:53 Could we have stopped the slide into mass surveillance?
NG: Six years ago this month, in 2010, in an Ars Technia forum under your unfortunate pseudonym “TheTrueHOOHA,” you asked, “did we get to where we are today via a “slippery slope that was entirely within our control to stop or was it a relatively instantaneous sea change that sneaked in undetected because of pervasive government secrecy?” With what you were just talking about, how would you answer that question now? Are we frogs in a pot of water that’s getting warmer and warmer or was there a switch that was turned on and that’s how this happened?
ES: So first off let me caveat as a privacy advocate, I’ve never publicly owned these posts. And this is not to say “oh these aren’t me” or anything like that. The individual in question who offered these posts seems to have a suspiciously large amount of correlating events in their life that match mine. But the point here is that when individuals write under pseudonyms right, there’s a reason for it. [It’s] so individuals can be judged on the basis of their ideas, their engagement in a particular conversation rather than their personalities.
NG: And certainly in American history, such as the Federalist papers [which were published anonymously], we are a country that was founded on anonymous speech in many ways. You, or whoever it was, was participating in a grand tradition….
ES: For the sake of argument, let’s presume that individual was me. The idea here is, “Could we have arrested this slide?” And at the time, contemporaneous to that, I think it was circa 2009, 2010, I was still working for the CIA, I had just moved to the NSA. I believe. And I didn’t have the same kind of comprehensive insights into how the system had arisen. And of course, if I would have been in this position writing as this individual, the idea would be, “Well, we should’ve seen this coming, right?” It would have been incremental, there would have been some public indications. But when you look at the public record of how the institutions of mass surveillance occurred in the United States—they occurred under a veil of secrecy. And when officials were challenged on them, even under oath, even on camera, they lied about them.
Johnson: Does the NSA routinely intercept American citizens’ e-mails?
Sen. Wyden: Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?
Clapper: Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly.
ES: So this is sort of the challenge. Can we stop policies? Can we arrest them? Can we have a voice in them? Can we have a vote on them if they are intentionally and wittingly concealed from us?
19:04 How can government earn back the trust and confidence of the American people?
NG: By all indications—look at Gallup or Pew or other surveys—trust and confidence in government to either be effective or to do the right thing, these are at or near historic lows. How does government win back the trust? I’m going to ask the libertarian question in a second, but most of us here are libertarians, not anarchists [groaning and baby crying]. And the anarchist is crying in the background there, but how does government gain back the trust and the confidence of the American people?
Because we saw this in the 1970s with the Church Committee hearings and a general hollowing-out of belief in government. Libertarians want a government that is smaller than it is perhaps, but one that is effective and is legitimate. How does government win back the people’s trust?
ES: Accountability. I mean, the whole idea behind the divide and the simple language of a private citizen and a public official is that we know everything about them they know nothing about us, because they are invested with powers and privileges that we don’t have. They have the ability to sort of direct the future of society, and as a result it is incumbent to assume a level of responsibility and accountability to the public for the exercise and abuse of those authorities that simply does not exist today. And that’s the problem. They know more about us than they ever have in the history of the United States and some would argue in any society that sort of ever existed before.
At the same, thanks to aggressive expansions of state secrecy authorities, the use of classification and so on and so forth, and even simple management of the press where, you know, they play leaking games and they don’t give comment on this, that, or the other, or more directly aggressive things like we just saw with the Director of National Intelligence, the most senior intelligence official in the United States. They’re excusing themselves from accountability to us at the same time they’re trying to exert greater power over us. And that I think leads to an inevitable result over time. Whether through good intentions or bad, that the public is no longer partner to government, but merely subject to it.
21:40 What’s wrong with the political parties in the US?
ES: I should caveat this with the fact that I’m an engineer, not a politician. My opinions being what they are, I look at systems in terms of incentives. Where are the incentives, and how does human behavior emerge in response to those incentives? We’ve approached what in game theory terms is called a Nash equilibrium, which is where you’ve got a limited set of choices that each player in the game can make and they’ve identified what is the most optimal move that they can make in the context of that game and so they play the same move every time hoping that in some rounds they’ll win even if over time they’ll lose because they’ll have the maximized score possible for the given set of constraints that exist. Now what this means is that people go, “Well I dislike this side, I dislike this individual, I dislike this tribe more than I dislike the other one and so I’ll pick this one.” And so they start voting against. It’s important to have the principle of understanding who I will vote for, but also who I won’t vote for. But we need to disentangle this from parties.
24:27 What are Snowden’s political beliefs? Is he a libertarian?
NG: That by the way is the ethos behind the Free State Project—very much so. So can I ask on a technical question: Can you vote in the election? Can you send in an absentee ballot? And if you do, will you make your vote public? It’s a secret ballot, but it would be kind of an interesting observation to see who you voted for.
ES: This is still a topic of…active research [laughter].
NG: You know, as I mentioned before, this is an overwhelmingly libertarian crowd and one of the things that libertarians talk about besides reducing the size, scope, and spending of government and maximizing individual freedom is recognizing that economic liberties and civil liberties are conjoined and inseparable.
In some of the clips that you showed, people were asking, “Are you tracking Amazon purchases? Are you tracking cell phones?” We see that surveillance covers economic activity as well as civil or personal communication. How do you define your politics or ideology and where did it come from? Do you consider yourself a libertarian or a classical liberal? Are these terms that are meaningful to you? Or how do you think about ideology I guess.
ES: Well you know there’s a whole field of political theory that I don’t really subscribe to in terms of classifying people on the basis of their beliefs. Because what it’s trying to do is it’s trying to establish tribes, it’s trying to establish common identities. And while I do think that is valuable and important for the sense of collective action, for me, it’s not really the right fit. I do see sort of a clear distinction between people who have a larger faith in liberties and rights than they do in states and institutions. And this would be sort of the authoritarian/libertarian axis in the traditional sense.
And I do think it’s clear that if you believe in the progressive liberal tradition, which is that people should have greater capability to act freely, to make their own choices, to enjoy a better and freer life over the progression of sort of human life, you’re going to be pushing away from that authoritarian axis at all times. Because authoritarianism is necessarily about the ordering and control of society. Now they can argue that that will produce a better quality of life, but it cannot be argued that it would provide a freer life. And for me, I’m on the side of freedom.
26:27 How did Snowden educate himself? Is he helped or hurt by his lack of formal education?
That’s coming out of a classical liberal tradition [which gave] birth to the American founding. You’re an autodidact in many ways. You don’t have fancy degrees and I don’t see diplomas on the wall behind you. Talk a little bit about the process of how did you educate yourself and how does that play into larger roles of the types of educations that governments or societies give people. Is it to liberate them? Is it to kind of subjugate them? Talk about where you came from in terms of your ideas and your self-learning.
For me, yes, I did not graduate from high school. Instead I got a G.E.D., and I don’t have the formal education and that’s held me back in a lot of ways. In terms of just wanting to have some kind of formal education, it’s difficult to go back and get later on. Like chemistry, right? I’m really interested in chemistry but lacking the formal education, it’s just kind of a pain to go back and read textbooks later on. At the same time, I have a very broad and diverse education on a number of different topics and this has helped me in my professional career because I was much more conversant and fluent on a number of topics that ended up being very highly valued in the national security space that really aren’t taught in school, particularly when it comes to system security and anonymity online, in certain ways, how to combat that.
This illustrates a key point which has been reflected by other thinkers before, it’s not original to myself, which is there is a very strong difference, a bright line difference between your schooling and your education. And we should all be careful not to let the one influence the other.
28:48 Why did Snowden see bulk surveillance differently than his NSA coworkers?
NG: You were working with people and you’ve talked about this, who had similar backgrounds and technical skills but then you brought a moral dimension to what you were seeing when you were working for the government as a sub-contractor. Was it a moral education that was lacking in the people around you? Or was there something in the way that you learned that triggered that sense of “You know, we all know this is unconstitutional or this is wrong?” Why was it you who actually decided to bring it to the public’s attention?
ES: Well, I represented a different generation in many ways than the majority of sort of the institutional structure at the NSA and CIA because of course I was the new group in.
But I was also sort of the first generation of children of the internet, right? When you think about where my biggest influences are in that context, my reading, my writing, well of course yeah we read the history of course yeah, we read the books and the traditions and the classics as well, which classics do you get directed to, which come to your attention? That becomes part of a sort of zeitgeist debate that occurs all around the world. You have a much larger mixing of perspectives. And because of that, nationalism— blind nationalism—is less effective.
Because there’s a very real difference between allegiance to country, allegiance to people and allegiance to state, which is what nationalism today is really more about. The institution can come and go but the people remain. And this kind of context is what differed. I brought a Constitution in and put it on my desk because I had a personal interest in it and I thought it was relevant to the work. And there were a number of people that I worked with, co-workers and colleagues, particularly when I started raising sort of alarm internally about these programs and saying, “Something doesn’t smell right here” who agreed with me, who were interested, who had different interpretations who challenged back and forth, but who cared.
And then there were others who didn’t, who said the Constitution didn’t really matter, who would literally say, “You know, who cares about the 4th Amendment, the 5th Amendment?” and so on and so forth, the 1st Amendment. It doesn’t really matter, this thing is from hundreds of years ago. It’s no longer relevant and look, we’ve got a job to do. There’s bad guys out there and we’re going to decide who they are and what we’re going to do about them.
The problem with that that I would argue is how designations of national security are made in the first place. There’s a real-life case here that I think is relevant to a lot of people where the FBI had a lead on the individual. They were a religious leader, a sort of community leader that the government state believed was in contact with or under the sway of sort of agents of foreign power. And this is common with all people who are involved with any kind of radical politics. If you challenge the prerogatives of the state, they presume it’s at the direction of another state because that’s simply how the thinking works.
The attorney general was briefed on the case, they said, “Yeah, let’s wiretap this guy even though he’s a US citizen, son of a popular cleric, fairly well known” and they put him on a watch list. They said “in the event of a national emergency, martial law you know, F.E.M.A. and so on and so forth we’re going to detain this person because they are dangerous. They are a destabilizer, they are a radicalizer, in the modern vernacular.” And the FBI actually made a determination that out of all of the similar radicals in the United States, this individual was the most dangerous from the standpoint of national security.
Does anyone in the room know this case? Do you recognize him? And the determination was made two days after he gave the “I Have a Dream” speech. That is what a threat to national security looks like [displays image of Martin Luther King, Jr.]. There’s a very real difference between the public interest and the national interest. When you hear national interest, when you hear national security, think state interest, think state security and you’ll be on the right track.
33:03 Was the NSA involved in gathering evidence against Ross Ulbricht?
NG: Let me finish with three quick questions if I might. First, in the case of Ross Ulbricht, who was prosecuted for founding the Silk Road website and is now effectively [serving] a life sentence. Do you assume, or should we assume that the NSA was involved in corroborating or gathering evidence which they might have denied in the actual trial?
ES: Just to elaborate on that… But the NSA and the United States is part of a large group called the Five Eyes Network, right. This is the United States, the UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. And these five countries, they sort of mix everything together in a common pot, and they share and share alike. They’re not allowed to ask a partner to violate their laws, but partners can share information that would have been in violation of their laws if they didn’t ask for it.
Now not to say that particular strategy applied in this context, but the difference between the National Security Agency’s authorities and particularly the British equivalent of the NSA, the G.C.H.Q, is [that] the UK is allowed to use NSA systems that we built, that work in the United States and everything else against, or under the mandate of what’s called a serious crimes authority that’s completely unrelated to national intelligence prerogatives. And this includes drug trafficking. They are literally mandated for this. They use our systems for this. And the fruits of their investigations they can share freely with us.
So I would say yes, of course, and it was foolish in the court case, I understand why they did it, he didn’t want to own the server at the time, he didn’t want to say “yes, this is mine” therefore the judge wouldn’t allow him to make a sort of 4th Amendment argument here that investigatory restrictions had been violated. But it seems unthinkable to me that there was not an intelligence angle internationally that was involved in that case.
35:39 Will the government eventually give up fighting internet commerce? Or will they just change tactics?
ES: I’m not sure. Again, this is something that is quite beyond my expertise. But I would say there are models in history to look at to sort of draw from. Look at the prohibition on alcohol. Eventually crime groups gained influence, they gained power, and they were difficult to combat as a result. Therefore, the government reevaluated the policy and found that it would be more in line with their interests, not the public’s interests, but their interests, if they ended that prohibition.
And we see similar things happening with prohibition of marijuana today. Now that’s not to say that I think there’ll be necessarily a global free-for-all, but technology is providing new means to enforce human rights and traditional concepts of human interaction through technology rather than through law, across borders, regardless of jurisdictions which allows people to communicate privately, associate privately, care about one another privately.
For example, in Russia there are prohibitions on who and how you can love one another as there were in the United States quite recently. And this kind of thing is being challenged in ways that I think will be difficult to subvert. Does this mean that sort of great powers are just going to, you know, throw their hands up, give up, and walk away? I think that’s unlikely. However, the individual is more powerful today than they ever have been in the past.
And this is why you see governments that feel threatened by an individual like Julian Assange, who’s trapped in an embassy. Because despite the fact that they can control the physical location of someone, the power of the reliable sort of old, bad tools of political repression, are increasingly losing their weight.
37:32 How can Snowden advocate freedom from a place like Russia?
NG: And the irony is not lost where you’re sitting in an authoritarian regime talking about how people are freer and more empowered than ever.
That is an irony that I hope people will cogitate on for a long time. When we talked about the presidential election, what would a candidate have to do in order for you to say “you know what, that is the type of thinking on surveillance or on individual freedom and liberty from surveillance that I can get behind?” What would they have to do?
It’s important to understand that I never intended to end up in Russia. Originally, I was hoping to get to Iceland. After that, Latin America when Iceland fell through. But the State Department cancelled my passport, trapping me in Russia when I was initially on the move, as soon as they heard I was in the air. Despite the fact that I’ve asked several times, they’ve refused to reinstate it, which is quite interesting. The United States of course criticizes me for being in Russia but at the same time they won’t let me leave.
Be that as it may, there’s a deeper point here, a philosophical point here about hypocrisy. Is it hypocritical to be somewhere else and not be as concerned with that locality as you are with your own? And I would argue that it’s not. I owe my first duty, my first allegiance, my first loyalty to fixing my country before I try to solve the problems of the rest of the world, right? We’ve got to get our house in order first.
We don’t want Russia or China or North Korea or Iran or France or Germany or Brazil or any other country in the world to hold us up as an example for why we should be narrowing the boundaries of liberty around the world instead of expanding them.
41:00 How should we teach children about the Internet?
NG: So, that’s another way of saying you definitely won’t be voting in this election I think.
A final question, and this goes to what the Free State Project is about because it is a brushfire for freedom and for liberty and it’s 20,000 people and even already with less than 2,000 people who’ve moved here, they’ve changed various types of laws and culture in New Hampshire, which is already a pretty free place.
You talked about being a kind of child of the internet. You know, many of us are parents, and our children should “read” the internet in its entirety, but what are the places, what are the texts that they should read? It is true [that the internet] decentralizes knowledge and you come across the serendipity of all sorts of perspectives, which is incredibly empowering and important. What are the practices that are good, that would give [children] an independent, critical ability to kind of move into a world which is both nationalistic in a good sense -you are an American and you seem to still be proud to be an American - but not statist. Where do we go on the internet? Where should we be asking our children to spend some time?
ES: I think it’s less important to go to specific texts as it is to demonstrate how specific texts are written. If I were a parent trying to help my child understand the internet, the key exercise that I would do is I would go look at cases that are super partisan today right, extraordinarily charged. And I would get two radically different rewritings of the same story and I’d make them read both. And I’d do this on a number of different things to show, because this is something that a lot of older people fall prey to who aren’t so familiar with the internet and they just get their news from a single landing page or portal or whatever.
And also young people who get super-filter-bubbled because they sort of opt into communities that create a sort of groupthink, where it’s are always people sort of agreeing with what they say. [That] was not available the same 20 years ago on the internet or 10 years ago on the internet really. There weren’t walls that were quite so high separating communities. The idea here is to show that the truth lies spread across the abundance of sources. The beauty of the internet is that you no longer have to rely on a single source. You no longer are vulnerable to the broadcast that is “this is the voice of truth, this is the voice of fact” but it’s important to understand that sources that you prefer can still be wrong, even if they’ve got the right principles, the right ideas, the right values. Getting the facts right matters more than anything else.
NG: You’re talking about the internet really as the fulfillment of the Enlightenment project of kind of competing versions of truth in a marketplace of ideas and an understanding about the construction of knowledge and truth rather than its self-evident presentation without argument following. You can just nod.
43:43 Under what conditions would Snowden return to the United States?
NG: For a final-final question, what would be the conditions under which you would voluntarily return to the United States? Are there terms that you would be happy for? And this is something, again not to harp on politics because all of us I think are living our lives beyond politics but, that’s one of the things you hear, like: Well you should come back and you know, have your day in court, etc.” What would be the conditions under which you might return?
ES: Right, so this is interesting, it’s evolved quite a bit. Originally, I volunteered myself for prison, but I said that I wouldn’t be, I wouldn’t allow myself to be held up as a deterrent to other people who are trying to do the right thing.
And that was fundamentally contrary to what the government wanted to do. Of course, they wanted to nail a scalp on the wall as a warning to the others. And even though I was quite flexible here, it was Daniel Ellsberg who leaked the Pentagon papers, the secret classified history of the war in Vietnam in 1971, that showed the government had not only lied us into the war, but they kept lying to us to keep us in it despite the fact that they knew there was no way to win. And he told me that this was a mistake. And eventually he convinced me of this in the sense of to what do we owe our first loyalty? To law or to justice? And to submit ourselves to sort of a government that is sort of intentionally trying to deter the political beliefs and political acts of other people merely on the basis of law, as though that were a substitute for morality or superior to morality, is a very dangerous precedent to set.
Now, I’m still, this is I think, most people might be surprised by this, but fairly more trusting in the value of government and institutions than Daniel Ellsberg, who since his initial work, has just been an extraordinary crusader and a true radical in the best way, for more than a generation now. But when it comes to what’s the current context, what’s the current state of play that we’ve been at?
I’ve told the government that I will return if they guarantee a fair trial where I can make a public-interest defense of why this was done and allow the jury to decide if it was right or wrong in the context of both legality and morality. And the United States responded with a letter from the attorney general saying they promise they would not torture me. I’m not kidding, I have that letter. So it’s still kind of a work-in-progress but we’ll see where it goes.
NG: Well, thank you so very much for your time.
ES: Thank you. I look forward to seeing you in New Hampshire.
Produced by Todd Krainin and Nick Gillespie. Cameras by Meredith Bragg and Krainin.
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2019-04-18T18:19:47Z
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http://transformingfreedom.com/hyperaudio/apple-vs-fbi-privacy-nsa-and-more
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The Earth to Echo creature reminded me of a modern version of the Batteries Not Included creatures. That film wasn't really for kids though.
Other Jim Henson creations like Fraggle Rock, the Muppets and Seasame Street for small children are stupid by modern standards cute, so it's not like the had different ideas of cute then (of course).
Even just in fantasy films, compare the dwarves in the Hobbit or Ents in the Lord of the Rings, who could look more gnarly and weird and unsettling than they do (the CGs good enough now). Or the goofy but not very discomforting or disgusting creature Jar Jar Binks.
(Other examples, Troll dolls in the 1960s for a light version, Boglins toys in the 1980s-early 1990s.).
The alien in Super 8 was supposed to be pretty scary looking, but one issue might be that it's harder to make something viscerally grotesque with CGI.
Shrek wasn't Pixar, it was Dreamworks.
They all look so similar I can't keep em straight.
This might be a bit late, but I just came across it via Noah Smith. Hanna Rosin's "The Overprotected Kid" echoes some of your ideas, with a particular focus on playgrounds and unsupervised play.
On an unrelated note, this article nominally about the 10th anniversary of Michael Mann's "Collateral" is a sort of history of the spread of digital in "prestige" films of the sort that get cinematography awards. It tracks both ASC and Academy awards over time and how digital went from contributing sections of a whole film to 100%. The linked interview with Dion Beebe is unusual in that he views digital and film as having both strengths and weaknesses on an artistic level, whereas all the interviews I've previously read with people using digital regard it as just starting to approach film's quality and only being used because it's much cheaper.
"The Explorers" came out in 1985. It had some pretty ugly-looking aliens with a really scary, intimidating ship. I remember clearly how bizarre and freaky and unlikeable the aliens seem at first. Later on, the earth-kids find out that the aliens are just alien-kids, and they all get along (though the aliens never stop being vaguely creepy and weird).
It was essentially another E.T. rip-off. But I loved it when I was a kid because the kids build their own spaceship using science-y sounding ideas plus a bunch of abandoned garbage and car parts. (no magic E.T. flying here... the kids create their own adventure).
These are excellent observations on this subject. ET terrified me as a kid I was 8 or 9 when it came out, I couldn't watch it until I was much older.
kids is superior today then it was for those of us growing up in the 80's and in prior decades for that matter. It was always like the "kids" shows/movies were actually being written with kiddy themes but making direct appeal to the adults in the room with little concern for the developing mind of the child. The entertainment produced for kids today is much more age appropriate and as a parent I don't have to worry about nightmares and explaining concepts beyond their understanding and maturity level. This may be an overprotecting, helicopter style but I think for many Gen X parents who may now be developing programs for children recall the inappropriate mood, tone, language, visuals etc from their own experiences as a child and are producing more appropriate child oriented material.
It's today's children's programming that is aimed at adults, as gatekeepers for what the kids are allowed to take in. I can't count the number of times I've groaned having to listen to meta-ironic comments during Sponge Bob, zipping right over the kids' heads.
Today my nephew and I watched an old episode of Transformers (on demand), and there was nothing in the themes, plot, tone, or dialog that was aimed at grown-ups. It was refreshing how kid-only it all was.
Kids can understand all of this stuff -- not right away, we only understand things gradually. In fact, we understood it when we were growing up. Death, revenge, sacrifice, bravery, love, unrequited love, etc.
What's changed is that late Boomer and Gen X parents don't want to deal with any of life's awkward "issues" when their kid is in the room. So they screen all of those things out, and rationalize it as "awkward = age-inappropriate." Rather than "awkward = stuff you'll have to deal with, and might as well get started gradually figuring it out now."
If it was about age-appropriateness, then why do helicopter parents dress their kids as though they were miniature adults? T-shirt, cargo shorts, jeans, chuck taylors, faux hawk hairdo, and so on. Or leggings tucked into mini-Ugg boots for girls. When you look through pictures of small children in the '70s and '80s, they all have distinctly kiddie clothing and hairstyles, not a kiddie version of grown-up styles.
That is just another aspect of the "banish awkward" goal that helicopter parents have. A child is a qualitatively different creature from an adult, lying on the other side of a dividing line at puberty. They're caterpillars, not butterflies. Acknowledging that and treating them accordingly would remind parents that there's still that transformation looming on the horizon. So, why not just pretend they're mini-adults?
Language learning offers a clearer example. If children are never to be exposed to thing that are unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and require practice that is long, gradual, and continual, then they'd never acquire a language.
It's no different with life's great universal themes, lessons, and rules of thumb.
Or physical training and development -- look how many children are too weak to pull themselves up into a tree and climb around. That's because parents don't want to deal with all the awkwardness of their kid growing up -- seeing them struggle, take hard falls, whine that "I can't do it!", having to tell them to keep at it anyway and stop whining, etc.
The outcome is a person that gets flustered at the tiniest discomfort or awkwardness, immediately and totally gives up and shuts down when they stumble with anything, and move onto something else that will hopefully allow them to succeed 100% right away with no practice.
Bubble-wrapping the children softens their minds and their bodies. And it's all for the benefit of the parents -- soothing their overblown anxieties -- which makes it even more shameful.
"Today my nephew and I watched an old episode of Transformers (on demand), and there was nothing in the themes, plot, tone, or dialog that was aimed at grown-ups. It was refreshing how kid-only it all was"
Yet somehow the older kids movies seemed to have much more adultlike themes, like death, betrayal, sexual jealousy, etc.(don't get me wrong, I don't still watch them, but you get the point). Even in the Transformers movie, they killed off the leader of the good guys and half the characters. Guess it was the influence of rising-crime.
"The outcome is a person that gets flustered at the tiniest discomfort or awkwardness, immediately and totally gives up and shuts down when they stumble with anything, and move onto something else that will hopefully allow them to succeed 100% right away with no practic"
Well, you know, there isn't a lot of help to be given nowadays. I think a lot of Millenials would practice if someone would just show them the basic steps, or they could learn by observing someone. Just deal with any bureacracy to see how unwilling people have become to do basic courtesies. "Look it up online".
That applies to learning everything though, like academic work, sports, love. The self-help industry has boomed because of this.
For instance, in the movie "UP", one of the plots is that the crotchety old man had a barren wife, which they recount through a flashback.
Pixar films tend to be about appropriate child-adult / family relationships of one sort or another - there's pretty much always at least one adult and one kid character with some relationship tension in the successful / memorable ones. It's a family friendly thing I guess.
They tend to be anti-parental over monitoring and control, but probably more parent-child interdependent than something like the Lion King where the narrative is focused on losing a parent.
I think you might be right that kids don't respond as well to this, but I don't know for sure.
Trusting strange and ugly strangers. Why was this pushed by the media as Cultural Marxism increased. Is it so that Whites in the USA, Canada, Europe and Australia-NZ would warm up to the idea of trusting different looking and different behaving strangers (immigrants) from alien cultures? A kind of message 'we are the same after all, it is wrong to discriminate, trust everything and everybody even if your instincts say otherwise'. White people and modernised non Whites in general like the Japanese have become too trusting of outsiders and are thus taken for a ride by other races who have healthy strong racist tendencies. See how easily Whites are fooled in the bazaars of the middle East, by internet scams, by money making Hindu cults.
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2019-04-22T13:06:21Z
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http://akinokure.blogspot.com/2014/07/not-earth-to-echo-characters-who-looked.html
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The name AutonomatriX is derived from the words autonomy and matrix to represent a self-directed and self-governing repository of information. The emblem of the Auto-nomatriX is a circular blade with eight teeth providing a background to t he glyph of Eris turned on its side.
The AutonomatriX is a networking chaos magic guild of those striving to discover and rejuvenate magical ideas and technical skills with success as the only key to validation. We do not discriminate on the basis of lifestyle, gender, affiliation, race, or sexuality. We seek to interact with creative magicians who are pushing boundaries instead of being trapped by them. We are a guild composed of working craftspeople, whereas an order/lodge/clique is generally an exclusive membership of supplicants.
The time of centralized info-banks is at an end; the nature of "classified" or "secret" information is that it is more often limiting than useful to the collector, and only profitable to the banker of such media. Hierarchical structures are unnecessary and undesired; checks and balances regarding membership are determined by an individual's interaction with the rest of the group rather than personal prejudices or acceptance for any member by any other member. The principles "sink or swim" and "(inter)action equals life" are applicable to this magical guild, as in any network.
When a candidate has made intentional contact with a member of the AutonomatriX (called the "AX"), that member sponsors the candidate himself and provides all pertinent information about that candidate e to another member as soon as is possible for co-sponsorship. Alternatively, if for any reason the member chooses not to sponsor the candidate after the initial inquiry, that member must send the information to two other members, one of whom is the member nearest to the candidate's geographic locale. Ideally, the two sponsors would be geographically separated from one another. All inquirers will be provided with the current AX manifesto by any member who accepts sponsorship of that candidate at the onset of their relationship. The suggested sponsorship period is three months, at the end of which the co-sponsors mutually decide upon whether or not initiation should take place.
The sponsored candidate is requested to provide information regarding any personal magical work done in a journal or magical record. The candidate may in turn be given any part of the Corpus Fecundi other than the Contacts Listing (see below) that the sponsors deem appropriate at any time. Initiation may be performed by one or both of the sponsors and/or an y other members of the AX with the consent of the sponsors. The candidate must provide a record of a magical working which has resulted in manifestation of the intent at least two times, and design a self-initiation ritual. All initiation s must be performed in person. At the climax of the initiation, the new member is handed the current Contacts Listing ( on a scroll) and the remainder of the Corpus Fecundi.
The Corpus Fecundi comprises a record of research, technical experimentation and ritual methods that have arisen since the emergence of this guild of Chaos. The entirety of this information is provided only after a period of sponsorship resulting in initiation and excludes non-requested information of a political or genealogical nature.
It is the personal responsibility of each member of the AX to update their copy of the Corpus Fecundi as new information becomes available. An active member of the AX is any person who is on the Contacts Listing. All information for inclusion into the Corpus Fecundi is transferred throughout the network on at least a quarterly basis.
The first part is the "Contacts Listing," which includes all participants in the AX. All are listed by their appellation (any titles may be chosen), mailing address, Working Group and/or Project involvement information, and a brief biography (bio) of personal interests, researches, requests for information on any topic, etc. To remain on the Contacts Listing each member is responsible for making their membership known by interaction with other members. If for any reason this cannot be done, membership requires that the current AX curators are notified of continued participation in the net-work by a work record semi-annually.
The second part is an "Index" of all works currently making up the Corpus Fecundi. All members are responsible for ensuring that their copy is complete via this Index. The author of each item will be listed here, rather than on the items themselves.
The issuance of Contacts Listings and Indexes are provided by the AutonomatriX curators, who ensure that each display the name and emblem of the AX upon them. Two curators are randomly chosen on June 27th of each year from volunteers to update and maintain securely the hard-copies and electronic copies of all material in the Corpus Fecundi. The Corpus Fecundi is maintained in its entirety in both formats at all times. Any individual in the network may assume these responsibilities, although no curator may have successive terms of office.
Each member of the AX is encouraged to form autonomous Working Groups. All WGs may be designated by whatever name (Coven, Project, Team, Clan, Temple, Group, Cabal, Tribe, etc.) deemed appropriate by those directly involved. A Working Group is composed of at least two active members of the network and as many nonmembers as desired by them.
Each Working Group is inaugurated by the generation of its own unique manifesto, accepted by all participating in that WG. It must be distributed by the AX members of that group to all on the current Contacts Listing. This particular manifesto should be made as detailed as possible, to outline the WG's objectives and intent, protocol, any offices assumed within the WG's internal structure, and whatever else the WG decides upon. Accompanying the manifesto should be each participant's signature (of their chosen appellation), mailing address, and bio. The AX will in no way interfere in matters of any Working Group's internal structure or protocol, with the fullest intention being to keep regulation to a minimum in regards to the network's guild structure.
Each WG is encouraged to access any form of media available for wider distribution of ideas and material, and the AX provides encouragement and/or assistance to members who have material suitable for this purpose.
Projects or Operations which include any member of the AX within or without one's Working Group are to be listed in the Contacts List. An "Operation" is usefully described as an extended working for a specific goal carried out by two or more members of the guild regardless of WG affiliation.
It is recommended that each WG and Operation designate a Main Contact Point (or MCP) elected by the members in that Working Group, for response to inquiries and distribution of information. It is the responsibility of the acting MCP of that group to distribute all information for inclusion into the Corpus Fecundi of the members in his Working Group and/or Operation.
Information is distributed throughout the entire active membership of the network in the issuance of the Contacts Listing and Index of the Corpus Fecundi by the AX curators. The authors of any item produced and distributed for inclusion into the Corpus Fecundi are responsible for the distribution of that information throughout the network. Any item may be marked "Private" by its author, and this is understood to mean distribution via the Corpus Fecundi only (not for public consumption). No items intended for the Corpus Fecundi may be marked with the author's appellation, although it is recommended that each item is accompanied by a cover letter providing whatever personal data the author or distributor desires.
When voting is required within the AX as a whole, all members must provide a written response of yes, no, or abstinence. The votes of each member are then listed beside their name on the next Contacts Listing. A measure's success depends upon at least a two-third's majority of all members of the AutonomatriX. All members are encouraged to voice their own o pinions at all times.
The AX does not employ any single clue to disclose membership in the guild. However, objects that are easily available are periodically chosen to represent active participation in the network, such as a certain semiprecious stone or a color-specific pen for example. At any time, suggestions may be supplied to a curator for random selection. The identifier is described as briefly as possible at the top of each Contacts Listing. Aside from this, each WG and Operation is encouraged to generate totems and/or fetishes to designate themselves symbolically within the guild.
Each Working Group in the AX chooses what ritual accessories are necessary. Some may choose specific forms of jewelry or ritual garments as a group. Each member must possess the current identifier object of the AX in the working area at the time of any meeting attended.
Gotta run. Neighbors just sighted Elvis making crop circles.
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2019-04-21T04:33:35Z
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http://paganlibrary.com/reference/autonomatrix.php
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I posted this as a reply to Larry Alvarez's Solar Prom.
It should have been posted as a new topic to the general audience.
I just joined the forum today and apologize for my mistake.
Your photographs are a work of art. The images you have in Philip Pugh's book "Observing the Sun with Coronado Telescopes" belong in an artistic display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art!
Last Christmas I purchased a Coronado PST. My heart still skips a beat when I view solar activity thru it. As you are aware we always want a larger scope and when I checked Astronomics website I was astonished to see the Solar Max 60 and 90mm selling at deep discount.
May I ask your advise on my next Coronado scope? I have a Meade LDX 75 equitorial mount which is quite stable and should handle the SolarMax 90mm. Is that a correct assumption?
Scanning the website I hear talk about a rust problem. Is it common? The warrenty is for five years and I wonder what the repair cost would be out of warrenty?
Are there any other bugs or flaws in the 60mm or 90mm that you are aware of?
My thoughts are to try photography of the sun. I have never been artistic, but when I see your images I am enthralled with the beauty you bring out from the sun. I am retired and have been a night astronomer for years. I would like to start viewing the sun as well and see if I can capture its beauty as you do.
Going from the PST to the 90mm is quite a jump, but how often does Meade drop the price by 50%.
If there is any advice or suggestion on my next purchase, I am all ears to your thoughts and ideas.
Larry, the 90 will work with your LDX75. It weighs around 16~20lbs. Its pretty stout for a 90mm scope. The tube is thick gauge aluminum and the filter itsself is pretty heavy too.
The issue "Rust" is a common issue with what's is known as the Blocking filter. This is not the front main filter but rather the rear filter in the diagonal. More specifically it is the filter at the enterance of the diagonal. The part of the filter that rusts out is coated with a sort of metallic coating that is suseptable to moisture. I have found that if you keep it stored well it keeps for a long time. Since my original filters rusted I started keeping mine in an air tight tupperware container with some silica packs. So far 2.5 years and no rust. If you get a rusted Blocking filter you can get it repaired by Meade at no cost except for shipping within the warranty time frame. I do not know how much it cost out of warranty.
All solar filters that I know of no matter what the brand have a shelf life like this for their blocking filter. Proper storage is the key to a long filter life for all of them. If you are into photography I would suggest a Coronado filter because it attaches to the scope, is temperature stable, and it is easy to setup and use right out of the box. Truthfully though any h-alpha filter can produce good results. When I started I looked into the pros and cons for each. Coronado was the best bet at that time. Some of the other filters out there requires more preparation before viewing. One of the more popular is the rear mounted type h-alpha filter. This filter is good but be prepared to buy extensions for the back of your scope to make it reach the needed F30 bandwidth, a 2 inch barlow, 2 inch powermate or a telecentric lens. I found that the extensions to get my scope to f30 would have almost been as long as the telescope length.
The 90 is a really sweet telescope but the 60 is no small beans either. Its perfectly crafted both optically and mechanically and is well suited for delivering full disk shots and mild closeups. The 90 will buy you more close up detail on good seeing days but with the right camera it will be hard to tell the difference when comparing full disk shots. With the 60 you also get a more portable scope.
As far as imaging is concered the new DMK line of cameras are really excellent for solar imaging. For photography you want to stick to a camera with a true black and white ccd element. Color cameras work but not as well as Black and white cameras.
Great advice! I appreciate your comments especially concerning the 60mm.
At National Astronomy Day I had my PST on the LDX75 with clear calm skies. There were about 150 people and they got to see some solar prominences. A local college had their SolarMax 40mm on a camera tripod. They were never able to see the prominces. And their scope was a "step-up". Maybe with the image never centered for long they did not have the time to adjust the fine tuning.
Is it correct to say that I will notice a better solar image going from a PST to the 60mm, but not as great going from the 60mm to the 90mm?
I was sold on the 90mm until your comments.
What do you make of Meade's price reduction on the 60mm and 90mm.
I asked one dealer and his opinion was "they need the money." Then I inquired if they may go out of business. He did not think that to be the case.
From your comments I will now consider the 60mm Coronado. The advantages are money, portibility and in your opinion close visual images.
Thank you for your sage advice as well as the stunning solar images you capture. They truly are a work of art.
Your correct, the Wow factor from 60 to 90 is not that much. but the Wow factor from the PST to 60 will be pretty big. The view of the sun's disk will be much bigger in the 60 or the 90. There will be no problem seeing spots, filaments, flares, and all the other h-alpha details with a 60 or 90. There is simply more to see.
I think part of the reason for dropping the price is that Coronado has recently moved its operation to another location out of the US and they also have direct competition from the Son of the privious owner of Coronado. Both these things have probably played a part in their decision to reduce prices. I cannot say which scopes are better because the new scopes have not been demo'd that I know of. I can speak for the Coronado 60's, 90's and PST's because I have had one of each and I know they deliver. As this is a Coronado forum I will stick to my descriptions of the Coronado scopes and refrain from my opinions on the others out of respect for both.
I've had a 60mm single stack and double stack and found that the view was just amazing. When I got my 90 it was mainly for imaging purposes. Back then I was trying to shoot the sun with a color camera. It didn't work too well because the image through the scope is monochrome. Now that I have more experience I am considering getting a 60mm scope again. Mainly for portability and easy of use. Alot has changed since I got my first 60 and I now also have a 70mm Calcium telescope as well. The 60~70 range is awesome for solar imaging and viewing. I'm not sure why but it would seem that they are some how more balanced for average seeing conditions than the larger options. I think that there are more days of average seeing than there are days with exceptional seeing. This may play a part in why the view always looks good through a scope with a wider field but smaller aperture. When the seeing is good though you still can't beat a 90mm aperture with a smaller aperture but its pretty close.
I think that a pros and cons list would be in order before you make a purchase. Here are some quick ones I can think of between the 90 and 60.
As you can see, in my opinion the 60 is really an all around good sized scope to have. About the only thing I don't like about the 90 or the 60 is the focuser on them. Its an odd helical design and I prefer the traditional style focuser. Otherwise they are both built to perform.
I like your send off -"Clear Skyz".
Erie Pennsylvania on the banks of lake Erie is where I live.
According to the weather service we enjoy about 60 cloudless days a year.
So you can see that when we see the sun it is a special occasion indeed.
Your advice is swaying me towards the 60mm and your compaison table is right on.
I have a Canon 20Da and a Meade DSL camera. The Canon can be programmed for B&W while the Meade is a mono camera with color filters. Do you add the color in post imaging like Photoshop?
To my knowledge the images are nice thru a bino viewer. Any comments?
On my PST I have tried different types of eyepieces. The Cemax is nice, but the sharpest most eye pleasing image is with Brandon eyepieces from my Questar. I have also used Meades series 5000, but the Brandons have the edge.
Are you planning a book on solar photography? From the quality of the images you have amassed considerable knowledge and technical skills. Do you sell your photos or present them at art show or displays? You should make them available to the general public. They have no clue as to the wonders of old sol. With the increase in solar activity peoples awareness may increase.
Wow only 60 days. I'd go stir crazy but lately that's what we have been seeing. Most of the time I use a program called gimp which is a photoshop clone (but free). I think they call it levels in photoshop. You find that if you take a B&W image and then convert it to rgb it will be B&W still but it will have 3 channels. Adjusting the blue to near darkness, the green to about half and turning up the red a little will give you a false red / orange color. From there you can tweak it further to get just the color you like. If you go the opposite direction you can colorize it blue like a Calcium image.
Since I rarely view I really can't speak on the best eyepieces to use or binos. I mainly image the Sun. I do have a set of still in the wrapper unused Cemaxes that came with my 90. I hear they are good but I've never tried them. I typically use a couple old Meade 2000 eyepieces I bought years ago. I've been wanting to try some Televue eyepieces because I use their powermates and really like the quality. They are pricey though and I do not do enough viewing to justify them right now. People have said that the optics don't really matter with h-alpha but I think they do and I have as you have seen good optics in eyepieces and bad ones.
I do have a large collection of images and I helped Phil with the 90 part of the book that recently came out and I have been working on my own but work constraints have taken priority lately so I have had little time to work on it.
Yes 60 days of cloudless skies.
Many more with partial coverage.
Thank you for the salient advice on imaging.
I have a "clone" copy of Photoshop that I am anxious to try.
When I referred to the "bino's" I was refering to using them to observe the sun.
From my understanding you do not view very much?
Do you spend your time imaging?
From the amount of material you contributed you should be listed as co-author with Phil.
I have a copy and your material in it is great.
Sky & Telescope commented on the book in there last issue.
I do not agree with the writer's conclusion and his article should not be considered a review, but a footnote.
Patrick Moore's series cover a lot of pertinent topics in astronomy. It is difficult to get timely information published quickly and sometimes the editing must suffer. Later editions can polish the content. When S&T reviews Meade or Celestron equipment it is always good. Don't bite the hand that pays the bills!
Good luck with your book and save me an autographed copy!
I also just moved from the PST to the SolarMax 90 at .55 Angstoms. I just got mine last week and let me tell you, it is quite an understatement when you say there is a wow factor from the change.
I was absolutely thrilled with the 90, especially at the $4995 price. I had pre-ordered a Lunt 200mm but got so tired of all of the run around about production, I went with the Coronado price drop.
I use a Canon 40D and a Nikon Coolpix5100 but I am not getting the results I need photographically but as far as visually goes, the 90 is awesome!!!
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2019-04-24T20:13:57Z
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http://meade4m.com/index.php?/topic/1499-moving-up-to-the-solar-max-90-from-the-pst-any-advice-welcome/
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Kiln forming glass-melting cut or crushed glass together in a kiln until it becomes a single piece and shaping the glass with molds-has quickly become one of the most popular subjects in studio glasswork. This comprehensive introduction covers all of the fundamentals, such as fusing, slumping and draping, as well as some intermediate and advanced techniques, including pot melting, inclusions, mold-making and more. 19 exquisite projects, arranged by skill level, range from home décor items, like a wall sconce and fountain, to sculpture, and even an amber glass pendant.
This guide contains all the skills and tools you need to get started in the world of glass fusing. It will talk about what type of glass to use and how to cut it; how to work with a kiln from setup to project completion; how to make your own molds and glass accents. Includes instructions and full-size patterns for 18 projects: bowls, vases, plates, windchimes, candleholders, and more! Illustrated with hundreds of step-by-step photos, a gallery of inspiring projects, and a list of glass fusing resources. 160 pgs, 670 color photos, spiral bound.
Includes 20 exciting projects for the glass fuser. The projects vary in skill level and application. Vases, bracelets, clocks, and a bottle slumping firing schedule are just a few to choose from. The selection of projects were chosen from the favorites taught at the Vinery. This book will be a great guide for retail stores teaching fusing classes or for the hobbyist that wants to work independently. Provides clear step by step instructions and pictures.
Contains patterns for wind chimes for every season, holidays and special events. There are chimes for Christmas, Easter bunnies, New Year’s hats and champagne glass, Valentine hearts, autumn leaves, hummingbirds, ribbons or remembrance and more. With its illustrated, step-by-step instructions, this is an excellent book for beginning fusers and stained glass craftspeople alike.
Full of fused Christmas cookies, Gingerbread boys & girls, a Christmas tree, a 3D gingerbread house and church. Uses System 96 glass. Firing directions include as well as glass choices. Why not have a reminder of Christmas all year?
Extensively revised and expanded! 30% larger than the previous release with an improved tutorial and expanded sections on inclusions, surface techniques, pattern bars, high temperature firing, and more. Basic fusing and slumping projects, such as making coasters, tiles, bowls, and platters. Complete instructions for compatibility testing and annealing, including master firing schedules for fusing, slumping, and kiln casting. 208 pages with over 200 full color illustrations.
Your fast-track to fantastic fusing, casting and sinks! Includes firing guides. Patterns include clocks, candle holders, picture frames and much more. In this book, glass fusing is taken to a new level of sophistication. Ignited by curiosity, fueled by experimentation, you will find proven kiln crafting techniques approached from totally new directions. The result is a collection of incredibly exciting, awesomely fun, and often super-easy fresh new project ideas.
The first Fusing and Slumping "hands-on" manual of its kind has been updated with the latest fusing techniques and is now available in paperback. A user-friendly, easy-to-read, step-by-step lesson on how to fuse and slump, including information and pictures on what tools to use and how to use them correctly. Learn how to choose COE, measure glass, work with ceramic and stainless steel molds, and how to set firing schedules. Includes hundreds of tips and pictures to help make the learning process fun! 109 pages.
Contains 37 metal clay artists featuring 62 unique art-pieces. The work is showcased using high quality images taken at various view angles to enable the viewer to make a complete inspection of the piece – as if they were holding and turning the piece in their own hands. Each art-object is accompanied with a brief commentary about the artist’s work, a listing of statistics for the piece, plus the information on the artist.
Hot Techniques for Cool Projects. This 36 page book shows how to ramp up your skill level using various simple techniques in combination to create striking, artistic pieces. Both beginner and advanced fusers alike will find inspiration in the clever project shapes and more than 30 full color photographs showcasing the finished projects in sizzling trendy color schemes. Comes complete with more than 30 patterns, tips for project layout, stenciling and glass embossing, individual project assembly and firing instructions, plus fusing, slumping and draping firing guides for the projects included in the book.
Choose from over 30 art glass fusing projects designed to spark your imagination and ignite your creativity. This flashy assortment of easy-to-make projects features many holiday designs, including Halloween, Christmas, and Hanukah. Make beautiful fused bowls, plates, decorations, flats, and even kites! Choose from abstracts, marine life, flowers, frogs, and even a US flag. Firing guides and assembly information included. All projects shown in color pictures to assist in glass selection.
Looking for projects for tabletop kilns? Want to use up your scrap glass? Fun with Fusing contains 29 projects perfect for small kilns, classes and quick gifts. Make suncatchers, trivets, coasters or incorporate these designs into larger projects. Included are lots of fun animals, giraffe, panda, elephant, lion, puppy dogs, fish, hummingbirds, dragonflies and other fun subjects. Included are step-by-step instructions for construction, including how to make your own glass nuggets, materials lists and firing schedules.
Introduces new ways to utilize the bonanza of glass forming methods & materials through 18 lessons with names such as: Wear It (Jewelry), Display It (Holders), Hang It (Mirrors & Ornaments), Screw It (Clocks & Sculptures), Drop It (Vases), Zen It (Fountain), Rake It (hot combing), Sell It (marketing your work), plus 10 more. Fuse It will be a valuable resource for fusers of all skill levels with a desire to progress to the next step. More that 300 color photos offer a wealth of instruction and inspiring ideas for distinctive kiln formed creations.
If you′re running out of window space for your art glass creations, this book is what you need. Here are 15 contemporary designs for fused tiles to decorate your walls. Each tile is only 6"x6" so you can create them in even a very small kiln. These tiles are intended to be created in sets of three (or more) and then mounted, using hardware from Hang Your Glass, so that they "float" an inch or so in front of your wall. You can display the tile sets horizontally or vertically, depending what kind of space you are trying to enhance. Or use them individually to liven up a small nook or cranny.
Teaches how to easily, safely and inexpensively fire high quality photographs, graphics and text onto their fused glass projects using Fired-On Photo Fusing Decal Paper and any HP Black and White Laser printer. Takes all the guess work out of this exciting process giving step by step instructions and project ideas including instructions for colorizing sepia images. Filled with beautiful full color detailed photographs of exciting projects such as Wedding Invitation Plates, Family Portrait Brooches, Kids Own Drawing Tiles, Illustrated Stained Glass Panels and Treasured Family Recipe Platters. All fired images are permanent and food safe.
There are times when we would love to repeat a perfect firing outcome or an amazing, but unanticipated effect. There are other times when we have disappointing results that we would like to avoid in the future. These Fusing Log Sheets come in a writing pad style with convenient tear off pages. Each log page is pre-printed (in 2 colors) with easy to use check boxes for the most common types and styles of fuse firings. There is a space to describe the glass & components in the project and another to make a simple sketch. Then a conclusion and observation area is available for comments and suggestions to help you make appropriate decisions when planning similar projects in the future.
128 pages of creative ideas for making glass beads. 8 skilled beadmakers are given the challenge to create beads based on an inspiration--a color, a season, a painting, an emotion to see what they will create. The results are 323 color photos of their designs showing the variety of creative responses. Includes step-by-step techniques for using other materials with the glass to create unique beads.
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2019-04-21T04:15:02Z
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https://www.anythinginstainedglass.com/books/booksfusing.html
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Kyle Faircloth is the director of intercultural studies at Malaysia Baptist Theological Seminary in Penang, Malaysia, and a PhD student at the University of Bristol, UK.
Although evangelicals agree the church must be fervent in seeking to reach those who have little or no access to the gospel, this missiological consensus has not led to a theological consensus regarding the salvific state of those whom the church never reaches. Yet Daniel Strange seeks to throw fresh light on the discussion by proposing an alternative understanding of “unevangelized” based on a more nuanced explanation of divine revelation. This article will summarize Strange’s theory and then evaluate his approach by using the doctrinal rules instantiated by the solus Christus, sola fide, and fides ex auditu principles. For however one answers this disputed question in theology, Scripture is clear that salvation is through Christ alone by faith alone and that faith comes from hearing. The hope is that this doctrinal typology will facilitate not only this particular review, but also indicate a common theological environment in which evangelical theories on the unevangelized might be formulated and assessed.
Hence he claims that because “the ‘Reformed’ evangelical paradigm” precludes universal atonement, “there is no ‘problem’ of the unevangelised.”12 Yet if there are those who have only received general revelation, what then is this “light” and “responsibility” outside of special revelation?
As noted earlier, Strange attempts to make his case from a Reformed theological perspective, and specifically from “within the tradition represented by the Magisterial Reformers especially John Calvin and his followers.”38 Thus we might anticipate his claim that general revelation alone does not save but is enough to “condemn and ‘render without excuse.’”39 But whereas theologians usually base this assertion on an understanding that general revelation consists of little more than God’s communication of himself through the natural order,40 Strange distinguishes his approach by bringing in a much needed christological dimension to this standard confession.41 By connecting the Reformed appropriation of the prisca theologia to the protoevangelium in Genesis 3:15, he provides a framework to support his claim that God does not condemn the unevangelized for merely rejecting him through natural revelation, but for suppressing the proclamation of the gospel as well. Thus he is to be lauded for seeking to emphasize the need for an epistemic connection to the gospel of Christ in the theological discussion of the unevangelized. With this in mind, because Strange makes Genesis 3:15 the epistemic axiom of his understanding of revelation, we will focus on this particular point and seek to evaluate his theory scripturally, historically, and theologically from within his own stated terms of confessional faith.42 Our doctrinal typology for this assessment is that salvation is through Christ alone by faith alone, and faith comes from hearing (solus Christus, sola fide, and fides ex auditu).
First, scripturally speaking, we might question whether Genesis 3:15 is technically the first proclamation of the gospel whereby God announces his messianic intent in such a way that distinguishes this moment as the gospel’s epistemic source. For a canonical reading of Scripture shows that when Paul regards the source of human sin, death, and condemnation he points to Adam (Rom 5:12−21),47 but when he regards the first proclamation of the gospel and the basic elements for understanding faith in Christ, he points to Abraham (Rom 4:1−25; Gal 3:7−9, 15−29). This is not to say that God waited until the covenant with Abraham to initiate his redemptive work or that Strange has no theological basis for interpreting Genesis 3:15 as the protoevangelium.48 Rather, the point is that the promise given through Abraham is the hermeneutical lens for working out this interpretation. So although he seeks to explain Genesis 3:15 as the time “when the whole of humanity was in proximity of redemptive-historical events,”49 Strange nonetheless must rely exegetically upon Genesis 12 to support this argument. For the liminal moment from which we discern God’s redemptive intent is historically and textually correlated to its substantiation in Abraham. To be sure, Strange asserts that “Abraham and his descendants are a part of this ‘seed’ theology (cf. Gen. 3:15),”50 but it is perhaps more accurate to speak of Abraham and his descendants as the progenitor of this seed theology. For an intratextual reading of Scripture places the epistemic source of the protoevangelium within the historical period beginning with Genesis 12, when, as Paul declares, the gospel was preached “beforehand to Abraham” (Gal 3:8 NASB). This is why Christopher Wright asserts that “fromthe great promise of God to Abraham in Genesis 12:1−3 we know this God to be totally, covenantally and eternally committed to the mission of blessing the nations throughthe agency of the people of Abraham.”51 Thus, strictly speaking, the epistemological source of the gospel is Genesis 12:3.
While Strange recognizes a “gradual progression in the specificity of revelation as redemptive history progresses,” he nonetheless collapses God’s “authentic and genuine knowledge of himself and his salvation in his chosen people” into the textual and historical moment of Genesis 3:15.57 But if this particular text in Scripture demands further illumination before readers can grasp its redemptive content then, scripturally speaking, there is no reason to assume this particular moment in history comprises the epistemic origin of the gospel apart from further revelation in time. As John Sailhamer points out, “There remains in this verse a puzzling yet important ambiguity: Who is the ‘seed’ of the woman? It seems obvious that the purpose of verse 15 has not been to answer that question, but rather to raise it. The remainder of the book is, in fact, the author’s answer.”58 There is therefore no definitive intratextual support for claiming that those who lived in historical proximity to God’s verbal response to human sin in Genesis 3 would have understood these words as an offer of messianic redemption to which they must respond in faith. Hence, one can discern the messianic intent of this verse, if any, historically and textually only after Abraham.
Irenaeus teaches that Christ unlocked his self-communication in Scripture for the apostles, and we receive this hermeneutic through the apostolic proclamation of Christ. He claims that it is impossible to see the protoevangelium in Genesis 3:15 prior to the life, death, and resurrection of Christ (Haer. 4.26.1). Thus, scripturally and historically speaking, Abraham is the epistemic source for discerning the person of Christ (Gal 3:7−9), and Christ is the epistemic source for discerning all that is written of him in the corpus of Scripture (Luke 24:27, 32, 44). Walter Moberly concludes, “Israel’s scriptures not only prepare the way for Christ, … there is also a retrospective movement from Jesus back to Israel’s scriptures whereby they are recognized to be what they would not otherwise be recognized to be.”61 Therefore if one can perceive the gospel in Genesis 3:15 only after Christ, and indeed this potential interpretation did not obtain until the second century AD, then once again there is little reason to assume the original hearers comprehended and responded to a messianic purpose with just these words alone.
Third, considering Strange’s commitment to a “classical” Reformed theology, it is perhaps significant, theologically speaking, that John Calvin chooses the plural translation of “offspring” in Genesis 3:15, and thus appeals to the sensus plenior for a christological reading. He makes this connection in several steps. First, he interprets the plain meaning of the text to be “that there should always be the hostile strife between the human race and serpents” and that humanity will remain “superior” to serpents.62 Then, in a second step, he makes a “transition” to an anagogical interpretation whereby God “assails Satan under the name of the serpent,” so that people may first “learn to beware of Satan as of the most deadly enemy; then, that they may contend against him with the assured confidence of victory.”63 Thus, as regards the meaning of the verse itself, Calvin interprets “the seed to mean the posterity of the woman generally.”64 Yet because it is true that many people do indeed fall under the power of Satan, he connects this verse to Christ in a final step through a Pauline explanation of Abraham, saying, “So Paul, from the seed of Abraham, leads us to Christ.”65 In the end, Calvin understands the seeds of the woman to signify the church, which will gain victory over Satan through the seed of Abraham; who is Christ the Head.66 So we find that Calvin also identifies the protoevangelium beginning with Abraham and discerned only after Christ.
Though Strange need not agree with Calvin’s interpretation of Genesis 3:15, he would do well to work through Calvin’s position as he seeks to develop his own Reformed view. For if both Paul and Calvin place the protoevangelium with Abraham through a post-advent reading of Scripture, then this fact alone must have substantial implications for his single-source theory of revelation.
Again, the strength of Strange’s theory lies in his recognition of the need for an explicit connection with the proclamation of the gospel in the discussion of the unevangelized. And he takes a positive step towards filling this theological gap by highlighting Psalm 19 and asserting that this passage “is a microcosm of the symbiotic relationship between general and special revelation,” and that “God’s purpose in general revelation has never been for it to function independently of his ‘worded’ special revelation.”67 Yet in light of the doctrinal setting effected by the solus Christus, sola fide, and fides ex auditu, there is a critical weakness in the way he develops this strength.
For instance, if general and special revelation cannot operate apart from each other, and if general revelation includes a remnant of special revelation for which people are guilty through their implicit suppression, then it is just as possible they can be forgiven through their implicit acceptance of this ubiquitous knowledge. The problem for Strange is that in claiming there is a vestige of special revelation among the unevangelized, the logical structure of his argument requires that he allow for the Spirit’s work of special grace as well; otherwise there remains an internal dissonance in his theory.73 Strange holds that one cannot separate the ontological work of special grace from the epistemological presence of special revelation.74 Thus, irrespective of its condition—whether in “embryonic” or “remnantal” form—the presence of this revelation includes the regenerative work of the Spirit.75 So the only way he can balance his theory is to either allow the possibility that the unevangelized can have implicit faith in the same way they have implicit false faith—i.e., through the flow of universal knowledge about God and Christ rooted historically in the protoevangelium of Genesis 3:15—or explain how the unevangelized can have explicit false faith in the same way the evangelized can have explicit saving faith—i.e., fides ex auditu—thus making his notion of remnantal revelation irrelevant. Yet considering his particular Reformed theological framework, the first option cannot support an evangelical understanding of solus Christus, sola fide, and fides ex auditu (the crux of his criticism of Pinnock), leaving only the second option, which would require substantive changes to his theory.
To this purpose, Strange may want to set aside the scientific notion of a monogenetic view of human origins, the anthropological theory of original monotheism, and the deistic version of prisca theologia to make better use of his stated doctrinal and confessional material.76 For if the scriptural, historical, and theological resources indicate that the protoevangelium was introduced with Abraham so that everyone was not, has not been, and still are not in proximity to redemptive-historical events, then how might one explain false faith without separating the ontological and epistemological elements of faith? For this he may find creedal support from the Baptist confessions listed in his theological material, which state, “Nothing prevents the salvation of the greatest sinner except his own voluntary refusal to accept Jesus Christ as teacher, Saviour and Lord.”77 Thus he might speculate on how non-elect unevangelized people will come to refuse Christ explicitly.
Or, if the Reformed doctrines of total depravity and particular atonement imply that there is no “problem” of the unevangelized,78 then perhaps he could approach this subject indirectly by addressing related questions within Reformed theology perceived to be genuine problems. As George points out in his review of Strange, “There are a cluster of issues even Reformed theologians need to think through more clearly than has yet been done. What about the salvation of those who die in infancy, or those who remain mentally incompetent?”79 For instance, the Westminster Confession states, “Elect infants, dying in infancy, are regenerated, and saved by Christ, through the Spirit, who works when, and where, and how he pleases: so also are all other elect persons who are incapable of being outwardly called by the ministry of the Word” (10.3). Thus to affirm this confession, he might seek to explain how this particular group of unevangelized people will eventually receive the outward calling of the Word for saving faith—that is, the “fully orbed character of notitia, fiducia and assensus” ministered ex auditu.80 And by dealing with this issue he may also discover ways to approach the broader theological question of the unevangelized.
As his theory stands, however, his assertion that all humanity was in proximity to the gospel of faith and salvation in Genesis 3:15, and his subsequent notion of remnantal revelation whereby all people have epistemic guilt through implicit false faith, compromises the doctrinal relation between the sola fide and fides ex auditu principles. That is to say, if faith obtains through explicit hearing of the word of Christ (Rom 10:17), then the necessary epistemic conditions for belief are the same conditions necessary for unbelief. Which means that just as the notion of remnantal revelation cannot support the possibility of saving faith among the unevangelized, neither can it support the possibility of false faith. Yet if Strange will allow his scriptural and confessional material to have primary influence over the speculative nature of his theory,81 then perhaps he will be in a better position to offer a creative articulation of revelation for addressing the issue of the unevangelized.
“Inclusivism” is the standard label in the theology of religions for positions which affirm that salvation is found only in Jesus, yet are open to the idea of implicit faith and, traditionally, the possibility that other religions contain salvific elements. See, Paul F. Knitter, Jesus and the Other Names: Christian Mission and Global Responsibility (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1996), 4–12; or Christopher J. H. Wright, The Uniqueness of Jesus (London: Monarch, 2001), 37–85.
Daniel Strange, The Possibility of Salvation Among the Unevangelised: An Analysis of Inclusivism in Recent Evangelical Theology, Paternoster Theological Monographs (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2006), 26.
Clark Pinnock, A Wideness in God’s Mercy: The Finality of Jesus Christ in a World of Religions (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992).
Strange, The Possibility of Salvation Among the Unevangelised, 219–24.
Timothy George, review of The Possibility of Salvation Among the Unevangelised, by Daniel Strange, Them 31 (2006): 110.
Strange, The Possibility of Salvation Among the Unevangelised, 36–38, 304–6. The belief in universal atonement, that Christ died for all, is different from the belief in universalism, that all will be saved.
Daniel Strange, “General Revelation: Sufficient or Insufficient?,” in Faith Comes by Hearing: A Response to Inclusivism, ed. Christopher W. Morgan and Robert A. Peterson (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 40–77.
Strange depends primarily on Gerald McDermott’s study of Jonathan Edwards’s use of prisca theologia. See, McDermott, Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods: Christian Theology, Enlightenment Religion, and Non-Christian Faiths (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
See J. H. Bavinck, “General Revelation and the Non-Christian Religions,” Free University Quarterly 4 (1955): 43–55; idem, The J.H. Bavinck Reader, ed. John Bolt, James D. Bratt, and P. J. Visser (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 95–109.
Daniel Strange, For Their Rock Is Not as Our Rock: An Evangelical Theology of Religions (Nottingham: InterVarsity Press, 2014); published in the USA under the title Their Rock Is Not Like Our Rock: A Theology of Religions (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2015). This article refers to the UK edition.
Strange, For Their Rock Is Not as Our Rock, 98.
Ibid., 104. Strange cites Peter Harrison in reference to the “single-source” theory of revelation, ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 131.
Strange, For Their Rock Is Not as Our Rock, 98. Original monotheism is a theory that synchronizes world history with the chronology of biblical history to claim that the first religion of all human beings was the monotheistic faith of the Bible. For a contemporary assessment, see Winfried Corduan, In the Beginning God: A Fresh Look at the Case for Original Monotheism (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2013).
Strange, The Possibility of Salvation Among the Unevangelised, 8.
Strange, “General Revelation,” 41; cf. idem, The Possibility of Salvation Among the Unevangelised, 282; For Their Rock Is Not as Our Rock, 93, 324.
For example, see The Canons of Dordt, “The First Main Points of Doctrine,” Article 4, and “The Third and Fourth Main Points of Doctrine,” Article 15.
In For Their Rock Is Not as Our Rock, Strange develops a multifacited and multidisciplined theology of religions which deserves a fuller treatment than this article will provide. The following assessment will only consider his notion of revelation and salvation concerning the question of the unevangelised.
Strange lists these confessional terms in The Possibility of Salvation Among the Unevangelised, 8–9; Gavin D’Costa, Paul F Knitter, and Daniel Strange, Only One Way? Three Christian Responses to the Uniqueness of Christ in a Pluralistic World (London: SCM, 2011), 92–93; and For Their Rock Is Not as Our Rock, 41–42.
Strange, For Their Rock Is Not as Our Rock, 82.
Strange, For Their Rock Is Not as Our Rock, 89–90.
It is interesting, and perhaps relevant, to note that Paul was the first biblical author to make this connection.
It is common parlance in Reformed theology to speak of the messianic intent of Genesis 3:15. For example, see, Michael S. Horton, The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims On the Way (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), 152n3, 972; Thomas R. Schreiner, The King in His Beauty: A Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), 19–20; and James M. Hamilton, God’s Glory in Salvation Through Judgment: A Biblical Theology (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010), 82–91.
Strange, For Their Rock Is Not as Our Rock, 104.
Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2006), 63.
C. John Collins, Genesis 1–4: A Linguistic, Literary, And Theological Commentary (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R, 2006), 156.
Ibid., 178–79; Jack Collins, “A Syntactical Note (Genesis 3:15): Is the Woman’s Seed Singular or Plural?,” TynB 48 (1997): 139–148; R. A. Martin, “The Earliest Messianic Interpretation of Genesis 3:15,” JBL 84, (December 1965): 425–27; Jason Derouchie, “The Blessing-Commission, the Promised Offspring, and the Toledot Structure of Genesis,” JETS 56 (2013): 219–47.
He mentions this issue in The Possibility of Salvation Among the Unevangelised, 168–69 and in For Their Rock Is Not as Our Rock, 81, but only briefly with no discussion of the particular debate.
Collins, Genesis 1–4: A Linguistic, Literary, 158. The sensus plenior refers to a “fuller” or “deeper” sense of the meaning of a text which goes beyond authorial intent.
Ibid., 158–59; Collins notes Romans 16:20 and Revelation 12:17 as possibly alluding to Genesis 3:15, but also explains how this reading is by no means definitive.
Strange, For Their Rock Is Not as Our Rock, 222–23.
John H. Sailhamer, The Pentateuch as Narrative: A Biblical-Theological Commentary (Grand Rapids: Michigan: Zondervan, 1995), 108.
Justin Martyr may also allude to this verse in Dial. 102. The earliest “messianic” interpretation of Genesis 3:15 may be the Septuagint, according to Collins, “A Syntactical Note,” 139–48.
John Behr, The Way to Nicaea, The formation of Christian Theology 1 (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), 132.
R. W. L. Moberly, The Bible, Theology, and Faith: A Study of Abraham and Jesus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 70.
John Calvin, Commentaries on the Book of Genesis, trans. John King, repr. ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1948), 1:167–68.
Strange, The Possibility of Salvation Among the Unevangelised, 221.
Strange, For Their Rock Is Not As Our Rock, 82–87, 194.
Gavin D’Costa also recognizes this issue in Strange’s theory of religions. See, D’Costa, “Gavin D’Costa Responds to Paul Knitter and Daniel Strange,” in D’Costa, Knitter, and Strange, Only One Way?, 149–50.
Strange, For Their Rock Is Not as Our Rock, 221–22; idem, The Possibility of Salvation Among the Unevangelised, 139–290.
Strange, For Their Rock Is Not As Our Rock, 222.
Ibid., 108–10; see also Steven Studebaker, Jonathan Edwards’ Social Augustinian Trinitarianism in Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, Gorgias Studies in Philosophy and Theology (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2008), 222–23.
1925 Baptist Faith and Message, 6, emphasis added; see also, The New Hampshire Confession of Faith, 6.
Strange, The Possibility of Salvation Among the Unevangelised, 266.
George, review of “The Possibility of Salvation Among the Unevangelised” (by Strange), 110.
Knowledge, assent, and trust in Christ; see, Strange, For Their Rock Is Not As Our Rock, 222n22; also, The Possibility of Salvation Among the Unevangelised, 30.
Strange, For Their Rock Is Not as Our Rock, 35.
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2019-04-25T22:16:52Z
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http://themelios.thegospelcoalition.org/article/daniel-strange-on-the-theological-question-of-the-unevangelized
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Malthus' Essay on the Principle of PopulationA process essay is used for an explanation of making or breaking something. Often, it is written in chronological order or numerical order to show step-by-step processes. It has all the qualities of a technical document with the only difference is that it is often written in descriptive mood, while a technical document is mostly in imperative mood.A narrative uses tools such as flashbacks, flash-forwards, and transitions that often build to a climax. The focus of a narrative is the plot. When creating a narrative, authors must determine their purpose, consider their audience, establish their point of view, use dialogue, and organize the narrative. A narrative is usually arranged chronologically.The defining features of a "cause and effect" essay are causal chains that connect from a cause to an effect, careful language, and chronological or emphatic order. A writer using this rhetorical method must consider the subject, determine the purpose, consider the audience, think critically about different causes or consequences, consider a thesis statement, arrange the parts, consider the language, and decide on a conclusion.An argumentative essay is a critical piece of writing, aimed at presenting objective analysis of the subject matter, narrowed down to a single topic. The main idea of all the criticism is to provide an opinion either of positive or negative implication. As such, a critical essay requires research and analysis, strong internal logic and sharp structure. Its structure normally builds around introduction with a topic's relevance and a thesis statement, body paragraphs with arguments linking back to the main thesis, and conclusion. In addition, an argumentative essay may include a refutation section where conflicting ideas are acknowledged, described, and criticized. Each argument of argumentative essay should be supported with sufficient evidence, relevant to the point.Magazine or newspaperDescriptive writing is characterized by sensory details, which appeal to the physical senses, and details that appeal to a reader's emotional, physical, or intellectual sensibilities. Determining the purpose, considering the audience, creating a dominant impression, using descriptive language, and organizing the description are the rhetorical choices to consider when using a description. A description is usually arranged spatially but can also be chronological or emphatic. The focus of a description is the scene. Description uses tools such as denotative language, connotative language, figurative language, metaphor, and simile to arrive at a dominant impression. One university essay guide states that "descriptive writing says what happened or what another author has discussed; it provides an account of the topic". Lyric essays are an important form of descriptive essays.An Executive Core Qualification, or ECQ, is a narrative statement that is required when applying to Senior Executive Service positions within the US Federal government. Like the KSAs, ECQs are used along with resumes to determine who the best applicants are when several candidates qualify for a job. The Office of Personnel Management has established five executive core qualifications that all applicants seeking to enter the Senior Executive Service must demonstrate.Expository essay is used to inform, describe or explain a topic, using important facts and teaching reader about the topic. Mostly written in third-person, using "it", "he", "she", "they". Expository essay uses formal language to discuss someone or something. Examples of expository essays are: a medical or biological condition, social or technological process, life or character of a famous person. Writing of expository essay often consists of following next steps: organizing thoughts (brainstorming), researching a topic, developing a thesis statement, writing the introduction, writing the body of essay, writing the conclusion. Expository essays are often assigned as a part of SAT and other standardized testings or as a homework for high school and college students.Main article: Free responseAn 1895 cover of Harpers, a US magazine that prints a number of essays per issue.
Forms and stylesDescriptive writing is characterized by sensory details, which appeal to the physical senses, and details that appeal to a reader's emotional, physical, or intellectual sensibilities. Determining the purpose, considering the audience, creating a dominant impression, using descriptive language, and organizing the description are the rhetorical choices to consider when using a description. A description is usually arranged spatially but can also be chronological or emphatic. The focus of a description is the scene. Description uses tools such as denotative language, connotative language, figurative language, metaphor, and simile to arrive at a dominant impression. One university essay guide states that "descriptive writing says what happened or what another author has discussed; it provides an account of the topic". Lyric essays are an important form of descriptive essays.DescriptiveJapanEmploymentFilmA narrative uses tools such as flashbacks, flash-forwards, and transitions that often build to a climax. The focus of a narrative is the plot. When creating a narrative, authors must determine their purpose, consider their audience, establish their point of view, use dialogue, and organize the narrative. A narrative is usually arranged chronologically."After School Play Interrupted by the Catch and Release of a Stingray" is a simple time-sequence photo essay.Main article: Long-form journalismFamiliarClassification is the categorization of objects into a larger whole while division is the breaking of a larger whole into smaller parts.
In the realm of music, composer Samuel Barber wrote a set of "Essays for Orchestra," relying on the form and content of the music to guide the listener's ear, rather than any extra-musical plot or story.FamiliarAcademicThe abstract-universal: In this pole "we find those essayists who do their work in the world of high abstractions", who are never personal and who seldom mention the particular facts of experience.ExpositoryDescriptive writing is characterized by sensory details, which appeal to the physical senses, and details that appeal to a reader's emotional, physical, or intellectual sensibilities. Determining the purpose, considering the audience, creating a dominant impression, using descriptive language, and organizing the description are the rhetorical choices to consider when using a description. A description is usually arranged spatially but can also be chronological or emphatic. The focus of a description is the scene. Description uses tools such as denotative language, connotative language, figurative language, metaphor, and simile to arrive at a dominant impression. One university essay guide states that "descriptive writing says what happened or what another author has discussed; it provides an account of the topic". Lyric essays are an important form of descriptive essays.ReflectiveJohn Locke's 1690 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.Compare and contrast essays are characterized by a basis for comparison, points of comparison, and analogies. It is grouped by the object (chunking) or by point (sequential). The comparison highlights the similarities between two or more similar objects while contrasting highlights the differences between two or more objects. When writing a compare/contrast essay, writers need to determine their purpose, consider their audience, consider the basis and points of comparison, consider their thesis statement, arrange and develop the comparison, and reach a conclusion. Compare and contrast is arranged emphatically.An Executive Core Qualification, or ECQ, is a narrative statement that is required when applying to Senior Executive Service positions within the US Federal government. Like the KSAs, ECQs are used along with resumes to determine who the best applicants are when several candidates qualify for a job. The Office of Personnel Management has established five executive core qualifications that all applicants seeking to enter the Senior Executive Service must demonstrate.An essayist writes a familiar essay if speaking to a single reader, writing about both themselves, and about particular subjects. Anne Fadiman notes that "the genre's heyday was the early nineteenth century," and that its greatest exponent was Charles Lamb. She also suggests that while critical essays have more brain than the heart, and personal essays have more heart than brain, familiar essays have equal measures of both.
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2019-04-24T13:48:32Z
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http://www.geocaching.cz/videos/view-369-descriptive-kitchen-words-aaabbbggggdddccccbbbdddoooo/
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Note: I’ve just spent the last two weeks in rural Botswana, teaching writing classes on a creative writing safari. There was no Internet, and sometimes no electricity, both of which are useful when it comes to uploading stuff to my blog.
I did, however, have my netbook with me and wrote blog entries whenever my battery was not conked out. I’ll be uploading those blurbs over the next couple of weeks, now that I’m home in Seattle.
I am engaged to a delightful woman who has one severe flaw. Kattina likes to go camping, sometimes for weeks on end. She believes that sleeping in tents – in which you have condensation dripping on your face, centipedes crawling up your nostrils, and only two matches and a pile of wet logs to hypothetically keep you warm – is a good thing.
I am not of that ilk. I have a perfectly comfortable, urban condominium, which I pay a lot of money for. But Kattina thinks it is utterly cool that I’m working in Africa this week, sleeping in tents in rural Botswana, communing with nature and getting charged by hippopotamuses while she is back in Seattle, lavishing in the comforts of home.
My work here in Africa first sparked to life two Christmases ago in Denver, Colorado. I was hanging out with my step-brother, Bill, whom I didn’t actually know all that well at the time, at a dysfunctional family Christmas gathering. I was hanging out with Bill because (1) he has an interesting career as the owner of an African safari company, and (2) because he kept offering me beer, which one needs at dysfunctional family Christmas gatherings.
It ended up being a pretty good dysfunctional family Christmas.
I wondered for a moment. Botswana? It exists? People go there?
I had always thought Botswana was a fictitious place, like Oz, or Narnia, or Kalamazoo; a place with a fun-to-say name that humor writers could insert into their work as a comedic metaphor for a faraway and unreachable land. But Bill was claiming Botswana was an actual country, he had been there, and I could go there too.
I am writing this in my safari tent. It is not the kind of tent Kattina likes to sleep in. This tent is massive, approximately the same size as Kalamazoo. It has two twin beds, a paraffin lamp, a coat rack, and a set of wicker drawers in which to put my various articles of khaki-colored clothing. It is also supposed to have an emergency whistle in case a leopard tries to munch through the wall. I have been unable to locate the emergency whistle, however.
Outside my door is a fence made of reeds, which encloses a makeshift private bathroom consisting of a flushable toilet, a sink, a bar of soap, and a “bucket shower.” When I say “private,” I mean I am the only one who uses it. It does not actually offer much in the way of privacy. Part of the fence that surrounds the toilet is only three feet high, allowing me to sit and look out over a lush field of green, leafy things, and allowing hungry leopards to look in at me as I sit in a highly vulnerable position. The bucket shower? I’ll get to that in a couple of days.
4:17 a.m. – Lie in bed with open eyes and a full bladder. Listen to the crunchy sound outside. The crunchy sound is the trees, getting stepped on by elephants. Debate whether or not it is safe to go relieve myself. Make a run for it. Get back to bed.
4:19 a.m. – Fall asleep again.
4:23 a.m. – Birds begin chirping. Loudly. Some warble. Some squawk. Some chatter. Some cluck. There is one bird that sounds like a frog, another that sounds like the annoying guy behind you in the supermarket line who won’t stop whistling the same six notes over and over. One bird is known as the “blacksmith” because its chirp resembles a blacksmith’s hammer striking an anvil. I don’t know if you have ever tried to sleep while somebody was banging on an anvil outside your bedroom, but unless you are fortunate enough to be deaf, this is not an easy thing to do.
I also thought I heard a bird that sounded like a ghost going “Whoooo!” but it turned out to be a hyena. Apparently, sometimes hyenas do not laugh. They haunt. They’re probably pissed at the birds for waking them up so early.
The most distinct sounding bird here is the Cape Turtle Dove. It chirps out a guttural warble with a distinct rhythm – short squawk, long squawk, short squawk, like the Morse Code letter “R.” Some people here say it’s saying “Bot-swaaa-na. Bot-swaaa-na.” Others claim the bird is saying, “Drink lager. Drink lager.” Really, bird? It’s 4:23 in the morning. The bars are closed. Leave me alone.
5:14 a.m. – Finally fall asleep again.
5:30 a.m. – A safari camp employee stands outside my tent and shouts, “Knock knock,”until I wake up.
6:03 a.m. – Get out of bed slather myself with sun screen, stuff a freshly baked muffin in my mouth, and greet my other safari mates, who, like the birds, are way too perky for six in the morning. I am working, and am therefore obliged to act perky even if I don’t feel it. They, on the other hand, are on vacation. On vacation, one normally should snooze later than 5:30 a.m., but these people are here to see the animals, who are already up and snorting, growling, grunting, or whatever else they do in their particular animal dialect.
10:30 a.m. – Return to camp for brunch. This is serious deliciousness. Omelets, bacon, sausage. I begin to wake up.
11:30 a.m. – Time for the day’s writing class. I teach my classes outside at the table where we eat our meals. This is a beautiful setting, surrounded by Acacia trees and wildflowers, and exotic species of birds who land right at our feet, totally distracting everybody from everything I am trying to teach them about travel writing.
12:30 p.m. – Free time to write, nap, or pilfer booze from the free bar. Not that I would ever do that.
3:30 p.m. – Lunch, which consists of lots of food, which is impossible to eat because I am still digesting my omelet.
6:45 p.m. – The sundowner. This is an old and delightful safari tradition, in which people take a break from animal viewing to watch the sun go down and drink cocktails out in the bush. I mention this stop is hypothetical because sometimes wild animals ruin everything. For example, three days ago, we were all ready to start sipping adult beverages when we heard a lion roaring in the distance. Our local guide, whose name is Doctor, put the Land Rover into high gear and bounced us on an off-road rampage as thorny bushes scratched us in the face. The Land Rover, you see, is an open vehicle. It has no windows, making it easier to see the wildlife, and making it easier for the wildlife to jump inside and eat me. After a 20-minute chase, we found the lion – a majestic, 400-pound male with a bushy mane, who laid on the ground yawning while I pondered its splendor, and the fact that I was missing my gin and tonic. We watched the lion yawn for a long time, waiting for it to roar, shining a spotlight on it as darkness fell. It would not roar. So we turned the spotlight off, hoping the change in lighting might induce some roarage. We waited. And waited. It grew completely dark. I began to nod off. Yes, it is true. For a minute or two, I actually fell asleep, 30 feet away from a lion, in an unenclosed vehicle. Falling asleep this close to a lion is not recommended. But hey, I couldn’t help it. I was horribly sleep deprived. Damn birds.
After dark, the game drive continues. A local tracker, with superhuman eyesight, sits in a seat mounted on the front of the Land Rover and scans the land and sky for nocturnal animals. Animals such as spring hare, who are like a cross between a rabbit and a kangaroo, or owls. I like owls. Not only do they look cool, they also are awake late at night, and do not make so much damn noise early in the morning.
At 8:30, we return to camp for dinner. At 10:30, we agree that it’s getting to be bedtime. At 12:30, I go to bed, sometimes writing for an hour or so. At 4:17 the next morning, the cycle begins again.
So there you have it: a glimpse of life here in the Okavango Delta, in Botswana, which, it turns out, is not fictitious. The adventures are big. The bucket showers are warm. The people are kind. And the birds really need to keep their beaks shut, early in the morning.
To join one of Bill’s safaris, check out his company, The Wild Source, at thewildsource.com.
If you’d like to come along on a journaling and creative writing adventure, my next tour is to southern Vietnam in October, 2010. Visit traveljournaling.com/vietnam for full details. Bill and I are also pondering another African writing safari next year. Subscribe to my free e-mail newsletter for all the latest plans.
We can also both arrange private small-group tours – Bill throughout Africa, me anywhere you want to go write. If you’d like more info, you can contact us through the above websites.
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2019-04-19T21:16:45Z
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http://www.globejotting.com/holy-crap-botswana-is-real/
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Music is one form of art and is integrated with human culture from time immemorial. Music has great effect on our brains. Listening to the music of various forms can give calming or soothing effect, reduces anxiety and sadness, and improves the quality of life. A number of researchers and studies have explored the role of musical therapy in the management of patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI).,,,,,,, Indian music comprises various ragas. Raga is a music structure which has a set of rules and specific musical notes. These rules and notes are specific to each raga. Due to this, the ragas can affect the mood or emotion, cognition, attention, memory etc., of a person. Acquired brain damage can be due to blunt trauma or secondary to surgery. Patients who had undergone cerebral surgeries often suffer from emotional disturbances, depression, agitation, poor quality of life, poor participation in communication due to aphasia, and at times sleep disturbances. Knowing the positive effects of music helps us to provide a comprehensive treatment to patients along with standard medical and rehabilitation care. Music was introduced in rehabilitation of head injury individuals at the time of World War II and its practice increased in Western hospitals thereafter., The aim of the present study is to know the effect of musical therapy in postoperative cerebral surgery patients.
A prospective study was conducted on patients who had undergone surgery for various cerebral etiologies in the Department of Neurosurgery of Narayana Medical College Hospital, Andhra Pradesh (India). Patients who are above 18-year-old and having moderate-to-severe brain damage were considered for musical therapy. Severity was decided based on Glasgow coma scale (GCS) score. A number of ten patients were selected for musical therapy. Details of the patients are listed in [Table 1] and [Table 2]. All the selected patients were given South Indian classical instrumental music using mp3 player with earphones thrice a day. The volume of the music was kept at constant level throughout all sessions, and volume was lower than normal conversation level (on 1–15 level volume was set at 3). Three ragas were selected; Hindola, Todi, and Kalyani. Hindola was given in the morning, Todi was given in the afternoon, and Kalyani was given in the evening.,, Hindolam is a carnatic ragam and is a audava ragam means pentatonic scale. It is a janya ragam (derived scale) and does not possess all seven swaras (Sa, Ri, Ga, Ma, Pa, Da, Ni). Thia ragam is usually soothing to listen. This ragam is symmetrical in ascending (arohanam– S G2 M1 D1 N2 S) and descending (avarohanam– S N2 D1 M1 G2 S). Due to the symmetrical nature of arohanam and avarohanam, this ragam is improvized very well and commonly used in concerts. Hanumatodi ragam is popularly known as Thodi ragam is a carnatic ragam and is one of the common ragas used in music concerts. This is a melakarta ragam (parent scale) and difficult to perform due to its notes and intonation. The arohanam structure of this raga is S R1 G2 M1 P D1 N2 S, and avarohanam structure is S N2 D1 P M1 G2 R1 S. Kalyani ragam is a carnatic ragam and is melakarta (parent scale) ragam having all seven swaras. The word Kalyani means, she who causes auspicious things and is usually performed in the starting of the concert. The arohana structure of this raga is S R2 G3 M2 P D2 N3 S, and avarohana structure is S N3 D2 P M2 G3 R2 S.
These ragas were given time specifically because, in that particular time, each raga is more effective and all ragas are known to evoke calming/soothing effect. Each session of the music was 30 min in duration, and music experience was given for a week, three times in a day.
Heart rate, systolic blood pressure (SBP), respiratory rate, pupillary movement, and motor activity were considered as variables of interest to identify the effect of musical therapy. Effect of musical therapy was estimated as change between pre- and post-session values. Prerecording values of vital parameters was considered as baseline recording. To avoid bias in data collection, vital parameters were recorded by ICU nursing staff (who was changed in 3 shifts). All participants were observed for three times a day for subsequent 7 days. 21 readings for each patient, like these 210 observations of 10 participants were summarized. Changes in study variable observed after musical therapy were expressed in percentages by assuming denominator of 210 observations. Statistical computations were performed using SPSS version 24.0 software for Mac. Changes in variable under consideration were estimated in terms of percentages. Overall unit increase as well as decrease in study variable in mentioned separately.
Ten patients with 9 males and 1 female were selected for the study on the basis of GCS scores. The average age of participants was 48.5 years (23–71). Among five study variables, motor activity and pupillary movements were qualitative responses; hence, excluded from further consideration of this study. Changes are heart rate, respiratory rate, and SBP were represented in percentages to total of 21 (3 session/day for consecutive 7 days) reading of each of ten participants.
Change in heart rate was observed in 162 (77%) of responses while 48 (14%) responses were not changed and remained missing. Mean unit change recorded in heart rate after music therapy was 0.92 units, which was analyzed separately for increase and decrease response in pre- and post-music therapy. On an average, 5.20 units heart rate was came down while in remaining patients, it was found to be increased by 6.20 units.
One hundred and thirty-three (63%) responses of SBP were found changed after music therapy while 77 (37%) were either not changes or remained missing. Mean unit change recorded in SBP after music therapy was 1.36 units, which was analyzed separately for increase and decrease response in pre- and post-music therapy. On average, 9.10 units SBP was lowered while in remaining patients it was increased by 10.95 units.
One hundred and thirty-five (64%) responses of Respiratory Rate (RR) were changed, and 75 (36%) were not changes or remained missing. Mean unit change recorded in heart rate after music therapy was 0.13 units, which was analyzed separately for increase and decrease response in pre- and post-music therapy. On an average, 3.00 units respiratory rate was came down while in remaining patients, it was found to be increased by 4.22 units.
Pupillary response and Motor activity: Being qualitative values, changes in both of these responses were not found to be changing for majority of cases (83%). For remaining, 17% these both responses were missing, and hence, not considered for further calculation of the study.
Koelsch in his extensive works on music perception and musical therapy reported some scientific perspective of musical therapy. He reported that five factors which contribute to effect of musical therapy. They are attention modulation, emotion modulation, cognitive modulation, behavior modulation, and communication modulation. Attention modulation: Due to the presence of music, person's attention will be diverted easily from negative feelings such as depression, sadness, anxiety, etc., Thus, it gives benefit. Emotion modulation: Neuroimaging studies showed limbic and paralimbic systems are involved in emotional changes. As the music has the ability to evoke and change emotions, it will be useful in the treatment of pathologic anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder, and depression. Cognitive modulation: Analysis of in terms of decoding the syntax and semantics in the music helps in the long-term care of patients of Alzheimer's disease. Behavior modulation: This includes evoking and conditioning of behaviors such as physical movements by stimulating the premotor cortex. Communication modulation: Music helps in training nonverbal communication skills through active music therapy, where patient makes music and is used extensively for disorders such as autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder etc.
There is a limited research about scientific findings of the effect of musical therapy in head injury patients in the Indian context. Indian classical music ragas are known to work wonders on emotions. There are various ragas for each kind of emotion. For example; Natta Bhairavi and Revathi ragas associated with fear, doubts, and suppressed feelings. Ananda Bhairavi and Mohanam ragas are associated with joy and beauty. In Indian music, different ragas are presented at different points of time in a day. Ragas effect also depends on the time of presentation. Ragas such as Bhairavi are for early morning (4–7 am), Madhuvanthi for afternoon (1–4 pm), and MaruBihaga for night (7–10 pm). Very few studies were carried out about the effect of ragas on neurodisorder cases with proper scientific base. Singh et al. used ten different ragas for ten different points of time on Cerebrovascular accident (CVA) and diffuse head injury cases. Singh et al. found faster recovery of cognitive functions in cases which underwent music therapy along with regular medical care.
Music therapy given either passive or active way gives benefits to TBI patients in terms of reduction in anxiety and stress, facilitates breathing, improving attention, and emotional adjustment. Neurologic investigations pertaining to brain activity showed difference in activation of areas during positive and negative emotions. When music was given, parahippocampal areas (which are active during positive emotions) were more active than orbitofrontal areas (which are active during negative emotions).
In the present study, vitals were measured to see the music effect. Pupillary response and motor activity were not changed; however, changes were seen in respiratory rate, heart rate, and SBP. Changes in these parameters were increased for some and decreased for some. Decreased values could be due to the calming effect of the music. Increased values could be due to arousal or alertness of the patients. Another reason for increased values could be the preference of music. Preferred music gives more positive effect, and unpreferred music can cause arousal, anxiety, etc.,, As the musical therapy was given for a short period, exact reasons for the decrease or increase in values cannot be said. This study needs to be carried out on large number of the study population with head injuries of all severities to know the Indian classical music therapy effect during the acute period. However, the results gave hope for positive findings such as decreased blood pressure and respiratory rate which indicate relaxed state.
Gilbertson S. The silent epidemic of road traffic injury: What can music therapists do about it? Voices World Forum Music Ther 2008;8.
Gilbertson S, Aldridge D. Music Therapy and Traumatic Brain Injury: A Light on a Dark Night. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers; 2008.
Guétin S, Soua B, Voiriot G, Picot MC, Hérisson C. The effect of music therapy on mood and anxiety-depression: An observational study in institutionalised patients with traumatic brain injury. Ann Phys Rehabil Med 2009;52:30-40.
Hegde S. Music-based cognitive remediation therapy for patients with traumatic brain injury. Front Neurol 2014 24;5:34.
Purdie H. Music therapy with adults who have traumatic brain injury and stroke. Br J Music Ther 1997;11:45-50.
Scheel-Sailer A, Gilbertson S, Ochsner HM, Aldridge D. Music Therapy and Neurological Rehabilitation: Performing Health. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers; 2005.
Thaut MH, Gardiner JC, Holmberg D, Horwitz J, Kent L, Andrews G, et al. Neurologic music therapy improves executive function and emotional adjustment in traumatic brain injury rehabilitation. Ann N Y Acad Sci 2009;1169:406-16.
Singh S, Chakraborty S, Jha K, Haider S, Chandra S. Repeated measure analysis in raga therapy: A case study on head injury patients. Res J Pharm Biol Chem Sci 2013;4:420-8.
Singh SB, Chakraborty S, Jha KM, Chandra S, Prakash S. Impact of Hindustani ragas on visual acuity, spatial orientation, and cognitive functions in patients with cerebrovascular accident and diffuse head injury. Music Med 2013;5:67-75.
Barksdale AL. Music Therapy and Leisure for Persons with Disabilities. Champaign, Illinois: Sagamore Publishing; 2003.
Wikipedia. Hindolam; 2017. Available from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindolam. [Last updated on 2017 Jun 21].
Wikipedia. Hanumatodi; 2017. Available from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanumatodi. [Last updated on 2017 Jun 21].
Wikipedia. Kalyani (Raga); 2017. Available from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalyani_(raga). [Last updated on 2017 Jun 21].
Ayurveda – Influence of Music on Health. Available from: http://www.ayurveda-foryou.com/music/music.html. [Last updated on 2017 May 13].
Koelsch S. A neuroscientific perspective on music therapy. Ann N Y Acad Sci 2009;1169:374-84.
Kleinstauber M, Gurr B. Music in brain injury rehabilitation. J Cogn Rehabil 2006;24:4-14.
Jiang J, Rickson D, Jiang C. The mechanism of music for reducing psychological stress: Music preference as a mediator. Arts Psychotherapy 2016;48:62-8.
Jiang J, Zhou L, Rickson D, Jiang C. The effects of sedative and stimulative music on stress reduction depend on music preference. Arts Psychother 2013;40:201-5.
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2019-04-18T23:03:57Z
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http://www.journaldmims.com/article.asp?issn=0974-3901;year=2017;volume=12;issue=1;spage=51;epage=54;aulast=Reddy;type=3
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Texas Truck Center is a professional organization that delivers an excellent choice of trucks and has a staff that is second to none. Thanks Brian for making truck buying a pleasure.
I was assisted by Greg Weber in my purchase of a Isuzu Box truck. Greg was very helpful in the process. He was always very quick to respond to all the questions we had regarding the purchase of the truck. I would definately use his services for any future purchases for my company.
Nice people to work with. Large selection of vehicles. Was able to get a truck I needed very fast. Some minor repairs were taken care of before delivery. Paperwork easy and fast.
Houston Automotive Group was very knowledgable on what is on the yard. You guys were quick to respond to the demand of what we needed in the repairs of the truck that was going to be purchased and stayed on the ball to the end. Did a couple of follow ups to see if anything else was needed. Thanks for making the purchase easy and timely.
Very easy to work with & more than willing to work out the purchase price. Truck was in excellent condition & any repairs that needed to be made was done at no additinal cost. Great company to work with!
We finally arrived back into Canada early last night and just wanted to thank you and your staff for the smooth transaction and the awesome truck. This truck will be an a nice upgrade to our honey business as we are looking to better our equipment. Please let us know when you have another truck like this one with the similar specs and low mileage and we will make another trip out. Thanks once again and please keep in touch.
I would like to say,we were so shocked the way the truck looked the first day we walked in the dealership. We had not bought a truck like this in 15 years. I took the truck to my mechanic, (who also could not believe how new the truck looked for being a 2005). Darrell Miller was helpful the whole time. We needed the truck fast;Darrell did a great job in moving this truck through. We love our truck and are very pleased with the service of Darrell and the whole team!
We are an independent used truck dealer and a new and used heavy trailer dealer. I would like to thank Darryl for all his help and working with us as a dealer for a smooth transaction. The truck was exactly as it was described to me and the customer likes it as well. Thank You Darrell. I would also like to pay Nikki and Andy a complement on the completed package that was sent to me. I as a dealer appreciate all the transfer forms needed to complete the sale.
I would like to give a special thanks to Darrell in sales and Nikki in finance. You guys worked miracles for me!! The truck was very clean and I was very pleased with your service.
Darrell & all the staff where great !! Handled all the details to do with exporting our F550. They treated me & my wife very well & when we need another truck they will be on the short list. THANKS from up north !!!!
I have only met Tristan Martinez on the Web and telephone.I was trying to buy a special truck that none one seemed to want to sell. I called Texas Truck Center, we did our deal in two calls and one hour. We had some issue come up during the final (including shiping problems) that he hung in and took care of. He did a professional job and did everything he said he would. I enjoyed my experience with the purchase of this truck and he is on the look out for me another truck. Thanks agains Tristan. It was my pleasure doing business with you!
I looked extensively on-line for a service truck and ventured upon Texas Truck Center's website. Nice selection and very clean trucks. My account Mgr.,Tristan Martinez was very helpful on the phone and in person. I would recommend this company to anyone looking for quality trucks!
Our experience with Texas Truck Center was first class! They were very professional and a pleasure to do buisness with. I would recommend them to everyone.
My experience with Tristan and Houston Automotive Group was great! They were very profesional and honest. I would buy another truck from them without hesitation.
Tristan was a great salesman!!
Tristan did a fantastic job! He was straight-forward, direct, honest, and knowledgeable. Basically, all that you could ask for in a sales representative. When we hit some bumps in the road with financing from our bank back in Iowa, he made me feel right at home and entertained me for a full 36 hours as I waited for the money to come through. He even recommended a great restaurant where I could get dinner. We've been operating the truck now for over a month and it's exactly as advertised: a solid, very well-maintained truck that's going to help us make some money. We know where we're going for our next truck! Thanks Tristan!
I would like to thank Darrell Miller for being so helpful and curteous. When you have a down to earth salesman that you feel you can trust, it makes the buying process much easier.
Thanks Darrell for a very easy purchase. The truck was exactly as it was represented online. I will be buying more trucks from you in the future. Thanks again.
Darrell was great. He worked hard to get us the truck we purchased. I will be back, both for work and personal. Thanks Darrell.
Came down to Texas Truck Center, met with Darrell and was pleased with the vehicle that I bought. The staff was friendly and courteous.
I flew down from Indiana to pick up a truck for our company. Everyone was really helpful and informative. A good truck-buying experience.
We lucked out finding Texas Truck Center. I’ve been searching for a utility body crew cab with a 15’ open bed with a heavy duty ladder rack for some time. It was looking like my only choice was to go new. Then I found the perfect truck at TTC, (even a diesel). After talking back and forth with Greg Weber, and looking at a ton of pictures of the truck, we built enough trust to buy the truck site unseen and have it shipped up to us. This was a huge step; we’ve never bought something this big without inspecting it first. I was on vacation the day the truck was delivered, but my Operations Manager sent me an email saying he thought the truck was new. It looked so good he had to double check the odometer. And with only 21K miles, the truck was half the cost of new! The whole process was easy and without problem. I’ll be checking with Texas Truck Center for all our future needs.
Our experience dealing with Darrell and the rest of the crew at Houston Automotive Group has been flawless. Excellent equipment and service. We highly recommend the Houston Automotive Group!
We purchased a F550 Mechanic's Truck and this is a great truck. Darrel Miller was extremely helpful to us in buying a truck sight unseen. The whole staff was very helpful in making sure we got into this truck as quickly as possible. Looking forward to doing business in the future!!
We puchased a F-550 from Greg that I think we got a great deal on. I'm looking forward to doing business with Texas Truck Center in the future.
The truck we purchased was extremely clean and in great working order. Darrell Miller did a great job coordinating the entire process, and I would highly recommend him to anyone looking for a quality pre-owned truck. Amazing website, amazing people, amazing truck. We are looking forward to doing business again!
Great trucks, super clean and ready to work. Very promt and professional sales represenatives.
I had a good experience working with Mr. Miller as well as the whole staff at Texas Truck Center. The bed and set up looks Great, Good Job! I was overall very pleased with the truck.
The staff at Texas Truck Center, especially Amanda, were very helpful in finding the truck I needed. I was Amanda's first customer/sale and she was very professional and helpful. With her help, I was able to find a truck to fit my specific needs. Brian was also very helpful after we arrived. George, the Service Manager, took me to the truck personally and went with me on the test drive, which was very nice. Thank you to everyone at Texas Truck Center!
I just wanted to thank Darrell Miller for all his help when I purchased my truck from Houston Automotive Group. Darrell made it so easy to buy my truck.
Just want to say thanks to Darrell Miller and Heather for helping us find a suitable truck for our business needs. Look forward to doing business again!
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2019-04-24T18:23:09Z
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http://texastruckcenter.com/testimonials.html?page=480&limit=40
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"In my 40 years of practice as a psychologist, in Tennessee, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire, I have had the honor and privilege of working with so many patients on their paths of exploration, personal growth, and healing. My approach is grounded in psychodynamic, existential, and Buddhist theories, with a focus on integrating mindfulness and compassion with self and others. It is my belief that the quality of the psychotherapy relationship between therapist and patient is the principal healing force in treatment. Thus, I do my best to form a good and ethical therapeutic relationship with each of my patients."
"The decision to begin therapy is one that requires courage and a desire to better one's self. Having the support of a trusted helper makes a significant difference in our progress through this journey. As such, the foundation of my approach is to create an environment where people of any age feel understood, safe, and empowered. Whether you would like to explore issues related to life transitions, relationships, identity, trauma, anxiety, depression, or another area of focus, I have the training to help you achieve your goals."
"Welcome. Whether you are struggling in your relationship and need some couples counseling or are tired of feeling anxious and depressed, I can help you connect with yourself or each other in a new way toward feeling better. I bow to everything within you, in the midst of your search and struggle, which has brought you here. I understand the suffering within you as well as the wisdom to just want to feel better. I have an MA in Integral Counseling Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco — the first program in the world to blend Western schools of psychology with Eastern spiritual traditions. "
"I believe that most problems bringing people to psychotherapy arise from conflict issues and contact issues. Conflicts may involve inner conflicts, such as dilemmas of freedom vs. love, and interpersonal conlicts involving needs between partners, family members, past or present, coworkers, etc. Contact issues involve our connections with self,with others, and seeking, losing, healing, or needing to deepen the quality of these connections. Imbalances in contact or conflict may create mild to severe anxiety, depression, and when unresolved may fuel bad habits at best and at worst compulsive problems. Accurate definition of these underlying issues is necessary for resolution."
"My approach to psychological healing is integrative, mixing psychodynamic, mind/body, and transpersonal approaches to psychotherapy. My philosophy of therapy stresses respect for the client and an acknowledgment of the importance of starting "where the client is." I practice psychotherapy as a gentle process in which the client develops increasing intimacy with him/herself. Therapy often involves the exploration of family of origin issues and the impact of old conditioning on current functioning. I also emphasize the importance of developing existing personal strengths and resources. I sometimes use a test called the Enneagram to clarify client strengths and issues. I have expertise in mindfulness."
"I tailor my approach to meet the needs of those who come to see me, but offer every individual the respect and compassion they deserve. Maybe you are seeking insight and awareness for the purpose of personal growth. Perhaps you are looking to address a particular issue and need someone who can be goal directed and offer specific skills and feedback. Maybe it's hard to name just what is going on and this is one of the reasons you have decided to seek help. No two people come to therapy for the same reason because no two people are the same."
"My clients seek competent,ethical, dependable psychological services in a warm, inviting environment. They enjoy a therapist who is active, collaborative, goal oriented with a sense of humor. My clients are individuals, couples and groups age 18 and above. Typical issues include problems with relationships (emotional & physical), self-esteem, performance enhancement/sport psychology, depression, anxiety, stress, life transition, trauma, PTSD, grief/loss (both human and pet) and eating disorders. I work especially well with the GLBTQ clients seeking positive living within their sexual orientation/lifestyle. My approach is toward positive, solution-focused psychology with an emphasis on dynamically-oriented psychotherapy."
""Love and safety heal -- everything else is just tools."* And our places of deepest pain can, over time, not only heal but become medicine for others. I offer a safe space and caring presence to accompany clients who are ready to unburden their souls (psyche) and take a "depth" approach to understanding their lives and struggles. We have all been intricately shaped by our history and choices, our personality and life circumstances. The more we come to understand the complex tapestry that has led to our present situation, the freer we become to move forward differently, more joyful and whole."
"I work with clients wanting to heal from all kinds of painful experiences and challenges in their lives. Often what brings someone into therapy, their current struggles, are symptoms of an underlying unresolved experience which has thrown life out of balance. Anxiety and depression, for example, frequently are a pattern of being stuck in a state of imbalance, following a significant loss, heartbreak or trauma. The goal of therapy is to restore the natural integrity and balance within clients, empowering them to lead creative and fulfilling lives. "
""Life can often feel like a lonely journey full of obstacles and challenges. I am passionate about providing a non-judgmental environment during your journey of finding health and restoration. Honoring unmet emotional needs is a vital aspect of healing. By honoring what has led you to therapy, I provide a safe space to discover the underlying issues of life's challenges. As a multicultural therapist, I value every individual that enters my office. I desire to validate and truly understand your deepest hurts, by providing compassion and a safe environment to flourish and grow."
"My work is psychodynamically oriented, which means that I am interested in how early life and family of origin issues impact current life relationships and events. I work with both individuals and couples-- gay and straight. I have a general practice that includes people dealing with depression, anxiety, relationship problems, low self-esteem, trauma, work related stress, sexual identity, religious issues, etc."
"I believe that therapy is a unique opportunity to have a safe and empathic place to share one's story. It is a privilege for me to journey alongside others as they discover who they are in the midst of that story. I approach therapy in an eclectic manner, and have experience in a variety of therapeutic issues. I work with both individuals and couples interested in seeking treatment for depression, anxiety, relational distress, conflict resolution, and personal growth."
"My favorite all-time bumper sticker: Don't Believe Everything You Think! Obviously, everyone has problems in life, but both sages and scientists have discovered that how we think about our problems is a crucial variable in whether we grow through difficulties (past or present), or get mired in difficult emotions and unhelpful behavior patterns. While we all have unique histories and personalities, what leads to healing and change generally applies to all of us. But more than ever, we are living on "autopilot," and just trying to keep up. All the while, our busy minds provide a running commentary, often full of fear and criticism. "
"By curiously hearing and understanding your life story through our professional relationship, I hope to unburden you of your pain and help you remove road blocks which might be keeping you from experiencing greater pleasure. I work with adults ranging in age from 18 through post retirement years and specialize in treating life transitions, relationship concerns, depression, anxiety, trauma, infertility, adoption, postpartum depression, grief, loss, and divorce. I'm sensitive to issues of diversity and inclusion, am interested in working with people from various cultural backgrounds, and am a LGBTQ ally."
"I work to identify the strengths of my client and then utilize these as we collaborate, accomplishing the client's life goals, navigating stressors and bringing balance and hope to the client's life. Are you tired of sabotaging your success? Do you wish you could get a grip on your anxiety? Why am I so angry all of the time? Other people can quit, why can't I? Will I ever be enough? I believe in creating a safe space of healing, hope and refuge where you can achieve your goals and desires for your life."
If you're looking for couples therapists in 37212 or for a 37212 couples therapist these professionals provide couples therapy in 37212. Couples counseling can be effective and saves many relationships, but if you're part of a couple in distress remember that the sooner you get help, the more likely couples counseling will bring about a positive result.
Therapists in Nashville 37212 are able to work with a wide range of issues.
For example, if you're seeking a marriage counselor in 37212 you'll find that most therapists are trained in marriage counseling or couples counseling in 37212 and couples therapy. And they welcome families for family counseling in 37212 or family therapy in Nashville 37212.
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2019-04-19T22:51:24Z
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https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapists/couples/37212?topid=104257
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Those who have no Imam, their Imam is Shaitan.Alhamdulillah, we are happy with what we have. “La nu farriqu baina ahadin” (Quran 2:285) these are the words of Allah. Don’t make Imams dispute. Don’t make them unhappy. From you, make Imam happy with you, or it is all difficult, all fitna (corruption). Satan is messing up everywhere, just he is confused now.He is over burdened. Sit down,May Allah not leave us to Zalims (corrupter s)and make us neither Zalim (corrupter) nor Mazlum (their follower). Be neither Zalim nor Mazlum.
Quickly,Insha Allah an order will descend from heavens and when he will be told: “Appear” and he will. Imam Al Mahdi (A.S), he is looking for that order from heavens and waiting for the command from heavenly beings to come out.And he has been dressed with power on himself. No one can touch him. If touching him make you like this (Mawlana Showing his fingers bend) , his Takbir (glorification of Allah), Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar…whole world become flat…that is he. Insha Allah we will be accepted as small servants.
But when he is making Takbir,technology, ships will not sail, you can’t be able. Every machines that is giving so much courage to people, for that reason, will be closed down. The planes will not fly. The Arab lands, no flying.Their navies can’t move, their tanks can’t move, their missiles, Never, Never. And also,their artillery, only swords , nothing else!.
With the first Takbir of Imam Al-Mahdi (his first saying of Allahu Akbarr-God is Greatest) the technology will have it’s head cut. In Syria there are saying, for example,Syria closed, it’s sky closed up. So no one can see such things, or no one hearing or seeing, finish!. If that small, very small power, now technologian people using it. At that time, also everything that they are knowing,can’t be able to do anything. Finished! Only swords can.
They say Sayyidina Al Mahdi (A.S) one division all on horses, and when Sahib Al Zaman (Imam Mahdi A.S), making his horses like this (Mawlan Showing with his hands to command horses to move), enough!,no need like this (like the ordinary horse moving) and behind him 12000 chosen ones. If looking such a looking that person may fall down dead!.. Everything over technology , technology under the feet of his horse,finish!.
Ya Rabbi (O our Lord), we are asking , to reach those holy days when no prophet ever given such an authority, except for Imam Al Mahdi (A.S) to clean this world, not to leave anyone against Islam (Submission to Allah Almighty, Law Breakers , those who practice lawlessness ,those who deny the Laws and Commandments of Allah) They are coming down (on their horses from the sky). Any place that they are landing only making horse like this, one minute, up, one minute,down, (Mawlana Shaykh showing how quickly the Horsemen of Mahdi alaihissalam can reach around the world) , screaming. They are shouting If anyone hearing, they should say thunder, thundering. Hearing thunder, but no clouds.. How thundering?. Their swords… lightening…finish. Miraculous powers granted to him, to use it. Rasoolullah (Nabi Muhammad alaihiswalathu wa salam) never used that power. He (Nabi Muhammad alaihiswalathu wa salam) left it for Sayyidina Al-Mahdi (A.S).
This is coming, this is coming..”wa Khaba Kullu Jabbarin ‘Aniyd” (Sura Ibrahim, 14:15) Everyone who claiming that, he is the first,he is the best, he is most powerful,their heads like this , thrown away. Weak ones,poor ones, weak people with him. Tyrants, Allah Allah! Allah! Defend, defending believers, if they are not believing they are taken away also. Those people all of them passed away,their homes, their castles. What we shall do…?. I am looking which one should be for “Sahibu Zaman, the owner of time (Mahdi alaihissalam). That night building for “Sahibul Asr”, a castle, not palace,castle…If whole mankind trying to make such a castle, they can’t do.
And Mahdi (alaihissalam), Sahib Al Zaman, “Owner of time”, like this (Mawlana showing with hand how Mahdi ascend) with his sword on… between the skies and earth; now people they are not interested in such things, all of them, they are occupied for dunya (materialistic world) and for themselves. And dunya (this world)saying: “I am not with anyone. I am here, But you are going. Don’t try to reach to me,or everything on me”. No!..But try to be the last day from those people whom they should be called paradise people, may come for entering , Jannatun Aliyat /high station in paradise….in the paradise of Firdaus. Enter, Allah…Jalla Jalaluhu, Jallatu hu. We are not patient people. We are asking for everything quickly, We are weak ones and those tyrants making ‘Zulum’-injustice . They should not oppress any people also We are waiting who can take the hand of believers, Muslims, Ummat Muhammad (the Nation of Nabi Muhammad, peace and blessings of Allah be upon him and his family) to take them away, to save them, and to destroy everything from Kufr (disbelief).
Sayyidina Imam Al Hussain (A.S) the event of Karbala/ Karb (deep sadness) , Bala’ (evil) he came, he is coming there. When he is coming the order will stop!. Now leave what is happening for us, because here, with holy family , and coming a group of people fidaiyun/martyrs… fidaiyun they are sacrificing themselves. Coming Yazid’s armies. I am saying, what do you think?. The grandson of the Prophet (alaihiswalathu wa salam) was to be slaughtered? Do you think that he was…. slaughtered? . 70 kings of Jinns, they were in full readiness to attack. But his appearance was brought and this was slaughtered!. Allah Almighty, trying His servants. And he was taken,to his Grandather’s Maqam (station). There are so many things that no one knowing now, no one. Jinns, Jinny.., for what coming there?. To be making show?, for show? Rabbuna (Jalla wa Ala) ….Hasha! But “Wa lakin Shubbiha Lahum” (Sura Nisa 4:157)That is holy Quran..Ayathil Karima. (The ayat explains, like in the life of Jesus Christ Peace be upon him, which lead to a new faith in later) They were thinking that they slaughtered him (Imam Hussain, which lead to a sect to be emerged in Islam as Shia, based on the doctrine of Imam Hussain’s Martyrdom)!.. As they are thinking that they caught Jesus Christ (A.S) and making on cross,… never happened. One he was dressed, looking like Sayyidina Isa/Our master Jesus, juts looking Sayyina Imam Al Hussain (A.S). Never touching anyone…Hasha!….hasha thumma kallaa….
But people must cry for him. Must cry for Sayyidina Imam Al Hussain (alaihissalam). Everyone crying for him. Also, he is going to make intercession for everyone. He is not asking to make divisions of Ummah, No…Such a secret event, that Awliya Allah (Saints and Friends of God) also,they were ready for that. ready there in that place. No one is speaking..
now but it is over. Therefore, something from ocean , one drop, we can speak, no more.
And he (a.s) with his Grandfather, Nabi Muhammad (alaihiswalathu wa salam). .Insha Allah we hope that everything that we are doing is for Allah, not for dunya (this world) Who making any action without thinking, without knowing, they are just taken away..Taken away. And closed that event from Karbala Thousands and thousands of people writing about Karbala. If they are looking from out side,they can’t look inside.
Insha Allah, you should be happy with Sayyidina Al Mahdi (A.S). And you must make dua for a weak servant that for 70 years I am looking, I am making,.with to be saluting when he comes. 70 years, that I heard about Imam Mahdi (A.S), Qalbi/my heart just taken and putting in it , his love and his service…For…every century some people they have been granted that authority to meet him (Mahdi a.s) alayhissalam, alaihissalam. Ala Nabiyyina alaihiswalathu wa salam (Peace and blessings be upon our Prophet) . Thousands and thousands of Salawat and Salams (Blessings and Peace) on the Beloved of Allah. The purest descendant of the Prophet Muhammad (Swalla Allahu alaihi wa sallam), Sayyidina Imam Al Hussain (Radiyallahu Anhu wa alahissalam) Ya Rabbi. Let them be intercessors for us. On the day of resurrection to be our savior for us. Fatiha (Recite Sura Fatiha, Quran chapter 1), enough.
FOOT NOTE: Whoever say: “We don’t follow Imams, we follow only Quran, only Hadith, only Quran and Hadith”, and so on, such false claimants will perish as the people of Jahiliya (pre-Islamic period), before the coming of Imam Mahdi (a.s), Imam Mahdi (a.s) is one of the highest Imam and from the Ahlul Bayth, he is to be followed (see Quran 4:59).
So don’t get fooled by sects that preach false doctrines , stay firm in the congregations (Tariqahs) of the Friends of God (Awliya Allah).
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He was beset by indecision more than whether to attend graduate college and enter a profession in business enterprise management.A new profession counseling plan scheduled to commence this spring could help Jahrmann help other Stetson students sweep away the uncertainty that typically surrounds career choices.Jahrmann is 1 of about a dozen Stetson students education to be a Peer Career counselor.
Acquiring enable in profession counseling can be high-priced – in particular with some corporations charging as significantly as $5,000.Valencia Community College, however, delivers a series of courses that cover all the fundamentals of job hunting – for only $25 Search is a two-week program that was begun as a way to assist single, displaced homemakers get back in the job Herndon of Orlando paid a profession counseling firm $800 down on a $two,400 contract, but she says the VCC course is a significantly improved deal.
The 15:17 To Paris” follows the course of the friends’ lives, from the struggles of childhood through discovering their footing in life, to the series of unlikely events leading up to the attack. What advice do you have for people who want to adjust careers midstream but who are not positive what field they want to go into? NEW YORK Occasions BESTSELLER • With 101 recipes for household chefs of all skills, this cookbook tends to make a perfect graduation gift for these facing the genuine world (and feeding themselves) for the initial time.
Student Involvement offers involvement and leadership possibilities for Loyola students by way of student orgs, campus activities, peer involvement advising, campus recreation and fraternity and sorority life. WDVA’s Vet Corps plan serves to improve and collaborate with existing college solutions and currently receives a $630,000 AmeriCorps grant, rising the availability of veteran services on more than 50 distinct college campuses all through the state. Active duty, National Guard, Reserve service members as well as veterans, and their households who reside in the Higher Puget Sound location are eligible for help from the network at no cost.
Dream Foundation’s Dreams for Veterans plan serves our nation’s terminally-ill military veterans and their families by bringing their final Dream to life. The Rural Veterans Coordination House Base Pilot Program (RVCP) is operated through a grant from the WestCare Foundation and serves as one of five demonstration projects, established by Congress, to improve the coordination and access to solutions for veterans residing in defined extremely rural places.
WAServes, component of the national AmericaServes network, is a coordinated network of public, private and nonprofit organizations serving veterans, service members and their households in the Washington area. September 9, 2016 WASHINGTON – The Division of Veterans Affairs (VA) has published proposed regulations to establish presumptions for the service connection of eight diseases affecting military members exposed to contaminants in the water provide at Camp Lejeune, N.C.
Our VA investigation is intended to enhance the well being of Veterans.
Student Involvement offers involvement and leadership possibilities for Loyola students through student orgs, campus activities, peer involvement advising, campus recreation and fraternity and sorority life. The Vet Corps helps veterans be profitable in their post-secondary education by supplying a peer-to-peer mentorship plan on college campuses, tapping into the understanding, expertise and skills of veterans by engaging them in AmeriCorps national service positions, and enabling veterans to make a positive difference in their communities. We are grateful for the time that Michael took to support us capture the spirit of Walla Walla in his design that is now the symbol for the Walla Walla Veterans Property.
WAServes, component of the national AmericaServes network, is a coordinated network of public, private and nonprofit organizations serving veterans, service members and their households in the Washington area. September 9, 2016 WASHINGTON – The Division of Veterans Affairs (VA) has published proposed regulations to establish presumptions for the service connection of eight ailments affecting military members exposed to contaminants in the water supply at Camp Lejeune, N.C.
So Tyson brings the universe down to Earth succinctly and clearly, with sparkling wit, in digestible chapters consumable anytime and anywhere in your busy day.While waiting for your morning coffee to brew, or although waiting for the bus, the train, or the plane to arrive, Astrophysics for Persons in a Hurry will reveal just what you need to be fluent and prepared for the next cosmic headlines: from the Massive Bang to black holes, from quarks to quantum mechanics, and from the search for planets to the search for life in the universe.
A free of charge occasion exactly where students connect straight with faculty, advisors, and IT experts to find out the positive aspects of COS applications, certificates, and majors. NEW YORK Instances BESTSELLER • With 101 recipes for home chefs of all abilities, this cookbook makes a perfect graduation gift for these facing the true globe (and feeding themselves) for the initially time. When a young boy discovers the body of a lady beneath a thick sheet of ice in a South London park, Detective Erika Foster is named in to lead the murder investigation.
Their goal is to provide those who served our nation, their households and care-givers inspiration, comfort and closure that focuses on improving high-quality of life for veterans and their households.
Giving the most present, comprehensive coverage readily available, Career COUNSELING: A HOLISTIC Method, 9th Edition equips students with a strong understanding of the theoretical models of profession counseling and practical approaches on how to correctly counsel clientele about profession difficulties. If you’d like to know what some of history’s greatest thinkers and achievers can teach you about awakening your inner genius, and how to obtain, adhere to, and fulfill your journey to greatness, then you want to read this book nowadays. It is a crime novel, but it is also a story of friendship and family, a tale of a devoted detective and an obsessed brother on a mission to bring a serial killer to justice.
Profession Counseling: A Holistic Method Chapter 1 Vernon G. Zunker. Readers of Ian Rankin, Jo Nesbø, and Greg Iles will really like this book and obtain themselves breathless at the incendiary, ambitious, and unforgettable story. Even though retired from teaching, Dr. Zunker continues to push the discipline forward by keeping career counseling relevant to all counseling students. And what at first appears like an open and shut case turns out to have as a lot of shocking secrets as the Murder Home itself, as Jenna quickly realizes that the mansion’s history is a lot darker than even the town’s most salacious gossips could have imagined.
If you’d like to know what some of history’s greatest thinkers and achievers can teach you about awakening your inner genius, and how to uncover, adhere to, and fulfill your journey to greatness, then you want to read this book today. It is a crime novel, but it is also a story of friendship and family, a tale of a devoted detective and an obsessed brother on a mission to bring a serial killer to justice.
Full of the twists and turns that have produced James Patterson the world’s #1 bestselling writer, THE MURDER Home is a chilling, page-turning story of murder, revenue, and revenge. Petersburg Instances), It will overwhelm you… to be read in a well-lit space only” (Los Angeles Occasions). I really didn’t appreciate the book, but that is simply simply because I am not jazzed about career counseling.
This extremely effective book is now even much more inspiring as the author prepares readers for perform in the 21st century. You can turn off or edit your search history at any time. When a young boy discovers the physique of a lady beneath a thick sheet of ice in a South London park, Detective Erika Foster is called in to lead the murder investigation. NEW YORK Times BESTSELLER • With 101 recipes for dwelling chefs of all skills, this cookbook tends to make a perfect graduation gift for those facing the true planet (and feeding themselves) for the first time.
Rupi Kaur reads milk and honey, her New York Times bestselling collection of poetry and prose about survival, the knowledge of violence, abuse, love, loss, and femininity. The 15:17 To Paris” follows the course of the friends’ lives, from the struggles of childhood via obtaining their footing in life, to the series of unlikely events major up to the attack. Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson return as Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele in Fifty Shades Freed, the climactic chapter based on the worldwide bestselling Fifty Shades phenomenon.
He becomes a firsthand witness to Hannah’s pain, and as he follows Hannah’s recorded words throughout his town, what he discovers adjustments his life forever. Now graduated from college, realizing it requires far more than a cappella to get by, all the Bellas return in the final chapter in the beloved series. Add tags for “Instructor’s manual with test bank for Zunker’s Career counseling, a holistic method, seventh edition”.
You can turn off or edit your search history at any time. When a young boy discovers the body of a woman beneath a thick sheet of ice in a South London park, Detective Erika Foster is called in to lead the murder investigation. NEW YORK Instances BESTSELLER • With 101 recipes for house chefs of all skills, this cookbook makes a ideal graduation gift for those facing the genuine globe (and feeding themselves) for the initial time.
Though retired from teaching, Dr. Zunker continues to push the discipline forward by keeping profession counseling relevant to all counseling students.
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2019-04-19T22:39:02Z
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https://www.toptechjobs.net/category/counseling-ministry-careers/page/4
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When it comes to chaotic nightmare scenario, earthquakes, tsunamis, and nuclear accidents easily rank at the top of just about anyone’s list. On the other hand, there is also a pervasive sense among preppers that these scenarios are not likely to happen in their area, let alone strike all at one time.
Sadly, in Fukushima, Japan, all three events did happen at one time, and the long term impacts still need to be considered by everyone interested in prepping.
What Is the Fukushima Nuclear Crisis About?
On March 11, 2011, a major earthquake struck off the coast of Fukushima, Japan, then a very powerful tsunami occurred. The water struck a nuclear power plant and caused major failures in the cooling system for several of the reactors. Within 24 hours, enormous amounts of radioactive material were being released into the land, ocean, and air, and it remained impossible to stop the radiation from leaking out. Today, radiation still pours out as there are three reactor cores that melted down, and very little can be done to stop this process.
At least 610 workers and nearby residents died due to radiation exposure, and thousands more are expected to develop cancers related to exposure to radiation. The toll is greatest on children, of whom over 1/3 already show signs of abnormal growth in the thyroid glands that indicate an increased risk for cancer.
The radioactive half-life of materials used to power nuclear reactors spans thousands to hundreds of thousands of years. When these particles find their way into the water, air, and soil, they will remain radioactive and continue to pose a serious danger to almost all life forms.
How Is Fukushima Crisis Impacting the US?
As of December 2015, radiation from Fukushima has reached the western shores of the US and Canada. It is estimated that some isotopes have jumped as much as 50% in concentration, however government agencies still claim that radiation levels are not high enough to promote the idea that people should stop swimming, boating, and eating from the coastal waters.
This mirrors Japan’s claim that their coastal waters in the area are safe despite the fact that radiation levels are 10 to 100 times higher than what is currently being seen along the west coast of the United States and Canada.
Increasing levels of radiation from Fukushima are readily detectable now along the western coast of the United States. The progression of the radiation has progressed inland and now shows up in water and soil located further away from the ocean.
If you buy food or water from areas currently contaminated by radioactive materials from Fukushima, there is no way for you to know if these consumable goods are even safe. This includes wines, cigarettes, and just about anything else that you think is safe to consume just because it is “made in the United States”.
Unlike Chernobyl and nuclear bomb explosions, the radiation leaking from Fukushima has not stopped.
Unfortunately, it is virtually impossible for consumers to determine if elevated radiation levels are coming from Fukushima, a nearby power plant, or some other source of radioactive material.
Keep an eye out for data released by Fukushima watch groups and nuclear plants in your area, including controversial ones.
Keep Kearny (KFM) fallout meters in several locations at home and in the office. These devices are easy to make and can help you correlate information found in other reports.
Always be aware of what area of the world that food is grown and processed in. Never forget that dust and contaminated water easily find their way into plants and animals, and then into your body.
Obesity is an indicator of thyroid problems, but most doctors do not make thyroid function tests a routine part of medical exams, let alone look for this as a cause of increasing body weight. On the other hand, thyroid cancers are some of the most common types that people get when exposed to nuclear radiation. Leukemia and blood cancers are also very common in people exposed to nuclear radiation.
To protect your body from ionizing radiation regardless of the source, increase Vitamin C intake, as it works as a natural shield. If you have been exposed to radiation, make use of herbal remedies (marigold tea, turmeric, black pepper, and olive oil) that either inhibit tumor growth or stop it altogether. There are many other teas and other solutions that will increase pH (to a more alkaline level) so that it is harder for cancer cells to grow.
What About Long Term Consequences?
Once the land is contaminated by nuclear waste such as the materials away from the Fukushima power plant, it can no longer be trusted to sustain plants that will be consumed for food.
Any plants that are able to grow in areas contaminated with nuclear waste show severe genetic deformities: clover with 5 or more leaves, other plants with odd shaped flowers, stunted growth, giant or excessive growth, stalk tumors (yes plants do develop tumorous growths or knots!), increased susceptibility to infection, and many other problems.
Some plants and mushrooms are known to pull toxic radioactive waste from the soil and incorporate it into their leaves, roots, stems, and flowers. Aside from Tobacco and its notorious tendency to pull Polonium from the soil, some species of mushrooms and conifers also pull radioactive materials from the soil. Still there are no lists of edible plants that pull more radioactive material than others.
Failing crops, droughts, floods, and other severe weather patterns all contribute to soil erosion. As soil is picked up by the wind, or other forces of nature, it will take the radioactive material and spread them all over the place. As a result, even places further inland may wind up with trace to larger amounts of radioactive material entering the environment without anyone realizing it is present.
Even though heavy metals can be removed from water by distilling it, there are very few ways to remove tritium (a radioactive form of hydrogen), from potable water supplies. Tritium is commonly released by nuclear reactors including those that were damaged in Fukushima Japan. To this day, Japan is still trying to figure out what to do with Tritium waste left behind. Other than releasing it into the ocean, they are also considering simply letting the water evaporate, or try burying it.
Since it tends to be very hard to detect tritium in water supplies, there are very few, if any ways for governing bodies to determine just how much of this type of nuclear waste is washing up on the shores or falling along the coast of the United States and in heavily populated areas.
If you watch the news forecast, then it’s easy to see that water from one end of the country, or even the world, can move all over the place in a very short period of time. As a result, it is very possible that people on the East Coast of the United States may be dealing with the consequences of the Fukushima crisis well before they expected to. In terms of setting up a safe homestead, there is no such thing as a water supply that will remain uncontaminated because of the way water cycles so easily from air to ground and underground areas.
Many people that think of the oceans as endless bodies of salt water fail to realize that enormous amounts of water evaporate from them on a daily basis. Without this evaporation, supplies of potable water on land would never be replenished. When the oceans are polluted by radioactive materials, the water throughout the world will also get contaminated.
Today, there are many preppers that feel the best thing to do is return to living off the land instead of hoping that FEMA and social programs will help them out in a time of need.
If you thought the impact of Fukushima on human reproduction was bad, then you haven’t really given much thought to the impact on animals that you might rely on for food. In fact, if you do some research on mutations found around Chernobyl, you see why it will be impossible to hunt or fish where radioactive materials from Fukushima show up.
Large die offs of animals and plants also tend to occur when radiation levels rise. In this case, the path of the ocean currents between Japan and the United States may well be corridors of death for millions of fish that will no longer be available for humans to consume. No matter whether there is a social collapse or not, a reduction in food from the ocean will lead to higher food prices, which in turn, will trigger other disasters.
If you have done any degree of prepping, then you may already realize that respirators, gas masks, and closed oxygen systems simply cannot take the place of breathing regular air. The lungs are also some of the most sensitive organs in the body when it comes to being damaged by radiation.
As air based nuclear contamination from Fukushima travels along, it will drop into the Pacific Ocean long before it reaches the United States. That, however, doesn’t guarantee the safety of air in the United States.
Water always evaporates, and as it does so, it will carry small particles of radioactive material along with it. In this case, tritium will be carried along because it is the lightest of all radioactive materials.
As water seeps into the land, particles of radioactive debris will be left behind. As this soil dries out and turns to dust, it will blow along with the wind, which means that radioactive materials are right back in the air.
Cycles of nature aside, there are already statements coming out of Japan to the effect that they don’t know how to alleviate problems caused by Fukushima, let alone what kinds of problems will occur. If they can’t figure out how to even stop the radiation from leaking out of the reactors, why trust any governing body that seeks to assure us that air contaminated by this disaster is safe to breathe? The fact of the matter is no one really knows what the total impact on air quality from this radiation as it spreads across the world.
In a sense, running a country is not so difference from running a business. When you own a business, those who buy from you must have confidence that the products you sell are safe to use. There is no question that farmers in the United States and other nations rely on the good reputation of their land and water when it comes to exporting foods.
At a more local level, there are no estimates revolving around how many businesses will be driven under because high radiation levels mean that some operations can no longer be carried out in certain areas. This includes everything from farming to making wine, water, and many other products. As people get sick, an untold amount of pure human creativity and excellence will also be lost or left undeveloped as people struggle just to stay alive.
Anyone thinking about the economic impact of Fukushima should also think seriously about how much it costs to treat cancer. Since government bodies consistently under-estimate dangers from ISIS, it should come as no surprise that they may also be seriously underestimating just how many people right here in the United States are likely to develop cancer because of the Fukushima crisis.
In addition, regardless of the treatments used for cancer, they are all extremely expensive and there is no way for people with or without health insurance to be able to pay for it.
While everyone was focused on trying to avoid a nuclear war, a nuclear holocaust is already underway because of the ongoing nuclear crisis in Japan. Never forget that governments conspired to unleash a technology that they did have full control of, and is now presenting a very serious threat to millions of people right here in the United States.
Now is the time to demand answers and action on a problem that is much worse than anything that could come of conventional guns or even other forms of energy generation.
Take the time now to demand answers and the truth form leaders that continue to use “red flag” generated scenarios to hide what is going on in Fukushima. Our nation still has billions of dollars’ worth of tax dollars that can be used to help with research and resolving this crisis instead of wasting it on nonsense like gun control and other useless ego game agendas.
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2019-04-23T15:50:37Z
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https://disasterdefense.us/fukushima-crisis-continues-what-all-preppers-should-know/
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"Therian" is the shortened form of "therianthrope". "Therianthrope" is the general form of "lycanthrope". A lycanthrope, of course, is a Werewolf. But not every Therian is "wolf", hence the need for a general term.
It's rather unfortunate that the first image most people have when they hear "werewolf" is that of a fictional monster from movies and books. But the fiction was inspired by a truth. Before the 15th century there were Werewolves and now, again, there are Werewolves.
What I know (what I have observed in the Therian Community).
Some time in the 20th century (or before), some people began realizing, as children, that there was something different about them. They lived life more intentionally, paid more attention to what was going on around them, were more empathic, and felt as though they did not quite fit in with the people around them. On the other hand, they identified very well with various nonhuman animals - often to the point of conceptualizing themselves as nonhuman.
But they were not dysfunctional. On the average, they got along well with their families, they had friends, they succeeded in school, many worked for themselves, many worked for others, and they were happy and well adjusted. But they were unique, as far as they knew, and they kept their differences a secret.
November 16, 1992, a Usenet Newsgroup was founded for fans of horror movies so that they could discuss werewolf movies - it was called alt.horror.werewolves or AHWW. Soon, the administrators noticed that the discussions had turned from movies to the members' private lives. The Weres had found each other.
I have noticed that in the groups of Therians that I have been associated with, they seem to have certain predispositions, such as a high incidence of an unusual tooth form called "shovel teeth" and a tendency toward autoimmune disorders and migraines.
What they tell me (what I've read).
Before the Werewolf Trials of the later Middle Ages when thousands of mentally ill or simply despised people were tortured to death by the Inquisition for being "werewolves", there really were people known as "werewolves". Far from being insane, they were respected in their communities. They even had a special position in the church - they were called the Dogs of God and Saint Peter's Wolves. Traditions of these non-monstrous werewolves remain today in Eastern Europe.
What I think (My opinion - it's not the only one around).
There are many diverse explanations for Therianism. My own belief is that Therians are a genetic continuation of the old Weres who have awakened due to population and environmental pressures in modern society.
I have been digging through dusty old research libraries and downloading snippets of information about therianthropy for about 30 years. This time line is a result of the historical data I have collected.
The study of the history of the Therian Community is more like archeology than history. Much information was lost during the Inquisition. Information survived better in areas where the Roman Catholic Church had not gained a strong foothold. The British Isles and Northern and Eastern Europe remain rich in Therian lore - those places are also where most actual history survives.
Like archeology, in the study of Therian history, all that exist are, for the most part, fragments and hints. No individual fragment can be trusted. Each individual piece must be validated and interpreted by noting its place in known history and its relationship to the other pieces. As fragments stack up, patterns become evident, picture emerge.
And like any history, this one must continuously be revised as new information appears.
My name is Payton Wolf Bailey VanZandt. As an advocate for the Therian Community, I do not use web names. I don't keep my Wereism a secret.
I am a Werewolf who lives in the southeastern United States and am registered on the Werelist. Currently, I organize events for the Southeast Howl. I also provide other services to the Therian Community, including this site.
I am a vocational evaluator and am respected in my field. I am also a Christian evangelist who works mostly with fringe societies in the United States. I was a founding member of the local Christian Motorcyclists Association chapter. I perform much community volunteer service with the church, the Boy Scouts, and the local Department of Human Resources. I am also a founding member of the Citizens Against Violence.
I have begun adding sound files to accompany the texts in this website. They will be in audio galleries in each section. There will be sound files containing the texts and extra commentaries, discussions, interviews and panels.
12/26/18 I have added a section on time management to the DANSYS for Students guide.
11/21/18 The updated DANSYS User Manual is up.
11/17/18 I've encountered a problem uploading informaton to the Timeline, so the DANSYS User Manual isn't available. Once the issue is resolved I will make the updated version available. I've added a new section about exploratory data analysis. If you would like the new version before I can get it into the Timeline, send me an email. I'll be glad to send it to you.
10/30/18 I've added a section to the DANSYS Student Manual about online learning.
7/4/18 There's a new page in the Stat Files: Correlation. Remember: It's not causation!
6/17/18 I've added a Tips for Pastoral Counselors section to the Guide for Professionals.
5/31/18 I've started a user manual for DANSYS - DANSYS for Students - and it will grow by installments. The first section is in the Excursion>LabBooks page.
5/21/18 I have added another page to the Stat Files explaining how to analyze nominal data.
5/3/18 Version 2.0 of DANSYS is out with it's user guide. It features correlation procedures, contour charts, phasors, and more graphics, programming, and mathematics.
4/25/18 I have added a Tips for Clients page to the Guide for Professionals section.
4/24/18 There's a new pafe in the Stat Files about hypothesis testing.
4/8/18 I've added a page on descriptive and exploratory statistics to the Stat Files.
3/9/18 Tips for Therapists and Counselors, a "cheatsheet" of tips for psychological professionals with therian clients, is up in the Guide for Professionals section.
3/3/18 Finally! I have the statistical spreadsheet, DANSYS, it's first extension, DANSYSX Version 1.0, and both user guides (or, at least the first part of the DANSYS user guide) up on the LabBooks page. Thei'r free downloads and opensource, so feel free to download them and modify them to your heart's content.
2/20/18 I've added another page to the Stat Files. This one is about sampling and estimation, and that terribly confusing topic, the confidence interval.
2/10/18 I've added a new section to the Timline - Guide for Professionals. It currently contains a guide for professionals who have therian clients and for the clients. Hopefully, that will fill the gap left by the disappearance of the Theta website. I've also updated the Psychology labbook, including a section about measuring stimuli.
12/1/17 The ToolBook now contains a Psychology page with a kymograph, which can be used to display memory items in sequence. I have also made some corrections in DANSYS and DANSYSX. For instance, the INTEGRATOR command now works, and it works quickly!
6/21/17 DANSYSX version 1.0 is finished and available under Excursions>LabBooks. If offers extnsive complex mathematics and combinatorial functions, the beginning of a graphics suit that allows generation of graphics from scratch or programmatically, 2-way and 3-way crosstabulation routines, ntile conversion, and a Monte Carlo function that will generate sampling statistics. I'll be working on a user guide along with the one for basic DANSYS. Also, I'm working on an assembly language like programming language that can be coded on a spreadsheet. That's more fun and games and isn't really functional yet but, if you want to play with it, be my guess. The looping structure doesn't work yet.
5/29/17 There's a new section in the StatFiles on Distributions.
4/21/17 I have decided to post the extended version of DANSYS, DANSYSX, as it stands to date. The newest version isn't finished but it does have the two new crosstabulation programs XTab and XTab3 (the three way contingency table analysis procedure), a collection of complex math functions that can easily be used in Basic programs, and some new combinatorial functions. I'm working on a from-scratch graphics utility but it will be awhile before it is at the point that it will be useful.
A new section in the Logic LabBook has been added on "definitions".
1/13/17 There is now a mathematics overview in the Stat Files called "The Basics"
10/7/16 I've added ToolBook to the Excursions>LabBooks page. It's a speadsheet with several tools in it (hence, the name). Currently, it has timers, counters, a line measuring utility, and randomizers. I plan for it to grow over time.
8/31/16 I've updated a few things - added some entries to the bibliography, added a section to the Observation and Recording LabBook on Visual Field. I'm also working on a new blog for general objects. It will be about adventuring - especially hiking for llifelong learners. I'll be telling stories and describing my adventures in Colorado and in the Southeast. There'll be pictures. I'm getting a covey of articles together so I'll have a backlog to get started. I want to keep a good flow. I also placed DANSYS under a GNU license so it should be safe for people to download and use.
2/12/16 Several things this time...I've posted my first installment of Were Society (the sociology of the Were community) under the Therianthropy section. I've also added my Excursions LabBook which is a record of my randomized explorations, the first being a study of regional councils. On the same page (Excursions>LabBooks) I've started a section called toolswhere I have links to ..... well, tools. There is now a free statistics spreadsheet for LibreOffice Calc (it will also work with OpenOffice). I'm pretty pleased with it. There are also some links to some favorite free downloads.
8/31/15 I've added the mathematics LabBook which currently contains a discussiion of the counting numbers and counting; fun with fingers and abaci!
8/11/15 One of my hobbies is statistics and I am constantly dismayed at how many people dread involvment with statistics. I is one of those courses in college that everyone dreads. So, I am starting a section on statistics. Perhaps, also there will be some budding Were researchers in college that the page will help navigate through the world of data.
7/3/15 I have the Psychology LabBook up. The first part is introductory and has a section on equiping your computer to do psychological demonstrations.
3/13/15 I've uploaded the first module in the Logic, debate, and problem solving LabBook on the Excursions>LabBooks page. It's pretty introductory but it has some good resources and I'll be addressing definition on the next cycle. But, for now, I'll be working on the Psychology LabBook. Stay tuned.
12/20/14 Since my retirement, I don't cook much, but I live with a bunch of Weres who do. To showcase their creations, there's a new section under the Stuff Files - look for the Werewolf Gourmet page. There'll be old tfamily recipes, unique creations, and international flair. This is a great way for me to end the old year and bring in the new!
12/15/14 I have added two links to documents on my website. On the LabBooks page, I've added a link to the first part of my Philosophy tutorial which includes tips on critical thinking and especially on how to evaluate your own beliefs. In the Original Music section on the Other mp3s page, I've placed a link to the old (huge) Robert Service's Canada album.
11/30/2014 I have completed the audio files for The Mind of the Were and they are posted.
10/23/14 I have completed The Mind of the Were (for now). There are currently three research reports on therianthropy that I am waiting on to come out and, when they do, I will summarize them on that page. I will try to tackle Were sociology next. I'll also try to get a sound file out for the rest of The Mind of the Were, but that will take a while because our House is about to move and I need to wait until that's over with before I start recording sound files.
I have also started a new project in my Excursions section - a series of "LabBooks" to share my continuing education experiences. The first one (I'm working on six) is about observing the world and communicating your observations. The first section, which is in the posted spreadsheet, is a basic exploration of light and vision. Future additions will deal with field of vision, color vision, other aspects of visual observation and then the other senses, how to augment your senses with equipment and how to record and share information. I'm having fun with this and I hope you do too. It's in the Excursions section on the LabBooks page.
5/23/14 The latest article from the Therianthropy Research Group is out and I have included it in my Bibliogrpahy (Grivell, 2014).
4/7/14 I've been in Colorado since Christmas Eve 2014 and I'm having a blast. As for the Timeline, I'm adding a little here and a little there - especially to the Therianthropy page. I really want to keep you folks up on the research and substantive information about the Were community as it happens - knowledge is power and all that (I think that's the way it goes - maybe I'm thinking about "with great power comes ...." well, let's not plagerize here.) One big addition is the Links page. It's not a complete listing of sources by any means but it has my favorites - it can be added to (so send me an email if you have any suggestions), and remember, links are not forever. If one dies and I don't realize it, let me know and I'll delete it.
11/3/13 I am in the midst of a big (big!) move - from Alabama to Colorado. In fact, I am retiring, and my life is total chaos; therfore, all of my projects are on hold until after the beginning of the new year. I'm not sure what will happen to the International Wok since I will be living with other people, perhaps they will be adventurous enough to join me but there will be other dietary restrictions which may allow me to focus more on work on a section about special diets. I will also continue the outdoor cooking section as time and circumstances allow. And I have more material for The Mind of the Were. Hope to see you in 2014. Have great holidays and may your new year be better than any that has gone before.
7/20/13 I have added a section that considers language to The Mind of the Were along with the sound file, more bibliographic entries, and the Benninese meal under The International Wok B.
6/2/13 Both the sections about theriotypes and shifting are up in The Mind of a Were in the Therianthropy section. I will add the audio for the secction on shiftings soon.
3/2/13 You might have noticed that I've changed the name of the Christianity and Weres section to "Religion and Weres". I've begun an exploration of the religious/spiritual/shamanic implications of the Were community. The essay, Christianity and Weres is still there, but I've included some past poll and canvass data concerning the religions of Weres and a recorded discussion with the author of Creatures of the Night, Dr. Gregory Reece and myself.
1/21/13 I've added everal new sections to the Shamanism section and a Belgian meal (which turned out very nicely) to The International Wok - B.
1/5/13 I have added the first half of the shamanism page along with it's sound files. I apologize for the errors. I've gone through the files and made sure that they are minor and are not so as to change my meaning. Still, I am not a professional narrator, am dyslexic, and am losing my vision, so this kind of work is rather difficult for me.
I've also added three old recordings to the Original Compositions section under Other mp3s. One is a recirding of an older version of The Werewolf: A Love Song.
Happy New Year and may 2013 be better for you than any year that preceeded it!
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2019-04-24T00:31:00Z
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http://theriantimeline.com/home
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A hobby that many people across the globe participate in is video gaming. Some people enjoy playing them for entertainment, and some are paid to play them. Whatever the case may be, they are not going anywhere anytime soon. Read on for some ideas on how to increase the level of satisfaction you get from gaming.
When playing an online shooter, always make sure to take cover before you reload your weapon. Countless times gamers have been killed as their characters are standing in the middle of the action helplessly during a reload animation. Do not fall victim to this. Before reloading your weapon, find cover first.
Utilize the game store clerks to help determine what games you might enjoy. Many of them are gamers too, and will be able to enlighten you about certain games. You can get some guidance from the store clerk who will be up-to-date on the most recent games available.
Try a demo of any game you are considering. This preview can help you determine whether you want to purchase the full version of the game or not. With that said, use caution before downloading anything off the Internet. You should only download content from a trusted site for video games.
If you have young kids, turn off all chat features. A child does not need access to this feature. Don’t purchase any games that don’t provide you with the option to disable chat. If you can’t figure it out, search online for more information or talk to the people in the store.
If the system that your child is playing on can connect to the Internet, be sure that you adjust the settings for the family before he plays with it. This will help you filter some of what your child sees, to ensure that they are only exposed to appropriate information. You can also determine how much they can chat with others while online.
Be careful when signing up for online games. You will sometimes have to pay monthly fees in order to gain access. If you have a child who wants to join an online-gaming site, then you should check it out first. Find out all fees and determine whether the investment is worth the return.
Try brightening the screen on your gaming system. While you may enjoy having the screen set to match the scene in which you are playing, it can actually make it more difficult to play the game. A dark screen reduces visibility and makes it harder to see your enemies. If you don’t mind the slight loss to the game’s feel, turn up the brightness. You will be able to better spot enemies and dropped items.
If you find you are getting really engrossed in your video games, discipline yourself to take frequent breaks. Addiction to games is possible, which means you must step away and regulate your play. Playing a game should remain fun and light-hearted. Speak with a physician if you cannot stop playing a certain game.
Many games on the Internet let you either earn special items or buy them with cash. Make sure that you analyze whether or not this is worth it. On one hand be sure that you are getting your moneys worth with your purchases. However, they can save time.
Spend some time with your children playing video games that both of you like. Lots of kids enjoy playing games and they’re able to learn quite a bit from them. Video games help with your child’s coordination. There are also many educational game options as well.
Take some time to orient yourself with your console’s safety options. Some consoles allow you to customize the security settings to match what you find to be appropriate for your family as everyone has different preferences. It is possible to change the user level for each person in your house.
Enjoy playing video games with children if you have them. This can be a great bonding experience. When you have an interest in common with a child you will find that conversations flow more easily. Also, you can gear their development with the games that you choose.
You should determine the age your children should be before they can play M-rated games. Check to see if your console or PC has the option to block content meant for adults or older children. Monitor your child at all times for a safe gaming experience.
You may want to implement safety settings when setting up your home console. There are usually settings that can stop younger audiences from viewing inappropriate content. You may even be able to customize content restrictions for each member of the household.
To ensure you get the most out of your child’s gaming experience, there better be limits that are set for your children when they play video games. More than two hours a day can strain their eyes and interfere with other activities.
Be sure to thoroughly check a video game’s rating before letting little kids have it. Violence is involved in some video games and these are reserved for players over the age of 18. Do not let your children play these games or watch while you play. Violent or otherwise inappropriate video games can result in behavior changes or nightmares in children.
Reserve your game console well ahead of a new release. Early ordering is sometimes rewarded with special bonuses. You may get a bonus that helps you gain a winning edge, enhance your avatar or game features that cannot be acquired with a later date purchase.
Take the time to think carefully before choosing which gaming system you will buy. You need to consider all the features offered by the console and compare them to your style of gaming. Also, the Internet can be a very valuable source for this information. Reviews of the different systems can be easily found. Before you make your final purchase decision, make sure you are well-informed.
If you see that your kids are becoming too engrossed in games or are growing aggressive, they need a break. Give them a warning to get away from the video game, and then get them away from it while giving them something else to do. You may want to take a walk with them or allow them to go for a bike ride so they will forget about the game.
Local going-out-of-business sales are a great source for cheap games. A lot of rental stores aren’t lasting long. If you keep your eyes open, you may find some great deals at one of these retailers. Most of the time the games are in decent condition, but they may need cleaning.
Try getting a high grade video connection. These cables allow you to connect to your television with different picture qualities. Which cables do you use for your particular unit? You should use a DVI or HDMI first for the best picture. If you do not have these, you can use a composite or S-video cable to maintain high performance. A common connector are coaxial connection, but they are of low quality. If coaxial is the only available choice, then use it as your last resort.
Monitor your children if they play an online game. Many online games are very inappropriate for children. Some games may contain the ability to chat, and a lot of them let the player customize characters in many ways. You have to ensure the safety of your kid with these games.
Be sure you have proper equipment for your games. Do not assume that you just need a controller. You may be in for a surprise when you arrive home. Read on the package wheat you need to play the game. This lets you plan ahead so that you will everything you need for the game.
Make sure video games aren’t your only hobby. When you play all day, your health can decline. You have to make sure you do other hobbies and activities too. You can easily become addicted to video games, so only use them moderately.
If you wish to sell games on the Internet, put up an advertisement online so you can get some interest. Don’t go straight to eBay to sell, though. Sometimes problems can arise if you need to ship the games. You can post ads on Craigslist and Facebook to sell your games locally.
You can now talk to others while you play video games with them online. Video gaming can be a solitary activity, so be certain to keep socializing. You can share tips and chat with folks who share a common interest by using online forums and chat rooms.
Consider creating a special, dedicated place for young kids to engage in game playing. By having a game room you can enjoy the peace and quiet without the noise associated with games. A game room can have a lot of benefits for your family.
You may want to make an area in the basement or set aside a room for your kids to play their video games. Sometimes, it can get very loud while your children are playing, as you may want to have peace and quiet on the first floor of your home. You may even want to move gaming to a different floor.
Play games on your personal computer or laptop instead of purchasing a brand new one. Many games, especially ones that have been out for a while, are avaiable to be played free online. This will still be a game, but it will save you quite a bit of money.
When playing a sports video game for the first time, set the difficulty level to rookie. Sports games are often very difficult and take time to learn. After playing for a few weeks, you can begin to make it more challenging by increasing the level of difficulty.
Who needs to sleep when you are having fun? A lot of gamers spend their entire night playing their favorite games. However, this is false! You need to sleep at least eight hours night to maintain your mental alertness.
When you first play a video game, start with single player mode. The higher levels are much more difficult and you should wait to advance if you are having trouble with the single mode. If the game is too difficult, trade it in for something more your speed. Don’t bang your head against a wall!
It is important to master playing single player mode on your new games. If this mode is too difficult for you, scrap the idea of multiplayer or the online version because those will be even harder. If you find that it is more hard than fun, consider a trade-in that can result in a game you will enjoy more. Do not keep trying if you cannot win.
Before buying your children a video game, study the game’s rating. They are rated for a good reason. It is not recommended that children be allowed to play games with M or A ratings. You can use the Internet and check out video game sites to see a listing of what game ratings mean.
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2019-04-23T11:29:41Z
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https://izorlu.com/make-your-next-video-game-purchase-count-with-these-great-tips/
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The government plans to frame three new laws to protect intellectual property rights.
The industries ministry has already drafted Patents Act, 2011 and Industrial Designs Act, 2011 for stakeholders’ opinion before finalisation.
Another law on geographical indications will be finalised soon, said Industries Minister Dilip Barua yesterday.
“Our government has already taken significant steps for creating congenial atmosphere in the country in order to protect and develop IP [intellectual property],” said Barua at a two-day forum on use of IP for technological capacity building for economic growth and development.
World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) and Department of Patents, Designs and Trademarks (DPDT) under industries ministry jointly organised the programme at Sonargaon Hotel in the capital.
The industries minister said the government has already enforced the new Trademarks Act in 2009 to safeguard the intellectual property of businesses and other bodies.
Barua said protection, promotion and management of IP are appearing as important tools for national development in the context of globalisation of trade and commerce and emerging knowledge-based world.
“Companies are forging alliances with each other in order to heighten the value of their IP and to obtain mutually beneficial competitive advantages,” he said, adding IP management, formerly confined to legal departments, is increasingly being handed over to proactive IP departments.
This is especially true in some of the new technology firms which are developing so fast and making huge investments in research and development sectors, Barua said.
He said people of Bangladesh are traditionally innovative, creative and genius. “But due to lack of appropriate technology and IP protection initiative, we cannot utilise our historical talents to achieve the desired level of economic development,” he added.
The minister said the government is trying to strengthen the industrial property administrator DPDT to allow it to play a pivotal role for basic industrial development activities in line with the set target of vision 2021.
He said DPDT has partially been automated under a project and a good number of examiners and staff have also been appointed. Vacant posts of the organisation will be filled up very soon, he added.
“Therefore we strongly feel that the commitment of the developed countries on transfer of technology should be followed in spirit and in writing,” Mankin said.
Bangladesh should protect its IP to reap greater benefits. He said Bangladesh should frame IP policy in this regard, said Kifle Shenkoru, director of WIPO for the division of least developed countries.
BM Kamal, registrar of DPDT, said the government will take steps to frame rules to protect genetic resources, traditional knowledge and folklore, plant variety and traditional cultural expressions and bio-diversity.
DHAKA, Oct 24 (BSS) – The country would have the capacity soon to provide its manufacturers with accreditation for their goods for greater access to the international markets, Advocate Moinuddin Miaji, Chairman of Bangladesh Accreditation Board (BAB), said here today.
“Our businessmen obtain accreditation from abroad for their produces. The days are not far away when Bangladesh would be competing with international certifying bodies,” he told a meeting in the BAB conference room here.
Echoing Miaji, Industries Minister Dilip Barua said capable businesspeople have to go to many countries including Singapore and Bangkok due to lack of confidence in local certifying bodies.
“We would have to build up confidence in our certifying bodies too,” he said.
Among others, Chairman of Bangladesh Council for Science and Industrial Research (BCSIR) Prof Dr Ahmed Ismail Mostafa, eminent scientist Abul Kalam and BAB director general M Abu Abdullah joined the meeting.
BAB arranged the meeting titled ‘Laboratory accreditation: Promoting Strategy’ to exchange views with members of Association of Testing Laboratories (ATL).
Barua said the government is advancing towards industrialization as industrial units were once considered as dirty and polluted areas but now the concept has been changed.
The industrial units are now being operated with innovations and application of modern technologies, he added.
The industries minister said Department of Patents, Designs and Trademarks, World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) have become key tools to turn Bangladesh into an industrially rich country.
He favoured synchronization of BAB, Bangladesh Standards and Testing Institution (BSTI), BCSIR and other certifying authorities for greater market access to international market for widening the export basket.
Prof Dr Ahmed linked strengthening local certifying bodies to boosting export and said steps should be taken to transform all labs into accredited ones in phases to this end.
BCSIR has set up a chemical testing laboratory equipped with world standard apparatus and this lab would be launched formally within the next couple of months, he said adding that this lab would help get international acceptability for local products.
Experts say Bangladesh would be able to remove most of the Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) regarding exports to neighbouring countries if the country could upgrade its lab to international standard.
A 23-member delegation of Administrative Barrier Review (ABR) Working Group led by Bangladesh Enterprise Institute (BEI) Vice President Tariq Karim left for South Korea Sunday on a weeklong study tour.
The purpose of the study tour is to share and enhance experiences with the South Korean public and private sector counterparts on issues related to standards and testing, certification of products, registration of designs and trade marks and VAT administration.
The Korean Development Institute (KDI) will be facilitating the workshops and meetings to be held during the study tour. The Working Group expect that this shared knowledge will contribute to the private sector development in Bangladesh, says a press release.
Earlier, the ABR Working Group visited several government offices and private sector organisations to gather practical knowledge on how those organisations are dealing with respective ABR issues in Bangladesh.
RRCG Programme Coordinator Hasan Imam and Investment Policy Analyst of IFC-BICF Miah Rahmat Ali will also accompany the delegation.
The government plans to strengthen the Bangladesh Standards and Testing Institution (BSTI) with additional manpower and modern equipment, said the industries minister yesterday.
“BSTI has been suffering from a severe crisis in manpower. We are trying to strengthen it to ensure the quality of our products,” Dilip Barua told a delegation from the Dhaka Chamber of Commerce and Industries (DCCI) at his office.
He said the government has already approved the appointment of 113 new persons in BSTI on Tuesday, as part of the process.
The minister urged the manufacturers to be cautious against the production and campaign of contaminated and substandard products and strictly follow the quality guidance set by BSTI.
Barua said the government considers formulating a draft for a new industrial policy by April.
“We previously had an industrial policy that was never implemented properly and lacked industry-friendly directions,” he said.
“We are going to form a committee soon in this regard, which would emphasise attracting investment from both local, non-resident Bangladeshi and foreign entrepreneurs, create more employment and develop and patron the local industries,” he added.
Barua said the government also considers reviewing the bank’s high interest rate, seen as a major problem that hinders new entrepreneurship.
Zafar Osman, president of DCCI, said the government should review the present duty structure and take an initiative to reduce import duty on raw materials and ingredients for our local industries.
He said the government should take specific measures to patron and safeguard the small and medium enterprises, including the light engineering sector.
He stressed developing a special industrial zone for different sectors, such as RMG, pharmaceuticals and leather industry, and creating a database on the entire industrial sector.
He also emphasised organising training programmes for labourers in different factories that would eventually improve the present condition of the industrial sector.
MS Shekil Chowdhury, senior vice president, and Mohammad Sirajuddin Malik, vice president of the chamber, were also present at the meeting.
Republic of Korea, once known to be one of the world’s poorest agro-based societies like us, has undertaken economic development in earnest since 1962.
In less than four decades, it achieved what has become known as the “Miracle on the Hangang (river)”- an incredible process that dramatically transformed the otherwise divided economy while marking a turning point in Korea’s history.
South Korea recently pulled through an economic storm that began in late 1997. This crisis, which roiled markets all across Asia, has threatened Korea’s remarkable economic achievements.
The Korean government’s strong resolve for reform and successful negotiation of foreign debt restructuring with creditor-banks led to resumption of economic growth.
With introduction of reforms, the number of regulations in South Korea fell from 10,554 in 1998 to 7,812 in 2003, to 5,112 in 2007.
The cost of establishing and operating business has fallen drastically due to fewer administrative regulations. Simplified regulations have decreased the time and number of tasks necessary to establish a business by 40 percent and reduced administrative costs tenfold.
It was stated by Dr Gil Hong-Geun, director general at Prime Minister’s Office of Korea, on January 7 this year to the Bangladesh Regulatory Reform Core Group that comprised of mid-level officials from different ministries, including Bangladesh Bank and Chamber representatives.
Strong support from the political circle, business and the public, well designed institutional setting and clear quantitative targets with whole of government approach are, among others, the success factors for the regulatory reforms in Korea, Gil pointed out.
The Bangladesh team visited Korea Regulatory Reform Office, Prime Minister’s Office, Anti-corruption and Civil Rights Commission, Korea Customs Service, Korea Post, Hanjin (Shipping Service), Seoul Transport Operation and Operation Service offices to see reform process there.
The Bangladesh team was informed that in the backdrop of 1997 financial crisis leading to severe recession in 1998 with output falling by 7 percent, Korea initiated the regulatory reforms. The country constituted the Regulatory Reforms Committee (RRC) through enactment of law.
The Korea RRC sets the general direction of the regulatory reform and coordinates the overall regulatory reform activities. It controls the duplications of regulations and inconsistencies of policies between ministries by reviewing all draft regulations.
In Korea, a ministry has to make request to the RRC for regulatory review of a proposal for regulation with the opinion of stakeholders, Regulatory Impact Assessment (RIA) and self-review results. Citizens and NGOs can submit their comments. RRC also invites stakeholders during the review process. Decisions made by RRC have been decisive (binding for all). After having cleared by RRC, the proposal is, then, subject to review by Cabinet Council and National Assembly, where necessary. RRC is not, however, involved in minor issues. Even RIA is not required for all cases.
The RRC makes public the bills it reviews, the review results and other regulatory process through the homepage. Also it is compulsory to make public a white paper on the status of regulatory reform every year. The current laws and policies of each ministry can be found at the Ministry of Government Legislation homepage (http://www.moleg.go.kr) or the respective ministry homepage. Also, each ministry has to register with RRC the name, details, legal basis and processing body regarding the regulation of its responsibility.
RIA, introduced in Korea in 1998 by enactment of law, enables the public officials in charge of designing regulations to take informed decisions on how to make regulations viable, sound and effective.
Assessment areas and factors for RIA include: overview of regulation in question, identifying regulated entities and stakeholders, lifetime of regulation, short description of both the existing regulation being reviewed and the new regulation being developed and regulation mapping, i.e., the mapping of relationship between the regulatory proposal in question and the existing regulations relating to it, cost-benefit-analysis of alternatives to the regulation in question. The ministry concerned must gather public opinions during the stipulated 20-day notice and comment period and report the results of its review to those who provided inputs on the relevant regulatory proposals.
After having reduced the number of regulations to a substantial level, the recent goal of the Korean government for the regulatory reform is achieving regulatory quality and national competitiveness at the level of advanced countries, said Prof Chin Seung Chung of Korea Development Institute. He said after successful early stage Quantitative Approach, they are now moving to Qualitative Approach. It is a shift from regulator-oriented regulation to user-oriented regulation and shift from government-only effort to joint government-private effort.
The Korea RRC has conducted surveys every year to hear the public and experts’ opinions on the regulatory reform. The results of survey have been used as feedbacks in setting future policy directions every year. The results over the last three years have shown consistency, most of the respondents expressed positive, but not satisfactory views on the government’s strong commitment to reform.
Media are also very vigilant. In a recent review, The Korea Herald wrote: regulations often lack clear standards, procedures and outcomes, and there is too much discretion given during their execution. They often have ambiguous standards and complex procedures, which leads to unreliable outcomes. Many regulations are unrealistic. They are difficult to execute and create an environment in which they end up either being absent or failing to serve their original purpose.
Prof Chin Seung Chung, a former vice-minister, stressed the need for regulatory transparency. He said government officials want to retain regulations to enjoy more power. Prof Chin criticised the involvement of the bureaucrats in the key events of reform process. He even questioned why the RRO is in Prime Minister’s office.
Now let us look back to the regulatory reform process in our country. Reform is a continued process. It was initiated earlier in the banking sector. It is a success story. There are also reforms in other sectors. Though there exists Law Commission etc in our country, the immediate past caretaker government actually made ignition by constituting the Regulatory Reforms Commission (RRC) headed by Dr Akbar Ali Khan. The 17-member RRC was formed by a notification, not by an ordinance. Five of all part-time members are from private sector. It is presently a recommending body.
There are two things we need to address immediately. One is to introduce RIA process for new rule/regulation at the ministry/agency level. Another is to give RRC an institutional and permanent shape, preferably through enactment of law. All the country’s primary and secondary laws, including the proposed one, should be required to be cleared by the RRC, whatever name we shall call the body. This will definitely improve governance standard in our country. With better international credibility and improved regulatory consistency and predictability, we can become one of the most attractive investment hubs in Asia.
The government has formed a high-powered national body for drafting rules and regulations in line with the recently promulgated ‘Consumers Right Protection Ordinance-2008’ to shield the consumers from market foul plays, officials said Sunday.
The 21-member body under the name, ‘National Consumer Right Protection Parishad (NCRPP)’, is headed by the commerce Minister. A gazette notification to this effect was published in the first week of this month.
The NCRPP was formed after President Dr Iajuddin Ahmed promulgated the much-awaited Consumer Right Protection Ordinance (CRPO)-2008.
The Ordinance — first of its kind in the history of Bangladesh — would provide the government and the consumers the ‘necessary tools’ to detect market distortions and rein in ‘abnormal price hikes’ that have long been major causes of sufferings to the consumers.
The successive governments have tried to enact laws to curb hoarding and market manipulations, but their attempts failed mainly due to opposition by the vested interest groups.
The caretaker administration stepped up its effort to formulate the consumer protection law early this year amid soaring commodity prices, caused by a global spike and speculation and hoarding by some big traders in the country.
Experts and economists then said the absence of an effective consumer protection and competition laws has allowed the big traders to manipulate the situation at the expense of millions of the country’s poor consumers.
The 21-member NCRPP includes senior officials from the ministries of commerce, agriculture, fisheries, disaster management, home affairs, energy and law, Bangladesh Police, Drug Administration, Bangladesh Rifles, civil society, Jatiya Mahila Sangstha, National Security Intelligence (NSI) and the Bangladesh Standard Testing Institution.
The Parishad also includes presidents of the Federation of Bangladesh Chambers of Commerce and Industry, the Bangladesh Association of Pharmaceuticals Industry, the Consumers’ Association of Bangladesh and National Press Club as members with director general of the consumer protection directorate as its member secretary.
The terms of reference empowers the parishad to make its recommendation to the government’s regarding consumers welfare.
The NCPRP will also be responsible to extend cooperation to the government while the latter would formulate new law and policies for further strengthening the consumers’ right.
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2019-04-22T11:10:48Z
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https://bangladesheconomy.wordpress.com/category/legalregulatory/
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SHANGHAI--The deal was reached with Shanghai Shendi Group, which was specifically created for the development of the Disneyland project, the official Xinhua news agency said on Friday.
Disney confirmed the Xinhua statement and said it was still awaiting final approval from China's central government regarding the incorporation of the related joint venture companies and the completion of regulatory procedures.
"For quite some time, we have been involved in discussions with the Shanghai government about building a Disney theme park. We can confirm the statement from the Shanghai government that we have taken another step forward in the approval process," a Disney spokeswoman said in an emailed statement to Reuters.
Shanghai's Disneyland is expected to cover around 4 sq km and cost about 25 billion yuan ($3.75 billion), Xinhua said. Disney itself gave no further details.
It was not clear what the ownership structure of the park would be like, but state media reported last year that an investment company controlled by the Shanghai municipal government would own a majority stake in the park.
Disney received approval to build a Disney theme park in Shanghai a year ago, but discussions about the specifics have been ongoing and few details have been released publicly.
Disney has long sought to build in Shanghai, a wealthy city of about 20 million people that is ringed by the prosperous Yangtze River Delta, home to tens of millions more potential visitors.
It was less enthusiastic about building near Beijing, which has fewer large population centers in the immediate vicinity.
Disney's foray into the China market has been mixed so far, with its Hong Kong Disneyland park reporting a loss last year.
Hopefully Disney is not putting much, or any, money into this and just licensing out their brand.
There goes my goal to visit all the Disney parks worldwide.
Why put one in China? There's one in Hong Kong and China already "owns" that country.
My name is Gator. You killed my Sorcerer's Hat. Prepare to die.
It is perceived as inconvenient (or otherwise undesirable) for the large, wealthy mainland China population centers to travel to the Hong Kong park.
Since opening, only 40% of Hong Kong Disneyland Guests were estimated to be from mainland China.
The expectation is that building a new park closer to a wealthy population source will attract new mainland China Guests and increase the frequency of the mainland China Guests who were already visiting the Hong Kong park.
Pundits have brought-up the question of market saturation, but Disney and the Chinese government have both insisted that the addition of the second Chinese resort will lead to an overall increase in Disney park attendance. How? This hasn't been made exactly clear, but it is postulated that the those with the means to visit both resorts will be compelled by product differentiation to do so and those who would have otherwise visited no park will now be compelled to visit the much closer Shanghai park.
If they have a large wealthy population of people who don't want to visit Hong Kong; they could always take a road trip and visit WDW in Florida.
Because I don't ever see myself traveling to Asia again. Maybe, but it's a long shot.
Oh, okay. So, have you been to the Hong Kong park then?
Yep, we went for Christmas '08.
Walt Disney Co. on Friday will break ground on a new theme park and resort in Shanghai, according to people familiar with the matter, after years of red tape and negotiations with the Chinese government.
The groundbreaking ceremony follows Disney's recent receipt of final approval from the Chinese central government to move ahead with its long-gestating plans for the 963-acre park and resort. That is about 1/26th the size of the 40-square-mile Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla.
Early Saturday morning, or late Friday in the U.S., invitations were issued by Disney, together with an arm of the Shanghai government and a local business partner of Disney's, inviting recipients to "a special event in Shanghai" on April 8. Disney Chief Executive Officer Robert Iger is expected to attend the groundbreaking ceremony. Shanghai Disneyland will be the Burbank, Calif.-based Disney's sixth major theme park in the world, and its first in mainland China.
Shanghai's mayor has estimated the cost of the first phase of the theme park will be 24.4 billion yuan, or $3.73 billion. The total cost of the resort isn't clear, but it is likely to be one of the largest foreign investments ever made in mainland China. The resort will be majority-owned by media and entertainment companies that are in turn owned by the Shanghai Municipal Government. Disney's stake in the endeavor hasn't been disclosed, though the company is expected to hold a minority interest.
In addition to Disney, the parties issuing the invitation were the Administrative Commission of Shanghai International Tourism and Resorts Zone and Shanghai Shendi Group Co. Ltd. The latter is Disney's government-owned joint venture partner, a company formed by various government-owned businesses that has investors including a subsidiary of broadcaster Shanghai Media Group and another responsible for construction.
Just be aware comrade Mickey is watching you. I won't tell you what will happen if you do something wrong.
ºoº It all started with a Mouse.
Your trip is what you want it to be and it will turn out just how you want it.
(CNN) -- The Walt Disney Company broke ground Friday on the Shanghai Disney Resort, after getting approval from the Chinese central government in Beijing.
"Today marks a significant milestone in the history of The Walt Disney Company," said Robert A. Iger, president and CEO of The Walt Disney Company. "Our Shanghai resort will be a world-class family vacation destination that combines classic Disney characters and storytelling with the uniqueness and beauty of China. Working with our Chinese partners, the Shanghai Disney Resort will be both authentically Disney and distinctly Chinese."
Friday's groundbreaking ceremony featured traditional Chinese drum music, a Mandarin soloist and a 50-voice children's choir from Shanghai. Mickey Mouse was also in attendance, dressed in a traditional Chinese costume.
"We're incredibly excited to build a Disney resort in Shanghai, one of the world's most vibrant cities," said Thomas O. Staggs, Chairman of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts. "We are hard at work designing Shanghai Disneyland, which when complete will be a special place where guests of all ages will discover a world of imagination, creativity, adventure and thrills."
The resort will "include a Magic Kingdom-style theme park with characteristics tailored to the Shanghai region and other amenities consistent with Disney's destination resorts worldwide," Disney said.
The new resort is scheduled to open in about five years. When it opens, Disney says the park will also have two themed hotels, a large retail, dining and entertainment venue, as well as recreational facilities, a lake and plenty of parking.
In total, building the resort is expected to cost more than four billion dollars, which will be split between the Walt Disney Company and its China partners.
Disney already has a Disneyland resort in Hong Kong, China, as well as in Tokyo, Japan, but Shanghai's would mark the first Disney resort in mainland China.
Disney has offices in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.
I'm really looking forward to this. I actually leave for Shanghai on Wednesday with my wife who is there on business. She is originally from the Shanghai area, so we will be visiting her family as well. We will spend 3 weeks there so it will be interesting to see how the locals are feeling about the new park.
Having been to mainland China, I can tell you the answer is "not much".
Didn't the Red Scare die with McCarthy?
I guess when the world comes under one ruling power, it won't be a government, it'll be the Disney board.
DD is headed back this summer for a 2nd tour as a CP Intern!
Time to renew our annual passes.
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2019-04-18T12:56:54Z
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http://www.intercot.com/discussion/showthread.php?176611-Walt-Disney-Co-s-3-75-billion-Shanghai-Theme-Park&s=653948d5e3bf859dabbbff3035add9be&p=2161675
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From seed to shop – How cotton is made — And The Future?
In October 2018 I had the opportunity of a lifetime, to see the full re-wrap supply chain, from cotton field to the manufacturing of the goods… and to eat Masala Dosa every morning for ten days. I travelled across Southern India to discover what goes into the creation of re-wrap products.
In 2019, re-wrap are moving all of our products over to GOTS certified organic cotton or transitional organic cotton, in order to support the farmers that we work with that would like to take the change to produce certified organic crops in the future. This is something that we feel is extremely important as the use of pesticides and chemicals in farming has such a huge impact on our planet and on the lives of those that work at the very start of our supply chain.
We are able to offer the farmers that we work with rates that exceed the market value, pre-financing them to give them more security and the ability to invest in machinery or livestock that they may need for the coming farming seasons. We call this our seed to shop initiative as we are able to follow the source of our materials from seed plantation in the cotton field all the way through to manufacturing the final product for our customers.
re-wrap work with a farming group that connect us with tribal farmers from a cotton growing region in Southern India. The group that we work with helps the farmers to become certified organic, explaining the audit process to them and ensuring that certifications are met. Importantly the group educates the farmers on practices to enhance organic farming through pest management and water management. Many of the farmers are illiterate and don’t have access to a computer, the cotton farming group reach out to a wider customer base as they are able to market the cotton online.
When we arrived at the HQ of the farming group, we were gifted a rose and a lemon. The rose is symbolic of love and friendship and the lemon is to ward away evil spirits. I was told to roll the lemon in the palm of my hands as it releases the most beautiful lemon scent, used to help with nausea.
I met with the health promoter, Shashikala, who is one of the farming group directors. She cares for the women in her hamlet and four other hamlets. Shashikala ensures that pregnant tribal farmers have the right nutrients and vaccinations. Babies used to be born at home in the tribal hamlets but now she makes sure that there is medical supervision and intervention if required. Benefits are available from the government for every tribal pregnant woman with the government providing free vaccinations and food. She connects with nurses at local hospital and provides the women with knowledge through support groups, training them on what is best for their health and their babies health.
Shashikala, who is one of the farming group directors cares for the women in her hamlet and four other hamlets.
Traditionally, the women focused on housework and less intense farming work, such as mixing manure, which had more chemical use. Many miscarriages and deaths were recorded, however since the change to organic farming, we have been told that there has been a significant decrease in miscarriage rates.
We learnt so much about organic farming, pest and water management. As someone with very little agriculture knowledge (unless you count the ever-growing number of plants in my flat), learning about organic pest control was really interesting.
We were taught about multi cropping – in the 6 month period when the cotton crop is active, the farmers lay down border crops that have softer stems so that pests lay their eggs in these crops rather than the cotton as the cotton crops are more precious to the farmers due to it being the highest source of income, i.e. cash crops. They burn or bury the infested softer crop and turn it into manure for next year. Examples of softer stemmed crops are kopi, okra and the marigold.
Once the cotton has been picked, it is sent to the ginning unit. Here it goes through a series of processes that remove any impurities from the cotton. In the ginning unit I saw roller grading machines removing any unmeasured cotton and grass, as well as hand grading, where employees pick out impurities such as jute, plastic twine and animal hair and also separate the cotton from the cotton seed. At this stage I realised the enormity of the process of creating cotton in the fabric form that we use and wear daily! Each bag of picked cotton, generates a very small amount of pure cotton that can be spun into yarn and then woven into fabric. Once the cotton has been ginned, it goes to the spinning unit. Spinning is the process of the conversion of cotton fibre into yarn. At the spinning unit it is checked again, beaten gently to make it uniform and compressed into a flat roll called lap. It is then compounded into a cord by a machine. It is combed and spun and then compacted again and spun with other cords into a yarn. Spinning helps to compact the yarn. Then the yarn is wound onto a cone by an auto-coner. The cones are checked under a UV for any impurities. The yarn is now ready for weaving. The warp is assembled for length of the fabric and the weft for the width. Starch is added prior to the weaving process so that the threads don’t snap. After weaving, the fabric needs to be washed to remove the starch. Prior to washing this fabric is called greige.
Left: Cotton in the ginning unit where it will be cleaned of any impurities such as jute, plastic twine and animal hair. Right: Spinning unit; Spinning is the process of the conversion of cotton fibre into yarn.
At the printing unit, we use a variety of screen-printing techniques. I was able to watch some of the wax bed printing for our knot wrap seasonal samples. To make a screen a piece of mesh is stretched over a frame. A stencil is made by blocking off parts of the screen in the reverse of the design to be printed. An emulsion is then applied across the mesh. Once the emulsion has dried, it is exposed to ultra-violet light. This hardens the emulsion in the exposed areas but leaves the unexposed parts soft. The emulsion is then washed away leaving a section which will allow passage of the printing ink. Each colour on a design demands a new screen. Printing ink is mixed by hand (and eye) in a light box to a Pantone reference. This was incredible to see, after working with Pantone references for years and knowing how specific they are, I thought this was such a fantastic skill to have and that the artisans must have such an eye for colour! Wax bed printing is especially good for multi colour prints as the fabric can be prone to shrinkage after the first screen’s ink has been applied and starts to dry. The sticky wax bed holds the fabric in place so that the next screen can be applied and the design doesn’t overlap.
From left to right: The screen after it had the final design has been transferred by exposing light onto a photo sensitive emulsion on the screen through a stencil; screen printing inks ready for use; entrance to the screenprinting unit.
I was able to visit both our WFTO certified manufacturing units, located in Mysore and Gumballi. Janjri Trivedi founded re-wrap in 2002, with the mission to teach sewing skills to rural Southern Indian women, empowering them through long-term employment in our manufacturing unit and where they didn’t have to travel away from their families to the nearest big city to find work. The Mysore unit was the original re-wrap manufacturing unit and has recently been renovated.
The space was beautiful, although very modern, all doors and internal windows were recycled antique traditional Indian styles painted in vibrant colours.
We produce re-usable Furoshiki knot wraps for our biggest client in beautiful eye-catching designs. Any excess knot-wraps that we had stock of were used to cover ceiling tiles, creating a colourful patchwork effect. At the Mysore unit I met Janet, a councellor with over 40 years experience who I found to be very inspiring. Janet had been at re-wrap for 6 months and appeared to be a mother figure to many of the ladies. She provides the ladies support and advice on everything from nutrition, financial planning to enlighten the team on POSH – an Indian government scheme requiring companies to educate on the prevention of sexual harassment in the workplace.We provide nutritious lunches for our team and many see their time at work as the part of the day that they enjoy the most, a chance to do something for themselves and to leave any personal issues at the door. We had a delicious sweet tea with the ladies on their break on the rooftop dining area.The Gumballi unit is set in a rural location. Whilst it has more of a traditional warehouse feel, the artisans face the open door which looks out onto fields. It is peaceful and a warm breeze flows through the unit. Whilst visiting, I was able to talk to some of the artisans about their experience working for re-wrap and what their home life was like. It was obvious talking to the ladies that they enjoyed their jobs and the freedom that their jobs created for them, both financial and time away from the stresses of family life.
Melissa Tatko is Head of Business Development for re-wrap, a self-funded social enterprise that produce reusable cotton goods, produced ethically by female artisans in rural Southern India. She has been working in the textiles and fashion industry for 9 years.
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2019-04-21T19:20:00Z
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https://www.andthefuture.com/overview/2019/2/2/from-seed-to-shop
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The “hotspot approach” launched by the European Union in May 2015, and then implemented in September of the same year, is characterized less by peculiar infrastructures than by a series of procedures and mechanisms for identifying and selecting migrants (Garelli and Tazzioli, 2016; Kasparek, 2016; Sciurba 2016). The hotspot model—conceived as a series of more variegated and arbitrary measures for fingerprinting, illegalizing, and dividing migrants, rather than standardized procedures—has multiplied across spaces well beyond the physical barriers of those detention centers that have been renamed “hotspots.” The multiplication of the hotspot system is an extraordinary phenomenon in Greece, with a repentine mushrooming of refugee camps since the closure of the Macedonian border in early March 2016 and the eviction of Eidomeni camp in May. These recently established refugee camps work as sorting places, where migrants are identified and partitioned between those considered eligible for relocation and the others who can only apply for asylum in Greece.
A far less visible but determinant feature of the hotspot approach is the accelerated temporality of control, and I contend that this underpins its functioning and structures it in depth. Beyond the materialities of the infrastructures and the daily logistics of migration management, I take here the analytical angle of the temporality of control that is at stake in the official and unofficial hotspots, as well the temporal borders that set the pace of the exclusionary channels of the asylum. More precisely, the accelerated temporality of control is not simply one aspect that can be observed in the daily functioning of the hotspots but, rather, one of the main mechanisms that shape in a distinctive way the hotspot-machine. The EU’s “border strategy” combines the swift pace of control with temporal borders as techniques for further narrowing and hampering the access to the asylum system to discipline and respond to practices of migration that could not be regulated through spatial containment. The islands of Lampedusa and Lesbos are privileged sites for grasping the bordering of temporalities, the practices of control and regulation exercised on singular migrants and on migrant multiplicities through the enactment of specific rhythms of governmentality. Through such an expression I refer both to the disciplining of mobility through dates and “deadlines” that determine migrants’ protection and eligibility for relocation, and to mechanisms of partition, selection and identification that change over time, in a quite rapid and unpredictable way.
An accelerated temporality of control ?
Lesbos, April 20, 2016. The decision to date the events we talk about in the field of migration governmentality is not a trifling detail: the spatial and political transformations that have occurred in the last three years in the strategies of capture, control and containment of migration movements have followed an unprecedented hectic pace. The island of Lesbos is not an exception on this point. The frantic and convoluted rhythm changes in mechanisms of govermentality has reached its peak there soon after the implementation of the EU-Turkey agreement, signed on March 18, 2016. One month later, sitting outside the fences of the hotspot of Moria, I was observing 230 Pakistani migrants entering the hotspot. After the eviction of the informal camp, called “NoBorder Kitchen” near the city of Mitylene, where they stayed for three months refusing to be fingerprinted and registered in the hotspot of Moria, those migrants have been transferred by force there and detained. In the span of few hours, some of them have been labelled as deportable migrants and have been isolated in the inner area of the hotspot. The others have been allowed to claim asylum in Greece.
Due to the clause contained in the EU-Turkey agreement that considers Turkey a “safe third country,” many migrants who landed on the Greek islands after March 18 have been preemptively excluded from the asylum process and have been placed in the channels of deportation (to Turkey). March 18 can be considered as a watershed in the Greek hotspot-machine, and Lesvos in particular, as stressed by Doctors without Borders: “everything changed in the span of few hours, from March 18 to March 19, when the gate of Moria was suddenly closed, and the migrants who were inside or who arrived after March 19, remained detained there and were not allowed to take the ferry and go to Athens” (Doctors Without Borders Interview, April 21, 216). Indeed, since March 19 all the migrants who arrive on Greek islands are detained until a decision is not taken about their legal status. Currently, migrants in Lesbos are either considered deportable migrants or if they apply for the international protection, “asylum seekers,” in which case they are further divided between the nationalities eligible for relocation and the others who do not.
This accelerated temporality of control did not start in March 2016 but the EU-Turkey watershed produced considerable changes in the modalities and procedures for identifying and selecting the migrants according to new exclusionary criteria, as illustrated above. What changed after March 18, 2016, was not the speed of the politics of control but its modulations and the impact on the migrants. The accelerated pace in the procedures for marking, labelling, and dividing the migrants started already in summer 2015, with the massive arrivals in Lesbos, and more radically with the implementation of the hotspot system in September 2015; however, it affected and touched upon migrants differently. Until the end of 2015, rescued migrants were taken to the hotspot of Moria to register, and the registration was the necessary condition for getting the authorization to leave Lesbos by ferry and continue their journeys to Macedonia and along the Balkan route, with a temporary permit of one month (all nationalities) or six months (Syrians only) to circulate in Greece. The registration process in Lesbos lasted on average no more than one or two days.
Lampedusa, February 2016. The temporality of control in Italy has been less subjected to frantic alteration than in Greece, at least at the level of the effects produced on migrants’ lives. The logistic of the hotspot in Italy has been structured around a quite centralized mechanism for channeling migrants and transferring them from the places of first arrival in the South of Italy to hosting centers across the country. Nevertheless, even in Italy the pace of migration controls is formed by criteria of selection that are not constant in time, following desultory changes in the practices of government. On the island of Lampedusa the rapid decisions taken by the police about whether or not a migrant should be let to claim asylum or not, gave rise to a huge number of illegalized migrants on the Italian territory. The detention center of Contrada Imbriacola in Lampedusa was the first in Italy to be renamed a “hotspot,” in September 2015—after that, Trapani became a hotspot in December, Pozzallo in January 2016, and Taranto in March.
For about four months (November 2015-March 2016) migrants who landed in Lampedusa were subjected to a mechanism of preventive illegalization and hampered from the possibility to claim asylum. Upon disembarkation, migrants in Lampedusa are taken from the harbor to the hotspot where they are quickly identified in the span of few hours by the Italian Scientific Police, while Frontex and EASO officers control Italian authorities, checking that these latter fingerprint all migrants and transfer them to EURODAC database. The hotspot procedures rapidly identified migrants who were eligible for relocation (Syrians, Eritreans, Iraqis), and approved their asylum applications. The majority of migrant nationals from West African countries—among which Nigerians and Gambians, who in early 2016 were the first two nationalities of migrants arriving in Italy—and all migrants from “North Africa” have been illegalized “on the spot” (Garelli and Tazzioli, 2016). The non-juridical label of “economic migrant” was used for denying them the access to the asylum procedure. These preemptively illegalized migrants were given a decree of expulsion that obliged them to leave Italy with their own means in seven days. Yet, most of them remained in Italy as illegalized migrants, except those migrants nationals from Nigeria, Egypt, and Tunisia that can be quickly deported due to the repatriation agreements between Italy and these countries.
In this regard, it is important to highlight that Italy has been put under pressure by the EU concerning the obligation to fingerprint migrants. In this way, the preventive exclusion from the channels of the asylum can be seen as Italy’s strategy for not paying the cost of humanitarian assistance. In short, in a time of economic crisis, the cost of the asylum system has been reduced to the minimum, keeping out most of the migrants from humanitarian support, producing them as irregular migrants on the territory. Therefore, the accelerated temporality of control was functional to narrow the space of protection as much as possible and to temporally anticipate the threshold of deportability. That is to say, instead of waiting up to one year or more for the result of the asylum procedure, and in the meanwhile granting rights to asylum seekers, Italian authorities illegalized on the spot many migrants transforming them into irregular and thus potentially deportable subjects.
But which specific form of control is at play? And where does this accelerated temporality apply? As suggested by the main title of this intervention (identify, label, and divide), the strategy of control deployed by the hotspot-logistics, and that reverberates well beyond reception centers, does not exercise a constant monitoring of migrant conducts over time. Rather, what matters is that fast partitions are made among migrant multiplicities and that everybody is registered and his/her digital traces are stored in EURODAC, in order to mark his/her first entry in Italy.
Related to this, the accelerated temporality of control actually concerns the first stage of migration management upon disembarkation. On this point, it is worth recalling the argument pushed forward by Dimitris Papadopolous, Niamh Stephenson, and Vassilis Tisanos in the book Escape Routes through the notion of “decelerated circulation of mobility,” contending that “camps appear as the spaces which most drastically attempt to regulate the speed of this circulation and to decelerate it” (Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos, 2008: 198). Coming back the political context of the hotspot system, such an analysis is helpful for clarifying that the accelerated temporality of migration governmentality concerns the rapid procedure undertaken by national authorities for deciding upon migrants’ status and for dividing them. Instead, by looking at the hotspot system from the point of view of its impact on migrants’ lives and on their journeys, we see that it works as a spatial capture practice that slows down migrants’ speed, a machine of illegalization of many people in seek of asylum. The temporality of control is a strategy of government through and over time.
However, the hotspot-logistics—formed by the material infrastructures of the hotspot, by the identification procedures and the mechanisms for channeling migrants—not only obstruct and decelerate migration movements at the same time that they speed up identification and selection procedures; the Italian context also sheds light on the obstructed and slow pace of the institutional channels where migrants allowed to claim asylum. In fact, while according to Italian directives, migrants should stay in the hotspot no more than 72 hours, people remain in Lampedusa on average two weeks, and some of them up to four months. This is first of all because the transfer to hosting centers situated on the mainland can take time given the limited number of places available.
Yet, in many cases the extended permanence inside the hotspot of Lampedusa was the consequence of collective or individual forms of refusal with vengeance on the part of migrants, who opposed to the obligation to be identified and give their fingerprints. December 17, 2015; January 6-7, 2016; May 8-16, 2016: these are the most salient temporal landmarks of collective migrant refusals that took place in Lampedusa in the form of public protests and sit-ins, not to mention the individual and silent resistances that are not captured by the spotlights of the media and that remained fundamentally unknown and invisible. These collective refusals jammed for some time the hotspot logistics, since the police detained them indefinitely in Lampedusa due to their resistance to be fingerprinted.
It cannot pass unnoticed that in the Explanatory note on the “Hotspot” approach, the European Commission the accelerated temporality concerns the possibility “to intervene, rapidly and in an integrated manner, in frontline Member States when there is a crisis due to specific and disproportionate migratory pressure at their external borders.” Similarly, in The European Agenda on Migration, which is the text through which the EU launched the “hotspot approach,” the speed required in the hotspot does not concern the time needed for finding a solution and a protected space for people seeking asylum but, rather, the capacity to “swiftly identify, register, and fingerprint incoming migrants.” Thus, more than transit points, the hotspots appear as spatial and temporal “chokepoints,” that is as sites of mobility disruption. Mobilizing Debora Cowen’s seminal work on logistics and readapting it to the hotspot context, I suggest that migration management necessitates spatial and temporal chokepoints to slow down and select migrant movements, and its main fear is that these crucial sites could be jammed and unsettled in their functioning (Cowen, 2014).
When spatial containment does not hold. The temporal borders’ cut.
As I illustrated above, nationality certainly represents the main criterion used both in Greece and in Italy for establishing exclusionary partitions among migrant multiplicities. Yet, particularly in the Greek context, at some point nationality has become not enough as a parameter for keeping out migrants from the channels of the asylum and of relocation. March 18, 2016 is only the first threshold introduced by Greek authorities with the support of EASO for restricting the number of eligible candidates to the asylum. Moreover, while the date of the signature of the EU-Turkey agreement produced a split temporality, formed by a “before” and an “after,” migrants’ eligibility for the relocation and for the pre-registration procedure have been subjected to proper temporal borders; namely, temporal borders are enacted in this case as time intervals into which migrants fit.
The government of asylum seekers who entered Greece in the last year and half pivots around a dense calendar of dates that establishes, on the basis of the day of arrival of the migrant in the country and on other related events, who is not allowed to access the relocation procedure. The relocation scheme is in place only for those who entered Greece before March 20, 2016; Iraqis who have been registered after July 1, will be excluded from the relocation; the pre-registration procedure is applicable only for those who arrived between January 1, 2015, and March 20, 2016. These are some of the time-intervals, that migrants must be lucky to match in order to be “potentially successful candidates” for being allocated in some place in Europe and not being illegalized. When strategies of spatial containment and the criterion of nationality are not enough for disciplining mobility and narrowing the access to protection, states introduce temporal borders that vertically cut across the sites where migrants are identified and registered, producing a further hierarchization of “legitimate” mobilities. In other words, instead of working as thresholds for granting non-negotiable rights to people fleeing wars, temporal borders multiply and increase restrictions both to migrants’ presence in Europe and to migrants’ access to asylum.
Temporal borders have been mobilized by states as a strategy of spatial containment and scattering functioning through the channeling and slowing down of migrants’ movements. In this sense, the temporality of control represents a fundamental analytical angle for grasping the disciplining of unruly mobility.
Lesvos, Kos, Chios, Samos, and Leros in Greece; Lampedusa, Pozzallo, Taranto, and Trapani in Italy.
Since the hotspot is a restricted access reception center, this could be reconstructed only from the direct testimonies of the migrants who left and have been transferred to Sicily, or those who during the day used to go out from the hotspot of Lampedusa. In fact, in order to prevent possible turmoil inside the hotspot, the Italian police de facto unofficially allowed migrants going out during the day passing through a hole in the fences that migrants themselves made.
Doctors without Borders (2016) Personal interview, April 21.
Garelli G and Tazzioli M (2016) The EU hotspot approach at Lampedusa. Opendemocracy.
Kasparek B (2016) Routes, Corridors, and Spaces of Exception: Governing Migration and Europe.
Papadopoulos D, Stephenson N, and Tsianos V (2008) Escape Routes: Control and subversion in the twenty-first century. London: Pluto Press.
Sciurba A (2016) Misrecognizing and confining asylum. From a subjective fundamental right to an instrument of clandestinization at the era of the ‘Hotspot Approach. Filosofia del Diritto, forthcoming.
Martina Tazzioli is Lecturer in Geography at Swansea University and Visiting Lecturer at City University of London. She is the author of Spaces of Governmentality: Autonomous Migration and the Arab Uprisings (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014) and co-author, with Glenda Garelli, of Tunisia as a Revolutionized Space of Migration (Palgrave, 2016). She is co-editor of Foucault and the Making of Subjects (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016) and Foucault and the History of Our Present (Palgrave, 2015).
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2019-04-22T16:29:40Z
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http://refugeeobservatory.aegean.gr/en/identify-label-and-divide-temporality-control-and-temporal-borders-hotspots-m-tazzioli
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2019-04-20T06:42:19Z
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https://allerzeiten.com/en/terms
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The clinical history of nodular fasciitis consists of a small, superfically located, rapidly growing nodule with a short duration of symptoms from 1-12 weeks. Longer durations of up to a year have also been reported.
Usually patients complain of a single nodule, most frequently found on the upper extremity. Rarely, patients will present with multiple nodules either all at once or at different points in time. Although the tumor is less common in children, lesions in the head and neck are the most frequently occurring variety in patients in this population.
Patients will sometimes complain of pain or tenderness at the sight. Numbness or paresthesia is uncommon and may only occur when the nodule is compressing a peripheral nerve. Ten to 15 percent of cases are associated with a history of trauma.
On physical examination, the nodule appears well circumscribed, often round or oval in shape, and is thought to lie in the subcutaneous tissue. The size is small, ranging from 0.5-5 cm with an average of 1.5-2 cm. Rare cases of larger lesions measuring up to 10 cm have been documented. It is usually freely moveable without attachment to the overlying skin. Nodules are located most commonly on the upper extremity, specifically the volar aspect of the forearm, with other common places being the trunk, head and neck, and lower extremities. Rare sites include the hand and foot. The intradermal variant can present with additional physical features of superficial ulceration and bleeding and they are often associated with increased amounts of pain.
On excisional biopsy the gross appearance of nodular fasciitis depends on the cellularity, matrix composition, and location of the nodule. The lesions can be firm, solid, nodular, or rubbery, and are gray, white or yellow in color. Those lesions with an increased myxoid stroma have a soft and gelatinous consistency whereas those with pronounced collagenous stroma are more firm.
There are three main subtypes of NF; subcutaneous, intramuscular, and fascial. Other less common subtypes include dermal, intravascular, cranial, and ossifying. Most lesions are subcutaneous, well circumscribed, non-encapsulated, and less than 2 cm in diameter. The intramuscular lesions tend to be larger, poorly circumscribed, and invade surrounding soft tissue.
Nodular fasciitis was first described in 1955 by Kornwaler and is a benign proliferation of fibroblasts. This section will emphasize the histological features present most commonly in NF.
Many authors point out the importance of clefts between individual fibroblasts, throughout which there are extravasated red cells. Variable numbers of inflammatory cells may also be present, mainly lymphocytes or plasma cells. Although some authors disagree with the notion that there is a relationship between the microscopic picture and the preoperative duration of the lesion, many have found there to be a close correlation.
Early in the course of the lesion myxoid histology is especially prominent. It becomes more cellular with time, and older lesions tend to have a fibrous histology that may be characterized by hyaline fibrosis. Microcysts may also form in lesions of longer duration.
The probing border areas project into and dissect fascial planes and muscle bundles. Proliferating endothelial cells forming small vessels may be found around the periphery of the lesion in a radiating pattern. Multinucleated giant cells and, rarely, osteoid, bone, and cartilage formation, and areas of hemorrhage are additional features encountered.
Accurate cytologic diagnosis of nodular fasciitis is possible with knowledge of the fine needle aspiration cytology (FNAC) features along with clinical correlation, thus avoiding unnecessary surgical intervention. Sampling error is a possible limitation of this diagnostic technique. There are three different cytological categories for NF: typical, granuloma-like, and myxoid-like.
Granuloma-like NF cytologic features include an Increased number of multinucleated giant cells, hypercellularity, and few or no ganglion cell-like cells.
Myxoid-like NF cytologic features include abundant myxoid material, low cellularity of stromal cells, and no ganglion cell-like cells.
The appearance on imaging is varied and is based on the histologic composition of the nodular lesions.
Nodular fasciitis is a benign self-limited lesion that is often surgically excised for diagnosis with subsequent complete resolution. Studies using FNAC for diagnosis of NF have shown that the natural history of the lesions may in fact be one of spontaneous resolution.
Nodular fasciitis is the most common benign mesenchymal lesion misdiagnosed as a sarcoma. The differentiation is based primarily on growth pattern and cellularity. In comparison to NF, sarcomas tend to have a longer duration, larger size, usually greater than 4 cm, frequent cellular pleomorphism, increased mitotic rate with atypical mitotic figures, and course, granular chromatin. Cells are almost always densely packed and arranged in interweaving bundles resulting in the characteristic “herringbone” pattern. On MRI, sarcomas can have perilesional tissue edema or intralesional hemosiderin deposition.
Cellular nodular fasciitis may be confused with fibrous histiocytoma (FH). Differentiating features include the fact that FH is dermal-based less well circumscribed, demonstrates more polymorphous proliferation of spindle-shaped and round cells, and has a more consistent storiform pattern. Important secondary elements include the presence of chronic inflammatory cells, siderophages, foamy histiocytes, and the absence of ganglion cell-like cells on cytologic examination. Short duration of the lesion with spontaneous resolution points more towards a diagnosis of NF.
NF lesions with prominent myxoid stroma may be differentiated from a myxoma by the latter’s paucity of cells and poor vascularization Fibromatosis is also in the differential diagnosis but can be grossly differentiated from NF by the large size, usually greater than 3 cm, poorly circumscribed lesion, and the typical invasion of the surrounding soft tissue. Microscopically, fibromatosis is comprised of slender, linear fascicles of cells separated by abundant collagen. Mitotic figures are less commonly seen than in NF.
Both proliferative fasciitis (PF) and proliferative myositis (PM), two other pseudosarcomatous lesions, are considered in the differential of nodular fascitiis. PF is distinguished by the decreased cellularity, increased collagen fragments, and abundance of ganglion cell-like cells on histology. Ganglion cell-like cells are seldom seen on histologic sections of NF but are commonly found in PF, PM and NF with FNAC (fine needle aspiration cytology). Histologically, PM also has ganglion cell-like cells but growth of lesional cells between patches of intact muscle cells with sparing of muscle fibers distinguishes PM from NF. In NF, muscle fibers are obliterated or damaged when the lesions involve the muscle.
The differential diagnosis based on radiologic findings, lesions involving the head and neck, or intradermal lesions are broad.
Nodular fasciitis occurs with a peak incidence in the third and fourth decades, but an age range from infancy to the elderly is reported. There is no male or female predominance and no known associated risk factors.
The cause and pathophysiology of nodular fasciitis are unknown. Ten to 15 percent of cases are associated with trauma but trauma alone cannot account for the development of the lesion. Clonal chromosomal aberrations have been reported in a small number of cases. At this point there is no definitive evidence stating whether NF is a reactive or a self-limiting, neoplastic process.
There are no known systemic disorders associated with nodular fasciitis.
Treatment options for nodular fasciititis are summarized in Table I.
Excisional biopsy results in immediate complete resolution of the lesion. In some cases, complete resolution is seen even after partial excision. Bleeding is the only potential risk with excisional biopsy.
Several studies have shown that an accurate diagnosis of nodular fasciitis can be made with a good clinical history and ctyology from FNAC. These studies have demonstrated spontaneous resolution of NF with a median period of 2 weeks and up to 16 weeks following FNAC. When there is an atypical clinical course, long duration of symptoms, lack of resolution within 4 weeks of diagnosis, or irregular cytologic results with FNAC, excisional biopsy is necessary to rule out other diseases.
The risk of incorrect diagnosis and the existence of a potentially more life-threatening lesion may encourage excisional biopsy over observation alone as the diagnostic and therapeutic modality. While FNAC-based diagnosis is quite recent, histologic diagnosis of NF has been the mainstay since it was first reported.
One case report of a 5-cm, ill-defined, subcutaneous nodule located on the volar aspect of the right forearm of a 37-year-old female was biopsied for diagnosis. Complete excision of the nodule was too difficult based on its size and infiltration into surrounding soft tissue. Conservative therapy with intralesional injection of corticosteroids demonstrated complete resolution of the lesion within 36 hours of follow-up. Other case studies have also shown regression and eventual resolution with the use of intralesional corticosteroid injections.
The recurrence rate for nodular fasciitis is 1-2%. Recurrence is more common in the pediatric population with lesions in the head and neck region. Patients with excisional biopsy with complete resolution and no recurrence require no further follow-up. Patients with excisional biopsy and incomplete resolution should follow-up for observation or, if there is clinical concern, a wider re-excision. Patients with diagnostic FNAC and observation as their choice of treatment can follow-up with their doctor if the lesion has not resolved within 4 weeks of the diagnosis, if it continues to grow, or if it causes increased amount of discomfort. It is possible that the lesion can take longer than 4 weeks to regress.
Seven to 10 percent of lesions are located in the head and neck. Most cases show a benign nature with complete resolution after excisional biopsy. However, one study included a nodule in the prevertebral space of a 2 year-old boy that demonstrated aggressive behavior with jugular fossa destruction, intracranial extension, and related symptoms, including multiple lower cranial nerve palsies. The study did not clarify if wide excisional biopsy was performed and it did not provide information regarding follow-up of this patient.
Given the benign, self-limited nature of the lesion, it is possible that once the diagnosis of nodular fasciitis is made, no further surgical intervention is necessary and it can be observed for regression. In the case of an aggressive lesion, an alternative could be to do a trial of intralesional corticosteroid injections, which demonstrated complete regression of the lesion within 36 hours in one case study.
Allen , PW. “Nodular fasciitis”. Pathology . vol. 4. 1972. pp. 9-26. (This paper is a review of 895 cases of nodular fasciitis that were compiled at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) from 1957 to 1970. It provides updated information from previously published reports by the AFIP with particular attention to 96 consecutive cases seen from May 1969 to June 1970. It delineates the four most common histological features of nodular fasciitis as well as those less constant. The paper goes into detail about clinical history, gross pathology, histopathology, differential diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. It concludes with a detailed review of 9 recurrent lesions [~1%.]).
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2019-04-22T13:59:35Z
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https://www.neurologyadvisor.com/decision-support-in-medicine/dermatology/nodular-fasciitis-subcutaneous-pseudosarcomatous-fibromatosis-infiltrative-fasciitis/
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Thanks for the props, Tim.
Unfortunately, this argument lost in superior court and the client chose not to take on the expense of an appeal. It was litigated in 2012 or 2013. Litigants now using this argument face a less than receptive judiciary due mainly to Rajamin v. Deutsche Bank, 757 F.3d 79 (2nd Cir. 2014). Courts in California, all over the federal judiciary and even New York state are now accepting it as if it is mandatory authority on the issue of void vs. voidable, despite the fact that Rajamin’s holding was only on the issue of federal standing. Unfortunately, the New York state intermediate appeals courts, at least the 2nd and 3rd Appellate Divisions, have now begun citing Rajamin as authority to determine foreclosure defense litigants have no standing to make this argument – citing a case on FEDERAL standing without so much as a cursory analysis of the standing principles of New York state law – which is the applicable law.
I think the argument you posted is still accurate, yet, an attorney for a foreclosure defense client must understand the mistakes made by the Rajamins in pleading the case and the errors made by the 2nd Circuit in its void vs. voidable dictum and at the same time have a receptive trial judge who is honest and diligent enough to look at the void vs. voidable issue anew, despite the apparent authority of Rajamin.
While the Rajamin Court’s void vs. voidable analysis is dicta (because the court disposed of the appeal based on what it determined to be Rajamin’s lack of standing to even make the argument), even if it were not dicta, it is merely persuasive authority and not mandatory authority on state real property and trust estates matters, since the 2nd Circuit is a federal court deciding those non-federal issues. Mistakenly, federal courts throughout the nation are now determining that Rajamin settled the void vs. voidable issue since the 2nd Circuit covers the lower federal courts located in New York and they look at Rajamin as stare decisis on New York state law. However, that view is erroneous, since only the highest court in New York State – the Court of Appeals may have the last word on what New York State’s real property and trust estates law is. As I predicted prior to Yvanova that the California Supreme Court would find a homeowner has standing to make this argument, I also predict the New York Court of Appeals will revisit its past cases on the matter and do the same eventually.
That said, Rajamin is mistaken in its void vs. voidable dicta determination that an act in contravention of the trust may be ratified by the beneficiary. The Rajamin Court accepted cases in which the litigants did not invoke EPTL 7-2.4 or its predecessor statute as authority on the issue of whether EPTL 7-2.4 had the effect of voiding the purported transfer to the trust while not accepting cases that do analyze EPTL 7-2.4 because they did not consider the possibility of ratification! Compounding such an error, the Rajamin Court failed to engage in the rules of statutory interpretation by failing to recognize the absence of ratification in the plain wording of the statute under consideration that clearly evidences the legislature’s intent that acts in contravention of the trust be void, not voidable. If the legislature accepted that ratification could validate acts in contravention of the trust, it simply would have used the word “voidable” in place of the word it actually used: void. Finally, the Rajamin Court completed its judicial folly by indulging in statutory construction by judicially creating the ratification exception to the plain wording of the statute governing all trust estates in New York without first analyzing whether EPTL 7-2.4 is ambiguous, and, thus, in need of such judge made law.
Besides the void vs. voidable issue, the Rajamin Court also misses the mark in its standing analysis – as many courts in most jurisdictions have also – that wrongful foreclosure victims are somehow “challenging” or trying to “enforce” the PSA. However, that is a strawman argument – of course a non-party to the PSA has no standing to enforce or challenge it. Therefore, every litigant making a voidness argument in that context must be clear about what he/she is doing when seeking judicial notice of the PSA, and more importantly, when seeking to move into evidence the non-hearsay admissions of fact made therein by the parties to the PSA – the litigant is merely proffering evidence to support a wrongful foreclosure argument – nothing more and nothing less.
That said, the Rajamin Court cited portions of the PSA in which the parties acknowledge ownership of the loan being transferred concurrently with the signing of the PSA (which poses another issue – has anyone actually seen a fully executed version of the PSA signed by the parties thereto?). Having noted the language of that acknowledgment, the Rajamin Court properly inferred that ownership passed from the depositor to the trust.
However, like other courts in most jurisdictions, the court erroneously inferred the trust had the right to foreclose the security (property) due to the trust’s apparent ownership of the loan. The problem was compounded by the Rajamins, who in their third amended complaint challenged ownership of the note and challenged specifically the trust’s right to receive principal and income under the note. So, the Rajamin Court simply knocked down that argument while refusing to analyze the Rajamin’s third argument: that the trust had no right to foreclose on the property, regardless of whether it had the right to principal and income under the note. Instead of tackling this third argument – as the Yvanova Court so fundamentally did – the Rajamin Court instead only analyzed ownership of the loan.
The Rajamin Court was wrong to reach such a conclusion because only one having a UCC Article 3 interest in a loan (where the note is a negotiable one) may foreclose on the underlying real property, yet the trust had only received a UCC Article 9 interest in the note and/or deed of trust. What that means is the trust’s only recourse upon non-payment of the loan is to sue the homeowner (or the trust’s assignor) for money only. Only the holder of the note or a non-holder with the rights of a holder (who also actually possesses the original note at the time of foreclosure) may foreclose the underlying security and take the homeowner’s real property.
How do we know the trust only received an Article 9 interest in the note and/or mortgage? We know because the trust’s assignor – the depositor – only gave an Article 9 interest. It may be that an Article 9 interest is all the depositor actually possessed. It is axiomatic that the trust could not receive from the depositor more than the depositor actually gave, or could give, to it.
A careful reading of Rajamin confirms that, at most, the depositor assigned only an Article 9 interest to the trust as is apparent from this language the Court quoted from the PSA: “”The Depositor, concurrently with the execution and delivery hereof, hereby sells, transfers, assigns, sets over and otherwise conveys to the Trustee for the benefit of the Certificate holders… all the right, title and interest of the Depositor in “the principal and interest on the mortgage loans…” Under Article 9, a person may “own” a negotiable note, even when another party is the note’s holder or is a non-holder in possession of the note with the rights of a holder. The “owner” of a negotiable note is entitled to – at most – only payment under the note, and, as evidenced by the quoted language, that is all the depositor assigned to the trust. Furthermore, notice the complete absence of any language that the trust was negotiated the note. While the trust might have still been seen as acquiring an Article 3 interest as a non-holder in possession of the note with the rights of a holder because of the “transfer” language also used in that part of Article 3, there is no language indicating the transfer of possession of the note by physical delivery. Only the delivery of the PSA is acknowledged therein. This is an important distinction because a thorough reading of the “non-judicial foreclosure” provisions of Article 9 reveals a mere Article 9 interest in a negotiable note is insufficient to force a sale of the underlying real property. Only the negotiable note (or deed of trust) itself may be foreclosed (yet another mistake courts and lawyers make is thinking one who has an Article 9 interest in a negotiable note may foreclose the underlying real property without also having the requisite Article 3 interest).
Lastly, while the Rajamin Court capitalized on the Rajamins’ confusion about “ownership” of the note by knocking down the strawman argument, it also rubbed salt into their wounds by ignoring their third argument that the trust had no right to foreclose their real property, stating it was “implausible” that the trust wasn’t “assigned” the loan. In reality, the Court recognized the conveyance of an Article 9 interest in the proceeds of the loan and confused that with the right to foreclose the underlying real property. In rejecting the contentions as “implausible,” the Rajamin Court also violated the cardinal rule of reviewing a motion to dismiss: the pleader’s factual allegations are to be taken as true. Whether the allegations can be proven or not is tested on a dispositive motion or trial – reflecting an epidemic in homeowner suits against purported lenders (but not necessarily in other types of cases) of knocking the case out at the pleading stage without accepting the homeowners’ allegations as true and giving them the opportunity to prove those allegations (raising due process problems that could be reviewed on certiorari to the US Supreme Court – but that is another discussion).
The Rajamin Court either thought Rajamins’ first two arguments being rejected meant their third argument was moot, or it purposefully used its rejection of the first two arguments as a distraction from the fact that it refused to consider the third argument while knowing that it was dispositive.
In short, I’m convinced that these “trusts” have never received more than an Article 9 interest in the note (if the Article 9 interest was purchased with value – a requirement under Article 9). The securitization documents prove that fact. A foreclosure victim is not trying to enforce or challenge any of the agreements by the “securitization” parties – he/she is only proffering them as evidence from which it can be inferred they are being foreclosed on by a party with no right to do so. Not only does a homeowner have standing to make this argument – the homeowner also has a due process right to present evidence supporting his/her claims and defenses.
With regard to the “stare decisis” effect of bad case law, an advocate must soberly and pointedly ask the judge the rhetorical question: what would this country look like if the US Supreme Court merely relied upon Plessy v. Fergusson in Brown v. The Board of Education as resolving the case under the doctrine of stare decisis, instead of having the humility and courage to admit they were wrong in how they decided Plessy? Would Thurgood Marshall have even become a US Supreme Court Justice (or any African American for that matter) if he hadn’t so adamantly and tirelessly advocated on behalf of Brown against the rigid racial biases of the lower court judges who forced him to bring the case all the way to the US Supreme Court? Isn’t this similar to the struggle homeowner attorneys are having fighting against the socio-economic bias exhibited today by judges in favor of lenders and against homeowner/borrowers?
Finally, as with judges, it is a rare attorney who has deeply studied Article 3 and Article 9 of the UCC – a most disliked area of law – enough to know what rights come with an Article 9 interest and what rights come with an Article 3 interest and how the distinction is crucial in determining who has the right to foreclose and who does not.
My loan from 2005 was RE-SECURITIZED in 2016. I asked “current servicer” for PROOF they own loan and right to foreclose. They just send me OLD paperwork that does not PROVE that they own loan.
The had known Document Mill, Nationwide Title Clearing do a recent “CORPORATE ASSIGNMENT OF DEED OF TRUST” in their favor in 2016. My original loan was an old Countrywide Home Loan in 2005……is this legal?
Don’t they have to show me NEW documents PROVING they own loan?
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2019-04-25T20:12:14Z
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https://timothymccandless.wordpress.com/2017/02/03/remic-and-viod-assignment/
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I belong to a book club of women who are all moms like me. Once a year we pick a classic to read (or reread). This year’s pick was To Kill a Mockingbird, for which Lee won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize and on Monday received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. I had read Harper Lee’s classic in high school and I remembered the plot, but what I did not remember was how magical Lee’s prose was, how connected I felt to Scout Finch, the narrator, and the rhythms of her life in that small Southern town. I wonder now if I forgot all of this or if I never got the chance to feel this connection when I read Mockingbird in English class.
I was an avid reader even back then, but I often felt disconnected from the books that we read in school. I was reading James Michener’s historical tomes and Robert Heinlein’s fantasy by the time I was in high school (OK, not classic literature, but so fun to read!). The books we were assigned were so boring! It took forever to read one, stopping after every chapter to “do something” with the book: memorize vocabulary lists, hunt for examples of figurative language, and write lengthy essays from teacher prompts. These assignments killed any momentum that might have pulled me through a book, and killed my appreciation for the book, too.
As Mockingbird continues, Scout’s views show that she has become increasingly disconnected from the learning she must do at school. She says, “…as I inched sluggishly along the treadmill of the Maycomb County school system, I could not help receiving the impression that I was being cheated out of something. Out of what, I knew not, yet I did not believe that twelve years of unrelieved boredom was exactly what the state had in mind for me.” To Kill a Mockingbird was written in 1960 (set in the ‘30s), I was in high school in 1984, and as teachers and parents, we are still bemoaning the lack of engagement that students seem to have in school and with reading. Much research into reading has taken place since 1960, so what has not changed for students?
I think the mistrust is still there. Teachers do not trust students to take control of their own literacy development or their own learning. We still teach books instead of teaching readers. Students are given very little control of what they read, when they read, and how they are allowed to respond. School reading still seems to be about what teachers think students should be getting out of a book. The opportunity to fall in love with a story is denied to students who have come to view school reading as an obstacle course of comprehension assignments. Teachers are the gatekeepers of knowledge instead of the guides. Should knowledge have a gatekeeper? Until we release some of this control back to our students, they will never become independent thinkers or readers. As for students like Scout and me, who walk into classrooms already readers, we will continue to wonder why our love of reading has no place in school.
Oh, yes. I knew better than Scout. I didn't let on that I could read already in first grade. But I have a vivid memory of my first in-school reading group (and how disappointed I was that there was no reading involved), where the teacher held up a picture of ALICE in a red dress and asked us about how we would know it was ALICE if we saw her on another day, in another dress. I knew I wasn't supposed to notice that ALICE was printed in big letters under her feet.
I hated sitting in reading group, waiting as one after another had a turn at reading the same page over and over. It did teach me how to "read ahead" on the sly--a skill that carried me through many boring classes throughout the years.
As a child who read "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" independently at the age of 4 years and 9 months the summer before entering kindergarten, I felt exactly the same way in "reading" class. We didn't even have reading groups: the entire class read together. The first person in the first row read the first sentence, then the second person in the first row read the second sentence, and so on to the end of the story. I would read ahead, count up to my sentence, then read something else on the sly until it was my turn. Same for the worksheet -- finish it in about 20 seconds, then read a real book under the desk. I always thought that the other kids, who struggled over decoding their assigned sentences, were BETTER "students" than I was, because they were able to play dumb more successfully than I could! That was the lesson I learned by the end of first grade -- school was a gigantic charade, where you were supposed to pretend to learn things you already knew, for some unfathomable grown-ups' reason that kids weren't supposed to understand or question.
My mother went to open house when I was in first grade and was surprised to hear my teacher say, "We have lots of students ALMOST reading!" My mom told the teacher I really could read already. The teacher suggested that I might have memorized a few books at home, but that I wasn't reading in class. My mom came home asked me why I wasn't reading at school, and I explained that since I knew it was the teacher's job to teach me how, I didn't want to hurt her feelings. My mother told the teacher what I said; I was taken to some little room and given a reading test; I was sent to another classroom for reading every day after that, which made me pretty sure that I'd made the teacher mad--she was sending me away!
Years later, I was in a staff development session across the table from my first grade teacher. She introduced me to the others as "so brilliant we had to send her to second grade for reading from the start of the year!" I never knew the other classroom was a second grade room or that it was a good thing to be sent out.
I continually wonder what it is we do to children to make them dislike school so much. Analyzing the heck out of a novel, drill and kill with grammar, memorize this and that....No wonder kids are taking mind trips left and right to escape the boredom that surrounds them in school. I hope that more teachers read your blogs and reflect on their own teaching practices thinking how to best engage/invite children into learning again. Children begin school with such excitement. Where does it go?
Like Kerri, I remember being puzzled by the capstone project for my kindergarten class--a series of prereading exercises bound in a large format book called "I Am Learning How to Read!" I'd been reading for quite some time at that point but the teacher was very excited about it, so I went along with her. Luckily, my first grade teacher was excellent at differentiation, even back in the early 70s. I got what I needed from her.
Donalyn and others like her, from high school reading remediation teachers--Thank you for the love of reading you instill in your students and for helping others to achieve the same with students. When I taught high school remediation classes to help students pass the graduation exams, I had students who had been "properly schooled" but did not learn to read for the love of it. When you love it, you comprehend it--that's what I told my students. They couldn't understand why we spent 90% of our time just plain reading books and talking about what we read and only 10% actually practicing test questions. I read with them. We read to each other. They read to me--not round robin reading but the whole class period from a book they loved and wanted to share. It was glorious! Not one of my students failed the reading grad exam after a semester of breaking the "rules" and reading without a test or worksheet to assess comprehension! Too many of my senior level students had never read a book even though their classes were assigned books to read and they were tested on what they read. Students too often said they didn't need to read because the teacher spent too much time analyzing the book in class--they just took good notes during that analysis of what the teacher thought they needed to remember. They could pass the test without reading the book. So, thank you Donalyn for what you do with students and for how you have agreed to inspire others to be teachers like you!
I just found your blog, and loved this entry. I grew up in a small town in Western PA, and remember reading my sister's textbooks when I was in first grade and she was in third--it was glorious then, but third grade was an awful bore.
It went on being boring for several years, but then in 6th grade the entire reading class involved just sitting there every day, reading whatever we wanted. Once a week we were to take a break from reading and write a letter in our journals telling the teacher about what we were reading and what was exciting about it. She would write back, too, which made me feel really special.
Future classes were never as fun, as we had to stay back to the pace of the slowest reader. I was a vocal kid, and eventually the 7th grade reading teacher finally acknowledged that I had read all of the books on his list of appropriate books...so he had me read War and Peace instead. Writing a book report on that one was hard! After I finally finished it, I talked to my gifted class teacher and talked her and the principal into letting me skip 8th grade reading and go take an extra history class at the high school.
I ended up transferring to a private school where the other kids had read Shakespeare in 6th grade and I was grateful for my reading speed in attempting to catch up to all that I had missed in my semi-rural public school.
I'm glad to see so many others who were bored to tears with school. The best thing that ever happened to me in school was in seventh grade. I went to a tiny (60 students) private school. Someone had donated hundreds of books to the school and the headmaster asked me if I'd like to spend a few hours a day sorting them. I never sorted a single book, but I spent hours every day sitting in that "library" reading to my heart's content -- biography, history, fiction. That good lady headmaster never said a word about it.
I honestly do not know how I became a reader. Well maybe I do. But by all accounts I should have been illiterate. I never read growing up. I used to play outside all of the time. Then around 12 years old, my parent's subscription of Newsweek became my weekly read. I would look for it each week and read it from cover to cover. I do not know what prompted me to read and think about everything I read. I needed a lot of mental stimulation - or to think about things, anything, It was kind of odd and I do not understand what that was all about. I then started reading books and I became so immersed in my thoughts about what I would read. I was also too impressionable. At around that same age I read Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World, and became a cynic about life. Then I read Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier (sp?). I discovered my view on that book was completely different than anyone else's understanding of it. I just felt Rebecca was not liberated enough and dysfunctional as was those in her life. Too, later I felt that the book was too single faceted. But I find many authors are that way. I guess I just accept it now and add my own spin to it to make it more interesting.
What is my point???? Darn I lost track. I have a child with dyslexia. Of all things. And boy have I learned a lot about the other side of the reading experience. My question, what can I do? Everything that has ever been said to help these children is ridiculous such as "they need to practice reading". Correction: They need to practice ACCURATE reading, not just reading. You cannot give a student with dyslexia a book and tell them to read it over and over so that they get better because all they end up learning is how to read inaccurately. It reinforces multiple mis pronunciations or multiple incorrect decoding of the same word, it becomes an exercise in mind torture and turns them off to reading. These kids need to learn how to accurately decode words. I picked up on the pattern for decoding and it became reliable for ME. Not so for my child. She will need a few more explicit trips to such letter combinations like the trigraph "que" and the digraph "sc" before she gets it and can do this automatically so it does not interfere with the meaning and therefore pleasure or reinforcement we get in order to have the incentive to read.
2. Lots of love and nurturing - I stand next to her and respectfully correct the mistakes she makes reading the brownie directions.
5. Lots and lots of humor- let's face it these kids need to be able forgive themselves for making so many reading mistakes. Humor re energizes and takes away the anxiety that results from all the issues related to not having the most foundational skill needed to feel competent in school.
So what may have worked for me -interest and a lot of curiosity, plus the opportunity to pursue reading what I wanted to read, may or not work for these special kids who are often very bright, who are in desperate need for the same intellectual stimulation that we get from reading. The same motivation to learn is there but we need different approaches.
Parent who needs a very special teacher: You are exactly right. Kids with dyslexia need explicit instruction in decoding just like you said. Practice reading incorrectly will only cause frustration. You need to find a teacher trained in multi-sensory direct instruction - Orton-Gillingham. You also need to go to the International Dyslexia Association website- www.interdys.org . They provide a great deal of support and can also refer you to a properly trained instructor in your area. The research has proven what kind of teaching works and the help is out there.
I'm certainly glad I wasn't part of some of the classrooms described above. I always was allowed to read my own choices; and I abhor stories I hear where children are told they can't read a book because it's not on the list. Ms. Miller and I are of one mind when it comes to getting students to love reading.
All is seems to take in my classroom to get students reading is to help them find what they like. I do booktalks on new books all the time, and we have to have a lottery to see who will get to be first to read each one. If we take the time to be interested in students' individual choices and talk to them about their reading, it isn't too difficult to have a reading community in the classroom.
If you share your love of books with kids, they will respond, especially when you offer a menu with choices that connect to their own lives. Start with their comfort zone and then nudge them towards more sophisticated, challenging books as the year progresses. I'm amazed at times at what a child will delve into when they're motivated to read something on a topic they love.
I read all of your articles listed here and I'm so happy to see there are teachers in the upper grades who feel and teach as you do. It's one of the things other teachers in my building just don't get.
They cannot resist stuffing their 3 and 4 year olds with information, rather than letting them learn from a rich environment with an experienced guide (the teachers). I don't understand it, and they don't understand me. They say I don't teach. They feel the children will be more ready to succeed if they're drilled in academics, I feel like they are training the majority of the children to hate school.
Luckily my administrators are more understanding and supportive of my teaching style. What do you say to the teachers though, who like my co workers say, oh you don't teach, you're letting the kids down? Especially when they've had the same training and workshops as I have?
In 1962, I moved to a small, rural school where I was so advanced in reading that the teacher said, " Honey, you can read those books while I have reading groups and the others do their work." The shelf was beside my desk. There were plenty of books, like Tom Sawyer, Huckaberry Finn, and others. I read them all and loved it. Keep up the good work.
This is what I love about finding a group of really smart people. I can find the answers to questions I need help with. Can one of you wonderfully bright minded individuals please help me?
Is que a trigraph in the words queen queer query quercetin question or am I dealing with a quadraph with queer and queen?
I am working on listing letter groupings that represent specific sounds and matching the words to them.
However it looks as though que makes over four sounds such as in unique, quell, queen, quercetin.
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2019-04-21T02:34:08Z
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https://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/book_whisperer/2007/11/killing_mockingbird_1.html
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Be eligible for registration with Yoga Alliance at the RYT-200 level.
Meet the minimum requirements for entry into IAYT-Accredited Yoga Therapist Trainings.
River Flow Yoga, LLC is approved as a yoga school by the State of Wisconsin Educational Approval Board to offer this 200 hr. River Flow Yoga Teacher Training.
The journey begins with a focus on you and your personal practice as a means for understanding and living yoga. From that foundation, you will learn and practice the most important skills for teaching so that you can facilitate yoga for individuals and groups.
Mary Hilliker, RD, E-RYT 500, C-IAYT has been a student of yoga for over 27 years and a teacher for 20 years. She has over 4200 hours of teaching experience. Her interest is in seeing each student in the training gain ease and confidence as a practitioner and as a teacher. Mary feels a commitment to seeing each individual and the group as a whole progress in their knowledge and skills. Her foundations include studying with Gary Kraftsow of the American Viniyoga Institute for 500 hr. Viniyoga Teacher Training and Yoga Therapy Training and Liz (Chandler) Patric for 200 hr. Hatha Yoga Teacher Training.
Dr. Beaumont has a deep interest in complementary care including Ayurveda, Chinese Medicine, Acupuncture and Yoga. He is generous in bringing his physiology and neurosurgery background into the training in practical and accessible ways. You will find him engaging as he discusses the autonomic nervous system, the spine and adapting for health conditions. He is a talented yoga teacher in his own right and perceptive and kind as he helps others with their teaching skills. Andrew completed the 200 hr Viniyoga Wellness Instructor Training (2014-15) and is currently completing the 500 hr. Viniyoga Teacher Training with Gary Kraftsow and the American Viniyoga Institute.
Bill brings many years of experience in teaching methodology into his work with yoga teachers-in-training. His enthusiasm for yoga and teaching comes through in his gentle guidance. He helps students master skills one step at a time so that they gain confidence in their abilities to practice yoga and teach. A sense of humor is required for any practice or small group experience with Bill! Bill completed the 200 hr Viniyoga Wellness Instructor Training (2014-15) and is Certified in Gentle Yoga For Low Back Care (30 hrs.) through Justine Shelton and Yoga Vista Academy (2017). He has also received training through the Veterans Yoga Project in Mindful Yoga Trauma Recovery (2016).
Heather has been immersed in yoga for over 15 years, including over 7 years as a teacher and more recently as a Yoga Therapist-in-Training with Gary Kraftsow and the American Viniyoga Institute. Her experience as a High School & Jr. High English Teacher and Coach, business owner (Managing Partner, 5 Koshas Yoga & Wellness) and experienced Viniyoga teacher at the 500 hour level inform her work with teachers-in-training. Heather has over 2500 hours of experience teaching students of all ages and in many different community settings. She brings great insight, creativity, mentoring and kindness to students in the program.
Jane’s experience as a nurse and health coach, a former yoga studio owner, yoga teacher and Yoga Therapist combined with her sharp intellect enhances her work with teachers-in-training. She has over 20 years of acute care nursing experience in specialty areas such as oncology, coronary/surgical intensive care, and post anesthesia care. Jane holds certifications from a 200-hour hatha yoga teacher training and the AVI Viniyoga Therapist training and she continues to advance her knowledge and study of Viniyoga with her teacher Gary Kraftsow of the American Viniyoga Institute.
Jay’s passion for Vedic chanting and his accessible way of teaching Vedic chant and the Yoga Sutra-s of Patanjali enhances the student’s experience in our training program. Jay is a 200 hr. Viniyoga Wellness Instructor (2014-15 class) and Studio Manager for 5 Koshas Yoga & Wellness. He continues to study Vedic chant with Linda Speckman and Sonia Nelson (Vedic Chant Center). Jay brings his knowledge of healthcare where he worked on the insurance side of the industry as well as his wisdom about the daily workings of a yoga studio into the training. He leads chanting of the Yoga Sutras during each weekend session.
Maggie’s immersion in the Yoga Sutra-s of Patanjali and Vedic chanting, her embodiment of yoga through 50 years of practice and her 20+ years of experience as a yoga teacher enriches our training. Maggie is certified at the 500 hour level through the American Viniyoga Institute (AVI), is registered with Yoga Alliance E-RYT-500, and is certified as a Yoga Therapist through the International Association of Yoga Therapists (IAYT). Her primary teachers have been and are Gary Kraftsow (AVI) and Sonia Nelson (Vedic Chant Center). She teaches classes in asana, pranayama, and the Yoga Sutra-s and sees students one-on-one for Yoga Therapy at RiverGarden Yoga Center in St. Paul, MN.
Wit, wisdom, insight and excellence in teaching and group facilitation are qualities that Mary brings to the teacher training. In addition to her 200 hour Viniyoga Wellness Instructor certification, Mary also brings many years of experience as a facilitator with the UW-Extension into her interactions with students. Mary teaches ongoing classes at 5 Koshas Yoga & Wellness for Stress Relief & Deep Relaxation and leads workshops on leadership, team building and whole-hearted living. She is particularly gifted in teaching methodology and making yoga accessible for a wide range of students.
Pauline has over 13 years of experience as a yoga teacher, training in 2007 in Hatha Yoga and in 2014 as a Viniyoga Wellness Instructor. Her insight and fun-loving nature as well as experience with teaching beginning yoga students informs her teaching style as well as her mentoring of teachers-in-training. Pauline takes an interest in the transformation of every teacher-in-training. She wants to see you grow as a practitioner and as a teacher. Pauline teaches a variety of classes at 5 Koshas Yoga & Wellness, including Yoga for Beginners & Beyond, Yoga for Mental and Physical Balance and Senior Mat and Chair Yoga.
Renee’s care and nurturing of her yoga students carries over to her mentoring in the teacher training. Prenatal and Postnatal Yoga and Yoga for Beginners and Beyond are among Renee’s regular classes at 5 Koshas Yoga & Wellness. Renee is certified as a 200 hour Viniyoga Wellness Instructor (2014-15) and Prenatal Yoga Teacher (Jennifer Colletti, Yoga Center of Minneapolis, 2017) in addition to completing the Yoga Bonding Postnatal & Mom and Baby Yoga Teacher Training Course (2016). She teaches across the lifespan and is particularly gifted with adapting yoga for a variety of individuals including prenatal and postnatal.
H umor, intellect, and perspective are key qualities that Steve infuses into the teacher training. He also shows up with his yoga book collection to share resources and guide further study. Trained in Pilates as well as the Shambhala Buddhist tradition of meditation, Steve found yoga in 2006. An E-RYT 200 hour trained teacher in Vinyasa flow, Steve’s passion revealed itself in the Viniyoga tradition. Steve went on to study with Gary Kraftsow and the American Viniyoga Institute in the 500 hr. Viniyoga Foundations Program and Yoga Therapist Training. He’s a RYT-500 hour teacher and a Certified Yoga Therapist offering classes and private sessions in the Milwaukee area.
Contact Mary Hilliker at [email protected] for a copy of the training catalog and curriculum.
Application is due by Feb 25, 2019 along with the $100 application fee.
Missed the deadline? Contact Mary at [email protected] to see if there any spots left in the training. Late applications may be accepted until April 15, 2019.
There is a $100 application fee. Applications are due by February 25, 2019. The application fee is non-refundable. If you miss the deadline, please contact Mary at [email protected] to see if there are an additional openings in the program.
Early Discount Tuition is $3200 if paid 8 weeks in advance of the start of training (March 3, 2019).
Tuition is $3400 if paid between March 4 and April 15, 2019.
Payment plans: A partial tuition payment of $1200 must be made by April 15, 2019. Twelve (12) additional monthly payments of $200.00 will be required. Payment plans are done automatically from a credit or debit cards on the 15th of each month starting May 15, 2019. All payment plans must be completed before certification is granted. Jay Coldwell, Studio Manager, will be in contact to set up a payment plan after the deposit is made.
Pay the Deposit on Tuition for a Payment Plan Use the drop-down menu to select the deposit.
Contact Mary at [email protected] or call/text 715.218.7120 to request an individual appointment scheduled at your convenience to discuss the program.
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2019-04-25T16:53:52Z
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http://www.5koshasyoga.com/teacher-training/
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The latest emails from this gang.
The Ford Galaxy is available and the final price is £5400.I am the registered owner and i have all documents.This car is in excellent working conditions, slightly used in 100% working and looking conditions,ONLY 64,500 miles,no scratches or dents, no hidden defects. HPI clear. It has full Ford service history.
I am at my sister in Sweden and i left the car at the company to take care of the transaction.The car is still in UK at a shipping company www.express-shippers.uk and i can have it shipped to your location (I will pay the shipping) and we will use them as a third party.
The scammers reasoning why you are not able to vie the car.
Like i said in my previous email the car is at the shipping company www.express-shippers.uk and it will be better for both if the transaction will be done through them, due to the fact i'm overseas and I can not meet with you in person.They will be the third, objective party involved in the transaction. This way you will actually pay for the car after you receive and test it, because the shipping company will hold the funds in an Escrow and release it to me only after you receive and decide to keep the car.
In order to complete this deal the payment must be sent to Express Shippers. As soon as they receive the payment will notify me to start with delivery.After that you will receive all information about delivery so you can be able to track your shipment online.shipping company will hold your payment until you receive and inspect the car (you have 5 days for inspection) If you will find the smallest problem with the car you will ship it back on my expense and Express Shippers will send you your full amount back.
If you decide to buy the car,please include the following information in your next email.
The Citroen GRAND C4 PICASSO is available and the final price is £3500.I am the registered owner and i have all documents.This car is in excellent working conditions, slightly used in 100% working and looking conditions,ONLY 70,000 miles,no scratches or dents, no hidden defects. HPI clear. It has full Citroen service history.12/02/2018.
I am at my sister in Sweden and i left the car at the company to take care of the transaction.The car is still in UK at a shipping company http://www.express-shippers.uk and i can have it shipped to your location (I will pay the shipping) and we will use them as a third party.
Interesting to see it is a scam. Glad my hubby had his bad feeling about it too to question it!
imbrkothi0 (0 ) ZERO FEEDBACK!
Hi mate is the car still for sale? Could you send me your number please?
The Honda Accord is available and the final price is £3400 .I am the registered owner and i have all documents.This car is in excellent working conditions, slightly used in 100% working and looking conditions,ONLY 51,013 miles,no scratches or dents, no hidden defects. HPI clear. It has full Honda service history.
The car is still in UK at a shipping company http://www.express-shippers.uk and i can have it shipped to your location (I will pay the shipping) and we will use them as a third party.
If you have any questions feel free to contact the shipping company.
Ebay advert says it has 81,400 miles.. i would prefer to look at car first, is it possible to come and look? And how many previous owners it had?
Hi M**** yes you are right sorry for the mistake the real miles is 84340 ,i am the 3 owner if you are still interested please let me know .
Yes i am still interested, but i never used that kind of shipping company and to be honnest not really trust in it, i would prefer to come in person and check the car on place and if i would like it to make an offer. Is it possible?
Like i said in my previous email the car is at the shipping company http://www.express-shippers.uk and it will be better for both if the transaction will be done through them, due to the fact i'm overseas and I can not meet with you in person.They will be the third, objective party involved in the transaction. This way you will actually pay for the car after you receive and test it, because the shipping company will hold the funds in an Escrow and release it to me only after you receive and decide to keep the car.
In order to complete this deal the payment must be sent to Auto Shippers. As soon as they receive the payment will notify me to start with delivery.After that you will receive all information about delivery so you can be able to track your shipment online.shipping company will hold your payment until you receive and inspect the car (you have 5 days for inspection) If you will find the smallest problem with the car you will ship it back on my expense and Auto Shippers will send you your full amount back.
I check their website, it look quite genuie but only because they copy everything from other similar site!
Can you tell, why the car did only 2k miles last year? Is there something wrong with engine? and does the offside rear brake been replaced as at last MOT it been advisory noticed it is sticking.
I am really considering this car but it seems dodgy to me. Are You living overseas or its temporary stay?
Hi M***** as you may know i am not in UK anymore (I do not know when i will be back) and in regards the condition of the car is in excellent working conditions if you are still interested please let me know .
and eventually I did some research online about that company and found Your page.. without it I might be one of cheated people..
The Renault Scenic is available and the final price is £4850.I am the registered owner and i have all documents.This car is in excellent working conditions, slightly used in 100% working and looking conditions,ONLY 26,100 miles,no scratches or dents, no hidden defects. HPI clear. I am the first owner.It has full Renault service history.
I am at my sister in Sweden and i left the car at the company to take care of the transaction.The car is still in UK at a shipping company http://www.global-shippers.co.uk and i can have it shipped to your location (I will pay the shipping) and we will use them as a third party.
In order to complete this deal the payment must be sent to Global Shippers. As soon as they receive the payment will notify me to start with delivery.After that you will receive all information about delivery so you can be able to track your shipment online.shipping company will hold your payment until you receive and inspect the car (you have 5 days for inspection) If you will find the smallest problem with the car you will ship it back on my expense and Global Shippers will send you your full amount back.
I nearly got caught out when attempting to buy a 2011 Volvo V50 R Design D3 on E-bay. It is still up for £4500 and located in Middlesbrough... all the same details were stated: Sister in Sweden, Hearing Impairment, etc. etc.
It was only when I put the seller's e-mail address (the part before @) into Google when you site was listed.
Thank you to the kind and honest people who have taken the trouble to post.
Last edited by Bryon Williams on Thu Jul 13, 2017 4:05 pm, edited 1 time in total. Reason: Removed outside company.
I contacted the 'seller' on eBay regarding a Saab 9-3 for sale and it followed along the same lines from [email protected], hearing impairment, living abroad etc, etc.
The 2010 Saab 9-3 is available and the final price is £4500 .I am the second owner and i have all documents .This car is in excellent working conditions, slightly used in 100% working and looking conditions,ONLY 41,000 miles,no scratches or dents, no hidden defects. HPI clear. It has full service history last one at the 38,214 miles and no Mot advisories .
The car is still in UK at a shipping company www.globalexpress-ltd.co.uk and i can have it shipped to your location (I will pay the shipping) and we will use them as a third party.
If you have any questions feel free to email me or to contact the shipping company.
Yes is an Uk registered car is not imported ,no advisories on all MOTs if you are still interested please let me know and like i said in my previous email the car is at the shipping company www.globalexpress-ltd.co.uk and it will be better for both if the transaction will be done through them, due to the fact i'm overseas and I can not meet with you in person.They will be the third, objective party involved in the transaction. This way you will actually pay for the car after you receive and test it, because the shipping company will hold the funds in an Escrow and release it to me only after you receive and decide to keep the car.
Along with the car you will receive all the documents including the V5,keys, owner's manual,MOT certificates and a bill of sale signed to a legal attorney.
In order to complete this deal the payment must be sent to Global Express. As soon as they receive the payment will notify me to start with delivery.After that you will receive all information about delivery so you can be able to track your shipment online.shipping company will hold your payment until you receive and inspect the car (you have 5 days for inspection) If you will find the smallest problem with the car you will ship it back on my expense and Global Express will send you your full amount back.
Thank you for posting the latest version of this ongoing scam website.
More scam shenanigans from this schemer!
The 2006 Land Rover Discovery 3 is available and the final price is £5700.I am the registered owner and i have all documents.This car is in excellent working conditions,ONLY 90,000 miles,no scratches or dents, no hidden defects. HPI clear. It has full Range Rover service history.MOT due 30 May 2018.
I am at my sister in Sweden and i left the car at the company to take care of the transaction.The car is still in UK at a shipping company http://www.Auto-Trans-ltd.co.uk and i can have it shipped to your location (I will pay the shipping) and we will use them as a third party.
NB: They also text me after I messaged them my number on eBay saying they were deaf so to correspond by email.
Thanks for sending that - I just wanted to be sure which Ad to report to Ebay as a scam.
Clearly, you’re not getting any better at this as you are written up all over the internet for scamming. I hope no-one else is becoming a victim of what you are doing.
Please do not tell scammers that they are reported on Anti Scam Sites.
Hi, I'm so glad I found your site. I was looking to buy a motorhome and got the same reply word for word as some of your other reports. They now use www.express-shippers.co.uk but auto-trans-Ltd.co.uk. Copy of initial post follows. They even sent a photo of registration document when asked.
I am at my sister in Sweden and i left the motor home at the company to take care of the transaction.The motor home is still in UK at a shipping company www.Auto-Trans-ltd.co.uk and i can have it shipped to your location (I will pay the shipping) and we will use them as a third party.
Please post the email address that is currently being used.
Reported it to the police, but doubt they will do anything.
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2019-04-25T20:25:26Z
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https://www.scamwarners.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=327739
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I remember sitting with a group of friends back in 2012 and downloading an early version of Snapchat.
We laughed and deleted the app.
Four years later, and Snapchat are the ones who are laughing. Their app is now worth a staggering $20 billion, they turned down an acquisition offer from Facebook, and they’ve got more more users than Twitter (100 million, to be precise).
That last one might surprise you: more users than Twitter.
In fact, Snapchat grew more in 2015 than Twitter grew in four years. Businesses are still pouring much more time and effort into promoting on Twitter, when Snapchat is actually bigger and more engaging.
Is it time to start marketing your business on Snapchat?
We’ll start this article with a few statistics that might just convince you. Then we’ll take a look at some of the most successful Snapchat campaigns, and – finally – I’ll explain some of the real, actionable ways you can use Snapchat as part of your mobile marketing campaign.
For marketers and entrepreneurs, Snapchat isn’t as simple as Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. But those that dig deep enough and get the hang of it are richly rewarded.
Snapchat videos are viewed more times than Facebook videos (10 billion per day compared to Facebook’s 8 billion).
These views are currently increasing 400% year on year.
Adverts on Snapchat are viewed 1 million times every day.
Snapchat is growing faster than any other social media platform, ever. It’s already surpassing Facebook and Twitter statistics, and it hasn’t peaked yet.
60% of all smartphone users aged 13-34 use Snapchat.
This year, the app replaced Instagram as America’s second favorite social network (Facebook is still way out in front).
Snapchat is one of the very best ways to reach the hallowed millennial age group. These 18-34 year-olds are the most active sharers and promoters, and they spend a collective $600 billion every year.
They are also notoriously the most difficult to reach and influence, yet they use and trust Snapchat in their hoards.
Who else is using Snapchat marketing?
Despite its enormous size and potential, businesses and marketers have been slow to latch onto its power.
However, there are some success stories we can learn from, not least The White House!
Yep, President Obama himself uses Snapchat to keep followers up to date with behind-the-scenes snaps from the Oval Office.
The White House are using Snapchat as part of their campaign to ‘meet people where they are”.
Simply put, it means they aren’t waiting for followers to find them, they’re actively going out there and connecting with people on the platforms and apps they’re using every day.
And that’s something that every business – big and small – should be doing.
Cleverly using Snapchat’s disappearing images, the WWF posted a series of images about endangered species. Using the hashtag #LastSelfie, the WWF posted disappearing images of Gorillas and Polar Bears urging viewers to take action before they disappeared for real.
Sour Patch Kids partnered with an established and popular ‘Snapchat celebrity’ to promote their brand.
Teaming up with comedian and social media influencer, Logan Paul, they tapped into his enormous following of teenagers and young adults. By doing this, they managed to increase their awareness in a creative way.
ASOS use Snapchat to show viewers behind the scenes at exclusive events. During London Fashion Week, for example, ASOS snaps were viewed over 20 million times.
They also send customers exclusive offers that disappear quickly. It’s the perfect way to get customers to ‘impulse buy’ and treat them to a discount.
Gatorade went one step further with their Snapchat campaign. They partnered with the app to create a Gatorade ‘lens’ to coincide with the 2016 Super Bowl.
A Snapchat ‘lens’ is a sort-of filter you can put over your pictures and videos. As you can see in the image above, Gatorade created a lens that let users send a picture of themselves being dunked with a drink cooler – just like coaches at the real Super Bowl.
You can probably only try this if you have a huge advertising budget! However, it’s a good example of what can be done on the app.
Okay, last one. The NBA recently used Snapchat to celebrate Kevin Durant’s ‘Most Valuable Player’ award. Using ‘Snapchat Stories’, they urged users to head to their website to watch the full stream.
Snapchat is a useful way to cross-promote your products and services, and get your followers to take action.
Now that we’ve seen how the big businesses are using the app, let’s dive into the real, actionable ways you can start using Snapchat.
Social media has allowed brands to show even more ‘behind-the-curtain’ content than ever before. In other words, they can let customers into their world.
We all love to get a glimpse behind the scenes, and this trick has worked very well for Asos, as we saw above. For a fashion seller, the ability to send snaps from exclusive fashion events, launch parties, and runway shows is a great way to connect with your target demographic.
Airline company AerLingus are one of my favorites, using Snapchat to take followers into the cockpit of their planes.
Of course, we don’t all have access to exclusive fashion parties or plane cockpits! But even letting your followers see behind the scenes in the office helps build a connection with your audience.
Snapchat gives your followers a real-time ‘snapshot’ of your business. Let them in!
Snapchat has always felt like a very private and exclusive space.
Unlike Facebook or Twitter where all the world can see what you post, Snapchat feels much more like a direct, personal message. It puts it on a par with email marketing, where you can reach right into your followers’ world.
That’s why the app is perfect for giving your followers access to exclusive content and announcements. It feels more personal, making a stronger connection with your followers.
Again, fashion retailers are great at using Snapchat in this way. Some big-name fashion designers (like Rebecca Minkoff) have unveiled their collections on the app before they hit the catwalk, for example.
For one of your followers, seeing a new product before the media is a huge thrill and a great way to build loyalty with your customers.
In the past, we’ve talked about creating a sense of urgency to convince customers to buy products. By giving customers a time limit before an offer runs out, you can compel them to take action.
You can do a similar thing by running a limited edition of a product (“only 8 left in stock!”) Tricks like this greatly increase the likelihood of making a sale.
You can take advantage of this by sending your followers exclusive discounts and offers. First of all, it’s an exclusive deal, and your followers will feel like they’re getting special treatment.
But secondly, that timer instantly gives the customer a sense of urgency. They’ll rush to write down the code, and hopefully rush to buy something from your store.
Amazon has started using this trick on their Snapchat account, with really short time limits on the check-out time. It becomes like a race to get the deal!
Just like on Facebook and Twitter, endless self-promotion is likely to turn your followers off. It’s a good idea to follow a ⅓ rule.
In other words, only one third of your snaps or posts should be overtly self-promotional. With the other two thirds, use the opportunity to show off your personality and engage with your audience.
The New York Times are great at this. With a self-deprecating twist, they began by teasing themselves about their lack of expertise on the app. It came across as very personal and honest.
Like other social networks, Snapchat works best when you interact and engage with your followers.
One of the best ways to do this is by running competitions and asking for input from fellow Snapchat users. GrubHub (a food delivery service) has consistently been singled out as a Snapchat success story. In fact, in 2014, they had the highest Snapchat ‘score’ of any brand thanks to replying to every snap they received from fans.
They also ran a hugely popular competition, asking followers to ‘snap them back’ with a food doodle.
This is a super simple trick you can recreate with your followers.
The rise of social media has seen an enormous rise in ‘influencers’, whether it’s YouTube vloggers, Vine sensations or Snapchat celebrities with followers in their millions.
One way to reach a huge audience is to partner up with these big accounts to promote your product. I explained before how Sour Patch Kids used this trick by partnering with a famous comedian, but they’re not the only ones.
Marriott hotels hooked up with four different influencers in the travel niche to take over their Snapchat account. These four influencers used Snapchat to tell stories from all over the world, including a behind-the-scenes look at the exclusive opening of a new hotel in Hawaii.
Most ‘influencers’ with thousands of followers are open to promotional content. Reach out to a handful of influencers in your niche and see if you can strike a deal.
One of the most powerful features of Snapchat is the ‘stories’ section.
Rather than posting just one self-destructing image or video, Snapchat Stories is more like a slideshow. This allows you to string multiple videos or photos together to tell a story.
When Dominos pizza company joined Snapchat in 2016, for example, they kicked off with a long Snapchat story following the journey of a pizza delivery guy. On his way, he was abducted by aliens before finally delivering the pizza.
This irreverent story actually increased sales directly, without any forcible advertising.
By connecting with your followers in a natural, organic way, you can retain brand awareness and engage with customers. Ultimately, this translates directly into better business.
Of course, building a presence on Snapchat takes time, just like any social media network.
However, you can leapfrog the process somewhat if you’ve got an advertising budget. Snapchat’s advertising opportunities are still in their infancy, but it’s worth looking into.
‘Snap Ads’ are Snapchats most prominent ad program. It allows you to create a ten second vertical that appears in context with other apps. You’re also given the option to make it interactive and allows users to ‘swipe up’ to find out more information.
Another option is teaming up directly with Snapchat to buy sponsorship of its live events feed, called ‘Our Stories’. Previous examples include Samsung who sponsored coverage of the American Music Awards. A similar initiative is purchasing sponsored ‘lenses’ and stickers (like Gatorade’s campaign, mentioned earlier).
Lastly, you can team up with the brands on Snapchat Discover (typically media companies like National Geographic, CNN, and Buzzfeed who have a permanent presence on the app). You can then buy advertising space within their content.
The beauty of Snapchat is that it is still evolving and growing. Brands are currently experimenting, and there is a huge untapped potential.
Will it catch up with the enormous power of Facebook? Time will tell, but it’s definitely time to start building a presence there.
Are you using the app to promote your business? I’d love to hear how you’re using Snapchat to interact with your followers.
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2019-04-23T10:16:03Z
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https://www.bitcatcha.com/blog/marketing-snapchat-spoiler-alert-yes/
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Have you ever thought about the reality behind werewolves, the monstrous shape-shifters? Do you fear going out in the full moon? A majority of people do so and most of us do believe in the existence of werewolves. Perhaps, this is the result of endless sightings of werewolves around the globe and recurring illustrations of the creature in popular fiction. Whatever we know about werewolves is all thanks to myths, movies, and novels. Werewolves love to hunt during a full moon, they are scared of silver, and they can easily mingle with ordinary humans whenever they want. Is it all true? Maybe and maybe not!
What is true is that even the mere thought of meeting a werewolf is terrifying for all. These mythological man-wolf creatures have remained an important part of the cult literature. Throughout the course of world history, we have come across many myths, folktales, and incidents involving werewolves. Many legends across different continents and cultures are associated with werewolves. Almost all legends refer to werewolves as people who transform into powerful wolves and become bloodthirsty beasts. These creatures have a penchant for both humans and animals.
Yet, there is no clear proof about the actuality of werewolves. Hollywood although has romanticized the legend through churning out movies like Twilight. However, don’t forget that reality is always stranger than fiction. So, let’s find out more about werewolves and understand whether these do exist or are merely a myth.
Werewolf, man-wolf, wolf-person, and shape-shifter all refer to the same creature. In Latin, the term used for werewolves is Lycaon, which means “animal of the wolf kind.” A werewolf is a human having the ability to transform itself into a wolf-like creature. It is unclear how this transformation takes place, but according to folklore, it is more a curse than a characteristic. People who get bitten by a werewolf become one too. It is also stated that this transformation may be permanent or temporary.
Many believe that the man-animal creature is a metamorphosed or mutated human. It could be a person’s soul that leaves the body in a trance-like state and goes on a hunting spree, some believe. Many agree that it could be a spirit that shares a deep connection with its owner. This connection is so strong that any injury to the spirit causes the human to get injured too. This is called the repercussion phenomenon. However, there is no consensus among theorists regarding what a werewolf actually is.
As far as physical characteristics of a werewolf are concerned, there is consensus on many traits. According to European folklore, the physical traits of a werewolf remained the same even when it was in human form. These traits included thick eyebrows that met at the bridge of the nose, pointed, low-set ears, curved fingernails, and a wavering gait.
In its animal form, the description of the appearance of the man-wolf varies in every culture. Typically, it is depicted to be different and indistinguishable from common wolves. Such as, a werewolf in its animal form doesn’t have a tail, and it appears larger than normal wolves. Moreover, when in animal form, the werewolf retains its human voice and eyes. Swedish believe that a werewolf walks on three legs and stretches the fourth leg to resemble a tail.
When a werewolf transforms from animal to human form, it usually becomes weak, debilitated, and experience severe nervous depression. In medieval Europe, it was commonly believed that werewolves loved to devour freshly buried corpses. Some also believed that werewolves could easily paralyze cattle, and children with their gaze.
In ancient mythological accounts, werewolves were actually possessed old females or witches having poisonous claws. The method of identifying a werewolf from other humans also varies greatly from culture to culture. A common assumption is that cutting the flesh of a suspected werewolf may help in identifying one. That’s because the fur would then be exposed from the wound. In Russia, it is believed that a werewolf can be detected if it has bristles under the tongue.
Werewolves have remained an integral part of myths and legends of various cultures from ancient times. Any historical account detailing such a creature surfaced firstly in the 5th century. A battle between the Isaurians and the Roman Empire was documented by Procopius of Caesarea. According to the records, the Isaurians were harmless farmers who were called to battle by the Romans. Since they didn’t have the necessary skills or resources to wage a war, so they got slain. The point to be noted in Procopius’s accounts is that the Isaurians were referred to as Lycaones, which is derived from Lycaon. Lycaon means wolf.
However, there is another perspective behind naming Isaurians as Lycaones. Procopius might have used the term for Lycaonians, a community living at the Asian Minor quite close to the Isaurians land. Yet, believers still claim that the Isaurians were werewolves and this is how the legend originated. The concept of a werewolf was then adopted by many cultures and a number of legends originated.
Many scholars also believe that the legend originated in the Epic of Gilgamesh. It is probably the oldest and earliest written prose in the west. The story narrates the story of Gilgamesh who rejected his lover because she converted her previous mate into a wolf.
The legend of werewolves made its debut in Greek mythology as the Legend of Lycaon. King Lycaon was the son of Pelasgus who angered Zeus. Zeus was angry because Pelasgus served a meal made from the remains of a boy who was sacrificed. Zeus punished Lycaon and his sons by turning them into wolves. The term Lycanthrope or Lycanthropy has been derived from the name of the King Lycaon.
When native Indians roamed the Americas, they had believed in shapeshifting creatures. It was their sacred belief that an animal totem or spirit guide was associated with humans. This guide may take physical form at times or may always remain spiritual. Shapeshifting was highly revered by Native Americans.
In ancient Chinese folklore, animals could transform into humans. This belief was further established after three shape-shifting animals were identified in Chinese mountains. The three animals included a Fox spirit called HuXian, Da Yu (which was a bear), and dragons.
Africans also contributed to the legend of werewolves by providing accounts of people who transformed into huge crocodiles. There are stories of witty hyenas roaming around the villages in human and animal form. Not only were-hyenas but Africans had were-cats, which were believed to be witches. It is from the African folklore that black cats got associated with witches. The concept was later passed on to Europe during the Middle Ages. However, were-cat was a less common belief while a majority in Africa believed in the existence of werewolves.
In Nordic folklore, werewolves are mentioned in the Saga of the Volsungs. It is a story about a father and son. They discovered wolf furs, which could turn people into wolves for ten days. Both of them donned the furs to become wolves and went on a killing spree within the forest. Eventually, the father attacked his own son, due to which the son was wounded badly. To save his son, the father asked for help from a kind raven, who gave him a leaf having healing powers to treat the wound.
Renowned folklorist Carol Rose narrated legend of werewolves from ancient Greece era. She wrote a book titled Giants, Monsters, and Dragons, in which she described Greek werewolf legends. She mentioned that in Greece, people believed that a human could become a wolf by eating wolf meat. This wasn’t an ordinary meat but was mixed with a human’s flesh. After consuming this meat, a person could permanently transform into a wolf.
Rose wrote that after a few centuries people devised new theories for converting a human into a wolf. This included being cursed, eating certain herbs, or drinking water touched by a wolf. Additionally, people associated full moon and new moon with werewolves quite commonly. It was also believed that a child conceived under a new moon would be born as a werewolf. Also, Greeks were sure that sleeping under the full moon on a Friday night would turn a human into a wolf.
Scottish and Irish folklore also mentioned shapeshifters, which they term as selkies. Selkies were creatures who lived as seals in cold oceans and could change into humans by shedding their furs. The only twist to the tale is that selkies were supposed to hide their furs. If their furs were found, they couldn’t change back into seals ever. So, they were supposed to live on land with those who possessed their furs.
Hollywood has created its own set of myths and ideas about werewolves. The most commonly used theme is that werewolves are afraid of silver. So, to kill one, all you need is a silver bullet or a silver knife. Hollywood movies also mention an herb namely wolf’s bane. This herb has the power to deter a werewolf from attacking. There is no evidence of these aspects being documented in any of the legends and might be the product of filmmakers’ imagination.
In the Middle Ages of Europe, it was believed that werewolves could only be killed by burning at the stake. This theory is probably inspired from witch burnings, which was a common norm across Europe. Alternately, Europeans also believed that werewolves could be killed by beheading.
Scientists claim that any situation, incident, or phenomenon that humans fail to understand or explain, they make it a legend. The same is the case with the legend of werewolves. Science has provided many explanations about werewolves, which are described below.
Congenital hypertrichosis lanuginosa (CHL) is sometimes referred to as the werewolf syndrome. Scientists are of the opinion that those who suffer from hypertrichosis are viewed as werewolves. The reason is that in hypertrichosis, thick hair starts growing all over the body, including the face. Imagine the plight of those who were hunted as werewolves while they were suffering from hypertrichosis.
As we all know that the lanugo, a kind of soft hair, is present on all newborn babies. These hairs usually shed after a few months. However, the lanugo hair doesn’t shed in those suffering from hypertrichosis rather continue to grow. Eventually, it covers the entire body. Other skeletal abnormalities may occur in sufferers of this condition. This condition cannot be treated as yet but sufferers are encouraged to get the hair removed temporarily through electrolysis or laser therapies.
Scientists admit that it isn’t a very common condition. So far, there haven’t been even 100 cases of hypertrichosis in the world. This aspect makes it all the more difficult to study the condition. All that we know is that it is a hereditary disease.
It is a rare medical condition primarily associated with neurological health. In this condition, the patient starts believing that he has the ability to transform into an animal. Patients have this delusion that they can or have at least once transformed into a non-human animal.
Dr. Jan Blom, from the University of Groningen, researched most over this theory. Dr. Blom claims that for about a hundred years clinical lycanthropy was explained in a metaphysical manner. But today, modern science has categorically concluded that it is a brain disease.
Blom stated that in the past decade many brain imaging studies highlighted a certain area of the brain that creates a sense of physical existence. This particular part is affected during lycanthropy. Any changes in this part of the brain can alter a person’s sense of physical identity. This condition is quite similar to schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and/or severe depression.
Congenital porphyria is also called the vampire disease. Guy’s Hospital in London’s Dr. Lee Illis wrote a paper titled On Porphyria and the Aetiology of Werewolves in 1963. Dr. Illis argued that the historical accounts describing werewolves are actually about people suffering from congenital porphyria. The condition is the result of a natural buildup of chemicals producing a compound called porphyrin.
This compound is essential for the functioning of hemoglobin. It is called vampire disease because patients start showing symptoms that resemble vampire traits. Their skin becomes sensitive to sunlight, urine turns purple or red, and gums shrink so much that teeth become too prominent. Reddish teeth, photosensitivity, and psychosis are also common symptoms of this disease. These are also commonly known traits of werewolves.
Scientists claim that the human body isn’t designed to facilitate inter-species shifts/transformations. If we do believe that a human can be transformed into a werewolf, then this would mean the bones would be broken. Moreover, tendons and muscles would have to snap. The transformation process will shake the entire body system. This would create nothing else but a mess of bones and muscles. Human DNA would unravel like a sweater having a loose string which a child is stretching. Therefore, to physically transform into such a large species as a wolf is quite impossible.
El Chupacabra is a werewolf-like creature that exists in the southern United States region. It is believed to be a bloodthirsty monster having coyote like features. Almost every southern state has had its fair share of incidents where this creature has attacked animals. In fact, the sightings of chupacabra have extended from Mexico and Puerto Rico to as far as Russia over the years.
Farmers claim to have found remains of chupacabra but those turned out to be carcasses of foxes and coyotes suffering from mange. The creature is supposed to be a coyote and its huge size is a result of mange infection. Mange is a skin infection in which all the hair of the animal’s body shed. Farmers state that chupacabra attacks after midnight and like to hunt for livestock. All of its victims died due to excessive blood loss. This proves that chupacabra is a blood-sucking animal.
Rabies is a disease caused by a virus. It attacks mainly the central nervous system due to which the moods and behavior of the patient change drastically. Patients of rabies become demented and violent, pretty much like werewolves and vampires. The disease may also cause insomnia, which explains why werewolves are termed to be nocturnal legends. Muscular spasms are also observed in rabies patients. This may force them to spit blood. Interestingly, these spasms are triggered by mirrors, strong odor such as that of garlic, bright lights, and water, etc.
In fact, Dr. Gomez-Alonso states that rabies inspired the legend of the vampire. Dr. Gomez-Alonso published his theory in 1998 in Neurology medical journal. While Ian Woodward wrote in his research The Werewolf Delusion (1979) that the werewolf myth is inspired by rabies. That’s because rabies is transmitted via biting. People with rabies become so agitated that they may behave like animals.
The two Frenchmen were considered werewolves back in the 1520s. However, both turned out to be serial killers. It was reported that the two criminals swore allegiance with the devil. They claimed to have possession of an ointment that could transform them into wolves. Burgot and Verdun brutally murdered many children. At the time people believed that werewolves could only be killed by burning at stake. Hence, the duo was burned to death in the same manner.
In 1692, a case was brought to the court of Jurgenburg, Livonia, located at the eastern side of the Baltic Sea. The accused was an 80-year old man named Thiess. The case was that Thiess claimed to be a werewolf. He said that he became a werewolf after a person or a witch named Skeistan strike him and broke his nose. He also claimed that several witches were preventing crops from growing in his area. So, he decided to fight them as a werewolf. He had support from a pack of werewolves. Residents of his area deemed him to be in alliance with the devil, but Thiess rejected these claims. A priest was sent to chastise him but he refused. Out of desperation, the judges ordered Thiess to be given ten lashes for having superstitious beliefs.
Jean Grenier is another Frenchman nicknamed as the werewolf of Dole. In the 16th century, Grenier also claimed to possess an ointment that could transform him into a wolf. It is reported that Grenier used to kill children and then ate them. He met the same fate as the other two Frenchmen, as he was burned to death at the stake too. It is believed that all the three werewolves in France were under the influence of a hallucinogenic substance, or were mentally ill. Since Europeans in the 15th and 16th centuries were quite superstitious, therefore, they considered them mythical beasts.
Perhaps the most well-documented and famous of all real-life werewolves are sighted in the state of Wisconsin. Specifically, a southern town called Elkhorn is believed to be the breeding ground of werewolves. There have been around a dozen different incidents involving werewolves. Eyewitnesses claim to have seen a 5 to 8 feet tall creature that looks like a wolf. One of the witnesses stated that the creature was pulling out a dead deer from his vehicle. Many of the witnesses gave interviews to Fox News, which are still available online. So, if you want to learn more about the werewolves of Wisconsin, then search for them.
The legend of Michigan Dogman is quite similar to Wisconsin’s werewolf. The stories of the dogman started appearing from the 1930s. A person named Robert Fortney was fishing somewhere on the banks of a river located in Michigan when he saw a pack of wild dogs emerge from the woods. The pack was heading towards him. Luckily he was carrying a gun, which he used to fire a shot to disperse the dogs. All the dogs ran away but one stayed and looked at him directly while standing on two hind legs. Fortney swears by seeing the dog smile at him and showing similarities with humans. While giving an interview in 1987, Fortney claimed that the dog had green eyes, which was a rarity. This is a very popular story and even a song titled “The Legend” is written for this incident.
In the 15th century, a wealthy farmer named Peter Stubbe from Bedburg, Germany became famous as a werewolf. He is believed to be the most notorious of all real-life werewolves. Legend has it that Stubbe transformed into a wolf-like creature at night and hunted for innocent citizens. Eventually, Stubbe was captured and accused of killing many citizens gruesomely. Eyewitnesses who helped in his capturing verified that they saw him shifting shape from wolf to human. He was executed after he confessed to killing animals, and humans including children and eating their flesh. Stubbe claimed that he had a magical belt that empowered him to transform into a wolf whenever he wished to. That particular belt was never located.
Many novels have been written on the theme of werewolves but by far the most popular one remains Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Written in 1897, Dracula features a short story titled Dracula’s Guest. In this story, a group of soldiers comes to help the protagonist who is hunting for a great wolf. The wolf can only be killed by a sacred bullet. Count Dracula also claims in the novel that it was his Szekely racial bloodline from where the legend of werewolves originated. Count Dracula had the ability to shapeshift into a wolf too but only during the night. The concept of a full moon was explored in the movie Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943). It was from then on that the full moon became so closely linked with werewolves in popular culture.
The 1935 movie Werewolf of London is the first feature film made on werewolves as the central theme. A London-based scientist is shown to be a werewolf in reality but the movie doesn’t show him as a cannibal. Another movie was made in 1941 titled The Wolf Man. Lon Chaney, Jr. played the protagonist Lawrence Talbot in the movie. Jack Nicholson donned the avatar of a werewolf in his 1994 flick Wolf. Later on, werewolves were depicted by Hollywood as heroic supernatural creatures. Movies like the Twilight Saga series, the Underworld series, Blood Lad, Dance in the Vampire Bund, and many others were made. One of the most famous novels to have been adapted into a movie is The Howling by Gary Brandner.
It can be assumed that werewolves are nothing else but a myth. Scientific explanations are quite substantial in proving that it is quite impossible for a human to shape-shift so easily. We can say that werewolves should be taken as mythical creatures that make an amazing theme for horror stories. It cannot be overlooked that werewolves have a cult following and many incidents report about the sighting of a wolf-like man. But, it could be a person suffering from the werewolf syndrome. Those having this condition can exhibit wolf-like habits, including howling at the moon. So, go watch your favorite werewolf movie without worrying about the actuality of the creature. Werewolves are better left in folklore and enjoyed as legends.
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2019-04-20T13:05:58Z
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https://www.twinkleviral.com/werewolves-exist-live/
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Over the past 15 years, successive governments have sought to make Thailand's business climate more agreeable to foreign investors.
Although reforms have not fully overhauled Thailand's protectionist approach to domestic industry, it is still easier to conduct business in Thailand than most of south-east Asia. The country once known as Siam is structurally, technologically and administratively ahead of many of its neighbours.
Thailand, which has a population of 64.1 million, has recovered well since its nadir - the south-east Asian financial crisis of 1997. Growth is averaging around 6% at present, a healthy growth rate aided by the dramatic economic growth of its neighbour China.
Once an agricultural economy, Thailand industrialised rapidly during the 1980s, during which time the emphasis was placed on labour-intensive industries such as textiles. Since the 1990s, however, growth has centred on high technology areas like computer equipment and automotive components. Other major industries include hospitality, food and beverages, jewellery and furniture.
Tourism is a significant component of GDP - about 5%. One of the most popular destinations in the region, Thailand attracts not just backpackers, but increasingly package-holiday tourists as well.
Agriculture, though diminished as a proportion of economic output, is still central to the economy.
Winning favour, recognition or contracts in Thailand is often contingent on the payment of bribes. And despite a high-profile campaign by former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra to rid the country of corruption, government officials seem to be among the worst offenders - companies with links to government officials tend to have an edge in winning public works contracts, for instance.
Historically, Thailand has been politically unstable. Between 1947 and 1992 the military intermittently ran the country, a time punctuated by coups and periods of martial law.
After an uncharacteristically lengthy period of stability the military mounted a bloodless coup in 2006. After fresh elections the following year a new party with links to Shinawatra was voted into office.
Separatist Islamic violence flares up in the south of the country periodically, and fundamentalist factions have even scared retailers into closing on Fridays, the Muslim holy day. Aside from this stark exception, however, Thailand is a relatively safe place to do business.
The country's economic hub, Bangkok, is blighted by more prosaic problems: congestion and poor air quality. The addition of overhead and underground rail systems has eased the problem slightly, but Bangkok remains a difficult place to drive around.
On a national level Thailand is served well by its road network and has 33 civilian airports. Goods are often moved by train, and Thailand's rail network has a commendable punctuality record. International trains run to Malaysia and Singapore.
The rapid growth of the Thai economy - the most rapidly expanding in the world between 1984 and 1994 - placed demands on the country's infrastructure that the government failed to adequately address. Projects have often been characterised by indecision and cost overruns.
Thailand's telecommunications infrastructure still does not befit a country at its level of development, despite recent improvements. The sector is being gradually deregulated, and private companies are being allowed more participation.
Like most of Asia, Thailand poses less of a red tape burden than European countries. This was the view of respondents to a Grant Thornton survey of international business, in which Thailand came near the foot of the table of obstructive bureaucracy.
Instead, the lack of a skilled workforce was cited as the main restraint on business growth. Problem-solving is an undeveloped skill in Thai business culture, partly because the education is systemically flawed, insofar that it is almost exclusively conducted through rote learning.
This is a particular problem given that you can legally only hire one foreigner for every four Thais and 2m baht of capital. So you might end up with a larger staff than you really needed just to get that extra German engineer in.
UK visitors can remain in the country for 30 days before a visa becomes a necessity. Business owners can secure a work permit or one-year, renewable non-immigrant B visa - a popular option. Processing the paperwork to obtain a permit and visa for 'farang' employees, as foreigners are called, can be impenetrable - so get yourself a good accountant.
Generally, foreigners enjoy the same legal rights as Thai nationals, but there are restrictions - for example, on owning land. Regulations vary between regions, and tend to be more relaxed if the land is in a remote location.
The Board of Investment tends to grant greater subsidies and other incentives to business that locates itself in provincial areas. It also gives preference to agriculture, projects related to technological and human resource development, projects that develop public utilities and basic infrastructure, conserve natural resources and mitigate environmental problems, and certain other industries.
There is a 50% cap on foreign ownership in certain industries. In the media, farming, forestry and the trade of land, participation is wholly prohibited. A full list of the restricted industries and details of how to apply for exemptions can be found can be found at the Board of Investment website.
It is common for foreign investors to form joint ventures with trusted local business people, sometimes through necessity, and sometimes because of the local knowledge which they provide. Sleeping Thai partners can be arranged, but as well as being illegal, this leaves you open to being ripped off.
Local knowledge is of course vital, but beware cultural and linguistic barriers. For example, Thai, being a tonal language, is a formidable language to learn for westerners.
Having said all that, Thais are more used to dealing with westerners and adept at speaking English than any other country in the region, bar Singapore.
Western business is falling over itself to get involved with Chinese and Indian business. Yet these countries are still relatively inexperienced in supplying western vendors, while many Thai businesses have as much as 30 years' experience of this - so they are well schooled in the quality and punctuality standards required by western business.
Wages in Thailand are similar to those in India and China, although they are higher at the low end. In international terms, labour is cheap. In the construction industry, for example, the average monthly wage is around 4,700 baht (£66).
Even at the higher end of the scale wages are low - in financial intermediation, for instance, the average monthly wage is about 19,300 baht (£272).
Office space, electric rates and petrol - around 30 baht per litre - are very cheap.
The headline corporate tax rate in Thailand is relatively high, at 30%. But small and medium businesses with less than 5m baht paid-up capital pay a 15% rate on their first 1m baht of net taxable profits, and 25% on the next 2m baht.
Asset managements companies, venture capital companies, and companies promoted by the Board of Investment are also entitled to exemptions.
The character of many Thais reflects the philosophy of the country's majority religion, Buddhism. Friendly, humble and rarely angry (at least outwardly), they use the expression mai-pen-rai - meaning 'never mind' - in a variety of contexts.
This laid-back approach to life extend means punctuality is not assigned the importance that it is in Western culture. And it is not unusual for this disregard for punctuality to extend to the payment of fees.
Swathes of bureaucracy can delay payment of invoices interminably, so it is probably advisable to ask for a letter of credit if you ask for a transfer of money overseas.
Expressing anger in public is not seemly in Thailand; it is perfectly possible for a Thai to be angry with you and maintain a smiling exterior.
Thais are reserved, not particularly tactile people. They do not greet each other with kisses or hugs. Instead, the standard greeting is a 'wai' - click here to find out how to do it.
Thais enjoy a plethora of public holidays - 15 in all - and most offices will be closed on these days. The first half of April is the busiest time for holidays, as it covers Chari Day, which falls on 6 April, and the Thai New year - Songkram - runs from 13 to 15 April.
Many city-dwelling Thais disperse to the provinces during this time so Bangkok is very quiet - meaning it can be hard to get hold of contacts and partners during this period.
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2019-04-25T11:43:05Z
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https://mexico.businessesforsale.com/mexican/articles/buyer-relocation-guides/move-to-thailand
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NRPM: Standards for Privacy of Individually Identifiable Health Information. II. Provisions of the proposed rule.
We propose to establish a new subchapter C to title 45 of the Code of Federal Regulations. Although the rules proposed below would only establish two new parts (parts 160 and 164), we anticipate the new subchapter C will eventually contain three parts, part 160, 162, and 164, with parts 161 and 163 being reserved for future expansion, if needed. Part 160 will contain general requirements and provisions applicable to all of the regulations issued under sections 262 and 264 of Public Law 104-191 (the Administrative Simplification provisions of HIPAA). We anticipate that Part 162 will contain the Administrative Simplification regulations relating to transactions, code sets and identifiers. The new part 164 will encompass the rules relating to the security standards authorized by section 1173(d), the electronic signature standard authorized by section 1173(e), and the privacy rules proposed below.
The new part 164 will be composed of two subparts: subparts A and E, with B, C, and D being reserved. Subpart A will consist of general provisions and subpart E will consist of the final privacy rules. Because the new part 160 will apply to the privacy rules, as well as the other Administrative Simplification rules, it is set out below.
The discussion below describes the entities and the information that would be subject to the proposed regulation.
Section 1171 of the Act defines several terms and our proposed rules would, for the most part, simply restate the law or adopt definitions previously defined in the other HIPAA proposed rules. In some instances, we propose definitions from the Secretary’s Recommendations. We also propose some new definitions for convenience and efficiency of exposition, and others to clarify the application and operation of this rule. We describe the proposed definitions and discuss the rationale behind them, below.
1. Act. We would define “Act” to mean the Social Security Act, as amended. This definition would be added for convenience.
2. Covered entity. This definition would be provided for convenience of reference and would mean the entities to which part C of title XI of the Act applies. These are the entities described in section 1172(a)(1): health plans, health care clearinghouses, and health care providers who transmit any health information in electronic form in connection with a transaction referred to in section 1173(a)(1) of the Act (a “standard transaction”). In the preamble we occasionally refer to health plans and the health care providers described above as "covered plans," "covered providers," or "covered plans and providers."
We note that health care providers who do not submit HIPAA transactions in standard form become covered by this rule when other entities, such as a billing service or a hospital, transmit standard electronic transactions on their behalf. The provider could not circumvent these requirements by assigning the task to its agent, since the agent would be deemed to be acting as the provider.
3. Health care. We would define the term “health care” as it is defined in the Secretary’s Recommendations. Health care means the provision of care, services, or supplies to a patient and includes any: (1) preventive, diagnostic, therapeutic, rehabilitative, maintenance, or palliative care, counseling, service, or procedure with respect to the physical or mental condition, or functional status, of a patient or affecting the structure or function of the body; (2) sale or dispensing of a drug, device, equipment, or other item pursuant to a prescription; or (3) procurement or banking of blood, sperm, organs, or any other tissue for administration to patients.
4. Health care clearinghouse. We would define “health care clearinghouse” as defined by section 1171(2) of the Act. The Act defines a “health care clearinghouse” as a “public or private entity that processes or facilitates the processing of nonstandard data elements of health information into standard data elements.” In practice, clearinghouses receive transactions from health care providers, health plans, other health care clearinghouses, or business partners of such entities, and other entities, translate the data from a given format into one acceptable to the entity receiving the transaction, and forward the processed transaction to that entity. There are currently a number of private clearinghouses that contract or perform this function for health care providers. For purposes of this rule, we would consider billing services, repricing companies, community health management information systems or community health information systems, “value-added” networks, switches and similar organizations to be health care clearinghouses for purposes of this part only if they actually perform the same functions as a health care clearinghouse.
We would note that we are proposing to exempt clearinghouses from a number of the provisions of this rule that would apply to other covered entities (see §§ 164.512, 164.514 and 164.516 below), because in most cases we do not believe that clearinghouses would be dealing directly with individuals. In many instances, clearinghouses would be considered business partners under this rule and would be bound by their contracts with covered plans and providers. See proposed § 164.506(e). We would adopt this position with the caveat that the exemptions would be void for any clearinghouse that had direct contact with individuals in a capacity other than that of a business partner.
5. Health care provider. Section 1171(3) of the Act defines “health care provider” as a “provider of medical services as defined in section 1861(u) of the Act, a provider of medical or other health services as defined in section 1861(s) of the Act, and any other person who furnishes health care services or supplies.” We are proposing to define “health care provider” as the Act does, and clarify that a health care provider is limited to any person or organization that furnishes, bills, or is paid for, health care services or supplies in the normal course of business. This definition would include a researcher who provides health care to the subjects of research, free clinics, and a health clinic or licensed health care professional located at a school or business.
Section 1861(u) of the Act contains the Medicare definition of a provider, which encompasses institutional providers, such as hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, home health agencies, and comprehensive outpatient rehabilitation facilities. Section 1861(s) of the Act defines other Medicare facilities and practitioners, including assorted clinics and centers, physicians, clinical laboratories, various licensed/certified health care practitioners, and suppliers of durable medical equipment. The last portion of the proposed definition encompasses appropriately licensed or certified health care practitioners or organizations, including pharmacies and nursing homes and many types of therapists, technicians, and aides. It also would include any other individual or organization that furnishes health care services or supplies in the normal course of business. An individual or organization that bills and/or is paid for health care services or supplies in the normal course of business, such as a group practice or an “on-line” pharmacy accessible on the Internet, is also a health care provider for purposes of this statute.
For a more detailed discussion of the definition of health care provider, we refer the reader to our proposed rule (Standard Health Care Provider Identifier) published on May 7, 1998, in the Federal Register (63 Fed Reg 25320).
6. Health information. We would define “health information” as it is defined in section 1171(4) of the Act. “Health information” would mean any information, whether oral or recorded in any form or medium, that is created or received by a health care provider, health plan, public health authority, employer, life insurer, school or university, or health care clearinghouse; and that relates to the past, present, or future physical or mental health or condition of an individual, the provision of health care to an individual, or the past, present, or future payment for the provision of health care to an individual.
In this paragraph we attempt to clarify the relationship between the defined terms “health information,” “individually identifiable health information” and “protected health information.” The term “health information” encompasses the universe of information governed by the administrative simplification requirements of the Act. For example, under section 1173 of the Act, the Secretary is to adopt standards to enable the electronic exchange of all health information. However, protection of personal privacy is primarily a concern for the subset of health information that is “individually identifiable health information,” as defined by the Act (see below). For example, a tabulation of the number of students with asthma by school district would be health information, but since it normally could not be used to identify any individuals, it would not usually create privacy concerns. The definition of individually identifiable health information omits some of the persons or organizations that are described as creating or receiving “health information.” Some sections of the Act refer specifically to individually identifiable health information, such as section 1177 in setting criminal penalties for wrongful use or disclosure, and section 264 in requesting recommendations for privacy standards. Finally, we propose the phrase “protected health information” (§ 164.504) to refer to the subset of individually identifiable health information that is used or disclosed by the entities that are subject to this rule.
7. Health plan. We would define “health plan” essentially as section 1171(5) of the Act defines it. Section 1171 of the Act refers to several definitions in section 2791 of the Public Health Service Act, 42 U.S.C. 300gg-91, as added by Public Law 104-191. For clarity, we would incorporate the referenced definitions as currently stated into our proposed definitions.
As defined in section 1171(5), a “health plan” is an individual plan or group health plan that provides, or pays the cost of, medical care (see section 2791(a) of the Public Health Service Act (PHS Act)). This definition would include, but is not limited to, the 15 types of plans listed in the statute, as well as any combination of them. The term would include, when applied to public benefit programs, the component of the government agency that administers the program. Church plans and government plans are included to the extent that they fall into one or more of the listed categories.
a. “Group health plan” (as currently defined by Section 2791(a) of the PHS Act). A group health plan is a plan that has 50 or more participants (as the term “participant” is currently defined by section 3(7) of ERISA) or is administered by an entity other than the employer that established and maintains the plan. This definition includes both insured and self-insured plans.
Section 2791(a)(1) of the PHS Act defines “group health plan” as an employee welfare benefit plan (as defined in current section 3(1) of ERISA) to the extent that the plan provides medical care, including items and services paid for as medical care, to employees or their dependents directly or through insurance, or otherwise.
b. “Health insurance issuer” (as currently defined by section 2791(b) of the PHS Act).
Section 2971(b) of the PHS Act defines a “health insurance issuer” as an insurance company, insurance service, or insurance organization that is licensed to engage in the business of insurance in a State and is subject to State law that regulates insurance.
c. “Health maintenance organization” (as currently defined by section 2791(b) of the PHS Act). Section 2791(b) of the PHS Act currently defines a “health maintenance organization” as a federally qualified health maintenance organization, an organization recognized as such under State law, or a similar organization regulated for solvency under State law in the same manner and to the same extent as such a health maintenance organization. These organizations may include preferred provider organizations, provider sponsored organizations, independent practice associations, competitive medical plans, exclusive provider organizations, and foundations for medical care.
d. Part A or Part B of the Medicare program (title XVIII of the Act).
e. The Medicaid program (title XIX of the Act).
f. A “Medicare supplemental policy” as defined under section 1882(g)(1) of the Act. Section 1882(g)(1) of the Act defines a “Medicare supplemental policy” as a health insurance policy that a private entity offers a Medicare beneficiary to provide payment for expenses incurred for services and items that are not reimbursed by Medicare because of deductible, coinsurance, or other limitations under Medicare. The statutory definition of a Medicare supplemental policy excludes a number of plans that are similar to Medicare supplemental plans, such as health plans for employees and former employers and for members and former members of trade associations and unions. A number of these health plans may be included under the definitions of “group health plan” or “health insurance issuer,” as defined in paragraphs “a” and “b” above.
g. A “long-term care policy,” including a nursing-home fixed indemnity policy. A “long- term care policy” is considered to be a health plan regardless of how comprehensive it is.
h. An employee welfare benefit plan or any other arrangement that is established or maintained for the purpose of offering or providing health benefits to the employees of two or more employers. This includes plans that are referred to as multiple employer welfare arrangements (“MEWAs”).
i. The health care program for active military personnel under title 10 of the United States Code. See paragraph “k”, below, for further discussion.
j. The veterans health care program under chapter 17 of title 38 of the United States Code. This health plan primarily furnishes medical care through hospitals and clinics administered by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) for veterans enrolled in the VA health care system.
k. The Civilian Health and Medical Program of the Uniformed Services (CHAMPUS) as defined in 10 U.S.C. 1072(4). We note that the Act’s definition of “health plan” omits several types of health care provided by the Department of Defense (DOD). Sections 1171(5)(I) and 1171(5)(K) cover only the health care program for active duty personnel (see 10 U.S.C. 1074(a)) and the CHAMPUS program (see 10 U.S.C. 1079, 1086). What is omitted is health care provided in military treatment facilities to military retirees (see 10 U.S.C. 1074(b)), to dependents of active duty personnel and to dependents of retirees (see 10 U.S.C. 1076), to Secretarial designees such as members of Congress, Justices of the Supreme Court, and to foreign military personnel under NATO status of forces agreements. Health care provided by the DOD in military facilities to the aforementioned persons is not included as a “health plan” under HIPAA. However, these facilities would still be considered to be health care providers.
l. The Indian Health Service program under the Indian Health Care Improvement Act (25 U.S.C. 1601, et. seq.). This program furnishes services, generally through its own health care providers, primarily to persons who are eligible to receive services because they are of American Indian or Alaskan Native descent.
m. The Federal Employees Health Benefits Program under 5 U.S.C. chapter 89. This program consists of health insurance plans offered to active and retired federal employees and their dependents. Although section 1171(5)(M) of the Act refers to the “Federal Employees Health Benefit Plan,” this and any other rules adopting administrative simplification standards will use the correct name, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. One health plan does not cover all federal employees; over 350 health plans provide health benefits coverage to federal employees, retirees, and their eligible family members. Therefore, we will use the correct name, The Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, to make clear that the administrative simplification standards apply to all health plans that participate in the Program.
n. An approved State child health plan for child health assistance that meets the requirements of section 2103 of the Act, which established the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP).
o. A Medicare Plus Choice organization as defined in 42 CFR 422.2, with a contract under 42 CFR part 422, subpart K.
p. Any other individual plan or group health plan, or combination thereof, that provides or pays for the cost of medical care. This category implements the language at the beginning of the statutory definition of the term "health plan": "The term 'health plan' means an individual or group plan that provides, or pays the cost of, medical care . . . Such term includes the following, and any combination thereof . . ." This statutory language is general, not specific. Moreover, the statement that the term "health plan" "includes" the specified plans implies that the term also covers other plans that meet the stated criteria. One approach to interpreting this introductory language in the statute would be to make coverage decisions about plans that may meet these criteria on a case-by-case basis. Instead we propose to clarify its coverage by adding this category to the proposed definition of "health plan"; we seek public comment on its application. The Secretary would determine which plans that meet the criteria in the preceding paragraph are health plans for purposes of title II of HIPAA.
Consistent with the other parts of HIPAA, the provisions of this rule generally would not apply to certain types of insurance entities, such as workers’ compensation and automobile insurance carriers, other property and casualty insurers, and certain forms of limited benefits coverage, even when such arrangements provide coverage for health care services. 29 U.S.C. 1186(c). We note that health care providers would be subject to the provisions of this rule with respect to the health care they provide to individuals, even if such providers seek or receive reimbursement from an insurance entity that is not a covered entity under these rules. However, nothing in this rule would be intended to prevent a health care provider from disclosing protected health information to a non-covered insurance entity for the purpose of obtaining payment for services. Further, under proposed § 164.510(n), this rule would permit disclosures by health care providers of protected health information to such insurance entities and to other persons when mandated by applicable law for the purposes of determining eligibility for coverage or benefits under such insurance arrangements. For example, a State workers’ compensation law that requires disclosure of protected health information to an insurer or employer for the purposes of determining an individual’s eligibility for medical or other benefits, or for the purpose of determining fitness for duty, would not be disturbed by this rule.
8. Secretary. This term means the Secretary of Health and Human Services and any other officer or employee of the Department of Health and Human Services to whom the authority involved has been delegated. It is provided for ease of reference.
9. Small health plan. The HIPAA does not define a “small health plan,” but instead explicitly leaves the definition to be determined by the Secretary. We propose to adopt the size classification used by the Small Business Administration. We would therefore define a “small health plan” as a health plan with annual receipts of $5 million or less. 31 CFR 121.201. This differs from the definition of “small health plan” in prior proposed Administrative Simplification rules. We will conform the definitions in the final Administrative Simplification rules.
10. Standard. The term “standard” would mean a prescribed set of rules, conditions, or requirements concerning classification of components, specification of materials, performance or operations, or delineation of procedures in describing products, systems, services, or practices. This definition is a general one, to accommodate the varying functions of the specific standards proposed in the other HIPAA regulations, as well as the rules proposed below.
11. State. This term would include the 50 States, the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Guam. This definition follows the statutory definition of “State” in section 1101(a) of the Act.
12. Transaction. We would define “transaction,” as we have done in other Administrative Simplification regulations, to mean the exchange of information between two parties to carry out financial or administrative activities related to health care. A transaction would be (1) any of the transactions listed in section 1173(a)(2) of the Act, and (2) any transaction determined appropriate by the Secretary in accordance with Section 1173(a)(1) of the Act.
a. Health claims or equivalent encounter information. This transaction could be used to submit health care claim billing information, encounter information, or both, from health care providers to payers, either directly or via intermediary billers and claims clearinghouses.
b. Health care payment and remittance advice. This transaction could be used by a health plan to make a payment to a financial institution for a health care provider (sending payment only), to send an explanation of benefits remittance advice directly to a health care provider (sending data only), or to make payment and send an explanation of benefits remittance advice to a health car provider via a financial institution (sending both payment and data).
c. Coordination of benefits. This transaction could be used to transmit health care claims and billing payment information between payers with different payment responsibilities where coordination of benefits is required or between payers and regulatory agencies to monitor the furnishing, billing, and/or payment of health care services within a specific health care/insurance industry segment.
d. Health claims status. This transaction could be used by health care providers and recipients of health care products or services (or their authorized agents) to request the status of a health care claim or encounter from a health plan.
e. Enrollment and disenrollment in a health plan. This transaction could be used to establish communication between the sponsor of a health benefit and the payer. It provides enrollment data, such as subscriber and dependents, employer information, and primary care health care provider information. A sponsor would be the backer of the coverage, benefit, or product. A sponsor could be an employer, union, government agency, association, or insurance company. The health plan would refer to an entity that pays claims, administers the insurance product or benefit, or both.
f. Eligibility for a health plan. This transaction could be used to inquire about the eligibility, coverage, or benefits associated with a benefit plan, employer, plan sponsor, subscriber, or a dependent under the subscriber’s policy. It also could be used to communicate information about or changes to eligibility, coverage, or benefits from information sources (such as insurers, sponsors, and payers) to information receivers (such as physicians, hospitals, third party administrators, and government agencies).
g. Health plan premium payments. This transaction could be used by, for example, employers, employees, unions, and associations to make and keep track of payments of health plan premiums to their health insurers. This transaction could also be used by a health care provider, acting as liaison for the beneficiary, to make payment to a health insurer for coinsurance, copayments, and deductibles.
h. Referral certification and authorization. This transaction could be used to transmit health care service referral information between health care providers, health care providers furnishing services, and payers. It could also be used to obtain authorization for certain health care services from a health plan.
i. First report of injury. This transaction could be used to report information pertaining to an injury, illness, or incident to entities interested in the information for statistical, legal, claims, and risk management processing requirements.
j. Health claims attachments. This transaction could be used to transmit health care service information, such as subscriber, patient, demographic, diagnosis, or treatment data for the purpose of a request for review, certification, notification, or reporting the outcome of a health care services review.
k. Other transactions as the Secretary may prescribe by regulation. Under section 1173(a)(1)(B) of the Act, the Secretary may adopt standards, and data elements for those standards, for other financial and administrative transactions deemed appropriate by the Secretary. These transactions would be consistent with the goals of improving the operation of the health care system and reducing administrative costs.
13. Business partner. This term would mean a person to whom a covered entity discloses protected health information so that the person can carry out, assist with the performance of, or perform on behalf of, a function or activity for the covered entity. Such term includes any agent, contractor or other person who receives protected health information from the covered entity (or from another business partner of the covered entity) for the purposes described in the previous sentence. It would not include a person who is an employee, a volunteer or other person associated with the covered entity on a paid or unpaid basis.
14. Designated record set. This term would be defined as a group of records under the control of a covered entity from which information is retrieved by the name of the individual or by some identifying number, symbol, or other identifying particular assigned to the individual, and which is used by the covered entity to make decisions about the individual. The concept of a “designated record set” is derived from the Privacy Act’s concept of a “system of records.” Under the Privacy Act, federal agencies must provide an individual with access to "information pertaining to him which is contained in [a system of records]." 5 U.S.C. 552a(d)(1). A “system of records” is defined as "a group of any records under the control of any agency from which information is retrieved by the name of the individual or by some identifying number, symbol, or other identifying particular assigned to the individual." 5 U.S.C. 552a(a)(5). Under this rule, we would substitute the term “covered entity” for “agency” and limit the information to that used by the covered entity to make decisions about the individual.
We would define a “record” as "any item, collection, or grouping of protected health information maintained, collected, used, or disseminated by a covered entity." Under the Privacy Act, "the term 'record' means any item, collection, or grouping of information about an individual that is maintained by an agency, including, but not limited to, his education, financial transactions, medical history, and criminal or employment history and that contains his name, or the identifying number, symbol, or other identifying particular assigned to the individual, such as a finger or voice print or a photograph." 5 U.S.C. 552a(a)(4). For purposes of this rule we propose to limit the information to protected health information, as defined in this rule. “Protected health information” already incorporates the concept of identifiability, and therefore our definition of “record” is much simpler.
For health plans, designated record sets would include, at a minimum, the claims adjudication, enrollment, and patient accounting systems. For health care providers, designated record sets would include, at a minimum, the medical records and billing records. Designated record set would also include a correspondence system, a complaint system, or an event tracking system if decisions about individuals are made based, in whole or in part, on information in those systems. Files used to backup a primary data system or the sequential files created to transmit a batch of claims to a clearinghouse are clear examples of data files which would not fall under this definition.
We note that a designated record set would only exist for types of records that a covered entity actually “retrieves” by an identifier, and not records that are only “retrievable” by an identifier. In many cases, technology will permit sorting and retrieving by a variety of fields and therefore the “retrievable” standard would be relatively meaningless.
15. Disclosure. This term would be defined as the release, transfer, provision of access to, or divulging in any other manner of information outside the entity holding the information.
16. Health care operations. We propose the term “health care operations” to clarify the activities we consider to be “compatible with and directly related to” treatment and payment and therefore would not require authorization from the individual for use or disclosure of protected health information.
Compiling and analyzing information in anticipation of, or for use in, civil or criminal legal proceedings.
Our definition proposes to limit health care operations to functions and activities performed by a health plan or provider or by a business partner on behalf of a health plan or a provider. Our definition anticipates that in order for treatment and payment to occur, protected health information would be used within entities, would be shared with business partners, and in some cases would be shared between covered entities (or their business partners). However, a health care operation should not result in protected health information being disclosed to an entity that is not the covered entity (or a business partner of such entity) on whose behalf the operation is being performed. For example, a health plan may request a health care provider to provide protected health information to the health plan, or to a business partner of the health plan, as part of an outcomes evaluation effort relating to providers affiliated with that plan. This would be a health care operation.
We are aware that the health care industry is changing and that these categories, though broad, may need to be modified to reflect different conditions in the future.
17. Health oversight agency. We would define the term “health oversight agency” as it is defined in the Secretary’s Recommendations. See section II.E. below for further discussion.
18. Individual. We would define “individual” to mean the person who is the subject of protected health information. We would define the term to include, with respect to the signing of authorizations and other rights (such as access, copying, and correction), various types of legal representatives. The term would include court-appointed guardians or persons with a power of attorney, including persons making health care decisions for incapacitated persons, persons acting on behalf of a decedent’s estate, where State or other applicable law authorizes such legal representatives to exercise the person’s rights in such contexts, and parents subject to certain restrictions explained below. We would define this term to exclude foreign military and foreign diplomatic personnel and their dependents who receive health care provided or paid for by the DOD or other federal agency or entity acting on its behalf, and overseas foreign national beneficiaries of health care provided by the DOD or other federal agency, or non-governmental organization acting on its behalf.
The purpose of our proposal is to define and limit the circumstances in which an individual’s protected heath information could be used or disclosed by covered entities. As discussed above, we are proposing to make the use and exchange of protected health information relatively easy for health care purposes and more difficult for purposes other than health care.
As a general rule, we are proposing that protected health information not be used or disclosed by covered entities except as authorized by the individual who is the subject of such information or as explicitly provided this rule. Under this proposal, most uses and disclosures of an individual’s protected health information would not require explicit authorization by the individual, but would be restricted by the provisions of the rule. Covered entities would be able to use or disclose an individual’s protected health information without authorization for treatment, payment and health care operations. See proposed § 164.506(a)(1)(i). Covered entities also would be permitted to use or disclose an individual’s protected health information for specified public and public policy-related purposes, including public health, research, health oversight, law enforcement, and use by coroners. Covered entities would be permitted by this rule to use and disclose protected health information when required to do so by other law, such as a mandatory reporting requirement under State law or pursuant to a search warrant. See proposed § 164.510. Covered entities would be required by this rule to disclose protected health information for only two purposes: to permit individuals to inspect and copy protected health information about them (see proposed § 164.514) and for enforcement of this rule (see proposed § 164.522(e)).
The proposed rule generally would not require covered entities to vary the level of protection of protected health information based on the sensitivity of such information. We believe that all protected health information should have effective protection from inappropriate use and disclosure by covered entities, and except for limited classes of information that are not needed for treatment and payment purposes, we have not provided additional protection to protected health information that might be considered particularly sensitive. We would note that the proposed rule would not preempt provisions of other applicable laws that provide additional privacy protection to certain classes of protected health information. We understand, however, that there are medical conditions and treatments that individuals may believe are particularly sensitive, or which could be the basis of stigma or discrimination. We invite comment on whether this rule should provide for additional protection for such information. We would appreciate comment that discusses how such information should be identified and the types of steps that covered entities could take to provide such additional protection. We also invite comment on how such provisions could be enforced.
Covered entities of all types and sizes would be required to comply with the proposed privacy standards outlined below. The proposed standards would not impose particular mechanisms or procedures that covered entities must adopt to implement the standards. Instead, we would require that each affected entity assess its own needs and devise, implement, and maintain appropriate privacy policies, procedures, and documentation to address its business requirements. How each privacy standard would be satisfied would be business decisions that each entity would have to make. This allows the privacy standards to establish a stable baseline, yet remain flexible enough to take advantage of developments and methods for protecting privacy that will evolve over time.
Because the privacy standards would need to be implemented by all covered entities, from the smallest provider to the largest, multi-state health plan, a single approach to implementing these standards would be neither economically feasible nor effective in safeguarding health information privacy. For example, in a small physician practice, the office manager might be designated to serve as the privacy official as one of many duties (see proposed § 164.518(a)) whereas at a large health plan, the privacy official may constitute a full time position and have the regular support and advice of a privacy staff or board.
Similarly, a large enterprise may make frequent electronic disclosures of similar data. In such a case, the enterprise would be expected to remove identifiers or to limit the data fields that are disclosed to fit the purpose of the disclosure. The process would be documented and perhaps even automated. A solo physician’s office, however, would not be expected to have the same capabilities to limit the amount of information disclosed, although, in the cases of disclosures involving a small number of records, such an office could be expected to hide identifiers or to limit disclosures to certain pages of the medical record that are relevant to the purpose of the disclosure.
In taking this approach, we intend to strike a balance between the need to maintain the confidentiality of protected health information and the economic cost of doing so. Health care entities must consider both aspects in devising their solutions. This approach is similar to the approach we proposed in the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for the administrative simplification security and electronic signature standards.
This section addresses the requirements that we are proposing when protected health information is disclosed pursuant to the individual's explicit authorization. The regulation would require that covered entities have authorization from individuals before using or disclosing their protected health information for any purpose not otherwise recognized by this regulation. Circumstances where an individual’s protected health information may be used or disclosed without authorization are discussed in connection with proposed §§164.510 and 164.522 below.
where a covered entity asks an individual to authorize it to disclose or use information for purposes other than treatment, payment or health care operations.
In addition, this section proposes conditions where a covered entity or the individual initiates an authorization for use or disclosure of psychotherapy notes or research information unrelated to treatment. See discussion above in section II.C.1.c.
Individually identifiable health information is used for a vast array of purposes not directly related to providing or paying for an individual’s health care. Examples of such uses include targeted marketing of new products and assessing the eligibility of an individual for certain public benefits or for commercial products based on their health status. Under these rules, these types of uses and disclosures could only be made by a covered entity with the specific authorization of the subject of the information. The requirements proposed in this section are not intended to interfere with normal uses and disclosures of information in the health care delivery or payment process, but only to permit control of uses extraneous to health care. The restrictions on disclosure that the regulation would apply to covered entities may mean that some existing uses and disclosures of information could take place only if the individual explicitly authorized them under this section.
Authorization would be required for these uses and disclosures because individuals probably do not envision that the information they provide when getting health care would be disclosed for such unrelated purposes. Further, once a patient’s protected health information is disclosed outside of the treatment and payment arena, it could be very difficult for the individual to determine what additional entities have seen, used and further disclosed the information. Requiring an authorization from the patient for such uses and disclosures would enhance individuals’ control over their protected health information.
We considered requiring a uniform set of requirements for all authorizations, but concluded that it would be appropriate to treat authorizations initiated by the individual differently from authorizations sought by covered entities. There are fundamental differences in the uses of information and in the relationships and understandings among the parties in these two situations. When individuals initiate authorizations, they are more likely to understand the purpose of the release and to benefit themselves from the use or disclosure. When a covered entity asks the individual to authorize disclosure, we believe the entity should make clear what the information will be used for, what the individual's rights are, and how the covered entity would benefit from the requested disclosure.
Individuals seek disclosure of their health information to others in many circumstances, such as when applying for life or disability insurance, when government agencies conduct suitability investigations, and in seeking certain job assignments where health is relevant. Another common instance is tort litigation, where an individual's attorney needs individually identifiable health information to evaluate an injury claim and asks the individual to authorize disclosure of records relating to the injury to the attorney.
There could also be circumstances where the covered entity asks an individual to authorize use or disclosure of information, for example to disclose it to a subsidiary to market life insurance to the individual. Similarly, the covered entity might ask that the individual authorize it to send information to a person outside that covered entity – possibly another covered entity or class of covered entity – for purposes outside of treatment, payment, or health care operations. See proposed § 164.508(a)(2)(ii).
This section describes uses and disclosures of protected health information that covered entities could make for purposes other than treatment, payment, and health care operations without individual authorization, and the conditions under which such uses and disclosures could be made. We propose to allow covered entities to use or disclose protected health information without individual authorization for such purposes if the use or disclosure would comply with the applicable requirements of this section.
These categories of allowable uses and disclosures are designed to permit and promote key national health care priorities, and to ensure that the health care system operates smoothly. For each of these categories, this rule would permit – but not require – the covered entity to use or disclose protected health information without the individual’s authorization. Some covered entities could conclude that the records they hold, or portions of them, should not be used or disclosed for one or more of these permitted purposes without individuals’ authorization (absent a law mandating such disclosure), even under the conditions imposed here. The proposed regulation is intended to reflect the importance of safeguarding individuals’ confidentiality, while also enabling important national priority activities that require protected health information.
We considered permitting uses and disclosures only where law affirmatively requires the covered entity to use or disclose protected health information. However, because the activities described below are so important to the population as a whole, we decided to permit a covered entity to use or disclose information to promote those activities even when such activities are not legally mandated. In some cases, however, we would permit a use or disclosure only when such use or disclosure is authorized by other law. The requirements for verification of legal authority are discussed in each relevant section.
Where another law forbids the use or disclosure of protected health information without the individual’s authorization, nothing in this section would permit such use or disclosure.
Other law may require use or disclosure of protected health information. If such a use or disclosure is not otherwise addressed in proposed § 164.510(b) through (m), we would in proposed § 164.510(n) permit covered entities to use or disclose protected health information without individual authorization pursuant to any law that mandates such use or disclosure. To be in compliance with this rule, the covered entity must meet the requirements of such other law requiring the use or disclosure. Similarly, nothing in this rule would provide authority for a covered entity to restrict or refuse to make a use or disclosure mandated by other law.
The HIPAA legislative authority generally does not bring the entities that receive disclosures pursuant to this section, including public health authorities, oversight and law enforcement agencies, researchers, and attorneys, under the jurisdiction of this proposed rule. We therefore generally cannot propose restrictions on the further use and disclosure of protected health information obtained by the recipients of these disclosures (unless the recipient is also a covered entity). We believe, however, that in most instances it is sound policy to restrict further uses and disclosures of such protected health information. For example, the Secretary’s Recommendations proposed that protected health information obtained by researchers not be further disclosed except for emergency circumstances, for a research project that meets certain conditions, and for oversight of research. We believe that federal legislation should include appropriate restrictions on further use and disclosure of protected health information received by entities for purposes such as those described in this section. We note that, under S.578 (introduced by Senator Jeffords), protected health information disclosed for oversight could not be used against the subject of the protected health information unless the action arises out of and is directly related to a health care fraud or a fraudulent claim for benefits, unless such use is judicially authorized.. We believe such safeguards strike the right balance between encouraging national priority oversight activities and protecting individuals’ privacy.
The provisions of this section contain requirements related to use and requirements related to disclosure, as appropriate to each of the purposes discussed. For many of these purposes, only requirements relating to disclosure are proposed because there are no appropriate internal uses for such a purpose. Examples include disclosures for next-of-kin and disclosures for banking and financial purposes.
For many of these permitted disclosures, we would require the covered entity to verify the identity of the requestor and his or her legal authority to make the request. Requirements for verifying the identity and authority of requests for information are further discussed in II.G, “Administrative Requirements.” As discussed in more detail in section II.G.3. of this preamble, the verification requirement would apply where the identity of the person making the request is not already known to the covered entity (e.g., where the disclosure is not part of a routine business transaction). We would ask health plans and health care providers to take reasonable steps to verify the identity of persons requesting protected health information, such as asking to see a badge or other proof of the identity of government officials, and would allow covered entities to rely on the statement of government officials and others regarding the legal authority for the activity. We would not require covered entities to make an independent inquiry into the legal authority behind requests for protected health information.
The provisions below would permit covered entities to use or disclose protected health information without individual authorization, pursuant to certain requirements. Although health care clearinghouses would be defined as covered entities under this rule, in most instances clearinghouses will be receiving and maintaining protected health information as the business partner of a covered health plan or provider. In such cases, proposed § 164.510(a)(2) provides that the clearinghouses that hold protected health information as business partners would not be permitted to make uses or disclosures otherwise permitted by this section unless such uses or disclosures also were permitted under the terms of the contract between the clearinghouse and the business partner.
The following proposed sections are intended to facilitate individual understanding of and involvement in the handling of their protected health information. Four basic individual rights would be created under this section: the right to a notice of information practices; the right to obtain access to protected health information about them; the right to obtain access to an accounting of how their protected health information has been disclosed; and the right to request amendment and correction of protected health information.
The rights described below would apply with respect to protected health information held by health care providers and health plans. We are proposing that clearinghouses not be subject to all of these requirements. We believe that as business partners of covered plans and providers, clearinghouses would not usually initiate or maintain direct relationships with individuals. The contractual relationship between a clearinghouse (as a business partner) and a covered plan or provider would bind the clearinghouse to the notice of information practices developed by the plan or provider and it will include specific provisions regarding inspection, copying, amendment and correction. Therefore, we do not believe the clearinghouses should be required to provide a notice or provide access for inspection, copying, amendment or correction. We would require clearinghouses to provide an accounting of any disclosures for purposes other than treatment, payment and health care operations to individuals upon request. See proposed § 164.515. It is our understanding that the vast majority of the clearinghouse function falls within the scope of treatment, payment, and health care operations and therefore we do not believe providing this important right to individuals will impose a significant burden on the industry. We invite comment on whether or not we should require clearinghouses to comply with all of the provisions of the individual rights section.
In § 164.518, we are proposing general administrative requirements for covered entities. We would require all covered entities to designate a privacy official, train members of their workforce regarding privacy requirements, safeguard protected health information, and establish sanctions for members of the workforce who do not abide by the entity’s privacy policies and procedures. In addition, we are proposing that covered plans and providers be required to establish a means for individuals to complain to the covered plan or provider if they believe that their privacy rights have been violated. In the discussions of each proposed provision, we provide examples of how different kinds of covered entities could satisfy these requirements.
In proposed § 164.520, we would require covered entities to develop and document their policies and procedures for implementing the requirements of this rule. This requirement is intended as a tool to facilitate covered entities’ efforts to develop appropriate policies to implement this rule, to ensure that the members of its workforce and business partners understand and carry out expected privacy practices, and to assist covered entities in developing a notice of information practices.
The scale of the policies developed should be consistent with the size of the covered entity. For example, a smaller employer could develop policies restricting access to health plan information to one designated employee, empowering that employee to deny release of the information to corporate executives and managers unless required for health plan administration. Larger employers could have policies that include using contractors for any function that requires access to protected health information or requiring all reports they receive for plan administration to be de-identified unless individual authorization is obtained.
this practice does not use or disclose any protected health information that is not authorized or permitted under the federal privacy regulation and therefore does not request any authorized disclosures from patients. Staff R.N. reviews all individually authorized requests for disclosures to ensure they contain all required elements and reviews the copied information to ensure only authorized information is released in response. Information requests that would require extensive redaction will be denied.
Larger entities with many functions and business relationships and who are subject to multi-state reporting and record-keeping requirements would need to develop and document more extensive policies. A health plan would need to describe all activities that would be considered health care operations and identify the use and disclosure requirements of each activity. A health plan may determine that underwriting department employees must provide a written request, approved by a team leader, to access any identifiable claims information; that such requests must be retained and reviewed every quarter for appropriateness; and the underwriting department must destroy such information after use for an approved activity. We urge professional associations to develop model policies, procedures and documentation for their members of all sizes.
We are proposing general guidelines for covered entities to develop and document their own policies and procedures. We considered a more uniform, prescriptive approach but concluded that a single approach would be neither effective in safeguarding protected health information nor appropriate given the vast differences among covered entities in size, business practices and level of sophistication. It is important that each covered entity’s internal policies and procedures for implementing the requirements of this regulation are tailored to the nature and number of its business arrangements, the size of its patient population, its physical plant and computer system, the size and characteristics of its workforce, whether it has one or many locations, and similar factors. The internal policies and procedures appropriate for a clearinghouse would not be appropriate for a physician practice; the internal policies and procedures appropriate for a large, multi-state health plan would not be appropriate for a smaller, local health plan.
After evaluating the requirements of federal, State, or other applicable laws, covered entities should develop policies and procedures that are appropriate for their size, type, structure, and business arrangements. Once a covered plan or provider has developed and documented all of the policies and procedures as required in this section, it would have compiled all of the information needed to develop the notice of information practices required in § 164.512. The notice is intended to include a clear and concise summary of many of the policies and procedures discussed in this section. Further, if an individual has any questions about the entity’s privacy policies that are not addressed by the notice, a representative of the entity can easily refer to the documented policies and procedures for additional information.
Before making a material change in a policy or procedure, the covered entity would, in most instances, be required to make the appropriate changes to the documentation required by this section before implementing the change. In addition, covered plans and providers would be required to revise their the notice of information practices in advance. Where the covered entity determines that a compelling reason exists to take an action that is inconsistent with its documentation or notice before making the necessary changes, it may take such action if it documents the reasons supporting the action and makes the necessary changes within 30 days of taking such action.
In an attempt to ensure that large entities develop coordinated and comprehensive policies and procedures as required by this section, we considered proposing that entities with annual receipts greater than $5 million 1 be required to have a privacy board review and approve the documentation of policies and procedures. As originally conceived, the privacy board would only serve to review research protocols as described in § 164.510(j). We believe that such a board could also serve as “privacy experts” for the covered entity and could review the entity’s documented policies and procedures. In this capacity, the overriding objective of the board would be to foster development of up-to-date, individualized policies that enable the organization to protect health information without unnecessarily interfering with the treatment and payment functions or business needs. This type of review is particularly important for large entities who would have to coordinate policies and procedures among a large staff, but smaller organizations would be encouraged, but not required, to take a similar approach (i.e., have a widely representative group participate in the development and/or review of the organization’s internal privacy policies and the documentation thereof). We solicit comment on this proposal.
We also considered requiring the covered entity to make its documentation available to persons outside the entity upon request. We rejected this approach because covered entities should not be required to share their operating procedures with the public, or with their competitors.
We recognize that the documentation requirement in this proposed rule would impose some paperwork burden on covered plans and providers. However, we believe that it is necessary to ensure that covered plans and providers establish privacy policies procedures in advance of any requests for disclosure, authorization, or subject access. It is also necessary to ensure that covered entities and members of their workforce have a clear understanding of the permissible uses and disclosures of protected health information and their duty to protect the privacy of such information under specific circumstances.
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2019-04-23T20:20:51Z
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https://aspe.hhs.gov/report/nrpm-standards-privacy-individually-identifiable-health-information/ii-provisions-proposed-rule
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MUSIC – Page 2 – God's Grace ~ God's Glory!
If the Lord brings us to the heights of Christianity ~ Beyond a Mere Christianity ~ it will be according to the truth that the apostle writes here. What keeps us from reaching this height? It must be that we fail to perceive the love of God, who, in Christ, laid down his life for us. To perceive is to see with a spiritual reality ~ beyond our physical sight ~ how much He loves us and how He proved His love. We will look in depth in two other chapters at how His great love begins to work in the hearts of His children, but for this one we are led to write of those who, with time and experience of HIs grace, know the presence and power of the Holy Spirit of Christ working His own nature and disposition through them in relationship with others.
Several years ago, with a new birth (John 3:3), there was no real understanding of the difference He would make in my life. Baptism at the age of eleven did not change my heart; self-centeredness was still my nature. Years later, it was God’s Holy Spirit speaking through His Holy Word when He gave me a new heart and spirit (Ezekiel 36:26) that I longed for the life of Christ within me. Repentance and faith was a work of His goodness and mercy in me (Romans 2:4); the effect of His Spirit in the new heart and spirit within me.
Everything changed on that beautiful day in 1992 when He brought me to Himself, so that I never looked back.
He endeared Himself to me, speaking through the written Word and His Spirit so that I could see Him as the loving Creator and Redeemer that He is. Since then, He has been an ever-present guide and protector of my mind, heart and spirit. He has endured with me through all the trials and adversities we have encountered. The more affliction we experience, the more of His love and care are ministered by His Holy Spirit and the more we are able to see and care for others. We continue to grow in grace and the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ (2 Peter 3:18). We could speak of many trials we have endured, but time and space do not permit here. We have published eight books that witness of His presence and teachings.
Most and best of all is how He endears Himself through us to others. At present we are formatting One Month to Live ~ A Father’s Last Words, the story of God’s abundant grace as we cared for my dad during the last three weeks of his life.
Never would I have known that being a caregiver for my dad, for grandchildren, for my mother with dementia and for Jerry the last twelve years would have prepared me to practice this endearment. We, together, have learned to see the needs of others; to pray for them; to reach out to any that the Lord shows us. We don’t have to look far. Within our own family, and our church family, there are many who need encouragement. Just a word of support and hope is enough for most. These are the closest to us and the ones with which we have developed lasting relationships. In Prayer and In Touch is our email prayer ministry, whereby we stay in touch as we pray for others.
We are enabled to see the needs of others when we go for appointments. We may never see some of these again, but the Lord knows what they need. A smile, a “thank you,” a word of greeting or a short conversation can leave a lasting impression to the glory of our Lord.
It is those who are the closest whose needs we know and with whom we endure through their difficulties, sharing the promises of God’s Word, praying for special needs, taking a meal, etc. Whatever is needful, the Lord provides through us, His people.
We encourage those who are continually experiencing the hardships of this life to see others in need and pray with the desire to know how you can help them. Focus on the Lord and His will in how we can care for others greatly changes how we see our own needs. It is good therapy for the soul to count others in greater need than ourselves.
Is this what John meant in 1 John 3:16? What does it mean to lay down our lives? I believe it means that we first give ourselves to the Lord as the apostle Paul speaks in 2 Corinthians 8:5. I have TWO FULL PLATES, but this does not keep me from seeing others in their needs, praying and reaching out when the Lord leads. He always provides more room on our plates for others, and gives the extra strength that we need and extra servings pf joy.
We are, by His mercy to us, called to offer our bodies as living sacrifices to serve Him and others (Romans 12:1-2).
He endured all the wrath and punishment for our sins, so that we as His people would be united in our love for Him and one another; to bear one another’s burdens (Galatians 6:1-2).
The following is from Philippians 2:5-11. Have This Mind is the title of an album of Scripture Tunes recorded in the last twenty-five years.
ABLE may be one of the most powerful words in the English language. In God’s Word, it conveys meaning applicable to God in His greatness and power, and shows the weakness and utter dependence of man. This word, from Words of Life ~ A – Z ~ the Ordinary Vocabulary of a Christian, dovetails into Weakness and Meekness, our last chapter in Beyond a Mere Christianity, .
The first relates to man’s inability, then compared to God’s ability.
In Daniel 3:17, we have the words of the three Hebrews about to be put in the fiery furnace.
In Daniel 6:20, the king speaks to Daniel after the Lord delivered him from the lions.
“And when he came to the den, he cried with a lamentable voice unto Daniel: and the king spake and said to Daniel, O Daniel, servant of the living God, is thy God, whom thou servest continually, able to deliver thee from the lions?
may, might, be possible, be of power.
The power of God is defined in the following references.
References to men who not able.
“many shall not be able to enter in at the strait gate (Luke 13:24).
“adversaries shall not be able to gainsay nor resist wisdom ( Luke 21:15).
“no man is able to pluck us out of the Father’s hand (John 10:29).
“nothing shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8:39).
References to what God’s Word is able to do.
“the engrafted word is able to save our souls” (James 1:21).
“the holy scriptures able to make wise” (2 Timothy 3:15).
“word of grace, which is able to build you up and to an inheritance (Acts 20:32).
References to what God enables us to do.
“able to comprehend the love of Christ” (Ephesians 3:18).
“able to stand against the wiles of the devil.” (Ephesians 6:11).
References to what God is able to do.
able to heal a blind man (Matthew 9:28).
able to perform what He promises (Romans 4:21).
“able even to subdue all things unto himself.” (Philippians 3:21).
“able to keep that which is committed unto HIm against that day.” (2 Timothy 1:12).
Gracious Father, able and willing to make yourself known, even if through the stones you created, we praise you for all power that belongs to you. We thank you for enabling us as your children to comprehend with all saints the love of Christ for us, enabling us to stand against the wiles of the devil to witness of your promises, your presence and power of your Holy Spirit among us; to keep us and to present us faultless through Christ before the presence of your glory ~ all for your glory and our joy. In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen.
Could they have shared their thoughts as they waited, no doubt they would admit their weakness in saving themselves and their total dependence on anyone who could save them.
In our natural state, human pride pretends to be strong, rather than admit its weakness. It is in cases of despair that men will admit their weakness, and in meekness, cry out and accept help from anyone who can save them.
As a disciple of Christ, he suffered in his “infirmities, reproaches, necessities, persecutions, and distress” (2 Corinthians 12:10) for the sake of Christ. If the only result of his suffering was endurance, we might not be impressed, but he understood the reason for his weakness, so that he would experience the “strength that is made perfect in weakness.” His pleasure was through his suffering as he experienced the strength of Christ in his weakness. When the little “I am” is submitted to Him, the great “I AM” proves His strength.
Beyond a mere Christianity, the sum total seems to be: weakness plus the power of Christ equals pleasure in the presence and power of Christ, no matter the circumstances. No wonder Paul lived a life of meekness, in total dependence on the Lord.
This “power of Christ” that rested upon Him was the humbling of the Lord in his weakness, enabling him to submit in his weakness to the strength of Christ. Even in prison, he and Silas worshipped; prayed and sang praises unto God.
Paul understood the role of the creature in relationship to our Creator. He made us weak, so that we would need Him. When He left our first parents alone to their free will, He proved they were unable to take care of themselves and to fulfill their purpose. It is only when we come in our need to the Savior, in weakness admitting our nothingness and need for Him, that He can save us and be all to us that our Father planned for Him to be. We must in meekness, in true humility, come to Him and experience the difference He makes in our lives. If we mumble through, thinking we can accomplish anything on our own, we miss the true nature of the Christian life. To be humble is the only means of going beyond a mere Christianity to discover the power of Christ and His abundant life within us.
Dear heavenly Father, how blessed we are that you call us your own, having saved us in Christ, your Son. We praise you that even meekness is the work of your Holy Spirit within us. Enable us to see and admit our weakness and our need for you, so that we can glorify you even when we are afflicted and in distress, taking pleasure in your presence and power with us always. In Jesus’ name we pray and praise you. Amen.
We had begun to learn and know God’s covenant of grace. The power of His grace was something fairly new, but it was becoming a great work in my life, a life I had never known. To “grow in grace and the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 3:18) was a beautiful thing. The overwhelming grace that He had bestowed grew stronger and nothing seemed to hinder even during the few difficult times.
I don’t know where my former article is stored, but I know that His grace was stored within my heart and mind, so that in these last days they have not been lost. During these last days, when the adversities have become overwhelming, God’s grace is far more, able to temper with the greatest of difficulties in this life. God is Greater Than is an older article posted here years ago. His grace was working then and now, continuing to grow and bearing fruit for His name and glory.
“These are the worst of times, and the best of times” ~ the worst of this world, but the best of heaven, and that overwhelming grace is that by which He will wing us to heights unknown and to our eternal home with Him.
An older hymn sung at our church this past Lord’s Day attests to this grace in His faithfulness to us through all times and all things.
Dear Father in heaven, as we consider all that you have done in our lives, we can but know how powerful is your grace that fills and thrills, and spills over wherever we are. We praise you for such a work, a supernatural work, that only your grace can accomplish. We pray that you will continue to grow us as your people, as a witness of your presence and power through all of this life, however difficult and tedious it may become for us. Believing that all the darkness of this world is meant to be a backdrop for your light and goodness, keep us faithful, loving, and gracious; enable us to stand in the truth of your grace revealed through the life, death and resurrection of your Son, our Lord and Savior ~ in whose name we pray, thank you and praise you. Amen.
Music is designed with a melody that runs throughout the whole piece. Other parts add harmony. The melody is the beginning, and the ending. It is what holds the piece together. Lose the melody or make it a monotone—the same tone over and over— and it ceases to be music. Overpower the melody and the music loses its meaning.
Anthems are compositions for music that include all parts —melody, harmony, and sometimes, a descant. A descant is a part that is sung by a higher range of voices. It is not meant to overpower but provide an extra lift to the other parts.
Together all the parts speak to the senses to lift the spirit and the heart toward God.
In Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs we worship with Biblical texts and heavenly music (Ephesians 5:19).
I picture it according to His Word—the melody was begun in heaven with Jesus, His Son—“Holy, Holy, Holy” from the foundation of the world. He would not only be the beginning of music but the melody throughout the span of time here on earth, onward into eternity.
He was wrapped in our humanity— the melody of heaven was here —to gather around Him those that would add the harmony to Himself, and provide the music for His family, the music that the Father wanted to hear.
“On the same night there were shepherds with flocks of sheep in the field. And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them”—the music and the worship were about to begin.
“And the glory of the Lord shone round about them with good tidings of great joy”—the prelude—the introduction to the first anthem of true worship.
“To all people—unto you is born a Savior, Christ the Lord”—the music begins.
“And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly hosts praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest”—the descant.
“And on earth peace.” Christ Jesus, our Lord, is the melody of heaven, the melody of life, as God has composed it, and plays it for us by His Spirit and through His Word.
“I will declare thy name (the Father) unto my brethren, in the midst of the church will I sing praise unto thee.” “Behold, I and the children which God hath given me.” (Hebrews 2:12-13)— the harmony of His family. Now He has a full choir.
The Psalms, hymns and spiritual songs that we learn throughout our childhood are the anthems that are carried into heaven with us, as we join that celestial choir. Others are added along the way as He gives us a repertoire. The only soloist is the one who carries the melody—Christ, Himself.
As we live by the Spirit and walk by the Spirit, He opens our ears to hear the melody and to follow Him. Our off-keys and monotones are tuned to harmonize with other voices. And walking humbly with our Father, in the obedience of faith, loving the Lord, our God, and our neighbor, we are surrounded by the heavenly overtones echoing His praise in heaven and earth. In our devotion to Christ, He opens our hearts to hear compositions we have never heard before, especially during the difficult circumstances of life.
I pray that we would experience “the new song” as He fills us with His Spirit.
On the Lord’s Day we go to His House with a great expectation of hearing the melody—a strong and sure foundation for our worship—hearing the other parts, and the distant sound of the descant of the angels in affirmation that our worship is accepted.
I pray that each day we will practice our singing, individually, and in family worship, so that we are prepared for worship on the Lord’s Day—all in preparation for the great day when we see Him and praise Him in all His glory with the angels.
Our Father has composed the music and directs the choir.
Let us sing with full hearts to His glory and our joy.
In 1911, Julia H. Johnston wrote the text of the hymn Marvelous Grace (Grace That Is Greater Than All Our Sin).
The emphasis of grace is taken from the text of Romans 5:20b.
The apostle Paul, in writing to the church in Rome, compares the sin of man (which we inherited from the first man, Adam) to the grace of God (which is His means for our salvation through the person and work of His Son, Jesus Christ (the second Adam).
Grace exceeds but is not excessive; no more than is needed. None is wasted. Grace wins over any sin of His children, overcoming sin and revealing His grace through us to others.
As I have sung this hymn through my childhood and into my adult life, in relation to Paul’s letter, God has revealed the power of His grace as paramount to the power of sin in my life. The truth of His grace to related to our own sins, and the sins of all believers (vs. 4).
This past week, He has shown me something even greater.
What place does grace play in our relationships to other people, believers and unbelievers?
If His grace exceeds our sin and our guilt; if the blood of the Lamb was spilled; if His grace pardons and cleanses us within, what happens to this grace when someone sins against us, hurts or disappoints us?
Do we forfeit His grace when someone offends us?
Or does this same grace ~ grace that is greater than all our sin ~ remain strong and prove to be greater than anything man can do to us?
If a wealthy man meets a poor man, does the poor man, through his status, take away his wealth?
A wealthy man does not change. He may, in generosity, offer the poor man money, food, or whatever he needs, but the poor man has no power to make him poor.
In the same way, we who are born of the Spirit of God’s grace, made rich in heavenly blessings, do not give up our status as God’s children by allowing the person who offends us to take away our grace. Rather, we respond to those who offend us, or who sin against us, by remembering who we are, in Christ. We, in grace, forgive, pray for them, bless them as we would our enemies (Matthew 5:44), and return good for evil (Romans 12:21). Grace abounds through us, even beyond the sin of unbelievers.
This is the amazing, marvelous, infinite, matchless grace of our loving Lord living and reigning within us. God’s grace rules and wins over all else.
Gracious, heavenly Father, whose love for us exceeds our expectations, and whose grace is greater than our greatest sins, continue to show the extent of your love and grace through us to others, even when they offend or betray us. Make our relationships and our circumstances the means of revealing your greatness and power in all things. In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
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2019-04-19T15:15:06Z
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https://godsgracegodsglory.com/category/music/page/2/
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This study was conducted to evaluate the effect of Ecklonia cava, a marine alga native to Jeju Island in Korea, on the promotion of hair growth. When vibrissa follicles were cultured in the presence of E. cava enzymatic extract (which contains more than 35% of dieckol) for 21 days, E. cava enzymatic extract increased hair-fiber length. In addition, after topical application of the 0.5% E. cava enzymatic extract onto the back of C57BL/6 mice, anagen progression of the hair-shaft was induced. The treatment with E. cava enzymatic extract resulted in the proliferation of immortalized vibrissa dermal papilla cells (DPC). Especially, dieckol, among the isolated compounds from the E. cava enzymatic extract, showed activity that increased the proliferation of DPC. When NIH3T3 fibroblasts were treated with the E. cava enzymatic extract and the isolated compounds from the E. cava enzymatic extract, the E. cava enzymatic extract increased the proliferation of NIH3T3 fibroblasts, but the isolated compounds such as eckol, dieckol, phloroglucinol and triphlorethol-A did not affect the proliferation of NIH3T3 fibroblasts. On the other hand, the E. cava enzymatic extract and dieckol significantly inhibited 5α-reductase activity. These results suggest that dieckol from E. cava can stimulate hair growth by the proliferation of DPC and/or the inhibition of 5α-reductase activity.
Androgenetic alopecia (AGA), the most common type of alopecia, is a problem in men over the age of 40. Hair loss is a growing trend in the world, however, the prevention of this condition is not simple . Numerous possibilities have been discussed to treat hair loss . Nevertheless, only two FDA-approved drugs have been available for AGA patients, i.e., finasteride and minoxidil [3,4]. Finasteride is a type II 5α-reductase inhibitor. It can be used in prostatic hypertrophy as well as in hair loss . Minoxidil was used as a drug to treat high blood pressure . However, it was also found to promote hair growth [8,9], although the mechanism of minoxidil-induced hair growth is not fully understood. In a previous study, minoxidil was shown to have proliferative and anti-apoptotic effects on dermal papilla cells . Moreover, it was also found to stimulate hair growth by the opening of ATP-sensitive K+-channel [11,12], the up-regulation of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) and the activation of the β-catenin pathway in dermal papilla cells (DPC). The DPC consist of a cluster of specialized fibroblasts that play important roles in the regulation of the hair cycle through the secretion of diffusible proteins, such as insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1) , hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) , VEGF and transforming growth factor-β (TGF-β) [17,18].
Ecklonia cava, a brown alga, grows in the regions of Jeju Island in Korea. In previous reports, E. cava has been found to have effects such as anti-bacterial and anti-inflammatory activity . E. cava has been reported to contain various phlorotannins—such as eckol, 8,8′-bieckol, 8,4″-dieckol, phlorofucofuroeckol A, triphlorethol-A, phloroglucinol, dioxinodehydroeckol, fucodiphlorethol G [21–24]. Eckol was reported to have radioprotective activities , dieckol to have anti-inflammatory effects , and triphlorethol-A to have antioxidant activity [22,23]. Recently, it has been found that phloroglucinol induced apoptosis . However, the effect and the underlying mechanisms of E. cava on hair growth have not been described. In this study, we examined the promotion effects and the mechanisms of E. cava extract and its components (eckol, dieckol, triphlorethol-A and phloroglucinol) on hair growth.
To determine whether E. cava enzymatic extract could induce hair growth, we examined the effect of E. cava enzymatic extract with the use of an organ culture of the rat vibrissa follicle. When the rat vibrissa follicles were treated with various concentrations of E. cava enzymatic extract for three weeks, in particular, the hair-fiber length with 1 μg/mL of E. cava enzymatic extract treatment showed a significant increase when compared to the control group (Figure 1). The result indicates that E. cava enzymatic extract contains components promoting hair growth.
To investigate whether anagen induction was promoted by E. cava enzymatic extract, we used C57BL/6 mice, since the dorsal hair is known to have a time-synchronized hair growth cycle . Shaved skin of telogen C57BL/6 mice is pink, which then darkens along with anagen initiation. As shown in Figure 2, the area of black skin was significantly larger (p < 0.05) in the 0.5% E. cava enzymatic extract treated group than in the control group at 26 days after depilation. Induction of the anagen phase in the 0.5% E. cava enzymatic extract treated group was observed to be faster than in the control group. The 5% Minoxidil (MINOXYLTM) treated group, a positive control group, showed gray skin from 13 days after depilation.
We examined the effects of E. cava enzymatic extract and its isolated compounds on the proliferation of DPC. When DPC were treated with E. cava enzymatic extract in the concentrations of 0.001, 0.01, 0.1, 1, 10 and 100 μg/mL, E. cava enzymatic extract significantly promoted the proliferation of DPC compared with the vehicle-treated control at all the concentrations, except the 100 μg/mL (Figure 3). We evaluated whether the isolated compounds from E. cava enzymatic extract such as eckol, dieckol, phloroglucinol and triphlorethol-A, could promote the proliferation of DPC. DPC were treated with eckol, dieckol, phloroglucinol and triphlorethol-A, individually, at 0.005, 0.01, 0.05, 0.1, 0.5, 1 and 10 μg/mL for 4 days. The dieckol increased the proliferation of DPC by 100.5%, 103.9%, 113.5%, 106.1%, 108.1%, 98.5% and 97.3%, respectively (Table 1). The eckol also promoted the proliferation of DPC by 100.8%, 106.1%, 120.3%, 108.5%, 107.8%, 105.4% and 104.1%, respectively (Table 1). However, phloroglucinol and triphlorethol-A did not affect the proliferation of DPC (Table 1).
Minoxidil, a hair-growth promoting agent, has a mitotic effect on NIH3T3 fibroblasts via KATP channel opening. Whether E. cava enzymatic extract, eckol, dieckol, phloroglucinol and triphlorethol-A could act as an opener of KATP channel, proliferation of NIH3T3 fibroblasts was examined. NIH3T3 fibroblasts were treated with E. cava enzymatic extract, eckol, dieckol, phloroglucinol and triphlorethol-A at 0.05, 0.1, 0.5, 1 and 10 μg/mL. The E. cava enzymatic extract significantly increased the proliferation of NIH3T3 fibroblasts by 119.6%, 118.8%, 116.3%, 113.7% and 77.4%, respectively (Figure 4A). To evaluate whether the E. cava-induced proliferation was mediated through KATP channel opening, NIH3T3 fibroblasts were pretreated with tolbutamide, a non-selective blocker of K+ channels. Tolbutamide inhibited the E. cava-induced proliferation of NIH3T3 fibroblasts (Figure 4B). Nevertheless, it is important to note that dieckol, a major component of the E. cava enzymatic extract, did not alter the proliferation of NIH3T3 fibroblasts (data not shown). Eckol, phloroglucinol and triphlorethol-A slightly increased the proliferation of NIH3T3 fibroblasts compared with the control group (data not shown).
5α-reductase activity is known to be important for preventing hair loss. We investigated the effects of E. cava enzymatic extract, eckol, dieckol, phloroglucinol and triphlorethol-A on the 5α-reductase activity using rat prostatic enzyme. As shown in Figure 5, the E. cava enzymatic extract, eckol and dieckol significantly inhibited 5α-reductase activities in a dose-dependent manner (Figure 5A–C). Especially, when the reaction mixture was incubated with 100 μg/mL of dieckol, its inhibition activity was similar to that of the finateride treated group, a positive control group (Figure 5C). However, phloroglucinol did not affect 5α-reductase activities (Figure 5D). 5α-Reductase activities in the triphlorethol-A treated group showed a slight inhibition (Figure 5E).
In this study, the hair growth promoting effect of E. cava enzymatic extract, which contains more than 35% of dieckol, was investigated in vitro and in vivo. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to demonstrate that E. cava enzymatic extract and dieckol, a component of E. cava, have the potential to promote hair growth via the proliferation of dermal papilla cells and/or the inhibition of 5α-reductase activity.
The hair growth cycles, in hair follicle organ cultures of the rat vibrissa follicles, have been reported to be synchronized according to their age and the isolated rat vibrissa follicles could be maintained in vitro up to 23 days . Use of the organ culture methods to evaluate hair follicle growth is thought to be correlated with in vivo systems because the extent of hair growth can be observed as the sum of the function of each cell . We found that the E. cava enzymatic extract increased the hair-fiber length of follicles by 12.4% at 1 μg/mL, compared with the vehicle-treated control. To evaluate the in vivo effect of E. cava enzymatic extract on the induction of the anagen phase, the hair growth promoting effect on C57BL/6 mouse was examined. The hair growth stimulating in vitro effect of E. cava enzymatic extract was also observed in vivo using C57BL/6 mice.
The hair follicle consists of several distinct epithelial cells and DPC [31,32]. Regulation of hair growth depends on the balance between proliferation and apoptosis in the DPC . As shown in figure 3, E. cava enzymatic extract significantly increased the proliferation of DPC. We also examined whether the isolated compounds of E. cava extracts such as eckol, dieckol, phloroglucinol and triphlorethol-A, could increase the proliferation of DPC. We observed that eckol and dieckol increased the proliferation of DPC, whereas phloroglucinol and triphlorethol-A did not affect proliferation of DPC (Table 1).
K+ channel opening is involved in not only mitogenesis , but also hair growth . In previous studies, minoxidil was able to potentiate the mitogenic effects on NIH3T3 fibroblasts through the KATP channel opening . As shown in Figure 4, the E. cava enzymatic extract could promote the proliferation of NIH3T3 fibroblasts, which was inhibited by tobutamide, a non-selective blocker of K+ channels. The result indicates that the E. cava enzymatic extract can promote hair growth via the KATP channel opening.
Inhibition of 5α-reductase activity is important in preventing hair loss in AGA [36,37]. E. cava enzymatic extract significantly inhibited 5α-reductase activity in a dose dependent manner. Among the isolated compounds from E. cava enzymatic extract—eckol, dieckol, phloroglucinol and triphlorethol-A—dieckol was the most active. The results suggest that E. cava enzymatic extract and dieckol could have the potential for the treatment of AGA via the inhibition of 5α-reductase activities. Previous studies propose that AGA may be caused by DHT in different ways: The miniaturization of dermal papilla and hair follicles is induced by DHT, which leads to transition from anagen to catagen . DHT increases the levels of transforming growth factor-β1 (TGF-β1) and TGF-β2 in dermal papilla cells, which leads to decreased proliferation of epithelial cells [39,40]. Up-regulation of dickkopf related protein-1 (DKK-1) by DHT can cause repression of the growth of epithelial cells in hair follicles . In further studies, we need to examine whether that E. cava enzymatic extract and dieckol can regulate the levels of TGF-β1/β2 and DKK-1 in dermal papilla cells. The androgen action and gene expressions in dermal papilla cells (DPCs) from the human beard are known to be different from those in DPCs of the human scalp. In the future, therefore, although the structure of hair follicle in the human scalp is very similar to that of hair follicle in rat vibrissa, we need to examine whether E. cava extract and dieckol can promote hair growth of the human scalp.
The brown alga, E. cava, was collected along the coasts of Jeju Island in Korea, between February and May 2010 and taxonomically identified by Professor Ki Wan Lee. The samples were washed three times in tap water to remove any attached salt, epiphytes, and sand. Then, they were rinsed carefully with fresh distilled water, and maintained in a medical refrigerator at −20 °C. The frozen samples were then lyophilized and homogenized using a grinder prior to extraction.
We followed the methods reported in previous studies for the preparation of E. cava enzymatic extract . To briefly state the preparation procedure, fifty grams of E. cava were homogenized with water (2 L), and mixed with 500 μL of carbohydrate enzyme (celluclast 1.5L FG, Novozyme Nordisk, Bagsvaerd, Denmark). E. cava enzymatic extract was adjusted to be within the optimum pH and temperature range of the carbohydrate enzyme and enzymatic reactions were performed for 24 h. Following extraction, the extract was boiled for 10 min at 100 °C to inactivate the enzymes. Then, E. cava enzymatic extract was clarified by centrifugation (3000 rpm, for 20 min at 4 °C) to remove the residue. E. cava enzymatic extract was adjusted to pH 7.0.
Eckol, dieckol, phloroglucinol and triphlorethol-A were isolated from E. cava as previously described . In short, the dried E. cava was extracted three times with 80% aqueous EtOH, and was evaporated in a vacuum. The EtOH extract was then partitioned with EtOAc. The EtOAc fraction was subjected to silica and LH-20 column chromatography. The active compounds were finally purified by reversed-phase HPLC (ThermoFisher Scientific, San Jose, CA, USA), and the purified compounds were then confirmed by comparing their LC/MS, 1H NMR data to those in the existing literature .
Eckol: LC/MS data (M+, m/z: 372.0 calcd for C18H12O9). 1H NMR (400 MHz, DMSO-d6) δ 9.54 (1H, s, OH-9), 9.45 (1H, s, OH-4), 9.21 (2H, s, OH-2,7) 9.16 (2H, s, OH-3′,5′), 6.14 (1H, s, H-3), 5.96 (1H, d, J = 2.8 Hz, H-8), 5.80 (1H, d, J = 1.7 Hz, H-4′), 5.78 (1H, d, J = 2.8 Hz, H-6), 5.72 (2H, J = 1.7 Hz, H-2′,6′).
Dieckol: LC/MS data (M+, m/z: 742.0 calcd for C36H22O18). 1H NMR (400 MHz, DMSO-d6) δ 9.71(1H, s, OH-9), 9.61 (1H, s, OH-9″), 9.51 (1H, s, OH-4″), 9.46 (1H, s, OH-4), 9.36 (2H, s, OH-3″,5″), 9.28 (1H, s, OH-2″), 9.23 (1H, s, OH-2), 9.22 (1H, s, OH-7″), 9.15 (2H, s, OH-3′,5′) 6.17 (1H, s, H-3″), 6.14 (1H, s, H-3), 6.02 (1H, d, J = 2.7 Hz, H-8), 5.98 (1H, d, J = 2.7 Hz, H-8″), 5.95 (1H, s, H-2′, 6″′), 5.82 (1H, d, J = 2.7 Hz, H-6), 5.81 (1H, d, J = 2.7 Hz, H-6″), 5.80 (1H, t, J = 2.0 Hz, H-4′), 5.78 (2H, d, J = 2.0 Hz, H-2′,6′).
Phloroglucinol: LC/MS data (M+, m/z: 126 calcd for C6H6O3). 1H NMR (400 MHz, DMSO-d6) δ 8.97 (3H, s, OH-1,3,5), 5.66 (3H, s, H-2,4,5).
Triphlorethol-A: LC/MS data (M+, m/z: 374.0 calcd for C18H14O9). 1H NMR (400 MHz, DMSO-d6) δ 5.7 (1H, d, J = 2.7, H-3), 6.0 (1H, d, J = 2.9, H-5), 5.8 (1H, S, H-3′), 5.8 (1H, S, H-5′), 6.0 (1H, d, J = 2.2, H-2″), 5.9 (t, J = 2.2, H-4″), 6.0 (1H, d, J = 2.2, H-6″).
The purity of eckol, dieckol, phloroglucinol and triphlorethol-A was >95%, according to the peak area of all components absorbed at each specific wavelength in HPLC analysis. Their chemical structures are shown in Figure 6, and were freshly dissolved in dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) (Sigma, St. Louis, MO, USA) for subsequent treatment. Further, minoxidil sulfate and minoxidil were also dissolved in DMSO for subsequent treatment. The final concentration of DMSO was adjusted to 0.2% (v/v) in the following experiment. Tolbutamide was made up as a 410 mM stock solution in ethanol and added to the culture media in a final concentration of 0.25% ethanol.
Male Wistar rats (3 weeks of age) were supplied from Orient Bio (Seongnam, Gyeonggi, Korea). Six-week-old female C57BL/6 mice and 8-week-old male spargue-Dawley (SD) rats were purchased from Dae-Han Biolink (Eumsung, Chungbuk, Korea) and were provided with a standard laboratory diet and water ad libitum. All animals were cared for by using protocols (20100031) approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) of the Jeju National University.
Isolation of rat vibrissa follicles was performed as described previously . Briefly, rat vibrissa follicles were harvested from male Wistar rats that were 23 days old. To accomplish this, the rats were sacrificed under carbon dioxide (CO2). Next, both the left and right mystacial pads were removed from the rats and placed in a 1:1 (v/v) solution between Earle’s balanced salts solution (EBSS, Sigma, St. Louis, MO, USA) and PBS that contained 100 unit/mL of penicillin and 100 μg/mL of streptomycin. Anagen vibrissa follicles were then carefully dissected under a stereomicroscope (Olympus, Tokyo, Japan) from posterior parts of the mystacial pads, with considerable caution to remove the surrounding connective tissue without damaging the vibrissa follicle. Using this method, we were able to routinely isolate more than 40 follicles from each animal. The isolated follicles were then placed in separate wells in 24-well plates that contained 500 μL of Williams medium E (GIBCO Inc, Grand Island, NY, USA) supplemented with 2 mM L-glutamine (Gibco Inc, Grand Island, NY, USA), 10 μg/mL insulin (Sigma, St. Louis, MO, USA), 50 nM hydrocortisone (Sigma, St. Louis, MO, USA), 100 unit/mL penicillin and 100 μg/mL streptomycin at 37 °C. They were cultivated in an atmosphere comprised of 5% CO2 and 95% air. The isolated follicles were then treated with vehicle (DMSO diluted 1:1000 in Williams medium E) as a control and E. cava enzymatic extract (0.01, 0.1, 1 and 10 μg/mL). Minoxidil sulfate (Sigma, St. Louis, MO, USA) was used as a positive control in the culture systems (Buhl et al., 1990). The culture medium was changed every 3 days and photographs of the cultured vibrissa follicles were taken using a stereomicroscope, for 3 weeks. The length of the hair follicles was measured using a DP controller (Olympus, Tokyo, Japan).
Anagen was induced on the back skin of C57BL/6 mice that were in the telogen phase of the cycle by depilation, as described previously . Briefly, 6-week-old female C57BL/6 mice were allowed to adapt to their new environment for one week. The anagen was then induced in the back skin of the 7-week-old female C57BL/6 mice by shaving, which led to synchronized development of anagen hair follicles. From the following day (day 1), 0.2 mL of 0.5% E. cava enzymatic extract in 50% ethanol was topically applied every day for 33 days. 5% Minoxidil (MINOXYLTM; Hyundai Pharm. Co. Ltd., Cheonan, Chungnam, Korea) was used as a positive control. The back skin of the mice was then observed and photographed at 1, 7, 13, 20, 26 and 33 days after shaving. For the quantitative assessment, dotmatrix planimetry was performed .
Rat vibrissa immortalized dermal papilla cell line was donated by the Skin Research Institute, Amore Pacific Corporation R & D Center, South Korea. The DPC were cultured in DMEM (Hyclone Inc., Logan, UT, USA), supplemented with 10% fetal bovine serum (Gibco BRL, Grand Island, NY, USA) and penicillin/streptomycin (100 unit/mL and 100 μg/mL, respectively), at 37 °C in a humidified atmosphere under 5% CO2.
The proliferation of DPC was evaluated by measuring the metabolic activity using a 3-[4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl]-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide (MTT) . Briefly, DPC at 1.0×104 cells/mL were seeded into 96-well plate, then cultured for 24 h in a serum-free DMEM, and then treated with vehicle (DMSO diluted 1:1000 in serum-free DMEM) as a control, E. cava extract (0.001~100 μg/mL), eckol (0.005~10 μg/mL), dieckol (0.005~10 μg/mL), phloroglucinol (0.005~10 μg/mL), triphlorethol-A (0.005~10 μg/mL) and minoxidil sulfate (1 μM), for 4 days. After incubation, 0.1 mg (50 μL of a 2 mg/mL solution) of MTT (Sigma, St. Louis, MO, USA) was added to each well, and the cells were then incubated at 37 °C for 4 h. Next, the plates were centrifuged at 1000 rpm for 5 min at room temperature and the media was then carefully aspirated. 200 μL of DMSO was then added to each well to dissolve the formazan crystals and the absorbance of the plates, at 540 nm, was then read immediately on a microplate reader (BioTek Instrument, Inc., Winooski, VT, USA). All experiments were performed three times and the mean absorbance values were calculated. The results are expressed as a percentage of absorbance caused by treatment with the extract or the active component compared to those of the vehicle treated controls.
The mouse embryonic NIH3T3 fibroblasts were purchased from ATCC (Rockville, MD, USA) and cultured in ATCC-formulated Dulbecco’s Modified Eagle’s Medium (DMEM), supplemented with 10% (v/v) heat-activated bovine calf serum (BCS), 100 unit/mL penicillin and 100 μg/mL streptomycin at 37 °C atmosphere and 5% CO2.
The proliferation of NIH3T3 fibroblasts was also evaluated by measuring the metabolic activity using MTT assay . NIH3T3 fibroblasts, at 1.0 × 104 cells/mL, were seeded into a 96-well plate. Cells were incubated for 24 h with DMEM supplemented with 10% BCS, then washed with phosphate buffered saline (PBS, Sigma, St. Louis, MO, USA). The cells were maintained with DMEM supplemented with 10% BCS or 1.5% BCS and treated with vehicle (DMSO) as a control, E. cava extract (0.05~10 μg/mL), eckol (0.05~10 μg/mL), dieckol (0.05~10 μg/mL), phloroglucinol (0.05~10 μg/mL), triphlorethol-A (0.05~10 μg/mL) and minoxidil (75 μM), for 4 days. To clarify whether proliferation of NIH3T3 fibroblasts is regulated by KATP channel opening, NIH3T3 fibroblasts were pretreated with tolbutamide (2 mM), a non-selective blocker of K+ channel, for 30 min prior to incubation with E. cava enzymatic extract for 4 days. All experiments were performed three times and the mean absorbance values were calculated. The results are expressed as the percentage in the absorbance caused by treatment with the extract or the active component compared to those of the vehicle untreated controls.
Male SD rats (8 weeks) were sacrificed with carbon dioxide (CO2). The prostates of rats were dissected, freed of their capsules, then washed with saline, and stored at −80 °C. Frozen tissues were thawed on ice and procedures were carried out at 4 °C. The tissues were homogenized with Polytron homogenizer (Brinkman Instruments, Wesrbury, NY, USA) in 5–6 tissue volumes of medium A (0.32 M sucrose, 1 mM dithiothreitol (DTT), 0.2 mM phenylmethylsulfonylfluoride (PMSF), and 20 mM potassium phosphate buffer pH 6.6). The homogenates were centrifuged at 100,000 g for 60 min. The pellets were recovered, washed with three tissue volumes of medium A and centrifuged two additional times at 400 g at 0 °C for 10 min. The washed pellets were suspended in medium A and stored at −80 °C until use. The suspension (2.5 mg protein/mL for Rat prostates, determined by the Bradford method) was used as source of 5α-reductase.
5α-reductase activities were assayed as previously described . The reaction mixture contained a final volume of 500 μL: one millimole DTT, 40 mM potassium phosphate buffers, 2 mM NADPH, Testosterone including 120 n Ci [1,2,6,7-3H]. The reaction in triplicate was started when it was added to the rat prostatic enzyme fraction (250 μg protein), 0.2% DMSO as a control, E. cava extract (10, 30, 50, 70 and 100 μg/mL), eckol (10, 70 and 100 μg/mL), dieckol (10, 70 and 100 μg/mL), phloroglucinol (10, 70 and 100 μg/mL) and triphlorethol-A (10, 70 and 100 μg/mL). Finasteride 2 nM (MERCK SHARP & DOHME, South Granville, Australia) was used as a positive control. The mixture was incubated at 37 °C for 60 min, and then stopped by adding 1 mL of ethyl acetate and mixing for 1 min. After centrifugation at 1000 g for 5 min, the organic phase was removed which then was dried under a heating plate, dissolved in 50 μL of ethyl acetate containing 500 μg/mL testosterone and 500 μg/mL dihydrotestosterone (DHT) and applied to a silica gel 60 F254 TLC plate (Merck, Darmstadt, Germany). The plate was developed in a solvent system consisting of an ethyl acetate:cyclohexane (1:1) solution, the plate then was air dried. Testosterone was visibly seen under the UV light (254 nm) and DHT was detected using 10% H2SO4 solution via posteriorly heating the plate. Under these conditions, DHT will be shown as a dark yellow color. Areas containing androgen were removed and the strips were soaked in the 5 mL of ULTIMA GOLDTM Cocktails (PerkinElmer, Inc., Waltham, MA, USA) and the radioactivity level was then measured via a liquid scintillation counter (Packard Bioscience, Meriden, CT, USA). The activity of 5α-reductase was expressed as the ratio [DHT/(T + DHT)] × 100.
Each experiment was performed at least in triplicate. Results are expressed as mean ± SD or mean ± SE from three separate experiments. The Student’s t test and one-way ANOVA test were used to determine the statistical significance.
In conclusion, this study demonstrated that dieckol, a principal component of E. cava, could stimulate hair growth through the proliferation of dermal papilla cells and the inhibition of 5α-reductase activity. These finding indicate that dieckol from E. cava enzymatic extract is a possible therapeutic compound for treatment of hair loss.
This research was a part of the project titled “Development of product and material promoting hair-growth from Jeju marine algae” funded by the Ministry of Land, Transport and Maritime Affairs, Korea.
Figure 1. Hair growth effect of Ecklonia cava enzymatic extract on rat vibrissa follicles. (A,B) Individual vibrissa follicles from Wistar rats were micro dissected and then cultured in William’s E medium at 37 °C under 5% CO2. Vibrissa follicles were treated with various concentrations of E. cava enzymatic extract and minoxidil sulfate, as indicated. All experiments were performed in triplicate. The difference in the length of vibrissa follicles of the control group on day 21 was taken to be 100%. Data are presented as the percentage of the length of the treated follicles based on the mean length of the control follicles ± SE. * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01 vs. control.
Figure 2. The effect of Ecklonia cava enzymatic extract on the anagen induction in C57BL/6 mice. After shaving, the back skins were treated with 0.5% E. cava enzymatic extract, vehicle and 5% minoxidil every day for 33 days. (A) The back skins were photographed at 1, 7, 13, 20, 26 and 33 days after depilation; (B) On day 26, the quantitative assessment of anagen induction analyzed via dotmatrix planimetry was performed. The transparency was put on a photo of a mouse to mark the areas that were in different stages (pink = telogen, anagen = black). Afterward a dotmatrix (sheet with a uniform defined dot pattern) was placed under the marked foil to calculate the percentages of the regions of interest by counting the dots. The percentage of anagen induction was calculated by the equation [(black skin/total skin) × 100]. Data are presented as the mean ± SE (n = 6). * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001 vs. vehicle treated control.
Figure 3. The effect of Ecklonia cava enzymatic extract on the proliferation of dermal papilla cells. Rat vibrissa immortalized DPC (1.0 × 104 cells/mL) were plated in 96 well plates. DPC were treated with various concentrations of E. cava enzymatic extract and minoxidil sulfate, as indicated. Cell proliferation was measured using a MTT assay for 4 days. All experiments were performed in triplicate. Data are presented as the mean ± SD. * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001 vs. control.
Figure 4. The effect of Ecklonia cava enzymatic extract on the proliferation of NIH3T3 fibroblasts. (A,B) Mouse embryonic NIH3T3 fibroblasts (1.0 × 104 cells/mL) were plated in 96 well plates. NIH3T3 fibroblasts were treated with various concentration of E. cava enzymatic extract, as indicated. Stimulation with minoxidil served as a positive control. (B) NIH3T3 fibroblasts were pretreated with tolbutamide for 30 min prior to incubation with E. cava enzymatic extract. Cell proliferation was measured using a MTT assay for four days. All experiments were performed in triplicate. Data are presented as the mean ± SD. * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001 vs. control; ### p < 0.001 vs. E. cava-treated group.
Figure 5. Inhibition effects of Ecklonia cava enzymatic extract and its isolated compounds on 5α-reductase activities. (A-E) Assay of 5α-reductase inhibition was performed using a crude extract of rat prostate. The reaction mixture contained [1,2,6,7-3H] testosterone, prostatic enzyme and E. cava enzymatic extract or its isolated compounds (eckol, dieckol, phloroglucinol and triphlorethol-A). The conversion rate of testosterone (T) to dihydrotestosterone (DHT) was calculated by the equation [DHT/(T + DHT)]. Inhibition activity (%) was expressed as a percentage of reduced conversion rate compared to the control. The inhibition activity of control group was regarded as 0% (not shown). Finasteride was used as a positive control. Data are presented as the mean ± SD of three independent experiments. * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001 vs. finasteride; # p < 0.05, ## p < 0.01, ### p < 0.001 vs. control.
Figure 6. Structures of eckol, dieckol, phloroglucinol and triphlorethol-A.
Table 1. The effects of isolated compounds from Ecklonia cava enzymatic extract on the proliferation of dermal papilla cells.
The proliferation of the control group was regarded as 100% (not shown). All experiments were performed in triplicate. Data are presented as the mean ± SD.
***p < 0.001 vs. control.
© 2012 by the authors; licensee Molecular Diversity Preservation International, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open-access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).
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2019-04-26T16:04:14Z
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https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/13/5/6407/htm
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The Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective (SERRC) recently addressed several interesting topics — often in connection with Steve Fuller’s ideas. To my mind, the most important topics are: The main features of social epistemology; A new relationship between human thinking and the surrounding world; The individual mind and its embodiment in a group; The significance of the material body (natural or artificial) for thinking; Human rights for animals; and, The Extended Mind Thesis (EMT). All these topics are interdependent, one cannot be considered without referring to the others. Their discussion has two sides, empirical and theoretical. First, let’s look at the theoretical side.
One way to discuss the question regarding the specificity of the human mind, in the framework of social epistemology, may be the Extended Mind Thesis (EMT). The key point of Georg Theiner, a supporter of EMT, “is to accept or discover that cognition is not just ‘all inside the head’. The EMT explores ways that cognition is extended beyond the individual brain/mind or body and this serves to overcome the classical Cartesian dualism between mind and matter, subjective and objective, the res extensa and the res cogitans”. For supporters of EMT the objective world is not only the natural world, but also the social world. EMT scholars study the relations of individual human minds and the thinking of human collectives among scientists and humanitarians, philosophers and sociologists and so on. Of course, they are also interested in the link between the brain and thinking. The focus of their reasoning is to show that borders among the participants in such kinds of interactions are disappearing. The idea of borders is important in social epistemology, but Fuller poses differently the problem of extending the human mind.
For Fuller, it is important to understand if it is possible to spread the human mind to creatures that do not have the ability to think like human beings. We can extend Fuller’s reasoning. Can we understand every thing as if it was created and as if it has an author? In classical science, for instance, each theory has a creator. But to understand a theory we do not need to know the name of its author. However, in the arts, it is often enough to say: “This is Picasso.” For many, given the author, the nature of the work is now clear. Naming the author says something important about the content. In the current context of social epistemology is thinking closer to art than to contemporary science? Recent science is oriented much more to the author than to the object of study.
This way of thinking asks us to look carefully at the things around us as having authors who created them and with whom we may communicate. When we look at a painting by Picasso, we communicate with him as we consider the details of his work. The same occurs with the creatures to which Fuller refers. We know in advance that we cannot talk with a monkey. To teach a monkey our language is problematic to say the least. But we can understand the idea of its creation as a unique and autonomous entity with its own properties and rights. We do not need to make a monkey similar to a human. On the contrary, we should understand the a monkey’s features in helping to develop its existing capacities.
Another of Fuller’s important ideas regards the possibility of the mind’s existence outside the human body. This question is posed in relation to the construction of thinking machines that occupy space in the artificial world that we created and that surrounds us. People must change their way of thinking in the process of adapting to this new world. The human body gets technological enhancements; science interferes in the structure of human genome. As for thinking machines, they master the human mind. At the same time, the “body” of the machine is a technical construction. Is it possible for human thinking to exist without a biological body? Perhaps we are witnessing two parallel processes? Perhaps scientists will invent a material that replaces biological tissues with inorganic machine parts? In this case the difference between machine and human will disappear. Humans will not exist so much as biological creatures. Machines will not exist so much as technical constructions. As a result, there is no problem. I do not want to say if this outcome is good or bad — maybe it’s inevitable?
Fuller’s analysis of the issues discussed at Yale, and his own conference presentation, helped me understand the main directions in the study of human-animal relations and the notion of humanity. Despite the variety of positions taken at the conference, I would like to draw attention not to the speakers’ differences, but to their similarities. All of speakers talked about human rights — about whether we can grant them to some of the most cognitively developed animals. The conference participants assumed, absent serious discussion, that it would be a great benefit to animals to have human rights. But is this really so?
Humans have the right to kill and to eat animals. We do it all the time. This right is necessary for us to live. In what way can we grant the same right to animals? Do we allow animals (e.g. tigers, piranhas or crocodiles) to kill and eat us when they are hungry? We also hunt for recreation. Perhaps, then, we have in mind contending only with clever enough animals. But who will define the level of animals’ mentality clearly enough to understand what is forbidden to them? Do we have the right to prohibit animals from acting? Can we be sure that animals will not use their knowledge to violate our rights?
As I see it, animals do not need most of our rights. But they have their own rights that we must take into consideration. I believe that it is impossible to spread human laws into the animal world. What is good for us is unacceptable for them. Here, I disagree with Fuller who says: “In any case, given our emerging sense of what constitutes a good life for ourselves, why not try to extend that across nature?” It is desirable to create conditions for animals in zoos similar to those in which they live in the wild, but not conditions similar to those in which we live in our flats. Wild animals have the right to preserve their natural habitat on the globe that is their home no less than ours. Pets, of course, are closer to a person, but their rights also cannot be the same as the human rights. If we want to see wild animals live well, we should take care to preserve their environment as much as possible in its most suitable form.
Without doubt, modern civilization reduces the area where wild nature is preserved and the changes are not in a favorable direction for the animals. People can compensate, to some extent, for the damage that their livelihood brings to animals. But, in so doing, we have to think first about the specific rights of animals and not about human rights. Human rights should not be considered desirable for all animals.
We can draw a parallel with the current state of affairs in the social world of people. We talk a great deal about the process of globalization. Indeed, the current conditions of our civilization, primarily means of communication, brings people closer to one other. Increasingly strong ties appear among different countries and cultures. But, at the same time, we are witnessing a stormy burst of national cultures, religions and traditions that seek to establish themselves as autonomous and having the right to independent existence. It is impossible to ignore that not just the good aspects of the past are revived. Hostility, strife and religious wars — the desire to spread one’s own cultural, religious and political values, if not to the whole world, then to the nearest neighbors — often form the context of international relations.
Life in western countries is more comfortable than for people in the east. It is not difficult to understand the desire to make all humans happy given the conditions of western democracy. But what is good for some people, is not good for others. Apparently, we need to develop a web of communication that would unite all its elements and preserve their individuality and autonomy. A policy of multiculturalism that encourages cultural coexistence and equal rights leads to both a culture in place, and a culture recently arrived, adopting a new form of existence. As a result, cultures lose their specificity.
I believe each nation should have place where people live constantly and which is their home. Outside their home, people are guests and obligated to obey local laws and customs.
When we enter the world of animals, we are their guests. We are obliged to take into consideration their norms of life. Whether we want to or not, our activity inevitably changes the living conditions of wild animals. If an animal fell into a difficult situation, and we want to help, we must know the peculiarities of the animal’s behavior. The biological features an animal’s body do not play a serious role.
As for people, I completely agree with Fuller that our natural biological makeup is not a foundation of humanity. While not the foundation, it is necessary for our thinking. Physiological processes in the brain are not a thought, but they are necessary for the birth of a thought, if nothing else. Overcoming this boundary is not easy to explain. Perhaps it is disappearing?
People organize the surrounding world as their house and do it with the help of their mind. Traces of human thinking remain in its results whether we like it or not. In classical science, we try to remove these traces and study the created world as if it exists absolutely independently of us. But now, on the contrary, we try to find these traces and reproduce them in machines. The surrounding world changes. If we want to live in it comfortably, we have to study its structure and create possible ways to communicate with all its inhabitants. Fuller considers this issue and offers relevant topics for discussion.
“Extended Knowledge and the Extended Mind. Interview Report Precis”, Gregory Sandstrom, European Humanities University and Lithuanian Research Council. SERRC, 2014. Vol. 3, No. 2, 35.
“Crediting People: An Exchange.” SERRC – January 16, 2014.
Steve Fuller “’Personhood Beyond the Human’: Reflections on an Important Conference.” SERRC Vol. 3, No 2. 11.
When I attended University of Tennessee in Chattanooga, I had the opportunity to work with Dr. Lyn Miles, an anthropologist who raised an orangutan, Chantek, and taught him sign language. By the time I had come to campus, Chantek had been living in captivity near Zoo Atlanta for a few years. Having met Chantek I can attest to his impressive communication skills and “crafting” capabilities. Lyn is of a small but passionate contingent who are pushing for “personhood” rights for great apes.
I do not believe there is anything intrinsically wrongheaded about this movement to extend human rights to “intelligent” non-human species, but there seems to be a rather pressing question of agency. The fact that we, humans, are interceding on behalf of (read: for the greater good of) intelligent non-humans begs the question; why should we assume they want/need our assistance? If these species are intelligent and capable of communication, maybe we should try harder to find out what they might want for themselves?
As a side note: the fact that humans commonly kill animals for food should not imply that that we have the right to do so. There are entire religions and people groups who get along quite well without killing or eating animals (in fact, many of these groups tend to have better health and increased longevity than the general, meat-eating populace).
Taylor Loy is absolutely right that there are no foregone conclusions in the discussion about the possibility for humans to intervene in the lives of animals. But I am sure of certain things.
To my mind it’s important to avoid anthropological explanations of animal behavior. If a parrot learned to pronounce words, and even short phrases, that does not mean that he became closer to a human being.
I believe that humans have to estimate and to defend animals rights first of all. “Red book” was created exactly for this purpose.
Of course an analogy cannot prove anything, but to clarify something you can use it. I mean social relations among people.
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2019-04-23T10:05:15Z
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https://social-epistemology.com/2014/02/13/the-humanisation-of-the-surrounding-world-and-the-technisation-of-humans-lyudmila-a-markova/
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Over the weekend, I took my kids to the movie, Night of Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. They thoroughly enjoyed watching the exhibits come to life. (My kids especially liked the Einstein bobbing heads). Now the Smithsonian Institution, in a flash of cloud like behavior, is coming to life on the social web.
The Smithsonian Institution is in the midst of a huge strategic planning effort, with new media as one of the focal points for its future. It looks like their strategic planning process is being extended by the social web, going beyond the traditional flip charts and chocolate chip cookies of all-day planning retreats. While they may be also be doing focus groups and surveys, it looks like they've added a research channel: YouTube.
Given the news ways of acquiring and sharing knowledge through technology: the internet, social networking, video sharing, and cell phones—where do you see the Smithsonian's museums and websites going in the future? How can we make education more relevant to you in a digital age?
There's a handful of videos already submitted and just gotta love this one with the baby.
We're looking for a few friends and fans from around the world to help us form the future Smithsonian experience. A revolutionary Web and New Media Strategy project is underway, and we invite you to collaborate with us as we envision a rich new media future for the Institution.
They're asking folks to join this YouTube group and submit a one-minute video by June 30th. I wonder who they are reaching out to, why they selected YouTube (are there other places where people who are interested in the future of the Smithsonian gather?), are they reaching out to new media professionals as well as others?
It will be interesting to see how they summarizing the feedback and illustrate how they plan to incorporate it into their strategic planning.
View more Microsoft Word documents from Nina Simon.
in the comments. There was a response from someone at the Smithsonian who answered Dave Cormier's query about why they are doing it and how to nurture the conversation.
The Voice Your Vision Project is just one more facet of the overall info gathering process. Video contribution seemed like a potentially engaging way to gather some public input, and YouTube was an easy place to set it up. This wasn’t a heavily analyzed endeavor, just another little piece of the puzzle.
The process has been designed to be very wide open within the Institution, so this seemed a easy and fun way to gather some input from the outside using New Media.
Nothing cynical, and no worry about losing funding. The Secretary is a Social Media booster. However, getting an institution as large as ours to undertake an integrated approach to New and Social Media is a big task. Building our systems from the ground up to both meet the internal needs of our researchers and other specialists while still filtering up to meet the needs of our constituents via our websites and our presence on an ever widening array of external social sites is going to take a lot of resources. We need begin to get a view from a lot of perspectives, and this is just one more slice of the pie.
So, not only are they opening up a two-way conversation, they are using social media best practices: listening and experimenting. Also being very transparent.
I don't know why I just don't come here and read your blog before i go off and 'think' things.
I wonder this too. wrote a long comment http://westmuse.wordpress.com/2009/05/25/o-m-g/#comment-200 here talking about this.
What exactly are they trying to do... do they know i wonder.
why youtube? Is there need for other reason rather than because its by far the most visited, it has other institution's channels...in brief isnt it the fastest way to have your video social network up and running?.
I am interested to see that using YouTube like this, feels like doing something else all together. And I am not sure what I mean by that.
I'd be very interested to see how the Smithsonian has diagramed all of this. Why is YouTube different? In what quadrant does it reside?
The Smithsonian has been very effective, thanks in large part to Mike Edson, Nancy Proctor and others in embracing technological engagement.
This feels like "network t.v." somehow to me. Is it the production value -- the look and feel? Is it YouTube itself?
Is twitter neat because it's more lo-fi w/lots of cutting and pasting?
Thanks for the invite to come back and look again!
There's a stage of full-on, two way, strategically optimal use (Obama campaign) that actually is crowdsourcing work.
There's a stage of partially two-way use that is intended to broaden existing conversations and evangelize social internally as well as evangelize the institution externally (Smithsonian; the student-run blog I'm pushing for in my school district.) Work at this stage isn't actually being "crowdsourced" - there's still a gatekeeping person sifting/winnowing/featuring on the back end - but opportunity for input has opened way up.
Last there's a stage of one-way use that uses social to simply replace an earlier tech within a traditional public input process. (Smithsonian originally looked like this, but the response to Cormier makes it two-way.) Out of system responses such as Cormier's aren't tracked or answered; systemwide evaluation for more advanced/optimal ways of using social aren't explored afterwards. A one-shot.
Fun to see what the Smithsonian had to say: essentially, no, this isn't fully strategic; we're experimenting/learning. That's a fine answer. Good for them!
The wiki effort (http://smithsonian-webstrategy.wikispaces.com/) is particularly impressive. Mike Edson is doing a great job making the new media strategic planning as open and accessible as possible. The Smithsonian is a HUGE organization with many different opinions and authorities. This content is just as much (if not more) for internal audiences as external, which affects the messaging. They are doing internal selling in a public venue, which ups the stakes but also keeps the pressure active, due to all of us interested outsiders!
My colleague Marc Bretzfelder did a nice job on the westmuse blog describing the motivation and circumstances behind the youtube contest. It's really just one idea we decided to try, somewhat serendipitously and spontaneously (for us), in support of the overall web and new media strategy process.
The main focus of the strategy process currently underway is the public-facing wiki that Nina mentioned, http://smithsonian-webstrategy.wikispaces.com . (I need to do a better job of linking the wiki and the youtube contest to each other and making the connection clearer. Tomorrow.) I encourage Beth's Blog readers to join the wiki and weigh in. Chief Wiggum said something to the effect of "if you don't tell me how to do my job I'll never know."
Beth, first of all thanks for sharing all this usefull information with us. It is wonderful to see that this site with its blogs and comments provides such useful knowledge.
I tumbled on this article Smithsonian: Crowdsourcing An Institution's Vision on Youtube describing the use of youtube and crowdsourcing. I would like to add some useful information about a platform, where I am working that is using the same features. Pifworld, which stands for Play It Forward for a better world, is the online social network platform that connects people and charity worldwide.
The principle behind pifworld is crowdsourcing; a lot of different people donate small amounts to make social projects possible worldwide. You don’t need to be rich or famous to contribute to positive change. Secondly people who like specific projects can become an ambassador and promote their favorite project through social networking principles. At last supporters and ambassador are being kept involved through video updates through youtube and personal involvement.
Pifworld is only launched some weeks ago, and I guess it is very interesting for the people following Beth’s blogs, since all the new features involving online fundraising, like new technology, video, social networking etc etc are used in pifworld.
Thanks for the useful tips and the information you provide that is very interesting and make the reader benefited its really a better one so I like this very much.
Good post. Thanks for your useful tips provided is very interesting.I think it will make the reader benefited.It's a very useful post. So I like this one very much.
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2019-04-23T04:09:39Z
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https://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2009/05/smithsonian-crowdsourcing-an-institutions-vision-on-youtube.html
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Faculty. Full-time members of the academic staff on the various campuses with the rank of instructor or above and equivalent ranks.
Other Academic. Part-time members of the academic staff, members of the academic staff below the rank of instructor or equivalent; and other personnel with academic responsibilities not holding faculty rank.
[Board of Supervisors of Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College.
(10/2/08). Bylaws and Regulations (Chapter II, Section 2-1).
Criteria: Personnel who are employed primarily for research assignments, whose duties and responsibilities are essentially the same level as those of Instructor are appointed to the rank of Associate. Associates are expected to perform specialized research, instructional, extension, service, or artistic routines under the supervision of a member of the professorial ranks. The individual must have graduated from a regionally accredited college or university or have extensive (4 or more years) research, instructional, extension, or artistic experience in the subject or a closely related area.
Faculty Status: This rank does not carry faculty status. A change in rank from Associate to Instructor shall be regarded as an appointment to the faculty and not as a promotion.
Tenure and Appointments: Associates do not earn tenure and are appointed for a specified term.
Educational Provisions: Refer to LSU System PM-12, Educational Privileges for Full-Time Nonacademic and Other Academic Employees, December 12, 2000.
Criteria: The individual must have graduated from a regionally accredited college or university or have extensive (4 or more years) library experience. Library Associates are expected to perform the simpler and specialized library routines under the supervision of a professional librarian.
Criteria: Individuals appointed to this rank normally should possess the highest degree requisite in the subject matter area (a minimum of a master’s degree). Each department, in collaboration with the Dean of its college, should establish definite standards to indicate what degree it considers requisite for the rank of Instructor. In addition to the above academic requirement, the individual should show promise of the ability to perform successfully the duties (teaching, research extension, or other scholarly activity) for which he/she was employed or which may be assigned in the future.
Faculty Status: The rank of Instructor carries faculty status.
Tenure and Appointment: Instructors do not earn tenure and are appointed for a specified term.
Educational Provisions: Individuals may petition (through channels to the Chancellor) to register for undergraduate and/or graduate courses. Each petition shall be evaluated on its own merit. Major factors in determining the course load to be allowed shall be the employee’s work load as shown on the appointment form and the relationship of the proposed course to the employee’s work assignment. Normally, individuals will not be permitted to register for more than one course during regular working hours.
Criteria: Minimum qualifications include graduation from a regionally accredited college or university, plus a degree from a library school accredited by the American Library Association, plus library experience.
The individual is expected to perform, under supervision, library tasks of a complex nature and to exercise responsible judgment in administering library routine.
Faculty Status: The same as for Instructor.
Tenure and Appointment: The same as for Instructor.
Educational Provisions: Individuals may petition (through channels to the Chancellor) to register for undergraduate and/or graduate courses. Each petition shall be evaluated on its own merit. Major factors in determining the course load to be allowed shall be the employee’s workload as shown on the appointment form and the relationship of the proposed course to the employee’s work assignment. Normally, individuals will not be permitted to register for more than one course during regular working hours.
Criteria: The individual shall meet the standards, which govern appointment to the rank of Instructor and shall normally possess the commonly accepted terminal degree in the subject matter area. In addition, the person should exhibit clear evidence of potential for excellence in teaching, research, extension, or other scholarly activity.
Faculty Status: Assistant Professors have faculty status.
Tenure and Appointment: Term appointments at this rank are to be for one, two, or three years. During the sixth year of service in rank as an Assistant Professor, a “pre-tenure review” will be conducted to evaluate the individual’s performance so that before the end of the sixth year of service the individual will be informed of the University’s position regarding his/her retention. Upon reappointment after seven (7) years of service in rank on a particular campus, tenure is automatic and appointments are for an indefinite period of time. Individuals at this rank who are paid from grant or contract funds shall not acquire tenure through the passage of time, but may become tenured only by specific individual recommendation through appropriate channels and approval by the President.
Persons holding a rank above the level of Instructor (or an equivalent rank) may not become a candidate for an earned degree on the campus of employment.
Criteria: Minimum qualifications include graduation from a regionally accredited college or university, plus a degree from a library school accredited by the American Library Association, plus varied experience in college and university libraries. A graduate degree in a subject field, in addition to the graduate degree in library science, is desirable for this rank. Individuals are under the supervision of a library administrator to supervise the work of professional and nonprofessional assistants and to aid in the development of materials and services to meet the instructional, research, and extension needs of the University.
Faculty Status: The same as for Assistant Professor.
Tenure and Appointment: The same as for Assistant Professor.
Educational Provisions: The same as for Assistant Professor.
Criteria: The individual shall meet the standards which govern appointment and promotion to the rank of Assistant Professor. In addition, he/she shall have established a consistently good reputation as a scholar and have demonstrated a high quality of productivity. Normally, the individual will have served at least three (3) years as an Assistant Professor.
Faculty Status: Associate Professors are senior members of the faculty.
Tenure and Appointment: Initial appointments of Associate Professors who join the campus at that rank and their subsequent reappointments may be made for a specified term through not more than five (5) years of total service on that campus. Persons promoted to the rank of Associate Professor after less than five years of service on the campus may be continued to term appointment no more than the fifth year. Individuals paid from grant or contract funds do not acquire tenure through the passage of time, but may become tenured only by specific individual recommendation through appropriate channels and approval by the President. With the exceptions noted above, Associate Professors are tenured and are appointed for an indefinite period of time.
Educational Provisions: The same as Assistant Professor.
*Exemptions to the rules pertaining to tenure and term appointments at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center and the Paul M. Hebert Law Center are found in Chapter II, Section 2.7 of the Bylaws and Regulations of the LSU Board of Supervisors.
Criteria: Same as for Assistant Librarian. In addition, this rank calls for proven administrative qualities of leadership, and other personal and academic qualifications should be contributing factors. The individual, as delegated by the Director of the Library, assists in the administration of major areas of library service and contributes to the formulation and execution of an effective library program.
Faculty Status: The same as for Associate Professor.
Tenure and Appointment: The same as for Associate Professor.
Criteria: Individuals appointed or promoted to the rank of Professor shall possess all of the criteria and meet all of the standards for Associate Professor. He/she shall have demonstrated an excellence in teaching, research, extension, and/or other scholarly activity in the subject matter area. The faculty member shall have established a commendable academic reputation through publications, extension educational outreach and service, or other creative work. Normally, the individual will have had at least five (5) years of successful service as an Associate Professor.
Faculty Status: Professors are senior members of the faculty.
Tenure and Appointment: Initial appointments of Professors who join the campus at that rank and their subsequent reappointments may be made for a specific term through not more than five (5) years of total service on that campus. Persons promoted to the rank of Professor after less than five years of service on the campus may be continued to term appointment no more than the fifth year. Individuals paid from grant or contract funds do not acquire tenure through the passage of time, but may become tenured only by specific individual recommendation through appropriate channels and approval by the President. With the exceptions noted, Professors are tenured and are appointed for an indefinite period of time.
* Exemptions to the rules pertaining to tenure and term appointments at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center and the Paul M. Hebert Law Center are found in Chapter II, Section 2.7 of the Bylaws and Regulations of the LSU Board of Supervisors.
Criteria: Minimum qualifications are the same as for Associate Librarian. In addition, this rank calls for extensive administrative experience in which responsibility and judgment of an independent nature are required. The individual should be capable of exercising the top administrative functions of the library. Librarians assist in the administration of all aspects of library service and operation and share in the formulation and execution of policy.
Faculty Status: The same as for Professor.
Tenure and Appointment: The same as for Professor.
Criteria: Individuals employed jointly by the Medical Center and an affiliated hospital who have academic responsibilities equivalent to the full-time University faculty may be designated as Full-Time Affiliate Faculty.
Faculty Status: Full-Time Affiliate Faculty are members of the faculty.
Tenure and Appointment: Full-Time Affiliate Faculty is appointed for term appointments of one, two or three years and are not eligible for tenure. Those who are gratis or whose University contribution to salary is less than 25 percent shall be considered as volunteer faculty insofar as employee benefits are concerned. However, if the University contributes 25 percent or more of their total salary, the percentage of University contribution should be indicated and employee benefits appropriate to that percentage provided.
* Note: This Rank does not pertain to LSUHSC-S.
Criteria: These courtesy titles are to be given to visitors from another institution of higher education who are on a temporary duty assignment with a component of the LSU System. The individual shall be given the equivalent academic rank as assigned by his/her home institution with the designation, “Visiting”, added to the title.
Faculty Status: Individuals holding these ranks are not given the right to vote in faculty matters.
Tenure and Appointment: Tenure is not awarded to individuals holding these ranks. Employees holding these ranks are to be given term appointments not to exceed one year in length.
Criteria: Appointment to the rank of Boyd Professor, Alumni Professor, Distinguished Professor, or any other designated professorships are governed by rules and regulations developed specifically for those purposes.
Faculty Status: Designated Professors are senior members of the faculty.
Tenure and Appointment: See specific rules and regulations for that particular designated professorship.
Criteria: Only individuals whose primary responsibility is conducting research or extension education and who often are paid from grant or contract funds are to be appointed to these ranks. (A) Persons appointed to the rank of Postdoctoral Researcher must possess a Ph.D. or equivalent degree. They are expected to assist and perform specialized research routines under the general supervision of a member of the professorial ranks. (B) Senior Postdoctoral Researchers must possess a Ph.D. or equivalent degree and shall normally have a minimum of three years postdoctoral experience in a laboratory or in extension education. Persons appointed to this rank are expected to perform independent research or extension service under the direction of a member of the professorial staff. (C) Instructor - Research or Extension must possess a Bachelor’s degree and usually would have a minimum of a Master’s degree. Persons appointed to this rank are expected to engage in research or extension related activities under the general supervision of a member of the professorial ranks. (D) Appointees to the rank of Assistant Professor - Research or Extension must possess a Ph.D. or equivalent degree and shall normally have at least five years of postdoctoral experience in a research laboratory or five years experience as an extension professional. In addition, the individual is expected to meet the standards which govern appointment to the rank of Assistant Professor, excluding the instructional criteria. (E) A Ph.D. or equivalent degree and a minimum of nine years of postdoctoral experience in a research laboratory or nine years of experience as an extension professional is normally required for appointment as an Associate Professor - Research or Extension. The individual is also expected to meet the standards for appointment as Associate Professor, excluding the instructional criteria. (F) Persons appointed to Professor - Research or Extension must possess a Ph.D. or equivalent degree and shall normally have a minimum of 12 years postdoctoral experience in a research laboratory or 12 years experience as an extension professional. Also the individual should meet the same standards for appointment as Professor, excluding the instructional criteria.
Faculty Status: Individuals appointed to these ranks shall have the same faculty status as the respective professorial rank, except that these individuals may not vote on academic standards or policy matters.
Tenure and Appointment: Individuals in these ranks do not acquire tenure through the passage of time and may become tenured only by specific individual recommendation through appropriate channels and approval by the President. If an individual in one of these ranks is temporarily switched from grant or contract funds to permanent funds that time does not count toward tenure unless specifically approved through channels by the President.
Criteria: This is a non-tenure track for full-time faculty in the clinical sciences who are effective in teaching and service programs and are essential for patient care, but whose research publications or scholarly activity does not warrant appointment or promotion to tenured positions.
Faculty Status: Individuals appointed to these ranks have the same faculty status as full-time members of the faculty with equivalent rank.
Tenure: Tenure is not awarded to individuals holding these ranks. Term appointments are made not to exceed one year. Educational Provisions: The same as for Assistant Professor.
Criteria: This is non-tenure track for non-full-time faculty in the clinical sciences who are effective in teaching and service programs and are essential for patient care, but whose research publications or scholarly activity does not warrant appointment or promotion to tenured positions.
Faculty Status: Individuals appointed to these ranks shall have faculty status except that these individuals may not vote on academic standards or policy matters.
Tenure: Tenure is not awarded to individuals holding these ranks. Term appointments are made not to exceed one year.
Criteria: This is a non-tenure track for full-time faculty in the professions (eg. Education) who are effective in teaching and service programs and are essential for coordinating field work and supervising students in the field, but whose research publications or scholarly activity do not warrant appointment or promotion to tenured positions.
Faculty Status: Individuals appointed to these ranks have the same faculty status as full-time members of the faculty with equivalent rank. They may be enfranchised to the degree deemed appropriate by the faculty unit (system, campus, college, division, or department).
Tenure: Tenure is not awarded to individuals holding these ranks.
Educational Provisions: Same as for Assistant Professor, Associate Professor and Professor.
Criteria: Individuals who meet the criteria and standards for designation at a specific full-time academic rank, but who are employed on less than a 100-percent basis by a component of the University System, are to be accorded one of the respective ranks listed above.
Faculty Status: As a class, individuals with the rank of Instructor, Parttime; Assistant Professor, Part-time; Associate Professor, Part-time; and Professor, Part-time may be enfranchised to the degree deemed appropriate by the faculty unit (i.e., System, campus, college, division, or department).
Tenure and Appointment: Personnel holding one of the above ranks do not receive tenure. Appointments at these ranks are made for terms not to exceed one academic or fiscal year in length.
Educational Provisions: The same as for Assistant Professor, full-time.
Terms of Employment: Services of part-time faculty personnel may be terminated by giving such employees reasonable notice with the approval of the Chancellor. “Reasonable notice” shall be interpreted to mean written notice given at the time the action is instituted by the employee’s Department Chairman and effective after a period of time equivalent in days to the usual payroll period of the employee.
Criteria: These ranks are to be conferred upon those individuals whose Primary employment is outside the department, but who make substantial contributions to the instructional, extension, and/or research programs of the LSU System. Recommendations for such ranks are to be made in the same manner as for the equivalent full-time rank.
Faculty Status: Personnel appointed to one of these ranks are not allowed to vote on faculty matters.
Tenure and Appointment: Tenure is not awarded to individuals in these ranks. Term appointments not to exceed one academic or fiscal year in length are awarded in these ranks.
Criteria: This title is limited to part-time appointments without rank designation and is restricted to specialists and professional men and women whose primary occupation is the practice of their profession.
Faculty Status: Personnel appointed to this rank are not given the right to vote on faculty matters.
Tenure and Appointment: Tenure is not awarded to individuals in this category. Term appointments not to exceed one academic or fiscal year in length are awarded in this category.
Educational Provisions: The same as for Assistant Professor, full time.
Criteria: Part-time personnel whose primary role is related to a clinical setting shall be given the appropriate rank listed above. Recommendations for these ranks are to be made in the same manner as for the equivalent full-time rank. When an individual holding one of the above ranks is also appointed as a department head/chairman, the designation “Clinical” is dropped.
Faculty Status: As a class, individuals with one of these ranks may be enfranchised to the degree deemed appropriate by the faculty unit (i.e., System, campus, college, division, or department).
Tenure and Appointment: Personnel holding one of these ranks do not receive tenure. Appointments are made on a term basis of not more than one academic or fiscal year.
Criteria: Individuals who meet the criteria and standards for designation at a specific library rank, but who are employed on less than a 100-percent basis by a component of the University System, are to be accorded one of the respective ranks listed above.
Faculty Status: As a class, individuals with the rank of General Librarian, Part-time; Assistant Librarian, Part-time; Associate Librarian, Part-time; and Librarian, Part-time may be enfranchised to the degree deemed appropriate by the respective unit of the System, campus, college, division, or department.
Tenure and Appointment: Personnel appointed to one of the above ranks do not receive tenure. Appointments at these ranks are made for terms not to exceed one academic or fiscal year in length.
Eligibility. A faculty member on one of the various campuses of the University System who has attained national or international distinction for outstanding teaching, research, or other creative achievement may be designated a “Boyd Professor.” The “Boyd Professorship” shall be regarded as the highest professorial rank awarded by the University.
Procedure for Nomination. Nomination of a Professor for designation as a “Boyd Professor” shall originate with a Dean or Deans (in the case of split appointments) or a Director of a school, which is not a college, in which a nominee holds professorial status. The nomination shall be addressed to a Review Committee through the Chancellor of the campus on which the nominee is a faculty member. The nomination by Deans or Directors shall be reviewed by a committee comprised of the Chief Academic Officer of the System staff, who shall serve as chair, two Emeriti members, and three faculty members appointed by the President from throughout the University System.
Upon recommendation by the appropriate campus, the title “Professor Emeritus” shall be conferred upon all persons who upon retirement have attained the title of Professor and who have been in the service of the University for a period of at least ten (10) years. The said title may also be conferred, upon recommendation of the appropriate campus, at the discretion of the Board of Supervisors upon a person who upon retirement has attained the title of Professor even though the period of service is less than ten (10) years, if it is determined that the person has made outstanding contributions to the University in either the field of scholarship or public service.
Any person who has held the position of Academic Dean, Director, or Department Head for a period of ten (10) years may be retired with the title “Dean, Director, or Department Head Emeritus.” Where applicable to other positions within the University, an Emeritus title may be conferred upon the recommendation of the President in appropriate cases.
LSU does not employ on a regular basis individuals who have retired from service at Louisiana State University. Such individuals may be employed on a temporary, non-continuing basis; however, it is expected that regular employees will be utilized when available.
Where there is a documented need to secure the services of a University retiree because the individual possesses particular knowledge and qualifications not possessed by available applicants for regular employment, the Chancellor is authorized to approve the appointment of such retired individuals for a period not to exceed six (6) months. Recommendations for appointment of a University retiree for more than six (6) months are to be submitted to the office of the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs through the appropriate Dean’s Office.
All actions for retired individuals are subject to applicable personnel and equal employment practices, including the normal review and authorization procedures for academic and unclassified employees.
A faculty member who accepts an administrative position maintains faculty status and tenure rights.
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2019-04-24T02:13:41Z
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http://catalog.lsuhscshreveport.edu/content.php?catoid=2&navoid=13
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John RTA Copenhagen Collection 61 Loveseat in Marzipan was created specifically for little areas. Nevertheless, you can use it in almost any space: apartment, dormitory etc. This established provides you with more than enough support. It boasts of high quality material, higher denseness froth pocketed coils, leading-collection rayon fiber, and strong hardwood frame. This increases the comfort and ease, durability, and toughness of the set. The set includes an extremely broad back shoulder straps. The set also includes extra comfortable cushions all which makes it much more comfortable. Notably, it's gently curved arms and plush material to give it the outstanding look that matches with any design. The set checklist compact, consequently its easy to transport. It features a minor scent that ends as time passes. More to the point, the couch is extremely simple to construct. It offers the putting together tools and instructions. You easily invest your penny listen to. It acts the purpose.
Copyright © Phineas Upholstered Dining Chair By Alcott Hill in Side Kitchen Chairs All right reserved.
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2019-04-20T01:03:46Z
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http://hewan.co/Side-Kitchen-Chairs/priceless-8225/best-choice-phineas-upholstered-dining-chair-by-alcott-hill-88oxvrpfwc.cshtml&item=T3076
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Fr Théophile Verbist was born on 12 June 1823 in Antwerp, Belgium and ordained priest on 18 September 1847. On 28 November 1862, Fr Verbist founded the CICM (Congregatio Immaculati Cordis Mariae) or the Congregation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. His first companions were Frs Alois Van Segvelt, Francois Vranckx, and Remi Verlinden. On 25 August 1865, Fr Verbist and his companions left Brussels for the historic journey to China.
On February 23, 1868, Fr Verbist died of typhoid fever at the age of 45 in Lao-Hu-Kou, Mongolia.
The CICM missionaries through the past 150 years have generously committed and offered their lives to the great missionary task assigned to them. For as long as there are men who are generous enough and who truly love God and willing to give themselves for others, the CICM and its mission will go on. Today, there are about 1,000 CICM priests and brothers around the world.
With changing human situations, emerging new realities, and looming global crises in the world, the CICM is strongly moved to redefine its vision and strategies of actions towards the attainment of that vision. Fortunately, from the writings and examples of Founder Fr Théophile Verbist and from the various official documents of the Congregation, the CICM can continually draw relevant insights for missionary directions in the face of new challenges.
“The general purpose of the Congregation is the conversion of the non-Christians, but its specific aim is the preaching of the faith to the Chinese and the salvation of the many abandoned children,” reveals Fr Verbist of the reason for the establishment of the CICM in 1862. That is, faithful to the inspiration of the Founder to dedicate lives and efforts as members of CICM communities to the proclamation of the Gospel values and to the care of the marginalized and the poor, we take the 150th foundation anniversary of CICM in 2012 as an fortunate moment to revitalize the common origins of the CICM character formed out of a genuine sense of the mission. Thus, we renew today with hope for a brighter future our shared missionary identity whether as religious or as lay members of CICM institutions.
5) Solidarity with the poor through the establishment of an inclusive society.
The educational apostolate of the Philippine CICM province (CICM-PHL) affirms the animating spirit of the pioneer missionaries who saw the essential role of schools in the process of evangelization. Evangelization essentially consists in the promotion of human dignity and solidarity with the poor, following the enduring message of the Word Incarnate, i.e., to give one’s life for another.
Hence, CICM schools, envisaged as training grounds of integral human formation for the work of the mission, are necessary conditions of social transformation. Likewise, CICM schools as places of learning, have the potential of shaping human character according to certain systems of values and beliefs. In short, CICM education must go straight to the heart of society with an enduring missionary spirit.
Bringing the Good News to the people of Northern Luzon beginning in 1907 demanded for the early missionaries the establishment of schools in order to sustain their missionary efforts of religious education. Religious education also meant training lay collaborators in the pastoral work of making the message of the Gospel more relevant to the lives of ordinary people.
Clearly, CICM school founders, namely, Bishop Constant Jürgens and Fr Godfried Lambrecht for USLT and SMU, respectively, Fr Alfred Spincemaille for SLC, and Frs Séraphin Devesse and Fr Florimond Carlu for SLU, started the mission of education in their respective assignments through religious instruction.
On the occasion of the 150th foundation anniversary of the Congregation which affirms its Ad Gentes character, with its theme of Mission Beyond Borders, CICM schools and Universities renew the missionary consciousness present in their education system by expanding pedagogy, rethinking concepts, and revising methods of teaching Christian faith in light of the emerging challenges of the present times. “The educator is forever confronted with new pedagogical methods,” (Kindling the fire, 1974). This includes framing, articulating, and formulating school core values around which school policy priorities, academic programs, and best practices revolve. In effect, these core values provide the foundation of the CICM schools’ unique identity and permeate their missionary nature as Catholic educational institutions in the world.
Consequently, the practice of CICM school shared core values on which rests the strength of the schools, alongside their respective internal institutional support mechanisms, calls for their active application inside the school in terms of promoting healthy relationships among the administration, staff, faculty, and students, and outside the school in terms of leading students to successful professional lives in the world animated by a distinct CICM identity.
In the end, the pursuit for academic excellence of international standards that CICM schools strive to offer to society must diffuse Christian life through relevant human formation. Relevant human formation is an integral component of the missionary activity of CICM schools as Catholic educational institutions. That is, CICM schools must engage their own future through a transformed missionary consciousness. For “together, we will be able to work for the transformation of our society,” (Kindling the fire).
3) Vocation promotion among the students to the missionary life.
Born in 1948 in Jackson, Michigan, USA, Fr “Tim” entered CICM in 1968. After his ordination in 1974, he left for Haiti. After his language studies, Fr “Tim” was assigned in Hinche. He also served in the US formation program in San Antonio, Texas, from 1983 until 1985. Back in Haiti, Fr “Tim” became pastor of La Victoire Parish until 1988. From 1989 until 1992, he was a seminary formator in Mexico. In 1992, he returned to Haiti, first as pastor on the Island of La Gonaives, and then in 1996 as Provincial Treasurer.
Fr “Tim” was a member of the Haiti Provincial Government in different periods. Since 1990, he has been a member of the Investment Management Board and of the General Finance Committee. From 2000 to 2005, Fr “Tim” was the Provincial Superior of Haiti. He participated in the 1987 and 2005 General Chapters, and he was elected General Councilor during the 2005 General Chapter.
In June 2011, the 14th CICM General Chapter in Rome elected Fr Timothy “Tim” Atkin as the 18th Superior General of CICM for a term of 6 years (2011-2017), a term coinciding with the occasion of the sesquicentennial blessed jubilee of CICM in 2012.
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2019-04-19T14:32:38Z
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http://cftnyjo.wz.sk/271-essay-about-cicm-missionaries-history.php
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Strains Divine | They hymned their King in strains divine; I heard the song and strove to join.
I saw today an article posted by Thomas Rainer, the much-acclaimed church-growth guru, about “Six Reasons Congregational Singing Is Waning.” Now, it is true that Rainer and I come from different perpectives on this subject. He operates on the assumption of instrumental worship in the assembly; I operate on the conclusion that congregational singing (sans instruments) is how God intended for us to fulfill Ephesians 5.19 and Colossians 3.16 in the assembly. Be that as it may, I think the points he raises are worth considering, for one reason or another.
Some church members do not prepare themselves for worship. More to what I think is the key issue (and some of Rainer’s point), many of us fail to discern the reason for our assembling. Yes, we assemble to offer worship to God, but we do so in the context of edifying one another, as Ethan Longhenry has pointed out elsewhere. We are to teach and admonish one another in psalm, hymn, and spiritual song. Why does this make a difference? When we come to the assembly only thinking about the vertical (God-directed) component, it us easier for us to excuse not singing because, after all, God knows what is in our hearts, and that’s where the melody is being made anyway. The problem is that our brethren can’t know what is in our heart unless we express it. How do we express it? By singing!
We don’t know the songs. I am all in favor of new songs in worship, having written the words to a few and the music to a few more. That being said, we must be respectful of the songs that are already on the hearts of worshipers, not just the ones that we as leaders want to be on their hearts. We may think that a song (or even a genre of songs) is passé, but that song may carry significant meaning for a lot of people (and not just because it was sung at their mothers’ funerals). But more than that, people have to know song’s before they are comfortable singing them. While I sight-sing reasonably well, my wife is not as comfortable with it, and I can tell her hesitation on a song the first couple if times we sing it. Now, imagine an entire assemby of such songs. Quite frustrating, no?
The songs are not sung in a range where we can participate. While there are fundamental leading issues at play in some cases (as Raines indicates), I think there is a broader problem with how songs are written. While not exclusive to the modern era (our National Anthem has the same issue), songs these days tend to use a broader melodic range than many of the songs we’be sung over the years. “Jesus Loves Me,” for instance, spans an octave, and “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” a scant half-octave. In contrast, “In Christ Alone” ranges an octave and a half, as do many of that variety, making them very sensitive to proper pitching. Again, this is not exclusively a “new song” problem (“Where No One Stands Alone,” anyone?), but I have noticed it more with them.
The lighting indicates performance, rather than participation. So this one isn’t as applicable to my experience, since lighting wherever I’ve been tends to be functional. But what I will say is this: the more we make our assemblies look like a concert, the more those assembled will act like they’re at a concert. They’ll sing along for that one song they really like, but not as much for the rest.
The music is too loud to hear others in the congregation. Again, not a problem I’ve experienced, since this assumes an instrumental context. Personally, I’d say the opposite tends to be the problem in a capella settings. When people don’t sing out, it’s harder for others to do the same. Few of us (even naturally loud-mouthed ones like me) really want to stick out in congregational singing. I’ve noticed that when others sing out, so do I. I will even go so far as to say that this begins with the song leader (about whom more will be said in the next point). I get that we don’t want to turn the song leader into a glorified soloist, but when people don’t read music or aren’t a confident singer, they want to hear the song leader to make sure they’really singing the right notes. While we may be doing the overall sound a favor when we try to blend, rather than stand out, I wonder if we’re doing any favors to the people who most rely on the song leader. To Rainer’s point though, I wonder if this is a natural consequence of instrumental music generally.
Worship leaders are not listening to the congregation. Even without instruments, this can be a challenge. While a song leader shouldn’t allow the congregation to drag the singing down to a dirge, he shouldn’t run roughshod over them with unreasonable expectations. I also think this applies longitudinally over time. If a leader introduces a song and leads it multiple times within a short period, if the congregation still isn’t “getting it,” some serious consideration needs to be given as to whether that song is worth the frustration that the congregation is experiencing. Similarly, if a particular song or type of song gets more (and more enthusiastic) participation than others, that may be a clue.
How can we increase participation in congregational singing? As singers, come understanding the responsibility that each of us has to teach and admonish one another as we worship God. As leaders, pay attention to the needs of the congregation. Be objectively mindful of repertoire and the congregation’s response to songs (and don’t assume that no news is good news). Make sure that our zeal for a polished and well-conducted (pun intended) worship doesn’t present a barrier to the person who isn’t technically savvy on the finer points of singing.
One of the favorite scriptural justifications for singing new songs in the assembly is the repeated exhortation, particularly in the Psalms, to “Sing to the LORD a new song!” Old Testament/New Testament context aside, is that what this expression is really about? Singing brand-new songs to God?
Sort of, but not necessarily.
It is true that all songs were new once. So in order for a song to become an “old standard,” it must first be a new song that no one knows. If you were to have said, “Amazing grace,” back in the 1600s, you might have gotten a “verily” or two in response, not, “How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me!” But yet, here in the 21st-century, that sequence of words has become a cliche that appears in about every third song on Christian radio.
It is also true that God’s people in the Old Testament frequently created new songs. We have the song of Moses in Exodus 15 and the song of Deborah and Barak in Judges 5, to say nothing of the 150 written by David and others.
But is the singing of a new song primarily about the newness of the lyrics? I don’t think so. If we look at the context of all these exhortations, they come in connection with things that God has done or that God is. The examples of Moses and Deborah/Barak were responses to something great God had done for His people. The singing of a new song is about renewing our praises in light of the great things God has done in our lives.
God’s mercies and love are “new every morning.” And just as those things are new every morning, so should our song be. Our song of praise to God should be informed by all the great things that God has done, whether we use new words to express our praise or we consider the same words in a new light.
This, I think, gets to the heart (pardon the pun) of “making melody to the Lord with your heart” (Eph 5.19). This is what it means to sing “with thankfulness in your hearts to God” (Col 3.16). We aren’t just singing words, but an expression of praise and thankfulness for all that we have overcome with God.
Sometimes we do this with new lyrics. I’ve written one or two hymns in reflection upon a new circumstance in life. Horatio Spafford is famous for writing “It Is Well with My Soul” in the wake of personal tragedy. More often, though, we sing a new song by singing old lyrics with that new-found meaning. “Does Jesus care when I’ve said goodbye to the dearest on earth to me?” and the response of “Oh yes, He cares! I know He cares!” means something new when we’ve just buried the dearest on earth to us and have relied on God’s comfort to endure it. “Each victory will help you some other to win” means something new when we overcome temptation with God’s help.
The new song here refers to the book of Revelation, when in chapters 5 and 14 John refers to the singing of a new song. Assuming (and we have little reason not to) these chapters refer to the same new song, we are told in chapter 14 that only the redeemed could learn it, but we are given the words in chapter 5. So couldn’t someone not redeemed learn it?
Depends upon what you mean by learning. Learn the words, sure. But only the redeemed can sing the song in full appreciation of its meaning. The song we sing in heaven will be much like the song we sing on earth, but only in heaven will we have full appreciation of its message as those who have overcome for all time, who have gained ultimate victory in Jesus.
Whatever songs we sing—new or old—let us sing them as new songs in recognition of the great things that God has done.
In 1 Corinthians 16.13, the apostle Paul told the Corinthian brethren, “Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong.” These four admonitions would have been calls to the Corinthians to get about the things they needed to be doing. This would have been received much like a military commander marshaling his troops. My Bible cross-references this verse to 1 Samuel 4.9, where the Philistines rallied themselves by calling out, “Take courage, and be men, O Philistines, lest you become slaves to the Hebrews as they have been to you; be men and fight.” The idea is for the Corinthians (and us) not to shrink back from the battle before them.
Of all the hymns that immediately come to mind as iconic “Lord’s Supper” hymns, two of the perhaps three that I think of were written by Isaac Watts. The non-Watts hymn that comes to mind is Bliss’ “Hallelujah, What a Savior!” One of Watts’ hymns, “Alas, and Did My Savior Bleed?”, was written about previously. The other, and the object of our consideration at this time, is “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.” For some years, this has been a staple hymn of mine for use in preparation for the Lord’s Supper. The text examines our reaction to the thought of Jesus dying on the cross. This hymn’s reputation is such that Charles Wesley, one of the other giants of English hymnody, is reputed to have said that he would have given up all his other hymns to have written this one.
The first verse borrows the language of Philippians 3, particularly the idea of counting all things of loss in view of the greater prize of knowing Christ, and “the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death” (3.10). When we think back to Jesus dying on the cross—the very Prince of glory and Son of God—whatever we might have in this life pales in comparison.
The cross is indeed a “wondrous” thing, in that it evokes wonder at its paradox. Jesus, the Prince of glory, died for us. The sinless for the sinful. How does such a thing happen? The very thought was perplexing to many in the first century, and still is. If Jesus emptied Himself and laid aside whatever pride might have been rightfully His (Phil 2.5–8), what right do we have to hold onto our pride? What right do we to put stock in our own achievements and status?
As we move to verse two, we are reminded of Paul’s declaration in Galatians 6.14, “But may it never be that I would boast, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” This plays on the closing thought of the previous verse, that I pour contempt on all my pride. Of what am I proud? Am I proud of my accomplishments on the job? Of a family that I’ve raised and supported? Of the work that I believe I have done for the Lord? (remember the Pharisee’s prayer in Luke 18?) Do those things matter more to us than the fact that Christ died for us?
Here, Watts draws us to a description of Jesus upon the cross. The mention of Jesus’ head, hands and feet are from the thorns and nails that were pressed and hammered into His body. The idea of sorrow and love flowing mingled down is a play on the blood and water that flowed from Jesus’ side after His death. This further conveys the paradox of the cross. On one hand, we have Jesus’ personal sorrow in dying. This was displayed perhaps most clearly in Gethsemane prior to His arrest. On the other hand, we have the love of God that sent Jesus to this earth and, ultimately, to the cross. The love mentioned in Romans 5 that caused Jesus to die for us even while we were enemies to God. Thus, the “sorrow and love flow mingled down”…to us.
The fourth verse encapsulates the ultimate reaction of the one who comprehends the enormity of what happened at the cross. We are reminded of parables like the pearl of great price, wherein the person in the parable sold all that they had in order to obtain the pearl. But the reality is that even if we could do that, and even if we could claim ownership over all of creation, such would be an insufficient gift to repay what was done for us. Indeed, the love shown on the cross demands the only thing that is truly ours to give: ourselves.
Paul tells us in Romans 12.1, to “present [our] bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is [our] spiritual service of worship.” Jesus tells us to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength. If Christ gave Himself for us, can we give any less than ourselves to Him?
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2019-04-21T20:16:22Z
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https://carlopeterson.wordpress.com/
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On this 70th anniversary of independence, it is appropriate to dwell on the economic and social achievements of the nation since regaining independence in 1948. Despite the economy’s underperformance discussed in last Sunday’s column, there have been significant social and economic achievements since independence.
The structure of the economy has been transformed from a predominantly agricultural one to a more diversified one. We have reached middle income status with a substantial increase in per capita income. Attainments in health, life expectancy, literacy and education are impressive.
The seven decades have been a period of economic and social transformation. The country’s social and human development has outperformed countries with higher per capita incomes and earned the country a high position in the United Nation’s Human Development Index.
Although the economy grew by only around 4 percent, it has undergone a structural transformation with agriculture’s predominance in the economy being overtaken by industrial and services sectors. Per capita incomes have risen significantly, poverty and unemployment have been reduced and the country’s economic and social infrastructure has improved considerably. The most significant achievements have been in the country’s human development that is far better than most developing countries and even some developed countries. Mortality rates are low, life expectancy has reached 75 years, adult literacy has increased to over 90 percent and education has expanded significantly. Most people enjoy far better social amenities than seven decades ago.
Largely owing to the improvements in health and education, the country has gone through the three phases of the demographic transition in the first half century after independence and entered the fourth stage of an ageing population. The country’s population growth of 2.8 percent per year in the 1950s has been reduced to less than 1 percent (0.9). Yet the annual population growth is about 200,000, as in the 1950’s.
One of the most significant achievements since independence was the attainment of self-sufficiency in rice. At independence, the country with a population of only 7 million imported about half her requirements of rice and much of her other essential foods. Today with a population of 21 million Sri Lanka is about self-sufficient.
The seventy years since independence have witnessed profound and irreversible economic changes. The economy has moved from a pre-dominantly agricultural one to one in which both industry and services contribute more to GDP. The growth of industry for export has been a striking development of the last two decades. Not only has the relative importance of agriculture declined, but its composition too has changed.
The economic reforms since late 1977 had a significant impact on the structure of the economy and changed the basic character of the Sri Lankan economy. The share of manufacturing in GDP has increased. Currently the contribution of agriculture to GDP is only 7 percent. The industrial sector (including construction) contributes about 40 percent to GDP. There has been an increase in the contribution of the services sector to 55 per cent today.
These structural changes in the economy are reflected in the country’s trade pattern. Agricultural exports that dominated the export structure from the beginning of the plantation economy till the 1980s declined to 27 per cent in 2016. Industrial exports amounted to 77 percent of total export earnings.
These proportions of exports are to some extent misleading. Agricultural exports are more significant than suggested by the 27 percent as value added in agricultural exports is much higher than in industrial exports.
Notwithstanding these compositional changes in exports and imports, Sri Lanka’s trade dependence (imports and exports as a proportion of GDP) remains high. In 1950 the country’s trade dependence was 70 per cent. It was about 45 per cent in recent years. The character of the trade dependence has altered significantly. The trade dependence is more industrial than agricultural. Manufactured goods dominate exports. Raw materials and capital goods for industries account for a larger share of imports than food and other consumer imports.
There has been substantial increases in incomes. Per capita incomes have increased fourfold to the levels of a middle income country, poverty has fallen to 6.7 percent and unemployment is only 4.7 percent.
Social development after independence in 1948 is impressive. There have been significant improvements in literacy and school enrolment, reduction in mortality rates, an increase in life expectancy and significant improvements in social amenities such as housing, potable water, sanitation and access to electricity and telephones. The country achieved the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) set for 2015.
Life expectancy at birth increased from around 55 years at the time of independence to 75 years today. Life expectancy at birth is higher for females at 77 years than for males at 72 years. There have been significant improvements in maternal mortality, infant mortality and under 5 mortality. Maternal mortality decreased from 560 per one hundred thousand live births at the time of independence to 100 in 2015, while infant mortality declined from 82 to 8.2 per thousand in 2013. Under 5 mortality has declined to less than 19 per thousand.
Adult literacy increased from 57.8 per cent in 1945 to 93 per cent in 2016. Female literacy improved more sharply during this period from 43.8 per cent (1945) to 92.4 per cent and male literacy increasing from 70.1 per cent to 94.1 per cent in 2015. School enrolment of children between the ages of 5 – 19 years increased from 54.1 per cent (1945) to 75.2 in 2016.
The Human Development Index (HDI) is at 0.743 (2015) and the country ranks 99 of 177 countries. This ranking is above those of most countries at similar levels of income and higher than other South Asian countries. However, most countries in East Asia and South East Asia, such as Singapore, Malaysia and the Republic of Korea that were behind the achievements of Sri Lanka in the 1950s and 1960s, have overtaken us.
Despite the improvements in mortality rates, literacy and school enrolment, high rates of diseases associated with poverty and poor living conditions persist. Further, the quality of health and educational services leaves much to be desired. There are also significant regional disparities and urban rural differences. The progress in social indicators could have been much better in recent years, if economic growth was more rapid. Notwithstanding these qualifications there is no doubt that the country’s social and human development indicators are impressive. This comes out very clearly when comparisons are made with other developing and even some developed countries. Amartaya Sen has placed a very high value on life expectancy as it is a composite indicator and the basic aspiration of humans. He has pointed out that life expectancy in Sri Lanka is significantly higher than those of countries with similar, and even some countries with higher, per capita incomes.
There have significant developments in agriculture. Ceylon in the 1950’s with a population of just 7 million imported about half her requirements of rice. Today, Sri Lanka with a population of 21 million is self-sufficient in rice in a normal year.
The British colonial period of the nineteenth century introduced plantations and neglected paddy and other food crop agriculture. This process was reversed from around the third decade of the twentieth century. Paddy and food crop production became the centre of growth in the 1950′s and 1960′s. Paddy production increased due to an area expansion and increases in yields with high yielding varieties adopted by farmers. Consequently the country has achieved self-sufficiency in rice inspite of a threefold increase in population.
Although the country has achieved much in these 70 years of independence, it has been inadequate to resolve pressing social and economic problems of poverty, unemployment and inadequate incomes for a significant proportion of the population. The lack of pragmatism in economic policy formulation, ineffectiveness in implementation of economic programmes, excessive opposition to reforms, irresponsible union actions, and indiscipline, deterioration in law and order, weakened public administration and inability to resolve the ethic crises have all enfeebled economic progress. Other nations that were behind us have overtaken us. The pace of economic growth cannot be accelerated adequately until peace is achieved and our vision is focused on reforming political, cultural and social values.
The challenge before us in the years ahead is to consolidate these achievements, make qualitative improvements, catch up with the economic development of other countries and face the serious challenges especially in our external finances. National unity, social harmony, pragmatic policies and economic and social reforms are essential to achieve the government’s vision of being a rich and prosperous society in 2025.
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2019-04-18T11:00:26Z
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http://www.sundaytimes.lk/180204/columns/seventy-years-of-economic-and-social-transformations-and-impressive-progress-in-human-development-1948-2018-279671.html
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Office 365 Word for Mac and Word for Mac 2016 feature a new Design Tab that allows instant access to design elements and makes it easy to manage layout, colors and fonts across a document. A new Insights Pane automatically retrieves and displays relevant information from the web to deliver rich context for authors and readers. Another new feature is threaded comments, which promotes collaboration by tracking conversations and displaying them next to the associated text. Enhancements include simpler tools for inviting colleagues to review and edit documents, concurrent coauthoring of documents, and integrated Mail Merge capabilities that use Word, Excel and Outlook. As with newer editions of Office Excel and PowerPoint for Mac, Office 365 Word for Mac lets you to navigate documents with Multi-Touch gestures.
Microsoft Word for Mac 2011 features enhancements in the areas of viewing, template management, publishing, image editing, typography, document search, collaboration, and programmability. The innovative Focus View tool enables you to remove distracting content to increase the screen space available for viewing your document. The Word Document Gallery streamlines management of standard and custom templates and recent documents. Enhanced publishing capabilities include a better Publishing Layout view, the dynamic layer order, and more comprehensive graphic editing features that include background removal.
Microsoft Word for Mac 2008 introduced an improved user interface that offers an extensible toolbar and incorporates a rudimentary desktop publishing capability via the Publishing Layout View that provides increased precision in the positioning of words and graphics and enables you to chain text overflow from one page to a specified text box on another page. Other features built into Microsoft Word for Mac 2008 include support for OpenType ligatures for better looking type, and reference utilities that support a variety of citation formats. Microsoft Word for Mac 2008 supports AppleScript but doesn't support Visual Basic for Applications. Progent's Mac OS X consultants can help your business to evaluate if this limitation might affect your decision to upgrade to Word for Mac 2011.
Word for Mac 2004 introduced a Notebook Layout View that allows you to flag critical sections, search for key terms, and add date-stamped voice recordings into your notes as you write. The Track Changes feature makes it easier to follow edits and allows you to approve or reject edits from the comments. Reference Utilities permit you to access a dictionary or a thesaurus right from the Microsoft Office Toolbox, although there is also a link to Microsoft's now discontinued Microsoft Encarta online encyclopedia. The Navigation Pane enables you to navigate through your work using the improved thumbnail view.
Office 365 Excel for Mac and Excel for Mac 2016 introduce PivotTable Slicers to allow you to detect patterns within large volumes of data. A new add-on, the Analysis Toolpak, facilitates sophisticated statistical and engineering analyses. Interchangeability with PC versions of Excel is improved through support for common keyboard shortcuts and for the majority of the functions included with Excel 2013 for Windows. Other improvements include an enhanced Formula Builder Pane and the ability to print to a single PDF file.
Microsoft Excel for Mac 2011 includes improvements in the areas of data analysis and visualization, speed, graphics editing, scripting, data protection, and sharing. The new Sparklines feature provides an immediate visual representation of Excel data by means of tiny charts that fit within a cell next to the summarized data. Conditional Formatting has been enhanced to make it easier to format data with icon libraries, data bars, and color scales. You can now sort and filter information by color and use multiple- select filters and new quick filtering options. Excel Tables (before called Lists) allow you to make multiple groups of related data for easy manipulation and analytics.
Microsoft Excel for Mac 2011 PivotTables have enhanced speed and better resemblance with Windows versions of Excel. New and enhanced editing capabilities and SmartArt images/ allow you to make professional-looking graphics without requiring extra photo-editing tools. As with Word for Mac 2011, Visual Basic for Applications support has returned, improving compatibility with Office Excel for Windows and offering advanced features including IntelliSense, watch windows, and a new Visual Basic debugging tool. You can control access to workbooks via Information Rights Management (IRM) and collaborate on protected workbooks across platforms. To improve collaboration, Office Excel for Mac 2011 enables you to create platform-independent workbooks and transfer dates between workbooks without having to distinguish between 1900 vs. 1904 date systems.
Microsoft Office Excel for Mac 2008 supports as many cells as the Windows version of Excel and introduced the Formula Builder for streamlining the creation of complex calculations. Microsoft Excel for Mac 2008 also includes an Elements Gallery with templates for common applications including company payroll. Just like the 2008 edition of Microsoft Word for Mac, Microsoft Office Excel for Mac 2008 doesn't work with Visual Basic for Applications. Progent's Mac experts can help your business to determine if this limitation justifies a migration to Office for Mac 2011.
Excel for Mac 2004 introduced a Layout View that permits you to review and manipulate in a window exactly what will print, conveniently scale data to fit your desired number of pages, and insert headers and footers with ease. Charting improvements provide additional color combinations and enable you to use the Formatting Palette for quickly updating your chart class, data, colors, typography, and special effects. Smart Buttons enable you to find and fix spreadsheet formula problems and manage how the AutoFill feature formats your content. Additional tools enable you to view the proper syntax for over 140 functions, and to click and drag to alter ranges with the updated Range Finder. XML support allows you to use Extensible Markup Language to share complex data.
Microsoft Office 365 PowerPoint for Mac and PowerPoint for Mac 2016 include the new Theme Variants feature that makes it simple to alter the style of a presentation by altering the color scheme. As with new editions of Office Word for Mac, a new Threaded Comments feature promotes collaboration by showing full conversations adjacent to associated content. Teamwork is also improved with strong coauthoring features. An enhanced Presenter View shows the speaker the current and next slide, speaker notes, plus a timer while showing the audience only the projection of the current slide. An enhanced Animation Pane simplifies designing and updating professional-looking animations, and an improved Conflict Resolution View shows different edits to assist you to decide which edits to retain.
PowerPoint for Mac 2011 includes enhanced capabilities in the areas of template management, picture touchup, movie support, animated effects, layer and slide management, pacing, collaboration, security, search, performance, and programmability. The Media Browser provides convenient access to a broad selection of media libraries such as Apple iPhoto albums, iTunes playlists, and iMovie collections as well as shapes, Clip Art and other graphical data. The Presentation Presentation Gallery streamlines management of built-in and specialized templates as well as recently opened shows. New picture editing features include a background removal tool and tools for correction, color, and cropping. You can also embed and format movies from inside PowerPoint to make them an integral part of a presentation, making it simpler to distribute and control complex slide shows. You can also include 3-dimensional slide transitions and are provided with an extensive library of animation effects, customizable themes, improved chart tools, and more SmartArt graphics with new sets of organization charts and picture diagrams.
PowerPoint for Mac 2004 includes Presenter Tools that permit you to make your slide show properly paced and allow mid-show changes by means of the tools displayed in the presenter’s window. Animation and 3D transitions enable you to make more engaging presentations. The Format Font dialog box offers increased precision in selecting typography options including spacing, style, and transparency.
Office 365 Outlook for Mac and Outlook for Mac 2016 include important new features like support for push email to keep your inbox up to date, online archiving to conserve mailbox storage, the ability to propose a new meeting time in response to a meeting invitation, and the ability to view multiple calendars simultaneously. Also, navigation has been modernized for moving between Mail, Calendar, People, Tasks, and Notes. Other enhancements include the convenient display of message threads in your inbox plus message preview to help you decide quickly how to handle new emails. With an Office 365 subscription, Full Screen Mode allows you to have multiple open messages or to run two instances of Office Outlook in split-screen view.
Microsoft Outlook for Mac 2011 takes the place of Entourage and has been redesigned to deliver substantial improvements in the areas of usability, scheduling, backup and restoration, search, Windows compatibility, collaboration, speed, video conferencing, voice mail, mobility, Instant Messaging, and presence. The Outlook for Mac database for email messages, contact information, and calendars is now stored in individual text files, making them simpler to manage. Office Outlook for Mac is also directly Spotlight searchable and capable of being backed up and recovered with Time Machine. Configuring accounts has been streamlined so you can easily add either Exchange-based accounts or accounts from popular email services such as Gmail, Hotmail, MobileMe, Yahoo!, Windows Live, and AOL.
Microsoft Office Outlook for Mac now places your email, drafts, sent mail and deleted items for all of your mailboxes into consolidated folders so you no longer need to check separate email accounts and multiple folders. The Conversations capability automatically groups associated messages to simplify keeping track of email threads. The new Quick Look feature allows you to view file attachments that can include Office or PDF files, graphics, and videos. The new Contacts Search panel enables you to search your contact data from any Outlook 2011 view by entering any item in any field.
To support migration from Windows to Mac OS X, Microsoft Outlook for Mac allows you to import .PST files without the need of third-party tools. For improved collaboration, Microsoft Outlook for Mac can superimpose shared calendars so you can quickly uncover scheduling conflicts. You can also assign multiple categories to a calendar event. In conjunction with Exchange Server 2010, Microsoft Outlook for Mac 2011 can convert voice messages to text messages and put them into your inbox to cut the time spent during the often tedious task of checking voice messages. Support for offline contact data gives mobile users continual access to vital contact data. Running Microsoft Messenger for Mac 8 or Communications Server with Communicator for Mac 2011, you can see presence information in the Outlook for Mac contact card and launch Instant Messaging, a video conference, or a voice call without leaving Microsoft Outlook for Mac.
Microsoft Entourage 2008 includes an Out of Office utility that permits you to adapt out-of-office messages depending on the recipient. In comparison with Entourage 2004, Entourage for Mac 2008 provides better defense against junk mail and phishing and provides To Do lists that can be read by means of the My Day utility, which enables you to view your day's events and To Do List on your Mac desktop. Entourage for Mac 2008 also offers closer integration with Exchange Server and offers more sophisticated calendaring capabilities. Progent's Entourage 2008 experts and Microsoft Office Outlook for Mac engineers can assist your company to enhance your Apple Mac email system to work transparently with Microsoft Exchange Server so you can collaborate with fellow workers using Outlook.
Microsoft Entourage for Mac 2004 helps people to handle email, addresses, schedules, and notes from a central application. Entourage 2004 can access messages via IMAP, POP, and WebDAV. Microsoft Entourage 2004 facilitates collaboration between Apple Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows clients by allowing workers to connect to their accounts on Microsoft Exchange Server to handle messages, search Exchange's global address list, synchronize schedules and contacts, and set up meetings. Progent can help you to maintain your Entourage for Mac 2004 system or upgrade efficiently to Microsoft Office Outlook for Mac 2011.
Microsoft Messenger for Mac 8 is part of Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 and is integrated into Word for Mac, Office PowerPoint for Mac, and Outlook 2011 to enable IM, presence awareness, collaboration, and voice and video conferencing. Features include the ability to send messages to any device set up with MSN Mobile; the ability of up to 15 participants to join in a conversation; message and presence filtering determined by allowed, blocked, or unfamiliar status; the ability to share, view and comment on images/ and text; emoticon support; and custom display pictures. Messenger for Mac users need to have a Windows Live ID account.
Remote Desktop Connection, available with Office for Mac 2011 and intended for use with OS X Snow Leopard or Leopard, provides simultaneous access to multiple remote Microsoft Windows-based personal computers or to a remote server session to execute externally hosted programs and access files. With Remote Desktop Connection for Mac 2 you can print from within Windows programs to any Mac-configurable printer. An advanced protocol enhances performance and compatibility with Microsoft Windows 7 and an automatic reconnection feature restores a remote session in case the network connection is interrupted. Network Level Authentication improves security by authenticating users prior to allowing a full Remote Desktop Connection. To find out more about Remote Desktop Connection for Mac 2 and about how Progent can assist you to configure and manage a system for running Windows computers from Mac OS X, visit Remote Desktop Connection for Mac 2 consulting.
Office Web Apps are online companions to Microsoft Office for Mac Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook that enable you to use any standard browser on virtually any computer or smartphone to display, share, and lightly edit files stored remotely on Microsoft Windows Live SkyDrive or on a SharePoint 2010 web site. This permits cross-platform collaboration and helps mobile workers. For business use, Office Web Apps require SharePoint Foundation 2010. Security improvements for Office Web Apps 2011 include Data Execution Prevention (DEP) protection, Office file validation to guard against file fuzzing attacks, expanded file block settings, and the ability to create a protected-view sandbox environment. To find out how Progent's certified SharePoint consultants can assist your business to set up and maintain a SharePoint site to work with Web companions for Mac Word, Office Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook for co-authoring from any computer, visit SharePoint support.
Microsoft Lync for Mac takes the place of Microsoft Communicator for Mac as the enterprise-level IM, rich presence, video conferencing and voice solution included with Office for Mac 2011. Rich presence data can be based on calendar information, login status, or established by the user. Microsoft Lync for Mac works in tandem with either Lync Online or Lync Server 2010, which has taken the place of Office Communications Server and Live Communications Server. Microsoft Lync technology allows users to ask contacts to participate conferences or initiate a meeting directly from Microsoft Outlook for Mac 2011 or Lync for Mac 2011. Enhanced conferencing capabilities include desktop sharing. For details about Lync Server 2010's capabilities and the support services offered by Progent's Lync technology specialists, see Lync Consulting.
Progent's Microsoft-qualified support professionals, Cisco-certified network engineers, and macOS and OS X specialists can assist your company to integrate your Apple Mac systems and applications into a robust and protected IT network, set up your Microsoft Exchange Server to support the groupware capabilities of Office 365 Outlook for Mac, and provide Mac Education for Microsoft Office for Mac Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. Progent can also deliver a broad array of Microsoft Exchange support services such as system design and installation, troubleshooting, security, wide area connectivity, performance tuning, high uptime, and spam and Virus filtering and email encryption.
If you are looking for a macOS or OS X consultant, phone Progent at 800-993-9400 or refer to Contact Progent.
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2019-04-23T18:26:06Z
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https://www.progent.com/microsoft_office_for_apple_mac-m.htm
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A goal all park employees share—from the most behind-the-scenes support staff to the top administrators—is to help make sure you have the best experience possible. We know your free time is valuable, and we want to help you make the most of your schedule while visiting our state parks.
We’d like to tell you more about one particular team of employees whose primary job function is to help you have fun. On ArkansasStateParks.com, our social channels, and here on this blog, you’ll often hear us mention our “park interpreters” who coordinate the parks’ “interpretive programs.” Many people aren’t sure exactly what we mean by that. Today, we’ll explain the role of a park interpreter.
The most common question our interpreters in Arkansas State Parks are asked is “What languages do you speak?” It is a fair question. Most people are familiar with the term “interpreter” in the realm of translating spoken or sign languages.
When you meet an interpreter in a state park, though, he or she might be fluent in a language other than English, but translating languages is not a main job responsibility. Rather, it is to interpret the natural, historical, or cultural resources of the site for park visitors.
In simpler terms, an interpreter’s job is to help make your visit to the park meaningful. When you visit a park, there are always plenty of activities for you to do on your own. You can hike a self-guided trail, enjoy scenic overlooks, rent a boat to go fishing or wildlife watching, or just relax at your cabin or campsite.
Imagine, though, walking that same trail with a park interpreter as your guide. This is someone who understands the history of the area, who knows land, who lives in the park day in and day out, 365 days a year. He or she is in tune with nature’s rhythms and is able to point out things you might miss, such as bird songs in the tree canopy above, signs of wildlife foraging in the area, or remnants of a historical homestead.
Interpreters are the employees responsible for planning, publicizing, and presenting the fun, interactive, and educational programs for which Arkansas State Parks are known. Activities vary by site, but if your family has ever taken a guided hike, lake cruise, or kayak tour…or if you’ve attended an evening owl prowl, amphitheater talk, or campfire…or encountered a living history character, nature craft workshop, or outdoor skills demonstration, chances are good it was the park interpreter who served as your leader and guide.
Many interpreters are specialists in several subjects, and from time to time they offer multi-day workshops allowing visitors an immersion learning experience in a safe, supervised atmosphere. These include kids’ day camps, weekend family camping adventures, kayak and canoe overnight trips, Dutch oven cooking workshops, and many more. In addition, it is often the park interpreters who research and write the brochures and exhibits you enjoy during your park visits.
Some park systems, including the National Park Service, refer to interpreters as “rangers.” In Arkansas State Parks, we do have employees with the job title of “ranger” at many park locations, but their main duties are public safety, park security, and law enforcement. Our rangers and interpreters work as a team to educate visitors about how to enjoy the parks safely and protect the valuable resources of the area.
In Arkansas, the interpreter positions used to be called “naturalists.” Today, having naturalist skills is still a major part of their job descriptions; however, they do much more than just identify plants and wildlife. They are biologists, geologists, botanists, historians, educators, and recreation specialists.
More importantly, they are communicators who encourage you to discover your own meanings in the parks. We believe that interpretation helps visitors better understand just how special our parks are. Through understanding, comes appreciation and protection of the parks so that we can remain here for generations to come.
All of our full-time park interpreters hold four-year degrees in a relevant major, such as biology, history, environmental science, park administration, communication, or education. Most also come to us with prior professional experience doing frontline interpretation in the field. Many begin their careers as seasonal, or part-time, interpreters while completing their college degrees.
Interpreters are also encouraged to pursue credentials from the National Association for Interpretation, which is the recognized voice of the interpretive profession. Many have earned status as Certified Heritage Interpreters and/or Certified Interpretive Guides.
In addition, many complete specialized subject matter training from industry leaders. For example, we use the American Canoe Association’s standards for kayak training, and we use curriculum from the Leave No Trace Center for Outdoor Ethics for teaching camping and backpacking skills.
Park interpreters are passionate people. We love our parks and want you to love them too. I should know! I began as a seasonal interpreter in 1999 and have gladly made my career with Arkansas State Parks, now serving as chief of interpretation and program services.
We eagerly share our experiences and knowledge. We work hard, doing many things behind the scenes that you may never know about, to help put you in the right place at the right time to create wonderful memories. We help you have special experiences like a hike along a rugged mountain trail, a kayak tour in the morning mist, a nighttime forest walk with owls hooting overhead, or a trip back in time to cook in cast iron and imagine what pioneer survival was like.
Interpretation is more than just leading you down a trail, though, or simply showing you how to do things. Park interpreters are trained to engage you in conversation, find out what you’re interested in, and relate to you in a way that sparks inspiration to know more.
Good interpreters reveal meanings and relationships in the world around them. They ask questions, encourage thoughtful reflection, and listen to the stories that visitors are eager to share. But they don’t stop there. The best interpreters take these emotional and intellectual connections one step further and provoke visitors to act on their newfound interests. This action could be as simple as attending another program (and bringing friends and family along) or as in-depth as joining the park’s “friends” group and becoming a loyal volunteer. Ultimately, we hope our visitors become more conservation-minded in the parks and in their daily lives at home.
Our park interpreters routinely schedule programs designed to help you make memories of a lifetime. We offer over 40,000 family-friendly programs and events each year, including lake tours on park party barges, guided hikes, birding adventures, living history demonstrations, nature games, fall foliage programs, historic site tours, bald eagle watches, spring wildflower walks, campfires, outdoor skills workshops, and much more.
One way you can maximize your time while visiting an Arkansas State Park is to know in advance what our park interpreters have planned during your scheduled trip. Or maybe, you want to plan a trip around a certain special event. Either way, be sure to take advantage of our online calendar of events available to you year round. This handy tool allows you to customize your search with specific dates, locations, categories, and/or keywords (such as kayak, archeology, birding, or day camp). Our website is responsive, so if you’re out and about, you can search easily on your phone or tablet.
Your search results are sorted according to the categories in the drop down shown below, and within each category are sorted by title and start time. Programs involving physical activity are noted with a “heart healthy” heart symbol. When you find programs you like, we’ve made it easy for you to save it to your online calendar.
It is important to note that scheduled programs and events are subject to change. We try not to cancel or change dates for events that have been publicized, but sometimes weather or other unforeseen circumstances require it. Before traveling, contact the park for program confirmation, further details, reservations when required, and to check on accessibility for visitors with disabilities. Get started now by browsing our calendar of events to see what’s happening in the parks today!
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2019-04-18T20:26:41Z
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https://www.arkansasstateparks.com/articles/what-park-interpreter
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Middlebrook undertake the laying of felt roofs, taking care to ensure that the job is done properly. With a wide range of flat roofing products from single ply roofing to three-layer mineral systems.
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2019-04-21T21:04:54Z
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https://middlebrookpropertymaintenance.co.uk/roofing-services/
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Print Page - Mac Pro v3 - Install Message - "This installer requires admin privileges to run"
Title: Mac Pro v3 - Install Message - "This installer requires admin privileges to run"
Hi :) I am looking for help to jump the first hurdle.
Running Mac OS X 10.5.4 with everything up to date and checked out the TurboCad CD using Mac's Disk Utility to find that it is apparently OK.
Needless to say I am logged in as Administrator and think I have tried all the usual methods of encouraging the DMG file to install.
Clicking on the DMG file produces the message "This installer requires admin privileges to run" and the only option button available is 'Quit'.
The getting started printed copy supplied in the package does not specify how TurboCad should be installed, but rather moves straight on to explain how to launch the product.
This subject is not covered in the WIKI pages [referenced in the Getting Started pages of these forums] and IMSI support for the product takes the visitor on a spiral journey to without resolution, i.e. selecting TurboCad for Mac and entering a query reveals plenty of answers but these are all for PC based versions.
As a switcher to Mac of less than a year I am hopeful of being able to revisit some of my old PC TurboCad files [when they are converted?] 8).
It might be an idea to check that your privileges are set to your user name and not 'system'. I had these problems after I installed it, I had to change privileges for every folder.
I'm not sure what you meant about 'converting' your old PC TurboCAD files. TC for Mac is an entirely different beastie to TurboCAD Windows, there is no common ground at all.
Title: Re: Mac Pro v3 - Install Message - "This installer requires admin privileges to run"
The setting is definitely under my name, I am the sole user, there has never been any issues with permissions for the multitude of software I have installed on my Mac.
you can open the files in TurboCAD Mac 3.0.
I am already running my copy of TurboCad in Windoze on a VMware Fusion Virtual Machine running under OS X so it is just a case [once I get up and running with the TurboCad for Mac :D] of finding out the best format to use for the transfer.
With the intention of verifying any permissions problems on my own Home Account I have created a New Administrator Account and logged in under it's name and password.
Unfortunately the exact same scenario plays out and I am still unable to install TCM3.
I have tried Resetting PRAM and NVRAM to no avail.
I run a Mac Pro with 2 Optical Drives and tend to use the upper one most of the time, as a matter of curiosity I tried the offending disc in the lower drive.
Using the lower Optical Drive the TCM3 disc was not recognised and after a while it was auto ejected and nothing appeared on the screen at any time.
The OS X Installation Discs and Office for Mac 2008 Installation Disc can be read by both drives, self Burned DVD and CD discs are also similarly read by both drives.
In fact I cannot find any other disc that cannot be read by both drives.
This leads me to suspect that the TCM3 Installation disc is faulty, close inspection does not reveal any fingermarks or scratches that might cause this problem. The disc was taken fresh from a sealed package prior to this attempted installation.
Perhaps there are other actions that could be tried before returning the package to the Vendor?
I obtained a copy of DiskWarrior and ran the checks on my Mac and it's HDDs.
Apart from a moderate amount of optimisation that DW said was required there was nothing amiss with my system. The 'repairs' were permitted prior to re-attempting the installation with the originally supplied TCM Disc.
Shortly after completing the above I received a replacement TCM Installation Disc, kindly sent by the Vendor, but this behaves in exactly the same manner as described when attempting to install from the original TCM Disc.
Perhaps I am doing something wrong, TCM seems to require a different MO to most other Mac Software but I think all possible routes have been explored.
The TCM Disc is inserted [using the upper drive as the lower will still not read the disc] and the TCADMacPro3 'Gear Wheel' Icon displays. Opening this runs the verification, displays the mounted TurboCAD Mac Pro 3 'Disc Drive' Icon and also displays attachment B:. Running the DMG file [or dragging it onto the Desktop and running it from there makes no difference to the result].
The attachments and explanations below show what I have done in attempting to get TCM Pro v3 to install. Dragging the DMG onto the Mac and running it from there makes no difference, nor does 'Opening' rather than simply clicking.
I hope these attachments will not be too small to be of use.
Is it possible that this is a 'Volume License' or any other restricted version of TCM Pro v3?
What is the next level up from this version, there does not appear to be a TCM Pro v4?
Over 100 GB of free disk space.
I am installing from an Admin account. This is the first time I have ever seen this type of error massage. Usually during an install that requires some admin privileges a window pops up and requires you to enter in a password for the admin level account you are logged into. This is not happening.
1) I copied the file "TurboCAD Mac Pro v3.0(Double Click to Install).app" from the CD to my desktop and tried running it from there. I got the same error message.
2) From the terminal I ran the installer "/Users/ltomko/Desktop/TurboCAD Mac Pro v3.0(Double Click to Install).app/Contents/MacOS/installer" with the same error. The unix permissions for this file were "-rwx------ 1 ltomko staff 502108 Oct 28 2007 installer" which indicates that I was the owner and had read/write/execute permission.
3) My last attempt was to change to superuser (sudo su) and run the command. I got the same error message.
I am sorry to hear you are suffering a similar fate, you have followed a similar route to mine and have arived at the same destination. Having tried a second TCM Pro v3 Installation Disc and being advised by IMSI Support to do exactly what I have already done several times, perhaps it is time for me to give up on TCM?
As with your case the 'usual' Password Request was never presented during any of the very many attempts made to install TCM Pro v3. Also I ensured that for most of my installation attempts no software, other than Mac Essential items, were running at the same time. My Mac Pro [early 2008 8 core 2.8GHz with 4GB RAM] also has hundreds of GB of vacant space so equipment specification should not be in question.
I have searched and searched for such a TCM Pro v3 Download, and whilst communicating with IMSI Support they did not mention the possibility of that route.
Without 'broadcasting' the contacts full eMail address details can you give a few more clues as to where he may be contacted?
If you choose to reply perhaps you will be kind enough to give some idea of the date and origin of your TCM Pro v3 Download, and whether it was purchased as a Download or supplied as a result of a Disc Installation issue?
I've been on vacation, just read your last posting. Rip's email address is found in a posting I made in Problems. 'Problems activating TurboCAD Mac De Luxe 2D 3D V.4.
I hope you get some joy, at last.
Thanks for your reply Alan :).
I stumbled across the info in the post you mention but by that time I had made the decision to Save As/Export my TCW files to DXF/AI and then open them in Adobe Illustrator. This satisfies my immediate need to view/review old files and my 3D requirements can be filled by Google Sketchup. If a new TCM Pro version becomes available in the future I will consider the investment, hopefully a download trial will be offered so that any installation issues can be detected prior to purchase.
It seems that your suggestion regarding Download v Disc Installation is 100% correct. Accepting the minuscule user base sampled it is definitely 2 Disc Installations Failed and 1 Download Installation Success. It would be really great to learn of more success stories, from either camp.
This was repeated for each of approximately 30 installation attempts over a period from the 9th September 2008 to 17th September 2008.
Don't know if anyone managed to solve the issue, but I had a similar problem when re-installing TurboCAD Mac Pro v2 in my new MacBookPro recently.
The solution is quite simple, but not obvious.
replace the word true with false then save and try the install again. In order for this to work you must drag the installer onto your hard drive from the opened .dmg the installer comes in. This may help bypass your issue.
could one of you kind people do a button for button explanation how and with what to open the packet.
I spent a bit of time on this myself and since I found the solution I thought I needed to share it. The last post here solved it for me. I needed to copy it to my drive for the duration of the install but other than that it worked flawlessly.
I have to reload TC v.3.0 1.91 onto my MacbookPro and get the a.m. admin error message. I think with your suggestion to change the installscript I am very close to solving this. However I cannot save the edited installscript.plist as I cannot set the read & write privileges, even after having copied the dmg to my harddrive. How can I set the read & write permission and save this edited list?
PS I am the sole user and admin of this computer.
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2019-04-21T18:17:36Z
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http://tcmacforum.imsisupport.com/index.php?action=printpage;topic=13.0
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Should I buy the Assassin's Creed Odyssey?
Ubisoft has crafted a living, breathing world in Assassin's Creed Odyssey, and it's hard to resist the charms of exploring Greece and its myriad sunlit islands. The core loop of exploration, stealth, and combat remains largely unchanged from Origins, but you now have more freedom to approach it in your own way, and develop your character, ship, and equipment to suit the playstyle you find most fun.
As with any Assassin's Creed game you'll have to fight through some filler and put up with the occasional janky cut scene or minor glitch, but despite those flaws, Odyssey remains compelling. If you're a series sceptic, it likely won't win you over, but fans looking for a Greek epic to invest a couple hundred hours in will find a rich world, a frankly ludicrous amount of content, and a welcome step forward for Assassin's Creed.
It seems like only last year that Ubisoft announced it was taking a break from its annual Assassin’s Creed release cycle to focus on quality control. That’s because it was, of course, which made the announcement of Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey just months after last year’s Origins, a source of mild concern.
We’re pleased to report then that it looks like Ubisoft’s year out is having some lingering good effects, because Odyssey is not only a worthy follow-up to Origins but a committed progression, building on that game’s tweaks to the series formula while by pushing further and further away from its past. Find out more in our Assassin's Creed Odyssey vs Origins comparison.
If you want to play for yourself, you can get your hands on the game right now, following a 5 October 2018 launch. As you’d expect, it's available on PS4, Xbox One, and PC, with support for both PS4 Pro and Xbox One X.
It shouldn’t really be any surprise that when you first start out, Odyssey plays very similarly to Origins. As you explore the new Greek setting - which sprawls across the mainland and myriad smaller islands - there’s a familiar mix of exploration, stealth, and combat.
Where there have been changes, they run pretty consistently in one direction: picking up the baton from Origins, Odyssey is leaning into its RPG elements, building up your character choices, dialogue options, and skill progression to make each playthrough a little bit more your own.
That starts with the character selection, where for the first time you can play as either a man (Alexios) or woman (Kassandra). Coming from a series that once opted not to offer playable female characters because they were too much extra work to animate, it’s a big step forward (if rather overdue) for a mainline Assassin’s Creed game to let you play as a woman.
That choice won’t affect what you get to do in the rest of the game though: not even the new romance options, which let you flirt with men or women, regardless of whether you’re playing as Kassandra or Alexios. Another win. Don't expect fully fledged relationships that develop across the course of the game though - this is nothing more than a few flirty dialogue options and a cut-away when you go in for a kiss, but it's a welcome move towards a world where you interact with people in more ways than just killing them.
If combat’s more your thing, you get a bit more choice there too. Skill progression has been tweaked to free up your options, and encourage you to play around with how much you commit to skills down three main branches: Hunter, Warrior, and Assassin, which revolve mostly around ranged attacks, melee, and stealth respectively.
You can spend ability points (which you in turn gain as you level up) to unlock new abilities, mapping them to combinations of the shoulder and face buttons, which gives you quick access to a range of interesting moves, keeping combat a bit more varied. A personal favourite was lighting our sword on fire for temporarily boosted damage, though fans of 300 will be happy to know that there is a Sparta kick, and you can use it to kick people off things, and that you will catch yourself muttering “This. Is. Sparta!” as you do it.
The three skill trees encourage you to focus in on your playstyle, as any attempt to be a jack-of-all-trades will likely leave your damage trailing your enemies' hit points as you level. You can unlock both active abilities and passive buffs, and in addition to using points to unlock new skills, you can also use them to enhance the skills you've already unlocked - another choice between doubling down on a narrow skillset or expanding your options.
Your gear is also fairly customisable. Not only can you equip different gear to the various armous and weapon slots, but individual items can be upgraded at blacksmiths, and separately engraved to give them specific bonus attributes - such as crit damage or a defensive boost - making it possible for the first time to fully develop your items around your preferred play style.
Naval travel and combat are both back, and play a major role - the game isn’t based on a collection of islands for nothing. You can attack enemy ships with arrows and javelins (which you can set on fire for good measure), ram into them to shatter their hulls, or just board them and do the dirty work yourself. Naturally your ship is also upgradable in yet another set of systems, with options to improve defences, ramming speed, weapon attacks, and cosmetics - and pick up extra buffs by collecting a crew of lieutenants across your odyssey.
If ship combat isn't on a big enough scale for you, there are fixed Conquest battles too, in which you lead one side in a skirmish with up to 300 NPCs after. It’s a big twist to combat strategy, forcing you to prioritise the heavy hitters to protect your allies while simultaneously dodging attacks from enemies all around you, resulting in a combat challenge that will seriously test your mastery of the dodge and parry.
These are part of the war between Athens and Sparta that serves as the backdrop to the story, with each region of the map controlled by one side or the other. You can choose to back either nation, or play them off against each other, and can weaken their hold in specific regions by defeating their troops, burning war supplies, or killing the local leader - all in the name of setting your preferred side up for victory in the Conquest battle.
Odyssey veers away from ever forcing you to pick a side - or ever really discussing the politics of the real Peloponnesian War - which rankles at first, but there's method to the madness. While the early story (it's telling that given this game's scale, that's 15-20 hours or so) sets up the Athenians as the goodies and the Spartans as the baddies, laters arcs bring that into question, and use your position as a mercenary to pit you against injustice on both sides of the conflict.
Normal missions are dense and branching, and the game certainly isn't light on content. The core story centres on Alexios/Kassandra's quest to uncover their heritage and pick apart the plot of a sinister cult (assassinating a few cultists along the way, natch), which will take you all the way across Greece, though Odyssey is also heaving with side quests, bounties, and contracts and an endgame that gives you the chance to tackle various mythical creatures including Medusa.
Side quests vary predictably - some are interesting mini-stories in their own right, some are throwaway excuses to encourage you to explore a particular area, and some are down-and-dirty 'kill 10 Spartan soldiers' sorts of affairs. It's the same problem that has plagued the series from the start (and most other open-world titles, to be fair): there's a lot to do, but as a player it's tricky to tell what's worth your time and what's just padding and busywork.
Along the way Odyssey leans into branching dialogue for the first time, with frequent chances to have your say - either to set the tone of a conversation or to make choices with major repercussions for the ongoing story. It's another welcome development of the RPG elements, but there's a surprising lack of polish here: all too often Kassandra would forget information she'd already been given - or even things she'd already done - in jarring moments that suggest the scale of the story got away from Ubisoft and its sprawling dialogue trees got a bit tangled up.
That sense of scale bogs the game down elsewhere. Odyssey is the biggest game in the series so far, and there's just no need for this much game. It'll probably take you five hours to finish the intro and hit the title card, and another ten or so before the main storyline kicks off and all of the game's systems unveil themselves. It's at that point that all of Odyssey's interlocking systems begin to click into place, and that the world feels truly yours to explore, but it takes an almost unacceptably long time to get there - it's just unreasonable to ask a player to sink 10-15 hours into the main quest line (not even counting side quests) before a game really delivers on its promise.
Still, there's an encouraging sense here that Ubisoft is learning from its rivals and trying to progress the genre at least a little. There's the new Exploration Mode for example, an (optional) setting that toggle's off some quest waypoints, instead overlaying the UI with a series of clues you've gleaned from NPCs about where your target might be.
Instead of a map marker, you might just have the clues that an enemy left this area and went towards a cave to the west - it's then up to you to explore the region and try and figure out where exactly that might be. This isn't quite transformative (there are still a lot of map markers in this game) but it's definitely a more immersive, natural way to play, and encourages you to think of the world as a place to explore rather than simply travel across.
That’s particularly welcome given just how much the Greek setting feels like a natural fit for the franchise. Whether it’s darting around sunlit islands, trading blows with Spartans, or getting quizzed on ethics by Socrates himself, Odyssey makes a pretty compelling case for packing it all in and moving to Santorini. The devs are clearly having fun with it too, as Kassandra casually throws around ‘malaka’ at people who’ve pissed her off - we’ll let you figure out the translation for yourself.
As with Origins and Egypt, Greece is really the star of the show here, and the world is packed with colourful details and historical trivia, including a cast of renowned Greek sculptors, politicians, and philosophers. This is a world to get lost in, which has always really been the heart of this series. I could go on all day about combat tweaks and progression mechanics, but here's what matters: you'll want to spend hours, days, weeks sailing the Aegean Sea, roaming islands and climbing towering statues just to dive off from the top.
Once again Ubisoft has crafted a living, breathing world in Assassin's Creed Odyssey, and it's hard to resist the charms of exploring Greece and its myriad sunlit islands, whether that's trekking up mountains or crashing your ship across the waves.
The game's expanded RPG elements help back up the story and provide more depth to the progression system than ever before. The core loop of exploration, stealth, and combat remains largely unchanged from Origins, but you now have more freedom to approach it in your own way, and develop your character, ship, and equipment to suit the playstyle you find most fun.
As with any Assassin's Creed game you'll have to fight through some filler and put up with the occasional janky cut scene or minor glitch. Frustratingly, this feels more noticeable than more because of the quality elsewhere: the core story is interesting enough that the painfully slow build-up and occasional forced side quests bother us more than ever, while the lack of polish in tying the open world to the narrative feels especially glaring in the wake of the super-slick Spider-Man.
Despite those flaws, Odyssey remains inherently compelling. If you're a series sceptic, it likely won't win you over - at least not unless you can force your way through the first ten hours - but fans looking for a Greek epic to invest a couple hundred hours in will find a rich world, a frankly ludicrous amount of content, and a welcome step forward for Assassin's Creed.
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2019-04-20T10:22:43Z
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https://www.techadvisor.co.uk/review/games/assassins-creed-odyssey-3678785/
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Relieve the 20th Century through the eyes and words of Lord Mountbatten - a member of the Royal Family and one of Britain's most highly decorated naval officers. Here, Lord Mountbatten narrates his life story using a wealth of historical material from the archives of the world - including much from his own personal collection. This extraordinary 12 episode series spans 70 years of triumph, conflict and glory in the life of this remarkable man who rose to worldwide recognition as both statesman and military hero, yet was tragically assassinated in 1979. It is this tremendous sweep of international events and changes that has been recaptured in ths unique series. Unique because it is not only about, but with the man concerned. The production team, including Lord Mountbatten, revisited many of the locales in which his career was formed - Malta, Burma, Ceylon, Singapore, India. Excerpts have been incuded from many of those whose lives and duties infuenced those of Lord Mountbatten, or were influenced by him. They include the Duke of Windsor, Prince Philip, six former Prime Ministers, General Eisenhower and other key figures in world history.
The introductory episode of the series, dealing with the years 1900-1917.
Setting the tone for the series of personal reminiscences (related by Mountbatten) against a more general history of the times (narrated by Mango), this episode charts Mountbatten's early years (from his birth in 1900 to the beginning of his naval career serving as midshipman under Beatty on HMS Queen Elizabeth) and his family's position in relation to the Great War and its origins. The Dreadnoughts, Gallipoli, the Battle of Jutland, U-boats, conscription, form the background to the resignation of Mountbatten's father, Prince Louis of Battenburg, as First Sea Lord, and the Battenburgs' change of name (to Mountbatten) as the result of anti-German feeling, at which point "the Mountbatten story can be said to begin."
Mountbatten describes his ties with the Russian Imperial family, and the shock felt by the British Royalty at their deposition and eventual murder. With the entry of USA into the war, Mountbatten visits the Western front with Haig (not shown), before the July offensive leading to the armistice. Mountbatten, "looking forward to having some fun" after the restrictions of wartime naval life, spends two terms at Cambridge before accompanying the Prince of Wales on his 1920 world tour. On his return he is put in charge of a small naval force during the 1921 state of emergency, and then on HMS Repulse, at the time of the death of his father (reinstated as Admiral of the Fleet). Mountbatten is invited on the second Prince of Wales tour, which takes in India, where he discovers the pleasures of polo, and proposes to Edwina Ashley, whom he marries on his return. Their honeymoon is spent at Broadlands (her family home), in Europe and in America. Their stay in Hollywood (at "Pickfair") is recorded in a "home movie" made by their host Chaplin, and involving the house guests.
Mountbatten resumes his naval career in 1923 on HMS Revenge in the centre of the storm over the confrontation at Chanak, after the collapse of the Greek army against the Turks, the abdication of King Constantine and the exile of Prince Andrew, Mountbatten's brother-in-law. Mountbatten specialises in signals, produces a series of "newsreels" on board Revenge, indulges in polo, starts a family (his first daughter is born 1924), then moves to Portsmouth as a signals instructor in 1929. Meanwhile the French enter the Ruhr, nationalism begins to take hold in Germany, and the General Strike, the hunger marches and the Invergordon mutiny occur. In 1934 Mountbatten takes his first command (of HMS Daring and then HMS Wishart) and finds himself in Malta during the Italian invasion of Abyssinia; he then returns to England to the Naval Air Division.
A bad time for Mountbatten as for others: the death of George V; the abdication of Edward VIII; the war in Spain; the Japanese invasion of China; the failure of the League of Nations; the policy of appeasement leading to the resignation of the First Lord of the Admiralty and of the Foreign Secretary (Mountbatten was also not in favour); the death of Mountbatten's brother George, the Marquis of Milford Haven; the German and French mobilisation; the dispute over the control of the Fleet Air Arm, which the Navy eventually wins. Mountbatten becomes captain in command of the 5th destroyer flotilla in June 1939, taking command of HMS Kelly. Filmed at the Kelly reunion dinner in 1966, he describes the torpedoing of Kelly and the successful attempt to tow her back to harbour during the April 1940 raid on Norway, and her subsequent sinking after complete refitting in May 1941 in the evacuation of Crete.
Mountbatten goes to the USA to take command of HMS Illustrious at the time of the Atlantic Charter, but his command is cut short by his appointment as Adviser on Combined Operations (taking over from Admiral Keyes), and he is thus involved in (among others) the commando raids on Vaagso and St Nazaire. He then become Chief of Combined Ops, is made an acting Vice Admiral, an Honorary Lieutenant General and an Honorary Air Marshal. With the entry into the war of the USA, pressing for an early offensive, and the creation of the combined Chiefs of Staff, Mountbatten befriends Marshall and helps to ease the strained relations between the Allies. The Dieppe raid teaches Mountbatten and his colleagues valuable lessons and prepares the way to the North African landing of November 1942 (Operation Torch). Mountbatten attends the Casablanca conference, and then at the Quebec conference he is appointed Supreme Allied Commander, SE Asia.
Mountbatten takes up command in SE Asia in August 1943 (the film gives a brief resume of the events in the far east up to that point) and sets about raising morale by touring his command and introducing himself and his plans to his troops, and by launching a SEAC newspaper. His first plan for a seaborne attack on the enemy's flank falls through due to the withdrawal of equipment for the European campaign, and he is forced into a land attack from the north. The Japanese attack and their encirclement of Imphal and Kohima provides the British (eventually) with their first victory, partly through Mountbatten's use of air supplies, and he decides to fight on through the monsoon, reaching the Irrawaddy in early 1945, and crossing it in the boats built by Slim's forces. They take Mandalay in March 1945. In this episode, Mountbatten pays tribute to the commanders under him, Stilwell, Wingate (rather modified praise) and, in particular, Slim.
The Fourteenth Army attempts to reach Rangoon before the onset of the monsoon, and arrives in early May. A victory parade and a naval review are held in June. A final amphibious operation is planned but again is thwarted by lack of equipment. Mountbatten has his first experience of the rising nationalism in SE Asia - the Burmese request the reinstatement of a Civil administration and he reluctantly complies. While the US forces in the Pacific advance slowly, Roosevelt dies (Mountbatten remembers him as a friend), and the Potsdam conference is held, at which Mountbatten's sphere of command is increased and he is told to prepare for the Japanese surrender after the atomic bomb. Meanwhile Churchill is voted out of office (rather to Mountbatten's disappointment) and Attlee takes over at the conference. The re-occupation of Singapore (and relief of the POWs) is delayed after the Japanese surrender until the formal ceremony in Tokyo; Mountbatten eventually takes the official surrender of Singapore on 12th September.
With the end of the Far East war and the resulting chaos, Mountbatten's priority is the liberation of POWs, in which he is greatly helped by Lady Mountbatten. He also makes the unpopular move of using the many remaining Japanese as police. Mountbatten increasingly becomes involved with political problems: in Singapore with anti-British demonstrations and strikes led by the communists; in Siam, where Mountbatten hopes to retain the monarchy; in French Indo-China, where the British initially help to keep order; in the Dutch East Indies, where the British in the middle of the Dutch-Indonesian conflict experience their worst problems. Mountbatten saves Nehru's visit to Singapore from disaster by taking charge personally, and then makes a successful Australia and New Zealand tour with his wife. He hands over governorship to MacDonald in May 1946 and returns to England to receive the Sword of Honour and Freedom of the City of London, to become Earl Mountbatten of Burma and finally a Knight of the Garter.
Mountbatten returns to India as Viceroy and, faced with the increasing unrest and anti-British feeling, insists on having plenipotentiary powers. June 1948 is initially suggested as a time limit for India's independence. Mountbatten becomes firm friends with Gandhi and Nehru but finds Jinnah less approachable, and with trouble brewing in Bengal and Punjab and other provinces, he reluctantly opts for partition. The agreed plan is eventually drawn up and the date for independence and partition brought forward to 15 August 1947. Mountbatten's team race to complete the arrangements and try (for the most part successfully) to persuade the Princes to accede. On 13 August Mountbatten with his wife travels to Karachi to join Jinnah at the assembly, in spite of a bomb threat. As midnight approaches on 14 August, Nehru addresses the assembly in Delhi.
Mountbatten is sworn in as India's first Governor General and is immediately faced with the severe problems caused by partition. Nehru's government elects him as chairman of an emergency committee to tackle the worsening situation, which eventually improves, but the failure to accede of three states, Kashmir in particular, causes a permanent problem. In November 1947, Mountbatten returns to England for the marriage of his nephew Philip to Princess Elizabeth. Back in India he attends the funeral of Gandhi after his assassination by a Hindu fanatic, and in June 1948 he hands over as Governor General to Rajaji Chakravarti Rajagopalachari and returns to a somewhat hostile England. Mountbatten returns to the Navy in Malta under the command of some of his former juniors, and sets about climbing the ladder to First Lord, via Vice Admiral, 1949; 4th Sea Lord, 1950; Commander in Chief, Mediterranean, 1952; and Commander in Chief, Allied forces, Mediterranean in 1953. He finishes his tour of command in Malta in December 1954.
In April 1955 Mountbatten becomes First Sea Lord, and starts trimming the Navy down to a suitable peace-time force. In this episode, Mountbatten expresses some doubts about the Suez affair, while being pleased with the success of the combined assault itself. In 1957, he and the Minister of Defence (Sandys) reshape the Navy, which continues to be kept busy with the various emergencies around the world - Cyprus, Aden, Jordan etc. Mountbatten becomes Chief of Defence Staff in 1959 and brings about more sweeping defence changes in the face of strong opposition. In February 1960 his daughter Pamela marries, but, in the same year, Lady Mountbatten dies while on a tour of the far east. Mountbatten is persuaded by MacMillan not to retire in 1962, and he assists in the amalgamation of the three services under the single Ministry of Defence. He finally retires in 1965.
The final episode of the series, summing up Mountbatten's career and his outlook.
In this episode (the only one produced without Mountbatten's complete collaboration) Mountbatten's life today (1967) is presented - on his farm in Broadlands, talking with the Duke of Edinburgh; dressing up in full regalia as Colonel of the Life Guards; as Colonel Commandant of the Royal Marines; on "holiday" with his family at his seat in Sligo; and as a keen follower of scientific developments. Mountbatten is filmed at his home making (unscripted) remarks about his own view of his past achievements and his philosophy and approach to life.
This page was last modified 00:42, 14 April 2019.
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2019-04-24T22:30:52Z
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http://docuwiki.net/index.php?title=The_Life_and_Times_of_Lord_Mountbatten
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At Olympia Federal Savings we work hard to protect you and your accounts from identity theft and fraud. There are safeguards in place to protect your accounts and it is important that you continue to keep your personal information private. One of the first lines of defense is you and by working together we can reduce the impact of fraud. If you ever have a security concern, please contact our Customer Service (360) 754-3400 or 1-800-865-3470 toll-free Monday - Friday 8:30 AM to 5:30 PM.
The Equifax data breach exposed personal information for approximately 143 million U.S. consumers. A security breach this large has the potential to include many Olympia Federal Savings customers and we're here to help any way we can. Below are some steps you can take to actively protect yourself.
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Control: Turn your debit cards on or off if they go missing.
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Oly Fed customers have been receiving automated phone calls informing them that their accounts have been flagged and that they must enter their card information to re-activate.
Please be aware that these calls are not from Olympia Federal, nor would we ask our customers to enter their information, as we have that information at our disposal.
Sadly, the reality of the world we live in now includes scams and fraud, but the good news is you can always rely on Oly Fed to take care of you in these situations. If your card becomes compromised and is at risk, it is our policy to personally take care of you–calling and offering options to keep you safe. In light of the recent Target security breach, Oly Fed would like to thank our customers for your patience as we continue to be proactive with issuing new debit cards for those affected.
We have thoroughly reviewed our systems and can assure our customers that neither olyfed.com, nor your personal information or accounts have been compromised by the Heartbleed Bug. Here are a few measures you can take to protect your computer and personal information, and updates the status of the top 100 sites across the internet.
Telephone companies in the United States are seeing missed calls used to enable International Revenue Share Fraud (IRSF). Fraudsters are using call generators with automated spoofing capabilities to place calls to a large volume of US cell phone numbers. The calls typically ring once. The number displayed on the recipient’s caller ID is a high cost international number, usually located in the Caribbean. The recipient calls the number back and is greeted with a message designed to keep them on the line, such as “Hello, you have reached the operator, please hold.” The longer the caller stays on the line, the more revenue fraudsters generate.
Recipients do not realize they are calling an international number and that they will be billed for an international call. Businesses are also victims because recipients often use their work telephone to make the return call.
Telephone companies in the United States are charged when a return call is made because they are required to pay a fee to transfer calls to foreign countries. The payment is then shared with the fraudster who spoofed the calls. This is referred to as IRSF.
Area codes used in the spoofed numbers are from Anguilla, Antigua, Barbados, British Virgin Islands, the Commonwealth of Dominica, Grenada, Montserrat, and the Turks and Caicos Islands. These countries’ numbers are part of the North American Numbering Plan and do not require 011 to be dialed as with other international calls.
Recipients should not answer calls from numbers they do not recognize or initiate a return call. Recipients will not be charged for receiving the calls, however.
Companies that do not conduct business with companies in the above-mentioned countries may want to consider blocking these area codes to avoid this type of charge.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) has received numerous reports of fraudulent e-mails that have the appearance of being sent from the FDIC. While the e-mails exhibit variations in the "From" and "Subject" lines, the messages are similar. The fraudulent e-mails are addressed to the attention of the "Accounting Department" and meant to notify recipients that that that "ACH and WIRE transactions" are being blocked until "a special security software" is installed. They then instruct recipients to go to a Web site for instructions on how to download the necessary files by clicking on a hyper-link provided (Note: the Web site addresses (URL) vary widely).
This e-mail and link are fraudulent. Recipients should consider the intent of this e-mail as an attempt to collect personal or confidential information, or to load malicious software onto end users' computers. Recipients should not click on the link provided. The FDIC does not issue unsolicited e-mails to consumers or business account holders.
To report a lost or stolen debit or ATM card during regular business hours, please call Oly Fed at (360) 754-3400 or report it at any branch. You may also send us a secure message.
After hours, to report a lost/stolen debit card call 1-800-472-3272.
Oly Fed's Secure Messaging service is a trusted method using advanced encryption so you can send and receive private account and personal data with complete peace of mind. If you have any questions or concerns about our secure email, call us at (360) 754-3400.
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When you are no longer our customer, we continue to share your information as described in this notice as permitted by law.
All financial companies need to share customers' personal information to run their everyday business. In the section below, we list the reasons financial companies can share their customers' personal information; the reasons Olympia Federal Savings chooses to share; and whether you can limit this sharing.
Olympia Federal Savings means Olympia Federal Savings and Loan Association.
How does Olympia Federal Savings protect my personal information? To protect your personal information from unauthorized access and use, we use security measures that comply with federal law. These measures include computer safeguards and secured files and buildings. We also maintain other physical, electronic and procedural safeguards to protect this information and we limit access to information to those employees for whom access is appropriate.
How does Olympia Federal Savings collect my personal information?
sharing for nonaffiliates to market to you State laws and individual companies may give you additional rights to limit sharing.
Olympia Federal Savings has no affiliates.
Olympia Federal Savings does not share with nonaffiliates so they can market to you.
Olympia Federal Savings doesn't jointly market.
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2019-04-24T12:08:13Z
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https://www.olyfed.com/security-center.aspx
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The arts rise above the limitations of language and texts to offer a window onto other cultures. Artistic beauty and aesthetics can travel across time and place, and transcend cultural and ethnic boundaries. But at the same time, the arts can reflect values and ideals of a particular culture expressed within a particular time and place. Looking particularly at Islamic arts, this article explores the close connection between beauty and the sacred, between a search for beauty and refinement of one’s desire and character, between nature and revelation.
In this poem, Nasir Khusraw expresses a deep sense of awe before the beauty of creation. Taking to heart the Qur’anic verse, “And we shall show them our signs in the horizon and in themselves” (41:53), he looks upon the book of nature as replete with symbols intimating the presence of its Creator. Like a paintbrush of words in the poet’s hand, Khusraw’s moving description of the night sky brings near the loveliness and shine of the stars by comparing them to the smooth sensation of pearls and the warm glow of candles. At the same time, by invoking the image of the starlit sky as an ocean-sized tent, a huge glass bowl shimmering with points of light, Khusraw revels In the awesome magnificence of the universe.
The arts rise above the limitations of language and texts to offer a window into other cultures. Captivating the ear and eye, they draw one more readily into unfamiliar worlds. In many cases, getting to know another culture through its visual and performing arts is more profound and moving than only through its writings and customs. The arts form a bridge between people who are distant from each other and have no connections save for trade, The beauty and aesthetics of arts can travel across time and place, and transcend cultural and ethnic boundaries. It can also create a shared ethos among those who do not have a common religion or race. In Andalusia, for instance, the Mudejar arts were appreciated and cultivated not only by Muslims, but by Jews and Christians alike. In particular, decorative arts found in the ornamentation and design of textiles, ceramics, carpets, tiles, metalware, fountains, arches, and gardens lend themselves to wider use in a society.
At the same time, while the appeal of artistic expression transcends cultures, the arts also reflect the values of a particular culture. Islamic arts mirror the timeless ideals of Islam expressed within a particular place and time. They manifest both perennial spiritual values as well as local notions of aesthetics and craftsmanship. Islamic arts play on the concept of the One and the many: the One as the bounteous Source of the many, and the felicitous return of the many to the One. They direct attention to God’s nearness, yet mystery, through aesthetic experiences mediated through the senses, experiences that evoke the wonder of creation. It is often said that art in Islamic cultures exists not just for the sake of art itself, but to act as a constant reminder of the beauty of God’s presence. Both nature (God’s creation) and the arts (human creations} are understood as intimations of Divine mercy.
In Islamic arts, there is a connection between beauty and the sacred. The Qur’an is filled with verses exhorting human beings to witness the endless marvels of God’s creativity.The word “ayaf refers not only to the verses of revelation in the Qur’an but also to creation itself. Divine creativity and wisdom are inexhaustible as expressed in the verse, “If all the trees on earth were pens, and if the sea eked out by seven seas more were ink, the Words of God could not be written out unto the end” (31:27). Not only is God’s creation continuous and limitless, its very unfolding is purposeful: “Say: O God! Thou hast not created this in vain” (3:191). Islamic arts thus involve the thoughtful contemplation and remembrance (dhikr) of Creator, creation, and creativity.
The artist seeks to become like the pen in the Hand of God along with those who pledge allegiance to the prophet and are thus guided by God: “The Hand of God is upon their hands” (48:10).The calligrapher’s prayer is to become an instrument in the Hand of God through perfect surrender, concentration, and devotion. As a symbol of creativity as well as intellect, the pen is mentioned in the first verse revealed to Prophet Muhammad: “Recite! And thy Lord is the Most Bounteous, He who teaches by the pen, teaches humanity what it knew not” (96:3). Calligraphy, the most distinctive and cultivated of Islamic arts, has aptly been described as the geometry of the spirit. Hazrat Ali, known as the founding patron of calligraphy and inventor of the Kufic style, reportedly said: “The whole Qur’an is contained in al-Fatiha (Opening surah); the Fatiha in the Basmalah, the Basmalah in the Ba, and the Ba in the dot below it.” Originating with a single point from which are drawn an endless variety of lines, shapes and meanings, calligraphy demands exquisite control, balance, and proportion. The most handsome calligraphy is thus a sign of refinement and signals discipline of hand, mind and soul. Every human life, metaphorically, is also a script or work of art in progress; each person a pen writing and sketching his or her own life. In life as in art, the question is whether the individual, through repeated moments of surrender (islam), will write his or her life with God’s hand guiding it.
In Islam, there is an intimate relationship between the search for beauty and the refinement of one’s nature. The aesthetic pursuit of beauty has an ethical impulse since the artist cultivates a way of being in the world that intuits and senses minutely the inherent complexity and intricacy of the universe. In this respect, the artist shares the temperament of the scientist who pays close attention to things in order to appreciate their intrinsic nature. Both the search for beauty and the response to it is rooted in a disposition that cultivates a particular mood and discipline, one that is attentive to the signs of divine mysteries in the horizon and in the self. AM the senses are enlisted in the search for beauty both during the process of its imaginative creation as well as at the moment of its perception and contemplation. In the Qur’anic verse that describes the soul’s companions in the gardens of paradise, beauty and good are identified as one: “Wherein are found (companions) good and beautiful” (55:70). The role of the senses in perceiving beauty is crucial, and they must be made keen through piety and purity.The pursuit of beauty is thus tied to the perfection of desire and character. In Ismaili thought, this constitutes the transformation of the lower soul (nafs) into the higher spirit (ruh) of the self.
In his Symposium, Plato insists that training in the perception of beauty is indispensable for perfecting human life since it leads the self to a proper orientation within the universe. He argues, in fact, that those who possess the keenest ability to perceive beauty come closest to touching immortality.This perception, however, is not merely the enjoyment of beautiful objects. More importantly, it refers to the discernment of beauty in thoughts, emotions, actions, and society. For Plato, the ultimata purpose of training a person to perceive beauty is to draw out true virtue. Similarly, in Islamic aesthetics the perception of beauty is considered to have moral implications and effects. Since responsiveness to beauty is simultaneously an expression of gratitude to the Source of all beauty, it endows one with a generosity of spirit that is essential to all moral responsibility. This is because, ultimately, all arts are borne out of acts of generosity, for the artist shares insights into reality that are often beyond the ken of the ordinary person. Just as books widen the reader’s intellectual horizons, so too Islamic arts train the viewer’s eye to extend its vision of life beyond the visible spectrum.
Artistic endeavor is thus a particular way of attending to the world. Any effort at artistic creation from the most ordinary of objects (a prayer cap) to the most sublime (the Alhambra) requires one to contemplate the nature of a thing, whether it is a flower, brick, rock crystal or snowflalce. As we pass a flower, we may see it mindlessly, without really attending to its presence. An artist who passes the flower looks at it differently. Trained to perceive beauty and structure in the most ordinary of things, the artist’s eye notices the flower’s beautiful shape, the soft texture of its petals, the way they swirl around its center, the saturation and hues of its colors, and its delicious and soothing scent. By paying attention in this way to the flower, the artist has lost herself in it, and in those few moments as she surrenders herself to its exquisite beauty, she gratefully receives its mystery. This generosity that nature yields to the perceptive eye alters the inner world and articulates a relationship to God’s creation that governs how one ought to treat all that is in it including the flower. Much is thus taught to us by the pages of nature which are as saturated with meaning as are the divine verses of revelation. Learning to perceive the world with an appreciative eye is thus also a path to profound humility and underscores the ethical imperative enjoined upon Adam and his descendants, (i.e., humanity) to care for God’s creation. The central ethic of Islamic arts is to live as if “Whichsoever way you turn is the face of God” (2:115).
Tazim Ft. Kassam is a historian of religions and teaches courses on Islamic civilization at Syracuse University. Her specialty includes the musical and devotional traditions of South Asia, particularly the ginans of Ismaili Muslims. She is co-editor with Francoise Mallison. of Ginans: Texts and Contexts IOxford: forthcoming) and the chief editor of Spotlight on Teaching, a biannual published by the American Academy of Religions.
Tazim Kassam is a historian of religions and teaches courses on Islamic civilization at Syracuse University. Her specialty includes the musical and devotional traditions of South Asia, particularly the ginans of Ismaili Muslims. She is co-editor with Francoise Mallison. of Ginans: Texts and Contexts IOxford: forthcoming) and the chief editor of Spotlight on Teaching, a biannual published by the American Academy of Religions.
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2019-04-24T23:57:26Z
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http://islamic-arts.org/2011/ethics-and-aesthetics-in-islamic-arts/
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Today I am delighted to welcome Ryan Biddulph back to my blog as a guest author – appropriately enough with 4 tips to place guest posts.
As an aside, it seems hardly credible that at one time Ryan was hesitant about guest posting – because when I first invited him to be a guest author on my blog, I was probably even more anxious whether he would accept. But here he is for a second great post.
Here’s what Ryan has to say about guest posting ….
Guest posting feels intimidating at first.
Over 1,000 guest posts ago I recall second guessing myself left and right after submitting my first guest posts. I believed I’d be rejected every time.
Even if I placed a guest post I felt readers would criticize my work.
Sitting with those fears made the difference in my guest blogging career. I weathered those storms to become a clear, confident writer.
Follow these tips to place guest posts.
Write 1000 words daily in a Word document to get clear on your writing skills.
Most bloggers never submit guest posts because they feel they aren’t good writers. Then again; most bloggers rarely practice writing so they aren’t skilled, clear, confident writers.
Practice writing. Improve your skills. Get clear and confident enough to submit guest posts to top blogs.
I regularly guest post on most top blogging tips blogs but only after writing millions of words during my practice sessions as well as while writing posts for my blog and guest posts.
Promote bloggers on social media sites.
Feature bloggers on your blog.
Comment genuinely on blogs from your niche.
Virtually all guest posts I have placed came through invites.
I have pitched 2-4 bloggers during my 10 year career. All other opportunities flowed to me from buddies who I have helped over months or years.
Most bloggers guest post foolishly, trying to convince strangers of their skills through blind pitches. I allow friends to invite me to guest post and gobble up those opportunities.
This is why most bloggers celebrate 5 or 10 or 50 guest posts placed when I have placed almost 500 guest posts on Blogging Tips alone and well over 1000 guest posts online, collectively.
Help bloggers without asking for anything in return.
If you commit 100% to tip #1 your writing skills will inspire your friends to invite you to guest post on their blogs.
I do my best job each time I guest post.
Although my tone differs from my posts on Blogging From Paradise – my brand voice differs from virtually all places where I guest post – I try to match the brand voice where I guest post and intend to do a fabulous job every time to inspire readerships.
If you do a great job, bloggers will invite you to guest post again.
Do your best to land repeat guesties and to bond more powerfully with fellow bloggers.
Avoid the silly approach of being a blogging one night stand, publishing one low quality guest post for a stranger then falling off of their radar screen for good.
Build bonds through guest posting. Publish your best stuff. Gain more invites to guest post.
Early during my blogging career a few bloggers rejected my guest post requests.
I did take each non match personally because I didn’t work on my mindset much during those days.
After some serious meditation, deep introspection and by flat out diving into my blogging and life fears I eventually saw all relationships as either a match or non match.
I ceased taking rejection personally until the truth revealed itself; in a Universe of abundance, rejection does not exist. Either 2 parties are a match, or do not match. Either way, no big deal.
If you try to pitch someone who either ignores or explicitly rejects your request, the non match suggests nothing of your writing abilities.
I recall a few bloggers who didn’t vibe with my writing style. No worries.
I know I can write. My writing style just wasn’t a match with their blog and brand. No biggie.
I rarely if ever doubt my writing ability which helped me land guest posts on sites like Positively Positive, with its 2.5 million Facebook Fans, 80,000 subscriber list and celebrity guest posting roster including the likes of Seth Godin, Deepak Chopra, Gary Vaynerchuk and Ryan Biddulph (OK; not yet ;).
Are you successfully placing guest posts?
Ryan Biddulph is a blogger, author and world traveler who’s been featured on Richard Branson’s Virgin Blog, Forbes, Fox News, Entrepreneur, Positively Positive, Life Hack, John Chow Dot Com and Neil Patel Dot Com.
Ryan can help you build a successful blog at Blogging From Paradise.
Great Idea for Successful Guest Posting…I tried so many places to showcase my articles but no luck, Usually I will write a minimum of 5 to 10 emails per day to promote my unique content, at the end I will get only No-follow and medium traffic bloggers reply.
Thanks for sharing great info..
Thank you Shefali much appreciated my friend.
In addition to helping other bloggers without expecting anything in return, which I read in one of your previous posts, this article gives some more useful tips. The match or non-match philosophy is great and very liberating.
Another tip like writing for practice may sound like common-sense but is very powerful and practical in terms of results. Also, it provides great encouragement to us how you continued after initial rejections.
Your tips are what would work in the long run. Thanks for sharing these tips with us. Have a great day!
Practice makes better Naveen and yields a slew of guest posting opps buddy. Write, write and write some more. Attract guest posting opportunities to you. Thanks bro.
Thanks for the article. I did a lot of guest blogging several years ago and I’m planning to get more active with it again, so this article is really helpful. Like you, I was really uncomfortable at first with guest posting. You just have to push through it and be willing to do some things outside of your comfort zone and it can open up some great opportunities.
Amen Marc. I saw the benefits you reaped through persistent guest posting too with Profit Blitz.
it’s really nice to see you here on Joy’s blog. And the guest post is really good for guest blogging.
Thanks so much Robin. Guest posting brims with benefits.
Amazing stuff from you…. Guest post is the best way to get traffic to our web pages. I liked your post and tips for guest posting. And I will take care about these tips.
OK cool Samir. Glad you liked the post buddy.
Guest post is a refreshing change of tone. Thanks for the tips. Definitely will keep them in mind next time I get a guest post.
Great tips to follow, but the first one is also the hardest to do, from my opinion. Keep up the good work!
Good to see you here. You are a practical example of success in guest posting. This is demonstrated by your presence and to quality content on different many blogs.
As I bounce back to blogging, I want to be able to follow your steps. Thanks for revealing your secret in this post.
This is very informative and really inspiring.
I am blogging for a few months now. As a beginner, I just wanna know, do I have to give priority to guest blogging or creating content for my own blog.
You are the best person to ask this because your guest posts are all over the internet.
Amazing tip. As Guest posting is such a great practice in order to build relationship, gain visitors. And Ryan I have seen you on many blogs, and you are such a good example for everyone who doesn’t know how to do guest posting.
Sometime we don’t get a response from big bloggers, I think our mistake is that we can’t just connect them and expect an immediate answer; that isn’t fine. We should make connection first by promoting their content on social media and do genuine and relevant blog comments etc. Once they start noticing us, then they definitely give us chance.
You’re quite correct – I get enough requests for guest posts, so I can’t imagine how many Ryan must get.
A guest post request is always much better received if it comes from a “familiar” name.
This is great advice. Very honest and practical.I really enjoyed this post. Nice post. Thanks for sharing.
Excellent write up I must say. I am just really getting my feet wet with guest posting, as I know the real value and reward from doing so. I like your idea from #2 as in building relationships with other bloggers.
I have a huge lists of blogs that accept guest posts (in my niche), but would much more prefer to write for the folks I have gotten to know and vice versa. It feels great when someone jumps on my blog, leaves great comments, then then eventually asks me to write for them!
I have a huge list of blogs that accept guest posts (in my niche), but would much more prefer to write for the folks I have gotten to know and vice versa. It feels great when someone jumps on my blog, leaves great comments, then then eventually asks me to write for them!
The first thing everybody should remember when doing guest posting is that are you writing just for the sake of backlinks or spreading valuable information? If you are writing to educate people then you are on the right track, in this way, you will increase your brand’s credibility and Google will love you.
Anyhow, thank you for putting up such a nice post, people who are facing difficulties in publishing their guest post should read this great piece of writing.
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2019-04-18T10:44:06Z
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http://joyhealey.com/4-tips-to-place-guest-posts/
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The Code of Conduct for the Credit and Debit Card Industry in Canada came into effect in mid-August, 2010. One of the key provisions of the Code, articulated in Policy Element 6, is that “Competing domestic applications from different networks shall not be offered on the same debit card”. Given that Canadian bank cards that currently have Interac’s ubiquitous Interac Direct Payment functionality predominate, it in effect prevents scheme debit applications (MasterCard and Visa debit) from “riding on the Interac rails”. While it would be easy to assume that the term ‘card’, which is not defined in the Code, would refer only to the traditional plastic card (magstripe or chip) that allows debit payments to be effected at a point-of-sale (physical or virtual), there is some confusion as to whether this could also apply to debit applications on mobile phones. In essence, it raises the question as to whether the mobile phone is a card or a wallet. Deeming a mobile phone to be a card would imply that the Code of Conduct also applies to debit payment applications on mobile devices. This would, in turn, prevent any competing debit payment applications from residing on the same phone, similar, for example, to preventing a consumer from having multiple debit cards in their wallet.
At first blush, it would seem absurd to deem that a mobile phone is a card, much as it would be absurd to deem a computer to be a word processor. Mobile phones, especially in the smartphone era, are multi-functional devices capable of executing many different types of applications and functions, from voice communications, to e-mail, to web access, to games, to music, and more recently, to payments. Payment cards, by contrast, are far simpler, and while they may support a number of applications, these are usually focused on payments and cash withdrawal, or some combination of payments/cash withdrawal and loyalty/rewards.
“payment card” means a credit or debit card — or any other prescribed device — used to access a credit or debit account on terms specified by the issuer. It does not include a credit card issued for use only with the merchants identified on the card.
The addition of the qualifier “or any other prescribed device” opens the door for regulators to deem any device used for debit or credit payments, including mobile phones, to be a card.
The implications of this for mobile debit payments are significant. Consumers would be unwilling to have multiple phones simply to be able to use different domestic debit payment applications on their phones. It would force selection of one scheme over another, and hence limit consumer choice at a transactional level. The first debit payment application on the mobile phone would have an advantage over others because it would have to be deleted in order to install a competing application. It would reduce competition in the domestic debit payments space, and it would almost certainly lead to a lower adoption rate. Enforcement would be impossible. Furthermore, it would by no means represent technologically neutral regulation. It would be difficult to uncover a grain of sanity in such a decision, should it ever be made.
Over the past year the Canadian payments environment has undergone a period of dramatic change. Competition has intensified across most major segments of the industry, EMV migration has gained traction, technological innovation has resulted in new payment mechanisms being developed and rolled out, and regulatory scrutiny of the industry has increased. Here is our assessment of the top ten developments in the Canadian Payments Industry in 2010.
The final form of the voluntary Code of Conduct was tabled by the Minister of Finance, Jim Flaherty, on May 18, 2010, after more than a year of intense lobbying by the retail sector and other key players in the Canadian payments ecosystem. The major financial institutions involved in the Canadian payments industry were quick to publicly adopt the voluntary code for fear of it becoming compulsory, and to head off the possibility of more stringent direct regulation. Provision 6 of the Code prevents co-resident competing applications on the same debit card. One of the most important impacts of the Code has been to delay the entry and rollout of scheme debit (Visa and MasterCard) into the Canadian market, thereby giving Interac an extended period of monopoly protection. The Code of Conduct came into effect in mid-August, 2010. It applies to payment card networks (i.e. credit and debit card networks), card issuers and acquirers. The Financial Consumer Agency of Canada (FCAC) has responsibility for overseeing compliance with the Code.
In June 2010, Finance Minister, Jim Flaherty, announced the formation of a Payments System Review Task Force “to help guide the evolution of the payments system in Canada”. While the Task Force’s mandate is fairly broad in that it addresses policy, innovation, regulatory structures, the competitive environment and security of the payments system, it marks the start of an era of increased regulatory oversight in the Canadian payments industry. The Task Force is scheduled to present recommendations to the Minister of Finance by the end of 2011.
Interac has been engaged in discussions with the Competition Bureau since 2007 in an effort to be allowed to operate as a for-profit organization. This was largely a response to the threat of increasing competition from Visa and MasterCard in the Canadian debit market. With Visa and MasterCard now publicly traded companies, they are no longer subject to similar levels of scrutiny by the Competition Bureau and are free to structure their businesses and pricing in any way that they choose, provided they do not breach the provisions of the Competition Act. In February 2010, the Canadian Competition Commissioner declined to grant permission to convert to ‘for-profit’ status, but left the door open for further discussions should the situation change. This development was not surprising, given Interac’s near monopoly in the debit transaction market. A change in situation that would warrant a review of Interac’s status would imply that other debit card networks had gained a reasonable share of the market, and that Interac was no longer in a position to exercise market power or abuse its dominant position. Other aspects that Interac will have to address prior to gaining ‘for-profit’ status are changes to its governance, structure and funding.
The contactless market in Canada reached a critical mass of contactless cards and merchant acceptance terminals in 2010. More than 30 million contactless payment cards have been issued and there are in excess of 70,000 merchant acceptance terminals in place. Acceptance infrastructure rollout has been atypical in that it has been implemented in a ‘top-down’ manner, focusing on large merchants that have multiple checkout lanes and points-of-sale. MasterCard has the clear lead, having started its Canadian PayPass contactless initiative in 2007 (it originally showcased the technology in Canada in 2004). Most MasterCard issuers in Canada have started to issue PayPass cards. Over the past year Visa’s payWave initiative also started to gain momentum and Visa issuers and acquirers have focused on playing catch-up. Interac conducted contactless trials in 2010 and has announced that it will be offering a contactless debit product – under the name Interac Flash – in 2011. While the number of acceptance terminals and cards is substantial and still growing rapidly, usage of contactless technology is still lagging. Most consumers are unaware of the fact that the cards issued to them have a contactless capability.
The first slew of Interac’s EMV migration deadlines come into effect at midnight tonight. According to the Interac schedule, 90% of deposit-taking ABMs, 50% of white-label ABMs and 35% of POS terminals must be EMV compliant by December 31, 2010. Most of the bank-owned ABM’s have already been converted, whereas white-label ABMs are way behind schedule. In September, Interac offered the white-label ABM industry a compromise to either have 50% of their ABM’s converted by the deadline, or have 80% of ABM’s in high-risk locations converted. It is estimated that less than 20% of white-label ABM’s have been converted thus far. Organizations that are not compliant with Interac’s EMV migration schedule face sanctions and the risk of transactions being blocked. In September, Visa and MasterCard both postponed their EMV liability-shift dates from October 31, 2010 to 31 March, 2011.
The Code of Conduct for the Credit and Debit Card Industry prevents competing debit applications appearing on the same card. In October 2010, CIBC launched a debit card that allows Interac debit transactions for domestic payments at points-of-sale, and Visa debit payments for international or online transactions. While some have suggested that the card is in contravention of the Code, the fact that the debit applications on the card do not compete, means that the card is compliant with the Code. In 2009, some debit transactions on Bank of Montreal transactions were routed through Maestro, which created a furor amongst merchants, and led to intense government lobbying to prevent preferential routing that did not default to Interac debit.
The Competition Bureau of Canada has, historically, not allowed the same financial institution to issue both Visa and MasterCard credit cards, and the market developed as a ‘non-dual’ environment. In November 2008 the Canadian Competition Commissioner issued a ruling permitting duality in the Canadian market. Duality gained traction in 2010 with the Royal Bank of Canada, traditionally a Visa issuer, issuing a MasterCard WestJet World credit card. In June 2010, CIBC, also a Visa credit card issuer, announced that it would acquire CitiCards $2.1 billion MasterCard card portfolio, opening up a new mass market segment to CIBC and allowing the successful Petro-Canada loyalty program to be brought on board. The deal closed on September 1, 2010. The CIBC Citibank deal is unlikely to have a major impact on Visa since an existing base of CitiCards is being brought into the CIBC fold. The RBC WestJet card, however, erodes Visa’s share directly since it cannibalizes the Visa base in a traditional Visa stronghold.
The increasing usage of smartphones in Canada has stimulated the development of mobile banking applications by most of the large Canadian banks. CIBC was first to launch a mobile banking app for the popular iPhone, but others followed rapidly and most large banks now have mobile banking applications for the iPhone, Blackberry and Android platforms, with launch usually occurring in that order. While mobile banking applications provide an extension to the online banking services that are so popular with Canadians, most banks see it is a precursor to mobile payments. Once consumers are familiar with conducting financial transactions on a mobile device – and have developed a level of trust in mobile transactions – it will be easier to gain acceptance of payment applications.
The iconic Tim Horton’s chain of coffee shops finally succumbed to the onslaught of debit in November by agreeing to accept Interac debit payments at all of its outlets across Canada. The company first started accepting debit payments in western Canada in 2003, but was reluctant to roll this out to other stores for fear of increasing transaction times. Interestingly, Tim Horton’s was one of the first to accept MasterCard PayPass payments. While both Interac and Tim Horton’s have denied that the move has anything to do with Interac’s plans to rollout contactless payments in 2011, it is unlikely that the move to debit acceptance would have taken place without the prospect of contactless debit payments on the horizon.
On December 15 the Canadian Competition Bureau announced that it will be challenging Visa and MasterCard’s ‘honour all cards’ rule and ‘no-surcharge’ rules, since it regards these as a demonstration of anticompetitive behaviour. The Bureau has submitted an application to the Competition Tribunal to have these, and other allegedly anti-competitive rules, struck down. The action is being brought under the price maintenance provisions of the Competition Act. According to independent legal commentary on the matter, it is believed that the action under the price maintenance provisions of the Act will be more effective than under abuse of dominance provisions since it does not require the Competition Bureau to prove that the two players are dominant and have abused their dominance by reducing competition.
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2019-04-25T16:27:05Z
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https://www.chrystech.com/payments-technologies/
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I popped in to IGA for an early morning milk run earlier this week, and when the friendly cashier asked “What have you got planned for today? Do you work?”, I explained that I wasn’t working that day and my daughter and husband were at home sick, she sympathised about caring for sick kids and went on to mention that her daughter was sick with a rare form of cancer. I was taken back and wasn’t sure what to say (how do you respond to that?!). When I asked her how she was doing, she replied that she had passed away 2 years ago.
“I’m so sorry…how are you coping?” I said. Her response will be forever in my memory. She replied “every memory I have of her is as fresh as if it happened yesterday and I still cry every day. Even talking about her makes me emotional”. She spoke so calmly and ‘matter-of-fact’ even though I could see tears welling in her eyes. All the while, putting my groceries in a bag and processing the payment etc. At this point, the next person in line was waiting rather impatiently. So she said ‘have a nice day” and started to serve the person next in line.
I got into my car and had to process the story she had just randomly shared with me – a stranger. I could not even begin to contemplate how I would cope if something like that happened to my daughter. And I admired her strength for still going to work, and getting through each day. How do people manage to solider on after experiencing the loss of a child?
Yesterday, however, I was the lucky recipient of a ‘RAK’.
After my card was declined whilst attempting to buy my lunch (I didn’t realise it was the 1st of December and my card had expired the day before!), a stranger overheard my conversation with the cashier and said “I’ll pay for it!” and handed $10 to the cashier. When I asked her for her address so I could drop the money off to her later that day, she said “no, no, no don’t worry about it, just do something nice for someone else”, and looked at me with a big smile on her face. “I will certainly do that!” I replied, thanked her and went on my way inspired by her kindness and on the lookout for who I could return the favour to.
So this week I have been on both sides of a RAK and it’s been a humbling experience. I truly believe that if there were more RAKs occurring, the world would be a warmer place.
And, in conclusion, ’tis a special time of year as Christmas approaches but it is a difficult time for many people – people who are reminded of loved ones who are no longer there to join in the celebrations OR families who are living below the poverty line. All the more reason for RAKs in the coming weeks. I hope that by sharing my little stories (albeit rather lengthy for a FB post!), you’re inspired to practice Random Acts of Kindness :). Happy holidays everyone!
With the election of Trump, I feel a tsunami of hate has been unleashed surging around the world, in which so many acts of racism, misogyny, homophobia and prejudice have been legitimised using Trump as a role model. The fear at the root of this negative, destructive energy is swallowing up not only those who are the targets of this hate, but also the perpetrators as well. Hatred wells up out of fear, out of ignorance, out of a feeling of being overwhelmed and helpless. And yet, even if we meet this hatred with anger, then we too become consumed by its energy. So how are we to deal with these negative energies? Where do we find comfort? How do we protect ourselves?
I have often been asked how I deal with the negative energy of angry or aggressive people I encounter, or how I cleanse the energy of Wabi’an to make it clear and pure, or how do I protect myself from negativity. But spiritual practice for me is not about building armour around myself or my sacred spaces; it is about learning how to open my heart wider and wider so that negativity simply flows through. Openness is not the same as filtering; it is not that your heart becomes a strainer collecting all the crap! The practice is to open your heart until it is like the vastness of the sky.
In Japanese Buddhism, the word for emptiness is the same as the word for sky, so that when we practice “emptiness” it means to feel like your heart and mind are as vast and open as the sky. In meditation terms, this is “sky mind”: a feeling of complete expansive openness. When your heart is as wide as the sky, that ’emptiness’ is then filled up with feelings of unconditional love and compassion for all beings. And this includes unconditional love for those who are tormented by the hate that leads to harmful actions. This practice of opening your heart is the antidote to fear.
That is not to say that you shouldn’t feel anger or sadness or the need to vent and rail at injustice. I felt so sad after the news that Trump was to be president because I have many dear friends who are suffering a deep and genuine grieving at this turn of events and who fear for themselves and their children. And I also believe that there is no one who is not going to impacted by this – in Australia, as well as America, and in fact all of the world. His presidency is a harbinger of dark times.
It’s natural to feel these strong emotions, and indeed you can use these emotions as an object of meditation: when you feel angry, feel it with your whole body, feel where in your body that anger expresses itself, explore that part of your body with careful attention and mindfulness. You don’t have to berate yourself for having strong reactions to everyday life events, but it is important to use those feelings as a focal point for your attention. Ask yourself, what is happening inside me when I feel this anger? This shift in awareness is enough in itself to also dissipate the intensity of the emotion.
But after the rant, there has to be a conscious working towards collective healing. I have always felt secure and safe, ensconced in my little cocoon of isolation here in a beautiful corner of the planet, surrounded by my birds and trees and Kuan Yin blessings; and yet, I cannot ignore the burning heat of the negative energy of the anger and fear that is now corroding the peace of the people I care about and love. It is up to you and I to make a commitment to keep practicing opening our hearts because the world is suffering and our genuine, unconditional love is the only balm for our own grief and pain and it is the only antidote to hatred.
When I said early last year that I was ‘retiring’, little did I know what challenges the following year would hold. It was as if, without realising it, I was clearing the space so that I could be completely available for the journey I was to share with my mother in the following year. Shortly after I decided to withdraw from my public role as a Buddhist priest, my mother was diagnosed with cancer. What had started as a little sore on her face, which she thought was just a mosquito bite, became a virulent facial cancer that quickly spread to the lymphatic nodes in her neck.
And so I became her primary carer throughout the ordeals that followed as her medical team worked to save her life by extensive face and neck surgery, which left her terribly disfigured, and brutal doses of radiation treatment, which caused her enormous pain, utter debilitation and the distress of losing her ability to eat and speak. The doctors held little hope of her recovery and the treatment was in order that she could die in the least amount of pain. It didn’t seem likely that there was very much of a win any way you looked at it. Then after the radiation finished, when she was supposed to be recovering, my mother suffered from a severe MRSA infection of her radiation burns that meant she another long stay in hospital, extremely ill and in continuous pain.
But throughout this nightmare, my mother met these ordeals with enormous courage, humility and dignity. And she was always so appreciative of every little kindness or attention shown to her by the wonderful nurses in the hospital and at home and she never complained. I saw a side of her that deeply moved and inspired me – she was nothing short of truly heroic!
Then, after all this, in order to give a final prognosis, she had another PET scan to see how far the cancer had progressed in her lymphatic system, but the medical team was astonished to find that the cancer had disappeared! This was completely unexpected as the surgery and radiation were seen as palliative measures only. The doctors were at a loss to explain it. However, for my mother the explanation was simple. She was absolutely sure that what had cured her was love: the love of her children who rallied to help, the love of her friends who prayed for her, the love of the nurses who cared for her. She said that throughout these terrible ordeals she could nonetheless feel healing love flowing through her body and she said she drank it up as a sweet medicine, focussing her meditations on fully opening to this love that was all around her. Then as her strength slowly returned and she felt her life-energy returning, she meditated on feelings of gratitude as a way of returning that love into the world.
At the time when my mother’s suffering was at its greatest, the almond blossoms at my home were blooming. I cut a twig of almond blossom that still had tight buds and I placed it in a bottle by Mum’s bed. One by one the blossoms burst open and then gradually the petals fell. Mum and I would meditate on the beauty of the almond blossom and reflect on how fleeting and beautiful life is. Even when all the petals had shed, we left them there because somehow they seemed to embody the journey we were sharing. Then, after all the suffering was past and the healing had begun, a whole year and a lifetime later, the almond blossoms once again bloomed this week and again I took a twig of blossoms over to Mum. When she saw the twig she immediately recognised its meaning and we both just hugged and cried because those blossoms still embodied that journey we had taken and yet here we were a year later, still together. It was indeed a miracle.
For me, to bear witness to my mother’s pain and to share in her journey was a tremendous privilege. It is so hard to watch someone you love suffering and to feel that there is nothing you can do to alleviate that suffering. But now I know that the greatest healing gift you can give a loved one who is in pain is to bear witness to their pain with love, to hold their hand and feel your own healing love flowing from your heart into theirs. This is the source of all miracles.
Looking up, I can see that it is live and surging with energy. I wonder, what is a tree?
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2019-04-25T14:33:49Z
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https://wabian.org/
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America’s founding fathers seemed to have settled all that British folderol about peerage, titles, bloodlines and pecking orders in 1776 with a the straightforward declaration that all men are created equal. Nonetheless, some descendants of early American leaders still revere their connections to their forebears. We know, because we in the Brenau family have a direct connection ourselves.
Many lofty titles come into play to describe Ann Ralls Freeman Murrah, WC ’54: dame, daughter, knight, regent, ambassador, president general. One finds her family names among signatures on the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. She appears in the original Marquis Who’s Who in America; among names of the descendants of Emperor Charlemagne; on the rolls of the Daughters of the American Revolution; in records and reports of the American Civil War; and in the Brenau University Alumni Hall of Fame.
However, Ann Murrah needs no calling card to confirm her identity.
In her 83 years, the self-professed “little girl” has affected the world and those around her in equal measure. After Brenau, she taught at Trinity and Westminster schools in Atlanta. Her varied careers since have included New York art broker, trophy-winning tennis player, Olympic-level equestrian in competitions in the United States and Europe (“I’ve had two broken backs from jumping horses”), riding instructor, and world-renowned scholar and lecturer on the U.S. Constitution. Her philanthropic efforts include fundraising for hospitals in Orlando, New York, and Washington, D.C., as well as the Metropolitan Opera. She has garnered numerous awards, and she has traveled to Russia and Taiwan, where in 1995 she was one of 11 keynote speakers at the Feminist Summit for World Peace.
Murrah grew up in Gadsden, Alabama, and now resides in central Florida with her husband of 63 years, Robert Leland Murrah, a retired insurance executive. The family is well entrenched in their community, where both Ann and Robert are active in a variety of civic and philanthropic enterprises. Their daughter, Frances Ralls Murrah Lovett, lives nearby, as does their son, Dr. Robert Leland Murrah Jr., a prominent orthopedic surgeon.
The iron gates across the front door of the modest Murrah home bear two colorful crests representing the grafted roots of the combined family trees that include generals, governors, members of Congress and state legislatures, Pilgrims, a Pulitzer Prize winner, some iconoclastic political leaders and possibly a celebrated rogue or two.
Ann Murrah’s lineage includes the early American political leader/land speculator William Blount, who signed the U.S. Constitution as a North Carolinian. Before the American Revolution, he was a member of the Continental Congress. During the Revolutionary War, he was a militia regimental organizer, paymaster and field commander. He subsequently served as the only governor of “the Southwest Territories.” After that region became the state of Tennessee, Blount took one of the new state’s first two U.S. Senate seats.
William Williams, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.
Blount’s political career ended rather abruptly. You will find him in the history books as the first member expelled from the Senate – the result of his entanglement in specious land deals and Euro-American political intrigue. However, the genes he passed along provided the credentials required for Murrah’s admission to organizations like the Daughters of the Cincinnati, the Colonial Dames of America (the oldest lineage society in America, which boasts among its members Jacqueline Kennedy), and the aforementioned DAR.
Likewise, genes of William Williams, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, from Connecticut, percolate through Murrah’s bloodstream.
Another relative was Andrew Jackson Hamilton, the Alabama-born lawyer who had a rather colorful run as the 11th governor of Texas. His appointment came not by plebiscite but by presidential appointment during the Reconstruction Era following the Civil War, thanks to his pre-war pro-union and anti-slavery sentiments. Hamilton later even broke with his presidential sponsor, Andrew Johnson, who in Hamilton’s view did not go far enough in supporting suffrage and civil rights for freed slaves after the war.
The Virginia newspaper editor and two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Douglas Southall Freeman was Murrah’s father’s cousin. Freeman earned a strong reputation as a historian of both the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, especially for his biographical works about George Washington and Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
Ann Ralls Freeman Murrah shares her namesake with Virginia kinsman and noted American Revolution and Civil War historian Douglas Southall Freeman.
Murrah’s Alabama roots come from her great-grandfather, Dr. John Perkins Ralls, who probably knew General Lee personally. A Georgia native, Ralls moved to Alabama to study medicine and became a practicing medical doctor and an ordained minister in the Methodist-Episcopal Church South. However, Dr. Ralls also looms as a player in what is known in some parts as “The Lost Cause.” He represented Alabama in the first Congress of the Confederate States. In Richmond, Virginia, where the Confederate government located its capital in the early days of the Civil War, Ralls preached a Christmas sermon at the request of his close friend Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy. When Alabama regained its U.S. statehood following the Civil War and Reconstruction, Ralls won a seat in the Alabama Legislature.
Murrah also claims a relationship with John Robinson Ralls. The Georgia-born entrepreneur and philanthropist acquired a ranch in the pathway of a proposed railroad line through West Texas and laid out a well-planned town named Ralls. The town included what he boasted shortly after the turn of the 20th century was the biggest opera house west of Fort Worth.
Such connections are extremely important to Murrah, as evidenced by the museumlike collection of memorabilia in her home. With piano recordings playing softly in the background, Murrah tells the story behind each of the countless mementos hanging on all walls and covering most surfaces.
She guides us around the first floor, her genteel Southern charm sparkling with wit. Indicating an enormous cherry sideboard in the sitting room, she says, “It took four strapping men to pick this thing up.” In one bedroom, well-used riding boots line the foot of the bed and equestrian helmets top the dresser. Pastoral riding scenes cover the walls. The portrait in the room of her great-grandfather – John Perkins Ralls – she claims is more valuable for the painter, Virginia portraitist David Silvette, than for its distinguished subject.
A converted garage is filled with historical pieces that match the gorgeous pre-Civil War furniture in the house proper. That elicits stories of her connection to the iconic Southern saga Gone with the Wind, and the Murrahs’ friendship with Olivia de Havilland, the actor who portrayed the character Melanie Hamilton in the classic 1939 movie. Murrah asserts that the actual clan of Georgia Hamiltons from which she descended had been novelist Margaret Mitchell’s inspiration for the fictional Melanie’s family.
Her familial connections come up in almost any conversation and inform the very fabric of her life. Yet it is her matter-of-fact rendition of something that merely is part of who she is that almost downplays the reality: You can scratch at many significant events in the first century or so of America’s history and uncover a genealogical connection to Ann Murrah.
It would be hard to find someone who could elicit more interest in the subjects that inspire her. A public speaker since she was 29, Murrah has toured the world talking about the Constitution and the foundation of the American government. The Descendants of the Signers of the Constitution in 2000 elected her president general for life. In 1988, the Sons of the American Revolution gave her its Martha Washington Medal. She held a place on the founding committee to build the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia with former President Bill Clinton. The list of her memberships in historical societies, from the Plantagenet Society to the Knights of the Garter, fills several pages of a resume.
The Thomas Jefferson Peace Medal Murrah received in 2009.
Three members of her husband’s family are also Brenauvians. Bob’s mother, Frances Kolb Johnson Murrah, also a member of Alpha Delta Pi, graduated from Brenau in Gainesville, Georgia, in 1927. Originally from west central Georgia, Frances moved to Florida in the early 1940s with her two young sons, Bob and his brother, Kenneth, who also lived in Orlando until his death last year. She taught school there for 40 years.
Bob and Kenneth’s great-aunt, Mattie Beall Magruder, graduated from Brenau in the early 20th century. His second cousin, Elizabeth Magruder, graduated in 1933 from the Brenau Academy.
The connection netted Bob, then an Emory University student, an invitation to a dance at the ADPi house on the Brenau campus. He was in the company of a young woman who was then the sorority president, he recalls, but as he danced with her in the parlor, his eyes wandered up the staircase, where he espied “a true vision,” he said.
“Who is that?” he asked his date.
However, as it turned out, there were more genealogical connections than Brenau in the lives of Ann Freeman and Bob Murrah. Records of the American colonial era, its revolution and Civil War that contain references to Blounts, Rallses and Hamiltons on Ann’s side of the family also contain references to Bealls, Magruders and Murrahs on Bob’s side.
Bob’s mother, like his wife, was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution. You will find the name of Bob’s great-aunt Mattie also listed in the official of records of that organization – she was a page at the DAR National Congress in 1913 – about the time she would have attended Brenau. Bob’s side of the family, like Ann’s, has an early Texas connection. Bob’s maternal grandmother, Florence Magruder, descended from the clan of John Bankhead Magruder, known for having served in the armies of three “nations” – the United States, the Confederate States and, after he fled the Confederacy at the end of the Civil War, Mexico. Bob’s family is also related to Pendleton Murrah, who served as the 10th governor of Texas, elected in the midst of the Civil War.
It is a somewhat amusing footnote that Pendleton Murrah, a staunch secessionist, took office the year after Ann Murrah’s ancestor – Texas State Senator Andrew Jackson Hamilton – who was rabidly against secession, had to flee to Mexico because of his pro-Union sympathies. Hamilton had given up a seat in Congress to enter the state legislature, believing erroneously that he could do more to stop his state’s secession in Austin than in Washington. When the Confederacy was on its last legs, it was Gov. Murrah’s turn to flee south of the border to avoid imprisonment or the hangman’s noose. After the war ended and Texas was back under control of the United States, U.S. President Andrew Johnson appointed as Pendleton’s successor none other than his old congressional colleague, the recently repatriated Andrew Jackson Hamilton.
A portrait of Ann Murrah’s great-grandfather, Dr. John Perkins Ralls.
“You don’t have to have all of this. Just because you cannot say that Jefferson Davis slept in that bed over there …,” she says, nodding toward an ornate headboard under the portrait of her great-grandfather, the Confederate congressman-preacher.
That kind of fact and connection clearly fuels Ann Ralls Freeman Murrah’s passion, and she will talk about those connections whenever the opportunity arises. It is who she is. She is a woman who cannot escape her past, because she does not want to.
Joseph Reed Hayes is a freelance writer in Orlando, Florida. Additional historical material and reporting by Brenau Window Editor David Morrison.
Anne Murrah is a dear friend, and a most extraordinary woman. Her deep commitment to the founding of this country, its Constitution, and perpetuation of its importance and relevance today is admirable. She has inspired me to further research my own family roots, which go back to Cornwall, England over 300 years ago! Thank you for publishing this article on such a beautiful, inspiring woman.
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2019-04-23T14:32:28Z
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https://window.brenau.edu/articles/fruit-family-tree/
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Economic analysis of climate change issues can help policy makers in many ways including identification of the least costly methods to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and how to structure incentives to encourage society’s maximum reduction of carbon footprints. Without doubt, economic analyses of climate change reduction strategies are vital to finding the most efficient solutions to human-induced climate change’s immense threat. The more low-cost solutions to climate change are found, the more hope there is to reduce climate change’s immense menace. Yet there are ethical limits to the use of some economic arguments frequently made in opposition to proposed government action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) of some environmental regulatory programs can help identify proposed market regulatory interventions whose costs significantly outweigh environmental benefits. Yet CBA of some government environmental programs including climate change emissions reduction strategies often ignore serious ethical limitations on the use of this tool to guide climate change policy.
CBA is a generic term for a variety of techniques designed to allow decision-makers to determine in a rigorous way whether the payback from a program will be greater than the costs of implementing it. If costs of an environmental program are greater than environmental benefits produced by a program, according to mainstream CBA theory, the program should be abandoned. The economic justification for this use of CBA is the notion that society must decide how to spend its scarce resources and it should spend its money in the most efficient way possible. If money is spent by society on environmental protection programs that don’t produce an environmental payback that is greater in economic value than the cost of the program, it is a bad investment and should not be supported. (Shogren and Toman, 2000) This is so, according to CBA theory, because public money should be spent on programs that will produce the largest aggregate benefits. The philosophical justification for this approach, as we shall see, is often a form of utilitarianism, sometimes referred to as “preference utilitarianism”An earlier post on ClimateEthics.org looked at certain ethical limitations in the use of CBA recognized by Sir Nicolas Stern, Head of the United Kingdom Government Economics Service and adviser to the UK government on the economics of climate change and development. http://climateethics.org/?p=14.
This post will expand upon some of the issues recognized in this earlier post and, in particular, (1) look at in more detail ethical issues that arise in CBA when costs and benefits are aggregated., and, (2) examine certain ethical limitations of “preference utilitarianism,” a frequent philosophical justification for CBA.Future posts on Climateethics will examine additional ethical issues that arise in CBAs because:(a) CBA techniques usually make human desire the exclusive measure of value;(b) CBA-based decisions often ignore rights and duties;(c) CBA-based decisions usually conflict with principles of distributive, retributive, and procedural justice;(d) Ethical problems arise in CBA in quantifying costs and benefits; and,(e) Ethical issues are triggered in CBA when future benefits are discounted.
Although CBA may be a very valuable tool for decision-makers who are trying to decide whether investment in a particular project will provide an adequate payoff compared to other projects or investments, as we shall see, CBAs use for some environmental problems can be ethically dubious particularly when it is applied to environmental problems such as climate change where harms and benefits are significantly disaggregated.Proponents of CBAs often argue governments should not take action to reduce greenhouse emissions if the cost to reduce emissions is greater than the value of climate change caused harms avoided because of the government action. Yet, climate change is a problem for which those who are causing harm are often separated by significant time and space from those who are or will be harmed by a warming world. We now know with high levels of confidence, for instance, that greenhouse gas emissions coming from coal fired power plants in United States and China are likely already contributing to droughts in Africa and Australia, threatening polar bears and walruses in the arctic as sea ice melts, and endangering millions of people who live near rising seas in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. Future climate change impacts threaten some of the poorest people around the world that are not located in high-emitting nations.One of the many ethical limitations of CBA that arise when this method of analysis is applied to climate change is triggered by the fact that those who would bear the greatest costs of reducing emissions are not as adversely affected as many others around the world who are most vulnerable to climate change impacts. That is, for climate change, harms and benefits are hugely disaggregated across time and geography.
One frequent justification for using CBAs as a guide to regulatory action is that if money is spent on a project that will return limited benefits compared to other projects that could return more benefits, then there is a lost opportunity to create greater human welfare. (Shogren and Toman, 2000) In economics an “opportunity cost” is the cost (sacrifice) incurred by choosing one option over an alternative one that may be equally desired. Thus, opportunity cost is the cost of pursuing one choice instead of another that could provide greater benefits.Yet in the case of climate change, there may be no “opportunity cost” experienced by many of those who are most vulnerable to a warming world and would therefore benefit from GHG emissions reductions expenditures that are diverted by high greenhouse gas emitters to other projects.
If, for instance, the United States decides not to spend one hundred million dollars on climate change reduction strategies because a CBA determines that this money will not return more benefits measured in dollars to them, the CBA can act as justification for continuing behavior which harms others without their consent. If the US chooses to invest in an alternative project such as health care for Americans with the one hundred million dollars, this alternative investment does not lead to greater benefits to parties that the United States is harming through its greenhouse gas emissions. For this reason, the opportunity cost argument does not work when harms and benefits are as disaggregated and spread across many regions outside the consideration or scope of a given CBA, as they are in climate change.Sometimes CBAs have been used to look at harms and benefits to the polluting country alone. Such an approach is particularly ethically problematic.
For instance, when the Clinton administration was attacked with the charge that the Kyoto Protocol’s cost in the United State was too expensive compared to the benefits of programs in the United States, the US government simply developed an alternative analysis that looked at harms and benefits to the United States alone and showed lower costs to the United States than those on which the opponents of Kyoto were relying. (United States, 1998 ) The Clinton administration’s defense of Kyoto ignored the benefits of United States’ global warming programs to others outside the United States. Although the Clinton administration may have simply been attempting to refute arguments against Kyoto, its limited focus on costs and benefits to the United States alone was ethically troublesome. This is so because such an insular approach treats foreigners as if their US caused injury is irrelevant to US obligations.Even if the costs of taking action under the Kyoto Protocol were very high to the United States, a fact disputed by many in the Clinton Administration, the United States has a strong ethical responsibility to prevent harm to others who neither consented to the harm nor benefited from US activities that cause harm. Given that the environmental harm from human-induced climate change could be catastrophic for some nations and will likely be grave for many of the poorest nations, the US failure to consider the consequences of its activities on others is ethically problematic. In a similar way, the H.W. Bush administration has often resisted committing to reducing greenhouse gas emissions on the basis of cost to the US economy alone.Even if it were true that the United States costs of global warming programs were high compared to the benefits that the United States would experience from these programs, the United States has a responsibility to prevent harm to other nations. No respected ethical system would condone one nation causing great harm to another by using the excuse that the harming nation’s costs of reducing its harmful behavior were too high for its domestic economic welfare.
Yet, even if harms and benefits are disaggregated in a CBA calculation, additional ethical limitations of CBA will remain that are discussed below and will be examined in subsequent posts of Climateethics. At a minimum, CBAs should expressly disaggregate harms and benefits: (i) within generations, (ii) over time, and (iii) according to the nurture of the risk imposed, and (iv) geographically. With this disaggregated information, decision-makers would need to consider other ethical issues raised by CBAs.including the duty to reduce to reduce harm to others.
“Preference utilitarianism” holds that governments should choose options which maximize humanity’s ability to fulfill its desires where the value of human desires are determined by the market transactions as measured by “willingness to pay”. CBA is classified as “preference utilitarianism” and distinguished from mainstream utilitarianism because it is peoples’ preferences expressed in market transactions that are maximized according to CBA theory. On the other hand, more mainstream utilitarianism is often concerned with maximizing happiness, not simply human desires.”Preference utilitarianism” is a much more ethically controversial theory than mainstream utilitarianism because the latter encourages exploration of what actually makes people happy, not just the preferences people express in market transactions. (Sagoff, 1982) That is, utilitarians urge decision makers to choose alternatives that will produce the greatest happiness not simply to assume that happiness is equal to what people are willing to pay for something. For this reason, many utilitarians advise careful thinking about which options under consideration will create the most happiness while “preference utilitarianism” is interested in which options will produce the greatest satisfaction of individual desires. For instance, a utilitarian may approve of spending money for such economically low payback activities as schools or parks because a case can be made that these investments produce greater happiness than other investments with higher economic returns. Moreover, utilitarians do not necessarily believe that all human choices made in market transactions lead to happiness. In fact, utilitarians urge that people reflect upon their desires and that people should sometimes opt for actions that is contrary to desires. As Ernest Partridge points out, happiness may require that people not act according to their preferences.
“Objects of ethical and aesthetic judgments do not as such have economic value but moral and aesthetic value: as the eighteenth -century philosopher Immanual Kant wrote, they have dignity, not a price.’ (Sagoff, 2004, 11).
Ethically motivated people frequently decide to not harm others not because they will derive pleasure from such decisions, but because they feel that they have a moral obligation to refrain from harming others. (This issue of moral obligation and CBA will be taken up in more detail in a subsequent ClimateEthics.org post)For these reasons, preference utilitarianism, the underpinning of most CBAs that have often been relied upon in arguments made in opposition to climate change programs, is often ethically dubious when applied to environmental issues. As we shall see in later posts, utilitarian based decisions also often conflict with other ethical theories including justice based principles and ecocentric and biocentric ethical theories.CBA tests to determine the acceptability of environmental programs also raise numerous additional ethical concerns. Although there is vast economics literature that discusses these limitations of CBAs when applied to environmental problems, many of the CBAs that have been applied to potential clmate change policy continue to ignore these ethical limitations. (See, Schneider, 1999)Later posts will examine in greater detail these additional ethical limitations of preference utilitarianism by explaining how preference utitiltarianism conflicts with rights and just theories, how caclculating harms and benefits raises ethical questions because of scientific and economic uncertaineties of costs and benefits while ignoring other ethical considerations, and how discounting future benefits can violate obligations to future generations.
To deal with CBAs ethical limitations, a variety of adjustments to conventional CBAs have been proposed by these economists. Yet because these adjustments also raise ethical considerations, it is imperative that ethical analysis be integrated into CBAs that are used in global warming policy analysis and ethical assumptions of CBAs be made so crystal clear that non-economists can understand the ethical assumptions adopted in the economic analysis. This is an ethical imperative.
Sagoff, Mark, 1982. At The Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima or Why Political Questions Are Not All Economic, Arizona Law Review, Vol. 23, 1281-1298.
Sagoff, Mark, 1988. The Economy of the Earth, New York: Cambridge University Press.Sagoff, Mark, 2004. Price, Principle, and the Environment, Cambridge University Press.Schneider, Steven, ed; 1999. Climate Change, Vol. 41, This volume deals with the limites of CBA.
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2019-04-24T14:31:00Z
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http://sites.psu.edu/rockblogs/2008/06/01/ethical-issues-in-the-use-of-cost-benefit-analysis-of-climate-change-programs/
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2019-04-25T20:41:46Z
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Kamehameha's Jeremy Kamakaala flashed a shaka as he led the pack in the 4x800 meter relay yesterday.
The Punahou Relays don't mean a thing when it comes to league standings or championships.
However, somebody forgot to tell that to the participants who went all out yesterday afternoon in a meet that featured record-breaking performances, as well as non-traditional events, which make the 61st annual event unique.
Samantha Cabreros was honored with the Mary A.P. May most outstanding award for the girls after helping Punahou claim victories in four events -- two of which established meet records. Cabreros, Stephanie Ratte, Kim Culver and Marisa Schoen led the Buffanblu to a win in the 1,600-meter sprint medley in 4:12.62, breaking the record time of 4:15.27 set last year by Pac-5. In the 4x100 meter relay, Cabreros, Anna Hildebrand, Culver and Schoen crossed the finish line first in 50.98 seconds.
Cabreros, a junior, also managed wins in the long jump (17 feet, 5 inches) and triple jump (37-10 1/2). The latter broke the previous meet record of 37-334 inches that stood since 1988.
"I've coached Sammy since she was in seventh grade, and she's just phenomenal," Punahou coach Vern Hashimoto said. "I call her my money jumper, because if she's ever behind, she'll pull it out, like she did last year when she broke the state record on her final jump."
The Punahou girls also took home gold in three more events: Alexa Untermann, Ratte, Culver and Schoen took the 4x400 meter relay in 4:07.65 seconds; Untermann also won the high jump with a mark of 5 feet; and Hildebrand soared over the bar at a height of 10-6 in the pole vault.
Kahuku's Redmond Tutor took home the Robert Paris most outstanding award for the boys after he carried the Red Raiders to victories in three events. Suaesi Tuimaunei, Aaron Victorian, Tutor and Afa Bridenstine tied a meet record, winning the 4x180 yard shuttle hurdle race in 1 minute, 23.5 seconds.
Individually, Tutor set the top mark in the long jump (22-9 1/4) and the triple jump (45-1134). The multi-talented athlete gave credit to Hashimoto, who has also been coaching Tutor once a week since December.
"Without him, I couldn't have done what I did today," Tutor said. "He put in a lot of work with me. It has a lot to do with visualization. Just putting something in your head that gets you going, and lights that fire. Then you just let that fire burn throughout the event, and when the next event comes, you do the same thing."
Leilehua's Vanessa Drake took second in the long jump at the Punahou Relays yesterday.
Cabreros and Tutor attribute their success to Hashimoto's tutelage, especially when it comes to off-the-track workouts. The athletes performed "tactical strength and conditioning functional training" which improves balance, stability, and core and leg strength through the use of numerous tools, including medicine balls, free weights and balance pads.
"The legs can absorb the landings better without buckling, and if you hit a hurdle (the runners) can come back in line again, so I would say that's the best training we ever did," Hashimoto said.
There were no team results tabulated for the meet, but Kamehameha had the strongest male showing of the participating schools. The Warriors won the 4x200 meter relay, 4x800 meter relay and the 4x400 meter relay and finished second in the 4x100 meter relay and distance medley.
"As soon as I get the baton, I just go out blasting," said Kinohi Warrington, the anchorman on the Kamehameha boys squad, which won the 4x200 meter relay in a time of 1:30.67. "My teammates really helped me out by getting and keeping the lead. This meet was pretty much like states, because there were a lot of OIA teams competing, too, so it was good to have the competition."
The other members of the winning foursome were Gagamoe Manuma, Kamuela Brito and Noah Wong.
"This was a really good gauge of how we're going to perform (in the ILH and state championship races)," said Jeremy Kamaka'ala, anchorman of the Kamehameha boys 4x800 meter relay squad, which won the race in 8:33.12. He was accompanied by Jesse Moniz, Kyle Pidot and Charlton Hee.
"I think it will be a steppingstone as we go into the ILH and state championships," said Kamehameha head coach Sam Moku. "The boys worked hard, and have run track since they were in ninth grade and came up through the system, so this is the fruit of their labor."
The title of Hawaii's Fastest Human went to Kelsey Nakanelua, who won the prestigious 100-meter dash in 11.20 seconds. The event, which Nakanelua has now won six times, is the only one that did not feature high school athletes.
The most entertaining event of the day was the 6x67 meter "Power" relay, which featured teams composed of six runners, each weighing more than 200 pounds. Kahuku completed the race, which looked more like a herd of stampeding cattle than a track event, in 48.18 seconds.
Possibly the biggest upset of the day came in the girls discus throw, where favorite Careena Onosai of Word of Life Academy fouled on all three of her qualifying throws, and opened the door for Kahuku's Aalona Ilissa, who won with a throw of 120 feet.
However, Onosai did bounce back to claim the shot put competition with a throw of 40-2 1/4 inches.
4x180-yard shuttle hurdle--1. Iolani 'A' (Maggie Cannell, Rachel Won, Kate Cannell, Ili Wong), 1:44.1. 2. Radford 'A', 1:45.2; 3. Punahou 'A', 1:48.4.
4x100-meter shuttle hurdle--1. Iolani 'A' (Maggie Cannell, Rachel Won, Katie Cannell, Ili Wong), 1:09.3; 2. Punahou 'A', 1:13.5; 3. Radford 'A', 1:15.7.
4x200 relay--1. Mililani 'A' (Nicole Mitani, Pauline Paia, Britney Stephens, Isabel Romero), 1:48.49; 2. Radford 'A', 1:49.95; 3. Punahou 'A', 1:50.20.
Distance medley--1. Pac-Five 'A' (Haley Abing, Jenna Matsumoto, Jennifer Tanaka, Julie Besenbruch), 13:01.11; 2. Campbell 'A', 13:26.11; 3. Punahou 'A', 13:34.55.
1600 sprint medley--1. Punahou 'A' (Samantha Cabreros, Stephanie Ratte, Kim Culver, Marisa Schoen), 4:12.62; 2. Leilehua 'A', 4:26.94; 3. Iolani 'A', 4:29.65.
4x800 relay--1. Pac-Five 'A' (Julie Besenbruch, Emily Latimer, Amanda Tamanaha, Haley Abing), 10:13.76; 2. Punahou 'A', 10:31.06; 3. Radford 'A', 10:40.95.
4x100 relay--1. Punahou 'A' (Samantha Cabreros, Anna Hildebrand, Kim Culver, Marisa Schoen), 50.98; 2. Kahuku 'A', 52.10; 3. Kaiser 'A', 52.37.
4x400 relay--1. Punahou 'A' (Alexa Untermann, Stephanie Ratte, Kim Culver, Marisa Schoen), 4:07.65; 2. Kaiser 'A', 4:12.58; 3. Waipahu 'A', 4:13.38.
High jump--1. Alexa Untermann, Punahou, 5-00; 2. Lisa Gulmon, Punahou, 4-10; 3. Caroline Ritson, Punahou, J4-10.
Pole vault--1. Anna Hildebrand, Punahou, 10-06; 2. Charina Sumner, Kamehameha, Nadia Romero, Mililani, 9-06.
Long jump--1. Samantha Cabreros, Punahou, 17-05. 2. Vanessa Drake, Leilehua, 17-04.75; 3. Yasmina Taketa, Kalani, 16-03.
Triple jump--1. Samantha Cabreros, Punahou, 37-10.50; 2. Vanessa Drake, Leilehua, 34-04.25; 3. Michelle Yoshida, Punahou, 32-05.75.
Discus throw--1. Aalona Ilissa, Kahuku, 120-00; 2. Sharde Pratt, Kaiser, 106-11; 3. Charnelle Ioane, Kapolei, 104-01.
Shot put--1. Careena Onosai, Word of Life, 40-02.50; 2. Megan Burton, Iolani, 35-05; 3. Charnelle Ioane, Kapolei, 34-07.
4x180-yard shuttle hurdle--1. Kahuku 'A' (Suaesi Tuimaunei, Aaron Victorian, Tutor Redmond, Afa Bridenstine), 1:23.5; 2. Punahou 'A', 1:25.9; 3. Kamehameha 'A', 1:27.5.
4x110-meter shuttle hurdle--1. Radford 'A' (Alexander Daniels, Nathan Blue, Shane Masaniai, Ryan Burciaga), 1:07.7; 2. Punahou 'B', 1:08.1; 3. Kahuku 'A', 1:09.5.
4x200 relay--1. Kamehameha 'A' (Parrish Brito, Noah Wong, Kinohi Warrington, Gagamoe Manuma Jr), 1:30.67; 2. Word of Life 'A', 1:32.31; 3. Radford 'A', 1:34.82.
Distance medley--1. Iolani 'A' (Kevin Barr, Jonathan Takamura, Clay Ozaki-Train, Morgan Stephenson), 11:04.01; 2. Kamehameha 'A', 11:19.79; 3. Punahou 'A', 11:21.63.
6x67 relay POWER--1. Kahuku 'A' (Aaron Victorian, Joshua Wily, Sifa Heimuli, BJ Beatty), 48.18; 2. Kamehameha 'A', 48.66; 3. Nanakuli 'A', 50.02.
1600 sprint medley--1. Punahou 'A' (Matthew Tsujimura, Zach Coronas, Ben Strand, Peter Deptula), 3:37.96; 2. Pearl City 'A', 3:46.61; 3. Radford 'A', 3:50.09.
4x800 relay--1. Kamehameha 'A' (Jesse Moniz, Kyle Pidot, Charlton Hee, Jeremy Kamakaala), 8:33.12; 2. Iolani 'A', 8:38.34; 3. Roosevelt 'A', 8:42.06.
4x100 relay--1. Kahuku 'A' (John Cummings, Gary Nagy, Malosi Teo, Suaesi Tuimaunei), 43.22. 2. Kamehameha 'A', J43.22; 3. Punahou 'A', 43.62.
4x400 relay--1. Kamehameha 'A' (Parrish Brito, Kinohi Warrington, Jesse Moniz, Noah Wong), 3:24.73; 2. Punahou 'A', 3:29.02; 3. Word of Life 'A', 3:29.98.
High jump--1. Jeremy Hayes, Radford, 6-04; 2. Aukai Lai, Waianae, 6-02; 3. Gary Satterwhite, Radford, J6-02.
Pole vault--1. David Walden, Punahou, 13-00; 2. Jack Flemming, Waipahu, Gordon Cox, Waipahu, Joey Nagamura, Moanalua, Steven Bolosan, Moanalua, Christopher Lau, Punahou, Micah Swain, Kamehameha, Mahikumakani Crabbe, Kamehameha, Ryan Terao, Punahou, 12-00.
Long jump--1. Tutor Redmond, Kahuku, 22-09.25; 2. AJ Clark, Mililani, 22-01.50; 3. Kealoha Pilares, Damien, 22-00.
Triple jump--1. Tutor Redmond, Kahuku, 45-11.75; 2. Kealoha Pilares, Damien, 44-04; 3. Brandon Hardin, Kamehameha, 43-00.50.
Discus throw--1. BJ Beatty, Kahuku, 157-04; 2. Adam Hom, Word of Life, 148-07; 3. Ryan Oda, Iolani, 141-07.
Shot put--1. Aaron Watson, Nanakuli, 47-03; 2. Drew Uperesa, Punahou, 45-06.50; 3. Kapono Rawlins-Crivello, Kamehameha, 44-10.75.
100-meter dash preliminaries--1. Kelsey Nakanelua, 11.20; 2. Shawn Nakata, 11.38; 3. Ryan Schmidt, 11.41.
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2019-04-20T05:07:48Z
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http://archives.starbulletin.com/2006/04/30/sports/story03.html
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In 2015, Christopher Townsend told us about his work on AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON. Today, he explains about the challenges faced on GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL 2.
I met James Gunn as I was finishing up on AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON, and we talked about GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL 2, and what he wanted to do differently than the first one; we talked about him wanting to surprise the audience all over again, but also to get to know all the characters better, including Rocket and Groot’s new persona, Baby Groot.
How was the collaboration with director James Gunn?
James was excellent to work with; he knew what he wanted and he had a clear idea of how to get there. He’s a very visual storyteller, and with that, and knowing his characters inside out, he was very clear with his direction.
He warned me at the very beginning that the department he was most hard on was visual effects, so I was very aware that our job was going to remain a challenge right to the bitter end! So much of the movie depends on the the visuals of the film, from two of the main characters who are entirely computer generated, to the massive array of spectacular virtual worlds; we had to get it right, in order for the film to work.
How did you approach a show with so many VFX shots?
We take it one sequence at a time, breaking those up into individual shots. You have to have an overview, but at the same time have to break the film into bite sized pieces; looking at a film which is over 2 hour long, and only has about 60 non VFX shots, and over 2300 VFX shots, from character work to huge environments, from makeup fixes to virtual set rebuilds, can be overwhelming at first. But when approached as many many individual creative challenges, then it becomes more manageable.
We pick VFX vendors because of their strengths, from their character work, environment work, simulation work, and their capacity and working styles. Ultimately, we look for the best companies that can work as our partners, creating the most beautiful imagery.
Splitting the work is always tricky, particularly on this one. Our two main CG characters, Rocket and Groot appear throughout the film, in many different sequences. Because of that, we realized very early on that not one single VFX company could do the all the character work. We assessed the script, broke it down and determined that the best approach was to split it among four different vendors, so that we could share the work load. Framestore, who created Rocket for the first film, took that model and rebuilt him from the ground up, paying particular attention to the facial structure, so that he could annunciate more clearly and be more expressive. They also created Baby Groot, then created character asset packages and shared those with Weta Digital, Method Studios and Trixter; Framestore worked closely with the other companies, taking input as to how best to share the characters, and everyone was very pleased with the results, being able to quickly bring them into very different pipelines, and getting them working very quickly.
I always rely on very strong supervisorial teams at the different companies, both the VFX Supervisor and Animation Supervisor, along with the CG and Sequence Supervisors. I often work with the same teams again and again, on different films, as we all need a shorthand. I need to have trust in them all, and I always welcome their ideas and input creatively. My job is to act as a conduit to the other film makers, the Director and the Producers, so I need to guide the VFX companies, to get the Director what he or she wants.
It takes a really great production team to make things run smoothly, when dealing with so many companies in so many time zones. We try and assign a coordinator to one or two different companies, and it’s their responsibility to act as the day to day production liaison, making sure that we distribute the information efficiently, and have the shots back, ready for review. I’m in cineSync sessions, video and phone conferencing most of my day, reviewing the work from around the world and giving notes.
Can you tell us more about the previz process?
Previs is hugely important; we use it to figure out action beats, camera angles, editorial timing, production design requirements, set builds, methodology breakdowns and scope of work. It’s one of the most valuable parts of the process. The director and I will often sit with the Previs supervisor (in this case, Jim Baker from The Third Floor), and describe the scene; in this case, James was very specific and TTF often went off of James’ stick boards or proper storyboards.
Let’s talk about the now iconic characters of Rocket and Baby Groot. What was your approach with them?
We had a lot to go on from the first movie, but I was keen to add another layer of realism, particularly to Rocket. Their characters had already been established, which was a great starting point, but I wanted to make Rocket feel more alive, more animalistic and more believable, so we worked very hard on that.
With Baby Groot, on the other hand, we tried to keep him as an alien twig creature, without falling too far into the cute, anthropomorphic, toddler that he could so easily become; we never needed to add to his cuteness in his animation as he was inherently cute from the start; we had to remember to keep him Buster Keaton neutral, and never to have him overact.
The opening title sequence is focusing on Baby Groot. Can you tell us more about his creation?
The opening title sequence was a massive undertaking. We prevised the entire shot, based on James’ script and stick boards; we really wanted to create a unique title sequence, but one that immediately immersed the audience back into the Guardians universe, showing the humor, the color, the music and the juxtaposition of form, scale and drama. It was incredibly tricky to hit all the beats, showing this crazy action going on behind Baby Groot as he dances joyously in the foreground, oblivious to it all, all in one single fluid camera move. The Third Floor worked for months on the sequence, initially in previs, and then after, once we’d shot the individual live action elements, in postvis. We also had to allow space and time for the titles, which originally were more integrated into the environment; however, during final shot production, we found that the shallow depth of field caused too many problems when they were fully integrated, because they became unreadable, and not really taken in – not really very good for a title sequence! In the end we opted for more traditional overlaid titles as they were more readable and didn’t visually compete with the action.
For the Baby Groot’s animation, we shot James a couple of times as a reference, as he was very clear about how he wanted the character to be; the first time was during principal photography where we filmed him giving some basic dance moves. Framestore then took that as inspiration and blocked in some movements for Groot. Once we had the general timing, we reshot James, during post production, and had him give us some very specific moves and timings, dancing to the music. Armed with that, Framestore continued to refine the animation, often filming their own animators to work out even more specific actions. It was a shot that ultimately is about three minutes long, and we started work on it early in pre production, and it was one of the last shots to final!
Which references and indications did you received for Baby Groot and his behavior?
James Gunn was very specific on how he wanted Baby Groot to act, and was always incredibly insightful about his performances. We often referred to Groot from the first film, as a reference and guide as to his textural qualities and movement, and extrapolated that back to how a young version of that would be. I also pointed at the simplistic yet incredibly expressive animations from early Aardman pieces like Creature Comforts; they captured exquisite performances using minimalist movements which were a great guide to the underplayed performance we were going for with Baby Groot.
How was simulated the presences of Rocket and Baby Groot on-set?
Sean Gunn, James’ brother who also plays the part of Kraglin, one of the Ravagers, performed as Rocket on set. He’s a very flexible guy, and was able to squat down to Rocket’s height. He performed as Rocket, giving the other actors in the scene something to act with. Once we’d got the shot with Sean, he’d step out and we’d play the scene again, with him just saying the dialogue off camera; this was usually the take we’d use in the film. However, I asked James to treat Sean’s performance as carefully as he would every other actor, ensuring that he got the subtly, nuances, correct gesturing, timing and attitude from Sean; we relied on Sean to give us a single, grounded performance that was the basis for all the different animators to work with, and that allowed us to have a consistent single ‘voice’ for the character throughout the film. Of course, the actual voice is that of Bradley Cooper, who we shot several times throughout the process, on ADR stages, with head mounted camera rigs and reference cameras so that we could really study lip-sync and the facial performance that he brought to the character.
In terms of Baby Groot, we had a life sized (well, 10 inches tall!) maquette that we’d ‘walk’ through the set, as camera lineup, and lighting reference, but otherwise we literally just used a twig as an eyeline reference for the actors. Occasionally, we’d also have them hold a small, soft, blue screen form, so that we could get the correct physical presence for their hands etc.
The movie is taking us to various exotic places. Which one was the most complicated to created and why?
Planet Ego was a huge challenge; it’s a world which had to be spectacularly beautiful and stunning, had to look like nothing you’ve ever seen before, had to look absolutely alien but have enough familiarity that it was totally real and believable. We were adamant going in that we didn’t want it to look like a real place on earth that had just been enhanced, so we realized very quickly that the worlds would have to be almost entirely virtual. We wanted a world that was based on a Mandelbrot organically grown, mathematically ordered logic, something that Ego has manufactured but that still has a feeling of natural life to it. We worked very closely with Production Designer Scott Chambliss, and his Art Department, and used much of their concept art as the basis of our worlds. Based on the complexity and scale of the sequence, we also realized that we’d have to share the creation amongst several different VFX companies. Method created the first views of the planet, when we first arrive and the Guardians are welcomed to his world, Scanline VFX created the different surface world where Nebula attacks Gamora as she escapes deeper into the planet, and Weta created the underground world for the final battle.
What was the real size of the sets for Planet Ego?
We estimated that all in all, Planet Ego in its various states, used about half a trillion polygons!
How did you approach the final sequence inside Planet Ego?
Based on James’ script, stick boards and the story boards, we started prevising the scene with previs supervisor Jim Baker and his team of incredibly talented artists at The Third Floor. The process is one of evolution; sometimes something that an animator would do would inspire an idea for a different action beat, sometimes it was just a matter of refining a move until it was something that James’ had very specifically envisioned, sometimes the storyboards would be so clear that it was really just a matter of putting them into action. We would then take the edited previs, and with all the various Heads of Department, figure out what could be shot, how to use stunts, practical effects, sets, costumes, what we would try and shoot and what we knew would have to be all digital. We’d discuss with the VFX vendor, the sequences, and talk about how best to get the imagery that we needed. We decided that much of the shoot would have to be done on blue screen stages, indoors, so that we could control the lighting better, but on dressed set pieces whenever we could; we wanted to give the actors as much environment help as possible so that the performances would be as real and visceral as possible, so opted to not just shoot in a big blue box whenever possible. However, even though the sets were often quite large, they were still tiny relative to the vastness of the final environments. After shooting what we could, we’d postvis with that, recut the scene then turn that over to the VFX vendor, and give a creative brief on what we wanted.
We challenges were very varied on this film; we wanted to create never before seen worlds (I know, cliché!), keeping in the same crazy colored vein as the first film, take audiences to places that they didn’t expect, surprise them with the juxtaposition of scenes and environments, and create CG characters that were as part of the ensemble as all the other real actors.
And as there were so many shots (over 2300), and the post production schedule relatively short considering the complexity (about 8-9 months), we had to split the work amongst many VFX vendors (Weta, Framestore, Method, Trixter, Scanline, Animal Logic, Lola, Cantina Creative, Luma, Technicolor and an InHouse team) and keep the work to a consistently high standard so that the audience was never taken out of the film. Even in an effects heavy feature as this, ultimately the film is all about character and story; our work has to be seamless and never be too shouty or too self aware.
This film was a real blast to make; it was a lot of hard work and incredibly long hours, but hopefully the fun we had is up on the screen. The artistry in the film is representative of the individual VFX artists throughout the world, who put their hearts and souls into the imagery; from the world builders, the animators, the painters, the modelers, the lighters, the programers, the compositors, and all the production crews in all the different companies, everyone gave of themselves, and it’s that passion which is what I love about making a film like this.
We were a team of about 15 people on the production side, and a huge thanks go out to all of them. Creating VFX for a show like this, with so many moving parts, takes an amazing production and coordination effort and without the incredible talents of people like Damien Carr, Tyler Cordova and all the Coordinators, VFX Editors, and entire production crew, we wouldn’t get anything up on the screen!
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2019-04-21T06:58:36Z
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https://www.artofvfx.com/guardians-of-the-galaxy-vol-2-christopher-townsend-production-vfx-supervisor-marvel-studios/
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Beach House Kitchen Designs Tags : Dashingcoastal House Plansthat Challenge Your Opinion Dazzlingbeach House Designs Sophisticatedranch House Plans With Basementthat Are Definitely Worth Lining Up For. Trendyluxury One Story House Plansyou Probably Did Not Know.
Kelsey Ayala Home Design, 2018-08-08 01:10:24. When many people think of home interior design they often conjure images of high priced consultants and even more costly furnishings. Yet each day we walk right past or over the most important and least expensive design elements in our homes. These are basic design elements that set the tone for any other decoration we will accomplish in our home. But like most things in life, the simple things are often overlooked or taken for granted.
Taliyah Kline Home Design, 2018-08-05 06:19:59. Spinsters and bachelors would certainly have different home design needs as compared to families, whether there are kids or none. There are many home interior design ideas that are suitable for bachelors and married individuals. Meanwhile, self-employed individuals and those who are working will also have different needs when it comes to house spaces. Since different people also follow varied hobbies, this should also be taken into consideration when coming up with a home design. Simply put, home design will practically depend on the status of the person who owns the house, as well as his or her way of life.
Aubrielle Jensen Home Design, 2018-09-26 16:41:57. Updating a home involves many elements of change, which involves anything from modern furniture and artwork to room designs. A home can be transformed into a contemporary dwelling with features and accents that have a 21st century edge and style. Modern home design elements can add a touch of style and design to any home. Modern homes can mean many things to many people, but all of them point to non-traditional style and features. Contemporary home furnishing outlets have home furnishings available, including things like glass panel kitchen cabinets and island kitchens with bar stool seating. These attractive furnishings can really serve as an attractive centerpiece for contemporary kitchen design.
Kelsey Ayala Home Design, 2018-09-26 23:56:07. Room design and furnishings are not the only ways to modernize a home, however. Many homeowners are choosing to add additions to their homes to accommodate relatives or borders in addition to extra rooms, such as laundry rooms off of the kitchen or entertainment rooms the whole family can enjoy. Environmentally friendly features are also popular that help to brighten the home, save money and improve the environment. Solar paneled windows and energy efficient doors can really help to insulate a home and make it cost effective.
Holland Joyce Home Design, 2018-09-27 09:25:29. The first of these design elements is so basic and yet so under-utilized that it is almost laughable, and just so happens to be the cheapest tool you can use to enhance the appearance of your home. PAINT. Before we can design any other element in our home we must first set the tone and depth of the backdrop. We have to paint the interior of any design area to enhance all other design elements. Before we can furnish or accessorize any room in the house we have to paint first. Color trends have changed and if it has been awhile since you last painted your home, you may want to give serious attention to this basic but necessary design tool. There are many more wonderful colors to choose from now and the colors you choose will set the mood and the backdrop for any home design plan. (We have some suggestions on how to use color to compliment you home on our web site).
Aubrielle Jensen Home Design, 2018-09-26 19:48:37. As far as interior design ideas are concerned, the type of furniture that should be chosen will depend on the number of individuals living in the house and their particular age group. The kind of room should also be taken into consideration when coming up with a home design in order to identify the if there is a need to add or move fixtures in order to make the living area more comfortable, convenient and stylish. There are different color combinations that can be chosen for ceiling and wall in the different rooms in your house and if you want, you can also pick a particular theme that will best suit your home design.
Aubrielle Jensen Home Design, 2018-09-26 22:52:00. The second is to think about the future. Consider the future of your family and how you will accommodate for different scenarios, such as having children, accommodating grandchildren and grandparents, taking care of elderly parents. Even accommodating extended family for holiday occasions should be considered in your house plans. Similarly, if you hope to transition from an office job to operating your own business out of your home, your custom home design should include an office or flexible space. When you think about the amenities in your custom home plan, be sure to not limit yourself or the growth of your family.
Lainey Daniel Home Design, 2018-09-26 17:37:40. The next is to ensure building code and state certification compliance. Federal and local building legislation is always changing. If your custom home design doesn't follow these building guidelines, city officials could reject it and you'll face more expenses to bring your design "up to code." Because this is such an important issue, be up-front about it with your designer. Ask about how they ensure code compliance, and check with previous customers to make sure the city approval process went off without a hitch. One final bit of due diligence: Check that your architect or designer is professionally certified with your state. If any red flags come up during this investigation, select a different architect. Otherwise, you could be stuck with home plans that can't actually be built.
Frida Hartman Home Design, 2018-09-27 01:15:10. Focus on lighting--both artificial and natural light. The home can never have too much light, and so the budget should allow for numerous light sources throughout the home, from one room to the next. Keep in mind that one central ceiling-mounted light fixture just won't do, and instead, aim for six light sources per room. As for natural light, with all the advances in insulated windows today, choose a design that lets the sun shine in through as many openings as possible.
Taliyah Kline Home Design, 2018-09-27 04:17:26. Home trends change along with the needs of consumers and of the general population. Modern home design aims to satisfy those changing needs by providing simplistic design with loads of storage space--a common problem found in older homes where dwellers find it impossible, or at least challenging, to store their personal items in a logical and organized manner. The design must be capable of providing such solutions for the home to be functional, and that has architects, interior designers, and builders scrambling to come up with great ideas every year.
Sadie Baldwin Home Design, 2018-09-27 11:57:01. New home ideas can turn an otherwise simple home into something spectacular, such as with adding features that would have been more common in older homes, like the ceiling medallions and crown moldings. Such features add beauty and interest to what would otherwise be very bland spaces. A smart idea that uses space wisely includes maximizing every square inch available, such as in the commonly wasted space beneath a staircase, which can be altered with fitted pull out drawers. This would provide space to store outerwear, footwear, and much more!
Do You Know How To Create The One Story House ?
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2019-04-21T04:49:15Z
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http://10000articles.com/tag/beach-house-kitchen-designs/
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Received 2017 November 26; Revised 2018 January 1; Accepted 2018 January 8.
담낭암은 예후가 나쁜 암종이지만 초기에 수술 치료는 매우 효과적이며 진행된 병기라도 방사선 또는 항암 방사선 병합요법이 예후를 향상시키는데 도움이 될 수 있으므로 외과, 영상의학과, 방사선 종양학과, 병리학과, 내과 의사 간의 다학제 치료가 중요하다.
Gallbladder cancer is the most common of all the biliary tract cancers. Incidence gradually increases with age, and women are more likely diagnosed with gallbladder cancer. Patients with gallbladder cancer have poor prognosis due to early local and vascular invasion, extensive regional lymph node metastasis, and distant metastasis. Gallbladder cancer is also related with shorter median survival duration and shorter survival duration after recurrence in comparison with hilar cholangiocarcinoma. Complete removal with negative margins is considered as the only curative therapy for patients with gallbladder cancer. The optimal resection comprises cholecystectomy with a limited hepatic resection (segments IVB and V) and portal lymphadenectomy to include the tumor with negative margins. The optimum adjuvant therapy for patients with resected gallbladder cancer has not been confirmed. The greater benefit of radiation therapy was achieved in patients with T2 or greater stage tumors and node-positive disease. Primary options for patients with unresectable or metastatic diseases include: 1) clinical trial; 2) fluoropyrimidine-based or gemcitabine-based chemotherapy; or 3) best supportive care including biliary drainage. In patients with advanced stage and jaundice, biliary drainage should be considered before setting up chemotherapy.
담낭암은 소화기에서 발생하는 암 중 드문 암으로 2014년 국내 발표에 따르면 소화기계 암 중 5번째로 드물게 발생한다. 담도계 암은 세 부위로 나누어 담낭암, 원위부 담도암, 근위부 담도암으로 나눌 수 있으며, 많은 경우 한 질환으로 여겨진다. 그러나 담낭암은 담도계에서 발생하는 암 중 가장 흔하며 담도계 암과 다른 특성을 가지고 있다. 담낭암은 최근 고령화 사회가 되면서 발생이 증가하고 있으며 여성에서 흔히 발생한다. 담도계 암의 예후가 과거에 비하여 좋아지고는 있으나 담낭암은 다른 담도계 암에 비하면 예후가 나쁜 편이다. 일부 보고에 따르면 5년 생존율이 12%로 매우 나쁜 예후를 가지고 있다. 간문부 담도암과 비교하여도 생존 기간도 짧고 조기에 재발하며, 재발한 경우 더 짧은 생존 기간을 보인다. 그 이유는 담낭 점막하층이 없기 때문에 주변 조직 침윤, 임파선 및 혈관을 통한 전이가 비교적 조기에 발생하기 때문이다. 따라서 담낭암 치료에 있어서 매우 초기에 수술이 가능한 경우에는 수술로 완치가 될 가능성이 높으나 진행된 병기에는 수술 단독으로는 완치율이 낮다. 따라서 진행성 담낭암 환자의 생존율을 높이고 예후를 호전시키기 위해서는 외과, 영상의학과, 방사선 종양학과, 병리학과, 내과 의사 간의 다자간 협력을 통한 치료가 중요하다. 본고에서는 다양한 임상 상황에서 담낭암 다학제 치료에 대한 최신 지견을 살펴보고자 한다.
담석 또는 급성 담낭염으로 담낭절제술 중에 담낭암을 발견하는 경우를 임상에서 종종 경험하게 된다. 담낭암 수술 경험이 많은 외과 의사라면 큰 문제없이 근치 담낭절제술을 시행하면 되지만 경험이 없는 외과 의사라면 경험이 많은 외과 의사가 있는 병원으로 전원하는 것이 바람직하다[4,5]. 담낭암의 완치율은 완전 절제가 되었을 때 가장 좋기 때문에 병리 결과에서 근육층 침범이 없고 완전 절제가 되었다면 복강경 절제를 완치 절제술로 볼 수 있다. 그러나 근육층 및 그 이상 침윤이 있고 주변 임파절 전이가 확인되었다면 근치 절제를 위하여 간 IVb, V분절의 절제와 간 문맥 및 위 간 인대, 십이지장 후부위에 있는 임파절들을 제거한다. 여기에 수술 변연에 암 침윤이 남아 있으면 각각 간 절제 또는 담관 확장 절제를 실시한다. 수술 변연 및 담관에 암 침윤이 없는 환자에서 간 및 담관을 확장 절제하는 것은 권유되지 않는다[6,7]. 또한 T2 이상 즉 근육층 이상 침윤 및 임파절 전이가 확인되었다면 수술 후 방사선 치료를 고려한다[8,9]. Fluoropyrimidine을 추가적으로 고려할 수 있으며, 방사선 치료가 어렵다면 fluoropyrimidine, gemcitabine을 이용한 보조 항암 치료도 고려할 수 있다.
담낭암 치료가 아닌 다른 임상 이유로 담낭절제술 및 담낭을 포함하는 수술을 실시한 후 조직검사에서 담낭암이 우연히 발견되는 경우도 임상에서 종종 경험하게 된다. 우연히 담낭암이 의심된다면 병리과 의사는 담낭암 진단에 전문성이 있는 전문가와 충분한 조직 검토가 필요하다. 우연히 발견된 담낭암이 확실하다면 외과 의사에게 담낭절제술의 충분성 및 완전성, 주변 조직 침윤, 종양 위치에 대하여 충분한 상의가 필요하다. 필요하다면 보다 정확한 병기 결정을 위해 진단 복강경 수술을 할 수 있다. 특히 T3 이상의 침윤, 분화도가 나쁜 경우, 수술 변연에 잔존 암이 의심되는 경우, 복부 초음파를 이용한 조직검사가 시행하기 어려운 부위에 전이가 의심되는 경우에는 특히 진단 복강경이 도움이 된다. 담낭절제술만으로 완전 절제가 될 수 없다고 판단되면 정확한 병기 결정을 위하여 복부 및 골반 전산화단층촬영, 흉부 전산화단층촬영 검사를 재실시할 수 있다. 담도 침윤 여부가 명확하지 않다면 magnetic resonance cholangiopancreatography (MRCP) 검사가 필요하다. 진단 복강경을 통하여 문맥 임파절 및 주변 임파절, 대동맥 주위 임파절 등의 전이 여부를 확인할 수 있다.
복부 초음파, 복부 전산화단층촬영, MRCP 등에서 담낭암이 종물 형태로 진단된 경우에는 진행된 병기일 가능성이 높다. 정확한 병기 결정을 위하여 골반을 포함하는 복부 전산화 단층촬영, 흉부 전산화단층촬영이 기본적으로 꼭 필요하다. 영상 검사만으로 병기 결정이 어려운 경우에는 진단 복강경 검사를 고려할 수 있다. 적절한 복강경 검사로 55.9% 환자에서 불필요한 수술을 피할 수 있었다는 보고가 있다. 복부 골반 및 흉부 전산화단층촬영 검사에서 근치 담낭절제술로 충분할 것으로 판단되면 근치 담낭절제술을 실시하고 수술 변연에 암 침윤이 남아 있으면 확장 간 절제 또는 담관절제술을 고려한다. T2 이상 즉 근육층 이상 침윤 및 임파절 전이가 확인되었다면 수술 후 방사선 치료를 고려한다.
황달로 내원한 환자가 담낭암이 발견된 경우에는 수술 적응이 7% 미만으로 매우 적지만 확대 근치 담낭절제술로 완치가 가능하다고 판단되고 환자가 수술을 견딜 수 있으며 환자가 원한다면 고려할 수 있다. 수술 후 방사선 치료 및 항암화학요법을 고려한다.
담낭암은 수술로 완전 절제가 가능하고 수술 변연에서 암소가 발견되지 않으면 가장 좋은 예후를 보장할 수 있다. T1a 병기인 경우 단순 담낭절제술 후 5년 생존율은 최근 100%에 가깝다고 보고하고 있다. T2 병기, 일부 T1b 및 T3의 경우 근치 담낭절제술로 예후를 향상시킬 수 있다. 그런데 T2 이상 또는 임파절 전이 환자에서 보조 방사선 치료를 추가적으로 하는 경우 예후를 더 향상시킬 수 있다. 보조 항암화학요법으로 fluoropyrimidine 항암 방사선 병합 치료 또는 gemcitabine 항암 치료 또한 선택해 볼 수 있다. 보조 방사선 치료로 다양한 방법이 시도되고 있으며 많은 경우 목표 조사량은 임파절을 포함하는 종양 토대에 45 Gy (1.8 Gy/fraction)이며, 보조 방사선 치료에 5-FU를 근간으로 하는 항암화학요법도 시도해 볼 수 있다. 수술이 불가능한 진행된 담낭암의 경우 최근 gemcitabine과 cisplatin 병합 항암화학요법이 좋은 결과를 보고하고 있어 매우 높은 근거를 가지고 추천할 수 있다. Gemcitabine 단독요법에 비하여 gemcitabine과 cisplatin 병합요법 환자에서 비교위험도가 0.61로 감소한다. 특히 Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group 0 또는 1인 환자에서 가장 효과가 좋으며 국소 진행 병기이거나 전이된 병기 모두에서 효과가 있다. 24주간 치료 후 치료를 중단하고 관찰하는 것 또한 유용한 선택방법이다. Fluoropyrimidine을 근간으로 하거나 gemcitabine을 근간으로 하는 항암화학요법과 fluoropyrimidine 항암 방사선 병합 치료도 근거는 부족하지만 치료로 선택해 볼 수 있다. 최근 다양한 분자생물 지표를 이용한 항암 치료가 시도되고 있다. 아직까지 그 효과는 확실하지 않지만 멀지 않은 시기에 담낭암 치료에 좋은 진전을 기대하고 있다. 진행된 병기 담낭암 환자에서 황달 및 담도가 폐색된 경우, 담도 배액을 포함하는 고식적 치료도 매우 중요하며 치료 내시경 의사 및 중재 방사선 의사와 긴밀한 협력이 필요하다.
담낭암은 담도계 암 중 가장 흔한 암이지만 예후가 매우 나쁜 암종으로 알려져 있다. 담낭암은 근치 담낭절제술이 가장 확실한 치료 방법으로 T1a인 경우 5년 생존율은 거의 100%에 가깝다. 그러나 대부분 진행된 병기에 진단되는 경우가 흔하며, T2 이상 또는 임파절 전이가 있는 경우 보조 방사선 또는 항암 방사선 병합요법이 예후를 향상시키는데 도움이 된다. 수술이 불가능한 진행된 병기의 경우에는 gemcitabine과 cisplatin 병합 항암화학요법이 예후를 향상시키는 데 도움이 된다. 진행성 담낭암 환자의 생존율을 높이고 예후를 개선시키기 위해서는 외과, 영상의학과, 방사선 종양학과, 병리학과, 내과 의사 간의 다자간 협력을 통한 다학제 치료가 중요하다.
The author has no conflicts to disclose.
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WordPress like any CMS can be vulnerable to things such as server crashes, hacking, security flaws, bad plugin or theme updates and insecure web hosts. If anything happened to your website, it would cost you dearly in time, money and reputation. Whilst other security measures are essential, backups are the ultimate insurance: they mean that, if the worst were to happen, your website (plus all related files and databases) stay safe, and can be restored in no time.
Best WordPress backup plugins list, In this article, we will help you to choose the best WordPress backup plugin as they are much helpful than making a backup manually each time. You can choose the best for your needs by comparing the most top ranted backup plugins and most popular WordPress backup plugins in the market. WordPress has a lot of free plugins to provide backup of your site. For more advanced WordPress and secure feature, you have to buy a premium version of these plugins. Most of these plugins both restore and backup functionality. You can schedule your site back up and restore any time. Along with that, you have the option to store to store the backup on a different cloud like Amazon, Dropbox etc.
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BlogVault has an incremental database and file backups. Backups are stored on cloud – BlogVault servers and on Amazon S3. and provides real-time backups for WooCommerce sites. It also facilitates backup restore, migration, staging, site copying, website and upload to Dropbox. It uses FTP, SFTP or FTPS for migrating/restore feature. BlogVault WordPress backup plugin also has a malware scanning and one-click malware removal functionality. backup plugins like UpdraftPlus, Backup Buddy, CodeGuard, it has all-in-one WordPress cloud backups, free cloud-based storage, free cloud staging site, it’s used by 4,000,000+ websites. and approved with 5,000+ websites.1 million successful website restorations in the shortest time. WordPress backup trusted by over 4,00,000+ website owners. with incredible backup storage. staging site in just one-click on our cloud servers.one-click merge to push the change to live site. fastest website recovery in minutes of hours or days experiences up to 70% faster website migrate 80% faster, migrate to a new domain, host, DNS or server. Recover anytime with 365 days of backup archives with powerful security by malware.it always improving & adding features, unlike plugins.
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Cyan Backup is one of the best backup plugins, it’ll back up your entire WordPress sites and database file on a schedule. Currently, support schedules are hourly, daily, weekly and monthly with intervals for each. storage options include FTP, SFTP, and FTPS.CYAN Backup required PHP5. CYAN Backup fully translated into any supported languages.WordPress Version:2.9 or higher. CYAN Backup is the total backup plugin by Wokamoto, Storage Maintenance, you can enable auto of old backups by setting the numbers of backup files completing the settings click on Update Options button to save all your settings of the plugin. it is very easy to use and configure the plugin with few clicks on your WordPress site backups within your devices.
Each WordPress backup plugin has their own different features than others. they all offer you the best WordPress file backup and full database backup. It provides you peace of mind and comes with tons of cloud storage options.you can store your backups on third-party storage service like Dropbox, Amazon S3, Google Drive, etc. we hope it’s useful and helped to choose the best WordPress backup plugin for your site. If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for more WordPress backup plugins. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
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2019-04-22T20:03:04Z
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https://vapvarun.com/wordpress-backup-plugins/
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Pannell Discussions » 122 – Effective environmental policy » Ideas in economics, environment, policy and more.
In PD#121, I talked about the new national environment policy in Australia, “Caring for our Country“. Much of the important detail of how the program will operate is not yet available. Here I will pull together lessons from our research on environmental policy in recent years, to identify key issues that designers and managers of such a program need to address if it is to be effective in achieving environmentally valuable outcomes.
This means making sure that investments are based on good knowledge about (a) the degree of threat or damage to an environmental asset, and (b) the extent to which this threat or damage can be reduced by particular changes in management. Environmental investments usually do account for the first of these, but it is remarkable how often the second one is overlooked, resulting in investments that produce little or no environmental gains. In many cases, generic knowledge about an issue is not sufficient – we need locally specific knowledge. Environmental managers should be allowed (or indeed encouraged) to invest in research to fill key knowledge gaps.
If the works or changed practices needed to protect the asset require changes in behaviour by private land or water managers, ensure that investment decisions consider whether those works will be attractive or unattractive to the people who would have to adopt them. There are many well understood reasons why conservation practices can be unattractive to land and water managers (Pannell et al., 2006). If the practices are highly unattractive, it will be expensive and difficult to get them adopted, and the viability of investing in that asset will be reduced. It is important to appreciate that, even if the works are relatively attractive when implemented at small scale, they may be highly unattractive at large scale. Thus the consideration of this issue needs to factor in the required scale of response, based on the available technical knowledge.
The idea is to create new potential management responses that are just as environmentally beneficial, but are much more attractive to landholders than the existing options. This can be much more effective than trying to force the adoption of existing practices that are highly unattractive to managers.
Not every environmental problem can or should be fixed. Sometimes the best response is to accept the changed circumstance, and attempt to make the best of it. Throwing money at attempts to fix intractable problems requiring extremely expensive works means that many other more tractable environmental problems will not be addressed.
There is a strong tendency for environmental programs to spread their resources across investments of widely differing merits. Some are really worthwhile, and some are not worthwhile at all. The highest priority environmental investments should have at least these four characteristics: (a) particularly valuable environmental assets, (b) facing high threat or high current degradation, (c) with high feasibility of reducing that threat or degradation at reasonable cost, (d) with the required works being reasonably attractive to land or water managers. If even one of these elements is neglected, there is a high risk of selecting poor investments.
6. To achieve 5, use a good integrated decision framework, such as SIF3 or INFFER.
Patience is needed in the planning phase to ensure that good investments are selected. Some environmental programs have a tendency to rush into spending money on on-ground works before the analysis has been done to check whether these works can even make a reasonable difference to environmental outcomes. Patience is also needed in cases where there is a lack of highly adoptable conservation practices, as we wait for our investment in technology development to bear fruit.
Often we make reasonable decisions about which assets to invest in, but then very poor decisions about which policy tool to use. Should it be grants, economic instruments, regulation, technology development, other R&D, communication/education, engineering works, or informed inaction? My Public: Private benefits framework (Pannell, 2008) provides strong advice about these decisions.
Programs often set unrealistic targets. The targets should be consistent with the known bio-physical information about the asset’s response to management, the known behavioural responses of land and water managers to policy interventions, and the resources available under the program. Clearly, you cannot select such targets unless you have already met requirements 1 to 8 above. Mostly we use targets that are, more or less, pulled out of the air.
A much stronger focus on outcomes is needed than we have seen in recent programs, and this includes the focus of monitoring and evaluation. Monitoring and evaluation tends to focus on accountability for funds spent, but to neglect the achievement of environmental outcomes. It is important to appreciate that for those environmental problems with long time lags between action and environmental response (e.g. salinity), the only evaluation that makes sense on a management time scale is through computer modeling. It should use the same sorts of analysis tools that were used to plan the investment. Indeed, such evaluation should really be an outgrowth of the planning process – effectively an updating of it, as part of an adaptive management strategy.
It is all too easy to have unintended adverse consequences. For example, in Australia many trees were planted to try to prevent dryland salinity caused by rising groundwater, but often without regard to their impacts on surface water yields into waterways. Don’t focus the attention of the program too narrowly.
There is a strong tendency for enforcement of environmental contracts or environmental regulations to be weak and spasmodic. The cost of good enforcement is high, so there is a balance to be struck, but the levels we usually see are too low.
Australian environmental programs over the past 20 years or so have created expectations among landholders that they should all be able to obtain benefits from the programs. This makes it very difficult for environmental managers to target their investments in a cost-effective way, especially if the programs require environmental managers to consult with the community in selecting their investments. Again there is a difficult balance to be struck, this time between consultation and hard-nosed decision making, but in recent years we have obviously got this balance wrong.
Policies inevitably involve someone having to make decisions about where and how the public money should be spent. These are very difficult decisions, and the decision makers need strong support to make them. They need good data; advice about appropriate decision frameworks and principles; access to appropriate skills; time and resources to consult appropriately; and they need to not be rushed into poor decisions to meet political time lines.
The system needs to reward and support those managers who can demonstrate that their investment decisions really are leading to environmental outcomes. In my view, programs should often be tougher in withholding funds from environmental managers who cannot demonstrate this, both on the technical side (e.g. through modeling or other analysis) and on the socio-economic side (e.g. economic evaluation of proposed new practices from the landholder’s perspective). One of the traps that programs often fall into is to create pressures for those making the investment decisions to focus on things other than environmental outcomes – things such as getting the money spent by a certain date, meeting various political or community expectations, accounting for financial expenditures, and spending money on on-ground works even if we lack evidence that those works would achieve anything.
I’ve been writing a critique of the “Natural Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality” (the NAP, which is coming to an end in June), to present at the International Salinity Forum in Adelaide next week. Sadly, I was able to create the above list of ideal policy characteristics by listing all the features that the NAP did not have. I’m hoping that the new “Caring for our Country” program will learn from the mistakes we have already made. As Peter Cullen regularly said, it’s better to make new mistakes. Early signs are that at least some of the lessons are being picked up, although it is still hard to be confident about this from the published material (as of March 26).
Pannell, D.J., Marshall, G.R., Barr, N., Curtis, A., Vanclay, F. and Wilkinson, R. (2006). Understanding and promoting adoption of conservation practices by rural landholders. Australian Journal of Experimental Agriculture 46(11): 1407-1424. Access paper at Journal web site here. Pre-publication version available here (161K).
Pannell, D.J. (2008). Public benefits, private benefits, and policy intervention for land-use change for environmental benefits, Land Economics 84(2): 225-240. See here.
Posted on 24 March, 2008 by David Pannell. This entry was posted in Agriculture, Environment, Natural resource management, Policy, Politics.
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2019-04-23T10:54:48Z
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http://www.pannelldiscussions.net/2008/03/122-effective-environmental-policy/
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ISIL fighters captured the mainly ethnic Turkmen city of Tal Afar in northwestern Iraq overnight after heavy fighting on Sunday.
(BAGHDAD, Iraq) - The United States is contemplating talks with its arch-enemy Iran to support the Iraqi government in its battle with Sunni Islamist insurgents who routed Baghdad's army and seized the north of the country in the past week.
The stunning onslaught by militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant threatens to dismember Iraq and unleash all-out sectarian warfare across a crescent of the Middle East, with no regard for national borders that the fighters reject.
Joint action between the United States and Iran to help prop up the government of their mutual ally Nuri al-Maliki, Iraq's Shi'ite prime minister, would be a major turn of events after hostility dating to Iran's 1979 revolution, and demonstrates the urgency of the alarm raised by the lightning insurgent advance.
ISIL seeks a caliphate ruled on medieval Sunni Muslim precepts in Iraq and Syria, and is also fighting Syria's Iran-backed government. It considers all Shi'ites to be heretics deserving death and has boasted of massacring hundreds of Iraqi troops who surrendered to its forces last week.
ISIL fighters captured the mainly ethnic Turkmen city of Tal Afar in northwestern Iraq overnight after heavy fighting on Sunday, solidifying their grip on the north.
"The city was overrun by militants. Severe fighting took place, and many people were killed. Shi'ite families have fled to the west and Sunni families have fled to the east," said a city official who asked not to be identified.
Tal Afar is a short drive west from Mosul, the north's main city, which ISIL seized last week at the start of its push. Fighters swept through towns and cities on the Tigris before halting about an hour's drive north of Baghdad.
Iraq's army is holding out in Samarra, a Tigris city that is home to a Shi'ite shrine. A convoy traveling to reinforce the troops there was ambushed late on Sunday by Sunni fighters near the town of Ishaqi. Fighting continued through Monday morning.
U.S. President Barack Obama pulled out all American troops in 2011 and has ruled out sending them back, although he says he is weighing other military options, such as air strikes. A U.S. aircraft carrier has sailed into the Gulf.
A senior U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said on Sunday that Washington was considering making contact with Iran to find ways to aid the Baghdad government. Publicly, the White House said no such contacts had yet taken place.
The U.S. overture came a day after Iran's President Hassan Rouhani, a relative moderate elected last year, said Tehran would consider working with the United States in Iraq if it saw Washington was willing to confront "terrorist groups".
The only U.S. military contingent on the ground is the security staff at the U.S. embassy. Washington said on Sunday it was evacuating some diplomatic staff and sending about 100 extra marines and other personnel to help safeguard the facilities.
The sprawling fortified compound on the banks of the Tigris is the largest and most expensive diplomatic mission ever built, a vestige of the days when 170,000 U.S. troops fought to put down a civil war and mass sectarian cleansing that followed the 2003 U.S. invasion which toppled Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein.
Iraqis now face the prospect of a replay of that extreme violence, but this time without American forces to intervene.
The prospect of cooperation between the United States and Iran shows how dramatically the ISIL advance has redrawn the map of Middle East alliances in a matter of days.
Rouhani has presided over a gradual thaw with the West, including secret talks with Washington that led to a breakthrough preliminary deal last year to ease sanctions in return for curbs on Iran's nuclear program. But open cooperation against a mutual threat would be unprecedented.
Iraq is the only country closely allied to both the United States and Iran, but tentative past efforts by Tehran and Washington to cooperate there were fruitless. Tehran has longstanding ties to Maliki and the Shi'ite political parties that U.S.-backed elections brought to power after Saddam's fall.
Iran blames the United States and its Gulf Arab allies for stoking Sunni militancy in the region by backing the uprising against its ally Bashar al-Assad in Syria, where ISIL emerged as one of a dominant Sunni rebel group in a three year civil war.
Asked if Iran would now work with the United States against ISIL, Rouhani told a news conference on Saturday: "We can think about it, if we see America starts confronting the terrorist groups in Iraq or elsewhere.
"Where did ISIL come from? Who is funding this terrorist group? We had warned everyone, including the West, about the danger of backing such a terrorist and reckless group," he said.
ISIL fighters began their assault last week by capturing Mosul. They swept through other Sunni cities in the Tigris valley north of Baghdad, including Saddam's hometown Tikrit, where they captured and apparently massacred troops stationed at Speicher air base, once one of the main U.S. troop headquarters.
A series of pictures distributed on a purported ISIL Twitter account appeared to show gunmen from the Islamist group shooting dozens of men, unarmed and lying prone on the ground.
Captions accompanying the pictures said they showed hundreds of army deserters captured as they tried to flee the fighting. They were shown being transported in the backs of trucks, led to an open field, laid down in rows and shot by several masked gunmen. In several pictures, the black ISIL flag can be seen.
"This is the fate of the Shi'ites which Nuri brought to fight the Sunnis," a caption to one of the pictures reads.
ISIL said it executed 1,700 soldiers out of 2,500 it had captured in Tikrit. Although those numbers appear exaggerated, the total could still be in the hundreds. A former local official in Tikrit told Reuters ISIL had captured 450-500 troops at Speicher and another 100 elsewhere in Tikrit. Some 200 are believed to be held in Speicher to trade for jailed insurgents.
Power and running water were off in the city, leaving residents dependent on water being brought in by tanker trucks.
With ISIL's advance halted on the Tigris an hour's drive north of the capital, fighters also hold most of the Euphrates valley to the west, which they captured at the start of the year, bringing them to the gates of the city of 7 million.
Shi'ites, who form the majority in Iraq and are based mainly in the south, have rallied to defend the country, with thousands of volunteers turning out to join the security forces after a mobilization call by the top Shi'ite cleric.
Baghdad itself is divided between Sunni and Shi'ite neighborhoods and suffered intense street-fighting in 2006-2007. Peace never quite returned and districts are still surrounded by barbed wire and concrete blast walls.
ISIL emerged after Saddam's fall, fought against the U.S. occupation as al Qaeda's Iraq branch and broke away from al Qaeda after joining the civil war in Syria. It says the movement founded by Osama bin Laden is no longer radical enough.
Its advance in Iraq has been assisted by other Sunni Muslim armed groups, who have risen up against Baghdad because of what they consider repression from Maliki's Shi'ite-led government. Washington says Maliki must reach out to Sunnis to create a political coalition capable of reunifying Iraq.
Tareq al-Hashemi, a Sunni who was vice president until fleeing the country in 2012 after Maliki accused him of terrorism, said Maliki must go if the uprising is to end.
"What happened is an uprising by the Sunni Arabs in Iraq to confront oppression and marginalization," Hashemi told the BBC. "Resolving the conflict in Iraq comes through excluding Maliki from power."
The government's collapse in the north has also allowed forces of the ethnic Kurdish autonomous region to advance, seizing the city of Kirkuk and rural areas with vast oil reserves.
Residents in Tal Afar said Shi'ite police and troops rocketed Sunni neighborhoods before the ISIL forces moved in and finally captured the city overnight.
"The situation is disastrous in Tal Afar. There is crazy fighting and most families are trapped inside houses. They can’t leave town," a local official said on Sunday before the city was overrun. "If the fighting continues, a mass killing among civilians could result."
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2019-04-21T06:30:12Z
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http://salem-news.com/articles/june162014/us-iran-iraq-kh.php
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We are University Hills leading restoration company, we proudly serve residential and commercial customers throughout Louisiana and even offer emergency restoration services. Call today for professional cleanup services you can trust.
With our water damage removal & repair service in University Hills, Louisiana, we provide the exact type of services to help you during your moment of crisis and get your life back the way it was pre-flood event..
Flood damage may be sudden, immediately wreaking havoc on your house. Also, the flood damage could become a health hazard and lead to mold problems. Flood damage shrinks leather, warps wood surfaces, damages carpeting, and causes other major problems. Immediate water damage cleanup is vital in stopping water damage from further ruining your residential or commercial property.
Once our University Hills water removal experts arrives, we can manage the more challenging water cleanup tasks. Cleaning water damage requires skilled experts who understand how to address all probable consequences and repercussions. Not only does an emergency restoration professional have to understand how to fix the cause of the flood damage, but they also need to know where to look for the areas mold forms. Our water restoration professionals in University Hills, Louisiana are trained in water extraction and flood damage removal services and are certified by the Institute of Inspection, Cleaning and Restoration Certification (IICRC) and the Indoor Air Quality Association (IAQA).
Throughout each step of the procedure, we gently handle your possessions with extreme care. We go to great lengths to ensure mold isn’t a problem after recovery and your indoor air quality is contaminant free.
The flood damage restoration and repair process begins with a comprehensive evaluation of your premises, including a comprehensive damage assessment. University Hills Water Damage Restoration Professionals will determine the scope of the damage so we have the ability to develop the right plan of action.
Our Flood Damage Repair Professionals in University Hills, Louisiana have to establish the classification and type of water to revive your home firmly to business specifications. The form of water contamination will affect the specific restoration procedures used to restore your home.
We inspect and evaluate your home to discover the extent of the harm. In addition, we’ll attempt to find security concerns and review them to you. If you know of any security issues, such as asbestos or lead, please discuss them with us.
Moreover, bad water extraction may lengthen the drying process significantly. Last, the most vital thing throughout the extraction isn’t exactly how much water is eliminated, but just how much is really left behind. If heavy water extraction is not accessible, we will need to remove all carpets cushioning to prevent prolonged drying times. If the carpet isn’t eliminated, additional water will remain beneath the carpeting raising the prospect of there’s secondary harm to your industrial or residential property. Also, leading to needing more time and wanted gear to completely dry the home.
When hardwood is undergoing the drying process, complete extraction of the water is necessary only as each other surface. Hardwood emergency flood damage mats are used being put on the ground and connected to the vacuum cleaner. Furthermore, the time period required for a complete extraction is dependent on the entire quantity of water found on the ground. The procedure is wholly done when it is completely visible by our water damage technician that there’s no more visible water.
Removing interior water too quickly, together with the pressure present out, could lead to structural damage to the home. What is more, if water is not decreasing at the technician’s expected speed, there is a possible water from external is not entering. Our flood damage repair professionals avoid this issue by calculating the quantity of water within the area to discover the flow rate required to take the water out to prevent any structural damage to the house.
Normal inspection during the water reduction procedure by monitoring and assessing the property is accomplished by our water repair experts to properly determine improvement.
Our company guarantee a potent dry standard by applying this reading. It’s set by using an untouched substance and comparing it to the affected giving us a target that needs to be achieved. This allows our experts to use it as a benchmark as it lets them see ordinary moisture levels in the environment.
The water extraction step removes nearly all of the water out of your home or property. By doing a comprehensive water extraction, Experts help reduce the drying period and help to prevent mold and secondary flood damage. We use powerful pumps and truck-mounted vacuum parts to quickly eliminate tens of thousands or tens of thousands of gallons of water from your premises.
Highly trained emergency repair technicians will start the water extraction process almost instantly. Depending on the whole amount of water, we could use strong submersible pumps in addition to industrial electricity, wet/dry vacuums. This measure can help decrease drying time and helps to prevent mold and secondary water damage.
Following the flood mitigation, your floors and walls may seem dry at first glance, but they are still moist to the touch. Most construction materials, such as drywall and wood, are porous and will keep significant water. The retained water may cause these substances to warp, swell, or break and may also cause mold damage.
Our University Hills Repair Company will manipulate temperature and relative humidity to eliminate the residual moisture. We use specialized water drying equipment, such as industrial air movers and dehumidifiers, to eliminate water retained by building materials and other hard-to-access moisture. We carefully track the improvement using moisture meters prior to the materials return to suitable drying goals.
Your properties walls, floors, and other surfaces will probably require professional cleaning remedies. Apart from cleaning your house’s construction, University Hills Flood Damage Repair professionals may even clean your possessions, like upholstery, furniture, clothes, and other restorable private items, ruined from the water. Flooding and water damage frequently require odor removal and deodorization remedies, because moist substances possess a unpleasant odor.
Flood Damage Repair University Hills specialize in restoring contents damaged by water, fire, or mold. Our expertise and”restore” versus”replace” mindset will enable you to save money while keeping precious keepsakes, such as photos and other personal items which can not be replaced.
Water Repair University Hills Experts are trained to spot and remove offensive odors with industrial air scrubbers and fogging equipment. This gear can effectively cure persistent and serious scents that average air fresheners and comparable remedies can not.
Water Damage Restoration and Repair University Hills Experts will remove and dispose of damaged materials with advice from you together with your insurance adjuster.
Restoration, the final step in restoring your home, is the process of rebuilding your house or business to its pre-water harm condition. Restoration may involve minor fixes, like replacing drywall and installing new carpeting, or might involve big repairs, like the renovation of different places or rooms within a home or business.
Our Restoration Company in University Hills, Louisiana can simplify the recovery process by managing the initial water damage mitigation and rebuilding the affected regions. Having one competent restoration company for the full repair and recovery process can save yourself time and keep cost low. We offer this continuity by supervising a complete range of repair services which will bring your property back to its original condition.
University Hills Water Damage Restoration Experts | We Clean It Up!
University Hills is located in an area that’s quite susceptible to water damage as a result of the usual heavy rain we encounter during the year. What’s more, it’s very probable your residential or commercial property will sooner or later face water damage unless you have had repairs. Emergency restoration services are critical in commercial buildings, especially apartments, as consumer dissatisfaction because of inadequate maintenance proves difficult in increasing living spaces or retention. It is important to understand that water damage is very common in University Hills, Louisiana. It takes only one uncontrolled source of water in just about any area of your house or office to cause significant damage. This type of water damage is placed into one of two categories, gray and black water. Black water comes from outside water while gray water comes from inside your home or commercial building. Additionally, leaky pipes, cracked walls, and ruined wood surfaces are clear signs of water damage that needs repair. If you find any stains in your ceilings it is also a sign of a water leak in your residence. Call us today to schedule a free inspection of your home. If you think that your home could be experiencing flood damage you should immediately call us. If water is left to stand, the humidity will start to grow and it will not be long before mold begins to form. This can lead to serious health issues and expenses that are considered through the mold removal procedure.
"Water Damage Restoration University Hills is very professional and extremely knowledgeable in water damage mitigation. They do incredible work and truly had my best interest at heart."
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2019-04-21T04:21:25Z
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https://waterdamagerestorationbatonrouge.com/university-hills-louisiana/
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When it comes to finding the right roll off dumpster rental prices, sizes, company for Bettendorf, Iowa you’re looking in the right place. Landrum Disposal has served Bettendorf customers since 2001. We’re located right here in beautiful Bettendorf, so our service is both prompt and reliable. We pride ourselves on being a customer driven waste services company that concentrates on providing the highest quality service possible regardless of the size of the customer.
We concentrate on residential and small contractors for our roll off rental in the area and have served tens of thousands of customers over the years throughout the Quad City area. Our bins come in booth small and large sizes and are shown on the web site complete with actual photos to enable you to get a good idea of which equipment best fits your needs.
What type of waste will you be putting in the container?
Where do you want the container placed at your location?
When do you need the container delivered?
These questions need to be answered by the customer to ensure a smooth waste removal process, so lets look at each of them.
What city are you located in? Or better yet, what is the address you’ll need the dumpster delivered to? We charge different haul rates for some of the outlying cities in the area, so to accurately quote you a haul rate, we need to know the city your waste is located in. We serve six counties and literally hundreds of cities in Illinois and Iowa, but we can usually give you an instant dumpster price for any city within our service area.
What type of waste will you be disposing of in the container? This question is asked for a few different reasons. First, there are several waste items that cannot be disposed of in a landfill. Yard waste, tires, appliances, liquids, chemicals, etc are just a few items that will cause a load to be rejected at the landfill. Secondly, many waste are quite heavy and can’t be transported in large quantities without overloading the truck. Dirt, asphalt, concrete, brick, shingles for example need to be placed in smaller 10 yard roll offs and not the larger 30 yard boxes to avoid overweight fines and accidents arising out of excessive weight.
Where do you want the container placed at your location? Waste bins are large metal objects that require a large, hard, level surface for placement. Study driveways, parking lots, gravel areas, etc are possible bin locations. Some cities allow bins to be placed on side roads if parking is available and allowed. We can usually be of assistance in determining if your city allows equipment to be placed temporarily on a public street. Additionally, our friendly drivers can be of assistance in helping customers with bin placement options when on-site.
When do you want your roll off delivered? If you’re starting project that will require instant filling of a box, you might want the roll off delivered the day prior to the project being started. This will ensure the bin is available when you need it. Our daily rental fees are reasonable, so one or two additional days of rent shouldn’t break your project’s budget.
We don’t provide several of the services that our competitors provide because we like to focus on a few things and ensure we’re doing those things right. But we do haul demolition and construction debris, recycle wood and concrete where these materials are separated. We’re always seeking to minimize waste taken to area landfills by looking for materials that can be recycled. Metal recycling is one of the more profitable endeavors a waste generator can engage in. If you’re planning on generation a large quantity of metal, we’re interested in hauling it to a metal processor.
The City of Bettendorf provides weekly curbside waste collection for its residents living in single-family dwellings and some residents residing in multi-family dwellings. In addition to automated garbage collection, the City also collects bulky waste, appliances, and yard waste. Under the All In One program, the city collects co-mingled recyclables curbside in plastic carts from its residents. Some of the Bettendorf residents opt to have every other week garbage collection or smaller carts to save money on their quarterly waste bills.
Commercial waste collection in Bettendorf is performed by the private sector. Rear loading and front loading trash trucks empty bins in alleys and behind commercial businesses on a scheduled basis. These arrangements are set up directly through waste haulers and business owners typically on a several year basis.
Temporary roll off service is provided by private companies in the City. The equipment delivered under these arrangements usually sits at residential sites or construction sites for a short term basis.
The waste generated through the above activities is usually disposed of at the Scott Area Landfill or any of the two privately operated landfills on the other side of the river.
Renting a waste management roll off dumpster in Bettendorf, Iowa has never been easier, but you’ll need to consider a few things before the process agains. Some of those things are common sense for some folks, but let’s go through them step by step for those who haven’t rented a roll off container before.
Determining the volume of waste, debris, junk you’ll be wanting to toss away is the first thing you might want to think through. This is important because dumpster sizes are plentiful beginning with 6 cubic yards continuing through 30 cubic yards or even larger. Now once you’ve figured out what you want to toss away, you’ll need to think of the pile of debris in terms of cubic yards as roll offs are referred to in cubic yards. A cubic yard is 36” X 36” X 36” or 27 cubic feet. You can think of a pickup truck with a 6’ bird being able to haul 2 cubic yards of waste at one time. So as an example, a 20 cubic yard roll off can hold roughly 10 pickup truck loads of debris.In addition to needing to determine the amount of waste you will have, you’ll also need to give some thought to what type of waste you intend to generate with your project. maybe you’re gutting a commercial building and will have materials like dry wall, concrete, fluorescent light bulbs, etc. Well the dry wall can easily be deposited in a rented dumpster, but the fluorescent bulbs are considered a hazardous waste and can not be landfilled. The concrete can be landfilled, but can not be hauled in large quantities. So if you just plan on tossing out a yard or two of the concrete, it can go into the same dumpster as the drywall. But if you have significant quantities of concrete, you’ll need to get a separate and small dumpster to prevent the overloading of the collection trucks. The good news is that, if you keep it clean, you can save money by having the concrete recycled.
When do you need to have the roll off container delivered to your location? Now you don’t want to have the equipment delivered too early as this might cause you to incur unnecessary daily rental. On the other hand, if you intend to start loading your trash bin early on a Friday morning, you might want to have it delivered on a Thursday. We can not always promise an exact time of day for delivery, but we can promise to have your dumpster delivered to Bettendorf, Iowa on a particular day. Bottom line is that having your bin delivered a day oil advance ensures that it’s there when you want to start loading it.
Finding and evaluating the local waste management dumpster rental company in Bettendorf is a necessary step. Maybe you have a friend, neighbor, favorite contractor who you can ask about the local trash haulers. You could always dust off the phone book and look in it for garbage collection companies, if you can find that book/directory. And then there’s the internet- A place to find both local garbage collection companies, nation wide waste giants, and internet waste brokers.Bettendorf, Iowa has some nation-wide waste companies who serve residential and commercial accounts in the area. They generally do a good job with large accounts, but might not bend over backwards to assist a one-time dumpster rental customer. Also, you might have to phone an out-of-town call center and explain to them a whole bunch of times whee you live to get a bin ordered. The internet brokers are pretty much a waste of time and money- They don’t have the trucks or dumpsters to fill your order. So they pretty much take orders from folks who believe they’re dealing with a local company, tack on a whole lot of money to the local dumpster price, and then subcontract the delivery to a local garbage collection company. The problem, in addition to paying an unnecessary middle man fee, is that your specific requests often get lost in the interaction and you don’t get exactly what you have originally asked for.( i.e. delivery time, correct size bin, correct on-site placement of the bin, etc)So then theres the local Bettendorf, Iowa dumpster rental companies. These are the folks, like Landrum Disposal, who have served your city for years, employ local drivers, have the right size dumpster rental for you. And as an added bonus, when you order a trash container from them, your money gets recirculated back into the community in which you live, creating prosperity for all.
Haul rate is the charge you’ll be assessed each time your roll off bin is emptied. You might want to consider this when determining the size bin you order as you’ll want to get the right size from the start to minimize the number of haul rates you’re charged.
Daily rental charge is the charge levied for keeping equipment for an extended period of time. That period of time should be discussed and understood when you order the bin as some companies offer longer periods of rent free usage than others.
Excess tonnage fee is the charge for the weight of the debris, if any, in excess of a pre-determined threshold. Again, this per-ton fee and the threshold should be discusses at the time the order is placed.
And finally, there are the miscellaneous charges that some companies use to line their pockets like administrative fees, fuel surcharges, environmental fees, etc. I don’t like them, you don’t like them, but they’re a part of life at this time with some of the larger companies. It’s just important that you understand what you’re getting into before you rent a dumpster in Bettendorf, Iowa.
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2019-04-19T18:27:56Z
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https://www.landrumdisposal.com/bettendorf/
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I get several newsletters (as I’m sure you all do) and usually they contain interesting articles and information I can use. In the past 2 days I have received two different newsletters that contain food articles. I’m not going to name the newsletters because after doing a little research, they aren’t saying anything really new.
Well, I’m about to say something that is new. Buy FOOD, real FOOD.
The first article brags that the writer can help you SLASH your food bill. The tips include clipping coupons, and checking community bulletin boards for local festivals, openings, etc., that offer free food.
OK, clipping coupons is OK if you’re getting coupons for (1) food you normally buy, and (2) it’s REAL FOOD, not prepackaged instant processed crap.
Showing up at community festivals just for the free food, which is usually made-from-boxes crap or high fat, high salt recipes because everyone always loves those, is not a good idea nutritionally or morally. Go to the festival in your community because you want to be part of the community.
If you buy lots of prepackaged, processed items saving money on your grocery bill is not that difficult. Stop buying them. I say terrible things about these products because they are terrible products. You save money by not buying them anymore.
WAIT! Before you start typing about how much time these items save you, hear me out. The only prepackaged items I buy are things I can’t make from scratch like: flour, pasta noodles, some bread, grits, some cereals, soymilk, 100% juice (in the winter), soda water and rice. I’m not talking about the occasional treat like a candy bar or popcorn. I’m talking about the stuff I buy regularly.
What I buy is actual food. The snappy current term is “whole food.” I think that’s misleading and I don’t use it. I buy FOOD because crap in boxes is not, for the most part, food. Just because you can eat it doesn’t make it food. Just because it tastes good doesn’t make it food. Ask any small child with crayons in her mouth, happily chewing away.
Eating healthy is so much more expensive! people tell me, clutching their boxes of .25 macaroni, and it takes so much more time to cook from scratch!
And check out the farmer’s markets. They can give you all the info you need.
It takes so long to cook from scratch, you say? Depends on what you’re cooking. Many people will have to get a cookbook -you can find them at the library for free-because they haven’t cooked in a while. But the basics aren’t that difficult or time-consuming. Think about the last time you stopped at your favorite fast food place (ugh) and be honest about how long it took to get there in traffic, how long you stood in line. And think about this: If you have a family, what more loving thing can you do for them than feed them a healthy, nutritious meal? They are your family. Get them involved!
Back to the main issue: food. Say you still want bacon in the morning and steak at night. There are farmers who do it the old way, letting the cows and chickens actually roam naturally and they slaughter as humanely as possible. They cost more, but you can eat without as much guilt. Eat smaller portions. Really. You can make portions that are 25% smaller and save that much on your meat bill. Trimming in lots of places can save a lot your food bill. And think about this- you’re helping local farmers, your own community, not large corporations whose CEO’s make million dollar bonuses.
Now that I have given you some suggestions about simply buying real food instead of boxed crap, let’s address the actual cost. I live alone, so I know I don’t have to spend as much as a family of four. But the concept behind how I manage my food budget is the same for everyone.
First, because I’m buying real food, every penny counts. If you’re buying junk that doesn’t contribute to your nutritional needs, the money is wasted. If you are unsure about nutrition, get a book from the library. It’s not that complicated, although a lot of processed food companies want you to think that. Basically, you need to make sure you have a varied diet to ensure you get what you need.
The second newsletter article I mentioned tells you about this great APP that you can use to tell you what is in a food product by scanning the bar code into your phone….for goodness’ sake, just READ the ingredients list! The rest of my article is about food that doesn’t come in a box, unless it’s something I can’t make myself, and I list those things. Those items have a very, very short ingredients list. I love technology, too, but when it comes to food, the closer to the real thing, the better. You don’t need an APP for that.
You can teach yourself what you should be eating. One of the best things I ever heard (from a nutritionist) was “The closer you can get to its original state, the healthier it is (with the exception of meat, of course.) Raw veggies are best, if you cook them, steam them.” See? You’re already saving time!
Back to cost. I spent $40 last week on my groceries. That included several bags of dried beans, which will last several months. Fresh vegetables, soymilk, vegetable juice, bread and soda water. I use the soda water with something like apple juice to make myself a healthy soda. It’s good, tastes like punch and even kids like it. You don’t have to tell them how healthy and cheap it is. Just serve it.
I made my dinner-cut up raw veggies (which used a fraction of the fresh veggies) hummus, (which I make myself from beans,) tea and half a toasted pita.
I was completely satisfied and got all my nutritional requirements. I didn’t even start on most of what I bought, but let’s say I had to feed 4 people this meal. Before you start guffawing, I want to tell you about my nieces. They stayed with me some time back and we made up a large platter of veggies, hummus, pita bread and apple-soda. They loved it, told me it was a party platter! We chopped everything together, they had a great time arranging the platter to be especially pretty while we talked about the different veggies. They had no idea broccoli was full of calcium. They were also teenagers. They ate until they were stuffed and we had some left over. No problem, I said, that will go into the next hummus batch. They were so excited that we had to make hummus the next day.
In other words, it may not be as hard as you think to wean your kids off McDonald’s. Food can be a family project.
Anyway, let’s say I used half the veggies for one meal for 4. I use the rest to make a HUGE pot of vegetable soup that I put into 2 and 4 size serving bags and put in the freezer. Yes, those veggies will make more than one pot, believe me. I also don’t use potatoes in the soup I’m going to freeze because potatoes don’t taste as good after they are frozen. When I go to make the next pot of soup I start by cutting up and cooking a potato or two, then I add the frozen soup to the pot after the potatoes are tender. potatoes aren’t something I have to buy every week and a 10 pound bag is less than $5.
Recently, I was stuck in my little mountain home for several days without being able to get out and my freezer full of soup was especially delicious.
Back to cost. The veggies cost $25. The first meal of cut-up veggies uses half of them- $12.50. That’s not much for a family of four. OK, say you made only one large pot of soup with the rest. That will make up eight 2-portion servings (I know this is true because I make up 2-portion servings all the time. I have it for lunch and dinner on the days I thaw it out) that’s the rest of the veggies-$12.50 for 2 meals. That’s for all 4 people.You’re also serving bread with these meals, and a beverage so everyone is satisfied. Let’s add $2 for bread and beverage to each meal. That’s $14.50. So far, you’re spending less than going to a fast food restaurant. And it’s FOOD.
OK, I think you get the idea. Now, about all that time you have to spend making food for your family. Hhmm, that doesn’t actually sound so awful, does it? Food for the family? What better way to let them know how important they are? Also, remember my little side about my nieces and our veggie meal? They worked with me to make that meal. Stop making yourself crazy thinking you have to do everything by yourself. Let this be a family activity. Your children, and your husband, can be involved. Along with saving money, you’re helping your family become acquainted with values that will stand the test of time.
I had a friend who, after several years back out on his own, told me “What I miss the most are the times we all made dinner. We all worked in the kitchen, talking about school, work, and we didn’t care about time. We weren’t trying to get it finished so we wouldn’t miss our shows or whatever. The kids set the table, poured the tea, my wife and I stirred the pots, cut up vegetables (until the kids were old enough to be trusted with the knives!) and, oh, we just taught them by working with them. Now, they do the same things with their kids and feel sorry for newlyweds who don’t know how to feed themselves! It was such a good time, such a close time every day.” How can you put a figure on that?
My point is this: feed yourself real food. You’ll save money, you’ll be healthier, your children will be learning real life lessons…and you’ll get to feel really, really noble.
My car sat at the garage awaiting a fan assembly. I’d spent $1500 in the past few months on oil leak repairs, new tires, new radiator, and this last made me groan. No matter how much was right with your car, if there’s no fan to cool the engine, you can’t drive. I could do nothing but wait. Snow and ice storms in my part of the mountains had made travel hazardous.
Frustrated, feeling trapped, I considered renting a car. The expense quickly brought me back to reality. The bus, I thought, and went online in search of schedules and ticket prices. I could buy a round trip ticket for less than the cost of gas if I drove myself. The idea of spending several hours on the bus actually appealed to me. I could read. Think. Compose something for my friend.
My bus left Friday night at 9:15 pm. The other options were nine and 9:30 am, neither of which was possible for Richard, my landlord. I quickly realized that while the bus might be less costly it was definitely not convenient, and public transportation meant you had to rely on someone else to take you there and pick you up.
My landlord agreed to take me to the bus station and pick me up when I got back. I appreciated his generosity-the bus was 20 miles away in Asheville. I gave him $20 for gas and his time, acknowledging one of the reasons more people don’t take the bus. You’re dependent on other people’s schedules, not just the bus schedule. Still, even with the extra $20 I gave him, it was less than driving and less than renting. I printed my tickets at home, one tiny bit of convenience, and packed a small carry-on bag so I wouldn’t have to haul around a suitcase or pay a baggage fee.
Richard dropped me at the station early-several hours early- to avoid being caught in bad weather after dark. In the mountains, winding roads with severe curves can be treacherous once the sun, and the temperature, goes down.
I walked into the station at 5 pm. There were many businesses on Tunnel Road and I thought I’d have a leisurely dinner, walk around a bit, and settle in with a book once it got cold and dark. I checked in with the station manager, tucked my canvas bag into a locker (4 quarters), and walked the 2 blocks to an inviting Mexican restaurant where I enjoyed a quiet meal.
When I got back to the station, a young black girl was stuffing her own bag in a nearby locker. I sat down and pulled my book out.
“You know they close up at 4:30?” she asked me after she closed her locker.
“What?” I asked, looking up form my book, thinking I had misunderstood.
“They close at 4:30 and open back up at 8,” she said, nodding at the man behind the counter, who was beginning to jingle keys.
Maybe if more people rode the bus, I thought and sighed. I walked out and spent the next 3 hours walking and visiting shops I would never had visited any other time.
First, I stopped in at Anna’s Linens and marveled at what people will pay for a dish to put their soap. I looked at towels, bathroom accessories, curtains, and placemats. I felt no urge at all to buy anything, but there was a couple at the cash register insisting that the husband get a veteran’s discount an a sale item. It put me in mind of all the ‘dealing with the public’ jobs I’d had and wanted to pat the patient salesgirl on the head. The wife was incensed that they couldn’t get a discount on top of the sale price (a 30% mark-down) and the sales girl explained, repeatedly, that sale items did not qualify for any other discounts. I left before the manager showed up to give the woman the extra 10% just to get them out of the store.
My next stop was the Dollar General where I walked down aisles badly in need of attention, but not likely to get it, since I only spotted 2 employees in the store, both working cash registers. Clothes and toys lay on the floor, Christmas ornaments spilled from packaging and boxes of snacks had been torn open. Who had a party back here? I thought, and once again felt sorry for the employees who would have to clean this mess up after closing. For $7 an hour.
I found a pair of gloves for $1 and a velour lounge set on sale for $10 ( My gloves and a sweater were in my bag in the station locker.) I put them in my basket along with a travel size toothpaste and toothbrush combo for $1.
My next stop was the grocery store. Ingles had a cafe and I thought I could get away with reading and sipping something hot without buying anything else. This Ingles boasted a Starbucks right next to the little cafe-a few tables next to windows near the produce section-where I bought a regular coffee and a slice of pumpkin bread.
I sat down next to a window, sipped my overpriced coffee, and read my paperback. My feet warmed up, my hands warmed up and the coffee eventually made me want to visit the bathroom. Ingles also has a very nice bathroom. I didn’t feel bad about hanging out in Ingles because I shop there every week.
After my refreshing stop at Ingles, I realized I still had over an hour to go. I walked, carefully, carefully, through the parking lot mined with ice patches and brick hard snow clumps, to the street where I waited for the light so I could cross. I assumed cars wouldn’t see me so I took care to cross at the intersection, watching my feet so I didn’t slip, while still keeping an eye on cars. I breathed a lot easier when I made it to the other side of the street without incident.
From there, I walked to the Cracker Barrel. I mingled with many people desperate for a table, obviously hungry people, and I was glad I’d already had dinner. I walked through the store and marveled at the things people will buy. There was a set of wind chimes made of wire and glittery metal butterflies in unlikely colors. The usual table tucked away with Christmas items on sale. Candy in all colors. Pictures of pink-bottomed children to hang in the bathroom. More pictures, some lighted, of Bible verses.
I didn’t buy anything. I stopped at the Dairy Queen next door and got a soda to get the taste of coffee out of my mouth. Jeopardy was on and I eventually got into a conversation with a couple of women, about my age, about some of the questions. We were thrilled when we got one right that the smartly dressed contestants missed.
I got back to the station just after they opened back up, glad to have place to read my book without feeling guilty.
A Mexican family came in shortly after I started my book. A mother and father (I assumed) were sending off a teenage daughter. Two brothers carried in the luggage, one large black suitcase, and one large leopard print bag. The counter man weighed everything and told them the leopard suitcase was way over, the black bag way underweight and if they switched items from one to the other, they could save $100. I thought that was very kind, he didn’t have to do that. The few people in the station spent the next 30 minutes being entertained by the unexpected amount of underwear that came out of the leopard print bag and was tucked into the black bag. The brothers and father retired to the sitting area and let the women handle all that. A younger sister was charged with the care of the three children with them. All three were under 8 years old, so she had her hands full, especially since she was still learning to walk on the stiletto boots she was wearing. My Lord, I thought, she can’t be more than 13, what on earth is she doing…I stopped myself, suddenly remembering the first pair of heels I’d been allowed to wear-to church-and smiled at the young woman. So they were too tall for her age, I thought. So? She’s taking care of her little brothers and sisters, let her have too-tall heels.
The bus pulled in at exactly the scheduled time. The seats were in twos, with the aisle between. Each of got our set and during the ride I noticed a lot of people taking advantage of the quiet and the extra seat to grab a nap.
I watched the countryside roll by, the streetlights shining on flat snow, like cake icing.
We had one stop in Spartanburg. Three people got off, including a blind man with his guide dog. No one got on.
When I recognized the skyline of my old hometown, I called my friend to pick me up. Downtown Charlotte after midnight is still active. My friend was concerned that a “weirdo” might spirit me away. I looked around, of course, I’m not naive, but I saw people like me, people traveling from one place to another. We were mostly tired.
The bus terminal in Charlotte was much larger than Asheville, but it was pretty much the same. Heavy wire benches, vending machine, a loud roof mounted TV, bank of telephones near the restroom. The Charlotte facility also offered a coffeeshop/gift shop that was still open. My friend got there before I succumbed to the urge to buy a $2 soda.
My return trip started Monday morning. Cold, but nothing like Asheville, the snow on the hillsides was beginning to melt. My bus went first to Winston-Salem, where I had to change to get on a bus for Ashville. The countryside rolled by in shades of gray. Gray sky, gray pavement, gray trees, gray snow by the road. I closed my eyes and listened to the low thunder of tires.
There was no loud cell-phone conversation, no children shouting or crying. There were more people, but once again, mostly people like me, traveling. Alone.
In Winston, I had about an hour so I walked up the street past several restaurants that were obviously closed until I reached a submarine shop. I had a full size sub and tea. It felt nice, being on my own, watching people, knowing my schedule was the bus schedule. I didn’t feel any of the stress I usually did traveling, needing to leave, wanting to get on the road before rush hour, get home before dark. I was a rider, not a driver. It was wonderfully relaxing.
The bus made a couple of stops in small towns. We didn’t get off, just picked up another rider.
Richard was waiting for me when we pulled into Asheville. We talked about my cats, which I had missed, and the weather predictions. I was glad to be home, and even though I’d been on the road longer than I would have I been driving, I wasn‘t nearly as tired. We laughed about my journey through the shops of Tunnel Road and I said I knew where to buy my next set of shower curtains. Mainly, I was glad to be back, the way I always feel when I get home from a trip and not nearly as tired.
The extra time had given me a chance to think about the reason I was making the trip. I thought through some of the things I wanted to tell my friend, and thought about what I could do for him in the little time we both had left. Riding the bus gave me a quiet, soothing place to reflect. I”m glad I chose to travel that way, and I’ll definitely do it again.
One: the bus is very safe, reliable means of transportation. You can get mugged anywhere, the bus station is no more likely than anywhere. I didn’t see any weirdos (not unusually weird, anyway). I didn’t see any teenage runaways, though I looked and wondered where they had all gone. Maybe we just don’t have as many during the winter-at least not coming to Asheville.
Two: The bus is cheaper. I spent $64 on a round trip ticket (a little less because I paid for it online) gave Richard $20 so my total travel cost was $84. My van costs $35-40 to fill up in Asheville, a little less somewhere else. It takes a full tank to get to Charlotte, I have to fill it up when I get there, and I have to fill it up when I get home-that last isn’t something you can’t count. I have to fill it up to go anywhere the next day. So I spend a minimum of $100 when I drive to Charlotte. We aren’t even taking into consideration oil and wear and tear. The savings are worth the inconvenience.
Three: The time. Yeah, it takes me longer, but I’m more relaxed, less tired. I’m willing to give up the time, which I can use reading, writing, or simply observing. And relaxing.
Four: Safety. The people riding the bus are just people. They are going somewhere they need to go. Yes, most of them are doing it because they don’t have a car but I hope gradually more and more people will be doing it because it’s smart.
There are also some interesting online discussions about bus travel and experiences.
Next time, try something different. Take the bus.
Winter is beautiful in the way only Winter can be. It stands in defiance of what we expect beauty to be. It is not warm, welcoming, or enticing. It is not tactile in the way other season are. It does not invite us to touch, and when we do, we are met with cold, brittle sensations.
Not like Spring with joy bursting from every branch, shooting right out of the ground.
Not Summer, with juicy fruit, rich carpets of grass, cool shade from nurturing trees.
Not like Autumn, with wild parties of color, and leaves that dance across our path, inviting us to share in one last festival before the silence of the coming season.
Winter is severe, stark, and breathtaking. Beauty few can grasp, the few who do not sleep through the season in front of TV’s and computers, burrowed in their homes and offices.
It is there for those who dare to reach out and touch the fiery ice, who will allow themselves to be clothed in snow, who will hear the crunch of ice and snow, dead leaves and twigs as they walk in the woods, who hear sounds beyond the silence.
It is a hard beauty, and one that does not care if you join in or not. It is proud and unrelenting. Its beauty lies in the very force of life. Winter holds the seed for all the seasons to come and needs nothing to embellish its power.
2011. Sounds like science fiction. I remember when “In The Year 2929” was in the Top 10 and it sounded so cheesy. We aren’t literally connected to our computers yet, we still have the use of our legs…but now the damn song doesn’t sound nearly so cheesy.
This year I look back at the last 12 months and still wonder how they flew by so quickly. I still remember one failure after another. I also look at my work and feel some measure of progress. Success is something I define differently than I did in other years. Now success is someone complimenting my work, someone buying it. Success is having a long conversation with a friend in pain, encouraging a family member when they are frustrated and frightened. Success is going to sleep knowing my rent is paid, my vehicle is running and I have a job to get up for.
Success is understanding life is lived one day at a time. Success is knowing in my heart I’m doing the best I can.
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2019-04-25T00:36:00Z
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https://katiewritesagain.wordpress.com/2011/01/
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Most people would think that a pool in a backyard full of plants would be a mess. Luckily, there are some helpful tricks to having a beautiful backyard without the hassle of having to maintain it all the time. Especially here in Arizona where many backyards have pools. A few weeks ago we published a blog with some tips on how to have plants around a pool without the debris. One of the best ways to have plants around your pool, but without all that debris is to use potted plants.
Succulent plants and large leaf plants are the best option when it comes to plants around a pool and they require even less clean up when they are in a pot. Not only do most of these plants offer a tropical look to your landscape, they have very little debris. Potted plants can add a unique look to your yard when you get creative with the pots and décor.
Most of the dirt and debris will be collected in the pot, so you won’t have to worry about it getting into your pool. Plus, potted plants are an effortless way to add some beauty to the border of your pool. It is always fun to go with colorful plants because that will make the blue water stand out even more. When you use a pot, you are able to mix together a variety of colored plants that are a great addition to any poolside.
Potted plants are an easy way to break-up boring blank spots that surround your sidewalks or pool. Taller plants are always a great option for pots because they add height to your backyard landscape, which helps with keeping your yard private and also adds shade to your pool area. From the ground level when you are in your pool, these tall plants look really neat and add some extra flare compared to plants that are in the ground.
You can never go wrong with dwarf palm trees or other palms like the fan palm, especially in Arizona. These plants can survive the heat, require little water and don’t leave much debris around.
Most potted plants can be easily maintained and do not require a lot of clean up, but if you are ever stuck or don’t feel like maintaining your landscape yourself, make sure to call the professionals at BV Lawn Care!
Helpful Tip: Potted plants around the pool are the perfect place to have those fun trailing plants like the desert broom!
Citrus trees thrive in Arizona’s climate, but caring for them can be tricky if you don’t know what you are doing. These citrus trees tips will come in handy when you are maintaining your trees in Arizona.
Did you know that trimming your fruit trees actually isn’t a good idea? Most people trim their trees just to make them look good, but citrus trees are considered bushes and that means that their branches grow low to the ground naturally.
By trimming Arizona citrus trees, you are helping lead your trees to a shorter life span. You always want to keep in mind the health of your tree because this will help lead to better fruit production.
There are times of the year where you may need to trim your trees, but make sure to only trim off a little amount. Why is this? Not trimming your tree will leave extra leaves and branches that will protect the trunk from sun exposure.
To make it easier to water and fertilize, you can trim the bottom of your tree a little, but make sure to keep a few thick branches that touch the ground. It also might be necessary to trim some branches that might be growing into other branches or branches that might be growing erratic.
If you are going to shape the foliage of your citrus tree, make sure you are using the right techniques and keeping the health of your tree in mind. You never want to trim so much off that you are exposing branches to the sun.
So when is the best time to trim Arizona citrus trees? It is best to trim your citrus trees in the spring because then they will be ready for the harsh temperatures Arizona sees in the summer. Even though citrus trees do very well in Arizona, they can get sun damage easily. That is why you want to make sure your citrus tree isn’t trimmed too much so that it will still provide the trunk with shade. It is also acceptable to do a little bit of trimming in the fall, but make sure to avoid it in the winter just in case we see cold temperatures that may lead to frost.
When it comes to maintaining citrus trees in Arizona, you just have to remember that the trees are actually considered bushes and that the health of the tree is more important than the look, so keep that trimming to a minimal!
Helpful Tip: When it comes to water sprouts, you will want to remove these. Not only will it make your citrus tree look nicer, but also it is good to remove these because they will actually not be able to produce fruit that is edible. You never want these water sprouts to take over your Arizona citrus tree!
Maintaining a beautiful lawn requires quite a bit of work and if you don’t want to hire professionals to do it, then you want to make sure you are using the right lawn care equipment. You also want to make sure you are using the tools the right way.
To start, you want to own some basic lawn care equipment. Tools like a garden cart or wheelbarrow will help easily haul everything for you and comes in handy when doing all types of yard work. You also want a garden rake. The steal headed type is best to prepare small areas of soil for planting.
If you need to remove turf, a grape hoe has a wide and heavy blade that does the work for you efficiently. To trim flowers, carefully use grass shears and to help clean up any debris after, a landscape rake will do the job. A rake with a 36-inch aluminum head on an aluminum or wood shaft will remove debris from soil while also leveling it out. To rake leaves, you can use a more lightweight leaf rake that you can find in a bamboo like material or even plastic. There are many options when it comes to lawn care equipment, just find which one will work best for your lawn.
One of the most needed lawn care equipment is a shovel. You don’t want to just own one shovel, but you will want to have a few different types on hand because they all have different purposes. A shovel with a round point is to be used when you want to remove large qualities of material like sand and soil. A D handled shovel is best to break up dirt, then follow-up using a long handled shovel to dig the dirt.
When it comes to gardens, smaller versions of lawn care equipment work best. A trowel, which is a hand tool with a pointed small shovel on the end of a metal handle, is perfect for scooping. The trowel will help break up dirt in your garden easily and help dig small holes for planting. A weeder is a short shovel with a forked steel head and helps get rid of weeds easily.
A blower isn’t as necessary in Arizona as it may be in other parts of the country, but it isn’t a bad tool to keep on hand. If you have a lot of grass and want to mow your own lawn, then there are several different types and sizes of lawn mowers. Depending on the size of your yard and how often you need to mow it, it is sometimes makes more sense to hire professionals like BV Lawn Care to do the work.
When it comes to lawn care equipment, there are a lot of options, but don’t get overwhelmed. You just need to evaluate your landscape and choose the best tools for your yard.
Helpful Tip: A trowel is the perfect tool to use when dealing with potted plants!
Succulent plants, specifically cactus and agaves, are a great addition to any Arizona landscape. These decorative plants tend to thrive in the valley because they can handle the high temps and don’t require a lot of rain. Plus, their striking features add a tropical look to the desert landscape.
A succulent plant by definition is a plant that stores water in the stems, roots and leaves. It stems from the Latin word “sucus” meaning juice or sap. Succulent plants come in a variety of styles and in a number of different shapes, sizes, colors and textures.
The most popular succulents found in Arizona are cactus. They are known to survive the extreme heat without needing much water. Most succulents love the sun, but it is still smart to try to plant them in an area where they do get some shade and not always getting direct sunlight. Succulents usually stay green all year round and some even have bright colors, which make them a great addition to your lawn to mix in with other plants and trees.
One of the best things about succulent plants is that they are easy to care for. You can put them pretty much anywhere, like on your patio or even around the pool. All you really need to have a thriving succulent is to use soil with good drainage.
If for some reason your soil seems to be too dry, try mixing in potting soil to help retain water. If Arizona is seeing extremely dry weather, try to water succulents once a week and wait for the soil the to be completely dry before watering it. This will help prevent any overwatering.
With a lot of plants, there are some safety issues when it comes to those beautiful succulents. Many of them have spikes and thorns and they can cause some painful injuries. Try not to put these plants in areas where you will see a lot of traffic or where they can get in the pool easily. Be careful when dealing with the sap as well because it could cause a rash and is toxic if ingested.
There are a variety of succulent plants to choose from and since they are so easy to care for, you might want to add quite a few of these plants around your yard!
Helpful Tip: We don’t see cold of temperatures often in the valley, but when we do, cover your succulent because they don’t do well with frost!
Living in beautiful Arizona, you may think there isn’t much to do with your landscape to prepare for fall. But fall is actually the best time to plant trees, flowers and vegetables and also a great time to do some lawn care.
The months of September and October are the ideal times to work on your yard and do some planting and gardening. Especially for Arizona residents, the ground isn’t frozen yet, so the soil is easy to work with. Plus, by the time spring comes around, all of the hard work is already started!
September is when you want to decide if you want to overseed your grass for winter so that you can start preparing. If not, then use a high nitrogen fertilizer to help keep your grass looking green longer. You want to wait until the end of September to start your garden because that is when it really cools down, especially at night. The best vegetables to plant during this time of year are broccoli, spinach, carrots, peas and lettuce. The vegetables will have plenty of time to be ready for all of your holiday festivities. If it starts to get really cold out you, you can use floating row covers to provide extra heat and prevent frost.
October is when you want to sow winter grass if that is what you are choosing to do with your landscape. If not, then continue to use fertilizer. If you are unsure, you can always call the professionals at BV Lawn Care.
The month of October is also the perfect month to plant those citrus trees because it is still warm enough for the roots to grow. Just make sure to always remember to keep the trees hydrated. If we do see some colder temperature and winds, make sure to keep an eye on them and water the trees more if needed because these conditions can easily dehydrate them.
You might want to wait until November to plant wild flowers. It depends on how warm the temperatures will be in October. Cooler temperatures will help flowers like tulips, daffodils and iris thrive.
Landscaping is always more enjoyable when the weather is beautiful. Arizona usually sees amazing weather at the end of September and during the months of October and November. Make sure to take advantage of this time and do some planting and gardening!
Helpful Tip: Clean up your yard and add some pretty fall decorations. From pumpkins to a handful of different Halloween decorations, there are plenty of looks to choose from. Sometimes having fun decorations is all the motivation you need to keep your yard clean and looking good.
Maintaining your lawn can be a lot of work, so it is nice to hire a lawn care company that can do it for you. But there are a few factors to consider before just hiring any lawn care company.
First, you need to decide what you want for services and how much you are willing to spend. Most common services include fertilizing, tree trimming, mowing and other landscape maintenance. Don’t be afraid to ask questions things like what type of products and tools do they use, do they routinely spray for pests and what their philosophy is on lawn care.
One of the most important factors when it comes to hiring a lawn care company is their reputation. You always want to do your own research on the company, but start by reading reviews or asking for referrals. It is helpful to check out the company’s website to make sure they are credible and trustworthy.
When it comes to research, you want to look for things like how long they have been in business, reviews on the internet and also any testimonials they may have posted on their website. It is also crucial that the company you hire is licensed and insured.
Start by asking if they can provide a free estimate. But make sure they are actually going to come out to your yard to take a look so that you can get an accurate estimate. Plus, this says a lot about the lawn care company. You don’t want to use a company that won’t take the time to come out and evaluate your lawn.
Since you are paying for a service, you want to make sure that you are getting what you want. It is important that you can communicate easily with your landscapers. BV Lawn Care offers the best in customer service with an efficient and friendly staff that can take care of all your lawn care needs.
Lawn care companies are not all the same and we are not all looking for the same kind of yard maintenance. That is why you should always do your own research and take into consideration what you want and what you need from a lawn care company.
Helpful Tip: Don’t be afraid to ask neighbors and friends whom they recommend. Referrals are always great; just remember to do your own research also since you might be looking for something a little different for your lawn care!
When you own a dog, you may think it is impossible to maintain an attractive lawn, but you can still have a safe yard for fido without comprising the beauty of it. Your ultimate goal for the perfect dogscape is to create a safe, yet fun environment for your pet, while still having an attractive lawn full of plants and trees.
First, make sure to design your lawn around the needs of your pup. Keep in mind that they need lots of space to exercise and romp. You will want this space to be a safe area for your pet to prevent any injuries. If you do want to have trees in this area, just make sure they are sturdy and safe. You should also designate a certain area for your pet to potty. Flagstone, pea gavel, grass or even bricks make clean up easy. Plus, these things are safe on the paws and make a nice addition to any yard.
A very important part of a pet safety yard is what you put on the ground. You want to make sure it is gentle on your pet’s paws so use things like smooth flagstones, pebbles or even small cedar chips. These chips are really easy on the paws and they won’t get stuck in their fur. It is also great to use for easy potty clean up.
If you want to have a garden or flowerbed, just build a border around it and train your pet to keep out. It is also a good idea to use raised flowerbeds so it is more difficult for your pet to access. And always use temporary fencing around new areas. Once your pet is trained to avoid these areas, you won’t have to worry about them destroying it!
Dogs like to have fun and relax in the sun, but they still want an area they can go to that is shaded. They usually prefer their own space, so a doghouse is always nice to have or even just an area with a dog bed just for them on the patio.
The most important part of a dogscape is that you have plants and trees that are safe for your pet. But you have to think about other things than just poisonous plants and trees. Thorny and spiny plants aren’t the best options because they can stick to the coat easily and can get stuck in the paws, which is very painful for your dog. They can also cause injury to the eye if they get poked with it. Foxtail grasses are another threat to the eye and even the ear. They can work there way into the ear, which causes a lot of pain and requires a trip to the vet. They can also get stuck in the paw and they could cause damage if inhaled. Plants like the bamboo palm, the magnolia bush and most weeds can be very toxic.
Our pets are our family and we want to be able to share our yard with them safely. With these helpful tips, you will be able to have a safe yard for your pet and still be able to enjoy the beauty of it.
Helpful Tip: For more information on plants and trees that could be a threat to your dog, visit http://www.aspca.org/pet-care/animal-poison-control/toxic-and-non-toxic-plants.
Whether you are revamping your yard or designing a new yard, there are many things you can do to spruce up your property. Even the smallest change can help you get even more enjoyment out of your surroundings.
Of course it is always a good idea to use a lawn care service and to also maintain your yard throughout the year. In Arizona, we are lucky enough to get some great weather year round, which allows us to spend more time outside. You will be able to relax more and enjoy your yard more if you keep it maintained and tidy.
Besides hiring a residential lawn care company, you will also want to start a list of what you want your yard to be like. When you have a plan in place, you will be able to execute it better. You want to have a good idea of what you want from your yard and so that you can plan where things go. For example, do you want space for the kids to play around? Or do you want a nice patio or a special water feature? Planning ahead will make the process easier and less stressful.
You will also want to think about the weather. The sun and wind hit at different spots during different times of the day. Try to notice the weather pattern in your yard and avoid putting things directly in the sun or in the path of winds. If you tend to always have the sun hitting a certain area of your patio, maybe add some shade so that you will be able to enjoy your yard at all times of the day.
It is nice to have a focal point that you can build and decorate your yard around. A water feature is perfect for Arizona, but you can also have a nice big tree or bush or even a statue. The main focal point will help draw the eye to the landscape. You can have fun with adding things to the surrounding area, just remember to not make it too cluttered. There is such a thing as too much.
Also think about details, like the variations in sizes, shapes and colors. This is your yard; so you can design and decorate it how you want! Try using tall plants against a wall or even adding vines to add to the backdrop of a flowerbed. You can also add some subtle and seasonal décor throughout the year to add some change.
No matter what you decide to do with your yard, make sure you are having fun and being safe when making changes. And of course always remember to maintain your yard so that you will get the most enjoyment out of your surroundings all year long.
Helpful Tip: Patience is key. Take your time and never overdo it. You want to create something that is enjoyable, but you also want to have fun and actually enjoy the process. It is best to start small so that you don’t get overwhelmed or try to tackle too many things at once. Start sensible with a small flowerbed or even just a few veggies in the garden. You can always add to it!
It may come as a surprise to some that the Phoenix area is home to some beautiful lawns. Quite a bit of work is required to maintain a well-kept lawn in the desert, especially since we have summer lawns and winter lawns. Winter is just around the corner and it is the opportune time to prepare your rye grass for the upcoming months.
Since the summer climate and winter climate differ so much in the desert, lawns see different types of grass throughout the year. Bermuda grass is popular in the summer because it can handle the harsh temperatures of the Valley of the sun. To help keep your Bermuda grass green through the whole summer, it is important to have rye grass during the cold season.
When the temperatures start to fall to 60 degrees or below at night, usually in October, is the best time to start planting your rye grass for the season. You want to make room for the rye grass, so you must cut back and thin the Bermuda grass. Planting rye grass is known as overseeding because you are planting the rye seed over the Bermuda grass.
Rye grass usually starts drying out in April or May, when we start seeing triple digit temperatures. Around this time, stop watering the rye grass for a couple of weeks to help it dry out. To awaken the Bermuda grass for the summer, start to water again after the rye grass has dried out.
It does take a lot of effort to have rye grass, which is why everyone doesn’t have it. It isn’t really difficult, just time consuming and it does require a lot of water. But if you want to have the best grass all year long, you need to take care of your Bermuda grass in the summer and your rye grass in the winter.
Helpful Tip: Beware of overseeding when on the golf course. Overseeding can cause choppy courses and that is never fun when playing a round of golf. Most courses alert the public on when they plant to start the overseeding process. Check with your golf course before heading out.
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2019-04-19T16:57:26Z
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https://bvlawncare.com/blog/
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This paper results from the research project carried out in 1996. Different notable personalities, community leaders and elders were interviewed in different parts of the region. Through this work the author, a Sidama himself, hopes that the article will help those who are interested in carrying out further study in the field in the future. The presentation below is restricted to the foundational elements of the Sidamas’ faith and the way the Sidamas live out this faith.
The Sidama nation is located in the north-east Africa, the now southern Ethiopia. Customarily, the Sidama people have been agriculturalist and semi-pastoralist. However, today, because of the high density of population and education, pastoral life is disappearing. The Sidama land is located between 4500 - 10000ft above sea level, and is marked by three climatic zones: lowlands, midlands, and highlands all supporting different activities and life styles. About 90% of the Sidamas live in rural areas with the substantial number being adherents of Sidama religion. There exist the followers of Christianity and Islam.
The social organization in Sidama is changing because of the education, political changes, contacts with different people from other regions and provinces and religions. This phenomenon also affects their cherished values, such as the rule of Halaale (truth), the government of the elders, dialogical and consensus based method of problem solving, and the fear (respect) of Magano (God).
God, spirits, and ancestors are the foundational elements of faith for the Sidamas and are the constitutive part of their life.
God is named as Magano. The word magano is a compound word of ma and gano. Ma means "what" and gano has three meanings: as a noun it means conspiracy; when used as a verb it means I beat and I say or call or name. The approximate meaning of the compound word Magano can be "What can I call?" or "What can I say?" It indicates a deep experience of incomprehensible and incomparable God. It could be that the original person, unable to express the experience, resolved by calling Magano, "What can I say or call?"
Magano is addressed by the Sidamas as father. Other attributes for Magano are Kalaqa (the Creator), Kaaliqa (the Almighty) and Halalancho (the True One). There exists one, supreme, and universal Magano. He alone created all that a person could see around: humankind, nature, animals, birds, heaven, sun, moon, stars, and so on. The Sidamas make a clear distinction between God and their common ancestors saying that the ancestors were created by Magano. They say that "Magano had created and taken them away". Even during their sacrificial offering to their common ancestors Magano comes first before the ancestors' names.
An elaborate story of creation is not what is typical of Sidamas. Some clans attribute a mythical element and special power to their common ancestors, such as claiming a descent from heaven or emergence from earth. Yet every Sidama, if asked about the one responsible for creation, he/she automatically replies that Magano is the one who created all.
The Sidamas generally agree that in the beginning God used to live with people. As the result of sin they committed, Magano departed far away into the sky. Even then Magano is perceived as being actively involved in human life for which reason people continue reconciling themselves with God through sacrificial offerings until today. Magano is called daily in different situations. For instance, people say Maganu wolqai... (In God's power...), Magano anna’ya kaa’li’e (God, my father, help me), Maganu kaa’lona (may God help), and so forth.
The Sidamas possess no statues or images of Magano. For them Magano, though active in their life, cannot be represented. Generally Magano’s name is feared or highly respected and is not called for wrong intentions (e.g. cheating, telling lies, stealing). But one can observe some mischievous people or thieves swearing in Magano’s name to hide themselves from being discovered when they are suspected of such acts. Theft itself is a recent experience for the Sidama people.
There is no special day (like Sunday for Christians) for worshiping Magano. Apart from daily invocation of Magano’s name individuals such as the family heads make burnt offering for thanksgiving without any obligation or time set by a special authority. Communal burnt and sacrificial offerings take place at a particular moment and are dependent on the situations provoking them. More than offerings Magano demands good behavior because one often hears people saying "Do not do that for it displeases Magano" or "Magano will get angry". It is only the act of responding to Magano either in thanksgiving or asking forgiveness that people make animal offerings. The Sidamas see their Magano as a true loving father, the one who really cares for his children. They also experience Him as merciful and believe that He forgives their trespasses when they ask for forgiveness. Sprinkling of the blood of the sacrificial lamb is a sign of reconciliation with Magano and with each other.
The Sidamas believe that there exist good and bad spirits. The good spirit, dancha Ayyaana, is identified as God's spirit, as the spirit coming from God. This manifests how Magano is perceived as being present in the people's daily life. Maganu Ayyaana, God’s Spirit, is presented as real and playing the role of giving life and blessings. Without Magano’s name, the spirit is not mentioned. One can certainly think that the hierarchical structure that exists within the community (i.e. ancestors - clan elders and religious leaders - parents - children) reflects the degree of the presence of Maganu Ayyaana. Consequently, a common ancestor is conceived as having Maganu Ayyaana abundantly and is made like divine. He lives with Magano and plays the role of a mediator between Magano and his people. Tribal elders and religious leaders are also filled with Maganu Ayyaana.
The bad spirit, Busha Ayyaana, is also seen as real and is hated by the religious leaders and community elders. They curse it whenever they offer sacrifice to Magano. They command saying, Busha ayaana gobbatee ba’i (Bad spirit, go away from the world!) and Magano busha ayaana gobbatee huni (God destroy the bad spirit from the world". The term sheexaane is a borrowed name from the Christians to refer to the bad spirit and is widely used. The Sidama People also say that evil spirits can cause diseases but cannot cure them. Consequently, some Sidamas fear the evil spirits. The individuals called qaallo are seen as the medium of the bad spirits through which communication with them is enhanced. In order to avoid getting sickness some people give animals (male sheep or goats). These spirits have recognition only in a family setting and not in the community setting. There is no community acceptance of them.
There also exists a female spirit, belonging to mothers-in-law, prayed and honored by women alone. They make food offering to it, sing and dance (always at night and under a tree). They call it woxa. It is a cult of fertility. At child birth, mothers-in-law say: ane woxa tirtohe - let my spirit help you for safe delivery. Sometimes when a dream occurs telling of eventual dangers such as war or plague or drought, women also make an offering (always food) and pray to this invisible mother-in-law spirit. However, they never associate it with being Magano but see it as another existing reality. They are aware that Magano alone is the Supreme. At the same time they believe that this mother-in-law spirit can protect them from the evil spirits and help them during their delivery. The food offered is expected to be eaten by the hyenas in the absence of women. The significance of this requires further investigation.
The Sidamas believe that the ancestors live with Magano, who granted them special power to act. They play a mediating role. However, daily practice of praying to Magano directly or daily calling of Magano’s name and spirit renders the ancestors’ involvement superfluous and reveals Magano’s direct involvement in the life of the people. During the time of supplication Magano’s name takes precedence and that of an ancestor comes next.
Since the Sidama people are organized according to clans, the common ancestor of each clan receives special respect and is paid homage in terms of appreciation that the people came into existence through his instrumentality. The Sidamas, being a patriarchal society, attribute power and authority to men alone. Equal respect and homage is not given to women ancestors. Common ancestors are regarded as very much blessed and filled with Magano's spirit, living in a state of divine. A lot of animals are periodically offered to them as a sacrifice.
Apart from acting as mediators, the common ancestors are seen as blessing and protecting the people and their ethical and religious values. They communicate with their people through dreams and warn them against human abuses of the defenseless, animals, and nature. Whoever dreams a dream, if the dream touches a situation implicating a clan or the nation, spiritual leaders call their councils and examine the dream carefully. If they conclude that the dream truly touches the reality existing within the clan or the nation, they give directions to the people on what to do. They also make an offering to Magano asking for forgiveness and protection from the eventual dangers. The following example illustrates these points.
During an interview with one elder called Ribbo talked about a recent dream dreamt by someone from Holloo clan. The dream was being carefully studied by the clan’s spiritual leaders called Gaana and Woma. And the dream goes as follows: a horse, cow, and dog were pleading in Magano's presence. When Magano asked about their problems, they explained a miserable life they were living in. The horse complained that the areas reserved for the horses to graze (always along the rivers) were no more there. There were now fences everywhere that they could not move as before. The cow complained that the areas reserved for them were shared by the people and that they had no place to move and feed upon. The dog complained that people used to give them food but now no one cared for them. Instead, everyone chased them away and that they were dying of hunger. Magano asked the common ancestor of Holloo clan, who is called Aabo, about the issue. The ancestor replied to Magano that he was going to ask his representatives, the Gaana and Woma.
This dream is to be understood in the Sidama cultural context. It is already noted that the Sidamas used to be semi-pastoralist people. Because of the high population growth, all free places are being occupied. The lands left free for communal use have been divided and shared. People with small pieces of land are very much affected for they lack enough grazing places for their cattle. In the past, all the areas along the rivers were free for the horses to graze. Now it is becoming very narrow and the number of horses as well as cattle is decreasing. Certainly many Sidama people do not like dogs and chase them away. This dream does reflect the reality. The story shows how the Sidamas conceive the relationship between Magano and the common ancestors. The mediator role of the common ancestors is shown in the story. Moreover, even animals are shown receiving Magano’s concern.
The immediate dead parents also receive respect and veneration. A grand-father is also remembered. A person offers a bull for his dead father and to a certain degree he also remembers his dead mother. They are seen as being part of the family still living. They play a role of mediating, blessing, and protecting the family from misfortunes.
Thus far we have seen the elements of faith in Sidama Religion, we now proceed to the faith responses which the Sidamas make in their lives.
Morality, prayer and sacrifice reflect the faith of the Sidama people. And this section explains what these elements are.
Morality and religion are identified in the Sidama culture so much so that outsiders may not recognize the existence of monotheistic religion in it. Consequently, they would easily regard the Sidamas as animists. Many of the missionaries have spoken and some have even written about the people as animists and today some still hold this idea with conviction. However, for a thorough observer and sensitive person, the opposite is true. For Sidamas, morality holds a holistic approach: relationship among individuals, with God, and vis-a-vis creation (land, animals, plants, trees, ...). The dictums, Gafo ikkanno and Maganu di-baxxanno (God does not like it), are the keys that regulate individual’s attitude towards the "other".
At all times a Sidama person would never fail to mention God's name. For example, Magano anna'ya ati afootto; Hai Magano anna'ya; Maganu lao; Maganu kaa'lo,... [in a respective order: God, my Father, You know it all; O God, my Father; May God see or witness; May God help,...].
One cannot find a commandment taught and imposed on the people saying that there is only one Magano to worship and everyone must worship Him. One does not receive or learn the values and practices of Sidama through formal teaching, but learns the ways of behaving and even beliefs and practices from elders through hearing comments about acts, following the elders, and also being reprimanded or physically punished if one acted in an unacceptable way. All passed through customary practices. In other words, the social structures contribute to the young ones to grow in conformity to the cultural values. Seeing, listening to, and following mark children's behavior. As they grow up they, consciously or unconsciously, assimilate and interiorize all the cultural values and practices. Grand-parents and mothers play a role in helping their children to grow in the socially accepted ways. Elder brothers and sisters also help their younger ones.
Elders are generally respected. There has existed a harmonious and supportive relationship between parents and children or the older generation and the younger one. However, today young people, due to different factors such as education, political ideologies, new fundamentalist churches and so forth are diluting the force of the relationship which previously existed between the two generations.
Killing a Sidama person by a Sidama is prohibited. Unfortunately, this value is changing because of the political motivations imposed from outside. For instance, if some people are seen as a threat to Ethiopian government, those who promote the interest of the government would seek to eliminate them.
Adultery and fornication have been also strictly forbidden. Virginity for a girl has been a value honored very much until today. It is considered a very shameful thing for the parents if their daughter is discovered to have lost her virginity. A virgin girl is considered as equal to a man. During marriage people talk of making a girl a woman as if she was never a woman. But if she is not a virgin, she loses her respect and pride, and under customarily setting, she often becomes a second wife and remains under the kindness of her husband. No dowry will be paid for the family. Today, however, because of education there is more relaxation and contact between boys and girls. The educated group does not put emphasis on virginity as a necessary condition for paying dowry and for marriage. As for adultery, Sidama people have lived according to family, sub-clan, and clan level. Those who belonged to one clan regarded themselves as brothers and sisters, and sleeping with the wife of one’s brother was unacceptable and a taboo.
Truth is highly regarded. The expression Halaale gorsitooti [don't abuse or diminish truth] carries with it a deep respect for truth. Maybe this is because truth is also associated with Magano. The people believe that a person who takes offence against truth will certainly suffer the consequence. This is manifested in the expression, Halaalu annasi di-hawao. The exact translation of the expression into English is difficult, but it implies that truth itself will take revenge against the offender and bring justice to the offended. It also means that the one who walks in the truth will win. This is a principal reason for respecting the property of others and refraining oneself from speaking false things. There exist, however, some dishonest people and thieves, who falter this value within the Sidama people.
The consecrated people practice three days fasting before the new year feast, Fichee. Customarily the Sidama people do not practice of fasting, and even the fasting of the consecrated people could be because of their being too busy reconciling and solving problems in the community before the new year.
A holy man is a man who avoids bad words and acts in a good (acceptable) way. He is respected and considered as being blessed and loved by Magano. Maganu maassi'no manchoti, Maganu battino manchoti, Maganu battino bettoti, Maganu maassi'no bettoti are the common expressions. The Sidamas consider Magano as fully involved in people's daily life. With this and other reasons which I have directly or indirectly mentioned, I conclude that for the Sidamas morality and religion are one. Fr. Markos Beyene, a Sidama priest, rightly observed and wrote in his unpublished article - 'A Christian Approach to Traditional Religion in Sidama Area"' - saying that 'the Sidama people see the direct action of God in creation more than the natural laws. Everything comes from God...the fulfillment and success in life is achieved only by the will of God (...). They believe that if people misbehave God goes away from them' [p.8].
Meaningful life is understood as doing good things and passing life (procreating). Every young man is expected to get married and beget children. This is very much valued.
Generally elders, the cimeeyye, try to live an exemplary life. Wherever hatred or quarreling exist the elders bring reconciliation. They solve problems; they take care of social affairs, look after the needs of the widows and the weak, and maintain justice and peace. Misbehaving results in disturbing a harmonious relationship that exists between God and the people, among the people themselves, and among them and their ancestors.
Apart from the consecrated ones (e.g., Ga'ro and Qqaddo) one has to be at least 50 years old and a circumcised in order to assume the position of a community elders. The good life a person lives determines his position or importance. One can be the eldest in the community but if his way of living is not appreciated he cannot play a role of an elder (cimeessa), who is a very much feared and respected. This is explained in the expression, "chimeesu chilo itisano" [The elder can make a person eat faeces].
Many other practices such as hospitality, respect to foreigners, ceremonies during birth, marriage, funerals, and festivals that exist in the Sidama culture are left for future study.
People pray to Magano individually or communally. Individual prayers can be done with or without sacrificial offerings. But communal prayers are always accompanied by sacrifices. During communal offerings the consecrated people act as the celebrants. If it is at the sub-clan level, unless there exists a consecrated person, a notable elder leads the community into prayer.
The Sidamas follow twenty seven important "moments", which are called ayyaana, in a month. They are followed through the position of the stars. Only some particular men called the ayyaanto (astrologists) know how to follow the stars and discover the types of ayyaana. Each ayana is used for a special function: ayyaana for marriage, for feast, for war, for success, and so forth. The ayyaana for offering sacrifice to Magano are either adula or gutcha. The ayyaanto and the consecrated people whose duty is to look after the issues of their people, direct most of their activities according to the ayyaana. Individuals consult these people to know, for example, when weddings should take place.
Two types of sacrifices exist within the Sidama religion: one is offered to Magano and the other is to the ancestors.
Burnt offering: As thanksgiving and asking for blessing the Sidamas offer this sacrifice to Magano. It is offered individually (e.g., a family head) and communally (e.g., at the sub-clan or clan level).
Magano, itoommo, agoommo, duwoommo. Tini xinino, tini shilqqo, atera iilitohe ... Gobba'ya gowi, keere assi, ge'issi, gada'ya geedo'ya seeki, gobbate, saadate kaaya kaayoma qqoli. [God, I have eaten, I have drunk, I am satisfied. Let this burnt offering reach you.... Unite my country, bring peace and stability, bless my generation and the coming generation, and domestic animals].
At the family level, the family-head offers the sacrifice to thank Magano for all the blessings (e.g., children, wealth, good fortunes) he has received from Him. While burning the animal he says, "My Father, take this. Let it reach you. It is for you, and take it." He also prays for more blessings. Some individuals who prayed during their suffering, such as barrenness and serious sickness, offer the burnt offering sacrifice to Magano when their prayer is answered. These people had promised Magano an animal if He would respond to their prayers, if He would come to their help. Women and young men bring their promises to the spiritual leaders who would offer on their behalf.
Blood offering: This is done communally for the purpose of purification, reconciliation and protection from bad things such as enemies, drought, and plague. If something which is considered as grave offense against human beings, and indirectly against Magano, within a sub-clan or a clan by an individual or the individuals, the community offers this type of sacrifice. When those with the gift of foreseeing tell the eminent danger (e.g., war, plague, drought) or when a dream revealing the eminent danger occurs, the consecrated people organize the sacrifice. If the people are suffering because of plague or drought, the consecrated people make supplication through blood sacrifice.
With this act the people are reconciled with Magano and with the earth, which is regarded as mother, and with themselves. Thus, they are purified from their guilt. They also make their supplication to Magano. Then a small piece of meat is taken before removing the skin. The presider takes and raises the meat, tastes it, and passes it to the elders. After this the meat is cut, roasted and cooked, and everyone present in the gathering consumes it. Finally, the future issues of the community are discussed. The presider concludes and the people go to their home.
The Sidama people show their gratitude to their ancestors through sacrificial offerings. At the communal, clan level, the offering is done to the common ancestors. At the family level, the husband fattens a bull and offers it for his father.
Bulls are slaughtered in several numbers periodically as a sacrifice of thanksgiving for the blessings received from the common ancestors and for their continuous presence among the people. At the same occasion, people also ask for their continuous blessings and presence. For instance, the people of Holloo clan offer their sacrifice to their common ancestor after every seven years.
During an interview with an eighty-eight years old elder from the Holloo clan concerning the sacrifice, he says that their common ancestor does not demand that the people must bring animals for sacrifice. But individuals who possess animals want to keep a bull among their cattle in gratitude for the blessings they have received from their common ancestor. Moreover, out of the sacrifice the ancestor wants the poor in the society to feast on meat, for they rarely get it. So it is a joyful moment for the poor to gather together with others and enjoy meat to the full. Both the poor and the rich alike celebrate together, and carry the remains back to their homes.
When the bulls are killed the blood is poured on the tomb of the ancestor. Those who received favours (e.g., children) they had asked from Magano or the ancestor also bring whatever they had promised . The lambs brought on this account are killed and burnt as a thanksgiving offering to Magano, and to the ancestor if he was asked to mediate. His name is mentioned after Magano’s name.
gedeno'ya seeki, geedo'ya seeki, galte'ya seeki, ooso'ya seeki. Ooso'yarana saada'yara gosa'yarano kaaya abbi [Make straight my future, my wife, my children, my cattle. Bring blessings to my children, cattle and to my nation].
However, if an individual is poor, he is not obliged to do so. Responding to the question why an individual has to make an offering to his parents, an elder, Gujo No’ora, said that when a sacrificial offering is done here on earth a simultaneous gathering and celebration of the people living with Magano in heaven takes place. When one is remembered by his son, all his friends come to celebrate together. But if one is forgotten by his own, he will feel that he is like an abandoned beggar. So he communicates through a dream to his son. It is believed that if the son who possesses wealth refuses to respond to the dream, he will fall sick until he reconciles himself with his dead father. As we observe, the concern is more on a father than a mother.
An offence a father commits against somebody is perceived to affect not only himself but his children as well. If he dies without solving the problem, the case has to be solved before or after his burial by his relatives. This signifies that the familial and affective relationship continues between the living and the physically dead. The relatives organize reconciliation to heal the wound caused by their late member lest their children suffer the consequences. The dead parents are also beneficiaries of this reconciliation, for they too are perceived getting peace.
harm. This is a family affair that does not involve the whole community.
Concerning the sacrifices offered to Magano on communal level, no fixed place is found. There exists neither a house nor a tent, not even an altar. All depends on the dreams specifying the place or on the indication of those who possess the gift of prophesying or on consensus. On the individual level, it is done at home not inside but outside the house of the one offering the sacrifice.
As for the ancestors, the sacrifice is offered where their tombs are found. There exist in different places the shrines called hara but only houses, without statues or images, where the elders and others come to pray. The elders also conduct their meetings there. Sometimes burnt offering to Magano at the sub-clan level takes place at these shrines.
The Sidamas are truly Monotheist and they do not see Magano as a tribal or exclusive entity. God does speak to people through their cultures and situations. To this communication or revelation each individual or group responds according to its understanding of God and culture.
God has been speaking to the Sidama people in their culture, revealing through dreams, prophets, and individuals' deep experience of the sacred. What I consider important is that be it a dream or a prophecy, but if it deals with avoiding evil, promoting human life, and bringing people closer to God it is good and a revelation. The Sidama religion is an example of God's universal salvific act. God truly acts and Christianity is not the only way for salvation. An honest dialogue and true respect to other religions are important not only for collaboration in promoting human life and to live in harmony with others, but also to discover more the mystery of God's work to bring humankind into Himself.
These people are the consecrated ones. They offer sacrifices on behalf of their clans. Each one has his own council of elders (all men). They do not take any decision without the knowledge of their councils. In their councils' meeting they act as moderators. Gaana and Woma announce and execute the decisions of their respective council. They are very much respected and their words are taken seriously by their people. They live separately and each one has his own council. Yet they work harmoniously in such a way that whatever decision one takes, the other one does not oppose or act against it. There exists constant communication between them.
Animism denotes the belief in many spiritual beings who are autonomous in their dealings with human beings. It is characterized by its "particularism, a quality opposite to the universalism of the ‘great religions’, which conceive man as subject to global powers and personal destiny." Individual divinity is attached to a particular place and person or resident in a particular creature. "If animistic spirits anywhere exercise authority, they do so in particularistic, even egoistic fashion, sanctioning men for ritual neglect or breaking taboos, not for acts of moral neglect or secular offence. Animistic religion do not readily coalesce with systems of political authority and probably do not favour their development." See Encyclopaedia Britannica, Macropaedia, Vol. I (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1977), under "animism", pp. 923-4. If Christianity is not associated with animism, one wanders why the Sidama religion is termed animistic. Both religions venerate ancestors (e.g. Catholic and Orthodox Christians venerate the saints as the Sidamas venerate their ancestors). The ancestors or the saints possess no autonomous power to practice over human beings unless in relation to God. The only difference would be that the Sidamas take their ancestral veneration as a duty. The ancestors are not seen as egoistic. They are concerned with the well being of people. For instance, the common ancestor of Holloo clan, Aabbo, shows concern not only to his clan but also to the whole nation and to others who ask for his help. The Sidamas do not worship trees or stones but God alone.
Ga'ro (Moote) plays the following roles: he organizes communal sacrifices if war or drought or plague occurs, commands the army during war, reconciles if two clans are at war or tension, takes decisions on issues concerning the whole clan, solves juridical problems which cannot be solved in sub-clan level, and announces the date of the new year feast, Fitchee, and makes prayer. Qqaddo is a collective name for Woma, Gaana, Gaadala, and Qqaarricha. Their roles are more or less the same but with some particularity to each one. Two of the Sidama clans do not have Woma. The Holloo clan has created a complicated organization. It has both Ga'ro and Qqaddo. Except Woma the rest of the Qqaddo are not found in any other clans except in the Holloo. Ga'ro and Qqaddo are the consecrated people who take care of the life of the whole Sidama people. Each of them have their own council of elders. These people are deeply religious as the elders too are notoriously religious.
Elder women (Qqarubba) are respected, too. But they do not practice authority over men. In the Sidama culture men do not associate with women. Consequently, women also have their own organization. The elder women practice authority over them. Women can change men's decision if it violates peace and harmony in the society. The eldest woman (Qqaro) can impose a punishment if a husband abuses his wife. The punishment cannot be reversed unless he fulfils the imposed obligation by the Qqaro.
The Author is a Sidama specialising in Theology and Philosophy.
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2019-04-20T08:15:18Z
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http://afrikaworld.net/afrel/sidama.htm
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11 kids filled my home last night- 3 seniors, 3 juniors, and 5 sophomores. It is one of the most gratifying events of the year. Our current scholarship students make dinner for the new scholarship students. They share the concerns they had about coming to HOPAC, how their transition has been, and advice for the new students. Everything they say I have heard before, but there are different students saying it each year. It reminds me of what my seniors were like when they came to HOPAC almost two years ago and who they are today. One senior said, “Miss, you said this when I started and I still remember and hold on to this. You said, ‘If you leave HOPAC and you are only a good academically, we have failed you. We care about you holistically. Your life should be impacted not just academically, but in every other way as well.” I get to see students come into HOPAC and blossom into who God designed them to be. Sometimes they apologize for being too loud or too quiet; I laugh. No need to apologize. I want you to be comfortable in YOUR skin, not who others think you should be. I am not the one making the transformation in these kids’ lives. I just get to witness it and sometimes God uses me. But I am part of a team of teachers, parents, and prayer warriors around the world that care deeply for each of our HOPAC kids. And at least our older kids, ones that have studied in other schools, they see the difference. They FEEL the difference. They experience the difference and love sharing with everyone what an amazing life-changing opportunity they have had to study at HOPAC.
In order to have victory, though, there needs to be a battle to be won. Sometimes that battle is self-esteem, learning hurdles, family pressure, financial, or just life as a teenager. Most often, if not all the time, the battle is spiritual. I have felt it and recognized it more often this year than any other year. Many days, I wanted to crumble and run away from the battle. But then I remember there wouldn’t be a battle if lives weren’t being changed! So when my bank account is at zero, my tire is flat for the sixth time in 8 months, both of my ACs quit working, and I have been sick for 10 days with the Dengue Fever (I have been told you feel worse than Malaria) and I am weary and want to quit, I remember that I am in a battle fighting for precious lives.
I was watching a video of a few Christian apologists answering people’s questions and one of the men said, that people from other religions are most often converted to Christianity in two ways. 1) dreams or 2) seeing the love of God through another person. It is the first that we pray for and the second that we live out and students see in school. When after they graduate, the alum say, “There was something different at HOPAC than I am experiencing anywhere else.” Then I get to question them until they make the connection that it was the teachers that genuinely love them like God loves them. We don’t always see the fruit, but sometimes we do! I just saw a post that one of my alum from three or four years ago was baptized. And one of my youth group kids asked if I would stay in Dar until he returned the end of June to be here for his baptism. Both students that had grown up in a mixed religion family taking a firm stand in the faith that God has called them to.
My permit is currently being renewed. Pray it goes through with no issues.
I am contacting several churches over the next few weeks to try to get another church or two to support me. I currently only have one. If your church would be open to considering supporting another missionary, please let me know!
As we quickly approach the end of the school year, pray for our seniors as the reality of leaving HOPAC and moving on to the next stage of life becomes more real and scary. Pray for me and our staff as we help prepare them for “Good Good-byes”. And for me as I plan everything for seniors and process saying good-bye to yet another class of amazing students.
“I never realized we had students at HOPAC that weren’t Christian. Why don’t we make that a requirement?” This was the start of conversation I had with someone shortly after returning from Young Life camp. He had been one of the leaders on the trip. Nearly 75% of our senior school had chosen to attend “the best weekend of their life”. As this person and I continued to talk, I shared with him how it would look to those that weren’t Christian and when else would these non-Christian kids have the opportunity to experience the gospel like they can at HOPAC. And besides all that, we cannot assume that just because the parents are Christian that the kids are. He responded, “Mine will be.” I reminded him that he can guide and encourage them, but he cannot make them be a Christian. That has to be a personal decision. That weekend and conversation was a beautiful example of how schools are such important place of ministry.
The conversation reminded me of a few conversations I had over the holiday while I was home. I had a few people ask, “If she is a teacher, why should we support her?” I realized it has been awhile since I started at HOPAC and many new people have joined my email list since then and may not have heard about the mission of HOPAC, TeachBeyond, and why I need to raise support. The story is much bigger than teaching Lifeskills, getting students into university, and photography. So, let me take a few minutes to share the bigger picture and when I am home this summer, let’s meet for coffee or come to one of my events and hear more than I can say in a page (because who reads after one page) or in 5-10 minutes in church.
In 1994, a group of missionary families got together with a vision of starting a school to support the missionary community in Dar es Salaam, and the great East Africa region. One of the main reasons missionaries leave the field is for better education for their children. Today, HOPAC has grown to almost 400 kids. Our primary vision is still to serve the missionary community.
HOPAC is now one of the elite schools in Tanzania. The equivalent schools are three times more expensive. HOPAC is able to keep education affordable by recruiting missionaries to be teachers. We receive a small housing allowance, that just covers rent. My support covers every other cost from electricity, groceries (feeding teens is expensive!), and ministry expenses.
When I first moved to Tanzania, people were encouraging me to get involved with various ministries outside of HOPAC. I was struggling with feeling guilty that I just wanted to spend time with my students. They were why I came to Tanzania but when I looked at my pictures of the cute kids from the orphanage and my seemingly well-dressed kids from school, I worried that people would think I shouldn’t be here or think I was working with rich kids and shouldn’t financially support me. But God reassured me that my ministry was my students. Despite appearances, they needed teachers committed to loving them unconditionally and feeding into their lives not just in the classroom. Yes, some come from wealthy families, but most are missionary families, on scholarship, or barely keeping their head above water because they want the best education for their children.
When I say to the kids, “Most of your teachers are not getting paid by HOPAC to be here, what does that tell you about them?” The students realize how much their teachers love them and want to help them.
HOPAC’s values that are printed on our logo and school uniform say SERVICE*LEADERSHIP*STEWARDSHIP. Through a Biblical worldview, these values are instilled in our students. They leave HOPAC valuing community involvement and equipped to be leaders and changemakers in the world.
Many times schools raise the kids. At HOPAC, kids’ lives are changed. Every year I see it. Students enter one way, by the time they graduate they are a different person. This happens when campus is a safe space. Teachers show unconditional love and push the students to grow in every way. And especially when we can help them grow to understand a genuine, personal faith.
Living a Christ-centered life out for the students. What does that look like? Juice and crackers in my office for those who didn’t get breakfast (and probably didn’t get dinner last night either). Attending soccer and basketball games because most won’t have family come cheer them on. Creating a non-judgmental space to ask hard questions. Especially showing forgiveness, grace, and mercy when they screw up. They are kids. They make bad decisions. How we respond in love and appropriate discipline can be the best example to them.
Helping students see God’s love and plan for their lives when it all feels overwhelming and like they are walking into a dense fog. Reassuring them they are not alone, one step at a time, they will be okay. Then celebrating when they get the university acceptances.
Through school and youth group, we help students develop a firm foundation in their faith so they can stand firm when they get to university. And for those that aren’t Christians, seeds are planted that when they are in the world and see how different HOPAC was, they realize the element that made the difference was our faith in Jesus.
Yesterday was Youth Group. My favorite part of the week. We had a record number of people yesterday but all engaged in the discussion. Somehow a general question lead into “Is Christianity fun? Should it be? What is perception and what is truth?” And so many different directions from there. It is so exciting to hear my students ask honest questions, answer each other, and wrestle with truth. I love how they love and support each other. But more than anything, I love how God has brought each person; each with their own story, experiences, and perceptions. 19 people filled my home yesterday EXCITED to talk about faith and life. A true genuine Christian walk is far from boring! Yes, it has its ups and downs, but share a meal with my students and me. See them light up when His truth becomes real to them, when his peace comforts them, when the connection is made that their identity is only in how God sees them, not how men judge them.
Youth Group has been having a great time learning about what it means to Love Dar through our church series exploring Loving the City, Loving the Children, Loving the Environment, and Loving the Poor. During the week of service we went and visited out friends at Green Pastures.
One of my favorite activities in August is catching up with my alumni before they head back to school! A few lunches, an pizza night, and a panel discussion in Lifeskills class. I LOVE hearing what every one has been up to!
First day of school!!!! Worshiping with the whole school community is always a blessing.
A significant part of my time as school starts both before and after school starts is helping the new students settle in well. Grade 9 gets a bonding day on campus and Grade 11 get a weekend away on the beach!
Grade 12 also get a day away on the beach after their parent meeting. It is a time to hang out as a class, think about goals for the this year, and discuss some of the details of their senior year.
Finally, I get to get students excited to think about their future in university. One of the ways we do that is by hosting university fairs. The first one for this year was 26 schools from the UK.
A friend introduced me to a new person in our community and was telling him, “She has such a cool job!” Yes, I do. I love my job. But the truth is, my favorite part of my job is everyone’s job. It is loving those around us. It is reminding our students. “I see you, I care about you, and you are loved!” It is looking beyond the marks on a paper and recognizing those less than acceptable marks are a cry for someone to see they are struggling. It might be learning hurdle, it might be a social issue (i.e. bullying), it might be a home issue, and all of it is an identity issue.
Are students lazy? Yes. Are students deceitful? At times, yes. Are students broken? Absolutely. Do they need to be loved anyway? More than we know! They make mistakes. They need to be loved unconditionally but not all of them, sadly probably a majority, have no idea what it feels like to be loved unconditionally. How can we expect them to begin to comprehend God’s love if we aren’t modeling it ourselves; If we aren’t creating safe places for them to share their questions, fears, and stories? That is my goal in my office, in my classroom and in my home. What are you doing to create those spaces for those in your life where you are at?
Thank you for continuing to support my ministry here in Tanzania. Lives are being changed by our team at HOPAC, a team that loves each student unconditionally even with all the baggage they bring with them to school.
Thank you to those of you that responded to my letter this summer. I was able to raise about half of my goal of $500 for monthly support through those who increased their support and a few new ones. Thank you!!!! I had also set a goal of doubling my monthly support team. I am eight people away from that goal. Would you consider being a monthly supporter? I have supporters from $10 a month to $400 a month. Whatever fits your budget! Not able to commit monthly? One time gifts are just as helpful! The teens I feed every week thank you!!!
There is no team I would rather do this crazy job with than this amazing group of people!
Some days it is fun to count the number of “hats” I wear in one day: teacher, counselor, advocate, tutor, Life Coach, photographer, friend, admissions, tour guide, caterer, travel agent, fundraiser, but most important is an image bearer of God (Read my blog about that here!). I hope through all I do, students see it is done in love, God’s love for them! A great way to show that was at the assembly I was honored to speak at in February. Thank you all for praying it was one of the best responses from students I have seen. I was amazing to see God use me to speak to students. If you would like to read more about it, you can read that blog here.
It is through His love, student’s lives are changed. Today was the last day of regular classes for our Grade 11 and 12 students. Over the next six weeks they will write as many as 12 tests. As I talked to my seniors today about being their last regular day of class, we reflected back to when they started in Grade 11 and how much they have grown. They readily admit they are a hard class but are now able to see the growth in themselves and as a class because we, as teachers, didn’t give up on them, they didn’t give up on themselves. Because of the love God showered down on them through HOPAC staff, they have grown in their faith and for some have become Christians.
I am able to show God’s love here because you, there, support me in your prayers and financially. I know that I and other HOPAC staff are the physical body here, but it is the prayers of many around the world that are changing the lives of our students here at HOPAC.
I was at lunch with a couple of my students this past weekend when they both commented, “HOPAC develops us academically, yes, but more importantly, they change us into better people! They care about WHO we are and help us grow in every way.”What they said next brought tears to my eyes, “HOPAC has allowed me to have the childhood I never had.” I know it sounds strange coming from 19 year old boys, but what they meant was that they were safe at HOPAC to be completely themselves. They can let down their guard and be safe at HOPAC. It truly is a Haven of Peace for them.
June 1 & 2 I am taking my photography team to Zanzibar for some experience in street photography, marketing photography, and fine art photography. It is a great time really invest in the lives of these kids. Please pray for great conversations and a safe trip. A few of the students are not sure they will beable to attend because of the cost. I hope to ease the financial burden so they can attend stress-free and as a reward for the hard work and eagerness to learn photography they have shown all year. Would you be willing to donate towards this trip? The total cost of the trip is $700. I would love to raise $500 towards the cost.
Pray for HOPAC as we hire new staff and as I transition once again to friends leaving and new staff coming including out principal. I will have my fourth supervisor in 6 years.
Pray for our seniors. This class does not deal with transition as well as other classes have. Many have already expressed their concerns regarding graduation and classmates leaving. Please pray they can focus on exams and finish well while saying good good-byes.
My WhatsApp was a flurry of messages last night as students tried to convince me we shouldn’t have school tomorrow (despite my telling them I have no power over the decision). The light-hearted banter and enthusiasm reminded me of Snow Days back home in Michigan.
Every year in school we would have 3-5 snow days. Days when the roads were too bad to get to school. We usually welcomed a day off school except when it fell on Christmas party day. Some years it was so bad, the businesses would close so even as adults we got snow days! They were a forced slow-down day. Go back to bed, sleep in, read, relax, binge watch the series we were behind on.
So no, we did not have a snow day, but after having 36 hours of heavy rain, we had a rain day. Many roads are impassable. It is a welcomed recovery day after a very hectic week for both me and my students. With this blessing comes a heavy heart and many prayers for those living in living in lower areas severely affected by the heavy rains.
So today, after a good long sleep, I am enjoying the cool weather, enjoying a good cup of coffee with my pup curled up beside me reflecting on the amazing week I had last week.
My life is always a bit on the crazy side, but this week even more! University fair tomorrow, dinner at my house with my current and new HOPAC scholarship students tomorrow night, guest speaker (Tanya Crossman for those who read about TCKs) on campus Wednesday and Thursday, G12 is running the school Talent Night which will be Friday night at 6:00, and my G11 will be taking the ACT on Saturday so after school prep every day this week. I am barely keeping my head above water this week. Prayers of energy and focus would be greatly appreciated!
It was an AMAZING week! Thank you to all who saw this post and prayed. It was only through God’s strength and peace that I stayed sane and everything was a great success. It was an exceptionally busy week, but it gives a good glimpse into my life and responsibilities.
IG Takeover Week: For TeachBeyond, my friend Jenn and I offered to take a turn doing an Instagram Takeover! So this past week, we shared on @teachbeyond some images from our week. Most pictures were taken on my old phone this week so I apologize for the image quality.
Youth Group: My week started on Sunday with youth group after church. They surprised me this week with a birthday box full of notes from them and others in the church. Then we settled in and talked about how to watch movies with discernment and watched “The Shack”.
University Fair: Three or four times a year, HOPAC hosts university fairs with 20+ representatives. This week, we had 21 Universities mostly from the US.
Scholarship Dinner: Each year, HOPAC offers 2 or three full scholarships to attend HOPAC for grade 11 and 12. After the students have been selected, I host a dinner at my home with my current scholarship students and the new ones. The goal is to provide an opportunity to ease concerns, answer questions, and provide encouragement. I have my current students help with preparation and mostly have them facilitate the discussions. It is a privilege to sit back and hear how HOPAC has impacted them and see how they have grown in confidence and maturity in the time they have been at HOPAC.
Senior Pics: As we near graduation and end of the school year, Senior pics are due! This week I was planning a night for several students to do a group shoot later in the month and I had the opportunity to spend time with this wonderful young woman!
ACT Prep: Grade 11 students have been preparing since January for the ACT exam. Once a week we would have a tutoring session. The test was this past Saturday so everyday after school this week was reserved to support last minute prep. I am so proud of the hard work these students put in!
Even coming in on a Saturday to practice a full-length exam!
Long days means Tessa gets to visit after school. She even has a fan club!
Host Speaker: This week was extra special. We were able to host Tanya Crossman author of Misunderstood: The Impact of Growing Up Overseas in the 21st Century. She spoke with parents, teachers and in my Grade 11 & 12 Lifeskills classes. My interest and research in TCKs is what first brought me to HOPAC. It was wonderful to spend lunch with Tanya and talk to someone who shares the same passion.
Talent Night: The week ended with our annual Talent Night. This year it was run by the Grade 12 for a fundraiser for their senior trip. It made for a hectic couple of weeks, but I am so proud of the performers and especially the G12 that planned everything!!!
In addition, this week I had Parent Teacher Consultations, Lifeskills Classes, admissions planning, relationship building, calming down seniors and encouraging them through senoritis, Campus Service supervision; As well as planning Graduation dinner, Senior Trip, Graduation, and a photography trip.
I am grateful for “Snow Days”. Days to stop, relax and reflect. It was an amazing week last week and now, after my TZ “snow day” I am ready to jump in tomorrow for another great week!
At HOPAC, over 100 of our students traveled four hours to a Young Life camp for the “The best weekend of their life”. It was an amazing weekend! I could tell so many stories of challenges, changed lives, and the spiritual battles around us. But one little story stands out. It seems insignificant. There is a flock of sheep on the grounds of the camp. A few days before we came, twin lambs were born. The girls in my cabin thought they were adorable and wanted to catch them and pet them so they went running after flock. A few minutes later they returned.
I realized, If we have grown up in the church, we have heard many times. “Jesus is the good shepherd. We are sheep.” But this doesn’t make any sense if we don’t understand what this means. I mentioned this to a co-worker and he said, “Sounds like you are leading assembly!” As I gave it more thought, I remembered The Friday we left for YL camp, I had to run home a minute. As I was walking up to the back gate, a sheep was on campus running towards me. I tried to herd it back towards the gate but it didn’t know me so I just scared it more. It couldn’t have been a coincidence that I encountered this sheep the same weekend. Fast forward a month and here I am sharing my message to 160 senior school students. There is a message God wants you to hear about the Good Shepherd.
Sound familiar? Do you understand them?
When I told my dad I was going to be talking about the shepherd and sheep, he asked, “do you know the difference between a shepherd and a sheep herder?” I didn’t. He said a shepherd leads and a sheep herder follows behind, pushing them to where he wants them to go. Generally, sheep don’t take well to pushing. Sheep need a shepherd, they need to be lead.
Driving from Arusha to Serengeti, I would see several boys with their sheep at the same watering hole and wondered how they figure out which animal goes with which shepherd. The shepherd calls them and they know their master’s voice! They trust him and follow him. He leads them to food and water. He provides for his sheep.
More importantly he protects the sheep. When animals are threatened, what are their natural instincts? They will either Fight, flight or take on a posture. Think about sheep- can they fight off a wolf? Rear-up, bit, kick, attack? Can they outrun a wolf? How about a scary posture? like a growling dog, a spitting cat? See why sheep need a shepherd? A good shepherd is fearless and will fight off the wolf with his rod and staff.
Did you know, Sheep will not lay down unless they feel safe. Scared sheep will stay standing or run. Even the FEAR of a wolf too close will kill a sheep. So only when a shepherd leads to them pastures where they feel safe will they fully rest by laying down.
We too need a shepherd. A GOOD shepherd. You might be thinking, sheep sound like dumb animals. I am NOT a dumb animal! I don’t need a shepherd. I am doing just fine on my own. Teachers- How many of you thought you were just fine on our own without a shepherd at some point in your life? Where you? How many of you thought you could protect yourselves only to find out later that you needed a shepherd to protect you? How many of you have wandered astray in your life and the good shepherd came and found you and brought you back?
As it says in John 10, our shepherd calls us by name. Can you hear his voice? Or are other voices, wolves, or other predators leading us astray? We try to protect ourselves, but get weary and frightened. We build walls around us to try to protect ourselves but actually then isolate ourselves from the flock, from the green pastures and refreshing streams. But even when we build this wall, there is a gate. We run around on our side of the wall like the lost sheep on campus. All kinds of fears prompting our survival instincts. We run, run from people, run from our past, run from God. Maybe we run in circles looking busy, trying to feel fulfilled. That is what I do. I run. I run and hide but there is no place I can go where he can’t see me. We fight! You don’t know me. You don’t know my story! Get away from me. Spread rumors, act out in disrespect, bully, say cutting words. Maybe literally try to fight with fists. Or we take on a scary posture. Glare a people, ignore people, take on a bristly body posture that says don’t come near me.
This might work short term, but not against the wolves or the thieves. The evil in the world that wants to steal our joy and peace, our souls, to keep us from finding our eternity with Christ. The false teachers, bad religion, the cultural lies. Those wolves and thieves aren’t scared of sheep. That is why we need our shepherd. Without him we would be devoured. Picked off one by one by the wolves that come to kill and destroy. Our shepherd, He isn’t afraid of the wolves! The wolves are afraid of him! That means, shouldn’t we want to be right by his side? To show how much he isn’t scare of them, He prepares a FEAST for us in the presence of those enemies. He laid down his LIFE to protect us from them.
Psalm 23 says that our Shepherd is our provider. He says we will not lack. He will provide what we need. He leads us to green pastures where we feel safe enough to lay down and truly rest. When we run around trying to protect ourselves and provide for ourselves without the shepherd we grow weary. We can’t sustain it. The shepherd leads us to a place where we can find contentment and peace- not to be confused with being happy all the time but peace knowing our shepherd has our back. Where HE can restore our soul. Our mind, passions, desires, feelings and emotions.
He doesn’t promise a life without hardship, but he leads us through those valleys, through the shadow of death. But we don’t need to be afraid! Because we are following our protector! And finally, not only does he protect us, provide for us, bring us to a place of contentment and peace-, we get to dwell in the house of the Lord forever! He came so that we could have life and not just life, but an abundant life! What is an abundant life? Well it isn’t a life where you feel you are lacking something, empty and dissatisfied. It is a life that is meaningful, purposeful, joyful, and eternal.
The shepherd doesn’t “put up with us”. He KNOWS us. We are his prized possession. He wouldn’t lay down his life for something he didn’t care about. He looks for us when we wander away. He never thinks, “that one is hopeless or that one has wandered away one too many times. I give up on that one. NEVER! He doesn’t want a single lamb to get devoured by the wolves. He doesn’t consider how broken, bruised our messed up we think we are. He doesn’t sit there, “well they did this, they are now damaged, dirty, not as valuable… not worth my time to get them” Absolutely not!!! Please hear this! What he sees is his beloved little lamb is hurting and he wants to help you heal.
So, when John says the shepherd stands at the gate calling, who is he calling? Think he isn’t calling you and that is why you don’t hear him? He is calling those who know his voice and have wandered away so those who call themselves Christian but aren’t representing Christ in their lives. He is calling those who aren’t Christian and are running around lost seeking rest somewhere but aren’t finding it in their family’s religion or a life without religion. He is calling those of you who are Christian to a life closer to him.
Growing up in a Christian home, I had heard about God speaking but never really understood what that meant. I would listen to messages and go on “Silent Retreats” to learn to listen for the voice of God but only recently, maybe within the last year can I say I have really learned to recognize his voice. Before that, he used other people or my gut to confirm decisions or choices. My conscious wouldn’t let me be okay with things that were counter to his will. About a year ago, I was taught that God’s voice isn’t a different voice. It is my own voice speaking truth in love. Since learning that, I am recognizing more when he is speaking to me. Any time I question if it was him, I ask for a confirmation and many times someone will tell me exactly what God told me. For example, when I was preparing this talk, there were so many different directions I could have gone. As I prayed about it, God told me to speak on the shepherd as our protector. Before I had prayed, I sent a message to a friend of mine that had grown up raising sheep and was now a pastor. I asked her what came to mind regarding the sheep and shepherd. Her response- the most important thing is he is our protector!
So the protector, the Good shepherd is standing at the gate in your wall calling you to follow him to green pastures where you can find rest in him, where you can heal. To streams of water so he can fill you, bless you to over flowing with peace. What is keeping you from hearing his voice? From allowing HIM to protect you? What fears are drowning out the shepherd’s voice that you feel you need to protect yourself from? Are there distractions? He isn’t a big scary being running trying to catch you! He wants so much more for you than a life of fear, worry, regret. He wants to lead you to freedom from whatever fears or regrets are holding you captive! Take a moment in silence. Ask the good, loving shepherd, “What is holding me back? What do I need freedom from? Why have I built walls and what do you need to do to be freed from my own captivity” He has left the 99 to find you. He isn’t chasing you down like a mad man. He is a shepherd looking for his prized possession because he loves you! You are too important to him to abandon you. It doesn’t matter where you are, if you call to him he comes to you.
I have so much to be thankful for. This year I am especially thankful for my youth group. It was started for my Grade 11 and 12 students that were coming to God’s Tribe on their own. Last year I had about 5 this year it is over 10 and growing. We meet at my house after church, share meal together, share the best parts of our week, and spend time praying for each other. Then, I just ask, “So what did you take from today’s message?” and usually an hour or longer discussion goes from there. The group is now expanding to college age and Grade 10 too as friends invite friends.
Enjoying American Thanksgiving together. Missing a few this week.
sitting there, I was speaking with one of the students about patience and how God was still teaching me patience. “You? but you are so patient!” So I gave the example of how was waiting on God to know if this was my last year or not and how that was such an exercise of patience right now. Every year I re-evaluate and pray to know if I am called another year. Every other has been easy. Last year was a little harder. This year, I needed a clear message from God. I just didn’t know for many reasons.
Just before church started, I was going to head over to the seat where I usually sit and the kids all said, “no stay here on the bleachers with us!” How could I say no, haha. As we were in worship, one of the new students leans over and says, “look miss, everyone is here because of you.” I just smiled and continued singing, then the still small voice said, “This is why you are here, stay” tears… I was pretty sure that was the affirmation I had been waiting for. I know it was from God. It came with such peace. But yet, I was hesitant to say 100% that I am committing to be here another year.
I had been sick the previous week so I missed my regular Bible study. That same Sunday in the evening, I watched the video I had missed. Soooooo much spoke to me. Not letting fear make my decisions. Trusting what might seem strange to others. Stepping out in faith. Wow! It would not have had the same impact if I had been present Tuesday. I couldn’t deny a second longer that God was clearly calling me back to Tanzania for 2018-19 school year. So I am excited to say, I am staying another year!
I am blessed to work with amazing staff and students, to be supported by so many people in so many ways, and to serve an amazing, loving God!
Thank you all for your prayers and support. Today on giving Tuesday and as we look towards the end of the year, will you consider supporting the work being done with teens in Tanzania? From youth group to pizza nights, photography training, university preparation, and developing life skills, students are being impacted and seeds of faith are being planted and watered. Funds raised the end of this year will be used for food for youth group ($50/week) and pizza nights ($75/week) as well as journals, Bibles, and Bible study resources for youth group.
Praying for you all to have a blessed Christmas season!
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2019-04-19T14:53:40Z
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https://rebeccalaarman.wordpress.com/
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What Kind of Parent Are You Based on Your Zodiac Sign?
Each parent is different with their approach when it comes to taking care of their children. Some are more anxious while others are very lax; certain parents feel that the need for a strict home environment is necessary for the long-term growth of their kids while some are adverse to any kind of structure. There are factors that may trigger the kind of upbringing the parent follows. These include outside influences, demographics, and traditions that play a major role on a parent’s approach to childcare. And there might be some other factors that influence a person’s parenting style.
Before technology and during the early ages of civilization, there were plenty of worldly phenomena that were deemed inexplicable. The existence of things like storms, plagues, and seasonal changes was explained through astrology.
Through astrology, the Babylonians who are the earliest known users of the craft were able to predict seasons and celestial events. In time, reading astrological charts was passed down to the Greeks and soon everywhere else.
Today, despite the rise of technology and the advancement of science, many still find relevance for astrology and rely on their zodiac fortunes to foretell a possible future, match personalities and even improve relationships between their partners, friends, and children.
According to the American Federation of Astrologers, the 12 zodiac signs are based on constellations that early astrologers linked to the progression of seasons which they learned then is based on the 12 lunar cycles before the sun returns to its original position. The lunar calendar that we use today and the 12 months in a year are all based on that understanding.
A person’s horoscope depends on the date and month of birth and wherein the zodiacal map (horoscope) it is. Each zodiac sign possesses a certain personality trait and fortune influenced by its ruling planet and the predominant planet during a particular period.
What’s your zodiac sign based on your birthday?
New information about the zodiacs shook the world of astrology in the latter part of 2016. During those controversial months, zodiac believers everywhere were taken aback to put it mildly. What’s the news? That there was a 13th zodiac sign. What does that have to do with the twelve? Well, since each of the twelve revolves around dates and months of the year, having a new one means that if originally you were a Pisces, then maybe now you’re no longer one.
It started with a rumor that ran around the cyberspace that NASA added another zodiac sign called Ophiuchus which points to the sun from November 30 to December 18. Putting it in astrological terms in the horoscope, that would mean that the old zodiac sign dates will be moved one way or another.
Fortunately for many, the confusion was swiftly cleared out by NASA saying that they did not add a 13th zodiac sign in the horoscope but also went on to say that the constellation Ophiuchus does indeed exist in the zodiacs. The space organization then adds an analogy of the existence of the 13th constellation to a pizza.
Long story short, the old zodiac dates is still what’s followed in the horoscope. If you’ve been a Libra all your life, you’ll remain a Libra… until further notice. So, let’s use the old dates to determine the type of parent you are.
Unlike other zodiac signs, Aries is not a natural when it comes to parenting primarily because of their childlike characteristic and short temper. If you’re an Aries, you might have experience becoming easily annoyed when your child is too unruly or messy and when they don’t want to listen to you. On the upside, if an Aries embraces their becoming a parent, they can truly nurture their children in becoming more advanced in development because of their natural leadership capacity.
If you’re an Aries, you can focus on ways to manage your own emotions when things get stressful at home. A pro parenting tip is to get your kid’s energies used up so they don’t run around the house trying to wreak havoc. Try to look for ideas for activities active toddlers can join that will help them grow and use up all their energies.
Are you a stage mom or dad? Do you attend to each and every need of your child, big or small? It’s most probably your second nature as a Taurus.
Taurus are grounded individuals and as parents, they tend to be pampering and caring for their children. Unlike Aries, Taurus are natural born parents and they love the responsibility of taking care of their kids. However, there can be a downside with overindulging children and a tendency to spoil kids if not moderated enough, Some Taurus parents can also seem overbearing or controlling because of their desire to make sure everything is all good for their kids.
If you have this problem of giving way too much to your kids, then the best way to go is to set goals and boundaries for yourself as well as encourage independent play with your kids so that they learn to interact with others in a social situation. Taurus parents love indoor playgrounds because they provide a safe and controlled environment without being too controlling.
Gemini parents value learning above all else with their children. The dream is for an over-achieving child with the best of grades and a shining record. But it’s not only numbers that the Gemini mom or dad looks at. It is also how they learn to interact with others and the world around them.
Parents of this zodiac are often quite immersed in the education of their children and encourage extra-curricular and social activities. Like the Taurus, Geminis love indoor playgrounds but also outdoor play areas. Their kids get to interact with others and learn along the way. Because going out can be quite expensive (and being Geminis, there must be a lot of other things your child is enrolled in), there are ways to lessen the cost of going out.
Cancer as people are very caring and nurturing. They love to be around others and are always the ones throwing parties or organizing get-togethers. Cancers value the proximity of loved ones and love to surround themselves with love.
As parents, Cancers are arguably the most natural in all of the zodiacs. They almost always seem to be ready to be parents. Cancer moms and dads are loving, sweet and nurturing. They love to be around their children and want to go out on trips and enjoy meals together with them all the time.
Does this sound like you? Then you also might have noticed that you tend to be overprotective of your child and sometimes smother them with too much attention and affection. Going on trips, instead of staying cuddly at home, is a helpful way to keep the bonding with your kids without making them feel overwhelmed. It will also help them learn more about the world around them and create precious memories.
Do you have two, three kids already and somehow seem to be wanting another? If you’re a Leo it really is not surprising. This zodiac’s personality can be described as quite childlike and playful. They love being with children because the energy kids give, helps keep them feeling youthful and light-hearted.
Leo parents enjoy going out to travel with their kids and family because of the free new places give out. If you’re a Leo parent though, sometimes you forget to be more of an adult especially in financial matters and disciplining your child because adult stuff is a little bit boring to you.
Especially when on a tight budget, Leos can get carried away and overspend on a day out trying to have fun with the family. Fortunately, there are many other ways to enjoy a day with the family that won’t break the bank.
Virgos are great parents most of the time because they know how to balance discipline and fun. Their approach in parenting is benchmarked on balance and they understand the needs of their children.
While the Virgo parent is often seen as the perfect parent, there is a tendency for this zodiac to become a perfectionist and set impossibly high standards for their kids to meet. However, with enough moderation and care, Virgos are naturally good parents.
Libras are another zodiac can easily be great at parenting. They are good at keeping disputes at bay and communicating with the family. Because Libras are considered one of the best zodiacs for keeping and managing relationships, they tend to be the best at creating a harmonious household. Even Libra children are usually the peacekeepers of the home.
Because Libras do not like conflict, they tend to be lacking in disciplining their kids and tend to get stepped on every now and then. Setting boundaries for your kids and learning to muster the will to call your kids out for bad behavior will benefit you in the long term– furthermore, it will help your child grow into a respectable member of society.
Scorpio parents are the best disciplinarians because of their unwavering resolve and determination in life. Generally, either as parents or singles, this zodiac are usually the overachievers on any group because of their strict resolve and need for excellence.
While discipline can be highly beneficial for kids, too much of it can traumatize and overwhelm children and create a desire to rebel. Perfectionism is often something the Scorpion parent struggles with especially when it comes to their kids.
If you’re a Scorpio and feel that this is often your problem too, finding a balance is a key to resolve it. For instance, you want your child to study and study but your kid is tired. What you can do is allot a few minutes to hours to play with them or you can make a reward for their hard work more enticing like going on playgrounds or having a special treat.
As parents, the Sagittarius is easily the opposite of strict Scorpio. These zodiacs like to have fun and are often the life of a gathering. They enjoy parties, playing and are usually best buds with their kids.
However, like every other zodiac, too much of something can be bad. Like the disciplinarian Scorpio, the Sagittarius does get carried away sometimes and can be too lax and concentrate on enjoying and having fun and forget discipline and structure. If you’re having difficulty with creating order in your home and putting in some house rules (as well as keeping them), then you can ask a fellow Scorpio how they structure their parenting and get some tips along the way. Maybe you can also share a few tricks to having some serious fun with your kids.
Another opposite of the wild, fun-loving Sagittarius parent is the Capricorn mom and dad. These zodiacs love structure and embrace a strict and organize, military-like lifestyle. While this will truly create more disciplined and achieving children, it can also drain the fun out of them, which according to studies is a detrimental part of child development.
For your zodiac personality, a structured play that can still satisfy your desire for order as well as create a fun place for your child is the way to go. Places like indoor playgrounds, activity centers, home-based puzzles or obstacle courses can serve both you and your child.
Unlike other zodiacs that seem like natural-born parents, your sign is a little adverse to caring for children because of your highly independent and individualistic approach. You might notice struggling to enjoy child care during the earlier years of your kid. This is because you would rather talk to sensible, mature individuals than try to understand children.
With all that said, it doesn’t mean though that you can’t be a parent. However, there might be quite a number of instances that will test your patience and resolve. But the good side of all these is that when your child becomes an adult, unlike other parents, you’ll thoroughly enjoy their company and might even become best of friends.
If you’re a Pisces, you know that you have quite a loving and empathetic side and it doesn’t take you a lot of effort to stretch a hand of understanding towards your child. Because of this trait, you are able to form a close bond with your child. Looking for more enjoyable activities you can do together can sometimes become challenging to you though because it seems you’ve been able to do all of it from parent-child dance lessons to costume parties.
While you’re definitely a natural at parenting, you can tend to overreact in some instances. Make sure to give your child some controlled freedom as well like giving them options or letting them loose in a controlled environment. Book a ticket for indoor playgrounds regularly and let them play with other kids in a safe space. You’ll be happy with the results.
No matter what zodiac sign you have, parenting is serious work. While for others it is less difficult, there is no approach to parenting that is perfect. We hope this article helps guide you on or at least relate to you.
The Polliwogs is a chain of seriously fun indoor playgrounds here in Singapore. Visit our page, https://thepolliwogs.com/ for more parenting, birthday parties and kids activities blogs. We believe in the right of every child to play and the value of independent play. We’ve got tons of articles proving its benefits to young (and older) minds alike. Book online for discounts and some seriously serious fun!
By the way, was your personality right? Did you agree? Comment below!
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2019-04-19T16:42:36Z
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https://thepolliwogs.com/what-kind-of-parent-are-you-based-on-your-zodiac-sign/
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